Yes.
No. That isn’t a premade. That’s not vetting people before queuing with player-made requirements, and doesn’t result in high ranked premades.
Thing is, to explain this, you must first understand what they did to mitigate the premades back in january-february. First they simply made it so you couldn’t see the number of the BG in the queue pop (although a weakaura could still manage to do so).
Then they added a redundancy in the matchmaking itself if I remember the order correctly, where what used to be instant pops were all of a sudden taking minutes to find a match. Thing is, while the amount of people signing is never static, in the gigantic matchmaking pool then there’s always a certain amount of people queuing, basically every second (which includes bots etc.).
So with the redundancy, they artificially increased the pool size of possible matchmakings for teammates even with a much smaller pool compared to the opposite faction. Because what used to be instant and would therefore be limited to the people queuing with the queue timing garbage, it’d instead include everyone signing up in the following couple of minutes into a much larger selection of possible players to matchmake people with.
Then players were intentionally going offline past the expected wait time, so that when they got back online they’d end up in a “priority placement” and when a full 40-man team all ends up in priority placement at the same time, ofc they’d end up in the same AV.
So that was what Blizzard shut down next.
But the thing is, Alliance players were still queuing in enough quantity back then in the gigantic pool, so that those redundancies Blizzard put in would actually be enough. For the gigantic pool only.
With a naturally small matchmaking pool, it’s possible just through normal queue timing manipulation still.
No. That’s misunderstanding the nature of what they’re doing. You’re talking like there’s less than 40 players on Russian realms queuing for AV. That isn’t exactly true. While there’s not many in comparison to the gigantic pool, it’s not like it’s empty over there.
What they’re doing is basically what EU Alliance did back in December-February.
While they had the population figures to fill up the queue more normally, there was a lot of Alliance players who simply didn’t queue for AV outside of their premades’ predetermined times to play. So with much fewer random “injections” into the matchmaking pool on their end, the pool would artificially become smaller. Even though there were enough players to fill it properly. This is what Russians are doing to their matchmaking, because it’s a natural consequence of normalizing premade exploits to AV.
The real question is why Blizzard’s language support sucks. Why is cyrillic ok, but not other alphabets? Why doesn’t the game transliterate the symbols to the chosen client’s language? So a name with cyrillic symbols would instead become the letters the symbols means, but with Roman letters, to players using a client with language support for the Roman alphabet.
That way, EU players wouldn’t see Russian players with cnEmvXewtFEAaTni in their name (a bit of an exaggeration, but it does look like that to normal people who doesn’t go out of their way to learn another alphabet just for playing a damn game).
With the rise of translation software in the world, it’s not unthinkable for Blizzard to show some proper ingenuity once more and bring in a translation software specialized for common in-game terminology as well. That’d help a long way with overcoming region gaps and communication issues.
Πάμε ρε μαλάκαςςςςςςς