battleground rewards in proportion to challenge

In WoW at the moment there is a particular strategy being heavily used in the battle grounds. Quite simply, sixteen players join as a group and consequently roll most PUGs. These premades have quite tangible advantages over the more random PUGs .. first, they form up outside the battleground and so have more than the 2 minutes (or less) to decide on strategy and allocate roles like defending farm/stables, and not only decide on a strategy appropriate to their class makeup but also adjust their class makeup. Further, they've got plenty of time to get everyone logged into a voice chat server, which provides a huge advantage in battlefield coordination.

I said sixteen players join as a group .. they do that such that when the battleground pops one of them can enter the battleground and scout to see if it's a PUG or a premade. If it's a premade, the group leader, who is still outside, queues the group up for a different battleground.

When the premade scout sees a PUG, the rest of the available players enter the battleground. What happens next is that usually the premade, by being better prepared, roll the PUG completely, 5-capping AB or 4-capping EotS, and winning the game in very little time.

They walk off with a lot of honor, and done in little time. Very efficient for grinding honor. And very boring, regardless of whether you are in the PUG or the premade.

However, I keep reading blog postings and forum comments which pretty clearly say that those rare occasions where the battle is closely fought, where victory hangs in the balance .. those battles are the really interesting and fun ones.

But because they tend to take longer for the same amount of honor they are not preferred by those players grinding for honor. Thus the premade vs PUG situation arises.

So .. what if the honor given out in the battleground was greater for those games which were closely matched. In the EotS and AB there's an easy way to see how evenly matched the battle is, because of the accumulating resource counts. They could even give out more honor whenever bases are captured, and more again when they are re-captured. Also, the amount of honor which is given periodically could be larger if both sides control 2 bases only. More honor should be given out if the number of honorable kills on both sides are about equal, but less if one team is easily trampling the other team in kills, to the point that graveyard camping slaughtering would provide very little honor.

In WSG, more honor per kill could be given according to how many flags the opposing team have captured. No flags for normal honor, 1 flags giving double honor, 2 flags giving triple honor, and an additional 50% if the opposing team is currently holding your flag.

AV would be similar to AB and EotS in that there is a numerical count of reinforcements, except it is a figure which is going down rather than up. If the reinforcements for both sides are within, say, 50 of each other then provide double honor per kill and double periodical honor.

A more powerful team if they want more honor would need to play a risky game of letting their opponent stay close to winning the whole time. Cat and mouse. There might even be some games where a powerful team discovers, to their horror, that who they thought was the mouse is actually the much more powerful team who have been faking their weakness the whole time only to snatch victory at the end.

The design goal would to set up the result of greater honor being rewarded for the more enjoyable longer and closer matched games, and less honor for the fast but boring wipefests.

I play a tauren, so the idea of whooping it up in a battleground and counting coup appeals to me. So much better than playing chief butcher in a sausage factory.

In the end, these are honor points we're talking about, not efficiency points.

Would you play in a battleground with those rules?