I would not say the bug was caused by the premades, even unintentionally. Cause implies blame.
I think it would be more accurate to say the premades dropping some queues triggered, or exposed a bug in the coding.
Back in vanilla, Horde were the underpopulated faction and did use the same kind of method to create premades for themselves. There was never a complaint about those kinds of lopsided games starting, let alone an entire forum uproar about it.
If a game did not have enough people in it, it did not start. In making Classic, someone under time pressure might have made a mistake while cutting and pasting a part of the code.
Or given realm populations were much smaller, and given you didn’t have the entire Americas in one Battle group, a much smaller number of AV’s were created. Maybe something about the current population in the battle group created a situation that had never been encountered before. I have no idea what the cause was, but something obviously was not fully tested before release.
In any event, the premades had no idea that something like this was even possible. As the problem began to reveal itself, people expressed feeling bad for the pugs that were getting stuck in them. Some groups agreed to take borderline queues that were less than optimal, and would have normally been rejected, even though it increased the chance of failure for us. This was done to try to reduce the negative impact.
To then be repeatedly slandered; to be accused of being completely callous and doing far worse than what Horde did during phase 2 even after the real problem has been identified, gets to be way much.
As far as I have heard, there is only one thing premades have done that is ethically wrong, and that is to chat report a pug. I was in a premade group for a little over two weeks. I probably did someplace between 100 and 200 games with them. I had read about it on the forums, and one of my guild mates was silenced. But I did not run across it in any of my games until the night before the patch.
I was horrified when I heard someone ask the group to chat report someone. A rl friend of mine was at my house playing with me. “Don’t do it!” I yelled. “It will silence the person’s account for a week. No way he deserves that kind of treatment.” So neither of us reported the poor fellow. But enough people did that he was removed from the bg.
I’m still mortified over that. It is wrong, wrong, wrong.
In another post, I talked about the anti-social behaviors of psychopaths, sociopaths and “almost psychopaths”.
In any event, I believe that premades absolutely do have to take responsibility to stop this kind of behavior.
Because many people are quick to point the finger, I want to repeat, I ran well over 100 AV’s, maybe even over 200, with these people. In all those games I saw that occur only once. So it might not be as prevalent as the forums make it appear. Or maybe I was just in a group of people who rarely did it. I do think it’s the kind of thing that can get worse over time. Because people with little or no conscience will encourage others to do it, and they can influence people who don’t fully understand how bad it is.
If the person in our group who told the others to do it, is actually one of these extreme anti-social types, they probably did not even report the person themselves. They are very good at getting others in trouble while protecting themselves.
These behaviors have to be nipped in the bud, or they will destroy the good that the premades have done, and are trying to do.