Dont worry, my future is golden in wow anyway, Those people quitting the game sooner or later. I wont go past TBC and if there will be WoTLK expansion that will suck up the least player base i dont really like. so i can just enjoy my classic and tbc, and even if they stop to TBC these kind of players wont last a year
This can be partly blamed on xrealm anonymity.
For example, let’s say the Classic servers would’ve been set to Vanilla standards in population. Then with no xrealm matchmaking for BGs. You’d recognize the opponents more and more, the more you play on your server.
You’d then learn to recognize the “good premades” from the bad ones, based on nothing but the names of the players (the human brain can vaguely recall around 3k names, possibly more, while 150 is the average of the ones you can remember well).
The more you meet someone (even if it’s a visual representation in an MMO), the more familiarity grows. (read about the mere-exposure principle for this one)
Which means you can remember even enemy players as long as you get repeated exposure, either with strong impressions or repeated in a short amount of time enough times for it to stick. You can even grow rivalries.
But in this flood of xrealm anonymity without even so much as a battlegroup to limit the numbers, the names are endless. Most of the names you see in xrealm, are names you’ll never remember, and you won’t even feel inclined to want to remember them. It’s like that in retail too.
So without xrealm matchmaking, and with a more limited number on realm population to mimic vanilla’s 2-4k population caps, you’d be exposed to fewer names and more often to the same names amongst people that queues up repetitively for BGs.
This is how the vanilla PvP stories were created, the underlying reasons for them.
So with today’s xrealm anonymity (and we all know what anonymity does to human behavior, research done on facebook and other social media has shown that time and time again), it means that we’re less inclined to even resist a force we perceive as annoying to face, and we get pushed into choosing the path of least resistance because we’re given NO REASON in the design to choose the more challenging one.
Without xrealm, you’d get some premades wanting to “prove themselves” by putting up a fight vs. a known premade of the enemy faction, while others would queue dodge by using stuff like realm discords (queue dodging was a thing in vanilla too, and also on pservers from what I’ve heard).
We’re just not given any reason to care about dominance in the design as it is now. To become the king of the hill. It’s too anonymous for that.
It’s also part of why solo players don’t even want to try and beat a premade. Because a premade is just a faceless crowd of nobodies we’re given no reason to remember or even want to compete against. There’s no chance for rivalries to grow.
Whether it’s a teammate or an enemy, as long as they don’t write anything or behave odd, then it’s practically no different than an NPC that you’re playing with or against. It’s the social element that makes the difference.
Tbh, if the people constantly complaining and whining about getting rolled by premades spent half as much time trying to find people to queue with in-game as they do complaining on the forums for daddy Blizzard to break the pvp system for them, they’d have their premade vs. premade games already as BGs would be 100% premades with no solo queuers.
The way I see it, getting rolled by players who are superior in social skills, in game skills, farming skills, and so on is an incentive to get better at finding people to queue with, work as a team, farm consumables and play your class.
This is the same as whiping for days on end for stupid PUG raids and dungeons, they create incentives to get some friends and get in a guild to do less bad raids.
“Just wait for Arena the premaders will be at 1300 rating”
Maybe, but arena does at least require you team up with 1 - 4 other persons and most of you “I hatez the premades” people can’t even do that now.
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Have you ever actually read a single post by myself, Beware, Jagganath or Bodiesan?
I thought not, you wouldn’t be saying this utter rubbish if you had.
You have tought deeply about this and this is pretty much true but not being only explanation for it as if everyone would be doing bgs to improve their own personal pvp skills and doing their best or close to it every bg they would fight premades just for the challenge
Seems you didn’t really understand what I wrote.
What this means is that people en masse are trapped in the most self-serving mindset, because the social design isn’t providing the underlying reasons to immerse yourself in the BGs themselves as a social space.
These are unconscious mechanisms taking place, and most people aren’t even aware of it.
Another way to put it is that the World of Warcraft isn’t creating a world within the game for BGs. It’s kept shallow, as just a system. It’s not as socially immersive as it can be.
The more anonymous it becomes, the more egocentric we act.
Couldn’t quote it normally anymore for some reason. Guess the thread is too old.
I’m already R14, retired as bracket leader and produced a premade that created 10 or so R14s so I don’t have a dog in this game anymore, but the main issue is that and I know cause-effect is hard:
The current pvp system is based on earning the most honor in your faction to get max RP. To accomplish this we:
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Aim to stack brackets, this means that we aim to be within 1k honor of each other as this maximizes RP within a bracket and between brackets.
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Pool Boost, this means putting more players into each pool to create more spots in each bracket, thus allowing more people to get more RP and thus higher ranks.
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Aim to keep caps reasonable so people do not have to farm 18 hours a day/7 days a week.
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Premade in order to make sure that random solo queuers can’t break the brackets thus forcing players to play an unhealthy amount as 50 - 80 hours a week is plenty.
This means that the main reasons to premade is:
A) Earn more honor in a shorter time /played in order to maintain your health, social life and sanity.
B) Earn enough honor that solo players cannot outfarm you and mess up the brackets.
If you split the premades from the yolo-solo players, then premade and solo honor will slowly normalize, meaning premaders lose the arbitrage advantage, currently premades earn more honor due to rolling solo players because of mixed queues. If the queues were split, then the bottom of the premade queue earns less than the top of the solo queue.
Do you know which queue works for botters and afkers? The solo queue, because nobody accepts leechers in premades. If solo becomes the meta, the law of large numbers kicks in, and whoever lucks out with RNG that week ranks up. This makes ranking much more of a pain for everyone, it means 1 solo-yolo breaker each week messes it up for everyone, and it means that a group-based game (MMORPG) becomes a solo-based game. It discourages developing a social circle, playing with others and succeeding as a team.
Personally, my main issue with this as a veteran of EQ, Lineage, SWG, WoW and SW:TOR is that a CORE aspect of MMORPG game design is the need to make friends, build teams, work together and create guilds. If I can log in, hit “join battle” and get some of the best gear in the game, without ever needing to deal with other players, it’s not an MMORPG. Any game designer aiming to design an MMORPG need to heed Raph Koster’s teachings about interdependence between players in order to make his virtual world work, which is why retail is not an MMORPG but a MOBA. However some of us saw this coming when WoW started losing subs to guild wars back in the day, it’s not that hard.
To end this rant, I wish it was financially acceptable for companies to say “We don’t want the most subs/sales, we want the most dedicated subs/sales” this would allow companies to create games that do not cater to everyone but to a select group of players who are more loyal and willing to pay more.
This is why I think companies might be able to land themselves a nice niche by being more excluding, more discerning with their audience and sticking with their design.
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ye sorry it was read just at the start, “This can be partly blamed on xrealm anonymity”.
Sorry i had to read the post again and focusing it and this seems very wise and deep thinking and can’t agree you more, tho why we have xrealm bgs i think the reason is that blizzard made it because the up coming huge flood of people and later on when tbc relased to keep BG’s alive, even this werent good idea to pick imo and i am also with the idea of having realm only bgs, would be awsome.
There we have it.
You can bet your last dollar that those boasting on this thread about gerrymandering PVP ranking, tantamount to cheating, by deliberately forcing solo players to work much harder than them, while they steamroll pugs in their premades, have NEVER achieved anything of note in an arena with two equally matched teams and when TBC is released not a single one of these thieves will be anywhere near the top tier elite.
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Noone in their right mind as ever claimed getting to a high rank in Classic is about skill.
Literally noone.
We know it’s time over skill. What’s your point?
Yeah yeah, that’s convenient. Dig a bit deeper in their mind and you will find out they actually truly believe they might be skilled players after all this time spent rolling on others (at least they might hope they are).
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On countless other threads solo PVPers have also complained about the constant harrassment they get from players who are involved in the ranking cartel. This blatant cheating trickles outside of PVP and is ruining the game experience for many players.
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If you looked at my gear you’d see that I am R13 on this char.
We know it isn’t skill.
I’m not a fan of bracket stacking.
I’ve never claimed that bracket stacking is a good thing, so I’ll just do a disclaimer here and hope you didn’t include me in this, and link you this:
Just sayin’.
I’m actually a solo pvper, I’ve done a total of 15 hours of premades in Classic as a whole thus far. Got rank 11, then went back to PvE.
But premades are still the better option compared to the asocial toxic pile of garbage called xrealm solo queue. They should just remove solo queue to increase the amount of ppl doing premades, albeit many of them would be bad ones.
And if you check my BG achievements in refail, you’ll see I’m no stranger to solo queuing there either.
Let’s be honest, arena was never really about “skill” either, it was all about cheesy comps, RMP, WAR+druid etc, because WoW has never been a game about pvp skill. If it was, you’d only face mirror comps, which is what “premades should fight premades” is all about, forcing the people currently facing them to only face mirror comps, while they themselves face non-mirror comps.
WoW for as long as I’ve played it has never really been about skill, it’s about who can cheese mechanics, knows more about the game and has good RNG. Is reaction times and class knowledge a factor, sure, but luck is also a huge one. The skillherald proc at the right time in TBC S1/S2 is the main one in 2s.
Let me put it to you like this, there is a reason why every single wow iteration has whiners on these boards complaining about pvp, and why every iteration of them complains that “X takes 0 skill”
I once joined a premade to see how they play and what happened was, we faced an enemy premade, they scored one point and everyone gave up and went to farm graveyard.
This is the mentality of players that play premades, they want easy wins, nothing else.
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Whiiich can also be traced back to xrealm. Xrealm provides a more regular supply of new BGs 24/7, so the impact of falling behind on the honor per hour is greater and thus it naturally emphasizes the need to maximize that honor grind in whatever way possible.
The larger realms also naturally creates more competition in the ladders if you play in an active faction on that realm.
At the same time you’re made to not care at all about who you’re facing and you develop no rivalries in particular, as explained here:
The premade cartels currently dominate WSG and AB and stomping pugs ensures they remain in control of that cartel. From what I gather every active realm currently has organized PVP cartels. A cartel has an unfair advantage and is anti-competitive for good reason. Posters on this thread have also publicly stated that PVP cartels deliberately target individual solo players to put them at a disadvantage.
It wasn’t aimed at anyone personally just the general attitude on this thread that cheating is acceptable, a cartel is cheating. The original classic was a totally different experience. Ignoring the rose-tinted specs, the cartels did not exist in the numbers they do today. The PVP ranking system was not artificially inflated to the extent it is today. The cartel mafia is also harassing solo players outside of PVP to ensure they keep control of the PVP market. If a solo player puts in more hours than a player in a premade, then that solo player should be equally rewarded for it, no favours from Blizzard, just an equal right to the spoils of war.
The PVP cartel mafia contradict themselves as well, they state they are entitled to better reward (ranking and gear) because they are more organized but then admit it is not down to “skill” and “hours” anyway but solely down to the manner in which their cartel control the PVP market. If it is not down to skill and hours put in, what makes them more entitled to a better reward. What have they done to earn it other than organizing a realm cartel whose main goal is to control the ranking system?
Well, I don’t think it’s cheating to organize placements amongst the top earners, but flaming others for “breaking brackets” outside of the organized assignments I’d argue falls under harassment, and yes that is indeed against the rules.
No. Nobody is entitled to win. A ladder is a ladder, people will be excluded. Obviously a decent premade will have a better shot at raking in more from each BG than a solo queuer. It’s as Miylee put it, there’s an “equal opportunity” in place already. Everyone has an equal opportunity to group up.
Artificial limitations leads to exploits NOT offering that equal opportunity anymore. It’s what happened to refail for a long time, and it’s what’s already happening sometimes in AV.
It’d also lead to bots ranking much higher and faster.
Don’t need any of that garbage just because the loner casual gamers with no time to play the game feels like they should earn more epics for the little effort they put into the game. It’s thinking like that which led to LFR and world quests and titanforging and so on.
Oh hell yeah, there are 2 reasons why we premade:
A) To be able to play with people who aren’t bad at the game and suck in social skills, aka solo players.
B) To make sure that no solo players can break brackets… ever. I mean every solo-yolo player who broke brackets had to transfer servers, got banned or quit the game.
The “cartels” or “mafia” as you refer to them are the majority of the community on every server who wants to rank without sacrificing their life in order to rank up so they make the best of a horrible system. The main drivers of high brackets are solo queuers, if there were no solo queuers every server would have BR1 set at 250K and people could cap by Friday morning. But, because there are always solo queuing afker/bots breaking brackets, brackets had to be 800K+ just to minimize the odds of someone breaking.
Solo queuing is what makes the ranking torture and no-lifing, not premading.