With the WoW Battle for Azeroth Expansion coming to a close, it is time to address some of the dire changes needed to reverse the rapidly dwindling rate of participation in the Rated Battleground Community. While this form of rated player versus player is not the centerpiece of WoW, it has been around for an entire decade and has become a staple part of many players’ passions for the game. This document will be divided into sections addressing the current lack of participation and providing solutions to these issues. The most major of these issues pertains to the queue times of teams due to rapidly fluctuating mmr.
In December of 2018 (BFA Season 1) the queue system for both arena and rbgs was changed mid season when mmr was squished. The queue system calculates a team’s mmr then searches for teams of similar mmr and widens every minute. The system prior to this December 2018 change was approximately ±50 mmr/minute whereas now it is speculated to be much closer to ±20/min. Teams of even less than 100 mmr difference have to wait upwards of 5-10 minutes to get a game. There is now a “hard cap” of how big the difference of mmr teams can queue into each other which never existed prior to December of 2018. While this system is beneficial in theory, if there were infinite amounts of teams at all mmrs in the queue, this is simply not the reality. This system ultimately hurts the higher end teams (Hero of the Alliance/Horde level competitors) due to win streaks rapidly spiking team mmrs. Example: If there are two 2700 mmr teams and one wins three games in a row versus the other, these two teams will virtually never get each other until a third high rated team queues up. In season one of BFA after the queue changes, the highest rated NA and EU teams both sat over six hour queues in their respective regions and were NEVER able to get a queue of their main characters until season two. It should also be noted, this change made it so that no two teams could queue into each other EVER if there is a difference of greater than 500 mmr which must be reverted. As mentioned, this change was also implemented in the arena but was later reverted; it still has remained for over a year and a half for rbgs. As the highest team queueing currently it is standard to sit over 1-2 hour queues before giving up because no other “high” teams form and with the mmr cap will NEVER get a queue pop. While activity in RBGs is not the highest, this change would still help bring more life to the bracket; especially during the oceanic timezone.
The second part of this document addresses the lack of incentives in Rated Battlegrounds and why BFA has led to the least amount of participation in comparison to other expansions. While Blizzard has added some minor incentives to RBGS over the years such as: Higher totals of conquest points in Mists of Pandaria, extra gear from weekly wins in Warlords of Draenor, the implementation of Soldier/Defender/Guardian of the Alliance/Horde also in Warlords of Draenor, lucrative item level drops & a secret mage tower artifact appearance in Legion. The implementation of Challenger/Rival/Duelist/Elite in Battle for Azeroth was simply underwhelming as most players are already able to accomplish these much easier in the two versus two and three versus three arena due to vastly different amounts of times to form groups/time in queue. Gladiator (the 0.5% of the 3v3 ladder version) is something that prior to BFA was considered relatively prestigious and thus represented a player base that was slightly below the skill level of a rank 1 competitor. While the new version of gladiator (50 wins above 2400 cr in 3v3) does incentivise lower level players to aspire towards participation and improvement in the arena, it ultimately leads people away from pursuing Rated Battlegrounds. Gladiator mounts, or a color variant of these gladiator mounts should be added to RBGs following the same logic of the changes in BFA. It should also be noted, the top 0.5% reward for rbgs has been the same since its implementation in Cataclysm. Once earned on a character, the title remains permanently bound to that character regardless of season. A change in the title to include the name of the season which the title was earned (example: Sinful Hero of the Horde) would VASTLY incentivise the amount of higher end participation in the bracket (much like the older gladiator and current rank 1 titles do). Whether this would be the percentage (Top 0.1%) equivalent to a rank 1 arena title or current hero of the horde (Top 0.5%) requirement would be upon the decision of Blizzard. While Blizzard has made a stride towards incentivising RBGS, there is a firm belief throughout the entire community that there should be more exclusive rewards added to the bracket.
In conclusion, the unreliable queue times and time to form groups due to lack of participation through lack of incentives has led to the decline in overall participation. Players active in the community from both the NA and EU servers have come together to create this document and agree that the issues listed above are the cause of the dramatic drop in the player base rather than the actual gameplay of Rated Battlegrounds themselves. Thank you for your time.
Here are some examples of queue times that were dredged up by the RBG community from season one of BFA. Even an old reddit post from February 6, 2019 was uncovered with a picture of nearly a 2 hour queue that never popped on NA servers. https://old.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/ang72h/ever_since_patch_81_high_mmr_rated_battleground/
Example of an EU queue time during prime time
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R1 RBG titles pls, I cba grinding hour long queues for my 15th duplicate hero title
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They tried to nuke the RBG scene due to win trading and carrys, now they let PVE guilds do it… love how everything is equal in this game, they have no idea how many people quit WoW due to bans and such from PVP carrys and win trading, they should have never let PVE guilds do this, its def not fair to everyone who got banned b4 when it was happening in PVP
Love this. I’m sure Season one of Shadowlands will be good though, first seasons of expansions are generally really active.
3 Likes
Rated Battlegrounds are dead because because of the huge amount of cheating over the years. It wasn’t uncommon for a large majority of rewards go to people who payed real life currency or used in game hacks to win.
The queue times are terrible because the rated community has each other on their friend list and they actively avoid fighting each other in competition in favor of farming unorganized yolos.
I understand that the best want to play together but the price you pay for that is a lack of competition, thus your six hour queue. If you want to actually play then bring in new people and split up and play against each other. Most people though are so concerned about rating that they would rather farm pugs than have a competitive game.
That’s why no one plays rated anymore. The higher your rating the more isolated you are. If you want more participation then there should be better rewards for lower levels of rated battlegrounds and not just all the rewards to be sold by the top rated people for real life currency.
4 Likes
There’s 0 integrity of the ladder, 0 incentives/rewards for doing rbgs, and 0 time to do rbgs when everyone is stuck doing their wow chores.
5 Likes
They need to make rated solo queue for rated BGS…
I did 3 for the first time in 15 years during BFA…
Took me about a hour to get everyone together.
Took about a hour for the queue.
Than we just got smushed by a horde guild team that actuall has a strat.
Like…Takes way to long to form a team of randoms…takes way to long to queue for it…Most likely the team you VS is seasoned ready to stomp you…
Yeah i aint not god but i’ve played this game normally for years…what i experienced with RBGS was just terrible and the only word that it shouted out to me was " broken system "
7 Likes
I think it just boils down to the fact its significantly easier to get a group of 2 or 3 people together to run an arena vs getting 10 people to do a RBG. There’s no real rewards in RBG to justify the amount of time & effort it takes to basically setup a raid.
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End of the season of the worst pvp expansion ever. It will be much better season 1 shadowlands
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The beauty of player agency (something Ion hates) would be that you aren’t forced to do things you don’t like.
If you don’t like solo queuing. Great! Don’t solo queue.
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I mean luckily they’ll never add it.
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Hello Quarck,
I agree, overall, with the gist of your post; however, I would like to take the time to respond in-detail.
Disagree. I mean, did it help? No. Yet, cheating has always existed in arena, people have paid real life currency, and used in-game hacks to succeed in arena, as well. The key difference between arena and rated battlegrounds are the incentives: tournaments, titles, public prestige, cash-prizes, etc.
With regards to terrible queue times, and the lack of competition; I believe you make a fair point. A lot of the top-end talent is elitist, overly concerned with their rating, and unfriendly towards new players. I would much rather a charter system (such as we had before S13 mop in arena) in which rated battleground teams were hard-capped at a roster limit of players, and people would stop rotating bench spots for top teams and farming less organized, lesser skilled teams. This is probably unlikely, though, so what I believe is the most pragmatic solution is 6v6.
Either attempt to incentivize 10v10 rated battlegrounds properly (doubtful) or dissolve 10v10 rated battlegrounds completely, and create a new bracket of 6v6 rated battlegrounds with incentives (seasonal mounts, r1 titles) akin to arena.
5 Likes
Bailamos happy your ban is over so your back in the community…
As in after they released you when they caught you on to catch a predator.
Solo queues exist: they’re called random battlegrounds. Solo queues also exist for raid, it’s called LFR. We’re talking about high-level rated battlegrounds, not pick up groups. The solution is most likely 6v6, but it doesn’t look like they’re pulling the trigger or care enough about the mini game of PVP.
2 Likes
Solo queue means only being able to queue solo. Both those allow queuing as a group.
The matchmaking system is good. The problem at higher ratings is just that most high-rated players refuse to play if they are not on the strongest team currently queueing. They rather wait for a spot. Similarly, they will ditch their current team (which typically disbands) if they can jump to new better team in process of forming. The long queue times for the highest team will always exist unless there is some concept of “limited size roster” or “team loyalty”.
Low participation is the real problem.
The 4 issues with participation are:
- Lack of rewards. Solution: Anything more valuable than a title could work. For example: color variation of some mount, make it obtainable only from RBG with faster progress at higher rating. However, anything aimed at top 0.1% wont help much. It needs to be achiveable by a commited average player to improve participation most.
- Huge barrier to entry. Players don’t get invited to groups unless they are geared. Solution: reduce the ridiculous amount of boring PvE work required to obtain and maintain competitive PvP gear.
- Too busy with PvE. Solution: again, reduce the ridiculous amount of boring PvE work required to obtain and maintain competitive PvP gear. If you are busy grinding PvE, you are not playing PvP.
- Imbalances. The excessive power of Mythic raiding gear, PvE trinkets and corruption stacking makes many matches pointless. Solution: make PvP outcome more dependant on skill, knowledge and team coordination by significantly reducing the impact of gear in PvP.
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Solo-queue-RBG would become extremely toxic possibly to a point Blizzard would have to anonymize teammates and block all chat. It would also be abused by friends all queueing at the same time and have the player(s) on the team with the lesser number of friends to lose the game on purpose. I do not see any way it could be setup to work and be fun.
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None of that stops solo queue in other far more successful and competitive games.
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