I know it's early days, but I'm wondering how people have been finding the new battleground matching system.

We formed a warsong team not long after the patch (Thursday?) and quickly lost to a better coordinated team, but then had a half hour wait (with an average queue time of <1 minute) and gave up. Admittedly it was quite late at night, but there were still quite a few games up.

Today we tried again but had a 40 minute queue before being put in against a hapless pickup group. It seems that now there is little advantage to be gained from playing a premade in the battlegrounds, nobody is bothering. You still get better honour from AV, which makes the problem worse.

So what we have is a vicious circle: the fewer premades there are, the longer the queues, and the longer the queues, the fewer premades there are.

Has this been the experience of others?

Blizzard really didn't learn by their mistakes. Almost all my guildies don't play 2vs2 anymore du to the 5-10 min ques just to meet the same team again. Thus making it hard to get enough games to build a rating that needs to be higher than 70% of a 5vs5 rating.

I feel it's the same with premades. If they do not reward the time and effort of making premades ie. more honor even for loosing the premades will die out. It is all about making the most honor/ hour and as of now the ques and length of games makes the premades suffer very much.

I have been running a full wsg raid with the guild since the new patch. We play horde and this new match making system hasnt made any difference to our queue time. It takes < 1 min to get in to a game. The same applies when we run with half a raid.

I think they did learn from their misstakes really. I mena when Cross server BGs was introduced lots of people did battle grounds. I could get into Alterac Valley 39; and there were over a hundered AB's and WSG's. Slowly the BG part of the game has died out though. Beeing repetedly put up against people with better gear, better organization, and better skill also (though this is hard to call unfair) isn't fun.

Plenty of people stopped playing BGs as much obviously. As its common now to have less than 10 games of each type going on. Perhaps Blizzard thinks that removing unfair matchups as much as possible will renew intrtesst and motivate more people ot queue up? Instead of slowly removing more and more people from Battlegrounds altogetgher?

If more people start playing Battle grounds again then its good; othervise its bad. But really if premade groups drive solo-queue people away from BGs more and more then the end result would still be fewer and fewer games for premades. Though more slowly...

Ideal would of course be that there were enough people intressted in playing premade vs premade so both type of players could get good games. But if people aren't sufficiently intressted in playing premades then who's to say its bad that they die out?

we got invites in a full 15man AB premade almost instantly, always against other premades. We're playing on world's largest realmpool though.

One thing I noticed at least for arena is that it seems under high load (read: Monday evening) the servers seem to take a dump almost weekly. We play a few games and all of a sudden the queue times shoot up to 20 minutes. We have people of the same rating standing next to us looking for a game, and we don't get matched. And there are next to no games going on judging by the arena numbers we got. After a while the servers recover and queue times go back to seconds. This seems to occur every Monday.

This of course has nothing to do with BG matchmaking but maybe there are similar issues.

Good obvservation. On Monday, to "warm up" before we started playing ranked games, a bunch of us single queued 2v2 unranked arenas (since our 5-man queue took over an hour). If 5 peeps all single-queued into 2v2 and could not get a game in for like 5 minutes, something is clearly wrong.

Since you can't see the number of games going on, I'm curious to see how many arena instances are going at once. Would be very interesting to see the capacity, especially on Mondays before the server maintenance.

And where the Alliance has at least a 60 % majority. I guess the patch widens the gap again between the queueing times between the majority and minority factions (mostly alliance vs horde though on new realms this seems to be often the opposite).

I queued yesterday night first alone, then with a guild mate, after that we added another member. Queueing times didn't change noticeably, I also didn't get the impression that folks were sorted out for gear (D3 vs 3/5 Gladiator and better), but that could have been caused by the fact that only a few BGs were still open (IIRC 1-2 AB and 1-2 EotS). So at least the system seems to be flexible enough to allow folks who tend to play outside of the main hours to queue without having to wait for matching opposition (though I must admit that my PVP gear is still a very mixed bag only slowly reaching my tanking stuff - I wonder how the quality of the latter is weighted in the gear matching system).

Regarding the high time of BG PVP: one reason for the boom was surely the 2.0 epixx for free patch. But even before folks that were purely PVErs for 18 month did turn to PVP since there wasn't much new content beyond raiding. Which left depending on the raiding schedule 3-5 days where folks didn't know what to do. This is quite different now, you only PVP if you want to grind the PVP stuff or if you do it for the PVP itself.

Yes exactly. When the BGs were made cross server; but before the Honor system changed and the lure of 'easy epics' came. The whole BG thing (besides playing for loot) seems to have slowly gone down hill since.

Mem, we did get the same premade twice in a row though, so they got their invite as fast as we did

I don't believe that's possible Braids. IIRC one of the CMs was asked why the servers were divided into their battle groups so (possibly Tseric, I do not remember for certain), and he responded that it was based on the physical location of the server cluster. Considering the servers used to be segregated by time zone, I would not be surprised at this.