They were very successful most of the time. They even streamed it and these forums were filled with Horde tears about them camping Isle of Conquest and purposely extending the game.
No? The example I gave is that if Horde queue times were long (such as in Shadowlands) it was near impossible for Horde to get a full premade in like Alliance could. If that Horde mercs to get a premade in, its an Alliance premade. They’re playing as Alliance. Sure, they are originally Horde, but they will never fight against another premade while doing that, not a full one atleast like theirs.
The end result is that, while a Horde can merc to premade as Alliance, they will fight against a pug Horde. Horde cannot effectively bring in a premade to fight against an Alliance premade.
Why can’t horde pre-mades get in? Too many horde playing? Sounds to me like it’s not a problem tbh. In the EU side this was the case for a long time and it balanced out. The Alliance players were so demotivated that they’d leave or afk after the first wipe. To this day Horde pugs are still stronger than Alliance pugs.
At this point it feels like the Horde in US just has to “git gud” like they did in EU. Queues are fairly balanced now with similar wait times. I dare say that Horde pre-mades in SL playing as Alliance fixed the issue. There are still more Alliance than Horde pre-mades, but there has been talk among some alliance players to faction change (back) to Horde for pre-made vs pre-made reasons.
Back in Shadowlands, too many Horde were playing. It’s balanced out a bit now and our queue times are quite short, but I don’t do enough battlegrounds to say I see Horde premades. That’s a question for the community.
This was not the case in Dragonflight, especially when it launched. Alliance received more Honor than Horde did for battlegrounds, and therefore, geared faster. Gear has been front loaded and having a set of honor gear is 411 ilvl.
Horde pugs were fighting against better geared Alliance pugs and they destroyed Horde. Even now, we’re actually starting to see Alliance queue times become longer because more people are going Alliance. It’s about even at the moment I’d say.
I wouldn’t know because I don’t do battlegrounds too often. I only did them beginning of expansion and to get Honor whenever I needed to upgrade my gear, but since gear upgrades don’t matter this expansion, all of my time is spent in World PvP and gearing through Solo Shuffle for Conquest gear and weekly sparks quest.
Again, point being made is a pug vs a premade isn’t fair and no amount of arguing can deny that. You can say, “just premade too lol!!1” but that’s counterproductive. Not every epic BG will be premade vs premade, it’ll be premade vs pug and it doesn’t matter who’s premading, Horde or Alliance, it’s still unfair to the pug. If you can’t see how it’s unfair for a pug to fight a premade, then you’re being purposely obtuse.
Anyway, enable cross faction BGs so we can end this.
It isn’t inherently unfair either. There’s something special about a bunch of randoms on voice chat with a leader that makes it much more fun. It’s similar to joining a pug raid on Discord.
There are different levels of pre-made and it’s important to make a distinguishment here. I sometimes play with a pre-made that is very organized where we have 3 groups at max, balanced roles and classes etc. Limited to 3 because (A) much easier to get in and (B) because 15 pre-made still has 20~25 pugs in a bg to not overwhelm the enemy team. Pre-made does key points in a bg and the randoms will just do random stuff
The other pre-made community I play with is basically 4~6 groups on Discord with several leaders, and as soon as 3 groups get a pop we enter. These groups are mostly just people playing alts, or randoms that just join Discord and play some together. This community is no different from a pug group where you have a random leader and they all join in-game voice chat.
It won’t end-premades, it’ll just (if implemented properly), split pre-mades. If 3 different BGs open at the same time, they’ll be split on 6 teams instead of 3. The result here is probably to automate letting everyone else know when the exact time is that you got a pop (easily done with addons), and then make a decision. I know that if I won’t write this feature in an addon, someone else will. This in turn will just become more effort for Blizzard to shield the pop-up and break people’s UI, think about addons like SafeQueue that will no longer work.
Most of our groups have always been randoms, most of whom don’t like to listen or get into discord to help the bg. Outside of a core 10-15 people most of our groups are filled with trade chat randoms and people who don’t like discord.
That sounds about right. I’ve been in various community premades where even if half the raid was community members alone, Disc might have like ten people in it.
The reason why Blizzard doesn’t want premade raids in random bgs is because history has shown how unfair it is to the pugs. If premade raids vs. pugs were even battles, Blizzard would let you queue up as a raid. But they’re not. They’re very one-sided games that drive players away from PvP.
Besides being able to fill your team with what you want, premade raids have superior coordination. They use voice chat to call out strats, incomings, kill targets, etc. It’s a huge competitive advantage.
Imagine watching a competition where a premade team using voice chat goes against a randomly assorted team using text chat.
If we merc we can get a premade in. It’s not difficult. Queues are short enough now as Horde to not need to merc. We’d rather not fight other Horde. When we see mercs in the field we put them on KOS.
My community plays every night, but we keep it fairly small. We have a core group for the most part. Those are the same people you’ll see with me nearly every game. I’d rather have a smaller group of people that I know can perform objectives given to them than have 10 ppl not in discord following the person with a skull on their head. We do more with less and have fun even in games where we lose.
Then there’s the whole pug mentality of a good portion of the Horde that just wants to argue with anyone trying to lead. These are the smoothbrains who fight mid and don’t push to take objectives. These are the people who don’t want to pvp. I question why are they there if they do not want to pvp.
I wholeheartedly object to cross faction bgs. I left alliance many years ago for a reason (they whine too much) and I quite enjoy killing them.
Exactly, it would split them. Imagine a premade of 40 try to sync a queue. Not only are the queues so much faster because of cross faction, but even if they get the same queue pop, there’s a huge chance that half of them end up on the enemy team.
At that point, it’s pretty fair for all parties involved. You’d have half a premade on one side, half a premade on the other.
That’s pretty much the point I’m trying to make though. If it was a guarantee that a premade would always fight against another premade in epic BGs, it wouldn’t be a problem.
Matter of the fact is, a lot of the times it’s premade vs pug, which just isn’t fair to the pug group, Horde or Alliance.
It’d be so fun to kill you though. It’d also be hilarious to see enemies who hate each other suddenly be on the same team.
