I don’t know why but I’m pissed
only good thing about this is not getting lumped in with LA and BR realms
I’ve read through most of the replies and I feel like I need to mention two things:
Firstly, someone implied that deep down ‘we all just want to stomp levelers’, which is just so incredibly wrong for 85% of twinks. In retail 10 years ago, when they split xp-on from xp-off, hundreds and hundreds of twinks transferred to the same battle-group to continue to get games for months. We didn’t do it to kill levelers, we did it because truthfully the competition in the lower brackets was actually extremely worthwhile. I hate sounding dismissive but if you never really tried to play low level premades or arenas against other twinks, you just don’t fully understand it. Certainly, there are a few people who farm mid and kill midlevel characters, but they are generally regarded poorly by anyone interested in competition and winning games.
Secondly, I know that some of you think this is a stepping stone to server only BGs - but I have news for you. That will never, ever happen in this iteration of classic. This is coming from someone who’s main is on an RP-PVP server, who plays at cap and had some of the most fun time of his WoW career from the community play of world PVP. If they did server only, I’d be ecstatic to play my 60 again. That said, there’s just so many servers with horrific faction imbalances that they’ll never make a change this late in the game that would so dramatically shift the balance. Never mind the impact on smaller server queue times. I’d put any amount on money on this being a quickly decided and poorly implemented band-aid on a timezone issue, not 14D chess to work towards the server only BGs people want.
There’s a reason I twink and it’s the competitive, reasonably small community feel. The trash talk, the mutual respect, the premades, and eventually the arenas are all made better by a bracket where once you get the BIS gear - you just queue up to PVP. There is no gear treadmill, there is no 6 month poopsock R14 grind. There’s no two 50g respecs a week to be an effective player in both PVE and PVP. You just get to play capture the flag because you love to play the game. Gear disparity is probably in some games lower than you see at cap. There is no honor grind, which means most guilds don’t queue with more than 5 players because people actually want good balanced games. There is literally nearly no point to queueing with 10 people and 3-0ing in 10 minutes minus reputation gains.
This is going to result in a loss of a subset of the player base. It’s probably not enough to see on the bottom line but if retail has taught them anything, it’s not one big event that makes everyone quit - it’s a slow atrophy. Please don’t start that in classic for me and all my friends. There are a few good solutions to this problem where ‘everyone wins’, and I’d urge blizzard to at least give it some thought.
4 Likes
Taking this approach to “fix” the time issue is like blowing up your entire lawn to get rid of a few moles. Absolute crazy overreaction for really no reason, classic Blizzard!
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This feels insane, and overkill. There’s probably a hundred different answers to a problem here that ISN’T splitting the battlegroups.
As hundreds of people have mentioned both here, online, in discords and more -IF this is the case, queue times will likely be hurt and badly. There’s already hours where queue’s are 30+ minutes. With half the population that will escalate. And if it escalates, it is a slippery slope with less and less people even wanting to attempt a queue if it’s 30 mins - 1 hour. This happened when the /expoff was implemented to only queue against other /expoffs. There were no more WSGS/AB pops. Please don’t do this again.
Many of us play specifically for lower level queue’s 19, 29, 39, 49, 59. I hope this won’t effect them as drastically as I imagine it will, but making these brackets unviable (both for levelers and for twink community) will make a dent in subscriptions.
7 Likes
Any data on the faction makeup of east vs west coast?
Even a slight difference might be enough to get horde ques above 2hr
BTW, I am a player that loves playing low level BG brackets with a bunch of alts, none of which I twink. I do confirm that most twinks aren’t trying to grind down levelers. In fact, I’d say in the 19 bracket, maybe 50 to 60% of players are twinks.
Many twinks are terrible (most back pedal, some cruise around midfield, don’t have good awareness of where to be) but the games are fun and almost all do have some focus on winning.
Hurting low level brackets hurts twinks and levelers alike.
This is one of the most ridiculous changes that Blizzard is implementing to solve a non-issue of when to start the friggin’ BG Holiday.
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Noo blizzard stop this nonsense, what are you thinking?
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First game alliance didn’t have over 7 players. Quick 3-0 pub stomp for the horde. That will surely make more ally want to q up…not. Now back to another 30 minute queue. Thanks blizzard for ruining another part of the game.
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Where’s the dislike option on this post? @Kaivax 7 likes so far nice job Bliz
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Ugh… sad to hear this. The one part of the game I really enjoyed and Blizzard destroys it.
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You should get exp in BGs anyways.
But you didn’t in vanilla, and you get HONOR for killing PLAYERS, you get XP for killing NPCS.
You sound like a good fit for the current Blizzard dev team though, suggesting the most idiotic things seems right up your alley.
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They’ll being losing subs. Nuff said
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They have all said it is a bad idea. Reading comp…
The original team changed BGs to give exp because twinking was never really intended. Honor is useless for a twink for the most part so should be exp.
Frankly they should do more and make it server only BGs with only Xrealms being open on holidays.
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The original team changed a lot of things. So much so that they killed the retail version of the game, and had to re-make classic WoW to improve subs. Yup I know.
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Xrealms were one of those bad ideas, needs to be reverted to server only.
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Terrible terrible decision. Revert this change Blizzard.
Why mess up the queues for horde and alliance for “Bg weekends”? What a lazy and uninspired decision to “fix” battle groups. What was exactly broken ?
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Blizzard, your company has a very clear history of making repeated alienation to sections of your player base without consultation or warning to those affected. This is another case of an egregious change that will impact your most community based pvp demographic in the lower level brackets.
I implore you, please, do not make this a permanent change and revert is back to the old system, you are going to lose many subscribers as a result of this. Many of us play twinks or lower level BG’s because endgame classic content does not last us more than 1-2 days a week. As a personal anecdote, I raid 3 hours in 1 night and full clear all level 60 content. The rest of my week I spend on either my main twink or leveling other ones and working on their gear. It’s this community that takes up most of my time in WoW, not my level 60.
Understand that making a split like this should be consulted with the community well ahead of time for feedback. I miss the old Blizzard, really, the disconnect from your fan base has baffled me. Since you guys botched WoW expansions after TBC, then the Diablo franchise is run into the ground and you guys fail to even release a good rendition of Classic and Warcraft 3 Reforged.
Spell batching alone in classic has resulted in the worst version of this game I’ve ever played.
12 Likes