In a Competitive Game, Fairness is Mandated by Circumstance.
Imagine a starcraft II tournament where one player’s units were inherently stronger than the other’s. A great Starcraft player, who is skilled at the game, might be able to still win despite being disadvantaged in such a way.
I would suggest that a similar premise lies at the root of all Vanilla PvP, because successful players are required to utilize teamwork and individual skill to overcome things like gear discrepancies, and the strengths and weaknesses of the various classes, in order to complete objectives on the battlefield.
That said, in reference to our Starcraft example, matchmaking pugs and premades together isn’t like providing one player with a minor handicap. It’s more like providing one of the players with more buildings to start the match.
Since one player started with a barracks, this player is getting marines out more quickly, because he doesn’t have to invest the time it takes the other player to construct one. He can win every match if he wants to, because he can rush the enemy base with several marines before the other player’s barracks has even finished construction, and the game feels broken as a result.
This is the point, in development, when we suggest that changes are absolutely necessary to the system which is causing an inequity in the number of barracks’ each player starts with, because it has a profoundly negative impact on the competitive nature of the gameplay – frequently resulting in matches where most of the finer points of the game are never played out.
It’s literally just one player repeatedly sending his marines to kill the other player before he can even get a single military unit out onto the playing field, and that doesn’t make for a very interesting game.
It isn’t the fault of the player who didn’t receive a free barracks that he lost the match, in this case; rather, it’s a fault of the game’s design for providing the other player with one; because that made the game inherently unfair.
Meanwhile, if both players are provided with a barracks at the start, then the game is still fair, and the competition isn’t invalidated; it’s just relying upon a different set of rules, where both players are provided a barracks in addition to a command center at the start of the game, and that ultimately changes the way the match plays out as it develops over time.
In WoW, there are two separate sets of rules which determine how a Battleground teams are constructed. One of these allows teams to hand pick their own players, and in the other case the game provides random teammates to players who all queued alone or in small groups.
Premades facing pugs, then, aren’t playing the game utilizing the same set of rules, which frequently results in situations very much like the Starcraft player being unable to cope with early marines when, despite every effort, all he has is SCVs.
Is it possible your randomly generated team will have a druid, 2 priests, a paladin/shaman, a warrior, a rogue, a hunter, a warlock and a mage or two?
Absolutely.
It’s also possible you’re going to get 8 warriors and 2 warlocks. In the random teams ruleset, the objective is to still win the game despite not having access to every single one of the class mechanics which would make completing the objective easier.
When your team composition is random, you have to be more creative in terms of how you intend to complete battleground objectives. When your class composition has been meticulously constructed to feature every single tool you could possibly need, and puts them easily at your disposal, you’re playing an entirely different game.
Perhaps you won because your team was hand picked, while the other team was randomly generated. That doesn’t make you a better or more competitive player, it just means that the premises of the match were built upon circumstances which were inherently unfair to the other team.
Pugging is about improvisation. Becoming a great pug player is about learning to contend with the inherent imperfection of your team makeup and being successful anyway by responding appropriately to circumstance on an individual basis, and thinking on the fly.
Premading is about structure. Premades need to construct the perfect team composition by class and execute a coordinated strategy, frequently using inherently more efficient methods of communication to take command of the battlefield.
Both exemplify merit in their own way. Both have value for different reasons; and I would argue that neither one is inherently more valuable than the other. They are both challenging and difficult after their own fashion, and the obstacles a player must overcome in order to be successful in each variant are not the same.
They are not the same gametype, however, because they don’t follow the same set of principals; and when we pretend they do, it creates an insurmountably unfair situation for the pug, and a boring challenge-less one for the premade, assuming that their team composition is “viable,” and the pug composition is not; which happens frequently as a result of player preferences.
The rule of random teams, or otherwise preconstructed ones, should rightly remain constant on both sides of the matchmaking equation, given that we propose to create a set of fair circumstances for players on both teams.
As such, a pure pug doesn’t belong in the same matchmaking queue as a full premade and vice versa, because there’s an inherent inequity between them in terms of their likelihood to feature “viable” class compositions.
One is being thrown together at random, the other is being engineered for success, and it isn’t fair to offer a player the option to queue alone if the game, then, proceeds to throw them into an almost unwinnable game, against players who didn’t – just like it wasn’t fair to the starcraft player who held out for 5 whole minutes fighting marines with SCVs.
There isn’t anything that suggests that players in pugs are bad players – it’s just the nature of the game as it pertains to team composition. If the enemy team has multiple well-geared healers ready to dispel CC effects off each other and your team doesn’t have even one healer among all 10 players, your team is going to melt, and their team is going to feel invincible. That’s just the nature of how things work out.
You might suggest that premade versus premade is an overall more “formal” experience from the standpoint that pugging cannot, by definition, be standardized; and that would be a nominally valid claim.
For instance – if you were to hold a formal battleground tournament, you would be hard-pressed to enforce a randomized teams ruleset – unless you were to organize it by producing a lump sum of individual qualifiers, shoving them into random battleground queues, and over the course of multiple instances, grade their individual win-loss ratio as the sum of the result of every match they participated in, weighted by their individual performance in the event of a tie by match points, or something.
It would be a really wonky system, and it would be far more formal perhaps, to organize a tournament around the premise of premade teams, provided you’d be dealing with a heck ton of players at that point; depending on how many teams you intended to invite.
In my opinion, MMO’s simply don’t make the greatest platforms for competitive gameplay, in general, because they are so difficult to standardize.
In the previous example, how would you even begin to distinguish which players qualify to participate in the tournament in the first place?
Unlike something like Starcraft, which is inherently standardized by nature (race/unit balance patches not withstanding), MMO’s operate on the basis of individual character power that is constantly shifting in response to a player’s progression through content, and their acquisition of gear upgrades – which are continually released as new content is introduced to the game. The curve of player power is ever advancing, and players are trying to stay ahead of it.
Your character’s, and by transience your capabilities as a player change over time in reference to the other characters in the game; and those power imbalances, in addition to the RNG centric nature of the combat system, result in a game whose competitive premises are very difficult to regulate because of the amount of variance that is inherently possible between respective players, who may very well stand upon similar grounds in term of relative skill.
In the end, MMO’s – WoW, specifically, feels like a game that is played for the purposes of personal enjoyment, and not as a platform for competitive gaming in most cases – and that feels appropriate, given the nature of the game and its’ systems.
Players are attracted to the sense of accomplishment that they associate with increasing the power of their character relative to the world and the other players that populate it; and I don’t see why the game has any genuine exigence to be any more competitive than that.
Winning a pre v pre game is surely worthy of prestige.
If top players from top guilds go head to head – the team that wins is clearly comprised of better players, on average, who have worked harder on their characters, and the match results will show us who is determinedly the stronger team – so long as there wasn’t any manner of terrain advantage which inherently privileged one side over the other which, I confess, is infrequently the case.
The point I’m trying to make here is that, even if premade versus premade is more formal; pugging is more fun, despite being competitive, and far less consistent otherwise. The gameplay in pugs is varied, unique, and interesting; because of the randomized nature of the system by which teams are constructed.
Compound that upon human-controlled player behavior, in reference to an NPC which behaves upon the premise of mechanical threat, and you begin to see why pugging has an inherently higher entertainment value than “formalized” competitive gameplay. Trying to turn the game into an inherently formalized contest damages the game’s ability to do what it’s best at – which is entertain us.
Itemized reward might be what draws a players toward participating in a specific piece or type of content – but the true reward they should always receive is simply the experience of playing the game; because that’s what the point of a game is, on principal. Games are entertainment.
Given that an MMO makes a poor platform for competitive gameplay anyway, I suggest we compound our efforts on what the game is legitimately good at providing, and emphasize that point instead of trying to turn it into something it’s not.
Vanilla’s PvP progression system was designed to reward effort. Obviously it had it’s flaws – mostly in the nature of rank decay, and the effect that decay had on locking players into doing PvP almost exclusively in order to make progress. Time spent doing anything else in the game was time you could’ve spent advancing your rank; even in the case of a player who would’ve preferred to’ve been doing something else entirely, and not playing games at all.
The rank system wouldn’t have been so bad if progress made towards rank had been an individual, cumulative, and comprehensive system, rather than a system which was relative in reference to the other players on your server, and which decayed over time. Arena may have been a healthier alternative, but I’m not sure it quite hit the mark either for a number of reasons.
Consider two players playing Starcraft once more. One player’s units are handicapped by 10% of their maximum health.
If the unhandicapped player wins, he can hardly suggest he’s legitimately a better player because he was given an inherent advantage. In order to achieve that bragging right wholesale, he needs to be able to compete against the other player under circumstances in which neither player has that advantage.
That said becoming more powerful is also the inherent point of playing an MMO, and the playable classes are designed and balanced by human beings; which is why, I assert, once more, they make a poor choice as a standardized competitive platform.
We saw this in Legion PvP with stat templates. They were genuinely pretty unpopular.
In my opinion, the best possible player-power progression system is still based on effort, rather than raw skill.
Eventually, all players reach the same plateau of player power after exerting enough effort, and that results in a fairer game; which allows the best players to shine out the brighter on an inherently level playing field, because they’re still the best despite the fact that their character’s progression doesn’t privilege them with an inherent player-power handicap, or advantage over other players.
They’re simply better, because they are more skilled at the game.
The problem, of course, is how to incentivize and reward players who continue to spend their time playing the game after they have achieved the best possible mechanical advantages that affect their prospective power as a character.
This is offering appearances and prestige items instead of player power as a reward past a certain point; which obviously isn’t going to happen in WoW Classic, because drastically changing the game was never the point of the project.
All I’m trying to demonstrate is that it’d be hard to call WoW Classic a competitive game, despite that it may feature competitive gameplay. In a model which rewards players at the crossroads of effort and skill, equal effort should rightly be rewarded with essentially equal reward, regardless of whether you’re “playing at the highest competitive level” or not, to allow for the best players to reveal themselves.
Currently, “the highest competitive level” is getting a bunch of well geared players together with the right composition of classes to completely demolish randomly generated teams that can’t contend with the cocktail of class mechanics they’ve mixed together by default; and overtly avoiding confrontation with other preconstructed teams, who would otherwise present an appropriate challenge.
The “competition” is not between two opposing teams who’ve been pitted against each other to compete for objectives; people are viewing the competition as one which transpires between themselves, and the other players from their faction, for a ladder positions on the weekly PvP participation bracket – and that doesn’t seem like a healthy mentality with which players had ought to be approaching playing the game, even if that is the reality of how progress within the system is achieved.
Premades are, in effect, giving players the ability to form “alliances” with the very players that they’re supposedly competing against using this competitive model.
Competition in WoW should rightly be about wanting to win the challenging and engaging match you’re currently in, rather than concerning yourself with how many pushover matches you need to win by the end of the week to make rank.
Given that progression is determined upon the premise of a relative ladder, it doesn’t feel appropriate to offer greater reward to players who are cashing in on exploiting unfair circumstances in order to more frequently succeed.
All things considered:
- Premade vs. Premade = fair game.
- Pug vs. Pug = fair game.
- Pug vs. Premade = unfair game.
Given the premises:
- What we’re talking about is a game, meant to be played for the purposes of entertainment
- Poor quality gameplay provides less entertainment than higher quality gameplay
- Unfair situations frustrate the player, and provide poor quality gameplay experiences
Our conclusion must be:
Distinguishing between Premade and Matchmade Battlegrounds increases the quality of PvP gameplay in WoW Classic.
There is no real justification why Pugs can’t face Pugs, and why Premades can’t face Premades. People who stand against a wider distinction between them have an ulterior motive by directly benefiting from a broken system that allows them to acquire honor more efficiently by exploiting matchmaking circumstances which result in gameplay which is inherently unfair.
Unfair games are what they’re after on the surface level. Higher honor yield is their only concern underneath; and the quality of the gameplay they experience is of little to no consequence at all which is why I deem their argumentative position(s) to be invalidated.
The queue dodging mechanics we saw them abusing prior to the changes to the pre-match WSG scoreboard should be all the evidence I need to provide in order to support that claim.
I suggest that queuing with 4 or more party members should place your group into a different queue.
This would allow small groups of friends to continue queue, together, into the “solo queue” field of play, without also empowering them to completely control the outcome of a match, due to the sense in which the vast majority of their team has still been generated by the matchmaking system – which acts as a constant regulating fair matchmaking on both sides.
Players can still queue with larger teams, provided that they are guaranteed to face an enemy team with 4 or more group-queued players to oppose them.
Queuing with a team of 7 or more players had ought to place you into a 3rd queue type which will only fill a spot with a solo queue or social group member if:
- The team didn’t queue with enough players to fulfill the player cap
- Someone fails to accept the Battleground invitation
- Somebody leaves the match
For instance, if you queue with 12 players for Arathi Basin, the queue system would fill in the remaining 3 spots, but the enemy team composition would be guaranteed to feature at least 7 players from a single server’s premade team to mirror your own 7+ player team’s queue.
This queue system is creating 3 different variants of AB/WSG matches:
- Pure Pugs
- Exclusively single players and parties of 3 or less*
- Teams (4-6)
- One team of 4-6 players from a single server on each side
- Single players, and parties of 3 or less*
- Premades (7+)
- One Team of 7+ players from a single server on each side
- Single players, and parties of 3 or less*
*With the exception of the Team or Premade around which the 2nd and 3rd variants of these matches are constructed, a 3 player maximum from any single server applies to any and every situation where the matchmaking system intends to select a player from the pool of “Solo/Social group queue” players to fill out a team.
Finally, introduce a minimum queue period of somewhere around 20-30 seconds, and scramble the player queue order in that time frame so people can’t abuse the system, attempting to make cross realm premade groups utilizing multiple parties of 3 or less players per server.
Because if we know anything about the hardcore player-base at this point in the game’s development: it’s that “if you let them, they will.”
Ultimately, nothing changes about Classic in reference to Vanilla; and, as a matter of course, the gameplay we remember is better preserved.
On a side note, I’m certain that some semblance of alteration to AV is necessary to give the Alliance a better chance of winning.
The fact that many of their best players won’t step foot into AV unless they can hand-pick all 40 players not withstanding, due to the distances between the Alliance and Horde caves and the center of the map, it seems like the resulting opening engagement starts far too close to the Stonehearth Graveyard flag. As a result, the Alliance has very little chance to play offensively fear of losing their only forward spawn-point.
I think Blizzard should experiment with the idea of delaying the Horde gate’s opening by somewhere between 7 and 15 seconds, in order to draw the opening engagement further South.
Modifying the game to better suit everyone and provide a higher quality of gameplay for every person that steps into a battleground is not accommodating only me, but everyone that picks up the game.
Leaving the queue systems laughably broken, proposing that sub 5 minute games which maximize honor per hour rather than providing an immersive and substantial competitive experience; that is asking Blizzard to accommodate a vocal minority.
A vocal minority who doesn’t care about PvP at all, despite sowing the seeds of corruption in the system; and only desires for the rewards it offers for purposes which probably have nothing to do with that sphere of the game
I have always seen Vanilla/Classic PvP as an alternative endgame progression path to endgame raiding. While raiding is a largely social enterprise, PvP, with its matchmaking features, feels far more gameplay centric.
It feels unfair to the avid proponents of 60 cap PvP to allow social prowess to continue to dominate this sphere or variant of WoW endgame, when the option is also provided to queue as a single player, effectively opting out of the social experience one associates with endgame raids when creating a preformulated group prior to joining the battleground.
Ultimately, it’s just one more kick in the teeth to consider that the popular and well connected players ought to have an inherent advantage in PvP; especially when this place was where many of us ended up almost as a direct result of not having, or perhaps even wanting, the strong social connections other players might’ve use to raid.
Increased server sizes, larger pvp brackets, xrealm battlegrounds – all of these implementations were not features of the original game, and are largely to blame for the gameplay’s degenerative tendencies over the course of the it’s release schedule. Ultimately, this has resulted in players realizing and capitalizing upon the efficiency of farming pugs for honor in premades, which wasn’t ever a meta that genuinely developed in earnest, and certainly not to this extent, when the game was live content.
I have watched as a game I sincerely enjoyed in 2005, which featured engaging objective oriented PvP, has been simplified and reduced, until nothing truly authentic remains except “Holocaust Simulator 2020;” the objective of which is to systematically murder the maximum number of players you can in the shortest amount of time.
Separating premades from being matchmade against pugs seems like the best solution to restore some semblance of Vanilla’s authenticity back into Classic’s PvP gameplay.
To me, pugging in an effort based model was one of the novel successes of the Vanilla PvP system – even if had its’ own set of failures in the nature of rank decay.
If anyone who reads this thread comes away from it with the understanding of why that experience had value, my time will not have been wasted; even if no changes are made to matchmaking in WoW Classic.
Pug v Premade being permissible was, in my opinion, one of the notable mistakes upon which the trajectory of 12-13 years of subsequent development hinged; that might’ve otherwise gone a completely different direction if the developers had better understood what value that experience had to offer their players.
Being able to see the server side ladders with spy definitely changes the way I’ve come to perceive it, and the first time around I confess I enjoyed it far more; because people knew less about how it worked, and it was more about just playing the game.
What some people fail to understand is that Vanilla’s servers had far fewer players on them. As a result, the weekly PvP participation ladders were smaller, which meant the brackets were smaller, which meant that far fewer players had the ability to push high ranks at any one time.
In effect, Classic’s server sizes have allowed full premades to continue to rank collectively upwards of rank 12, which is why you see full teams of rank 12+ players forming premades, and playing in them for 8 or more hours a day.
As a result, the frequency with which you encounter premades is significantly different in Classic than it was in Vanilla. If you encountered a well geared premade in Vanilla, a vast majority of its participants weren’t hardcore rankers, and their purposes there were either for fun or for reputation in most cases, because the constraints of the PvP bracket didn’t make ranking lucrative for all of them at once.
As a result of server size, there’s a wholesale increase in the number of players ranking in premades, and that’s resulted in vast differences in terms of how the game feels to play.
Thank you for reading.
Have a good Morning/Afternoon/Evening.
