How to Address Premades in Classic Battlegrounds

Alliance players are forced into premading because it’s the only shot they have at winning.

That you can get rank 11+ and bis pvp gear as a pug ironically makes this version of WoW pvp the most casualized and welfare version of the game- because after this, you need a premade from TBC right up to BfA if you want BiS.

I just can’t wait for the complaints that you can’t pug arena.

And a fourth reason why it’s a stupid comparison, dungeons and raids have a static difficulty so how others choose to group up for them doesn’t impact your experience.

What happens now matching premades vs pugs would be roughly the equivalent of randomly throwing LFR people into mythic raids and mythic raiders randomly getting LFR difficulty. If we’re comparing dungeon/raids grouping to BG grouping.

Given how crappy pvp is in classic its kind of funny people assume that people are going to show up in droves to pvp in tbc.

You’re implying that pug players aren’t exerting effort, aren’t skilled, and don’t use consumables which isn’t a fair assumption to make.

The only difference between the premade winning 4 games and the pug winning 1 and losing 3 is that the premade queued with a guaranteed viable class comp and the pug didn’t.

The only legitimate premise in this scenario is “having a team;” and not all players can accomplish that because premades are socially constructed. Premade proponents are trying to enforce a social barrier to good honor that they can control, instead of allowing the player who exerts far more effort than they to be rewarded for the time he spent playing the game.

If you allow them to create unfair match premises, yes. They are. These are teams engineered for success being pitted against teams that were randomly generated. If you want to use consumables to help your team achieve victory? Be my guest. If you want to queue with a team? Be my guest. If you want to queue with a team and face players who didn’t? You’re the source of the problem.

Even if this is true, the players did have an issue with them, and there was a patchnote that made them more likely to face each other rather than pugs somewhere between patch 1.5 and 1.9, because people complained after the implementation of x-server.

Right, but you can’t queue for a raid as a solo player either. The fact that you could queue for PvP was exact reason why it appealed to me as a player.

Elitist raiders frequently privilege themselves and their close friends when it comes to gear drops. They don’t intend to reward every player that assists them with accomplishing a boss kill in most cases. I didn’t like associating with those players, and felt like PvP better rewarded me for my time and effort – not to mention that I also thought the gameplay superior when games were fair.

Then the system turns around and rewards those same elitist jerks better for their time spent in PvP, as if it’s somehow has more worth than mine, simply upon the basis that they have friends in the game, and choose to exclude, or otherwise refuse to assist others to succeed in PvP battlegrounds by playing in pugs.

It sounds to me like the pug player faces consistently unfair circumstances in every game as a direct result of not raiding with so-and-so’s guild, because so-and-so’s guild won’t invite him to their premade, which is stomping pugs from the opposing faction instead of facing premades like they should

A premade can prove it though, by winning more. Premades that put in no effort, have no skill, don’t use consumes aren’t going to win very often.

In the current system, how does an individual player prove their skill makes them more deserving? The player afk by the battles earns the same honour as the player right in front of them.

It’s an advantage- much like consumes, gear, an epic mount are an advantage. All of which can be obtained by players.

Nothing stops a player from making a premade, and if the reason you can’t is because your server doesn’t have any, then you’re ultimately rank competing against pugs, which is the thing you have to remember.

You are always competing against your faction, on your server, and have the same advantages available to you as anyone else there.

But you’ve always known that when you queue for pvp in Vanilla/Classic, you do so in a shared queue with premades and pugs.

If they separated them, as they do later with moving premades to arena/RBG, they also separate the gear available to you at the same time.

Blizz considers premades to be more valuable, if they didn’t then they wouldn’t be giving premades better pve gear from Vanilla up til BfA, and premades better pvp gear from TBC up til BfA

Vanilla pvp, while the outlier, still always had the premade and pug queues joined.

That is how the system has always worked, yes.

That is also true- you are at a disadvantage if you go pug, whether in pvp or pve.

By design. It may be unfair, it might suck for pugs- but that’s how the game has always and will always function. By valuing premades above pugs.

Its voice communication. Premades are taking any advantages that they can get buff and comp wise (probably got an edge in gear as well) but what makes it extra easy for them is voice chat.

The premade can’t prove anything because they didn’t play the game following the same set of rules. There was inherent unfairness in the premises of the match.

If two randomly generated teams play each other, one team was better at reacting to what benefit there was to be found in there composition and using it to their advantage. Two hand selected teams? One team was constructed with a better class comp and/or more skilled players than the other.

A hand selected team played a team that was randomly generated?

It’s the scientific method. There’s an uncontrolled variable that makes the results of our competitive experiment inconclusive. That’s how we can define unfairness, in this case.

The afk player’s entire team most likely loses the match if they don’t kick him because he’s forcing them to play man-down, which puts them at a disadvantage.

Again, there’s a reason why that functionality was added to the game.

I don’t think I should have to explain the difference between having a team of 10 players to play with and having an epic mount.

That obviously isn’t a fair comparison to make.

Getting an in game item requires engaging with the mechanics of the game. Having a social group of players to queue with requires navigating the social hierarchy of a guild or server which not everybody wants to do, and not everybody can do because some of those social structures are far more toxic than others.

In many cases, the lack of desire to navigate that hierarchy, for whatever reason, is probably the reason why they prefer ranking in PvP over raiding.

First of all, premades still exist in the random battleground queue even in retail WoW. This is still a problem in modern WoW today.

The split between conquest and honor resulted in a situation where players were inherently forced into voice chat, which isn’t where all of them preferred to be. RBG gameplay never appealed to me; I would prefer to have a larger chance to lose a match by playing it with a randomized comp and yet still be rewarded some semblance of consolation prize for participating – as things were in Vanilla; instead of waiting around for 20 minutes between every match waiting for a vengeance dh to run the flag.

I was disenfranchised; as were many other players who were enthusiastic about the Vanilla PvP endgame progression model; which did reward merit on the premise of an individual’s effort, at least to some extent.

Obviously that system wasn’t perfect, as we’ve seen. But it absolutely could be with the removal of decay and relative ladders as a means of dictating progression, and by the separation of premade and pug matches.

The conquest point variants of PvP endgame inherently required interfacing with other players on a personal level, and that wasn’t the part of the game we enjoyed. We just wanted to play the game.

Premades are here to stay, forever. There is nothing you can say or do that will remove them.

The amount of entitlement you have to demand blizzard fix a non issue is astounding. You have 3 easy solutions.

  1. Form / Join a premade
  2. Reroll Alliance
  3. Accept that you’ll lose a lot while pugging or just stop queueing

No amount of whining will get rid of premades from WSG or AB. Go sit in your 3 hour AV queue for your win.

My goodness, is this argument still getting kicked around. I took a 2 month break from the forums and the same argument was going on then…

“Darn it, make the game the way “I” want it to be, that’s an order Blizzard!”

Yes, nothing new to see here…

I haven’t suggested they should be. Only that they oughtn’t to face pugs.

While I respect your enthusiasm, there’s a multitudinous amount of evidence here, which I have provided, that suggests premades facing pugs is unhealthy for the game.

None of the solution’s you’ve provided serve to address the fault I see with it, because unfair circumstances will still exist for players in battlegrounds who are matchmade into instances that are pug v pre.

I’m not giving you a solution I’m giving you your options.
Premade vs pug, pug v pug, premade vs premade. None of this is changing.

Interesting assessment.

Why does that serve the game better than what I have suggested?

It’s not about what you’re suggesting it’s about what is expected out of classic.

You CANNOT have two seperate queue tiers that reward the same end gear. The fixes you are suggesting would require blizzard release a separate set of gear for people pugging that’s worse then what the people premading could earn.

The only other resolution to split the game into pug v pug and premade v premade is to completely remove all reward structure from pug v pug (honor/rep).

Interesting assessment.

Why not?

We’re not having a discussion that you already know the answer to.

I legitimately don’t know the answer to that question.

Enlighten me.

TBC - Arena vs BG
Cata - RBG vs BG

These are examples of other instances that followed that design policy…

Doesn’t justify them.

It does. People who bother putting together groups in order to win should be rewarded for it. The only sad state about classic is there is no rating system. Putting one in though is just not an option.