WSG seems to have fallen into a death spiral where the amount of premades queuing is just so high that it’s put pugs off queing, which has made the situation even worse for the remaining pugs to the point it’s easily possible to que 10 games in a row vs 10 man premades.
I really think this needs a fix, as a lot of players enjoy solo queing Bg’s or queing in small groups. I personally in retail played over 1000 WSG after vanilla, just because i found it really fun. I don’t play WSG anymore solo, even though i want to. As getting stomped into the ground by a 10man premade is not fun, and it just happens way to often now.
I feel like blizzards needs to do something about this, and in my opinion making it so you can only que with 5 players would be a big improvement for pugs, while still allowing people to que with friends, and get an advantage from doing that. I like to hope it’s kind of a happy medium.
We will have to see how AB has an effect. I believe 5-cap 3 minute AB wins are better honor for the tryhards, so many will migrate over there.
This could make WSG more PUG friendly, unfortunately the queues will skyrocket (at least for Horde), as AV will still be the better honor per hour for a PUG. Due to being more consistent, even if you lose AV you still get decent honor whereas WSG with 0 flags gives nothing.
It is unfortunate that most people don’t actually care about PvP, they just care about min-maxing their honor. Which is why I am enjoying pre-60 BGs right now, where nobody cares about honor.
Blame the system not the players.
If the system didn’t punish you this badly for low honor/hour people would be way more relaxed about it.
But if you want R11+ it’s basically a requirement to do good honor per hour.
Premade PvP is the only competitve PvP in Classic, and it is what will keep Classic alive in the long run, so you can’t change it like that. The issue right now is that there is so many people pushing ranks all at once, and the most efficient way to do so, is just to assemble a premade of whatever and whoever one can get. Unfortunately it sucks for solo queuers because even though you, as a pug, would face a garbo premade, the odds of winning are still lower.
I sort of believe it’s all just a phase right now, and at some point point we will see less but more hardcore premades, I guess. Hopefully AB will have a positive effect on this, even though WSG will always be the most popular BG for premades.
Remember, once BG/honor-weekend is out, every ranking premade will do whatever BG that gives the most honor, so say it’s AV-weekend then WSG and AB will pretty much become premade free playgrounds for solo queuers.
I wonder how big of an influence cross realm battlegrounds are to the death spiral you mentioned. Premades always existed in vanilla, but it was never such a large portion of the games.