First and foremost, thank you to everyone who played Battlegrounds last week and sent us thoughtful and informed feedback on same-faction play. While we don’t plan to re-enable it again over the next few days, we’re analyzing the data we collected, and we’re planning to test more soon.
Here are some of our initial findings that will inform our next test:
Before this test, most players who joined the queue were unable to get a match, sometimes after waiting for over an hour and/or dropping out of the queue altogether. This was particularly unfortunate at some times of day or in some regions. During the test, BG queue times became short and reliable for both factions.
Prior to the first test, we wondered if the queue was having an effect on PvP in the outdoor world, and we now have data showing that when same-faction Battlegrounds were available, PvP deaths in the outdoor world were very close to 50/50 between the factions.
Similarly, win-rates for the two factions when facing the other faction in Battlegrounds were close to 50/50.
We’ll let you know as soon as we’ve completed our analysis, have decided on any further tweaks to the system, and are ready to test it again.
And again, thank you very much for your feedback as we explore potential solutions.
Glad to see stats on the win ratios and open world deaths, this helps confirm some of the assumptions and quells some perceived concerns that came up prior to testing.
I think the main issue with same-faction BG’s was the sheer number of premade groups, and the lack of matchmaking considerations when accounting for them. Is there any chance that a premade vs premade preference could be included?
So everything worked out great, Why is there a next test then. Release it and deal with wintraders later. No one cares, people just want to play the game.
Don’t even test again. Just implement this stuff. This is our time and it is valuable. Stop futsing around while we wait one hour for a que and do whats right for Horde faction.
Good to hear that the low level ganking is going down. “People who care about playing alliance will keep playing alliance with or without this change” yeah the people on pve server will stay. The alliance on pvp servers I’m not sure about. I had two geared level 60 horde characters in classic and switched to ally because I knew the que were going to be bad for horde.