How to Address Premades in Classic Battlegrounds

[Crayoladream-atiesh]

Premades don’t have an advantage over pugs actually. The pugs just aren’t trying. They see it is a premade and just give up. I bet if they tried they would see at least a 40% win rate. Or maybe it’s just that Alliance have better pvp’ers than the horde.

…or at least that’s the garbage alliance get when we try to say AV is unfair.

[Thromkar-westfall]

@Zydax-kromcrush

But that won’t stop rankers farming players. It’ll just change the method. But you don’t care as long as you get a free pass from being farmed right?

Here’s the thing, though Zydax.

From a technical standpoint, that’s all ranking is; even if many people wouldn’t perceive it that way.

Winning a battleground is frequently the highest honor gain objective at any given time – and so players will play battleground objectives in an attempt to win if they can’t bank on the next game being easier.

The most easily available honor will still come from battlegrounds, and the matchmaking system will have generated some semblance of parameter to facilitate fairer matches between players.

At this point, nobody is being “farmed.” People are just playing the game and enjoying it while making progress towards rank when they participate.

[Chizz-burning-blade]

@Crayoladream-atiesh

Or maybe it’s just that Alliance have better pvp’ers than the horde.

Not everything is a Horde Vs. Alliance issue, for example, this is a casual PvPer Vs. Hardcore PvPer issue.

[Thromkar-westfall]

This is a people who enjoy playing games versus people who just want gear issue.

The latter is ruining the game for the former; and this is me stepping in to address the issue as a concerned party.

[Ziryus-doomhammer (Ziryus)]

@Zydax-kromcrush

@Ziryus-doomhammer

No it won’t stop, the point of separating queues is not to stop it. It’s to prevent premades from being queued against pugs

But that won’t stop rankers farming players. It’ll just change the method. But you don’t care as long as you get a free pass from being farmed right?

As I said the point is not to stop people from farming, where did you get the impression that was ever the issue? The issue has always been matching premades vs pugs.

[Chizz-burning-blade]

You can have fun too, just join a premaid or create one. Its not unfair, everyone can do it, just some people don’t want to deal with the social aspects of an MMO.

[Thromkar-westfall]

@Chizz-burning-blade

You can have fun too, just join a premaid or create one.

This is the problematic mentality, Chizz.

In what world is a pre v pug fun?

If my team has 3 healers, and their team has none because they didn’t hand pick their teammates; they’re going to get crushed, and I’m not going to have the engaging gameplay experience I was looking for when my team joined the queue.

That wouldn’t be challenging to me.

[Zakiri-stalagg]

@Thromkar-westfall

The honor system was not designed that way, it’s simply what players have turned it into as a direct result of premades facing pugs in bgs.

Funny that Horde think farming players trying to do dungeons 24/7 with multiple raids roaming high level zones and camping them, causing some players to take a literal hour to reach a dungeon only for it to fall apart due to frustration and resulting in multiple server communities falling apart- was completely fair.

But the moment you put that into an optional, even numbers environment like BGs- having a premade advantage is suddenly not fair.

Guess what, if Horde hadn’t gone full zug clearing casuals off of all the pvp servers for the first months, there’d still be thousands of casual pvp minded Alliance in the game making pug BGs.

Remember that you guys told us to just make premades to handle pvp during phase 2- and now you want us to stop making premades? Not going to happen.

[Crayoladream-atiesh]

Fine maybe those players in the premades are just better pvp’ers.

[Thromkar-westfall]

@Crayoladream-atiesh

Fine maybe those players in the premades are just better pvp’ers.

Prove it.

shrug

@Thromkar-westfall

@Thromkar-westfall

In a competitive game mode, fairness is mandated by circumstance.

Can you imagine a starcraft II tournament where one player’s units were just inherently stronger than the other player’s?

In some cases, a really great player would be able to overcome a handicap, which is, at least to some extent, what Vanilla PvP was all about: utilizing teamwork to overcome gear discrepancies and the strengths and weaknesses of the various classes to complete objectives.

That said, matchmaking pugs and premades together is like providing 1 player with more basic tech buildings to start the match. He’s getting marines out more quickly, because he doesn’t have to invest the time it takes the other player to construct his barracks.

@Thromkar-westfall

He wins every time, because he can rush the enemy base 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 gameplay, resulting in a meta where most of the finer points of the match are never played out.

It’s just 1 player sending his marines to kill the other player before he can even get a single military unit out onto the playing field, and that does’t make for a very interesting game.

@Thromkar-westfall

It isn’t the player’s fault, in this case.

It’s the game’s design.

If both players are provided a barracks at the start, then the game is still fair, and the competition isn’t invalidated; it’s just relying upon a different ruleset, where the players are inherently provided a barracks in addition to a command center at the start of the game, which ultimately changes the way the match plays out.

In WoW, there are two separate rulesets which determine how a Battleground team is selected, one allows players to hand pick their own players, the other provides random teams.

Premades facing pugs 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, a priest, 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, and in the random teams rulset, 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 of capturing the flag easier.

When your team composition is random, you have to be more creative in terms of how you intend to complete various objectives. When your class composition has been meticulously constructed to feature every tool you could possibly need, and puts them easily at your disposal, you’re playing an entirely different game.

So yes. 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.

@Thromkar-westfall

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.

Instead of trying to be something it’s not, maybe we can all just agree that playing WoW is something we all enjoy for whatever reason. While there are competitive elements to what we’re doing, ultimately we’re all just working to improve the capabilities of our own characters.

And there legitimately isn’t anything wrong with that.

[Donkles-bloodsail-buccaneers]

Your starcraft analogy is pretty bad.

Starcraft also has a random queue for team games, just like WoW does for BGs. It’s like that.

There is no barracks style advantage; premades don’t start games with extra flags captured, or bases in AB taken. It’s faulty logic, and then you base most of the rest of your post off of that faulty logic.

[Mootwo-earthfury]

@Thromkar-westfall

If the fun in the game is stomping pugs with invincible teams, you’re not being very considerate to the other people who play it.

That’s not the fun, the fun is playing with a team. Playing with the same people over, learning how to improve as a team, figuring out strategies, and just, in general, playing an MMO with other people. We PUG stomped absolutely but that wasn’t the fun part, that part was rather boring, but it was the game so we did it and I do not feel bad about it either. Those people decided to queue up solo. My favorite games were always against another evenly matched or premade where we fought it out.

I’ve said before I have no problem with premade vs premade personally as long as premading is incentivized enough where it is the preferred option of rankers. That is going to have to be better HPH. I’m of the opinion that losing premades and really only having pugs around is a bad thing.

Also, when the AV meta was a thing I was beaten by bots who would be in the game 24/7. I have a job and could not play 24/7. I would always participate in AV but I could not beat the bots and it was only the time reason. I think that any system that allows botting to get you more honor than a normal player is a problem. There are absolutely still AB and WSG bots.

[Zydax-kromcrush]

@Thromkar-westfall

The most easily available honor will still come from battlegrounds, and the matchmaking system will have generated some semblance of parameter to facilitate fairer matches between players

By what criteria are matches deemed “fair”? Because group size isn’t a good indicator of “skill” not all premades are honor farmers, same way not all solo players are casuals. Does it distribute players by rank? Rank is also not a measure of skill, but a measure of time and effort put toward ranking.

Classic pvp has no rating system, no MMR. There is absolutely no way to ensure fair matches when there is no metric to determine which players are actually better.

On top of that if solo queuers were sperated why do they deserve any honor? They chose to opt out of facing the best teams, and BG’s are team based games.

[Tigolbidies-kelthuzad]

And that’s totally fine. Leave the system.

[Thromkar-westfall]

@Mootwo-earthfury

That’s not the fun, the fun is playing with a team.

While that’s interesting…

I don’t see how the fact that you’re not facing pugs will do anything to detract from playing with your team.

@Mootwo-earthfury

I’ve said before I have no problem with premade vs premade personally as long as premading is incentivized enough where it is the preferred option of rankers.

In this case, Mootwo, I don’t think there’s going to be an overbearing preference based on the premises of Hph. It’s more about how you choose to play becuase of your inherent preference as a player.

For you, that sounds like pre v pre, and I envy you. The gameplay in that space is really unique and exciting, and I enjoy it very much.

Personally, I don’t have anyone to play with in that capacity, and that’s caused me quite a bit of frustration in the current meta.

[Donkles-bloodsail-buccaneers]

I thought you were against seperating the queues?

[Tigolbidies-kelthuzad]

Want to solve your problem and frustration with pvp?

Get into the twink community.

There is no gear incentive there. Your gear is done. The games are about competition.

Pick a gd bracket and fix your problem. And if you want to be a stubborn ox about it and respond “but i waaaaaa wanna pvp in waaaaaa the level 60 bracket waaaaaa” then I can’t help you.

You must remain to suffer because you are stubborn and lack the strength and knowledge to solve your own damn problem. Must be a PITA going through life like that.

[Thromkar-westfall]

Sure, if you want to play a rogue. Go ahead. lol

[Ziryus-doomhammer (Ziryus)]

@Donkles-bloodsail-buccaneers

Your starcraft analogy is pretty bad.

Starcraft also has a random queue for team games, just like WoW does for BGs. It’s like that.

There is no barracks style advantage; premades don’t start games with extra flags captured, or bases in AB taken. It’s faulty logic, and then you base most of the rest of your post off of that faulty logic.

SC and WC3 both have separate queues for premades and pugs.

[Ziryus-doomhammer (Ziryus)]

@Zydax-kromcrush

@Thromkar-westfall

The most easily available honor will still come from battlegrounds, and the matchmaking system will have generated some semblance of parameter to facilitate fairer matches between players

By what criteria are matches deemed “fair”? Because group size isn’t a good indicator of “skill” not all premades are honor farmers, same way not all solo players are casuals. Does it distribute players by rank? Rank is also not a measure of skill, but a measure of time and effort put toward ranking.

Classic pvp has no rating system, no MMR. There is absolutely no way to ensure fair matches when there is no metric to determine which players are actually better.

On top of that if solo queuers were sperated why do they deserve any honor? They chose to opt out of facing the best teams, and BG’s are team based games.

Group size is a very good indicator of who should be matched together. Don’t match premades vs pugs, it’s pretty straight forward.