Old battlegroups compared to now

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
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https://web.archive.org/web/20070206055244/http://www.wow-europe.com/en/info/basics/battlegroups.html
Is a list of the battlegroups from way back when.
There are 43 realms up now in classic, with over 3 times the maximum population capacity compared to back then.
(5 of those realms being Russian btw, since they’re now only possible to be enemies in BGs so they deserve a special mention here.)

Keep in mind that so many servers with over 3 times the population caps, you’re looking at more than 43k players when only assuming 1k characters per realm, all thrown into the same matchmaking mix (except for the case with the Russian realms, which is limited to enemies only.)
The population caps are over 10k right now, so assuming the average is at 5k, that’s 215,000 players. That you can be matched with and against.
It’s pure insanity.

When battlegroups were first introduced, it immediately had a chilling effect on the social awareness due to all the new names you never recognized and wouldn’t remember when seeing it again.
You hear much more about “epic pvp stories” from vanilla about a rival or a pal you formed some form of teamwork with back then, after having met them so often in the same BGs in a short amount of time. Before battlegroups became a thing, that is. (Google the mere-exposure effect and proximity principle to see the reasons for this, as well as look up what you can about Dunbar’s Layers.)

You barely hear anything at all, if you even hear anything in the first place, about such stories AFTER the end of vanilla was coming and xrealm matchmaking was implemented. You wouldn’t hear about it again until the arenas came in Burning Crusade, and the recurring encounters on specific rating ranges started shaping into rivalries and familiarity, due to the few people in those ranges (more common on the really high ratings back then).
People made sure to remember the names of certain arena teams when that occurred in Burning Crusade.

Now compare that to the classic BG experience.

It’s expedited, and anonymous if you’re not in a premade. Because there are hundreds, even thousands of names you encounter between most recurring encounters like this.

You do remember certain people that stands out on your server if you’re not on a “mega-populated” server at least. But that’s because the mechanisms of social awareness are allowed to form now that the layers are gone, out in the world.
It’s not allowed room in the xrealm matchmaking though.

So you’ll get rewards, but it’ll end up as an extrinsic reward-kind of feeling. It’s shallow, and you’ll forget about the feeling pretty fast.

This is not the formula that creates “epic pvp stories” like those of the past.

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I think it was cutting costs. To create battlegroups, they’d need to check the population balance, and they’d have a headache of merging the battlegroups if some realms become low. To make all the EU servers into one battlegroup is the cheapest, one-button solution.

But yea it’s a shame.

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Honestly, it doesn’t even matter why.
Blizzard just doesn’t have a soul anymore.

And then you have the sheep so focused on convenience that they don’t even care about the longterm effects on the game itself.

The way it is now is a retail formula. It won’t take long until people simply choose not to talk anymore, and then you’ll get a dungeon finder-esque experience in BGs like in retail. (I’d say it’d become like random BGs in retail, but who even does those anymore…)

There’ll be yelling. There’ll always be yelling. But the way to counter social toxicity is by making it into a more wholesome social design. People tolerate more when they aren’t complete strangers, even something as small as simply seeing a player in a major city from time to time, or just seeing their name on your team in BGs occasionally and it’s actually possible to remember it because it isn’t being filtered out with all the junk names your brain can’t remember anyway due to limited mental resources, can impact a person’s subconscious willingness to ASK instead of yell. Due to the forming of social awareness.
It’d effectively reduce the amount of “toxic behavior” if the social design would be done better.

You can find examples of that in this report:
https://www.projecthorseshoe.com/reports/featured/ph18r8.htm

The more anonymous it becomes, the more egocentric we act.

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This is from TBC btw. It says bgs and arenas.

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Battlegroups (and this version of AV, as well as xrealm matchmaking together with the battlegroups) were introduced just a few months before the burning crusade prepatch came, near the end of vanilla.

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Were there arenas in the prepatch? I dont remember

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No, the first arena season came in burning crusade with people on lvl 70.

There’s a timeline wiki for this stuff if you wanna check.

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Ah so Cyclone was the battlegrp i was in.
Anybody who was ally in cyclone battlegrp here that can tell if allies sucked in vanilla? They sure did in tbc at least.

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Ally suck in all expansion, but specifically in classic :rofl:

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Btw to anyone thinking the vanilla wiki shows the battlegroups from back then, you can see how they looked VERY different in the web archive link from the official wow website back then.

https://vanilla-wow.fandom.com/wiki/Battlegroup

Compare that to the archived link up top.

And remember:

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I was against the Xrealm BGs.
The fact that vanilla was superior was due to the community mostly.
You knew who had the xx enchant ,who had the xx recipe ect
In pvp you knew who you fought against and made rivalries who even though you were against them ,there was a mutual respect among players , with others there was pure hate …
Those were the things that made the game on each server better… now it has become an anonymous field of grinding and farming honor…

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I completely agree with you. Even 15 years on I remember the names of the old high warlords and premade captains. That must say something.

Now with crossrealm you can play with 10 players from 10 realms all with the same name.

It’s the social aspects of the game that make the game. Remove these and the game is as empty and impersonal as retail.

I’d rather spend an hour forming a group for a dungeon or waiting for a BG to have this, it’s a price I pay gladly.

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I do remember people in vanilla queueing skirmishes at lvl 60(pre tbc). Season were later indeed, but arenas as far as i remember were available to que in cities from goblin near battlemasters, correct me if im wrong. There’s some footage over WM and youtube of pre-tbc arenas, with already talent changes ofc

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2004 gaming isn’t 2019 gaming and 2004 players are not 2019 players. Gaming as a whole changed too much, what you want is impossible today.

Just imagine no cross BGs. Faction who dominates a server and overall has better players will not only dominate WPvP but BGs. As a member of weaker faction you will be losing again, again and again. Knowing those people who defeat you every single BG hardly help you enjoy a game. You will probably switch factions or stop playing which will lead to more and more imbalanced server. Stronger faction will eventually stop playing because they will be waiting 2 hours in a queue for BG.

Battlegroups saved the situation back then, they didn’t destroy anything.

Cross BGs nowadays give chance to those weaker factions they will face weaker opponents from other servers.

Im sure you will find some like-minded people but its not majority.

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Seems you didn’t read it the first time, so I did you a favor and spared you from scrolling up to the original post.

Before you even write another ignorant propaganda post, read:

^ that link first. It’ll explain, in detail and from much more qualified sources than your limited mind, about exactly how it destroyed a lot of things. Then google the mere-exposure effect and proximity principle and think about how it can be applied to WoW.

It’s people like you who doesn’t even understand concepts like social engineering or social designs, nor what social psychology or sociology is even about.

I’m betting if I were to ask you “What are they?” you’d answer with something like: “… Beer? I want beer.”. (You’d actually probably try to ignore the question with an insult in return, but this example was more to illustrate a point in a roundabout way since saying it directly is something Blizzard tends to frown on.)

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I was writing from my personal point of view as a player. How I perceive the situation. Why are you so offensive?

Believe it or not, this game IS meant for masses. That´s how it is. Masses want to have fun, not another job in a form of Classic wow.

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This is surprising, so you didn’t go with the offensive route yourself, you took to the martyr route.
You still didn’t answer anything though, you’re actually trying to ignore the arguments made in an attempt to obfuscate.

Now once more, go back up, read it all, read the reference material, google those things, and stop writing such ignorant posts.

I don’t mind people arguing against the points made with their own arguments if they’ve got logical arguments to base it on, but when people don’t even read the arguments presented and only serve to derail something, then that deserves to be scorned. Because that’s just pure ignorance.

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Your original topic is about how anonymous BGs are, how “epic pvp stories” ended with Battlegroups. I really don’t see the contradiction you are looking for. That anonymity which came with Battlegroups (and rn crossBGs) ofc brings more toxic behaviour and less social interractions but on the other hand brings what I wrote. You wrote cons in OP, i brought pros. There is no contradiction. I never questioned those cons you mentioned. And for me personally those cons are not as important as not having hours of queue. I don’t try to make friends in game, I got plenty of them IRL. I just want to have fun, that fun I won’t find in a queue.

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The way you phrased it carries certain implications. You’re basically negating the existence of those cons by not even addressing them.

You also still haven’t read that source material to truly understand the wide range of those consequences and what it truly does to the psyche and perception of the social atmosphere.

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Man english is not my first language, don’t elaborate every word of mine :wink: and no, I really won’t read that material. I know the more anonymity people get the more toxic they behave, it’s nothing new.