For the last few weeks I have had maybe 3-5 AB & EoTS matches out of at least a hundred total in which an opposing organized group stayed to play vs. mine. Usually they take the next queue out and leave the incoming pugs with a hopeless situation. Stormstrike BG.

This is good honor, but my entire team (mostly old-timers) was disgusted. We did the Honor grind back in the day, and horrible as that was at least the PvP vs other honor farming teams was great. Now you can farm PuGs on a normal schedule, but it's boring as hell.

Is this happening everywhere? I've only noticed it since the last AV patch discouraged our Alliance and AV queues soared to 2+ hrs. For the first time I can remember on our server, Horde starting forming WSG/AB groups as regularly as instance groups.

Happens on Bloodlust as well, I was on my mage one day, queued for EOTS, to find myself on a premade Blackrock team, I asked where they wanted me, they said, "oh, we're leaving.", and within a few minutes, they were gone. Over the past few weeks I'd say the rate of desertion of a premade when facing another premade was probably a little over half, based on my own experiences when facing premades with my own. Every once in awhile, its nice to get a pug to roll, but I'd rather have the challenge of a premade, but then again, a good amount of the premades I've run into are the trade channel teams that just get rolled in the same amount of time as a pug.

Most people just want honor and a long game against another premade isn't good honor. They'll multi-queue and hop until they get a PUG, typically. That's the inevitable result of the honor system that Blizzard has given us. For most people in BGs, the only thing that has mattered for a long time is honor/hr.

Praetorian pretty much hit it on the head. If more people did BG's for fun rather than the honor grind you might see less of queue bouncing. If you do BG's solo or with 1 or 2 friends, going up against a big pre-made is usually a waste of time with very low honor / hr, so I am not surprised that this goes on.

I suppose we could go into the whole "I wish Blizzard would make BG's fun or worthwhile etc" thing but its early in the morning (at least for me) and we know thats not going to happen.

You don't even need to be in a premade to do that. I'm currently gearing up my Druid alt in pvp stuff (zzz, halfway now) and I just queue for AV and when I get in I queue WSG & AB. If I zone into AV and it's a premade, I just hop the first queue I get. If I do get into a shitty AB/WSG game, I queue up for EOTS/AB/WSG depending on what bg I'm currently in with another character parked at the battlemasters. It's lame, boring and annoying to do, but all that matters is how much honor/hr I can accumulate while I torture myself with this grind.

But all of that has been touched on in way too many threads already. To answer your question, it's happening in this BG too.

Karma usually hits me with BG queueing where the last available queue ends up being a worse BG than the last one I was in.

Well for almost everyone, AV is lower honor/hr than it used to be. In some cases (e.g., if you're on Stormstrike, Bloodlust, or a similar BG with a 90% Horde win ratio and 2hr Horde queues) drastically lower. That means more people who'd otherwise solo-queue AV are looking for premades. More premades in general in turn encourages the development of still more premades, as it makes pugging less and less viable. Solo-queuing and running into premade after premade is neither profitable nor very fun. But most people are still terrible. Being in a premade doesn't make terrible players less bad. A lot of premades are formed in trade channel ("LFM AB premade, 200 resil min" and such) and are awful. I've been in a pug that held 4 nodes for the whole game against a premade in AB before. Now, awful premades really exist solely to prey on awful pugs, and they know that they're probably going to lose against most other teams. This further encourages BG-hopping. Better to queue-hop for 15min and then stomp a pug in 5 minutes than to spend 25 minutes grinding out a stalemate against another premade.

I was solo-queueing this weekend. I won about 5% of my games (with maybe 30 played). At some point I just quit trying to solo and did other things during my 2.5hr AV wait.

With so many premades and queue hopping it is no longer worth my time to solo in BG's anymore (other than getting the daily done). I hope the alliance queue times go straight to hell.

I routinely queue-hop, usually joining AV + the daily. If the daily isn't going well, I hop into AV. No point sticking around when you zone in and Alliance is already 500 points or a flag cap behind.

It really depends on what the organized group is trying to accomplish. The 'organized' trade channel groups are looking for honor. They are often terrible (We've 6 minute capped countless 'organized' groups and I am sure everyone here has had countless wins against these 'organized' groups with a pug), however there are some groups that have an assortment of mains and pvp alts where the goal is to get honour for the alts. Depending on the success and confidence of the mains those groups are interested in playing against other premades.

This happens on the Shadowburn battlegroup as well, and I'm sure on many others. I typically run with well geared players so we do try and fight some of the other premade groups. Last weekend was Warsong Gulch, and when playing against another premade it wasn't fun because it would result in an hour long match (turtle). On battlegrounds such as Eye of the Storm and Arathi Basin premade vs premade is much more fun as there are no stalemates. But as many have stated in this thread, most premades are all about maximum honor/hr.

I'll bounce out of any BG vs a premade when I'm solo queuing. AV queues are still fairly immediate for horde in our BG, so I just wait for the daily BG to pop, and queue AV before joining. The worst are the premades that are barely better than your pug, and it takes them like 20 minutes to beat you.

Yeah I guess I was wondering if it wasn't as bad in BGs where AV queues are still reasonable, since that's where most new toons would go to grind honor.

I usually run in a group with a mix of well-geared old-timers and newer guys still gearing. Matches were mostly vs PuGs a month ago but at least every couple of nights we'd get a well-geared Alliance group that obviously didn't feel queue-jumping was necessary. I wonder if we we'd still get those matches if we were all fully geared. From the perspective of the gear-matching system, I'd guess we don't look that different from the average trade chat pre-made; our queues are probably overflowing with those right now.

We did some guild organized WSG this past weekend and out of the 20 or so games played probably 15 organized groups (>8 from the same server) and I think only 1 of them left. I would say this practice is not as widespread on Rampage as other people are reporting. Now of those 14 teams only about 1/3 of the teams we played were particularly well organized despite all being from the same server. Many seemed to be an organization of alts looking to gear up their druids and warriors.

I have said it before. It is unfathomable to me how the MMO for the masses could allow a situation where the casual gamer loses 95% of his games go on for so long without doing anything about it. And it is not like it is fun for the premades either.

On Bloodlust, Horde seems to have the longer queues so in the game of queue chicken Alliance always leaves first, meaning that completely aweful groups get free wins because by the time the game has refilled with PuGs we already hold the map. Most groups don't even bother with vent and virtually none have a strategy beyond "group X zerg node Y".

It's crap for both sides on Bloodlust for what it's worth. I played 21 preforms straight on bloodlust while trying to get my EoTS daily quest done. Number 22 was a pug but of course we lost that one. It ridiculously frustrating to see blizzard ignore this huge hole in the deserter debuff system when it seems so easy to fix.

This happens all the time on Bloodlust. Whenever we ran as a premade, alliance premades would queue out and we'd be left with random alliance people joining mid-game (and the same thing happens for solo-queueing horde). I try queueing eots/ab and it's 95% premades. In fact most of the time it's just me idling through alliance premades while I wait for the AV queue. For someone who enjoys BGs it's not fun at all.

It's something that Blizzard is going to have to change so that it's not desirable. (eg. ONLY premades v premades)

I gotta agree with this. I did 80% of the honour grind for season 3 at the end of season 2, before 2.3 and the AV changes. I found it pretty easy and pugged the entire thing. I practiced playing my druid and got comfortable playing him in PvP. The last time that I'd grinded honour was back when alliance steamrolled AV on bloodlust, and of course at that time I was playing my alliance paladin, and found it equally easy. Basically I found that in general, I enjoyed BG PvP. At the very worst it was bareable.

Recently I've been abusing my warlock 2s partner to grind more resiliance (after discovering that he had around 226 or something). He's been doing a lot of BGs, generally premades. When I have time I help him out and I'm stunned at how much BGs have changed in the ~2-3 months since I last played them. AV queues have gone from 16 minutes to 2 hours. Premades are everywhere, most of them no better than your average pug. The few non-premades are horrible, made up of the worst of the worst of puggers.

From what I've seen, premades seem to thrive on a purely psychological effect. People see a premade and queue-hop. Premade from random-server sees premade from Blackrock and queue-hops. I don't BG often, only when I've got time and my 2s partner is as well, but having played maybe 40 AB / EotS matches in various premade groups, we only had one team stay against us, and they were obviously confident enough in their own abilities to take us on (they 5 capped us, hah!). As people have said it's a system geared towards maximum honour/hour, but it seems to completely ignore fun (my idea of it anyway).

Right now I'm of the opinion that the BG systems needs a very large overhaul. If it doesn't change before season 4 then I'll just be keeping my vindicator's gear. Not worth the pain for a 2% increase in stats.

It's a little silly to call this "cowardly" I think, it's just min/maxing at it's most flagrant. Gurgthock's post higher in the thread neatly sums up the situation: people want the the most honor per hour, and though a hard-fought 30 minute AB that ends up being 2000-1980 is definitely a lot of fun, it's not why people do it.

The structure of PvP has become something like this: grind battlegrounds, buy S1 arena loot, enter arenas, and compete. For most people, it's the best/only viable way to gear alts (my 5/5 S1 warrior is testament to this), so they end up solo queueing. I grinded out over 200k honor in the time it's taken to accumulate another 20k on my warrior, simply because the BG situation on Bloodlust has deteriorated to the point that if you're not in a premade or you're not in AV, you aren't going to win. It's a waste of time and everybody knows it, the end result being that nobody tries.

I still primarily solo queue my toons on Bloodlust, because I still assume organized groups want people who are there to play multiple games, and I really just want to knock off a BG daily per day and go back to PvE stuff.

In the past couple weeks, easily 90% of my games have had me & other pugs arrive after the game has started and the original horde group has Queue dodged. The silver lining is that if enough horde pugs get in the game before too big of a score has been run up, a few "pre-mades" are still beatable, and in those 10% pug v. pug games, Bloodlust horde has a very strong track record (in my experience).

It's definitely reaching a point, however, where I would clearly be spending less time by simply joining a trade channel group and staying for 6-8 games to not be a total "thx for the daily! bye!" jerk. It's maddening, because the average number of games required to get the daily done if only matched against other pugs (as the matching system supposedly was designed to do) should be closer to the 1.5-2 games mark.

In my opinion, the best and easiest solution would be to reduce the honor required to buy honor bought items. New 70s basically need 75-100k honor to even compete in arena games. The majority of the players who are doing BGs for honor/hours are those same people who are trying to gear up enough to compete in arenas. If the amount of honor needed to buy items was reduced, it would cut down on the amount of time needed to gear up, thus, getting the people who are in BGs for the honor/hr out of them faster.

What makes it even worse is that most premades these days have a resilience requirement, shutting out the new players and essentially turning them off of PvP. I see that myself. On my druid I can get a premade in seconds at will. "/2 415 resilience 1720 healing resto druid LF premade. The line forms to the left." On my 80 resilience mage, not so much. At least I can make tables so that has gotten me some groups. But the situation for a newly minted 70 is absolutely, completely, utterly 100% awful right now.