WildStar's PVP is Terrific Fun

At level 6 a character becomes eligible for the Walatiki Temple battleground. I cannot get enough of this 10 v 10 BG. The goal is to be the team to first bring home five moodie masks randomly scattered throughout the map and/or by stealing them from the opposing faction. There are several strategies that are easy to learn and fun to execute. The map is perfectly sized with enough line of sight obstacles, terrain differences and buff options to keep it interesting without being overwhelming. The match is usually complete within 10 minutes at the early levels and awards decent XP and sometimes a nice gear drop or housing plug. I've heard reports of players having long queues for rated battlegrounds on certain servers, but so far my experience on the Stormtalon server, at least for non-rated BG's, is five minute queues during peak times and one minute queues during off times -- not bad at all.

The second BG, Halls of the Bloodsworn, becomes available at level 15. This is also a 10 v 10 BG that is a variant on King of the Hill. In Halls, the winning faction captures control points in three different rooms faster than the other faction. As with Walatiki Temple, the design is superb.

Some have commented that dealing with telegraphs in WildStar's battlegrounds is difficult because many land on top of each other making it a confusing morass of telegraphs. When both teams converge en masse sometimes that is the case, but the same basic principles apply: stay out of the red and get into the green. Plus, in a split second you can often tell from the sounds, shapes and sizes of the telegraphs which attacks are converging in certain areas. In any MMO BG it is always confusing when scores of players are firing off abilities in the same area -- for me, the telegraphs actually help rather than hinder.

While it would be great to have additional battlegrounds to play at launch, I'm not at all disappointed to only have two at launch. I'm much happier to have arena play to look forward to at 35 and ultimately Warplots at 50 than, say, four battlegrounds at launch. Even so, for BG fans we already have a third battleground to look forward to later this summer, Daggerstone Pass.