Hey ya’ll, I’m leveling a toon in cata classic as Alliance on Benediction (I know, ally dominated). I’ve noticed that no matter the level bracket, from 20s all the way to 70s that bg queues are always an estimated time of “Unavailable” and will never ever pop. I’m assuming 80-84 bracket is the same.
Why is this? I find it really hard to believe there’s not at least a handful of other players who want to take a break from the dungeon spamming and pvp a bit. The only things I can think of:
BG queues at non-max level are bugged.
Absolutely nobody is queueing and just rushing to max level.
My server (Benediction as Alliance) is too overwhelmingly Alliance dominated and thus there’s no way to match against non-existent Horde (thought this is solved by cross-realm queues?).
Honestly, I think it’s just a lack of participation. Which is pretty stunning when you think about only needing 20 people collectively, but I’ve never gotten them to pop either. Then I’ll do /who 20-29, /who 30-39, or whatever, and it makes sense because I’m generally the only one within those spans on the server. Granted it’s more of a dead Ally server, but just what I’m figuring.
While it’s possible that there really aren’t 19 other players queued for a WSG between level 10 and 19… I’ve never heard of anyone in Cataclysm getting a sub-85 BG pop.
lets see… the most unpopular method of playing, mixed with the worst possible way to level XP wise… and knowing how a “queue” works… sounds pretty obvious.
People dont want to do a boring / awful version of a system thats rewards are garbage and not worth their time…
BGs where popular for a bit while leveling, BUT they died fast…
Everyone was in mixed heirlooms/next expansions greens/blues or straight up twinks parasitically attached to the bracket.
Everyone not in at least full looms was basically straight fodder
All in all, it was lame… and as mentioned above, slower than just leveling (dramatically so, even) and the honor rewards where scaled down, so it wasn’t even a good way to prefarm gear at level cap.
For the toons I’m leveling for mop, I’m more rushing to get my heirlooms unlocked and toons leveled before JJ expires… I genuinely don’t have time to bother with anything that would slow me down, including RDF.
Nah. Those who began PvPing in lower brackets for the first time to level were the ones to die fast lol pun absolutely intended. I hope you aren’t forgetting when they placed us exp-off folks into a whole different bracket, leaving all of the regular leveling people alone to do their thing. It practically killed most twinking brackets, but alas we organized. That’s when twinking was at it’s height of fun despite the class/gear changes. So much for haters thinking we only prey on non-twinks.
The other non-twinks genuinely knew what they were getting themselves into prior to bg exp, and if you didn’t then you learned how to use the “Leave Battleground” button. Besides, the majority of my experience was with 3-5 twinks maximum on each side on a given night, and haters discredit skill level while only focusing on gear.
Heck, we even had some regular non-twinks in the 39 bracket. Some were very good despite not being twinked out, and some, for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why they liked being 2-shotted over hundreds of games. While there were certainly plenty of gy farming groups (this happens at max level equally as often btw), that was genuinely about 5-10% of my experience. The majority played objective as is evident with the amount of flag captures, returns, bases captured/defended/etc we wracked up.
Even without formal twinks, people that invested in next expansion greens/blues and/or had full sets of heirlooms where effectively twinks on their own compared to normies.
shockingly when pvp is incredibly imbalanced/ one sided, people stop wanting to engage in it.
See twinks… or premades vs pugs… or fighting pilot groups while pushing rating… or deflation causing normies to frequently encounter mutli time rank 1s/multi glads in the 1700s.
I wasn’t able to get into bgs at the 80-84 bracket at all, but as soon as I hit max level than bgs pop within a minute. I’m guessing that there are just too many max level characters, and even with JJ returning it is likely that people are waiting on prepatch to level. Not only are panda’s and monks being added, but several classes go through some pretty big changes so I could see people wanting to wait for that.
I have seen more people dungeon grinding to max especially withxp boosts and heirlooms.
Usually you just get matched against other alliance players. When playing horde you just randomly get one of those halloween masks that show a horde character.
This definitely seems true for the level 19 bracket. The moment they separated twinks and new levelers than that bracket died entirely compared to what it used to be.
Dividing the already microscoping playerbase didn’t help, for sure…
But being pitted against twinks in general was pretty insufferable for anyone not twinking… The criticisms leveled against them from a talent perspective where largely true, given the relatively EXTREME amount of mistakes a twink could make during a fight and still absolutely stomp a non twink… Kind of like a fresh leveling green andy rolling into a bg against a squad of Naxx BiS toons.
That said, Heirloooms and next expansion greens by the ~cata/MoP eras of wow largely made twinking irrelevant in general, because MOST players where in effectively “twink” level gear by that point. Only the very new players where coming in without any gold to buy next expansion boes or any heirlooms… Those players, however… was like putting Prime Tyson in the boxing ring vs a 5 year old paralyzed girl with parkinsons.
I’d add, twinking was always a parasitical phenomenon depending on a healthy host of normal players to feed on in order to survive… people can cope about how twinks used to organize wargames against one another after forced into their own bracket, but those games where even more rare and niche than non holiday AB is on anniversary realms, and couldn’t sustain twinking when they weren’t stomping the undergeared… The real mistake wasn’t just separating the queus, it was every allowing “XP off” to begin with. They should have forced twinks to level through and reroll constantly if they wanted to sit in a certain bracket geared to the teeth, rather than divide the player pool.
Twinks, especially in the 19 bracket, had zero interest in competition, as much as they did “stomping noobs”.
Yes, that is entirely why they were twinking in that bracket. By getting rid of it, now no one queues and the whole bracket became nonexistent. If you were leveling before, you may have still gotten into a bg and for the most part you just had to hope you’re team had equal or more twinks. Now, that they separated it, the twinks lost interest, because the whole point was to feel op, and the levelers also can no longer get into bgs.
Eh, about half and half I’d say. Many simply treated it as a max level and geared/enchanted accordingly so. No different than obtaining arena gear to maximize performance in max level PvP.
In coincidence you are then vastly op to those with leveling gear, and it’s fun, but again it’s no different at max level.
