Triggering Event:
I just come from a random battleground (SSM), which ended like many random BGs, if you play in the German realmpool. Even during primetime, you lose, because you have significantly fewer players on your team and there is no one to refill. The match lasted around 8 or 9 minutes. During this period, we started as 8, played half of the time as 7 (vs.10) and ended as 6.
General Problem:
Often times, there will be enough people that queue for the bg to open, but not enough people to actually run it. For example, people may just not join, because there is no ready check in rnd BGs. Additionally, the German realmpool has significantly thinned out over the years, with many PvP players moving onto the English servers for a better environment. As of right now, it really not worth it to queue random BGs, and I also opted out and only queue blitz, increasing the problem for the remaining players.
Potential Solutions:
There are many solutions and each of them, would somewhat alleviate the problem.
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The most obvious one is to “blitzify” random BGs, so that they follow the very same ruleset as BGB in all its dimensions. This would mean x-faction, x-language and the bg blitz map design. While this is my preferred option, I understand some people like the old design better. So the next best thing is
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x-faction & x-language or either of these 2 options
Having both, x-faction and x-language would ofc be the best for participation. The former, would also be a small stop gap against queue syncers, who circumvent the 5 man restriction (not the main topic here), but I am open to any of these solutions. Most of the time, people even start speaking English in the German realmpool, because they don’t know that it is limited to their native server group and because they are used to in in epic BGs. -
ready checks
This brings its own set of advantages and disadvantages. If you play blitz, you know that it sometimes takes a while, until everyone accepts. -
Warbound Deserter for rnd bg
I am not a huge fan, because I prefer the carrot over the stick, but if you play blitz and rnd BGs, you will know that way way way more people /afk out of rnd bgs, than blitz.
Afk-ing in blitz is (almost) solved. While I personally think this would be good as well, I would not die on this hill. It is more important that we get people into the games, than punishing than those who leave.
Basically, anything is better than the current implementation. Even for casual-only players, this cannot be enjoyable at all. To my knowledge, Italian servers are already paired with the English ones for similar reasons, so I don’t see, why it would be impossible for the other realmpools