Can we please get something so premades only get grouped with other premades. When you get in and see 3 or more from the same guild, you know there is no point in even trying. Please Blizzard, either prevent premades in Trial of Style or only group them with other premades.
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No surprise to see Blizzard has not addressed this issue since the last few editions of Trial of Style.
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Maybe its just a coincidence they got grouped together
Premades in trial of style has to be a new level of in game patheticness I didn’t even think was possible
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I’ve won in premades before. Because not all premades are out to vote for each other. I was just in a group with 4 MG people all in the same guild. I took first. We all cheered each other on.
Not everyone is out to get you. And you still get tokens and get to have fun. 
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It’s not PvP. A Premade can be and often is just friends / guildies wanting to do things together.
That said, yes, some premades are there to wintrade. It’s particularly noticeable when they actually add new rewards, as they have done this time around, because they just want their mogs and to be done.
And even in groups where the premade isn’t intentionally wintrading or at least voting for their own people, you can expect a bias in any sort of “tiebreakers”. 2 people similarly good? Vote is 100% going to their groupmate. 2 people both ignoring the theme? Vote is 100% going to their groupmate.
But honestly, something arguably worse than the premades is the way individual players will try and cheese the vote to their advantage. See someone absolutely hideous? Vote for them every time over the good looking players to hopefully raise your own rank up a bit in the final tally against them.
People do that crap all the time, and again, it’s worse when there are new rewards that people care about getting.
They could probably do something about Premades if they really wanted to.
But there’s no way to do anything about the latter issue.
And at the end of the day, this isn’t meant to be a hyper competitive event. It’s supposed to be a bit of light hearted fun. So I get why they’d rather just let it be instead of being weirdly restrictive with it to combat these issues.
This is a unicorn situation.
The usual situation is 1st, 2nd and 3rd place are people from the same guild, not bothering to follow the theme.
That’s fine. Let them queue as a group of 6 and they can pat each other on the back until their heart’s content and not waste other people’s time.
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I got all of my new stuff the other day and never noticed this as being an issue does this actually happen or are we speculating?
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Dunno, I see guilds in groups all the time and usually end up placing with everyone participating in the theme.
My experience can’t be that much of a unicorn, can it? I run ToS like it’s my life when it’s up. LOL
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Yes, there are pathetic people out there that need to cheat on what’s supposed to be a lighthearted and fun game.
This used to be my favorite holiday but these people make the event entirely unfun.
To me it is. I just did a Shadowlands theme with a guild and the winners didn’t have a single piece of SL gear on. Hell, the winner was wearing the warden set 
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make this a solo event , end of story , this is abused endlessly by groups, sad thing Blizz has known about it since the start and has done nothing.
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Grouped players and Trial of Style is always a touchy subject. Me, I think a duo group is pretty well fine. Two players queuing together, especially if they vote as least mostly fairly? Well, that’s not going to really hurt the other players’ ability to place. Trios? Eh, that’s getting into “more unfair” though it is still technically possible for all of them to not place. Quartets and quintets? That’s unfair territory, IMO.
But, the thing is, I definitely understand the want to play some Trial of Style with friends and/or guildmates. I think what I would like to see with group queuing for Trial of Style is the following:
Two-players are firstly attempted to be placed with 2 other duo groups. After X amount of time in the queue—I don’t want the queues to get long, so like 60s maybe, I don’t know—if 3 sets of 2-players are not matched, it then tries two pairs plus 2 solo queue players. After another x seconds in the queue, it just fills the 4 slots for the rest of the group with solo players.
For 3±player groups the game should give the group the option when queuing to just go straight into the ToS with their current 3/4/5-player group. This solution allows guildies and friends to just play by themselves.
Otherwise, with Three players, initially the game should attempt to place them with another triplet group. After Y amount of time—longer than the X number of seconds for the grouping of duos, so maybe 3 minutes-ish—the game should again give the trio’s party leader the option to enter the ToS directly as a trio with no other players. If the party doesn’t want to do that, then it would then pull in either a duo and a solo player or 3 solo players out of the standard queue.
Quartets and Quintets would not have the option to continue into the standard queue. These sizes of groups would only be allowed to play by themselves with no random players from the queue. These bigger groups are where the prospect of vote abuse becomes the most likely. Also, with a direct-entrance straight into Trial of Style for big groups, maybe the devs could allow a 6-person raid to directly enter as well or maybe even the brackets could be updated to allow up to 10 or something…that could be a nice addition to big groups. The actual trial of style token rewards really don’t matter too much so I’m okay with non-queued big groups still getting full rewards for placing, but I could see this having the the rewards halfed or something too
(I may be biased though in saying that ½ the amount of tokes would be okay; I have quite a few saved up across characters:
)
Maybe some kind of sorting system like that would help lessen the feeling that someone might have been cheated out of placing because of in-voting between party-mates.
I love Trial of Style. I wish happened more often, even if new prizes only come once or twice a year. If not a permanent fixture available all of the time, I would be happy with once a month or even once a quarter is twice as good as twice a year. I’ve felt slighted or more than one occasion when someone from a guild group wins when they didn’t even seem to try. However, I also think there should be a different solution than not letting friends/guildmates queue together because, well, doing Trial of Style with a friend if a lot of fun. I’ve never done it with more than two players: a few times over the years with two guildmates/IRL-friends during separate expansions. This year, I’ve queued for a half-dozen+ matches along with Laeuko because, honestly, I’ve not been able to play except for one evening in a couple of weeks and that was spent losing horribly in the plunderstorm: so,I saw Laeuko was doing ToS too last night, so we grouped up. We voted fairly, and generally didn’t place even 3rd but still had fun.
It’s fun to do with friends, so I don’t hate on anyone wanting to do so; however, as I’ve mentioned above (and in other years) I do think there are some ways for Blizz to make it feel more fair for everyone not grouped up by a balancing of 2/3-player groups to mostly have to play with other groups and for 4/5±player groups to have to only play by themselves.
Also, I replied and quoted who I did because ya’ll two seem to always be commenting on opposite views of this every year, and I wish that a decent solution that would be satisfactory for most—even if it’s just letting any party with 3+ players to just be allowed to create a ToS instance of their own without using the queue. I hate that Tovi and others grow frustrated with an event they love. And, Sen, you seem to love ToS a ton too. It’s my favorite event—closest other is Classic Ashran—or, really as time has progressed, favorite anything in the game besides messing around making GIFs, which I don’t have the…oomph in recent times. I really wish Trial of Style was more often…and I wish those vexed by the occasional vote-abuse didn’t run into that and that maybe the devs could make some small alterations to lessen the frequency it happens. I hope everyone can at least enjoy it somewhat while it’s still running. 
Or you could make some friends and play with them.
ah, I’m sorry that’s happening, I hadn’t experienced any of that 
I guess, maybe try to ignore it and preserve some of the fun for yourself!
I got in to a trial of style yesterday and before i had even loaded in i had been vote kicked from the event and yes even in trial of style if you get vote kicked you still get the deserter debuff. for this kind of event they should have removed the vote kick option as it doesnt matter if someone is afking the event still takes roughly the same amount of time anyway.
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it happens, you still get currency, i still got another win, bunch of second and third place finishes on new chars, got all the mog stuff i wanted frankly