To set things straight, premades bypassing the 5-man limit have been a thing since the 5-man limit was first implemented. There’s the good ol’ queue timing exploit (exploit means to exploit something for personal gain, it’s not limited to bugs which some players seem to believe, and in this case it’s exploiting a weakness in the design), and there have been more addons than you’d think throughout the years that have served to synchronize queue timings and other ways to make sure a premade larger than the 5-man limit have ended up in the same, and Blizzard have eventually disabled each and every such addon in the API each time they have popped up in different iterations.
But the way to identify such exploiters from the normally & randomly matchmade players in unrated BGs, is pretty simple yet I haven’t seen anyone suggest such a way yet.
Simply put, Blizzard just needs to track the speeds at which players obtain rewards and HKs from unrated BGs while queuing. That’ll separate the “normal” speeds which the VAST majority of players gets their HKs and honor at, from the “exploit premades” so to speak.
Because the “exploit premades” will ALWAYS have abnormal results in either honor per hour or HKs, although I doubt people are doing it purely for HKs anymore (they used to though, it was actually a thing to waste time in the same 40-man BG with the “exploit premades” letting the opponents capture stuff that regenerated resources while they kept GY farming players at the starting points and new people kept joining the BG as most people just left the BG soon after joining).
Summary:
They just need to track abnormal acquisition speeds during queue sessions. The “exploit premades” will always come out on top with abnormal results. It’s something Blizzard can even create a bot for, to flag such players for them. It’s extremely easy to streamline that process for them, and it cleans up the unrated BG environment once and for all.
It just depends on setting the parameters properly, and then a little bit of manual investigation to confirm, and et voilà. Problem solved.
Well, that depends a bit. People have equal opportunity to communicate once having been matched into a BG. But what separates an “exploit premade” from a randomly matchmade team, is the vetting. An “exploit premade” can vet the players involved. They can put ilvl requirements. Control the setup. A randomly matchmade team can do none of that.
That’s what gives an unfair advantage. And the way for Blizzard to identify them in an easy way that they can create a bot to automatically track for them, is to keep track of those acquisition speeds. Because people do those “exploit premades” to speed up that process to absurd levels, so using that same motivation to identify & punish them in the automatic fashion which Blizzard loves since it doesn’t cost them money to pay for extra manual labor, it solves the problem once and for all.
I give it around 15 minutes till some random Russian with wacky English tries to explain why there isn’t anything wrong about this.
“Yes, que friends ok premade you win 50-50”
Back to the topic, I’m not sure if queue sniping is described as an exploit in the rules or not, but it should be. It’s incredible that people strive for balanced gameplay unless they’re on the winning side, suddenly, it doesn’t matter that much. Random battlegrounds should be casual fun as it’s often comparable to other casual activities such as heroic dungeon.
Also on a side note, equalize gear in random battlegrounds, new player experience is horrid. Banish those who think there should be gear progression in PvP in a casual setting.
Exploiting a weakness in the design for unfair advantage over others is specified in the rules.
That as well. It’s dysfunctional for an online game service to provide this kind of gameplay experience in PvP. Any other game and it would have failed years ago. PvE is the only reason this game still exists.
From a rated player’s perspective, gear progression per se isn’t bad. It’s just way too much these days. Ranks on gear shouldn’t be a thing in PvP. But honor & conquest gear existing has worked for a very long time, until they started trying to reinvent the wheel.
Also, Legion templates didn’t have equalized gear. It just reduced the difference between ilvls by a factor of 10, but that didn’t affect damage from artifact weapons nor the levels on the artifact weapons and the proc which gave a ton of your main stat around 1 time per minute, which increased with the artifact weapon level.
Just mentioning it inb4 someone would bring up the templates.
This is a good thread and many to come like this one. Looking at the recent changes it might be plausible that a huge wave of complaints might cause a reaction on Blizzard’s end.
Gearing system I mentioned little bit derails the topic, but I agree on what you’ve said.
At the start of Classic BGs a couple of years ago, these “exploit premades” were so common that there were tons of complaints in every region about it.
Blizzard did a few changes several weeks apart by creating redundancies in the matchmaking to try and prevent it, but it was woefully ineffective. It took them 2 months of nonstop complaints with thousands of people reading the threads and hundreds of comments, before Blizzard even talked about it. Which was also when they put in more robust changes to the matchmaking that made it harder for people to do it, although still not impossible. But it drove away most of those “exploit premades”.
That was the one and only time I saw Blizzard ever having talked about it, despite these “exploit premades” having been a thing since Burning Crusade. And they basically just called it “unfortunate” when referring to what they were doing, as in that it’s unfortunate people were doing that stuff. It was extremely vague and politically correct.
Ah I see, I didn’t know about the Classic stuff. I wasn’t interested in that version of the game. Most likely they didn’t want to pick side without careful consideration and wanted to sweep it under the rug. At least that’s what I assume.
We should just keep insisting on this one and hope for the best.
Peoples queued as 5 men parties and have voice coordination leader, what’s wrong? I don’t protecting anyone but your words are joke. Have you ever heard about socialization or real voice communication with your friends?
Their luck is que pop on the same Ebg instance and you can going just around this.
Does not always have to be a pre made group either.
If you’re the BG leader, mark yourself with star or the orange cookie and use /rw to issue command to follow and most people will run with you like a flock of loyal sheep, ready to kill what gets in your way. I’d also wager this works better as a DK, since you just grab a kill target into your flock.
Oh look, disinformation. I say Disinformation, because it’s an attempt to intentionally change the narrative to something false. Misinformation is just when a person is unintentionally wrong and spreading it around.
In other words, you’re disgusting.
I never said it always is. Doesn’t mean it never is though.
Of course, that’s always possible. It doesn’t always have a 100% success rate in getting strangers you’ve just been matched up with to follow, but that’s going off on a tangent.
What makes it an exploit, is this part as specified earlier:
^ That’s what makes it into an exploit, because doing so bypasses the limit of max 5 people to pre-organize together, in order to gain a literal unfair advantage, by exploiting a weakness in the design of the matchmaking mechanisms.
As per the design of the game, you are only able to pre-organize as a 5-man group. Not as several groups using the queue timing exploit or other shenanigans to get into the same BG instance, which de facto turns you into a premade larger than the design allows.
That’s just how it is. Deal with it or not, but you’re disgusting if you’ve ever done the exploits yourself.
It’s just an example I’ve seen alliance employ in AV for example.
It’s much easier to see clear signs of coordination in small BGs, though that can in some cases also just be attentive and good random players actually working together.
Honestly, it’s something that shouldn’t even need to be discussed. You’d imagine Blizzard, after having put in the limit of max 5 people to prevent the full premades back from the days of Vanilla to be running around in every expansion, would also deal with the people bypassing that designed limit to premade sizes via exploits using weaknesses in hidden matchmaking mechanisms.
But instead, all they have ever done is eventually disable the addons that would turn the process automatic, in the API. That, and what they did at the start of Classic because then it truly became widespread across both US and EU as a whole to be using that exploit in AV.
Other than that, it has been an issue completely ignored. But that’s why I made this thread, to suggest a very simple and automatic way to deal with those “exploit premades”. Because they are doing it for that speed in rewards since truly randomly matchmade teams average out at a much slower acquisition speed, so it’s a simple way to target them and scare people from doing it ever again.
In other words, those “exploit premades” dominate inside BGs A LOT more often than the regular random BGs. So creating a bot to flag players that are part of BGs that dominates much more often than the average, would sniff them out very effectively. (By “random BGs” I also include the 40-man BGs in that, even though Blizzard arbitrarily calls them epic for some reason.)