[Update]: Burning Crusade Classic is bringing in The Black Temple and Mount Hyjal raids on January 27, 2022.

Due to a myriad of factors the PvP focused playerbase in Burning Crusade Classic tends to skew heavily towards Horde. Since battlegrounds require equal numbers of both Horde and Alliance players in order to function, the consequence of this situation is that the queue times for Horde players are obscenely long, and are only looking to become longer as more and more Alliance players give up on PvP.

In order to solve this problem, at least partially, Blizzard is now looking to implement Horde vs. Horde and Alliance vs. Alliance battlegrounds. The matchmaker will first try to make an opposite-faction match for you once you queue, but if that fails to produce a game within a reasonable amount of time you will be sent to fight against your own faction. Everything else, from rewards to reputation, will be awarded as usual.

Since Alterac Valley features a large number of faction-specific NPCs, this new system will not apply to it. So if you want to exclusively fight against the other faction, Alterac Valley should be your go-to choice.

Personally, I can't help but feel like this is Blizzard attempting to get rid of a house fire by simply building a new house right next to the blazing inferno. Sure, it'll make Horde queue times faster, but it'll do absolutely nothing for the Alliance players on PvP servers that are going to become increasingly smaller minorities until even they finally swap over to Horde. This sort of thing has already happened on the retail version of World of Warcraft, so I was hoping Blizzard would avoid repeating the same mistakes all over again.

That said, this could only be the first part of Blizzard's plan to fix the faction balance in Burning Crusade Classic, so I won't be too quick to judge just yet. After all, it's an extremely complex problem to solve, and one that will take quite a bit of time.

Until then, have fun with the faster battleground queues!