Old battlegroups compared to now

[Bewarê-frostmane]

@Mystiiqo-drakthul

Knowing those people who defeat you every single BG hardly help you enjoy a game.

@Bewarê-frostmane

The root of the problem with your perspective is that you don’t even consider the fact that a game can actually be designed to not be for everyone. That a game can actually keep content away from you because it requires commitment and engaging socially in order to accomplish it.
You just want it to be easier for you and more accessible to you without the need to do all those things, and without caring at all about the consequences. That’s what’s called ‘catering to casuals’.
You’ve got retail for that, and many other games. Retail is a game designed to make the player feel empowered with minimal effort, and requires very little time to accomplish most things.

@Mystiiqo-drakthul

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

@Bewarê-frostmane

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.

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:

@Bewarê-frostmane

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.

^ 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.)