Your solution has a 40-person premade raid going against a team of random pugs after waiting 5 minutes in the queue.
Premade raids aren’t going to face anyone they don’t want to face. If necessary, they’ll continue sync queuing to avoid premade raid matching.
Some premade raids will continue to send in a scout to see who’s on the other team. If they don’t like who they’re facing (e.g. another premade raid), they’ll drop their queue pops. Smaller premade raids will bail against large premade raids. Guess who’s going to backfill into these games and get roflstomped? Pugs.
Your solution makes it easy for your premade community to bring full raids into random bgs. Your solution makes this legitimate.
At the end of the day, I think many casual pugs want a fair, fun game (with no visible rating involved). In random bgs, in brackets that do not allow raids to queue up, pugs don’t want their queues to pop against premade raids.
The other issue is that a 5 minute timer is way too short. Random battlegrounds, at least whenever I’ve done them, seem to have a 4-6 minute wait on average. A 5 minute timer would not be nearly long enough. It shouldn’t even be a timer, it should be only a raid queue for epic battlegrounds.
And for random battlegrounds, if you want to do a 10 player premade, that’s available already via rated battlegrounds. Not sure why we’d need an unrated queue for it, though I suppose it couldn’t hurt.
Either way, the whole point is that premades face premades, whether that be a 10v10, or 5+5v5+5, or 5+5randomv5+5random or whatever combination it happens to be, generally.
If premade groups are getting very long queues, that just means that the majority of people queueing up are not doing so in large groups, and the game should not penalize those majority of players to give the minority of players shorter queues.
If you want to group up with 5 players, you should expect a longer queue if most other people are not doing the same.
its not meant to be punishing, its a separate chance for the system to pair premade vs premade, if its too long people would go back to syncing and dropping.
remember that solutions need to be based on how humans actually act and not around fantastical ideals we want them to follow in daydreams.
Except that premades can already fight other premades via war games, but there’s a reason they go through the hassle of queue syncing into epics. They don’t usually want to actually fight another organized team. Some premade communities do, for sure, but most don’t.
If they did, they’d do wargames.
we’ve done wargames from time to time, but the reality is that it is not a substitute for daily play, its buggy and offers no rewards. its main purpose is for one team to directly challenge another, aka a guild sized duel.
its also not a random game against a random team. for example if there is 6 teams available to play but only 3 of them know of each other and only 2 have contact with each other and know how to bring up the wargame UI, then the options for who can actually play them are limited.
if you had the 6 premades in the queue, the system could match them against each other.
This would be ideal, but they would never queue for it. Too much risk of losing imo
I respect that you guys wargame each other sometimes but lets be honest, the vast majority of premades would stop if you were exclusively put against other premades.
Whoever is the best premade would queue but the others would leave fearing losses
Your idea about premade queue for 5 minutes is interesting however… tack on a tenacity type buff for the pugs and it could be fun
mostly what you get when you premade is stomping on PUGSs which is why people do it. You rarely rarely go up against another group which is competitive. Groups will drop out so they just face PUGs. Against the pro-premade people need to be dishonest.
Everyone plays for different reasons, and I don’t doubt some people do it to stomp pugs. Everyone I know who run premades do it so they can compete when they run into another good team. My group will literally stop running if we don’t run into a good team after a while, everyone gets bored
I take it you don’t premade because that’s not true
If premade groups wanted to fight other premades, why don’t they?
Rated battlegrounds exist. War games exist. There are options there that don’t involve ruining the match for the other players who aren’t in the sync premade.
Most premades ‘dodge’ each other not because of the competition but because how ‘toxic’ the player base can get.
For example…
Premade A loses to Premade B
Player C takes a screenshot, heads to the forums, posts said screenshot while insulting players in Premade A for being ‘bad at WoW’ (lol)