Literally every game has a pre-made as the enemy. Solo queue right now is just consisting of sitting in the spawn waiting for it to end for miniscule honor and one mark.
Make completely stacked pre-mades only go against other stacked pre-mades so solo queue isn’t as mind numbing as it is right now.
To the people saying it’s all premades. Is it really? Are they all from the same realm? I see a lot of horde complaining that alliance have 3+ healers and horde have none. I’ve been doing bgs non stop as an alliance holy paladin. I’m not doing premades. I have won 9/10. There have been at least 3 healers on my side. Every single time. Not a premade.
I played horde for 10 years. I know for a fact horde don’t like healing in bgs. It used to be a major issue back in vanilla when I played. So much so that I rolled a holy paladin for the first time for that specific reason. So, maybe, just maybe, y’all just need more healers.
This is absolutely horrific. Prior to this change, alliance had a winning chance at bgs. Now every. single. match. is versus a premade. We get stomped in less than a minute. This is going to result in the already few alliance players quitting or going horde. If you add this horrific change, at least make it better by removing premade -v- non-premade. There is zero excuse to leave this terrible system now that you are no longer doing “no-changes”. Remove premade -v- nonpremade if you leave horde-v-horde intact. Failure to do this will decimate the few alliance that exist.
This is probably not going to be a popular post, but here goes:
As an Alliance player who ONLY chose Alliance at the start of Classic (I am a long-time Horde player) for shorter PvP queue times, there is officially no incentive to play Alliance at all right now. In my opinion, if you chose Horde to PvP you kinda knew what you were getting into with long queue times and such. Now every game I get into is against a premade whereas I was only placed in two partial premades out of queueing all day Thursday and Friday in EotS.
Soooo, I guess if Blizzard does decide to implement the change permantly, and thus appeal to the larger population that PvPs, more Alliance will be swapping over to Horde causing less well-balanced servers (some of you care about this, some of you don’t; just mentioning it). At this point, I suppose I’d transfer too to have the fast queue times AND the better racials.
EDIT: Or, as several other posters have mentioned, make pre-mades face against pre-mades regardless of faction. That would be helpful for everyone.
If Blizzard chooses to keep this implementation, absolutely this. Premades should go against one another, periodt.
This is great for PvP players, but what about that promised LFG tool?
Same faction fixed horde problems. Thank god we don’t have 2 hour queues.
But it created a new one, too many premades.
If you keep current changes and then make premades have to play against other premades, I think you make 95% of people happy.
You’re almost there.
I think same faction bgs are working out great but premade vs random HAS to go. Premade vs random was already changed in original tbc and it’s even bigger problem now.
This system is already in.
This effort to fix the “Honor Problem” rather suggests that Blizzard’s Classic WoW development team have failed to consider in any meaningful way the possible unintended consequences and resulting incentives involved.
The practical effect of these is that there is literally no good practical reason to play Alliance for PvP anymore, other than sunk time costs into a character.
However funny the masks are, a better solution than making such a dramatic and careless change is to analyze the roots of the problem, and additionally to figure out how to incentivize and mathematically compensate for the behavioral problem insofar as the underlying problem cannot be solved. As others have suggested, consider tuning racial abilities (#SomeChanges, right?), or removing them altogether from instanced PvP. Give Horde players some reason to play the Alliance, and make it of very little cost to do so: as many have suggested, provide free faction switching or something to that effect as an option. Increase Horde honor gains in proportion to the average queue time differences between the two factions, give Alliance players bonus marks on account of the general tendency towards losses due to the Horde’s general gameplay advantages, etc.
As it stands, while it will certainly help Horde queue times, it will also certainly exacerbate the already troubled faction aspect of the game to a completely unprecedented degree, not to mention the diminishing of the PvP experience for the casual player who does not have reasonable access to premade groups.
Lol just make a premade yourself. You chose to queue alone, you knew what you were getting into. Reroll premade.
Nope, whether vs premade or non premade, hopeless loss or instant win, i do not care at all as long as i get into the bg instantly.
Any human that would want to wait an hour for a BG queue is straight up lying, or spite shilling for alliance
Premades suck but who cares as long as i can play. If this becomes permanent the premades will stop. Horde are just enjoying being able to actually pvp and making the most of the few days they can actually PvP to gear up.
That is not true rofl. We are both Grand Marshals and no longer have any premades to queue with because most of the serious PvPers have already faction transferred to Horde because of the better racials. Point blank: Premades need to be put with premades. This does not solve the root of the issue which is an imbalance of H:A that PvP. We both VERY specifically chose Alliance at the start of Classic thinking far ahead that queue times would be faster, esp. doing a serious PvP grind. I would argue, with the same logic you’re exuding here, that Horde knew well what they were getting into. Better racials for PvP = higher Horde numbers that are queueing = longer queue times because the Alliance numbers are. . .quite frankly. . .sad. Horde are being tailored to here because the devs don’t want to actually do something to make Alliance worth playing. It’s seriously not worth playing Alliance at all right now. This is coming from a long-term Horde player. I prefer Horde. I don’t want you waiting in hour-long+ queues, but this was the reality unless Blizzard chose to do something about it that actually help fixed the problem. This is merely a Band-Aid. If you scroll through the comments, even other Horde are complaining about going against premades every round haha.
I actually love this. I came to pvp and instead of sitting in hour/hour 20 min queues can jump straight into it. Was not fun waiting when that’s what you want to play. Easier to get friends to come join for a ‘quick bg’ when the queues aren’t so long.
The problem with a thread like this is it will inevitably be a big echo-chamber. This change will likely only benefit Horde in the long term, while it harms Alliance in the short term, and because the majority of the players are Horde, the response you will receive will be mostly positive.
The issue of Horde BG queue times certainly needs addressing. However, this change is the most likely to cause long-term damage to the Alliance, and I feel it should be the last resort rather than the go-to solution.
Please consider something else before resorting to this. It may have the most positive immediate impact, but I am genuinely concerned for the overall health of the Alliance on PVP servers, especially after you’ve just stood by and watched servers bleed to death. My old server, Blaumeux, was one such recent casualty. My entire guild, along with many many others, were forced to transfer off as the server as a whole became unplayable as Alliance.
Offer Horde free transfers to Alliance on Horde-majority servers, and see how it plays out. A big reason a contingent of them are unwilling to reroll is the time and emotional investment into their Horde characters. Faction changes implemented in this manner could not only help Horde solve their own BG queue problem, but help tip the overall faction balance closer to even.
As for the performance of the system itself, I don’t understand why I got paired against Alliance if Horde are the ones with the queue problems. The threshold of when the same-faction matchmaking kicks in needs to be higher, as Alliance should almost never get paired against other Alliance. The masks are kind of stupid but whatever to me personally, and while I didn’t feel disoriented by being on the Horde side of the EOTS map (because I’ve played each faction for several years), some of my teammates did.
The issue of Horde BG queue times certainly needs addressing. However, this change is the most likely to cause long-term damage to the Alliance
This change affects more than the PvP community, it affects the overall health of the server. More people will be rerolling Horde, because why play Alliance at this point? This was extremely short-sighted of Blizzard.
It amazes me how horde actually take pride in having a handicap. Remember in those old console games where you friend sucked bad and you had a handicap slider to make it easier for him and harder for you? That’s horde, and their proud of it LOL.
Sounds like you might of been bad at console games, Cause i’v never done that lol.
This has been great for my friends/guild. We re-rolled horde for TBC because it was our original faction and now we’ve actually be able to BG together.
If you’re not going to offer some other solutions (faction transfer, etc) then don’t repeal this because it makes the game playable for horde.