It is my fault for not stating the problem explicitly. The biggest problem in the top gear bracket for battlegrounds is the imbalanced caused by premades. These premades are the main drivers of graveyard farming, mindless zerging, and imbalanced matches where half your team are no-shows or leave en masse (to join another battleground presumably). My solution is only aimed at addressing this singular issue, which has gotten worse since the new bracket changes.
The imbalanced caused by Blackrock players is also an issue, but this is becoming more of a problem for the middle gear brackets. Blackrock does have a disproportionally high number of bots and low skilled players; however, this is exactly what you would expect from a server that allows the creation of 5.5k GS PVP-ready characters within minutes. Since the introduction of new brackets, it seems like it is more rare to see a team of Blackrock players going against a team of Icecrown players. My observation is that the typical cutoff point for the middle brackets to the top bracket is around 5.6k GS and having 284 ilvl items seems to automatically bump people into the top bracket.
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Member
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Forum Veteran
I'm just wandering why lots of people expect some miracles from staff, how can they fix all the "road heroes" who got no clue what to do? You want staff member to crawl in each noobs north pole and puppeteer them like a skin suit to victory or what? Join a guild, run premades and enjoy, problem solved. Then be the "bigger man", when enemy team is made from dudes in rags running circles, just give up, let them gy camp you.
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Moderator
I'm at a point it's feeling like there's some unspoken expectation that all "skilled" will be only paired with "skilled," and "trash" with "trash," somehow, in an activity that is by essence chaotic and random.
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Member
Nobody expects anything from the staff. The problem here isn't even that.
Problem is that after all this time, BGs are ****ing boring and cancer to play with all the changes that got implemented in the not so distant past - Brackets, Blackrock being included to X-realm as the main issues.
While I don't care much about BRs free Rele, their incompetence makes every BG less fun than it could've been.
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Member
Removing or reimplementing the mercenary mode would be a start to fix bg s. Almost every pvp er exploits the ally race advantages, they get almost instant que s as they opt in as mercs and thread the rest as fodder without no downtime. Before then, to balance this, guilds were changing factions time to time, now there is no reason at all.
A true merc mode should include players from both factions and should not allow premades.
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Member
Randomizing the team rosters and breaking premades' ability to dominate Random Battlegrounds will make the existence of under-skilled or even under-geared players a non-issue when they are more or less equally presence on both sides. What you are proposing is only going to further lower the quality of battlegrounds on Warmane, and is a huge turn off for casual players who just want to have some fun or have a chance at getting their daily Random Battleground win. The only losers in this type of change are the ones who insist on farming HK's.
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Moderator
I don't know, this really looks to me like just a different version of the complain we've had for ages of people joining Battlegrounds completely without gear and unskilled, needing to learn. The big difference is they have some gear when they come from Blackrock. If they weren't in Blackrock, they would be in Icecrown or wherever and fall in the old case, no? Except they would have even worse gear. It kinda gets down to not wanting to play with "trash"...
What's the issue with brackets exactly? Aside from, again, the complain that the top one is ran by premades - not that it didn't happen before - what's a problem about people getting set against others with smaller gear gaps?
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Forum Veteran
Why not create some form of ranking based on Battleground wins? Similar to Guild rankings in PvE? Maybe even some rewards for it after season. If "casual" player ends up against premade, in most cases they will rip them in 5mins for extra win and that's it, instead of farming them. Literally only thing people do in premades now is farm HK's and maybe honor for alts. No need for a huge social engineering splitting and dividing everything, just give some carrot to chase. People will be HAPPY to see those Blackrock dudes.
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Member
No they won't. They will farm them while taking the win, because the "carrot", which is just a number for HK, is still there. But you bring up a good point, perhaps all that is required is to cap HK at a 100k. By removing the carrot we might also reduce the number of farmers.
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Moderator
Wouldn't that just make it even worse? Instead of camping for kills, they would repeatedly queue for easy, fast wins?
Personally I do see the merit in either limiting or separating premades from "the common pot." They undeniably bring a level of unfairness to the picture whenever they aren't matched against another premade, something that a hodgepodge group just can't make up for.
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Member
Well, considering that BR is mostly even filtered out (at least full rele people) out of highest bracket, it's not the issue of not wanting to play with trash. I personally never minded undergeared people. Another issue that comes from BR is the fact that last 5 cheaters that I found were from it because it doesn't require any effort to make account and a lv80 char.
On top of that, undergeared "trash" from Icecrown often had the will to learn or communicate/try to win while almost all of the BR either doesn't understand English or doesn't know how to see BG chat.
Brackets defeat the idea of RANDOM Battleground (Granted, that's the least of an issue.) Last time that I played BGs it was mostly the same faces in quite a few bgs in row, reminded me of Moltens Lordaeron when it went to 2k people on peak time. On top of that, while yes, premades dominated the BGs they're in for the most part before as well, a lot smaller pool of players means that you have a lot higher chance to meet a premade than when there were no brackets unless you went specifically for AV, and even then.
Overall, BGs were always there just to screw around and have fun with, and everything that was "added", except Mercenary just kept chipping on the fun until it just is boring/annoying.
If anything should've been added, it should've been Rated BG system (it should be possible) that shares the rating with solo queue system - but you can only do one or another.
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Moderator
You aren't considering one thing: many of the people from Blackrock might just be alt accounts of people who play in Icecrown or wherever; this distinction of "Icecrown good, Blackrock bad" might not really exist. Also, while you might not mind undergeared people, that was one of the most common complains from players, along with the queue times. This links to the next point for a theme.
This again is how you feel, but it doesn't seem to match what other players want. People don't want to just screw around and have fun (and if that was it, having people from Blackrock shouldn't affect it), they apparently want it to have a level of balance and evenness, matches that are a struggle the best side wins, not being steamrolled and waiting as a ghost for it to end. Brackets still keep a random factor, they just try to even the playing field of that randomness so people have fun fighting for a win. Both of your points don't seem to speak along with what other players want out of Battlegrounds.
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Member
So, apparently players don't want to play WotLK on WotLK pserver? Considering it all goes against how it played during retail.
Sure, you can use the argument that Warmane isn't Blizzlike with all the custom junk that got added, but it still steers towards being as close to it as it can. And on top of that, sure, blizz added Rated BGs with RBG "balance" in mind in Cata, but that should've been done here as well.
Even if you exclude BR cheaters/no hablo ingles's, and keep it in cross, brackets are still worse over the already mentioned system.
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Forum Veteran
Yeah, it wouldnt remove gy farms completely, but some portion of those premades would just do quick 5min wins. For them bjective would be to squeeze as many wins possible in shortest time, so no extended pain if player ends up getting stomped. And some matching priority against other premades, then top geared players and then just random - might work.
Maybe better idea would be just to mix players in each BG draw - 1/3 low gear, 1/3 intermediate, 1/3 top gear. Premades always against 100% top geared. I guess this might end up impractical to implement, depending on player amount in the pool.
But to me situations where premade stomps other team, this seems pretty core of the game. Just a reminder what teamwork can do, reminder to maybe join something like that and make some friends. If "casual" players are such huge part, then there is no big harm of small percent of times getting steamrolled by premades. And adding some other objective instaed of "HK farm" would reduce significant part of that to just "we got stomped in 5mins and it was over, gg, that was crazy" instead of gy farm until players just leave and take deserter out of frustration.
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Member
Frostmourne appears to be the best place to experience WotLK. At one point I even made a twink alt on Icecrown just to play with them. Those matches were usually quite fun because there was quite a bit a diversity in terms of player skills and gear, very similar to what I remembered from my WotLK retail days. You might get a similar experience in the lower gear bracket right now, though your mileage may vary.
It is incredibility difficult to reproduce the complete WotLK experience on a single realm, especially one that has been fully progressed. The new bracket system is overall an improvement, it just has the unfortunate side effect of highlighting the long existing problem of premades dominating battlegrounds.
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