World Of Warcraft: Large AV Changes Soon?

Anyone who has participated in an Alterac Valley match in the last few months has experienced a somewhat confused beast in motion. Originally the battleground was filled with NPCs and would take 8 hours (on a good day) to complete. Since then a variety of fixes have removed almost all of the NPCs, significantly shortened the length of games (down to as short as 15 minutes if both teams zerg their respective bases), and even put a stop-gap solution in to prevent the ever popular turtling tactic (resources). We've also seen the implementation of a flawed, but necessary, AFK reporting tool to prevent the starting cave parties of long ago.

Yet still your average AV match has at least 5-10 people sitting around doing nothing, even though they risk receiving no honor for their spacebar taping escapades.

In their continuing battle against this, Blizzard has applied a small hotfix to the tool, significantly reducing the number of reports required for action to be taken.

But is this enough? Some players think no and it seems that the developers agree:

In any case it's something we've been looking to do for a little while now, and since it's a hotfixable change (not everything is), we hotfixed it.

We do have some fairly substantial Alterac Valley changes coming in a future patch that we hope will address some of the balance and play issues.<[/annoyinglybutnecessarilyvague]>

Drysc goes on to explain the nature of these changes a bit more:

We want to fix the main issue.

The main issue is not that people AFK, it's why they AFK.
The main issue is not that some no longer queue, it's why they no longer queue.

While Drysc doesn't say anything specific here he hints that the solution is not having stricter punishments, but finding out why people are breaking the rules in the first place.