Brute Force is a bit different to most epic communities, mainly thanks to its leader. I’ll do the what first and have a go at the why below. May run the risk of straying into recruitment terrirotry, but the question was asked.
Brute Force has a both faction, open recruitment policy. Anyone is welcome to join. Epics run late night server time, usually after 1am ET/10pm PT/3pm AEST. Queuing is very casual and revolves around one of several leads turning up on the night. (Leads are some of the best drawn from other communities like RR and BSG.)
Everything’s very casual. Queuing. Leading. Chilling between games while listening to tunes and chatting about stuff. There are few rules and no expectations of class or role (which is why even we get surprised when 15 heals show up, but two can also happen). The community is structured so members can log in, check chat to see if anything’s happening and jump in as quickly as possible if it is.
Only thing banned is politics. We get a large mix of North American, Oceanic and South East Asian players. We queue both Ally and Horde, often for no other reason than queue times being slightly faster on one. Some nights are quiet. Some nights pop-off wildly with far too many players and leads.
Membership is broad. We have most of the other communities represented, even Goats. Brute was originally an arm of BSG but their leaders had the bright idea of cutting that arm off for the crime of playing with people they didn’t like. Anyway, now it’s a hybrid of all the other communities with ties to peeps like RR and DJL and AVM and RA and SPM (and sorry, there’s so many and I can keep track) and a few of what I’ve dubbed ‘Good Goats’, those in that community that don’t follow any of AFK’s nonsense.
All of the above is largely thanks to our leader who runs a tight ship with two simple philosophies, ‘queue up and have fun’ and ‘respect players’ time’. Genuinely nice guy if you can stomach all the puns.
How do you improve your own personal gameplay when all they do is zerg targets ?
What are they improving ? Better at zerging a target called by someone on Discord?
Do epics without your sync premade and see how you do.
I think if your queue syncing premade you should exclusively face other premades and leave the pugs to face other pugs.
After reading that thread it appears that groups were being prioritised over solo players even though those solo players queued before the 5 man ? does not seem fair.
Also considering the population numbers off a quick google search Retail has 6 million players.SOD has 400k players
Which would probably make it a bit easier for any solo queuers.
Personally I would be happy to be in a solo queue Epic BG even if it takes 10+ mins to pop as I can do stuff in the mean time (pve, tv shows, movies, workout, read etc) if it ensures a fair game.
Speed has long been prioritized over quality in this game sadly.
Blizzard more concerned about just shipping things out the door disregarding the fact they are unfinished unpolished products riddled with bugs usually.
There are about 450,000 characters on Retail who have engaged in any form of pvp (that they have an honor level).
Not all of them play Epics, most are probably Arena bunnies, a lot of them aren’t even level 70. So your population estimation would be far lower than the 6 million total.
This is honestly the most accurate, and still not guaranteed. I’ll randomly run into people I play with when I solo queue, but we’re not grouped - sometimes I just don’t notice they’re on. Going into games where there are premades on the other side and 0 on your side are unlikely though. It’s far less common that we don’t see groups of people we recognize on other team. It happens, but one out of 5 games probably, but not all groups are built the same
We aim for 5 but there are a lot of games it’s just us 3, sometimes a 4th. I do wish that if there are groups of players that queue that these groups would get shoved to the front of the queue and paired with another group, if availabble, to within +/- 1 of their group size, filled with other groups +/- their size etc, filled with pugs and sent on their way. The best games are by far the ones against other groups, and then people who solo queue just get their games without seeing a boogey man premade as the sole reason they lost…maybe
I will say though, guilds being cross realm is going to be interesting. There are a lot of people from communities joining up together and queueing and right now you’ll have no indication that they’re all from the same community. PVP guilds should start cropping up though and you’ll be able to notice these guilds
Potentially. Though I will see 5 man premades on enemy team, and maybe a duo or two on ours ? Do they have the same “impact” on the overall BG ? Commonly not as well as the 5 man.
I agree that BGs should be filled along those lines but maybe not groups pushed to the front of the queue. For example:
4 man premade vs 4 man premade (the rest of the slots filled with pugs)
There’s no way to verify, obviously, but when I duo queue games are in general easier. As soon as you add a 3rd to your group games get way sweatier. We think they treat 3/4/5 person groups and try to pair them, and 1/2 person groups get paired. When active players are low, nothing really you can do
If they aren’t shoved to the front of the queue then groups don’t get placed together. Its very unfortunate that when we queue 5 and see another group of 5 in queue (friends of ours) and we don’t get placed in the same match because there’s likely some group of 3 ahead of us who gets them instead. If groups get paired and given priority it will have minimal impact on solo queue players
At the end of the day blizzard will do nothing in relation to these sorts of changes to pvp anytime soon.
Im surprised they made the AFK change regarding blitz/solo shuffle in TWW to be honest.
I would love it if Blizz would give us that information, (enemy team has x groups consisting of 2 duos for example) but that would be fueling the fire I guess.
I face every group and pugs while queueing solo. Sometimes repeating groups that I know only queue together or predominantly in premades.
Unironically, when I catch them without their premade they usually lose, but when in a premade they then get dutch courage to come after me in their lil pack and emote on me
Most of the PUGs have honor levels below 100. We often take this information for granted.
It’s hard to find good resources on how to play battlegrounds because WoW is a 20-year-old game, and this aspect of pvp, especially epics, has long been forgotten and neglected. Many returning players don’t even realize that strategies like bomb running don’t work like they used to.
It might be a surprise to you but Horde pugs learn from Horde premades, that they repeat what they pick up from the premade. That’s why most people think Hordes run premades as much as Allies do.
