'Epic BG' Premades

It all relies on manipulating the queue timing (I always argue it falls under the definition of ‘exploit’ since it’s literally exploiting a weakness in the system), with a pre-organized group of players larger than the 5-man limit, to bypass the 5-man premade limitation. (‘group’ refers to a group of people, not the ‘group’ as in a WoW group of 2-5 players.)

However, this trick is only possible when the player pool in the matchmaking on your faction is small. The larger the player pool of potentially matchmade players it is, the more you’d need to compensate by “throwing bodies” at the queue to increase chances of getting people that are part of the pre-organized group to get into the same BG to essentially achieve the result of having a premade larger than 5 people in the same BG. (Which isn’t likely to happen since you’d be organizing several times more than just 40 players and it’d be a lottery who would get into an epic BG with enough players from the pre-organized group of people.)

The quicker the queue is, the easier it is to pull off this trick as well. Because when the queue is fast, it means it’s emptying out the player pool in the matchmaking for your faction at that speed. If it’s slow, it builds up and creates priorities depending on time in queue and other variables.

We saw people methodically abuse this in Classic AV when it first came, so much that it even prompted a response by Blizzard. Although Blizzard kept it politically correct and vague and basically said it’s not the way it’s intended, and due to the amount of complaints it was stirring up in both NA and EU, it led to a change to the matchmaking for Classic AV.

What they did was make the queue artificially longer, to give it a chance to build up more players thus making this exploit more difficult to pull off. But they underestimated the level of organization behind the premades, and the problem didn’t really go away. So they did a few other things I don’t remember exactly, but they got rid of most of the premades after a couple of months (yes, it took them months to accomplish their goal).

Anyway, so the point is that the queues are artificially made small by the faction split. Used to include the region split too, but I don’t know if there’s any region priority left in the variables anymore, and the regions are definitely not split anymore.

So when one faction has many players, and the other has few players, it means it’ll always be easier to pull off on the side that has few players since odds are their player pool will much more often than not have so few players that it becomes highly likely that a pre-organized premade exploit is possible to pull off somewhat reliably.

This exploit used to be handled by addons, but Blizzard disabled the addons in the API. First time they disabled an addon for it was in MoP iirc, but addons have popped up since then that tried to accomplish somewhat the same things and they’ve been disabled one after another each time since then.

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Not true. Because horde got some leaders that do the same, and they got highter player pool than alliance.

Are you the guy that gets every buff possible and send godly bolts?

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Are they from EU-English? Because if they aren’t, then it likely means there are still regional priorities involved in the matchmaking, even though the regional split is gone.
The point remains the same, the player pools are artificially made smaller than they need to be. If there’d be no faction split, and no regional priorities in the matchmaking, it’d make it that much harder to pull off this exploit.
However, a pre-organized group of players larger than the limit ending up on both sides in an epic BG might not be any better, although I’m not sure it’s possible to motivate players to lose intentionally.

Epic bgs doesn’t got the same regional priorities than normal Bgs.

That doesn’t answer my question.

Yes, they play in english realms.

Haha yeah that is me, usually on the Alliance side though for faster queues!

What time of day/night? In CET (Central European Time, it’s the same time zone as the realms).

Alright, despite an almost immediate reply to what you wrote, you have yet to answer this question. So I’ll explain why it matters:
Depending on the time of day, the player pool becomes smaller or larger. At peak hours, obviously the player pool becomes larger. In the middle of the night all the way to the middle of the day when most people are asleep or are doing things IRL, obviously the player pool becomes smaller.
That’s why it matters when you’ve seen these alleged English premades larger than the 5-man limit, assuming they truly are such premades. Not everyone is good at judging what is and what isn’t a premade larger than the limit after all.

Telltale signs of a premade larger than the limit is that the vast majority of the team got full gear, and their movements are abnormally coordinated like “special forces units” as a descriptive metaphor, and they can usually wipe out numbers of enemies more than twice their size as a “unit”. They also react extremely fast to ninja caps with a full “unit”, even though it’s normally a very unpopular choice to make when in a random team instead of one of these “exploit” teams.
Simply put, it’s like comparing LFR to a Mythic-raiding guild.

I don’t and will never support boosting in PvP, but premades in Epic Battlegrounds are almost a necessity on the Alliance these days. Winning a single Epic Battleground as Alliance in a random group feels like winning a lottery at this point. Even I will join any premade that’ll have me if I ever get the chance, because at one point losing so much crosses the tipping point. I understand that you can’t win every battleground, and that’s fine. But winning just ONE Epic Battleground right now is an outright miracle from my experience…

@Kotarnus I suspect that this won’t remain the case for long as cross-faction gameplay comes into the game; Many players are going to be shifting to Alliance.

Regardless, there is at least a chance to win when it’s a complete random v random team, but it is essentially impossible to win against any sort of premade. Furthermore, losing a game against a random team vs a premade is just a different sort of experience. You can lose a game but still some-what enjoy it, but there is no enjoyment to be found when dealing with a 40 man, organized group on comms.

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Another way to counter the exploit premades in the design is to put in a hidden MMR in the matchmaking for unrated BGs. It’d eventually lead to an MMR where a premade can only face other premades, or be forced to wait for a really long time for the matchmaking parameters to expand the range of rating to include the players who don’t sit and farm with an exploit premade all the time.

It’s because the rated matchmaking in WoW first begins searching for players close to your team’s MMR, which is the combined average MMR of all the players in your team. So with time, if it can’t find a match quickly, it starts to expand that parameter to include players further away from your team’s MMR. For example, let’s say it starts by trying to match you with players that got ±50 rating of your team’s MMR, but it can’t find any within the first 5 minutes so then it starts to include ±100 rating, so on and so forth.

It’d still be possible to “game the system” by losing MMR intentionally like that, but for one thing they’d have to realise there’d be a hidden MMR in unrated, and they’d have to keep their players motivated enough to do it despite the extra hurdles they’d need to overcome.

Will there be cross-faction for the automatic queues? Also, even if there will be, it doesn’t make it impossible for those exploit premades to continue. It just means they wouldn’t be able to control what side their players ends up at.

I understand. I don’t know how this issue can be solved, bit I do agree that neither side should be utterly stomped. But right now the overall experience in Epic Battlegrounds for the Alliance is utterly miserable. Something has to change, because right now this does nothing but create further incentive to play in organised communities and premades.

It’s gotten to the point where even getting my first Epic Battlegrounds win for the day for the bonus rewards is a challenge.

I was only regarding to general random BG faction balance. The point was made that epic BG’s currently favor Horde when premades don’t exist; I believe that the Horde favor will shift with 9.2.5.

The fact that those premades won’t be able to control which side their players ends up at should scare you, if you’re saying there’ll be cross-faction matchmaking for automatic queues such as unrated BGs.

Because if those premades do continue, they’ll either need to organize twice as many players to wintrade, or they’ll tell the side with fewer of their premade on it to lose intentionally.

Yeah, that’s definitely a problem for the future. I don’t believe there’s cross-faction BGs coming with 9.2.5 though? Can see it happening not long after though, for sure.

One of these leaders play in evening and night. Don’t know the exact time they start, but they can be found during the evening.

I have no idea, that’s what I’m asking you. xD

Nah, currently the only areas being affected are raids, dungeons and rated PvP. The shift in balance that I expressed isn’t due to cross-faction gameplay, it’s just due to more Horde playing Alliance now that they have the option.