Pugging is about learning to contend with inherent imperfection in your team makeup and winning anyway by responding appropriately to circumstance on an individual basis.
Premading is about constructing the perfect team composition and executing a coordinated strategy, frequently using inherently more efficient methods of communication.
Both exemplify merit in their own way.
They are both valuable for different reasons; neither one is inherently more valuable than the other. They are both challenging and difficult after their own fashion. The obstacles a player must overcome in order to be successful in each variant are not the same.
But they are not the same gametype.
They rely upon a different set of rules. A pure pug doesn’t belong in the same matchmaking queue as a full premade team and vice versa.
That has always been apparent; it will always be apparent, because that is the nature of the unadulterated truth. That is things as they are – despite partial-ism. Remove yourself from your position, regardless of where you are, and the truth value of that statement remains unchanged.
You might suggest that premade versus premade is an overall more “competitive” 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 randomized teams, unless you organized it to simply pull a lump sum of players into 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.
That would be a pretty wonky system.
But the truth is, WoW, and MMO’s in general don’t make the greatest platforms for competitive gameplay because they are so hard to standardize.
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.
Your character’s, and by transience your capabilities as a player change over time; 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’s possible.
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.
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 any reason why the game has any genuine exigence to be any more competitive than that.
Winning a pre v pre game certainly has the benefit of prestige and the right to brag – top players from top guilds go head to head – the team that wins is clearly comprised of better players who have worked harder on their characters, and the match results have displayed that so long as there wasn’t any manner of terrain advantage on the map which inherently privleged one side over the other which is infrequently the case.
The point I’m trying to make here is that pugging is fun; and that games are supposed to be about having fun.
The itemized reward might be what draws players toward participation, but the true reward they should receive is having fun.
That’s a video game.
An effort based progression system that allows all players of a game to eventually reach the same plateau of player power ultimately results in a fairer game which allows the best players to shine out the brighter on an inherently level playing field, because that system doesn’t privilege some players over others by providing them with an inherent player-power handicap.
If 2 players play Starcraft, and 1 player’s units are handicapped by 10% of their maximum health, and the unhandicapped player wins, he can hardly suggest he’s legitimately a better player because he was given an inherent advantage.
His bragging rights are diminished to the same extent that the other players’ units were handicapped; but becoming more powerful is also the inherent point of playing an MMO; which is why, I argue, they make a poor choice for standardized competitive models.