Hi everyone!
To give this some context, I am a long-time customer and user of Warmane's services: I have two accounts with "Exalted" donation status and have been around for more than 13 years. I obviously love it here and wouldn't trade it for any other place as it is.
I recently decided to give Blackrock a shot as I am pretty much maxed out on all my Icecrown toons and wanted to get a feel of some progress with the limited time I have to play these days as I am a working, family man with kids (I'm sure most of you old farts are the same lol).
Before I get to my point, I want to be very clear about my standpoint: I have nothing against premades or multiboxers!
It's unplayable. Plain unplayable. Every AV or Isle of Conquest BG is just either mindlessly farming HK's or being farmed for HK's. I don't do premades as most of my buddies don't play anymore and as you can imagine most of the time I am on the side that's getting farmed. Someone will say find a guild, do premades - well, my play time is very "scattered" and I can't be organized enough to play with a guild (understand sit on a discord call for 30 minutes to an hour or more). It's 20-30 people on discord, organized and experienced vs a bulk of random people, mostly cussing at each other as you know, some of them have no idea how the map needs to be played. And it's fine. I'll take the loss, they deserve the win. Someone needs to win and it will always be the one who's more dedicated, with more time on their hands and friends to help as this is a team's game.
The one thing I dislike is the "no way out" feeling you get when you enter an AV where the enemy team is fully occupying the first 20 places of the BG chart with 350 HKs each and you know it'll be either 40 minutes for 600 honor for you or desert and 15 minute penalty only to find yourself in the same scenario. It's just gross and repulsive and takes away the fun from the casual PVP battlegrounds are meant to be. PLEASE NOTE: I am not implying there's something wrong with one team stomping the other one. Imbalance is fine. The premade is the stronger team and they can do as they wish. I wrote all of the above just to PROPOSE something: Is it possible to add a surrender button? A surrender button will make things a lot easier for people to keep playing after losing. The team that surrenders should not be rewarded the honor you normally get for losing a match to prevent abuse. It will make playing a lot more enjoyable for people like me, who have limited time and are probably the bigger contributors to Warmane's wellbeing by donating a lot and compensating their lack of time to play and progress. Once a game starts to be HK-farming-oriented, the losing team will hit "Surrender" and the game would end, resulting in the farming team getting even less HK's than what they would normally get by playing the BG the way it's meant to be played (no real way it's meant to be played really, but 1h GY camping is just dumb and stupid for everyone involved and you can't change my mind about it). The farmers will be hurt from this for sure, but these are people already spending insane amounts of time in the game and are likely not having to do donate as much while destroying many others' experience and often times ruining the one hour or half an hour time we have to devote to the game a couple times a week. I can totally see this being in the way of someone investing in Warmane.
Please let me know if it's just me who feels that way. I really like Warmane and would love to be able to enjoy some nice battlegrounds. Right now, one out of 5 is enjoyable. When you play 2 battlegrounds a day, a couple times a week, you don't have bad battlegrounds or bad days. You have bad weeks interacting with the game here.
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Member
We need to talk about Battlegrounds on the WOTLK realms.
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Rock n' Roll Racing Champion
There already is a surrender button, "Leave battleground"
If you don't have much time to play battlegrounds, and you want something that feels "fairer", I recommend that you join specific battlegrounds other than AV/IoC.
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Member
Ok. So not playing some of the most interesting battlegrounds is your answer. I appreciate your participation in this conversation!
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Forum Veteran
I feel like I've read this speech before.
I think you need to stop thinking about how to change the game to adapt to your life and be convenient for you and accept it for what it is. After 13 years you should be very aware of how this game works.
If you don't like it then you can make a Blackrock toon on Onyxia. Or you can make a lower geared toon on Icecrown and leave it lower geared so you stay in the low gear bracket. Enjoy.
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Member
I feel you! 90% of the games are heavily one sided.
Going with premade is not fun either,
because there is no fun in graveyard camping.
Finding even games is so hard these days, close to miracle.
Maybe shorten deserter penatly, like 5 min or something?
13 years ago battlegrounds were more random than now, less crowded by PM groups, even 5 years ago comparing to today is like a night and day.Edited: September 8, 2025
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Member
I mean, 2 years ago it was a lot better also.
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Forum Veteran
You guys bring up a good point without meaning to. I don't have this issue currently because these groups don't play when I do. I ran into it a few years ago though with a couple guilds in particular. And that's the thing is you're actually talking about a variable operating separately from the game which is the schedule and gameplay of these groups. They don't always exist though and they don't play 24/7. So that variable can change from year to year here.
You can argue that the gameplay of premades is different here which is false. I saw the AV and IOC graveyard and HK farms by premades back in retail. It isn't new strategies. There are old forum posts discussing this subject that still exist. Point is they come and go and it isn't a universal issue for everyone.
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Member
Thank you so much for your input. I appreciate it, I didn’t mean to make a rant against RNG. I actually had more time to play last couple of days and I queued BGs repeatedly in a 10 hour span and kept running into this, maybe it was the “wrong” 10 hours of the day. The whole idea of my post is: we didn’t have 3s solo queue in wrath classic, but we have it here. Same for transmog. These are quality of life changes that make the community happier and their stay at these servers more enjoyable (well, probably 80-90% of it). I can easily see how a way out of these miserable battlegrounds will make playing PVP more newcomer friendly too. This is just my opinion though. The whole point behind this post is to see if I’m alone in feeling this way or if there are many more who would appreciate such a change even if it doesn’t come live. Your POV definitely shows another perspective. Maybe some people in specific time zones just won’t enjoy playing battlegrounds here for the time being.
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Moderator
You already have a way out, which was mentioned in the first reply you got.
We aren't going to implement a way to leave without a penalty, like you seem to want to. That isn't "quality of life," that's removing the requirement to commit. A lobotomy patient can see how that's a feast for abuse. One one side people could give easy wins to themselves by logging characters on both sides and "surrendering." On the other it would create a culture where if people didn't land on a good team, they'd automatically quit. And lastly, I would give it a couple weeks top until every match turned into "surrendering" the moment one faction got ahead.
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Forum Veteran
After some research on this subject I've found some interesting history. Preform AV enabler became popular in the game a little past WoTLK. In 2012 particularly it became a huge issue where battlegrounds saw a spike in large premades that resulted in very long games with severe graveyard camping and HK farming.
A blue post was made that this was not encouraged and action would possibly be taken. The reasoning for Blizzard intervention though was not about "Premades" as premades in 5 man groups are intended and allowed. The problem is that players were using Queue Syncing as a method to bypass the intended 5 man limit of premade groups. Bypassing that intended system allowed players to exploit the random match making system to not be random and create unfair and unbalanced battlegrounds.
So in original WoTLK it wasn't a big enough issue, but had it been then Blizzard would have taken action against it because they consider it a violation of their terms of service which would have been similar if not the same in the WoTLK era.
That kinda changes my perspective a little bit. This issue didn't exist in the original game. Evidence very strongly suggests that Blizzard never intended for it and would take action against it had it been in the game. So that would mean if Warmane lets it happen here then they go against the design and environment that would be Blizzlike.
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Moderator
Not paying a monthly fee isn't "Blizz-like" either.
Did you find any post about them in fact taking action? Or that people stopped doing it before Cataclysm? Did the queuing system in Wrath of the Lich King or earlier change in some way that multiple groups queuing at the same time didn't end up in the same match? Because it doesn't take any add-on for people to get on a call, do a countdown and click join together.
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Forum Veteran
This blue post implies taking action certainly: https://www.mmo-champion.com/threads...orm-AV-Enabler
They officially banned it in MoP for reasons I've said: https://www.bluetracker.gg/wow/topic...es-and-addons/
The 5 person queue maximum was considered a safeguard. Players found a way around it and Blizzard took action against that as it evolved into an issue later on. I think you should be asking the opposite which is where did Blizzard say they actively promoted or supported 40 man premades that bypassed their random match making system and the 5 player limit? All evidence we do have points to them being opposed to that.
Which I'll admit the communication from Blizzard is so spotty and terrible especially nowadays, but that's what we have. The enforcement actions of Blizzard are also really weak. They've admitted monitoring such a thing would be difficult which yes on a large scale it would be. I don't personally find the issue happening that much in a progression environment though.
This environment though is much different here. Free accounts and low populations worsen the issue to where an addon is barely necessary. An endless progressed realm presents new issues. Like the boosting community. Just as easily a strong coordinated premade community could form. Things like this could very heavily be abused and they might be already.
I don't know the answer really. Just highlighting the fact that what can happen with this may not be the original intention of the game creators and it could spin out of control. It hasn't personally affected me, but it is something to discuss and think about.
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Rock n' Roll Racing Champion
Queue syncing has been occurring for years now in retail and Blizzard has done nothing about it.
But, once again, banning AV Enabler will do nothing to fix this, since AV Enabler is not necessary to queue multiple groups into AV or IoC, since it is exceedingly rare to have more than one of those open at the same time.
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Forum Veteran
These are the issues. Enforcement and prevention. Queue syncing by itself can be done outside the game for one thing and it isn't something I can just pull up and track and narrow down the intention. Monitoring battlegrounds on a wide scale is also an impossible task. Enforcing something like that for Blizzard has challenges.
Prevention is what we all talk about including the idea from the OP. Things that lead to other issues. In theory though for Warmane it could be just as simple as forcing mercenary mode on players doing specific queue on AV and IOC. That's what these players do right? Regular players would select random battlegrounds and go into those battlegrounds with their normal faction, but players doing specific queue could be on either team. That would destroy that dynamic and actually help queue times. If your rebuttal was for them to queue random battlegrounds and wait for queue to pop at once that might suggest they would enter a 40 man which is more difficult, you could easily add a 2 minute debuff for canceling queue pop. May not be necessary though.
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Moderator
They were more rhetorical questions, because we know the answer: nothing ever happened. No one ever got action taken against them for it and doing something about an add-on in Pandaria means nothing (as I already had said in the previous post, AV Enabler just makes it easier, but people can do the exact same with a semblance of coordination; we tried in the past to make the add-on unusable and found out it was pointless). As Shred says, it never stopped happening in retail because of that change.
You see one blue post and one update that changes nothing as a sign they didn't mean for it to happen; I see the opposite, because over all these years and expansions they never took any real action against it at all, just one post and one hollow update. So really, using that as an argument isn't going to work in your favor the way you expected.
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