Exactly. They want premades so they can stomp pugs for higher honor yield; not so they can make friends.
The ‘friends’ they make in this venue are a means to an end, which is more honor in less time.
Premades have 1 purpose, and that’s to acquire honor faster when a mismatch between pre and pug is created by the matchmaking system. Premade teams’ unwillingess to face each other in a legitimate contest is evidence enough – which is why we saw queue dodgers running away with brackets early in phase 3 prior to the changes that were implemented regarding pre-match scoreboards.
Even subsequent to that, there have been stories of premade teams hiding in the mine in AB to preserve world and consumable buffs when the enemy team is also a premade. It’s despicable.
Pre v Pug results in unarguably poor quality gameplay, as well as inherent inequity in prospective reward for the same amount of time spent regardless of your skill as an individual player.
There isn’t any excuse why we’re all still having this conversation 16 years later.
You keep mixing up your primary argument, is it forming bonds and friendship or is it easy honor farm by taking advantage of a bad matchmaking system? If it’s the former, then those dedicated to forming bonds and friendships, such as yourself, will always find ways to meet your desire such as world PvP or actually competitive premade-vs-premade BGs.
People can form friends and form bonds in the game in other ways, having to be forced into learning this “lesson” by getting smashed in BGs by premades is not one of them.
The Vanilla honor system is presupposed to gauge your effort, as well as your quality as a player in PvP.
If every game is constructed on the premise of fairness, this goal is achieved.
If premade teams are pitted against pugs, there is an uncontrolled variable which is socially constructed; and that doesn’t feel appropriate to me.
It would have been nice if the rank system was cumulative, rather than decaying over time, in an attempt to better reward players for their effort and quality; but that isn’t what this conversation is about.
We’re here to talk about fair matchmaking, and as far as I’m concerned my point is proven.
While I enjoyed Vanilla’s Battleground centered system better, you’re not wrong.
Since there wasn’t an option to queue for arenas without first having constructed a team, every competitive arena match that ever ensued was built upon fair circumstances.
Battlegrounds in TBC, however, retained their feature which allowed players to form premades and face pugs – and that was still inappropriate in regards to fair matchmaking procedures.
Look, we are lucky that the meta is the most fun way to play the game. Most matches are premade vs premade, pugs are the vast minority (which you can easily deduce when you realize you mostly face premades) and pug vs pug is the most miserable match type in existence. Battlegrounds are a team vs team experience, you need to make a team to have a shot at decent honor per hour. Pugs are, as I said before, the worst teams by far and most players in pugs have zero idea of how AB works. Like, super basic rated battleground moves like wiping on LM in order to zerg Mines might as well be quantum physics for players who only ever pug. The truth is you never bothered making a team, studying strategies, adjusting the comp, assigning roles and you only think pug vs pug is in any way fun because you have no idea of what each player is actually supposed to be doing. Once you have the most basic idea of how battlegrounds are supposed to work watching solo queuers move around is beyond infuriating. You want to change the meta into one that rewards ONLY time spent, and your idea of a hard working, competent player is someone flailing around, contributing close to nothing but getting killing blows because he has Ashkandi.
Pug teams might not have a single healer among them – or if they do, he/she can be more easily CC’d, because there isn’t a concentration of healers ready to dispel them when/if they get locked up.
Playing in a pug requires more creativity and on-the-fly thinking on behalf of every individual participant, because your comp is unlikely to be perfect and contain every tool you could possibly need. It’s more about being able to react to circumstance on an individual basis, rather than being able to stick to a plan and execute what you’ve been told to do.
There is value in pug gameplay, even if it is different than premade gameplay.
If this is true, then why wouldn’t it be pertinent to enforce pre v pre?
If pugs are a minority, as you say, their queue times will be longer and you’ll end up with significantly more honor for premading anyway; you just won’t be ruining the game for players joining pugs.
My guess is that this isn’t true, and that you’re simply trying to defend your right to an easy win.
This is mostly the same discussion that will continue on forever. I completely agree with the idea that premades encourage teamwork and keep people more involved in the game.
Just an example. In phase 2 I was running with around 5 guildies at different times. We were all ranking and had goals. We had a blast running around killing allies and phase 2 was very enjoyable to me despite alliance having 60% of the server and always controlling BRM/SG as well as running around in large groups that would wipe us. Grouping with 1 - 4 of my guildies at a time and getting on voice coms and running into groups of alliance out there to PVP in Winterspring or Burning Steppes was extremely fun.
Then along came BGs and AV became the meta. We could no longer group and were forced to PUG with 39 random horde. For those of us who kept ranking it went from being a lot of fun to being a boring, mindless grind surrounded by strangers on other servers. For those of us that continued most got to the goal and were done. We did world PVP between queues when our times out of AV matched up but the fun mostly ended at phase 2s end. I know so many people who quit at the end of phase 2 because they expected WSG and they instead got endless AV grinds.
I started having fun again when I started doing premades and for me it wasn’t about stomping PUGs. I just enjoy PVPing with other people in my guild and on my server way more.
I have to call this out. This is just wrong. If you don’t carry your weight with a premade you won’t get invited back.
With a PUG there are PLENTY of examples of people not carrying weight including AFKing and botting. PUGs also reward chasing down HKs (regardless of objectives) while premades reward teamwork.
I dunno, I remember these arguments from back in the day. Eventually premades got seperated.
Then engineering items and other combat items got nerfed to not work in BGs.
Then classes started being balanced around arena nerfing them in PvE areas of the game.
It’s not fair, but I know where this leads. Solo queues want to have good winrates without being forced to make a premade, so they don’t want to ever play against a premade.
They don’t care that this is bad for the game.
They don’t care that it’s bad for premades
They don’t care that this is not a game with active development, but a remake/rerelease that isn’t being actively balanced.
They won’t care if it stops being classic pvp later because enough people complained engineering was unfair, or that a class was imbalanced.
They only care about themselves. And they’re too short sighted to see that breaking premades doesn’t solve the problem. The other team is still going to be unbeatable if all the people premading just switch to in-game voice chat and continue to use consumables when you don’t. They’re used to playing it more social than you are, they’ll communicate better even without a preset group.
I dunno man, the whole topic is missing the point of the game in the first place. If they released mario 2 classic, a rerelease of the old game, these are the guys who would be saying “nerf peach she’s overpowered” despite that being how the game has always worked, and this just being a re-release. Premades are one of the warts and all things that was mentioned. Keeping them out of AV is fine, it didn’t have a join as group button. You shouldn’t be able to avoid them completely in the other BGs.
Now go ahead and find the 2 sentences you can come up with a pithy argument about and ignore the rest of my post, like you always do. And then claim that no one had any good reasons, again, despite many people telling you.
I don’t remember them getting separated. Was it in a later patch or something? I remember crossrealm though.
To be honest I don’t think separating premades and pugs now is a bad thing and heres why:
In Vanilla, most of the life-span of the game was in-server. Crossrealm wasn’t implemented until the last patch before BC. Premade vs pug pre-xrealm was more competitive because you had rivals on the enemy team and you sometimes were pugged with people you already knew so it wasn’t so random like now where youre just pugged with randos from other servers going against people from other servers. The only way to make it a little more competitive between factions is to truly have premades fight each other…this type of competitiveness may be attractive to those players who are looking more for team/skill based pvp instead of team/grind based pvp. I wouldn’t be opposed to having premade teams being eligible for rank 13/14 gear while puggers only eligible for rank 10 gear.
The reason I only got to R13 in Vanilla and not HWL was because I was so burnt out on the grind. Log on, join a team, enter WSG/AB when popped, steamroll the other team and do nothing the rest of the battle. At first its nice because its a lot of honor but you need the mental patience to keep doing that for so much weeks. In BC, me and a few people would arena a lot and I never got tired of it. It was competitive and it kept me interested in PvPing. I lost that interest in Vanilla right after I decided not to go for HWL. Competitiveness keeps people going. Eventually beating a bunch of little kids in basketball is going to be boring and youre going to want something challenging, well atleast for people who are competitive.
Well if the argument is honor for effort then premades who get matched against pugs should have their honor significantly reduced as they had a much easier match.
Actually this would solve a lot of the problem without requiring a hard rule that premades be matched against premades. If the honor for premades fighting pugs was severely reduced premades would lose their incentive to try to pug stomp.
I wouldn’t consider that a win really. If pugs really are facing as many premades and losing as much as they say, brackets would stay the same with just different numbers. Premades would gain less honor at the same rate but competition for ranks wouldn’t change.
The difficulty is a direct result of their effort. Forming a group or joining one requires some amount of effort. Farming mats or gold for consumes requires effort. Coordinating with a team to kick healers/sheep/focus at the right times requires an amount of skill/effort. In pve we apply effort before raids to ensure success. I can imagine blizz tried to apply this to pvp as an option as well. It’s literally a team that que’d more prepared than the other.