Are There Plans for New Battlegrounds?

Q u o t e:
There's a new BG called Strand of the Ancients in WotLK.

This.

And I can't predict the future, but we don't plan to stop making content for the game, so we'll have to wait and see what happens beyond this.

Q u o t e:

Since WHEN cant you predict the future?!?

I gave it up yesterday.

Q u o t e:

Yeah, but Arena ratings and points are needed for the PvP gear.

/spit

For certain pieces, yes.

Q u o t e:
An open question to Blizzard and the forum: Will we see new battlegrounds in the future? Yes, I know about Lake Wintergrasp, but this appears to be more like time-managed World PvP than a Battleground, where even numbers of individuals fight for specific objectives in an instanced zone.

If your answer is "no new battlegrounds are planned at this time", then I guess I should conclude the BGs are becoming a dead-end from the developers perspective. If that's true, then its a sad day.

Actually, we have been discussing new battlegrounds quite a bit lately. Wrath of the Lich King will feature Strand of the Ancients (attack/defend) as well as Wintergrasp (non-instanced, world PvP).

But past that, we are exploring ideas that would involve expanding our Battleground content in future patches and beyond. We believe we have some strong ideas for improving Battlegrounds and PvP as a whole in the game and we're definitely going to focus on improvements in the future. Now, it's very early to be talking about some of this stuff but I think it's important for the community to know that it's on our minds.

Our general thought is that we could provide more BG content over time. The BG content that we could provide could be of higher quality with a higher degree of accessibility. Overall, we'd like to have more content and variety. We also want the gameplay experience in the BGs to be better directed. We're also exploring the concept of a complimentary "competitive" bg system as well. Over time, we'd like the focus of PvP to shift back to being more BG-centric and more focused on Horde versus Alliance -- the core of our game.

We're also planning on improving some Battleground and PvP features in general. For example, we want to give you the ability to queue for Battlegrounds from anywhere in the world. We're also going to explore EXP gain through the PvP system as well as low level itemization to support that.

Please don't take this post as a promise. This won't be an overnight process. Not all of these things are set in stone and guaranteed to happen. It would take us a while to shift in this direction. But these are some of the current thoughts on the development team. I think it's important for you guys to know some of our thought process in regards to PvP.