Battleground General

BGG is now in AV

Battleground General is a small panel that appears in Warsong Gulch, Arathi Basin and now in Alterac Valley (see below for specific AV instructions). It shows you where all your team-mates are, and allows you to give specific orders to multiple people at once, along with other useful and fun features.

Getting started:

Once you have downloaded Battleground General and put it into your AddOns folder, you can open up WoW and set some keybindings. The most useful bindings are Show, Hide, Order by Class and Order by Position. I use Ctrl-S, Ctrl-H, Ctrl-C and Ctrl-P for these commands. Once you enter Warsong Gulch or Arathi Basin the panel will appear and you can place it where it suits you. If the BGG panel doesn’t appear (which occasionally happens), using the "Show" keybinding or typing /bgg show will show it. It will show you where all your team-mates are and a red dot will indicate if they’re in combat. Ordering by class is self-explanatory. Ordering by position sorts players by where they are, with Alliance areas at the top and Horde areas down the bottom.

Giving commands

You can select players by shift clicking on them. This is different to targeting them as you can select multiple players. To order them around, use the Battleground Whisper command. For example you may select three players you want to defend the flag in WSG. Then you type:
/bgw stay on defence
The message "stay on defence" will be individually whispered to each selected player.

As of Version 1.3.1, whispers will automatically be preceded by a header: "[Multi-Player Whisper]"

When you start, this won’t actually work, as BGG is by default in Sandbox Mode. Once you are confident to send real whispers, type /bgg sandbox off

You can also right-click on the five red buttons near the top for pre-made, hopefully grammatical, commands. I like the Battleground Whisper concept a lot more, so am deprecating using the buttons.

Do Not Whisper List

Not everyone will respond positively to being whispered to. As a responsible Warcraft citizen, you can maintain a list of players to whom whispering is not productive. Target the offending (offended?) player, or select them in the BGG window and type /bgg dnw on to avoid sending them more whispers. Type /bgg dnw help for more information about maintaining the list. This list will be valid for the whole account.

Organizing Groups

You may wish to issue commands certain groups of players. Use the the Store Group # and Recall Group # bindings (I use Shift-Ctrl-1 to store and Ctrl-1 to recall) to save and bring back your groups. Alternatively you may want the groups to follow raid groups (players in the same party can share auras and make use of Vampiric Touch for example). Type /bgg group on to be able to recall raid groups (ie. BGG groups will follow raid groups).

Advanced Stuff

If you’re not American you may prefer the area above the Flag Room floor in WSG to be called "1st floor" instead of "2nd floor". To change this, open up the file BGGConfig.lua and change the first line to ABGUseAmericanNames = false.

The Toggle Enemy List keybinding shows or hides a panel showing which enemy players have been seen where in Arathi Basin. It is useful for knowing whether a node can be defended or whether it will probably by overrun. Note that this information is imperfect, and that there may be enemy players as yet unseen. The panel automatically hides if you enter combat.

You’ve grabbed the enemy flag in WSG and got all the way back to your base. Someone on your team returns your flag, but you don’t notice until too late in the desperate struggle to keep yourself alive. Battleground General can help! Type /bgg warn on to get BGG to warn you that you can now capture the flag with a sound you can’t miss.

Lastly, for fun, type /bgg cheer on to get your character to perform a suitable positive or negative emote when you or the opposition capture the flag in WSG. You raise your fist in anger at Dumbflagcarrier.

Alterac Valley

Out of necessity the interface is different in AV.

Instead of individual players, the frames now represent areas. Mousing over the frames will show you which players on your team are in that area, and which enemies have been sighted there. If you have selected any players it will list them by their area.

You can left- and right-click on the frame do select and deselect players:
Left-Click: Select one player
Right-Click: Deselect one player
Shift-Left-Click: Select all players in that area
Shift-Right-Click: Deselect all players in that area

Left-Clicking three times will select three players from a particular area. They will be the three closest players to each other so that they can group up easily (BGG selects the player with the shortest total distance to every other player in the area- processor intensive but it only happens when you mouseover, so it’s unlikely to cause problems in combat).

The eight buttons at the top are for selecting and deselecting raid groups. For example with button 1:
Left-Click: Select Group 1
Shift-Left-Click: Add members of Group 1 to selection
Alt-Left-Click: Remove members of Group 1 from selection
Right-Click: Clear selection

Mousing over the buttons with the Alt key down will remind you of these options.

All communications are done with the /bgw command. Players on your Do Not Whisper list will never be selected. There is a shortcut for selecting groups:
/bgg select 34

...will select members of Groups 3 and 4. So the following macro:
/bgg select 57
/bgw protect bal

...will instruct members of Groups 5 & 7 to help Balinda.

2.02 Added support for Death Knights. Their presence on a battleground may have been causing errors.

2.01 Updated (and tested) for WotLK. The event scheduling algorithm is now more efficient.

The Battleground General pane will now hide during combat. Specifically, it will hide when an enemy player (not a pet) causes you normal or spell damage. So it won’t hide if you’re riding through AV and are attacked by NPCs such as harpies, frostwolves, archers etc. To enable or disable this feature, type: /bgg hidecombat on|off

2.0 Battleground General has come to Alterac Valley! It works the same as before in Warsong Gulch and Arathi Basin. Out of necessity the interface is different in AV.

Instead of individual players, the frames now represent areas. Mousing over the frames will show you which players on your team are in that area, and which enemies have been sighted there. If you have selected any players it will list them by their area.

You can left- and right-click on the frame do select and deselect players: Left-Click: Select one player Right-Click: Deselect one player Shift-Left-Click: Select all players in that area Shift-Right-Click: Deselect all players in that area

Left-Clicking three times will select three players from a particular area. They will be the three closest players to each other so that they can group up easily (BGG selects the player with the shortest total distance to every other player in the area- processor intensive but it only happens when you mouseover, so it’s unlikely to cause problems in combat).

The eight buttons at the top are for selecting and deselecting raid groups. For example with button 1: Left-Click: Select Group 1 Shift-Left-Click: Add members of Group 1 to selection Alt-Left-Click: Remove members of Group 1 from selection Right-Click: Clear selection

Mousing over the buttons with the Alt key down will remind you of these options.

All communications are done with the /bgw command. Players on your Do Not Whisper list will never be selected. There is a shortcut for selecting groups: /bgg select 34

...will select members of Groups 3 and 4. So the following macro: /bgg select 57 /bgw protect bal

...will instruct members of Groups 5 & 7 to help Balinda.