Alliance have to premade in Alterac Valley or lose majority of their games
It’s a simple statement really and so far, it does hold some truth to it. I won’t go into racials, map layouts etc as that’s been discussed heavily in other threads. What I will focus on is the mentality of Alliance players vs Horde players.
With Alliance having instant queues, or close to it with the artificial queue that Blizzard set up, players are more prone to leech in the battleground while they are doing something else. If you play as a pug as Alliance, you can surely attest to it that by the time you reach the middle, you still have 10-15 players in the caves or nearby doing absolutely nothing of worth.
Some of these players have changed their tactics too and instead of camping in the caves, they will just run to Stonehearth Graveyard and afk there, and jump from time to time to not get the deserter debuff.
This is the reason why you Horde can camp Stonehearth Graveyard with 5-7 people despite Alliance outnumbering you because half of them standing there by the spirit resser and being afk.
And those who even try at the start are fully aware that they are outnumbered, and thus know that they will lose. But you know what? It doesn’t really matter as you can just queue instantly after this.
There’s also probably a major difference between those who are serious about pvp and those are serious about pve between the factions. Alliance have the advantage in competitive game play with Paladins outshining Shamans by a wide margin but Alterac Valley was never meant to be the competitive battleground, that was Warsong Gulch and Arathi Basins objective. I’d wager that a larger player base in Alliance only want to get their exalted and then never set their foot again in Alterac Valley, compared to the Horde that will probably still play despite being exalted.
Horde doesn’t have the same luxury with going inactive in battlegrounds. I’m sure that you guys have your fair share of afkers too, but having an hour long queue does promote incentive to actually play the game instead of leeching off others since you want to maximize your honor.
So what can be done about it then?
- You remove the battleground number and cause the premades to rush to Warsong Gulch. Horde can have their hour long queues with 99% win rate since Alliance pugs are riddled with afk ers, people who give up too fast and people who are just there for their reputation reward and nothing else. Those 1-hour long queue will extend to 2 hours and possibly even more as more and more Alliance will quit queuing up as no one is particularly interested in losing the vast majority of their games.
- You continue as it is. There’s certainly several standards of discord premades for Alliance sides and with me not being a high ranker but are in the middle, I would say an average game time is around 30 minutes with Alliance winning but Horde having gained close to maximum bonus honor. I’m sure that the higher premades are worse to face as they can end games in 7 minutes but how often do you face them?
- Blizzard either give more incentive to queue and play the battleground or penalize those that afk in even harsher ways. It’s sad that the vote kick function was removed due to players abusing it, but that function would have certainly remedied the amount of afkers.
Perhaps a middle ground is to remove the battleground number and put in the vote kick function again and increase the player amount that need to vote to 10. That way, you can’t premade more than with five other players and Alliance can also vote kick those that are a detriment to their team.
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It’s a vicious circle. The more premades there are, the more PUGs are filled with AFKers and low levels. The more PUGs are filled with trash the more rankers (even casuals) want to join premades.
The only way to stop this is to make premading impossible. Blizz tried and failed like usual so the circle continues and PUGs keep getting worse.
7 Likes
It’s interesting that any AV I’ve had a char in post change, the Alliance team hasn’t been a premade and has resulted in a Horde win. Of course it could well contain a number of 5 man groups and we are seeing a lot of that Horde side now. It’s been a real boost to the in-battle organisation/teamwork and we even had an ice lord summon last night which I haven’t seen in years.
30 mins a game is pretty spot on in my experience. There appears to be a chunk of bonus honour from getting a win over the 30 min mark. I don’t remember that being a thing before but maybe just didn’t notice.
We do get afkers although sometimes during the fight you see players being accused of afking in the cave when they’re actually dead and just resing there. I do wonder if any votekick system would be open to abuse by a premade in order to get the rest of their premade into a battle? The lengthy queue is more of an issue if you are questing etc when it pops then you have to choose what you want to do and get out of combat, knowing when it ends it’ll drop you back in Org which could be a long way away from whatever content you were doing.
So far, the changes appear to have been for the better. I’m glad we can now queue AV as a group but time will tell if it really causes an issue. Of course if players max their rep and stop playing AV then the changes will likely be blamed for it even if it isn’t the cause.
2 Likes
Alliance afk-ers or those who give up at the very beginning would use vote kick to remove players who want to actually play because that makes the game longer. So at the end those would be penalized who actually pvp.
Yeah.
When i played AV pve on my alt mage (52 lvl at time) month ago, there still was some decent aliance pugs, only 10ish afkers 2-3 botters and 2-3 harpie/quest guys including me 
So those 25 players realy put it up and often capped towers, mines, gy and even spawned those 3 npcs. Most of the pug games was “ok” 5/10. Few games i was getting 1000+ rep points per game and 2k +honor from liutenants and other npcs
That was month ago.
I tried few AVs again on my mage last night and it was just LoL.
Instead of 10ish there was like 15 afk ppl.
Yea I count them in cave only !!!
I guess there were some 5 more semi afkers, those went in base at very start.
Then there was 1-2 guys fishing, like 3-5 harpie farmers and some 10-15 brave souls that went straight into 100% insta death against 35 grouped hordes.
Anyway its getting worse and worse for pugs every day i think
1 Like
Wrong.
Premades are actually correcting failed game design:
- make sure that there are enough healers and tanks in the team
- minimize the number of afk-ers
- maximize the number of players who actually care
All of these should be granted by the system.
If they make premading completely impossible then alliance players will stop playing. You can’t expect people to play a game where they have less than 10% winning chance. It’s that simple.
I’ve seen it on pservers: AV was only playable on AV weekends, on the rest of the days you were just sitting in a queue for hours and when the game started it finished in less than 5 minutes because of not enough players.
Maybe on classic it would take couple of weeks or months until AV would get completely empty but it eventually would.
7 Likes
No
Remove 5 man groups. Remove numbers. Start perma banning ppl who are finding exploits for AV queue. Ban them or the game dies is simple as that.
Want premades, go bang your head against other premades in WSG.
You want easy ranking against ungeared ppl ? Fck off !
11 Likes
That’s exactly what horde does against pug. Premades are actually balancing the system.
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We don’t care that much about WSG. We just want to be able to pvp in AV without having to deal with the mess alliance premades leave behind.
Go play WSG and get gud or lose against horde. I really don’t care. Just leave AV.
What is your problem exactly?
What mess premades leave behind since the changes?
My problem is the new exploit. There will never be ppl taking seriously pugs if the players with decent gear either are running premades or quit AV. The situation will never fix unless given the chance.
I know what the problem is for you although. You probably have your classic char on some low pop server for easy ranking. And without AV and discord premades, you are screwed !!! Good luck making the cut into the one or two good WSG premades on your server.
Can’t wait for Blizzard to fix this AV exploit too and ruin your ranking.
Imagine you have 40 low level players and 40 high level players. Alliance have them separate and horde has mix. Because of alliance premades pugs have 0% winrate.
Really hope all of AV premades get banned for months. They ruin the game for horde and alliance and they know very well they are cheating. If you would want play premade you would play wsg agaist other premades but you dont. You want to have clear advatage because of exploit.
9 Likes
Now just remove premade from your own sentence and already got the answer:
There will never be ppl taking seriously pugs if the players with decent gear quit AV.
Alli pugs will never been taken seriously. If they make premading impossible there won’t be AV to play.
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Stop telling such crap really…they few days without Premades, they Alliance got better in AV.
What you doing with mass Premade is, that you focus all the afk/bot players to the rest of the matches. thats why we have it easy with the horde. Queue like everyone else is doing and the afk players will be split into more games what makes it more possible to vote them out of the AV.
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Here is root of all today problems, 90% of players who are serious about solo and pug pvp rolled horde because of broken racials.
Rest 10% of those ppl rolled alliance and now complain about unwinnable for alliance pug AV
Here is no solutions becides faction balancing by giving to alliance stronger than hordes racials to attract tired from queues pvpers to roll alliance.
Then they should make premade-only queues so (1) Ally premades would be forced to face equally organized Horde opponents and (2) Horde would have a chance to premade AV, too.
Sure 0% win went up to 10% until non-afkers realized it’s still not worth playing.
2 Likes
AV pugs are like LFR Onyxia without healers and tanks: makes no sense to play it. It’s failed game design.
Either people find a workaround or they quit playing.
You can live in denial but - like it or not - without alli premades or serious rework of the map and the whole queue system (which obviously never gonna happen) eventually there won’t be any AV to play.
2 Likes
Too long garbage post, title is enough
Yesterday I found one horde pug in wsg, won 3-0 easy
Then found 8 horde premades before I went to bed, lost 0-3
Hint hint
1 Like