I have gotten so frustrated with the Join Battle time mechanic I finally had to post something.
Now… I decided not to talk about the Random BG imbalances with Horde, since it has already been discussed heavily. But I think one thing that may contribute to it and contribute to many people’s utter frustration with losing BGs from the first minute (looking at you AB, Temple, Gilneas, and EotS) is that the game starts out with an imbalance. 10v8, 10v9, whatever.
I constantly go in to a BG with an imbalance on one side or the other. But from my experience, and data, there seems to be a correlation between Alliance winning Epic BGs and Horde winning regular BGs and imbalances. Looking at my Ally character and my latest 20 normal BGs, I lose ~70% of random BGs. Of those losses, more than 3/5 of them started the game with an imbalance. “STARTED.”
I suggest to many of you to start taking note of this. When do you have an imbalance? And does it affect wins? For my Alliance character I know 100% that it does. Today alone I have lost Temple cause we could not secure mid and Gilneas because we could not capture WW. In both games we were 8v10 and that was back to back. In my epic BG today, we secured Workshop (Isle) but noticed Horde was down 4 people.
There is no way this 100% accounts for loses. BUT it does create a horrible system where I can sit in a queue then go in to a BG that is decided from the start. If I leave, I get 15 minute Deserter queue. So…
SOLUTIONS: use either both or one, but both is more effective.
(1) Start the game when the sides of full. This means keep your matchmaking system, joining timers, and simply eliminate the timer for starting the battle until it is full. With the queuing of everyone together, this should not take any more than a few minutes. Which I, frankly, would MUCH rather have than starting a BG with a loss. This would solve the problem of starting a BG with less people quite easily. Not only that, it would encourage strategy to be developed while waiting, instead of the chicken with heads cut off we experience too often.
(2) “Join Battle” queue pop should be shorter. Comparable to the dungeon queue, join battle needs to be much shorter. If I am correct, it is about a minute 15 sec - a minute 30 sec. This is entirely too long if the battle starts in 2 minutes. If someone does not accept a queue twice in a row, we start a battle with less people. Simple as that. If you are not by your computer or doing something else and cannot join a battle in 30 seconds or less, tough t*tties. The queue is relatively short and you can start it back up.
Either way, both of these together would solve the problem of imbalances in the BGs. I hope to see them, or another even better idea, implemented!
Thoughts?