Premades are the vast majority precisely because premaking is the best way to get honor. If pugs didn’t have to face premades pugs would be the majority, because it requires way less effort.
Premades are the majority. Like… Look at Brutallus’ posts complaining that he faced 10 premades in a row in WSG. If premades weren’t the majority that would be statistically impossible.
The only time when the game is relatively premade-free is late sunday and monday because any PvPer worth anything has to work on keeping close to the caps on those days, so they only get like 500/1k honor
Players are players, Bozho. It isn’t accurate to suggest that a successful pug player is inherently more or less skilled than a successful premade player – only that he/she can still succeed; that is to say win games, even when playing consistently unsupported by devoted healers.
When your team is randomly generated, getting a heal is a rare occurrence. While you may die more frequently as a result of that, dying is part of the game; and the objective of a player who’s found themselves outnumbered or outmatched is simply to inflict as much strategic damage as possible prior to meeting their end.
For instance, I’ve been playing a lot of warrior recently. If I’m in WSG, and I try to flank the primary group camped out at midfield, but get bogged down by several rezzing players on my way to the enemy base, I might shield swap and try to drag those players as far away from their team as is humanly possible and snare them, increasing the amount of time it takes them to regroup with their team, forcing an imbalance at the primary point of contention, which increases the likelihood that the rest of my team will be successful in achieving control of the field.
If I’m 1 player, and 3 players are chasing, I’m prolonging a 9v7, and then a subsequent 9v3 (assuming nobody on my team died, which is unlikely).
Even though I died, that engagement was a successful strategic decision if my team can capitalize on the opportunity I provided them with, which is up to them. We may still lose because my teammates aren’t as skilled as the other team who succeeded when they were outnumbered, and in that case, we’re likely to lose the match as a result of being outclassed or outplayed.
If i’m in AB and my team is attacking a node, I can make myself useful by fighting on the road and denying their ability to reinforce that node by snaring the players scrambling to defend it. I’m likely to die without getting even 1 kill in that scenario, but I’m giving my team the best possible chance of capturing the node. That’s more likely to result in my team’s victory, and a win is worth more than an hk.
What’s different between pug and pre teams is that premades infrequently queue without at least 2-3 healers. That’s almost a 100% chance scenario, because players know and understand that having multiple healers substantially increases your chances of success – the queue system doesn’t make any distinction at all between healers and non-healers as it’s constructing teams, which results in a situation where enemy players frequently can’t be killed so long as they stay together as a group.
Killing a player in an objective oriented gameplay scenario accomplishes nothing, unless your team uses the absence of that player (while they’re rezzing and returning to a strategically significant position) to their advantage.
If we’re playing WSG, your team has 3 healers, and mine has none, any open engagement we have at midfield will result in a loss. I can kick back, charge the closest target and mortal strike it, hoping that my team will focus the spearhead and take it out while it can’t be effectively healed – but I’m going to take damage that isn’t going to be healed, and I’m eventually going to die.
The other warrior I charged, in this case, is being healed. All he has to do is retract back towards his team, I’m going to get plugged by a mage and a hunter simultaneously while his health slowly recovers, and I’m going to die; leaving his team free to cut into our ranged players and eventually melt the rest of our team wholesale.
If I charge in and pop shield wall attempting to fearbomb the healers, the priests are immune with fear ward and trinket, paladins are immune with bubble and trinket, mage is immune with trinket, the warriors are immune with berserker rage, reck or deathwish – so I’ve simply died, and have offered very little strategic benefit to my team other than, perhaps, that some of these fear immunities will have been burnt, making any additional fear effects that we employ during that engagement more dangerous.
Ultimately, that seems of very small strategic benefit, given that the battle at midfield is now 9v10, if not in circumstances more dire.
Paladins and priests can both dispel cc effects that occur on their fellow healers, and ultimately the enemy team is constantly regenerating health, and there’s very little our team can do about it because we don’t have the collective stamina to deal any lasting damage to the enemy team without the assistance of healers of our own.
If neither team has healers, or if those healers were easier to kill/lock down, both teams are bleeding members over the course of an engagement between them. Even if one side ends up firmly on top by the end, they may have only scraped by with 1-3 players remaining, and the rest are running back split from the graveyard and trying to regroup with them, which results in imbalances by player number elsewhere on the battlefield – which can be exploited and/or lengthened by the battle hardened battleground veteran.
The primary difference between pugs and premades is that one team starts without knowing what class assets they’re going to have at their disposal, and has to form a plan of action after they get that information – where as a premade stacks their group for the purposes of playing a preformulated strategy that’s exactly the same every time.
I’m glad to hear it, and guess what? You can still do that utilizing the changes I suggested to the matchmaking system.
And yet somewhere between 9-14 good players carrying that player doesn’t dent that group’s chances of success much, huh – where as 1 good player in a pug can shift the entire dynamics of a match when he/she capture’s a point after a 1v1, or does something sincerely heroic with the flag.
That’s the kind of excitement which simply doesn’t occur in 3 minute graveyard outdoor cookouts.
Except premades never got separated, Donkles. There was a bullet on a patchnote that said they would, somewhere between patch 1.6 and patch 2.0 and yet pugs still faced them from time to time up to the release of TBC and beyond.
You can still form a premade group for “casual” battlegrounds in BFA, and face a pug Donkles. This is still a problem in Retail today.
Solo queue players want to play a fair game. Matches in which pugs are pitted against premades are inherently unfair for every of any number of numerous reason’s I’ve provided over the course of this thread’s development; the knowledge of which you are playing ignorant.
You’re simply incorrect. It’s good for the game for it’s gameplay to feel substantial. It’s bad for gameplay to be one-sided and unfun. Pre v pre and pug v pug both offer substantial gameplay, Pre v Pug does not.
This must be the reason why they changed the scoreboard to stop premades from scouting pugs and dodging premades, and why they continue to hotfix bugs.
This is just another bug, it’s just a bug that exists in developer and player mentalities. I’m trying to hotfix that bug.
Nobody is complaining about engineering or class mechanics. We’re complaining about the matchmaking system, because it’s provoking inauthentic gameplay as a result of players abusing that system in classic.
Interesting assessment.
Also incorrect. I don’t have a horse in this race because I’m not going after rank 13/14 gear. This character has had the rank 10 set for months, and has deranked significantly since.
I’m spending my time purely on the basis of principal, because on principal, premades should not face pugs. I care about the health of the game and its’ gameplay, and the people who’re perfectly fine with damaging the integrity of that gameplay for the purposes of personal gain are premade players, not the pugs who they victimize.
Lets fix the matchmaking system, and put your assertions to the test. If you can beat me on a fair playingfield, in a pug, or in a premade if i’m in one, then you, and by transience your team, are better than me and my team.
There isn’t anything to blame other than the fact that my character simply isn’t powerful enough, or that I’m not skilled enough – there isn’t an uncontrolled variable at work which suggests that you simply beat me because you queued with a team, and I didn’t. The playing field is fair, you beat me, you’re better; enough said.
It’s my fault in that case, and not the game’s fault.
We’re not “breaking premades.” We’re fixing them, because they are currently broken.
The exact patchnote bullet said something along the lines of “we made it more likely that premades will face each other,” and it came after the release of x-realm, but before the release of TBC.
You still encountered premades in pugs, though. Whatever they did, there was some manner of queue time consideration which suggested that past some manner of threshold the queue system would be willing to matchmake pugs and premades in order to avoid unnecessarily lengthy wait times – and in my opinion, that ultimately hurt the integrity of the system.
This is absolutely true. Furthermore, if a premade was controlling a specific battleground, social elements could be employed to either boycott the queue, denying free honor to the premading team; or otherwise players could construct a premade to address the challenge and seek to subdue it.
Prior to xrealm bgs, you could employ a social solution to a social problem – the same cannot be said about xrealm bgs.
First of all this requires substantial changes to the game and its systems. Second of all you’re ignoring the fact that many players in pugs are just as skilled at the game as players in premades, they’re simply not backed up by a perfect class comp, and aren’t as coordinated as a result of not being in voice.
Players engaging battlegrounds in premades are exerting the same amount of effort as players who are engaging in pugs, there’s just an enormous variance in success rate due to the fact that 10 good players of the right classes* on a team is far more preferable to 3-7 good players of whatever classes queued up on a team.
Playing in a pug is just as challenging as playing in a premade, because you can’t depend on your teammates as much, and have to be prepared to do more of the heavy lifting yourself.
A premade fighting a premade may suggest their match is “more difficult,” because the other team contains 10 skilled and coordinated players – but so does your team if you built it to be competitive.
The challenge remains the same.
Correct, because they face pugs, which amounts to a free win due to the nature of hand selected teams facing randomly generated ones.
Play in a few pugs and then come back and tell me pugging requires less effort.
The honor you’re getting in a premade is where less effort exists, because your games against pugs require less effort to win as a result of having a stacked team comp.
When you’re making up for the lack of skill of 3 of the players on your team and pulling all that weight yourself you can come back and talk to me about what effort really means.
If what you say is true, premades will get more honor wholesale because they will have shorter waits in queue utilizing the system I proposed.
And this is the only time the game feels playable/authentic for players who queue alone. You still hit premades that are impervious to random teams, but they’re like 1 out of every 4-5 games instead of every single game you endeavor to play.
agreed… i dont think blizz will put any significant new development into the classic stuff.
Grab some guildies, and q up.
I think they’re perfectly okay with PvP being essentially broken by premades in Classic, because they never wanted to release Classic in the first place.
Ion Hazzikostas basically said as much when Nost went down because of Blizzard’s cease and desist, and there was all that political drama between the Nost development team and Blizzard.
I never played on Nost, but that ultimately became a pretty hot topic in the community.
The exact words used were something along the lines of “looking backwards” versus moving forwards with the continual development of the pre-existing retail game – which many vanilla pserver enthusiasts thought inferior for a wide variety of different reasons.
Leaving the matchmaking system broken hurts the integrity of classic gameplay, and increases the likelihood that players will return/revert to playing the retail game, due to an overwhelming lack of quality or authenticity in its gameplay.
The lack of action taken on this front would only serve to prove that Classic isn’t a product that Blizzard seems to genuinely care about. But that isn’t entirely true – is it?
Blizzard has taken action against player abuses of the matchmaking system when they changed the pre-match scoreboard to disable players in premades from being able to dodge other premades, and exclusively farm pugs for honor.
They changed it when instant AV queues for the Alliance allowed them to premake AV teams, because that resulted in gameplay which felt inherently inauthentic, and didn’t recall the AV battles we remembered from the original game.
They should change the fact that premades face pugs in WSG and AB, because that has similar adverse effects on the gameplay which pervades those content pieces. They should change the the Horde AV gate timing so that the opening engagement isn’t so close to SHGY, because Alliance didn’t lose every AV they ever played in the original game.
They should make changes to the client which restore a sense of Vanilla-like authenticity to Classic’s gameplay, and they shouldn’t heed the concerns of players who are abusing these features to hurt the integrity of their game; and who hide behind #nochanges to defend their ability to do so.
Many of the discontents I’m expressing here are ultimately the result of changes that were made to the game anyway when server populations and bracket sizes were increased, xrealm battlegrounds were implemented instead of server-specific ones, and because the knowledge gap resulted in stark, noticeable differences in player behaviors regarding some of the finer facets of the game and its’ systems.
The correct ethical action to take, in every case, is to preserve Vanilla’s gameplay in Classic.
That should rightly be the goal, objective, or mentality with which the development team ought to attack maintaining Classic WoW, because it best serves the interests of the game and its’ players.
No it’s not, it’s because matching premades vs pugs is and always has been silly. Pugs end up at a huge disadvantage that isn’t overcome by git gud and there is no reason premades should be rewarded for it.
Except this is false, pugs have the exact same win conditions as premades.
Oh, god, you can’t be serious. I give up.
From now on I’ll advocate for the complete removal of solo queues for battlegrounds. If you want to farm rep you should need to face the best teams.
And if you want to farm honor you should either make a decent team or be ready to get farmed endlessly in your own spawn point. You’re already used to that so it will be fine.
This would be preferable to leaving things as they stand.
At least, then, you would be appropriately earning your rewards by facing fairness in a competitive game mode.
But it’s well established this isn’t what they actually want, the amount of crying from these people would be immense if their easy wins went away. Look at how upset they get at the mere notion of that.
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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 in every team 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 premade 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.
In addition – that an effort based system which allows players to all eventually reach the same plateau of player power results in a fairer game which allows the best players to shine out the brighter on an inherently level playing field that 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, if 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…
/yawn
It’s just a game, dude.
No, we just want to keep you out.
It’s not about us, it is YOU who don’t want to face US. YOU are crying for change, YOU are losing endlessly because you are terrible at the system in place. We would be satisfied if we just kept you out. The fact that grand marshals need to play 8 hours a day because some pugs are playing 18 hours a day is what is wrong, not that you have to play for 18 hours to get GM and we only have to play 8. You should never be able to get high ranks because you can’t make a team. We don’t need you even for pool sizes, my server’s pool last week was 6000, 3000 of those were characters that rankers created, got 15 HKs on and then promptly deleted.
I’m not even a ranker, by the way. I do like 14 hours of pvp a week and I’ll get my commander mount next week. The fact that you can skip the entire team building system and get the same mount because you’re playing for 40 hours a week is what is wrong to me.
We only need to farm you because you exist within the system and you are gunning for ranks, for some reason. If we removed tryhard pugs we’d also remove the need to farm tryhard pugs.
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Alright, my server’s pool last week was 420 and I placed 41st, which wasn’t enough for me to gain even 7% to cap rank 9.
Nobody on my server has any interest in forming a premade team, and nobody whispers me back when I ask if anyone wants to get a team together.
shrug
So… who died and made these “grand marshals” more important than the pug player who worked twice as hard for it?
I would have to change servers in order to build a team and I don’t want to.
shrug
WoW is a social game and I have friends on my server who don’t PvP.
This game was obviously designed exclusively for you. Nobody else should be able to play it, nobody else should be able to rank, and you’re the only important person in the whole world.
I’m sorry. I see now. I was so wrong.
You server’s pool was… 420?
What is wrong is that it’s impossible to rank in your server. Like, even if you made a premade your premade team wouldn’t fit in the top 3 brackets. A small pool, hard to work with is around 2k players.
Lease, my server’s player pool is LARGER than a conventional vanilla server’s.
Do you understand the problem now?
We have 6 (count them) 6 helmets – and even that wouldn’t have been possible in Vanilla WoW. So stop hitting me with this #nochanges nonsense; because the game is not the same.
Okay, here is what happens in my server:
People who want to rank make/join premades.
People who don’t want to rank or only want to get rank 10 play battlegrounds solo or make small guild groups to make each battleground easier/more fun.
Both options are readily available. Nobody complains.
So, new solution:
PvE servers/Small servers get a battlegroup.
Large PvP servers get another battlegroup.
We don’t face each other. You don’t complain because you’re not getting your face bashed in by an entire server whose main focus is PvP.
I just need you to agree with me on something. If you play on my server, and if you can easily make your own premade and slowly make it better, is it still fair that pugs are able to reach high ranks? In this case it is clearly a matter of not wanting to adapt to the system in place.
I mean, the playerbase might be larger but the vast majority of people got their 15 HKs back then. I played in Malfurion, a medium-sized PvE server and there were small skirmishes all the time (with the associated butthurt). So if you had 2000 players you’d have a good shot at a 1500-sized pool.
Lease, my main focus as an individual player is PvP, regardless of what realm I’m on. I’m more than capable of contending with premade teams if my team has a coordinated core group of players. It happens infrequently, but it does happen.
How about this. Yes. It’s absolutely fair that if you play 8 hours a day, and another player is willing to play 16 hours a day, that player deserves HWL/GM more than you do, becuase he’s putting in more effort.
The system in place is effort based – and you’re using premades to circumvent that because apparently it’s owed to you for reasons beyond my comprehention.
Errrr, not really. In the case of my server, as I said, there are two readily available and widely used playstyles (although premades is obviously more prevalent than the other).
You need to understand that if you don’t premade you are playing a completely different game than I am. It isn’t owed to us, we made the system that was in place work for us, we took what was already there and got gud. For you it might not seem fair because, as you said yourself, the option to get gud (making a good team) ISN’T AVAILABLE TO YOU IN THE FIRST PLACE, and even if it was you’d still have a problem because the pools are so small. That is where the unfairness lies, in the fact that in some servers ranking is a 16 daily hours undertaking without any means to make the experience better or quicker. But in a large PvP server anyone can get gud (which within the system that is in place means making a good team) if they really want to, and if they refuse to do so they’re trying to get the rewards from an activity that they aren’t even doing in the game. Within the system in place fairness means the best teams get to rank, and the amount of time you have to spend on ranking depends on how far you want to get AND on your performance as a team.
Right.
Nothing I proposed would change that; only you would be competing against players who queued solo rather than in a team for rank as well; because they would be rewared appropriately for their time and effort too.
They would be graded on their ability to adapt to the circumstances they find within a match, and how well they were able to perform as a result.
Nothing has changed, except that pugs and premade players alike would be awarded an appropriate amount of honor for playing a fair game, and the gameplay would be fairer and more fun for everyone involved.
I’m not seeing where the fault lies.