I figured I would chime in with my own thread on this matter. This is an issue that has destroyed the Epic Battleground Bracket and I am not sure Blizzard is even fully aware of the issue despite all the threads. Unfortunately a lot of threads could be just chalked up to people thinking they are running in to premades more than they are. Which in of itself is an issue. Which in my opinion probably isn’t the case, it’s pretty rampant based on the testing I have done. To me premades are pretty obvious most of the time. People definitely cry premade even when it isn’t but again that is an issue in itself.
How it works:
Basically multiple groups of 5 all queue at the same time, some times using addons some times not and based off queue pops all take it at same time. Basically bypassing the 5 man group limit.
The issues it causes:
- The obvious one is just how awful and demoralizing it is for the other side who 99% of the time is not another premade. They just get run over making the experience a not so good one. Possibly driving people away from PvP completely or at minimum giving them a bad taste in their mouth.
- People leave almost immediately after the initial team fight sometimes before if you have a recognizable name on the other side people know run these queue sync premades. Even if the other side isn’t a premade just the fact a team gets run over leads to immediate leaving by players claiming premade. Just because of how often they have this experience.
- This kills activity in the bracket. Only Blizzard has the actual numbers but you can kind of gauge based off how often you are queuing into the same players. For instance not so recently I queued into the same obvious premade group 3 times in a row during peak hours. That to me tells me nobody at least on the other faction is queuing.
- Premades not taking queues. Often times leaving one team short 20+ players. I have started BGs with 20 players. Which is easy to tell that in that case four 5 man groups didn’t take the queue. Often times you are just short players the entire match as well. I have gone whole games without ever getting above 25 players.
- This is a manipulation of the queue system. Causing unfair advantages and like I pointed out above often times leaving one side short players for a lot if not all of the game when these groups don’t take queues.
Solutions:
I think I have couple:
- Pull the rip cord. Make random BGs 100% cross faction now. That would make queue syncing that much harder.
- Kill any addons that allow you to sync up queue pops. Ban them. Or at least that feature of the addon.
The easiest way to break up Que synchers is to create a simple algorithm that allows only one five man pre-made to enter a bg per side. That way five man premades can still have fun but Que synchers can’t abuse or manipulate the system. It wouldnt be a hard code to write.
Source: Solution to Que Synchers
I thought this idea was pretty good too.
I am not sure why this is allowed to begin with. The implemented the 5 man group limit for a reason I would think. Isn’t using methods to go around that circumventing those rules? We had a recent example of just allowing full premades in normal BGs in SoD. WSG was a god awful experience and the changed that in SoD as well because of it. People should have to feel like they need to join a community to play a mode that technically only allows you to queue solo or groups 2 to 5.
As someone who just loves BGs it sucks that this kind of stuff happens. IMO if you aren’t going to regulate the queue syncs or find a way to make it almost impossible to queue sync I don’t know why you need a 5 man limit.
Hopefully someone can look into this and can understand why this is an overall negative. There are brackets for full premades. If a mode has group limits and/or allows someone to solo queue they shouldn’t have to worry about queuing into full 20+ man queue sync premades.
12 Likes
good lord not another one
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People will complain that you made “another thread” on the issue, but yours is actually pretty well worded, listing the reasons why premades in epic battlegrounds are a problem and laying out some simple potential fixes.
Obviously since Blizzard has not done anything to improve the experience, people should not really be surprised that this is an issue people will complain about.
I’m down for making all battlegrounds cross faction anyway as it solves other issues as well, even if it’s not done because of premades.
5 Likes
but they’re evolving the wrong way, which is great;
thinking 5 man groups are the issue. lol
Ya overall queue times would just improve, you may even avoid some of the team imbalances as well. Especially when Alliance just seem to always have more people queuing than Horde.
I don’t think I said 5 man groups are an issue lol. I am actually fine with 5 man groups especially in EBGs.
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With Cross-Faction, It would be nice if they threw a Healer cap or balance on each team. Right now we can get teams with 10-12 healers on one side and 1-2 healer on the other which is a bit overkill.
Cross-Faction random Queues need to happen fast.
They are 100% aware of the issue. My worry is that the code is so old the only solution would be to revamp the BG system because they could break the queues. We’re basically asking them to work on Molten Core(AV).
3 Likes
Yup just simple role balancing so each team has equal numbers of healer, tank, and damage.
Ashran is a horrible experience when the enemy team has 9 healers and you have 3.
Cross faction queues should of been done a long time ago in randoms, works fine in rated. Good post btw OP, don’t worry though the degenerates will soon be in here to defend their behavior.
3 Likes
Oh I 100% know they are, but what I am saying is though don’t understand the impact or extent fully.
I’m for cross faction BGs for a few reasons:
- faster queues
- more randomization of teams may result in more even games (not guaranteed)
Some caveats:
Cross faction would still need:
- group matching
- numbers of healers/tanks matched
- games to start only when both teams have equal numbers
Also…
- quality of games (games that are even feeling) would not be guaranteed, it would be more luck-based since you’d have more players who don’t care about winning, playing objectives, or working as a team (how pugs play in general)
- IMO there’d still need to be a way for premades to play each other, so apart from ‘war games’ (which tend to devolve into min-maxing lameness) there’d be nothing for that, which is not in line with blizz’s philosophy that organization/group play is rewarded
3 Likes
I’ve been suggesting a raid queue for epic battlegrounds. Something like 30v30 or whatever number is best.
It would simply put one full raid vs another full raid. So you make a raid of 30 players and queue up and you get matched vs another full raid of 30. Cross faction, of course.
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That is exactly what they dont want sorry.
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Cross faction meaning alliance could be matched vs. alliance and horde vs. horde? Some may not want to. I think it could be fun if people played it without min-maxing, but you’re always going to have the kind of players who want to min-max everything - gear, comp, only the ‘best’ in their raid - and that would make it toxic instead of fun and would probably kill it off.
I would rather just have something like a separate group queue. Whatever the case, I doubt changes will happen anytime soon…
Cross faction meaning just like rated, you can make a raid with both alliance and horde, and you could be placed on either side of the map. A player’s faction would not be taken into account.
Whether or not it’s toxic, it wouldn’t be any more toxic than the current queue sync premade situation. And if sync queueing is taken away, this would provide an alternative for those who want to continue doing epic battlegrounds in a premade.
Those who don’t want to do it won’t have to.
There isn’t enough Raid groups it would always end-up being raid vs pug outside of prime time. Let’s say there’s 5 communities that can bring 30man raid, either their queue would be extremely high waiting for another raid, or they would just continue queueing as 5 man.
Best is to spread them on both teams so they fight amongst themselves with groups of 5.
5 man premade is the only premade allowed in my book. A Raid would break Epic BG more if they were to drop queue by “accident”. (dodging another raid oops). Then that other raid would go in the instance and what happens? Are they back-filled with pugs? Is the raid going to fight 30vs 2 the whole game? Does the game end?
5 man is a perfect size for unrated BGs, let communities fight amongst themselves.
https://imgur.com/a/9pYSiYa
EZ PZ, everyone’s happy. Communities could even merge into a giant blob of Epic BG Enjoyers. Where Epic’s are filled with 8x 5man on each side sourced from multiple communities. They have to get along, everyone is friends!
Well 5 player premades should ideally be spread out within a battleground. Easier if it’s cross faction.
For random battlegrounds if one side has a 5 player group, so should the other side.
For epic battlegrounds it should try to balance how many groups are on each side.
And yes, if there aren’t enough full raids queueing, that means a raid may have to wait a very long time for a group. That just means that premade vs premade epic battlegrounds aren’t as popular as the premade communities want everyone to think.
With making them all cross faction, that change alone would make it much harder for premades to queue sync.
And if they all queue up in 5 player groups, those groups would be split up 50/50 if they do happen to get into the same battleground.
Of course you could have win trading that happens, but that’s already possible under the current system anyway.
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I have no issues with raids being able to queue if they were always pitted against each other.
I am willing to bet most people are for cross faction stuff in general. I don’t think Blizzard would be doing it if they didn’t see that feedback. It’s a lot of back end work to go through all the old systems to make it work.
That must be why you get more rewards from shuffle/blitz than random bg premades.
I’ve said many times nearly nobody cares about “community” in retail wow nobody really talks about it cause the moment it was no longer necessary to play pretty much it was irrelevant.
Same thing irl in a lot of places to as much as some want to change that. I quite like it though being able to go about my day not have anyone confront me over idiotic drama or try to engage in small talk that’s hardly worth the air it’s spoken on.
Just nice peace and quiet. And as someone who likes reading there is nothing I like more.
To me it’s just silly that in 2025 we don’t even have cross faction dungeon finder or cross faction random battlegrounds.
If I have a friend who plays Horde I literally cannot just queue up to do a dungeon or battleground with them. I’m not sure I could even group with them in the open world (out of war mode of course).
When you have things like cross server groups, cross server guilds, even cross faction guilds, it’s about time that you could actually play with members of the opposite faction.
When we play Blitz, nobody cares that it’s cross faction. Nobody freaks out because there’s undead fighting alongside night elves. It’s literally a non-issue.
And don’t get me wrong, I am all about the faction vs faction conflict. I love that and want more things to encourage world PvP but there comes a point where gameplay must come before roleplaying.
1 Like