Play with the Blues! PTR Testing Aug. 14

UPDATED: Aug. 12, 5:45 p.m. PDT

We’ve added Mercenary Mode to the 6.2.2 PTR, and we need your help testing it out. This Friday, August 14, between 3 p.m. and 5 p.m. Pacific time, we'll be heading into unrated Battlegrounds and Ashran to test Mercenary Mode, and we hope you'll join us.

Here is the information we posted on July 15:

Players will be able to act as a mercenary for the opposite faction in PvP whenever your faction is experiencing a long wait time to get into Ashran or unrated Battlegrounds. Agents of the enemy faction will appear in your base in Ashran (Stormshield for the Alliance, Warspear for the Horde) and allow you to enter Ashran or Battlegrounds disguised as an enemy player, and actually fight as the opposite faction. While competing as a mercenary, players will automatically have their race changed into one appropriate for the opposite faction. Players will still be able to earn all the same rewards as winning or losing as their original faction (with the exception of faction-specific achievements).

If you haven't tested on this PTR yet, you have some time to make sure the PTR is installed and working for you. Here is our Customer Support article on using the PTR.

Your feedback is welcome! Please feel free to use this thread to tell us about any bugs you encounter. We’ll be monitoring your posts and talking to the game developers about them.

I just logged into the PTR and queued for a random BG.

Just a reminder that we'll be doing both Ashran and Unrated Battlegrounds today at 3pm PST! (30 mins from now)

You can use a copy of your live character, or the in-game character template option to create a level 100 character equipped with PvP Gear.

If you'd like to try out the mercenary mode you can head to the NPCs in Ashran and speak with them to queue up for a BG or for Ashran. The NPCs can be found in Warspear or Stormshield, alongside the road to Ashran.

Blizzard employees will be playing on both factions so come join us (or fight us!)

I was hoping that the implementation was more transparent. Queue and then decide "do you want to also be queued as <other faction if we get a spot>?" -> Yes.

Appreciate the feedback. Should be less confusing on live, right now this is configured differently for the purposes of PTR. Normally on live you'd never have a situation where both factions can become mercenaries at the same time.

The realities of PTR meant we had to enable some debug commands so everybody could at least see how it felt to get into a BG or Ashran as a mercenary.