Pre-made Epic Battle Grounds Need to Stop + Buffs and Revamps (Community Council Requested)

Community General Discussion
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     The Pre-made Epic Battle ground situation is getting out of hand. ( This is also an issue for casual Random Battlegrounds as well.) For context, I've always loved Leading Epic Battle Grounds, and have always wanted a Premade/Rated option for Epics, although I can see why it isn't practical. TLDR: Pre-made epics are a growing problem, Every single Epic BG is untuned and no longer function as designed, can our Community Council do anything to address this issue?

For people just getting into the PvP scene casual Random Epic Battle Grounds are a great place to learn how to play and and in some cases are one of a players first interactions with PvP. Going against an 8 Healer 4 Tank Highly Coordinated Premade Epic and getting farmed for 40 minutes for honor, or getting Boss Zerged and finished in 3 minutes is a terrible way to get to know PvP. Half the team leaves after getting stomped in the initial go, nearly cementing the fate of those who stay. The PvP community has shrunk and is still shrinking and this is one of many cuts leading to it’s death.

Being experienced in leading Epics a Non-Premade Group with a strong leader can pull out a win over a Pre-made but this is an exception. Queing into a game against a Pre-made can essentially be a 30-50+ Minute time sink with a nearly guaranteed loss. Or a 3min Zerge loss. Allowing this to continue is immensely disrespectful towards the time of the players.

The presence of Pre-Made Epics resulted in the creation of more Pre-made Epics to increase the likelihood of victory, and the numbers are only going to keep going up to the point where if you want a shot at winning you’ll have to be in a Pre-made to win, if something isn’t done. It’s time for Blizzard to turn their eye to the things that are harming one of their End Game Pillars, and fix it.

Furthermore to people running these Pre-mades (I know a few of you) why bother? The weekly quest requires only 1500 Honor Earned in Epics, you can get that off a single well fought win or 1 win and a loss, is your time really so much more valuable than everyone else’s? If you’re conquest farming there are better ways and the weekly quests give plenty. I know one group that’s running Pre-mades as a community service to help people get wins BECAUSE THERE ARE SO MANY PREMADES.

Tuning - All Epic BGs need to be tuned and restored to their intended states.

Alterac Valley - I can Tank Vaandar Stormpike with 0 towers down in AV and get a fast enough kill to win on a Zerg. Most games regardless of Pre-mades are zerge to the end cap 2 towers and GY and Pull, this needs to be tuned.

Ashran - Backdooring is a piece of cake and the only reason we’re seeing less of it is because players have been forced to watch out for it, the game was never intended to be won by 4 players downing the boss, as fun as it is.

Isle of Conquest - Capping Hangar at the start is the best strategy for victory, it out performs Work Shop and Docks even when held together. There are many ways to pull out a win over this but again those are exceptions and if a rogue ninja caps Docks even once the chances of pulling out said win become very slim.

Wintergrasp - Defending team has a huge advantage and wins most games, perhaps reducing wall HP, and increasing tower HP could help? Giving defenders more time to wipe demos without getting ploughed. Perhaps reducing time needed to capture or recapture a Workshop for defenders?

I’m not going to pretend to have all the answers on how to fix this but some Pre-made Coordinators are running 3rd party addons to coordinate ques (these addons could be black listed). One Forum suggested allowing a 75% vote to end a game if they encounter a Pre-made to prevent getting farmed, I actually like this idea, could use some work. Even making Pre-made coordination a temporary bannable offense might be an option.
Various Communities (you know, the “Not Guilds”), and Discords are being used to assemble these Pre-mades, not sure what can be done about this.

Would anyone on the Community Council be willing to bring this issue to the table for discussion? Or perhaps anyone who knows a Council member bring this to their attention?

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Some good points but… why do you talk like this:? “Pre-made”

Seems like most people simply pronounce it “premade” instead, your way of saying it is definitely unusual

I believe one or two of them already did, but come on… by now (coming up on year 3 of the program?) it’s pretty much common knowledge that Blizz mostly just ignores the CC forum. In fact, they’ve actually made one or two unpopular changes in spite of CC members specifically asking them not to do _____ :laughing:

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Ya I don’t make many Forum posts, to be honest I expected more feedback, maybe any at all from the Community Council. Might be time for new leadership? To be honest, I’m not sure why I chose to write it as Pre-made, just felt more formal I suppose. I just want this game to thrive and PvP is a dying aspect of this game that I love and would like to see make a come back, the current state of class balance isn’t nearly as awful as it has been in the past, there have just been so many bad patches I think most players have been driven off for good. It would take a grand gesture to bring them back.

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I am sad this post has no feedback.

No one is looking in here. No one sees us. We’ve become nothing.

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I’m following the advise of a Community Council Member and tagging these posts in the hopes of raising the Community Council and Blizzards attention. Please do not ignore this, the community has been doing everything it can to reach out for help for a long time now.

This is only in regards to Premades in Epic BGS and Regular BGs but there are soooooo many more issues plaguing PvP and so many would be so easy to fix, many of which I will list in a comment below.

Special Shout out to this gentleman here ^^^ after being ignored by all the others whose Forums I’ve tagged I’m hopeful that you will be willing to take up this issue on account of you having advocated for a couple PvP related issues recently, I can see you’ve made a couple posts recently and been ignored, just like everyone else on the community council that posts about PvP but perhaps if you wrote one more titled CALLING ALL COUNCIL MEMBERS or something you could garner the attention needed to get a Buepost response for us. You’re the hero we need.

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Hopefully someone from the CC can post it on the CC section so blizzard can ignore the topic on two different parts of the forums.

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That is more than I’m expecting to be honest but I would be grateful for even that. I’d like to leave this for anyone in the Community Council or from Blizz as well since I can only comment on this each time someone comments I hope you don’t mind.

I can’t take credit for what’s written here I found it on another thread.

WHAT’S BEEN CAUSING PVP PLAYERS TO QUIT FOR YEARS?

Ultimately the things that have been causing PvP players to quit for years and years are as follows.
FOR CONTEXT - imagine you’re paying the same price as everyone else but the content you like is handled as follows below.

  • Same Reasons Others Quit - Poor Gear Acquisition Systems from Xpac to Xpac, Convoluted Borrowed Power Systems, Content Droughts, and Lack of Bang for your Buck in todays economy, Poor Narrative Choices effect everyone - cut content in WOD, Hastily Swapping from War Narrative to Lets burn down N’Zoth in a single patch as a little N’Zoth head inside N’Zoths head. SHADOWLANDS, I’d wager a lot of the PvP players we lost did more than just PvP (like me) and they left for the same reasons a lot of our friends did.

  • Poor Class Balance - Blizz has never really been able to keep themselves from allowing a couple classes to either 1shot, overpower entirely, our outperform others in a small group or arena setting. It sometimes takes Blizz 3+ Weeks to catch on to a single class that’s actually 1shotting people or tripling DPS in arena or other content. This is likely due to a refusal to allocate resources to monitor these kinds of things or funding to actually fix them.

  • Lack of Innovation - No new Battlegrounds for years, with BFA and DF you’d think we’d have seen a Naval or Aerial themed BG at some point, should have been common sense, but it’s evident they aren’t interested enough in growing this “End Game Pillar”. Nothing new or exciting since Seething Shore in BFA (which c’mon now.) except for BG Blitz and Solo Shuffle which they haven’t been bothered to work out all the kinks. Players were really excited for Solo Shuffle but for the longest time Blizz refused to address it’s early onset issues like people leaving and or going afk, the mmr issues and Que Times, to the point where players begged and plead for months then just quit. Now that they’ve tweaked things a little it’s just too little too late.

  • Lack of Incentives - Some people will say the incentive to PvP is PvP itself and for me that’s enough and obviously for others just about everyone still playing it that’s enough but for the thousands of other players who had no new BGs, issues with Que times, Issues with mmr and watched for weeks on end or expansions on end as PvP was dominated by untuned classes there were simply not enough incentives to stick around through that level of neglect, obviously or they’d still be here.

  • Premades in Casual entry level Epic Bgs - See this Forum Post titled Pre-made Epic Battle Grounds Need to Stop + Buffs and Revamps (Community Council Requested)

  • Chromie Time - World PvP is a different beast but if you’ve ever leveled through chromie time with WM on you’ll know the odds of encountering another player are slim to none, not just because there are no leveling victims to gank but mainly due to sharding issues that go along with Chromie time that Blizz has never cared to work out.

  • Warmode - to a much lesser extent effected the PvP scene but allowing people to opt out was a smart and healthy move it just came at the start of WoWs massive player count decline in BFA which has been steadily dropping ever since.

I could go ON AND ON but this was a death due to years and years of neglect, we’re still hanging on against all odds, but to what avail? Fixing these issues would take some time and effort but with all the money they’ve saved neglecting it for so long, they can justify getting started.

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no point in pvping in retail until this is gone. casual bgs are supposed to be casual instead they turn into one sided stomps because a coordinated 40 man is always going to beat an uncoordinated 40 man.

These guys will even grief you if you’re on their faction by not picking up the invite causing you to start the match 10-20+ down.

If you want to play with your friends in a group join RBGS, RBGS are made for coordinated groups and you will be placed at your proper mmr with your friends. If you care about your rating, do them on characters you don’t care about rating for. Premades need to be broken.

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It’s a shame I’m sure loads of other players are thinking the exact same thing.

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I agree. It’s a big issue - for the pugs. For the premades its a romping good time with a bunch of like-minded people. I’ve been on both sides of the fence as a member of 3 premade comms and also as a pug.

Premades were more than just about a means to a end. Or at least they used to be. The premade teams I was in were basically a cross-server guilds. So people were interacting and socialising and making friends etc. Even doing non-pvp stuff. It’s the difference between playing an mmo solo or playing it with a bunch of friends. It made a huge difference to ones enjoyment of the game and what you could therefore accomplish.

For some unknown reason that no one has yet been able to fathom, Blizz outright REFUSES to scale bg npc’s or vehicles. This results in them being OP near the start of the season and a complete joke towards the end of a season. It completely destroys the way these ebg’s are supposed to operate as intended by the original devs.

Again, this is due to the lack of scaling of the npc’s. AV as it is intended should require burning a minimum of 2-3 towers to be able to kill the faction bosses. Being able to zerg them with 3-4 towers up should not be a thing and it is ridiculous that it is. Back capping, sneak caps, spawning the faction giant boss npc with the druids during stalements etc. That is the way AV is meant to be played. Not the abomination it becomes towards the end of a season.

Ashran is a shemozle. I’ve seen bear druids able to solo the faction boss and no one is any the wiser since you can e.g. pull the ally boss into a corner out of LOS of everyone else. Solo back-dooring should not be a thing in ashran. It’s stupid and like you said, has forced each team to have at least 1 player afk in the base to watch for it if they are actually serious about winning. The druid summoner stealth kill is annoying but whatever. It respawns in 5min so it can definitely stall a teams momentum. But it certainly doesn’t make or break a match like soloing the faction boss would.

The “hangar or bust” meta only exists because of the aforementioned lack of scaling. At the start of a season, you can very easily win IoC by taking docks and shredding the crap out of the gate extremely quickly since glaives do like double the dps of the airship even without quarry. With quarry it becomes even faster. The reason is because at that point in time, glaives aren’t made of paper due to the fact players don’t have the ilvl to obliterate them in 3 globals. Also people using the mid vehciles to lemming themselves into the gate canons are probably the single biggest cause of success or failure in an ioc match. Using said vehicles to D the glaives or hangar or using the demos to wipe out the glaives will have a FAR bigger impact than using them on the actual gates themselves.

D used to have a massive advantage but that changed when blizz switched who had control over the workshops at the start of the match. D still has an advantage, but now its actually quite simple to negate it. Unfortunately the strat required to do so pretty much necessitates the use of a premade team. PUG’s simply will not pay attention and will always end up feeding the defenders. The correct strat on O is to go down the middle, kill the stragglers then go left, kill the idiots on D who went to the BT workshop. At that point you will likely have rank before the D team does. You can then convoy to SR in catas and completely wipe out their team to rank to demos and sieges. Once that’s done, you’ve basically won. But again, only a premade team can pull this off. People on O also always forget to take out the 2 enemy base canons that can easily wipe out the O team at SR. 1 ranged can take them both down and often, it will be the deciding factor over the entire match.

The comms I was in never used sync addons. We did have an addon but it only facilitated the initial group formation. The problem you’re describing is the discord servers used to drop sync queues that result in a match popping with half or less players than the opposing team.

Have you ever wondered what all those “Molten core” raids were in the legacy raids section in the group finder? Ever wondered why they only appeared the moment cross-faction grouping was allowed in the legacy raids section? That’s right. These aren’t raids of 30-40 players running actual MC from vanilla, lmao. These are the assembly teams for cross faction premade teams sync queuing into bg’s. But you can’t queue cross-faction I hear you say? Yes I know. These teams are basically fighting against each other with a smattering of pugs thrown in the mix. Some are used to win trade. Some are just to act as spies on the enemy team while the main team is designated to win. This has been going on for months ever since cross-faction grouping was made available.

I have no clear solution here. Being a member of a few comms myself, I can attest that they can be very engaging and fun and great social areas ever since guilds basically died a few years ago and discord became a thing. But I also understand that the pugs have almost no chance of winning against most premades. I myself have led victories over a few premade comms with a pug purely due to my experience as a premade lead on occasion (not an actual lead of a premade comm).

Ultimately I think because it’s all unranked, blizz simply turns a blind eye to it all. But there’s also the elephant in the room. The fact that the toxicity (especially in pvp) and the gatekeeping has gone through the roof in wow over the last few years. It’s the same reason SoD and all the other various flavours of classic have been destroyed. So those few people trying to survive have begun flocking together to extricate themselves from the quagmire that is the general playerbase nowadays.

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It really is out of hand. Players will do what they can get away with. So the real issue is blizz’s very bad matchmaking system. The game should match premades vs premades and pugs vs pugs. This is 2024 - it shouldn’t be rocket science.

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Precisely. I didn’t want to go too in depth with the specifics of each EBG and the possible solutions since any time I’ve opened my mouth to spread awareness to these issues only a tiny handful have the wherewithal to actually read through it and otherwise ignore it if it’s too long.
Every single thing you said is right on the money. I’m hoping if we can keep this thread alive long enough that it not be buried under Tuesdays Reset nonsense posts it may gain some traction and the Community Council will take these issues seriously and raise this to Blizzard as a concern with the same fervor with which they raise concerns over other…matters…

Thank you for your thoughtful response and first hand testimony.

The player base has spoken through their creation of Premade Epics they want Rated or Premade Epics, they’re loads of fun! I echoed this desire in my opening statement as well. Unfortunately where there is a path the players will always find a way, even at the expense of the other players and the health of the game as we know it. Blizzard takes care to shut down sneaky methods and unintentional uses for LFG and things of the like in PVE content as soon as they catch wind, why not the same for PvP? I don’t expect them to create a whole new game mode for Premade Epics therefore I propose they be shut down entirely at least for the time being.

Mark my words if a more proactive approach had been taken since the begging the PvP playerbase would not have shrunk so much that it is nearly unprofitable to fix, and had Blizzard not cut so many corners in general Non-PvP content the already smaller (but still large) PvP playerbase of old that enjoyed more than just PvP would not have been so harshly impacted by the various mass exoduses we’ve seen over the years. Bad PVE causes PvP players to leave as well, since so many people love this world for more than one reason.

I shared a quote in a comment just a few comments below my post from another thread detailing a series of other issues plaguing PvP that have caused so many to leave, I’d be interested in your thoughts on that as well if it isn’t too much trouble.

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To be fair, part of the problem was blizz’s own making. That is, the fact that even in 100% pug v pug matches, one side may end up with 8 healers and the other have 1 or 2 or none at all. This is also a big reason why premades initially became a thing. So just something to remember.

Not much I can add to this really as I agree with it. Gear acquisition for pvp only started to get better in mid SL when blizz FINALLY put gear back on the pvp vendor. Of course by then, the damage was already done.

Again, not much I can add since it’s entirely true. Meta specs emerging and not being address is likely a budgetary issue. Either that or apathy by blizz. Some specs have always been fundamentally OP (e.g. MM hunter). Blizz would have to outright delete the entire spec if they actually wanted to bring hunters into line with other classes.

Pretty much. I don’t deal with mmr much as I don’t really do rated. But the issue of no new ebg’s is MASSIVE. We haven’t had a new one since ashran was made into one. It’s a joke. A sad, sad joke.

It’s hard to know and even harder to balance the reward structures without making it such that players start complaining about being “forced” to do content they don’t like in order to be competitive in the content they do like. I have no real answer here. That being said, with the deletion of the pvp track of the great vault in 11.0, Blizz will have to do something to add more opportunities for pvp players to gear up to compensate. If they don’t, the pve players will quickly outpace the pvp ones in the gearing race.

WM CT shards a joke. They’re basically the sole provance of mount farmers since they know that there will be zero competition for rares. However I would prefer to leave them in as I farm mounts and other cosmetics as well. So dead shards are a Godsend for that purpose. I don’t think the player population exists to warrant blizz trying to address dead WM CT shards. Just in the same way they can’t do much about dead servers outside of ramped up sharding which doesn’t even work on RP servers.

I like WM too. Dedicated pvp servers were always a stupid idea and lacked the flexibility that wow’s much shrunken population now requires. Blizz has no choice in the matter if they want to keep wow chugging along with the far fewer players it has now compared to its peak in wotlk.

Out of all of it, the biggest issue for me is that fact that we have had no new ebg’s in ages and none planned any time soon. That is by far the biggest indicator of an abandoned game mode. Everybody knows when the content stops, it’s game over. Literally. Basically ebg’s are the archeology of pvp modes. This despite the fact that ebg’s have by far the shortest queue times out of all the pvp game modes (I think?).

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Epic bgs are horrible to learn pvp

Its a slam into each other and if you live you live style match

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Doesnt help that racial imbalance leads to almost all serious healers to roll alliance (Shadowmeld)

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Honestly I never really noticed NE players leveraging shadowmeld to the point of it being an issue. In fact, I can probably count on one hand how many times I’ve come across an NE player use it in an ebg. Ebgs don’t really lend themselves well to it I think.

That story might be different in regular bgs. But I agree that blizz should do a pass at racials. Maybe buff the weaker ones. DIDs haven’t had their mole machine updated since BFA. I mean, how hard can it be to dump a couple mole machines in each expac? Doesn’t even have to be every zone as that would actually be OP. Just a couple of the major hub zones.

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Definitely true for the initial big clash but after that there’s lots of room for smaller group fights and 1v1s on the road. Because the games are 40v40 the individual is a bit less impactful on the overall outcome so there’s less of a chance your team will lose because you felt like experimenting.

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Yes! Personally Id like to see them tune the Epic BGs we have, Tune classes that are over performed and underperforming then shut down these premades in Epic BGs and Casual BGs, there’s no place for them in game currently maybe someday Blizzard can find time to create a game mode for it but right now it’s harming the future community of PvPers.

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I think they might just be to afraid to come out and tell us plainly that PvP has been and will continue to receive the bare minimum amount of tuning and updates going forward, with their silence people have been giving them the benefit of the doubt that they’re just incompetent and they’re hopeful that eventually things might change. PvP has always gotten by with less if they just tuned things a bit more regularly and added a few more things it would be all set for years to come.

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Yeah the racials could use a second glance I agree. Seems like they’re more important for arena but it’s obvious some are waayyy better than others.