On the high end, that’s 100% correct now and - in time - I do suspect that will filter down the same way it did for Horde back in the day, but it takes years for enough players to renounce their faction to go play another for mechanical/community advantages.
But for now, I’m looking at things like WoWAnalytica, that’s showing 36% Alliance to 63% Horde overall in NA. And I believe if you just looked at former PvP servers, it shifted to 28% Alliance to 72% Horde (though not sure that metric is as relevant anymore, years after PvP/PvE servers were made irrelevant via Warmode).
Regardless, I think if you dissolved the faction wall in unranked, the problem would be much easier to solve.
And yes, that would probably work - I suspect the reason they aren’t is, again, A.) They don’t want to do anything that would encourage even less Alliance to participate… or B.) the code for the whole LFG tool is so spaghetti at this point, they can’t figure out how without breaking it… which is likely the real reason why it already hasn’t gone cross-faction like everything else.
I mean it’s not surprising that players use every advantage in their power to make the game easier, why wouldn’t they?
As long as it’s in the game and not punished or fixed by blizzard, you can just assume they are fine with it and therefor even though you don’t like that, you’re at a disadvantage moving forward if not using those same tactics and complaining about it really accomplishes nothing
Of course it is an exploit to by-pass the queue restriction by executing a synchronized “Join” by counting down, and it 100% goes against the social contract.
Also, it is not useless to keep bringing uo the topic. It is a pain point for Epic BG enjoyers who want to fight random teams and not teams stacked with 15 healers and 10 top DPS, then be stuck in a back-fill loop while the premade community take their easy and effortless win.
There are no alternatives to Epic BGs. They are unique end-game content. Dont tell players to go play arenas or Blitz. Those are NOT Epic BGs.
Now, Queuing with 5 players, no counting down, and no dropping queues is how premades should be. Take your queues.
This issue could be resolved by enabling cross-faction BGs and Party of 5 can be distributed on either side.
Lots of people talking out of their Ooks over here. If you aren’t an EBG enjoyer, you probably don’t know the level of premading that is happening right now.
Coordinated queueing can be done more reliably at the moment because the BGs are still split by faction.
As an example, if two or three disparate Horde groups (as an example) are queuing to try to get into the same BG will either succeed, or one of the groups might end up as Horde in a different BG as a worse case scenario. Whereupon they abandon and try again.
But were random BGs cross-faction, then there is a very high chance that one of the Horde groups might end up Alliance side instead. It would make it much harder for this gambit to succeed. Dropping group and trying again won’t be feasible.
Almost every other part of the game will be moving to cross-faction in War Within. It’s time BGs should follow the example of the rest of the game.
I think it would be ok if they just put a limit on group size for queue. Then you would get partial premades but not as much of the full on nightmare a full premade makes in a random. Maybe 5 man cap, or less?
You can’t totally get rid of grouping in this content but I think 5 man max is a good first step. See if it fixes the majority of the issues then go from there.
There already is a cap of 5, but they get 6-7groups of 5 and combine some Solo Queuers, then they do a count down and All queue at once. When a queue Pop, if they have 4groups and a couple solos they will take the queue and enter battle. All 25+ players.
Oh interesting, never done the premade thing but have done a ton of bgs. If that is the issue then the queue system just needs to spot 5 man groups and try to split them up. Only allow one 5 man group per team maybe?
I fell like there are ways to fix that in the queue system without actually changing anything on limitations. If they already limited it to 5s then they need to try to match those and slow down queuing for groups in bgs. You have a 5 man that queues, you get put into a queue for 5 mans and it is slower to get in, because you need to be matched with an equal number of 5 man groups.
So even if you do this you will just end up matched at the very least with an equal number of 5 mans, even though you may actually have a bigger group it would go a long way to keep premades fighting premades, and dissinsetivize the practice and make it harder.
They could then just go to single or dual group queues but I think it would help a lot and make it much more visible to the system and it can then handle those groupings accordingly. Basically just try to match all groupings up. Will it slow things down? yes queues will be longer, but that might help stop it as well.
Cross faction would help spread out the premades on both team. Also need to fix dropping the queue abuse, where if 30players drop the queue, the BG still starts at 10v40.
Blizzard limited the queue to 5, yet communities are able to consistently bring 20-30 players in the same battleground. Is that not an exploit?
When 30-40 players get a queue pop and they decide to drop, leaving the players inside the battleground (that expected a full lobby) to play 10v40 for the first 5 minutes until enough players have backfilled… is that not gameplay sabotage? or behavior against the social contract? It undermines the enjoyment of the content when it is not experienced as intended.
When players hit the Random Epic Battleground, they expect coordination from small groups. Not a Raid group in Discord.
Hmm another idea would be to weight groups. Supposedly there is some system to try to match similar gear/honor/ability. What if having grouped players just adds a ton of points there and it levels things out?
Might not work, but it also might be a way to try an inbetween that might not have a hard hit on queue times.
Only works if that point system works though and that can definitely be wonky. This is not a simple nut to crack I think, but something it would be nice to see Blizzard working on and telling us the tweaks they are doing even if it is in generalities.
perhaps they could add each player’s power, for example by means of ilvl or any other method they could come up with, divided over the amount of players in the group, take the score and ensure both sides has a similar “premade score” on each side.
I was kind of thinking for every group it just gets bonus points put on top of it. So if your 10 man (just picked a simple number for math) and everyone has a rank of 50 points, and you are all randos you get a score of 500 and it matches you against osmething smilar. But if you have a 2 man, a 5 man and 3 randos, you get 500 + 2 man bonus + 5 man bonus.
Maybe make 2 mans a 5% buff for those players, and go up to 10% for 5 mans or something like that?
edit: So this group would get 3 singles (3 * 50)+ 5man (5 * 50 * 1.1)+2man(2 * 50 * 1.05) = 530…seems low but yeah something that takes groups into account is all. Edited again because the system hid my stars.
Then those bonuses could be tweaked and you could find an in between without trying to fight cheesing it to get the premades right. It wouldn’t fully fix the problem, but the effect would be subtle and they could tweak it much more than just outlawing something or finding hard matched group pairings.