How to Address Premades in Classic Battlegrounds

[Donkles-bloodsail-buccaneers]

That’s nice.

[Zydax-kromcrush]

@Thromkar-westfall

All you want is gear. Don’t care who it negatively affects. Don’t care that the gameplay sucks, you just gotta get that weapon

Don’t you want the same thing? Why else would you want to opt out of playing better teams. You want the rewards but don’t want to put in the work. You don’t care that it ruins pvp for everyone who doesn’t solo queue. The change will have no affect on rankers at all.

[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

@Thromkar-westfall

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

It’s the game’s design.
[/quote]

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.

This is why my opinion matters, Donkles. And perhaps why yours doesn’t matter to me.

[Donkles-bloodsail-buccaneers]

Nah. Neither of our opinions matter. We aren’t devs. We’re nerds on a forum.

If your opinion mattered wouldn’t it be fixed by now?

[Ziryus-doomhammer (Ziryus)]

@Zydax-kromcrush

@Thromkar-westfall

All you want is gear. Don’t care who it negatively affects. Don’t care that the gameplay sucks, you just gotta get that weapon

Don’t you want the same thing? Why else would you want to opt out of playing better teams. You want the rewards but don’t want to put in the work. You don’t care that it ruins pvp for everyone who doesn’t solo queue. The change will have no affect on rankers at all.

Separating the queues would only impact premades who rely on farming pugs. Premades who are competent and want to fight other premades benefit as do solo queuers.

[Donkles-bloodsail-buccaneers]

The truth is, it’s not unfair in the slightest. People who chose not to premade don’t get the benefits of a premade. They made a choice not to engage with the system, and now they don’t want to play against people who did. They want to make it unfair, force premades to play harder games only because they could not be arsed to build one.

Premading did exist in classic; it’s always been available. People are complaining because it’s far more popular and frequently used than before.

I argue against this because it’s forcing people to play differently because… what they are doing is now popular. And that’s no reason to make changes, by itself. Something’s always gonna be META.

Your argument boils down to I refuse to premade, so I don’t want to face premades. It’s like arguing I refuse to spend talent points, so I don’t want to play against people who did.

There’s no unfairness just because you make a choice not to do something.

[Thromkar-westfall]

@Donkles-bloodsail-buccaneers

People who chose not to premade don’t get the benefits of a premade.

Participating in a premade isn’t a choice that’s just inherently available to everyone dude. Players are selective on my server and the group is like 4 people. They wouldn’t include me, because they don’t want me cramping their caps.

At the end of the day, that shouldn’t be up to them – it should be up to me. Because it’s my life, and I do what I want. m’kay?

@Donkles-bloodsail-buccaneers

They made a choice not to engage with the system, and now they don’t want to play against people who did

Your “system” is entirely reliant upon whether you played in a premade or not. That’s literally the only determination, and you’re only benefitting because the odds are stacked in your favor when you face pugs, man!

It says absolutely nothing about your skill as a player, the effort you put fourth – it’s entirely socially constructed which isn’t appropriate for a game system which was designed around the premise of fair competition between players of the opposing factions.

You’ve completely de-naturualized the premise of the game as it pertains to battlegrounds. You’re not even competing against the enemy team, you’re literally competing against the people from your faction who are lower than you on the bracket which isn’t how the system is supposed to work

[Zydax-kromcrush]

@Ziryus-doomhammer

Separating the queues would only impact premades who rely on farming pugs. Premades who are competent and want to fight other premades benefit as do solo queuers

That’s fine, solo queues should get no honor or rep. You don’t deserve it if you’re not facing the best groups in a group based game mode. If you want rewards you fight the best teams for them.

[Ziryus-doomhammer (Ziryus)]

@Zydax-kromcrush

@Ziryus-doomhammer

Separating the queues would only impact premades who rely on farming pugs. Premades who are competent and want to fight other premades benefit as do solo queuers

That’s fine, solo queues should get no honor or rep. You don’t deserve it if you’re not facing the best groups in a group based game mode. If you want rewards you fight the best tea ms for them.

Right so by that logic premades who fight pugs should get no honor.

[Donkles-bloodsail-buccaneers]

I mean, you should absolutely know this, since you engage with it every day, but the way the honor system has always worked is you are competing with your own faction for rank.

Alliance wins and honor have literally no impact on that system for horde players.

It’s a system they trashed in TBC for a reason.

[Zydax-kromcrush]

@Ziryus-doomhammer

Right so by that logic premades who fight pugs should get no honor

Why? They’re better than you. The beat you, therefore they get the rewards for winning

[Thromkar-westfall]

You guys are obnoxious, and ignorant in the face of bare facts.

Inevitable truths, which I have meticulously laid out for you. If you can’t understand the fundamentals of logic and reason, you have no place on my thread.

@Donkles-bloodsail-buccaneers

Alliance wins and honor have literally no impact on that system for horde players.

I agree that the Vanilla PvP system was imperfect. If rank had been calculated cumulatively, I’m certain you wouldn’t be so argumentative.

If gaining honor simply meant that you had made progress towards the next rank, it would basically just be like leveling up through endgame PvP progression; and in my opinion that would’ve been fine.

But given that there is decay, and that the system is designed in that way, separating the queues to better preserve Vanilla’s gameplay and combat systems serves Classic better even when we maintain the same honor system which we can all agree wasn’t the best.

The alternative is to continue to allow hard-core rankers to ruin the game by win trading and pug-stomping which doesn’t seem like the wholesome path to take, given that we care about the game.

[Donkles-bloodsail-buccaneers]

Hard core rankers are always going to ruin the experience for casual pvpers, unless you plan on addressing engineering items, consumables, faps, lips, etc as well.

Your solution doesn’t fix the problem. It shifts it.

Edit: Inevitable truths? You know that just saying something doesn’t make it true, right?

I see plenty of opinions, and wishes about what you’d like the game to be. Everyone has those. They aren’t inevitable truths for you more than they are for anyone else.

[Zydax-kromcrush]

@Thromkar-westfall

Inevitable truths, which I have meticulously laid out for you. If you can’t understand the fundamentals of logic and reason, you have no place on my thread.

The inevitable truth is pvp in classic wow is a grind. It’s not about fair and competitive gameplay, and never will be. The honor system isn’t built for that. It seems you don’t belong in classic wow if you can’t understand that.

[Thromkar-westfall]

That’s untrue. A single player using engineering gimmicks and consumables doesn’t allow him/her to entirely control a match. Even a group of 3 players would still be hard pressed to consistently succeed in every case, which is why I’ve suggested that pure pugs can queue with groups of up to 3 players.

They would simply be a formidable opponent or group of opponents on the battlefield, and would represent an obstacle that the opposing team would need to circumvent or overcome in order to achieve victory.

[Ziryus-doomhammer (Ziryus)]

@Zydax-kromcrush

@Ziryus-doomhammer

Right so by that logic premades who fight pugs should get no honor

Why? They’re better than you. The beat you, therefore they get the rewards for winning

Hey you’re the one saying that people who avoid hard matches shouldn’t be rewarded, by definition that is what premades who fight pugs do.

Pug vs pug is the equivalent of pre made vs premade, the only people demanding easy matches(which according to you should award no honor) are premades who want to pug stomp.

[Donkles-bloodsail-buccaneers]

And when the entire enemy team is engineers? Remember, those teams exist right now, as premades. The characters aren’t going anywhere.

[Thromkar-westfall]

Then they’re playing in the premade bracket, and they’re going to probably dominate most teams they encounter unless they’re really good.

shrug

That’s built into the system.

[Donkles-bloodsail-buccaneers]

We already explained why they won’t be playing the premade bracket.

[Thromkar-westfall]

Then they won’t all be on the same team*

Unless they’re extremely fortunate.