The thing is…
Premades aren’t going to disappear simply because there’s better items in the game.
People are still going to pursue the class set and weapons after the release of AQ.
From what I’ve heard from other players on the forums, premade groups are apparently the way to go because even if you’re ruining the game, you’re maximizing hph.
He didn’t say disappear, he said there’d be less. If everyone is correct and premades don’t care about fun, they just want the rewards, then aq will be more appealing to those types of people. It’s much less of a grind. When confronted with “premades were a thing in vanilla”, the argument is “yea, but there weren’t this many”.
The interesting thing about raid rewards though is that between 1 and 3 items drop from most raid bosses, and there’s 40 people in a raid.
People are still going to value the rewards from PvP, even if they also raid, because those rewards are something that their effort can guarantee so long as they work hard enough to progress their rank.
Raiding, outside of farming consumable materials and world buffs etc, only requires several hours a week. Spending time doing that isn’t going to prevent hardcore players from continuing to rank.
I’m certain we’ll see just as many premades moving forward unless something is done to curb the hph advantage they’re receiving by being matchmade unfairly against randomly generated teams.
Whats broken is that they released classic with xserver queues. 90% of vanilla was nothing like this because xserver didn’t exist.
It’s not like xserver gave us short queues, so what was the point? We lost out on everything that made BGs great in the name of short queue times that dont exist.
Not to mention xserver removed one of the only mechanics that encouraged self-balancing faction ratios.
I think the problem is offering players the option of efficiency when it comes at cost of a detriment to gameplay quality.
The best course of action to take is to remove the choice. Either play premade team versus premade team or play in a pug versus a pug.
It serves to better protect the integrity of PvP.
Um, that’s adding choice, not removing it.
Well right now there is a choice between playing premade or playing pug.
In either situation, you’re going to be matchmade against both premades and pugs over the course of several games. (mostly premades, or so it seems.)
When you get matchmade with a pug while in a pug, the gameplay is fair, because neither team hand selected their class comp. When that happens in a premade, the gameplay is unfair because one team entered the battleground under a different set of circumstances.
Ultimately playing in a premade is a more efficient way to farm honor, because you’re more likely to win in every scenario.
If premades only faced premades, that gameplay is just as fair as a pug facing a pug. In that case, every game is fair, so efficiency is no longer an option. Everybody’s win rate is a consequence of playing a fair game.
Remove the choice of efficiency since it comes at the cost of forcing pug players into unfair matches when they’re pitted against premades, which negatively affects the gameplay which takes place in that space for players on both teams.
If it has the effect of increasing queue times who cares?
What benefit do you receive for a faster queue into a 0 honor game, or an inflammatory game which is disproportionately rewarding provided that it was an easier game as a result of the method by which you queued?
Only players who benefit from damaging the integrity of the game would support that, and since they have a self centered motive that doesn’t best serve the interests of the game or its players I’d be hard pressed to suggest it’s ethical to agree with them.
From the standpoint of development, at any rate.
Sorry you feel this way but with instant ques it just makes more sense to have quick losses when you’re clearly outmatched. I suggest you try a premade if you dont like pugging with toxic players. They have existed since 2004.
Agreed, I’ve always preferred same server queues. In phase 2 several rivalries were built that didn’t really get to continue, whereas in same server BGs they could have flourished. It is way better for personal accountability and yes could have also helped server balance. It’s too bad Blizzard went they way they did.
They have. And people have complained about them for 16 years because it never felt appropriate to matchmake them to be the opponents of randomly generated teams.
That manner of skewed playing field never felt fair to anyone.
hit the return key every once in awhile
All this is true, but I know most of the top rankers on my server. Around 80-90% of them are just in it for the gear and stop joining the main premades once they get their gear. Heck most of them get less than 5k honor per week after leaving the premades.
As soon as they get their rank 12 or 13 or 14 (whatever their target), they basically leave the premade groups and get replaced.
By the time AQ comes out though, I doubt my server will be able to fill as many premades as we typically do (3 or 4 on horde side). And the main reason for that is the AQ gear is going to generally be better.
Based on the people I know, I think we’ll have at most 1 or maybe 2 premades going on my server horde side. For most of us, there’s just no point to going for rank 12-14 if we don’t need the gear anymore.
It was never meant to be fair bro.
I thought this was going to be about R14 grind shenanigans.
what? no…the pvp itself is fine, even with all crazy class imbalance team vs team play is something retail pvp can only dream about being. only thing broken is the amount of cc in the game which definitely needs to be lowered all around, from mages flipping slowing and rooting you every 2 seconds to 30 second entangling roots as you take damage through it is ridiculous. other than that the pvp in classic is the best
In a competitive game mode, fairness is mandated by circumstance.
Can you imagine a starcraft II tournament where one player’s units were just inherently stronger than the other players?
In some cases, a really great player would be able to overcome a handicap, which is, at least to some extent, what Vanilla PvP was all about. Utilizing teamwork to overcome gear discrepancies and the strengths and weaknesses of the various classes.
That said, matchmaking pugs and premades together is like providing 1 player with more basic tech buildings to start the match. He’s getting marines out more quickly, because he doesn’t have to invest the time it takes the other player to construct his barracks.
If both players are provided a barracks at the start, then the game is still fair, and the competition isn’t invalidated; it’s just relying upon a different ruleset, where the players are inherently provided a barracks in addition to a command center at the start of the game, which ultimately changes the way the match plays out.
There are two separate rulesets which determine how a team is selected, one allows players to hand pick their own team, the other provides random teams. Premades facing pugs aren’t playing the game utilizing the same set of rules, which frequently results in stark power imbalances.
Is it possible your randomly generated team will have a druid, a priest, a paladin/shaman, a warrior, a rogue, a hunter, a warlock and a mage or two? absolutely. It’s also possible you’re going to get 8 warriors and a warlock and a mage, and in the random teams rulset, the objective is to still win the game despite not having access to some of the class mechanics which would make completing the objective of capturing the flag easier.
In that case, you might have the mage run the flag with the support of a single warrior and have the rest keep midfield clear; or provisionally have a warrior run the flag, pop shield wall, fear, swap carriers and continue on through to the base.
When your team composition is random, you have to be more creative in terms of how you intend to complete various objectives. When your class composition features every tool you could possibly need at your disposal, you’re playing an entirely different game.
So yes. You won, because your team was hand picked, while the other team was randomly generated. That doesn’t make you a better or more competitive player, it just means that the premises of the match were built upon circumstances which were inherently unfair to the other team.
This is why we have the souless, empty void of retail now. Everyone wanted this little change here than here than here than here… and we eventually got retail. No leave classic alone, all these changes people wanted can be found on retail.
Thinking the same because AQ gear is marginally stronger for pve and the min maxers that are in battlegrounds right now making everyone cry about it will be in AQ farming gear instead due to a 0.001% increase in damage or healing or whatever. No joke that’s how hard up people are about minmaxing.
He wins every time, because he can rush the enemy base before the other player’s barracks has even finished construction, and the game feels broken as a result.
This is the point, in development, when we suggest that changes are absolutely necessary to the system which is causing an inequity in the number of barracks’ each player starts with, because it has a profoundly negative impact on the gameplay, resulting in a meta where most of the finer points of the match are never played out. It’s just 1 player sending his marines to kill the other player before he can even get a millitary unit out onto the playing field.