I am making this suggestion from the perspective of a Lordearon player; I'm not sure if or how much the reputation boosts on the Icecrown server affect this issue. What I would like to see is a (substantial) increase in the reputation gains for the battleground factions. With the dynamic of the server it is basically impossible for people who want to max rep for achievements/tabards/etc to do so.

AV is a bit easier to grind out because there are a ton of quests you can do, and you gain rep for killing players, npcs, capping towers, etc. One thing detracting from this is that the game often ends after 5 minutes due to not having enough players. After ~6 months of being level 80 on this server I am roughly 3500/6000 rep into friendly, which is almost exactly where I'm at with Arathi Basin.

The only way to gain rep in AB, aside from two quests which are currently not working (I made a bug report for this) is to get points for holding bases. Every 160 points = 10 rep. Thus you get 100 rep for reaching 1600 points and victory. Assuming you win every single AB you play, it would take 420 victories to reach exalted from neutral. If the quests get implemented, that shaves off 1500 rep which saves you 15 victories. Obviously you won't win every single game you play, but you'll still get at least some rep from losses assuming you aren't instantly 5-0'd. According to a comment on wowhead it would realistically take something in excess of 500 games to reach exalted: "With 40800 rep grinded in total, I played 515 ABs -- 278 wins with 237 losses." He also did the two quests for 1500 rep.

WSG is possibly even worse than AB. You get 35 rep per capped flag, so 105 rep per victory. Thus you need 400 victories to get from neutral to exalted. Assuming you win 50% of your games, and accounting for the fact that most games are 3-0 one way or the other, you would realistically need in excess of 600-700 games played to reach exalted. I have only just reached friendly status, 170/6000, after ~6 months of being level 80 here.

Now I love the server, but there's just no realistic way to max out these reps with the population we have. I would estimate that something like 2-4 BGs are going on at any given time during peak hours, and 0-1 during off-peak. I assume that most people queue random BG because the honor reward is greater and the BG pops faster since everyone else is also queuing random. The queue times can be anywhere from instant to 10 minutes at peak times, while I have consistently spent 40-60 minutes waiting for a BG to pop during NA nighttime. Even with a higher population and cross-server battlegroups to queue into, Blizzard ended up increasing rep gain by 500% in patch 6.0.2.

To put this in perspective, I have been level 80 for roughly 6 months, and I have 169 total BG victories, including 46 in AB (my highest for any BG). Assuming a 50/50 split between Horde and Alliance (it's more like 60/40 or even 70/30 in favor of Alliance so I'm lowballing myself a bit here), I have averaged roughly 2 BGs per day over the course of that 6 months. If I need 500+ victories to max AB rep at the current rate, it would take me 10+ years of playing 2 random BGs per day. Something like a 1000% increase in rep gain would reduce that to 1 year, and a 2000% increase would make it 6 months. I'm guessing that I play more BGs than the average player, but probably not as much as some of the players who don't raid at all.

Cheers and thanks for reading.