I just started back up with WoW and have been exclusively playing WoW Classic. Back in the day, I played Vanilla through Cataclysm and BGs were one of my favorite parts of the game. I’ve yet to level a character beyond 18, but I’ve participated in WSG on both Horde and Alliance. This has led me to have a few questions for the WoW Classic community:
I’ve had relatively limited exposure, but I’ve yet to participate in a match where I’ve been on the winning side. Is this just due to premades? I find it hard to believe that my teams have just happened to lose every time.
Are twinks as prevalent in 20+ BGs as they are in 10-19 WSG? Frankly, they make BGs less fun for those of us who are actually leveling and not focusing so much on gear.
If the above questions are correct, is it even worth PvPing in BGs without a premade or being highly geared?
Classic WoW is a min/max culture. I never been into twinking but from what I’ve read from guildmates that do, not only are low level BG’s going to be very twink heavy but those twinks are also often in the absolute best in slot possible gear in every slot (meaning those fishing hats, stranglethorn arena trinket, +100 hp librams on gear, best possible enchant on weapons, etc). At least every guildmate I know who twinks is in bis gear. I helped one run deadmines like 10 times in a row for the van cleef chestpiece
At max level, BG’s are about 90% premades, especially on tues-saturday. Sunday and monday that number may drop down a little. These premades care about one thing and one thing only: honor per hour. Many (not all, but many) premades will essentially win trade vs each other by giving up against ones they know they cannot beat so they can quickly move on to PuGs to farm
As more and more people felt they had to join premades in order to compete with their server for standing/ranks, the pressure to join premades increased. Hence the amount of premades increased
I’m warning you as someone who essentially wasted his time leveling to 60 with the goal of doing solo BG’s at 60 that it wasn’t worth it. And pre-60 BG’s probably aren’t worth it unless you are into twinking
For your first point, yes premades stomping pugs is a major issue right now. If you’re pugging be prepared to lose many games before you actually get matched against another pug and can have a fun game.
Basically what plops said is true, and since I have now the more rare perspective of someone who has a Rogue on both sides I’ll say that the following is partly true for the horde and less true to a lesser degree on alliance.
Plopss is critical of the PVP because he like me plays the battlegrounds solo. I have fought along side him and against him and he’s the kinda player you actually want on your team from my experience both with and against him.
For the horde it’s really bad on Tuesday Wed and whatever the BG weekend is.
For the alliance it’s similar just way less bad because there are so many more horde players who solo que or que in small groups.
Alliance has small groups too, but a much higher frequency of premade play because alliance are just as ZugZug in gross as horde, just that there are way more horde that do battlegrounds.
Both sides are equally good or bad, you’re going to get out team mates who blow your mind with epic play, and team mates who blow your mind with the worst play imaginable.
It’s possible blizzard is using a match making system, this game does use the retail system, so they could inject that into the BG system looking at your win rate and whatnot and fix the match by placing you in all your epics with some super under geared scrubs who are effectively naked just to sell the game. (They actually do this in other blizzard and Activision games) so it may happen here too, but it’s not possible to prove.
Regardless of the situation, it can be very fun but also kinda ridiculous at times.
They seem to remember vanilla, where raiding was really hard, so they are queuing up in green gear for battlegrounds.
Raiding is far, far easier in classic than it was in vanilla and players are much better off spending a couple of weeks in raids and acquiring epics, than spending two months in battlegrounds to acquire blue gear.
Good point, I only know horde perspective. It might be different for alliance, although I have seen other people post on alliance saying they are getting lots and lots of premades when they solo queue. But there are definitely more horde players than alliance that BG
To argue the flip side of the coin, supposedly queueing at really off hours such as early morning reduces your chances of seeing 6-8 premades in a row like I get when I queue between noon to midnight (any time in those hours I tend to get usually at least 6 premades in a row for every 1 PuG). So if you are able to schedule your play time for early morning you can get more PuGs
I know I sound like a broken record, but just trying to save people some grief. I used to pretend it wasn’t that bad, but just couldn’t keep lying to myself
Do they? There was none in Vanilla and they’ve been pretty adamant about not changing that. I’d have to see some pretty definitive proof that there was any at all.
If there is matchmaking it’s so minimal that it’s essentially nonexistent.
Matchmaking, in the traditional sense, compiles match history into a rating that is used in matching players of similar rating. It is not the basic ground rules for joining games.
An example of this is the Elo system that is used in many games:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system
WoW uses a similar system for arena games and Retail has a type of ranking and matchmaking system in-place for battlegrounds.
/shrug match making can exist without rankings. Ranking is just a common metric used in modern games. But yeah match making often includes other parameters as well, for example overwatch’s match making system does include people joining as a group.
