Realms Player Vs. Player

[Sancta93]

Because of two things that I personally can see:

1. You're trying to set rules and limitations to something that, as the name says, is meant to be random. (...)

How is it random when there are times people manage to get into a bg as double or even triple premade?
'Player 1 takes the numbers he wants and Player 2 rolls on the leftovers' doesn't sound like a randomized game to me.
As far as I remember Blizz also tried fixing the AV enabler issue. Forgive me if the situation is different on wotlk & TBC.

(...)
2. How would that affect queue times? If we go by your examples, of how often you "faceroll" vs. how often you lose or have a challenge, how many people would rather wait that long to get queued with a "balanced" group instead of just having quick, casual fun? And where to draw the line? Is 25 item levels difference enough? Won't a premade with everyone 25 item levels higher still outmatch random disorganized people in the weaker gear just the same?

Splitting premade groups into smaller groups and enabling crossfaction should actually reduce the queue times.
Teaming people up by ilvl shouldn't change the overall queue times at all. If you have enough players for a bg, sorting them shouldn't change whether the bg starts or not. If someone needs to replaced and only the n-th player in que matches the required ilvl his queue time gets reduced while the others have to keep waiting. The overall sum of queue times should be the same.

Furthermore, having to get less people for a premade (due to 5 man premades being split into smaller groups) reduces preperation time. If the chance of facing a 5/10/15 man premade is low, there's no need to try making one.

(...) BGR or battleground rating just for short. Each individual's performance in a battleground works to affect their personal battleground rating. (...)

Why not use [Bg wins]/[Bgs played]. As far as I know your character statistics saves both values.

[Obnoxious]

How is it random when there are times people manage to get into a bg as double or even triple premade?
'Player 1 takes the numbers he wants and Player 2 rolls on the leftovers' doesn't sound like a randomized game to me.
As far as I remember Blizz also tried fixing the AV enabler issue. Forgive me if the situation is different on wotlk & TBC.

Are we really having to discuss semantics now? Is RDF any less random when you go with a group and know you'll beat it easily? The randomness is in who you will go against. Does this really need to be said out loud?

Splitting premade groups into smaller groups and enabling crossfaction should actually reduce the queue times.
Teaming people up by ilvl shouldn't change the overall queue times at all. If you have enough players for a bg, sorting them shouldn't change whether the bg starts or not. If someone needs to replaced and only the n-th player in que matches the required ilvl his queue time gets reduced while the others have to keep waiting. The overall sum of queue times should be the same.

Furthermore, having to get less people for a premade (due to 5 man premades being split into smaller groups) reduces preperation time. If the chance of facing a 5/10/15 man premade is low, there's no need to try making one.

We have no rules or limitations for premades and I wouldn't expect something like that to come if it didn't exist on retail. And it's quite clear that grouping by item level would affect queue times, or we wouldn't have complains about how they are one-sided most of the time. The very fact this complain exists indicates the amount of badly geared people queuing is much larger than that of very well geared ones - and that's not even going in intra-faction disparities for PvP in general.

[thyonem]

Actually, to be factual, the "random" aspect of a random battleground isn't that it's entirely random on who you get to face and what gets to happen to you once in that battleground. There exist options to queue Warson Gulch, Alterac Valley, Isle of Conquest, Stand of the Ancients and Arathi Basin and then there exists an option which doesn't burden you with that choise and puts you in a >> RANDOM << battleground, rather than a specific one. If I queue warson gulch specifically and I go in a battleground to face a people that stomps me or stomp people with an overgeared team I technically didn't queue a RANDOM battleground, I queued specific but still got the RANDOMNESS aspect of it without wanting it. Here the matter is not whether it's random or not but whether it is fair or not and the fact is certain players get an advantage over other players whether via paying or having played more, which is fair.

If you start segregating Random Battlegrounds behind ratings, aren't you just making them a sort of Rated ones and throwing the whole casual aspect of the randomness out of the window just the same, in an expansion that didn't have Rated in the first place?

By implementing the ratings system, you aren't throwing away any of the casualness or at least not by making it an option, rather than a must. Give the people the option of whether to queue CASUAL or queue RATED and if they queue rated, they will do so with the fact in mind that not so many people will queue rated such as them and be ready for long queues.

Why not use [Bg wins]/[Bgs played]. As far as I know your character statistics saves both values.

That is a flawed idea because of guilds such as the one I was temporarily a member of, before I /gquit. <idc gotta farm> is the name of the guild and all they did was get 10 max geared players in a battleground, stampede the enemy team, get them backed on a GY and just farm the everliving hell out of them, disregarding the battleground objectives and plain farming their HK's. A lot of times we actually lost the battleground we were dominating because of the sole purpose of farming people's corpses over and over again while two from the enemy team who managed to escape did the entirety of the work.

Using battleground statistics would be a better idea as they store your damage done, your kills, deaths and objctives followed. A formula for the determination of rating shouldn't be hard with these factors in play - all of them are stored in-game anyways.

We have no rules or limitations for premades and I wouldn't expect something like that to come if it didn't exist on retail. And it's quite clear that grouping by item level would affect queue times, or we wouldn't have complains about how they are one-sided most of the time. The very fact this complain exists indicates the amount of badly geared people queuing is much larger than that of very well geared ones - and that's not even going in intra-faction disparities for PvP in general.

Not implementing something if it didn't exist in retail is a bad business policy in general. Retail was a progression game with new expansions coming every so often. By the end of WOTLK, even if you were dominating with the highest possible gear, it wouldn't matter because a blue item from the next expansion would be of greater value and rebalancing could happen between expansions now. This gave people joining in the game at the start of a new expansion the same chances to get to end game gear as people who progress from a previous one, that is, if they level efficiently enough. We don't have that luxury and catering to new players is just as important as catering to the old ones, otherwise, nothing good will happen in the long term.

Right now, excuse the use of the word, we are stuck on this expansion. It's our choice to do so, but we are sotuck non the less. People trying to progress can't progress because they are GY farmed by people at the end of progression and this is a major turn off for a lot.

As for the queue times. Simply putting a disclaimer: "Rated battlegrounds might take longer to start," at the option of a rated battleground will be enough.

[Sancta93]

Are we really having to discuss semantics now? Is RDF any less random when you go with a group and know you'll beat it easily? (...)

I always thought it's called random dungeon, because the dungeon you get in is random. Just like the bg map you get in is random in rbgs.

(...) The randomness is in who you will go against. Does this really need to be said out loud? (...)

That was my point. If you're assuming it's called random due to the system's nature of selecting the teams for matches randomly, how can facing the same premade with a slight variance on the leftover team members of the premade side at least every second game be considered random? I've been in horde guilds on frostwolf that went into bgs as double premades for hours.

(...) We have no rules or limitations for premades and I wouldn't expect something like that to come if it didn't exist on retail. (...)

The problem isn't a big deal on retail, because the pool of players is large enough to actually randomize the players you face / play with. Furthermore, I still think there was a change when more players started using AV enabler.

And it's quite clear that grouping by item level would affect queue times, or we wouldn't have complains about how they are one-sided most of the time. The very fact this complain exists indicates the amount of badly geared people queuing is much larger than that of very well geared ones - and that's not even going in intra-faction disparities for PvP in general.

Assumption: factions are equally geared on average.
In queue: (player 1, player 2, player 3) on Horde and (Player 1, Player 2, Player 3) on Alliance. Let's say there were 2v2 bgs now (for simplicity). These lists are ordered with player 1 having less than or equal ilvl than/to player 2 and so on.
The ilvl disparity between the teams is lower when we put two of one faction (example: player 1 and player 3) and two with the same index (Player 1 and Player 3) of the other faction into one BG. (I've made a more complete example and explanation in my Frostwolf bg post (also a suggestion)).
If bg pops would tick every 10 minutes and player 2 has waited 6 minutes while player 3 has waited 1 minute, player 2 would have to wait for another 10 to get another chance to join (16 minutes overall wait time, with player 3 staying at 1 minute).

Overall time in queue = 17 minutes.
Without the system player 2 would get a pop while player 3 is forced to wait for 10 minutes. (player 2 has an overall queue time of 6 minutes and player 3 has an overall queue time of 11 minutes.

Overall time in queue = 17 minutes.

Where's the change in que time? Some people will have to wait a little bit longer while others get to join faster. The sum doesn't change.

(...)I wouldn't expect something like that to come (...)

Me neither, but we can still discuss it, right?

(...)That is a flawed idea because of guilds such as the one I was temporarily a member of, before I /gquit. <idc gotta farm> is the name of the guild and all they did was get 10 max geared players in a battleground, stampede the enemy team, get them backed on a GY and just farm the everliving hell out of them, disregarding the battleground objectives and plain farming their HK's. A lot of times we actually lost the battleground we were dominating because of the sole purpose of farming people's corpses over and over again while two from the enemy team who managed to escape did the entirety of the work.
(...)

Don't see where it's flawed. Same thing can be done with rating. Furthermore, the quotient will go down if the number of wins stays the same while the number of bgs played rises.

[Obnoxious]

Actually, to be factual, the "random" aspect of a random battleground isn't that it's entirely random on who you get to face and what gets to happen to you once in that battleground. There exist options to queue Warson Gulch, Alterac Valley, Isle of Conquest, Stand of the Ancients and Arathi Basin and then there exists an option which doesn't burden you with that choise and puts you in a >> RANDOM << battleground, rather than a specific one. If I queue warson gulch specifically and I go in a battleground to face a people that stomps me or stomp people with an overgeared team I technically didn't queue a RANDOM battleground, I queued specific but still got the RANDOMNESS aspect of it without wanting it. Here the matter is not whether it's random or not but whether it is fair or not and the fact is certain players get an advantage over other players whether via paying or having played more, which is fair.

You might pick the option to queue on this or that, but you're set against a random group of players, as I already said. You only "avoid" that if the only players queuing on the other side are a specific group. What you want are Rated Battlegrounds, which exist in other expansions.

By implementing the ratings system, you aren't throwing away any of the casualness or at least not by making it an option, rather than a must. Give the people the option of whether to queue CASUAL or queue RATED and if they queue rated, they will do so with the fact in mind that not so many people will queue rated such as them and be ready for long queues.

You have that option. It exists in other expansions where Rated exists.

Not implementing something if it didn't exist in retail is a bad business policy in general.

That's your personal opinion. Our aim is - barring necessity cases and those where the Staff and Administration consider a change is required or valid - is to emulate retail as close as possible.

I always thought it's called random dungeon, because the dungeon you get in is random. Just like the bg map you get in is random in rbgs.

As thyonem points out, even when you are able to queue for specific ones, they are still called Random. On RDF the randomness is in what dungeon you might get and who will fill any empty party spots; on Battlegrounds the randomness can be in which one you will end up in and who will fill any empty spots, plus who will be on the opposing team.

That was my point. If you're assuming it's called random due to the system's nature of selecting the teams for matches randomly, how can facing the same premade with a slight variance on the leftover team members of the premade side at least every second game be considered random? I've been in horde guilds on frostwolf that went into bgs as double premades for hours.

No, that obviously was not your point, since what you're saying isn't what I did. Facing a premade is still randomness, as you don't pick your opponent. You're going with whichever available opponent is picked. If all that is available is a premade the issue is with the amount of people queuing, not with randomness. Randomness isn't going to create players that weren't queued out of thin air.

Assumption: factions are equally geared on average.

Not going to waste time with made up scenarios. I'm dealing with the complains and what causes them, and it's glaring that there is not only gear disparity, but experience disparity, PvP interest disparity and faction disparity.

[thyonem]

That's your personal opinion. Our aim is - barring necessity cases and those where the Staff and Administration consider a change is required or valid - is to emulate retail as close as possible.

Yes but... No. You entirely disregarded why it is a bad business practice. Let me quote myself.

Retail was a progression game with new expansions coming every so often. By the end of WOTLK, even if you were dominating with the highest possible gear, it wouldn't matter because a blue item from the next expansion would be of greater value and rebalancing could happen between expansions now. This gave people joining in the game at the start of a new expansion the same chances to get to end game gear as people who progress from a previous one, that is, if they level efficiently enough. We don't have that luxury and catering to new players is just as important as catering to the old ones, otherwise, nothing good will happen in the long term.

Right now, excuse the use of the word, we are stuck on this expansion. It's our choice to do so, but we are sotuck non the less. People trying to progress can't progress because they are GY farmed by people at the end of progression and this is a major turn off for a lot.

Imagine if Samsung only put their latest most expensive phone for sale. People would just move to cheaper alternative brands if they can't aford it. Would Samsung still make money off of those who can buy it? Absolutely! Would it be as much as they would make if they catered to everybody? Absolutely not.

You have that option. It exists in other expansions where Rated exists.

Said other expansions are beyond deceased on this server and, truth be told, I have things keeping me on this server. The Icecrown realm, even, in the form of people I enjoy playing with. While this is entirely my own problem, the issues I regard are true even despites that when you look from other players' perspectives.

[Obnoxious]

Yes but... No. You entirely disregarded why it is a bad business practice. Let me quote myself.

Imagine if Samsung only put their latest most expensive phone for sale. People would just move to cheaper alternative brands if they can't aford it. Would Samsung still make money off of those who can buy it? Absolutely! Would it be as much as they would make if they catered to everybody? Absolutely not.

No, I didn't. You disregard the kind of business we want to run and the kind of service we want to offer. If we just wanted to make money, we could do so many things differently. It's more important to get less donations and be more faithful to what the expansion was, than to start adding MPL races and pet battles because of how much more money that could bring us.

[thyonem]

Now that you explained in in that way, I do understand why the changes cannot be implemented. It is true that you could be making a supreme load of money selling combat pets, more mounts and overall more content, but chose not to do so for nostalgia sake. I respect that and must admit am pleasantly surprised by the lack of greed I discovered by reading this.

However, one thing can still be changed that doesn't involve breaking the nostalgia but rather, plain giving a "hotfix" to an issue I now found out cannot be fixed entirely. That change is the ban of AV Enabler. It is allowing scenarios such as the one I listed above with my former guild and is making the experience miserable for anybody that is not only interested in their goals and/or benefits directly through them. Since it is not a part of the original content but rather was created to cater to such toxic individuals, AV Enabler shouldn't be an unremovable part of the game. True that such a change would peeve and turn off some of the people practicing it, but as you said, getting money is not as important as having the game accessible the way it was without changing its entirety.

[Obnoxious]

About that add on, I'll tag out and let another Moderator, who knows it and how it's used, take over the argumentation.

[Repost]

However, one thing can still be changed that doesn't involve breaking the nostalgia but rather, plain giving a "hotfix" to an issue I now found out cannot be fixed entirely. That change is the ban of AV Enabler. It is allowing scenarios such as the one I listed above with my former guild and is making the experience miserable for anybody that is not only interested in their goals and/or benefits directly through them. Since it is not a part of the original content but rather was created to cater to such toxic individuals, AV Enabler shouldn't be an unremovable part of the game. True that such a change would peeve and turn off some of the people practicing it, but as you said, getting money is not as important as having the game accessible the way it was without changing its entirety.

How exactly do you think that addon can be prevented? All it does is remove the need for a count down to queue. And what happens when one of these guilds who exist for premades queues multiple 5 person groups into a single BG, are they going to get reported for what can't be seen?

[thyonem]

No, of course not. The removing of the addon would prove to be nothing but an inconvenience to these people which they can still overcome. But it's far better to not convenience such toxisity even further. They cannot be reported for being in the same dungeon like they can't be reported for using the addon now, but making it one idea harder for them to queue is making the chances of fair match ups one idea greater. That's the only solution that I can see being made.

Also, another thing I forgot to suggest. This is a suggestion right of the top of my head that could actually work. Honor in battlegrounds should be given as it is right now but should also regard damage taken. That way one sided stomps won't reward the stompers as much and people would be encouraged to throw themselves in battle rather than AFK and wait for the team to win. Kill or die, they went there, they did damage, soaked damage. Overall, they contributed.

[Sancta93]

As thyonem points out, even when you are able to queue for specific ones, they are still called Random. On RDF the randomness is in what dungeon you might get and who will fill any empty party spots; on Battlegrounds the randomness can be in which one you will end up in and who will fill any empty spots, plus who will be on the opposing team.

Last time I took a look at my UI it had 'Specific Battleground' and 'Bonus Battleground'->'Random Battleground' as separate categories.

No, that obviously was not your point, since what you're saying isn't what I did. Facing a premade is still randomness, as you don't pick your opponent. You're going with whichever available opponent is picked. If all that is available is a premade the issue is with the amount of people queuing, not with randomness. Randomness isn't going to create players that weren't queued out of thin air.

So it's 'random' when an enemy team is picking the enemy team members for me. Alright.

If it was splitting, one could call it 'random'. Matching by ilvl or w/e else would make it 'less random' but it's still not as DETERMINISTIC as having to face the same team with the same party over and over.

Not going to waste time with made up scenarios. I'm dealing with the complains and what causes them, and it's glaring that there is not only gear disparity, but experience disparity, PvP interest disparity and faction disparity.

Sure, easiest way to dodge something that proves you wrong. The assumption does not change the result at all, because it has nothing to do with the overall que times.

[Obnoxious]

Last time I took a look at my UI it had 'Specific Battleground' and 'Bonus Battleground'->'Random Battleground' as separate categories.

So it's 'random' when an enemy team is picking the enemy team members for me. Alright.

If it was splitting, one could call it 'random'. Matching by ilvl or w/e else would make it 'less random' but it's still not as DETERMINISTIC as having to face the same team with the same party over and over.

Sure, easiest way to dodge something that proves you wrong. The assumption does not change the result at all, because it has nothing to do with the overall que times.

Not going to argue semantics either.
Call it "dodging" as much as you like - while playing under unchanged game mechanics just the same.

[Meowto]

Because of two things that I personally can see:

1. You're trying to set rules and limitations to something that, as the name says, is meant to be random. Dungeons have a requirement just because they are made for a group at a bare minimum point in gear. Battlegrounds are inherently gear-neutral. You aren't going to be facing a boss that requires this or that, you will be facing random players or groups of players. The very fact they are random should be enough to say they are something casual, that you're throwing yourself at whatever comes; and

2. How would that affect queue times? If we go by your examples, of how often you "faceroll" vs. how often you lose or have a challenge, how many people would rather wait that long to get queued with a "balanced" group instead of just having quick, casual fun? And where to draw the line? Is 25 item levels difference enough? Won't a premade with everyone 25 item levels higher still outmatch random disorganized people in the weaker gear just the same?

The problem is that premades take the idea of "random" and throw it out of the window. Its not random anymore, especially on the horde side its quite easy to get entire bgs made up out of 1 premade. Which basicely turns it it a random battelground group aganst a rated one, with obvious result.


And as per the "retail" argument, AV enabler in its woltk state was banned long ago, and the sheer amount of players means that premades are way minor issue. There are issues that retail didnt have due to its moving nature (content wise) and its amount of players, squashing away those issues with "blizzard didnt do anything about them" imo isnt a good idea.





Im not saying ilvl matching or mmr or so are the answer, nor are they (i.e high gs people queing, good people queuing etc) the problem. They are the baseline, and usually the random factor takes care of it. You have a bunch of good players on either side, geared players on either side etc. But premades, as said before, take away the randomness. The factor that makes it bearable.


Im talking mostly about Woltk here (as other servers have other issues, and the nature of frostwolfs premade problems is/was a bug with the way conquest was handled, allowing people to get the rated bg cap via random bgs), but its a stagnant server. There are more geared people on it then probably all 11 million of retail back in wrath, and it will never "move". It was unheard of for that amount of geared characters to q. You needed to be fairly good in pvp just to get the pvp gear and raid HC content. So almost no one ever ran into the problem of 3 6.7k DKs and 2 bis hpalas queing into them. Even if there were premades the gear to make them truely broken just wasnt avaible.

Retail never ran into the issue with premades. Warmane has. It ruins BGs for everyone untill you queue with a premade yourself, then its the other way around.



Lastly, its not the coordinates nature of premades that matters, in fact in most premades there is no more organization then there is with randoms. Usually just a "stay in group" "go blue" "cap BS" etc. Coordinated people vs uncoordinated isnt really the issue. Its that 1 bis geared character is worth about 4 honour geared ones, so a 5 man premade adds in terms of average damage/healing 20 people to one side. Which is just broken. Average ilvl wins BGs. And without a random factor it will contiue to do so.

[Sancta93]

The problem is that premades take the idea of "random" and throw it out of the window. Its not random anymore, especially on the horde side its quite easy to get entire bgs made up out of 1 premade. Which basicely turns it it a random battelground group aganst a rated one, with obvious result.

Bro, you're wasting your time. He already said 'he won't argue semantics'. It's random to him even if it's not per definition.

Call it "dodging" as much as you like - while playing under unchanged game mechanics just the same.

I thought discussing suggestions is what this section is for?