While the head smiles and nods, the hand is stealing your experience! Going live with yesterday's patch, a new set of battleground brackets went live (and a nerf to experience gains):

With the launch of patch 3.2.2 today there have been some changes to the Alterac Valley battleground and we wanted to clarify what exactly has been done.

Level 80 characters now have their own bracket and there is a separate bracket for characters that are levels 70 to 79. This change was originally planned for patch 3.3 but it was accidently applied to the current patch 3.2.2. As we had already intended to make this change so that players who are leveling play together and players who are at the level cap play together, we will be keeping the bracket setup this way, but the level of the bosses in the brackets below level 80 will be reduced to compensate. The reduced experience in Alterac Valley is due to the fact that Battleground experience is based off of the level of the Battleground. Characters level 70-79 are no longer getting experience based on level 80 characters. As a result of this, we are now able to do an across-the-board increase to experience gains from all Battlegrounds in order to make sure that no Battleground feels too unrewarding in terms of experience. We have also made it so the experience bonus from heirloom items work properly in Battlegrounds.

While it will be nice to keep the level 80s in their own battlegrounds, the jury is out on the XP nerf. Read the rest original post on World of Warcraft.