You’re still going to have 40 premade guys clicking que together in voice chat. So the only thing new will be, how many of them made it into one of the epic, game and where are their bruisers? If 24 are on one team and 16 either didn’t pop, or are all on the other factions’ team, those guys will drop and then the 24 group will take the que, especially if they have their heavy hitters, (Who will now, always be grouped together themselves as a 5 man), now were back at square one. This is the part you’re overlooking.
If the 24 person team doesn’t have their bruiser group, they’ll probably drop too. If I had a 5 man MM-boxer, I’d win every single (non-premade) Ashran I was facing in epic BG for sure and without question… And that’s what these 5 - 6 heavy hitters basically represent here, they really win the games for the rest of the slobs & wannabes on these premade-teams… We all know who these heavy hitters are… That’s the part some of you don’t realize that will make all these “cross-faction-will-fix-premades” fantasies, fall apart & go bye-bye.
The only way to try to fix it, is to put staggering math into the system, so when you hit que, it may not secretly que you for another 3 minutes, or it might take your que-click and instantly put you, (or your 5 man group) into a group thats been forming for 8 minutes already. This way nothing is ever consistent for a premade group queuing together and everything is a constant, headache & unpredictable, mess for them.
no, the way to fix it is to allow premades, but only a little. if you allow full raid queueing, you will obviously get problems, also you want things a little mixed to add variation to games.
syncing creates a best effort system instead of a guaranteed outcome you would get with raid queuing.
so how do you sync in a cross faction environment, well you can drop split pops which is the standard process but this causes a lot of problems for everyone. so instead you replace the merc NPC with a guy that lets you pick which team you will queue for, this will allow a premade team to all pick team red or team blue and then try to sync into the same game. they will still be at the mercy of best effort, but they won’t be on mixed sides.
the downside of this is that it will still result in situations where a player sits in discord and hears all their friends having fun in a game while they didn’t get a pop or got split. and while that might sound fair, over a long enough time it really takes its toll on players and drives many to quit and causes issues for communities as they argue over whether to waste time dropping to requeue on splits or just play split.
to me the biggest issue here is that this is a tug of war between making the game a fun social experience for pvpers or making a social game into a solo experience for pugs. i personally think that if you want a good solo game, there are many out there better than wow, people play wow for the social experience, not the game experience, so the devs should lean into being pro-premade rather than pro-pug.
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Cross faction queues won’t fix premades, but it will make it harder to organize, and therefor less fun for those doing them, and therefor less people will do them overall, which means the chances of being placed in a match with a premade will go down for the average player.
And contrary to what the premade communities themselves might say, the majority of players doing epic battlegrounds are not part of a queue sync.
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Would rather face a 4-5 team of Heavy Hitters in a Epic BG than 4-5 heavy hitters with priority healing / peeling from the wannabees and slobs. Much easier to beat and negate.
Only if they are exlcusively pitted against another premade to ensure fair games and to leave pugs to fight amongst themselves.
This needs to happen sooner than later and when/if it does it will lead to epic premade cheat groups fragmenting as their wins are no longer guaranteed.
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I suggested, always have three minimum games filling, take no more than 1/3rd of the total needed to fill per minute, so it takes 3 minutes minimum to fill the lobby.
Groups or individuals queue within the same minute have a 1 out of 3(or more) chance of being in a different battleground, and DO have cross faction so queue syncers that do get into the same instance as their community have a 50/50 chance of being on different teams.
If the cheaters(queue syncers) throw the match for their friends on the other team, report for gameplay sabotage. If they seem to be doing their job, no one will know they tried to queue sync and there is no problem.
Your suggestion is good too, but add cross faction.
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The only way to fix premades is to increase the amount of people queing in general so it becomes a major pain to sync them. At that point, it becomes a rarity to run into them, and less people would be willing to wait that long to attempt it.
There is absolutely no point to unrated PvP anymore outside gearing alts or “or fun” so the vast majority of the playerbase doesn’t touch it.
Fix that and it sorts itself out.
Renown track is a very good start for that.
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The issue isn’t epic premades, they’re just a symptom of the deeper issues of a lack of investment and communications. I can’t even read Twitter because I block their trackers, an untended wound that festered. They’re unwilling to treat those causes, won’t even tell us the rules of their game probably because if we knew the remaining casual players would leave aside from the ones exploiting the system and they’ll leave once they lose the people they exploit.
If they make changes and they fail then they have someone they can blame, if they do what they’ve always done then no individual blame can be assigned. They won’t tell us who is in charge of pvp, I couldn’t even tell you one developer that works on it. Should be a sign.
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im pretty sure more people would do them if you remove premades from the equation lol
Anyway no bgs should still be faction vs faction
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I mean less people will do queue sync premades if battlegrounds are made cross faction.
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Because it will be a lot harder to organize a sync queue when half your team is on the opposite team, on average.
It means those players would either need to leave the battleground and get deserter debuff, or spend their time fighting in a losing match, or risk getting reported for game sabotage if they go afk or otherwise help the other team win.
Cross faction queues would make it much harder to get a majority of your group on the same team in the same battleground.
Will people still do it? Sure. But they won’t be nearly as successful at it, which leads to less premade vs pug matches.
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They will simply just throw for the “leader” and try again.
People shouldn’t even be trying. Why do we need to make it “harder” for people instead of stopping it completely?
And right there is the problem.
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While yes, I would be all for stopping it altogether, cross faction would be a huge first step towards that.
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No, a huge step would be punished those abusing it. Making people scared to do it by putting their accounts at risk would lower the number drastically. Why do you think all of them demand no punishment will happen? Because they need that to be true.
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Or the new thing will become… The whole thing turns into such a headache, that the REAL heavy hitters from each team just start banding together themselves and form 8 x 5 man groups syncing together and with no slackers & dead weight… Chances are, half these guys will end up in an epic game on the same faction… And when that happens, and there’s 20 of these heaviest of heavy hitters grouped up together, ROFL!!! you’ll WISH you were facing an old regular premade. 
Yes xfaction and the staggered Que time will help fix the issue if implemented together.
And another thing is there are A LOT OF PEOPLE, especially reg BG, WPVP die hards etc that will just uninstall the game if it goes cross faction. There was a huge BOOOOOOOOO! at Blizzcon in the auditorium talking about cross-faction games a few years back before COVID. Those horde die-hards don’t want to start at the ally base on Ashran and vice versa for ally, they see it all as completely selling out and ridiculous. Like a WWII game where the Japanese & Americans are all on each others armies so just fake, shallow and cheesy to them… They’ll just laugh and click uninstall. The games’ already long-in-the-tooth as it is, so that to them would be the final nail. And a lot of these cats don’t even do rated at all, just regs so it would annihilate the player-base for epic bgs…
And the Role Playing cats aren’t going to like it either… – “I AM LORD GOTHGAR FROM ASHGAR, WHY AM I STARTING OUT AT THIS HORDE BASE IN ASHRAN! ? ! HUMANS DON’T BELONG STARTING HERE!” Bet the farm, that the dudes’ booing at Blizzon will be typing that in chat for sure. 
rofl
I dont queue Epics purely because of Epic Premades. Its a shame because I quite enjoy all the maps and it adds variety and a level of chaos.
Premades ruined that for myself and there are a few others I pvp with that are of the same mindset.
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Interesting, so where have those faction diehards been so far while battleground blitz has been a thing? Because at no point while running any of them so far have I seen anyone complaining in-game about it being cross faction.
At most, just sometimes confusion over which team’s score is your own from people not used to being on the Horde team.
Blitz (or solo rated now) is superior to random battlegrounds in nearly every way, except when playing as a group of course.
It’s going to be the go-to mode for anyone who enjoys battlegrounds even if just for the fact that it gets you away from premades and has some semblance of matchmaking rating to at least somewhat keep teams more balanced.
Sure, there are still lots of lopsided blitz matches, it’ll happen, but oh wow is it way better and more fun than random battlegrounds.
edit I mean where were they back when rated battlegrounds were added? Those had you starting on the “horde” side of the map too.
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What % of games are you willing to throw so a pvp community leader can win? I am willing to sabotage 0% of the games I play.
Is performing gameplay sabotage enjoyable enough to keep queuing with a community that makes you throw matches 50% of the time while your community members your faced against are throwing 50% of the time(win trading)? I dont find gameplay sabotage or win trading compelling gameplay.
Do you believe that queue syncing being made much more difficult to pull off will decrease queue sync community member count? I would hope it would.
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