This is a very long post. It’s sheer length, might make it difficult or annoying to read.
In short, I am try to paint a more realistic picture of people who premade than is often found on the forum. I would like the OP and anyone who shares the OP’s viewpoint to reconsider the opinion they currently hold.
Thank you to those of you who are willing to put in the time and effort to read and to understand a different viewpoint.
For weeks alliance pugs have been joining AV’s with a 12-40 start - because of you.
For weeks alliance pugs have been facing hordes with fast mounts non for the pugs-because of you.
For weeks alliance pugs have been facing better and high ranked horde - because of you.
Pugs got discouraged and many just don’t care anymore - more and more went afk. More under 60’s started coming in and farming xp while getting honor.This is the mess you created and I hope you enjoy it. You deserve it.
This is obviously a very frustrated and angry post. I think many people here can understand how weeks of playing on the short side of a 12-40 start could be extremely frustrating. I know I can certainly understand that.
I pugged the first 3 weeks. First couple of weeks because I simply did not know of any alternatives. It was extremely frustrating.
For me, this came on the heels of weeks of frustration of trying to level from 55-60 during phase 2 on Skeram - one of the most unbalanced PvP servers favoring the faction opposite to my own. The 12-40 starts give a taste of what every single moment of play time was like if you tried to do anything in any of the zones recommended for that level range. You might think, well you could just do instances.
But on Skeram you couldn’t even get to an instance unless you could block out double the time that it would normally take to do the instance. If you didn’t have that luxury, you couldn’t do instances. This meant, I could not farm pre-bis gear.
I got in the habit of playing at very oddball times, and in out of the way places that no one seems to want to go to. I had to get creative, and be willing to take what no one else wanted.
Finally I hit 60 and phase 2.5 came out with bgs. I had no epic mount, and was missing many pieces of gear. As I mentioned above, I pugged the first couple weeks because I saw no alternative. Due to my now habit of playing at odd times, I happened to play on both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Almost no one was playing - except the people who had a strong desire to rank up. I ran into a “premade” that had just launched within the last week. Because they were new, and because of the holidays, they were a bit short on players. When they joined a bg I had just entered, they invited all of us to temporarily join their discord. It was an invite only for Christmas Eve and Day. After that we would have to get verified to be able to remain with them. This required an epic mount and pre-bis gear.
I did not have an epic mount, and though I was missing lots of pieces of gear, I had managed to buy some in auctions my new guild had during raids. I was always a gear before mount kind of person. So that was where all my money was going.
It was a LOT of fun running with this new “premade”. They actually had strategies, which altered if the situation demanded it, and everyone was respectful to each other in both the discord and the bg chat. This was a great deal better than being with people who were constantly arguing, calling each other names, or fishing or afking.
I definitely wanted in. But I didn’t qualify due to my lack of an epic mount and inadequate gear that still included some pieces from Scarlet Monastary. It took me another week and a half of hard work to patch up some holes in my gear, to get exalted and buy the cheaper Stormpike epic mount so that I could qualify to run with these guys.
What I did not do - was scream at these people, call them immoral or elitist. I certainly could have. I really wanted in with them and felt horrible that I could not join them right away. But I could see that the people who were organizing this group were working extremely hard to build a system that would benefit not only them, but many other people as well.
These are not immoral people. They do not deserve anywhere near the amount of flack they are given.
Many members do feel bad about the messed up queues they have sometimes left in their wake.
I had even read that “premades” for people who do not have epic mounts or gear were in the works. The requirements for these lower tier “premades” would simply be a willingness to work together, no afkers, no fishers, no foul mouths.
A person could start in one of the lower tier “premades” and have a much better experience than recent PUG life has given. Over time, as they accumulated requirements (better mount, better gear, eventually better ranks) a person could work their way up into higher tier “premades”.
It takes time, resources and a lot of dedication to build an organization of this scale. I think the spirit of the premade group I joined is very much in tune with the spirit of Vanilla. It is a community built structure. It is designed to address problems that the community faces.
Take the problem of the afk bots in the battlegrounds. For years, the community begged Blizzard to get rid of the botters and afkers. But Blizzard has not been able to sufficiently address this problem.
A well designed tier system of premades could do a lot to reduce the problem. Because we are in the games with these people, we are more directly impacted by them, we are therefore more motivated to exclude them from our groups.
In any event, at this point, I do not know if the full premade tier system will ever be completed. Many people are currently very emotional about the subject of premades. Many people misunderstand what they are and how they function.
Many of the descriptions on the forums of what the premades are, are so far off base as to be unrecognizable from the reality of most of the premades. Many descriptions make them sound extremely anti-social, to the point of sociopathy or psychopathy. From what I’ve seen, it’s simply not true.
But, I’d like to clarify that. I am not saying that no premade has ever done anything that is ethically questionable.
It has been estimated that:
- 1% of the general population are psychopaths - Dr. Robert Hare, Criminal psychology researcher, Creator of the PCL-R
- 4% of Americans are sociopaths - Dr. Martha Stout, Harvard University psychologist - author of “The Sociopath Next Door” She defines sociopath as a person with no conscience.
- 5-15% of Americans are Almost psychopaths - Dr. Ronald Schouten, Associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School refers to the “almost psychopaths” in his book “Almost a Psychopath”
Now given that there are hundreds of people in premades, it stands to reason that some of them fit into one of these categories. Maybe 10% to 20% of them are. These people with little, to no, conscience could behave badly and influence others to behave badly. But they are a small minority. To succeed over the long haul, Premades would have to learn to curb and weed out these behaviors.
I think that it could be possible, because 80% to 90% of the people in premades are not anti-social people. They are decent people who do not deserve to be castigated or accused of all kinds of crimes and anti-social behaviors, simply because they do not want to group up with people who have not yet put in the same amount of effort they have been willing to put in.
I hope you will take some time and reconsider your opinion of these people and the overall situation.