Wasn’t talking to you. Don’t know why you think I was.
Ah I see my mistake. My point still stands though 
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Why would any alliance player who’s not a tryhard ranker would join a premade when alliance rush meta still works? It makes no sense.
You just join AV, rush to galv-towers-drek and alliance wins most of the times.
If you don’t have the time or the commitment to be in the top 1% premading before the horde meta changed was just not paying off for regular alliance players.
Even most horde posts from those days contradicts you, you know?
They wanted to turtle even if it lowered their honor / hour, because they wanted to pvp, wanted to win and hated that AV is about both team just passing each other and playing pve while everyone expected the never ending epic AV battles from vanilla times.
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Pretty sure I was posting about them pretty early. Don’t know what threads you’ve been looking at, since you’re not even quoting or linking them.
Not everyone posts on the forum. There has always, at most, been just a few people. NA posters number a lot more than EU posters.
Well because the rush meta stopped working rather quickly. After like 4-5 days Horde basically never rushed anymore (other than Russian Horde for whatever reason). In fact the Alliance pug winrate was pretty poor even on day 3 if I remember correctly.
Because the queue times went above 10 minutes at that point. Because it was a friday, and you should know what friday does to player counts for doing things other than raiding.
That doesn’t really explain the rise in queues though since you’d expect more Alliance players as well. Queues started rising because games started to last longer since (Horde especially) stopped rushing. If average gametime increases so will the queue time. Thing is that Horde as a whole would get higher HpH if they rushed every game even today since queue time is directly related to average game length. But that’s not going to happen since it’s a prisoner’s dillema.
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Sure we can set the time when the horde meta changed and alliance premades started to be popular more specific, so if you say it wasn’t weeks but days, I believe you.
However the question here was that if horde meta changed because of the alliance premades or alliance premades became popular because of the horde meta changed.
As soon as horde stopped rushing there was no choice for alliance pvpers than joining to a premade and it happened way before horde queue time became longer than 15 minutes.
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11th December was when AV came. (They copypasted the NA date instead of posting the EU date, because… you know… Blizzard.)
19th December. That isn’t really a sort of thread you make immediately either, but rather one that builds up from frustration over time.
See what I mean?
There are a lot of other threads like that from that time.
And that was already after the queue times had increased and Horde started doing the delay tactic because of it. The first two days was when the queue times were below 10 minutes.
Hey how u doing
That’s exactly what I was talking about: horde lost so much because the map favors the “both team rush” meta.
They did not complain about alliance premades are stomping them, they were complaining about how unfair the map is when both team rushes.
So horde changed the meta to turtle because they wanted better winrate not because of alliance premades.
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Oh, you want threads specifically mentioning premades? Hate to break it to you, but it took a little while until Horde players started noticing that premades were a thing. But ok, I’ll oblige.
These are threads people made after several days of observation and learning about the existence of premades to begin with. Which took some people a lot longer than others to find out about. Yourself as well is a good example of that.
These are not even counting the threads with people swearing their heads off that got deleted as well.
You are missing the point (again). People are always complaining about premades from day one.
But this doesn’t change the fact that the vast majority of alliance started to premade after horde changed to turtle meta, not before it.
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No, premades grew in popularity because it was an I-WIN button. The sheer glee of Alliance posters from back then kinda alludes to that attitude as well.
It had nothing to do with the delay tactic.
The delay tactic became a thing because of the increased queue time, that went above 10 minutes after day 2 of AV. And then it solidified on the Horde side, and evolved over time into what it is now.
And because of the way the premading worked, it required organized timed queues. Which meant nobody queued outside of the times they were told to, when part of premades. Which, as you can see in the links, very quickly grew into the problem of the solo queuers starting with just a few players on their side, when a premade didn’t get enough into the same AV.
This is a big reason why queue times rose. Because the randomly spread out “injections” into the matchmaking grew less and less common.
Yes, for the top 10% of the rankers, because 90% could not even get into one of those premades even if they wanted to.
However until alliance rush meta worked most people did not care about premades because they had a decent 60-70% winrate.
When this winrate dropped below 20% because of the new horde meta then the “plebs premades” were created which indeed made alliance pugs even worse.
And “plebs premades” were really far from being an I-WIN button, they had around 60-70% winrate, no more, but the actual winrate was below that because many games were dropped if lasted too long.
Anyway I’m not saying that horde was not right to play turtle and it’s their fault that AV became to whatever it is today.
It is simply a bad map design: either one side has unfair advantage or the other. For example if horde would be forced to rush, then alliance would win most of the games, because of the map. Also if SH GY would be behind the IWB choke or at least it would be as easy to defend and recap as IB GY then the better Alliance base defense would play a larger role and horde would complain about the map not being fair (and they would be right).
That’s why I said that the current version of AV is beyond fixing. Either they bring back the original 1.6 AV with all those npcs, mines, etc. or we just abandon AV until TBC comes out.
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To be honest, you can’t JUST blame the map all the time, you have to mention that the alliance pug win rate also dropped because rankers were joining premades, therefore not joining the pugs (so horde pugs had their top players, alliance pugs did not). Also, sometimes alliance pugs had games start with <10 players, i.e. free win for horde.
Which is where you’re wrong. Again.
Thing is, Horde weren’t exactly winning with the delay tactic. It took them WEEKS to reach a state where they’d even win close to half of the games played. Because the delay tactic evolved over time.
The reason the delay tactic became a thing in the first place, is because the queue times went up at the same time as premades grew in popularity in just a few days. As I’ve already mentioned (and provided links to), you’re the one who seems to be unaware of it growing in popularity that fast, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t becoming more of a thing with each passing day.
So the reason why Horde started with the delay tactic, is because with the queue times going above 10 minutes, it became worse rewards per hour to just “give up and lose”, compared to going for SH bunker and Balinda before losing.
There was around a week of just aiming for SH bunker and Balinda, while the defense would delay the attack as much as they could. They’d still lose vs. many of the premades though.
Then it evolved into including IW Bunker as well, and so on. With time, it solidified itself as the meta, and evolved over time, because it led to better rewards per hour.
This is why people have been saying Horde was put through a “boot camp” during the AV premades, while Alliance had their solo queuers left losing basically every game because their premades were messing it up for them and segregating them.
^ That. i.e. they got segregated. So more and more were seeking out premades, in order to hit that I-WIN button. Thus increasing queue times even further, due to even fewer randomly spread out “injections” into the matchmaking.
And that took just a few days, not weeks.
That was after the horde meta changed to turtle, not before it. The map favored horde turtle meta and that forced most of the alliance players to premades to counter it.
Everything else is the consequence of the map imbalance.
Even horde meta is the consequence of the map imbalance, since they were forced to change tactics against alliance rush.
Ally players might not win in AV matches, but they don’t have to sit ~2 hours in queue like Horde players have to.
So 6 months of ever increasing winrates aren’t going through a boot camp :D. You’d think the Alliance meta would shift. I guess your theory is that it’s different DNA between Alliance and Horde?
It’s all silly of course. There is an easy way to win for Horde and players found it out pretty quick. This whole meta talk is just an illusion.