But should people who run premades late at night or early in the morning be likewise punished because there's few or no other premades running at the time?
Yeah, I suppose the premades would face possible queue times if other premades weren't queuing up. Blizzard might have to come up with some kind of hybrid system between the current matchmaking system and a uniform premade/premade PuG/PuG system.
You can't simplify it to say "premade vs. premade, pug vs. pug", because what happens when a group of 9 joins the queue? Do they get thrown in with the premades or the pugs? If they get thrown in with the premades, how is the 10th slot filled? Answer: with a pug. Then the pug says, "Hey, I thought I joined the pug queue!"
Where do you draw the line with the premade vs. pug stuff anyway? Is a group of 2 a premade?
A few people have expressed their ideas on how to improve battlegrounds, so here are mine:
1) Put everyone in the same queue pool, both Horde and Alliance, and when you join the BG, you start on a random team. For lore and ease of telling who's a teammate and who isn't, give an illusion buff of the proper faction, similiar to Old Hillsbrad Human Illusion. For example, if I'm a Night Elf and I get assigned to the horde team, I'm Illusion: Troll for the duration of the game. Arena communication system would be in play -- you can only interact / speak with your team and for the duration of the game, you can understand either faction (again, only on your team).
2) Two different queue's: Solo Join and Join as Group. With the above change, queue times are no longer a concern with spliting solo queue's away from group queue's. In this setup, I do see problem of if a game is for example 10 vs 9, you can't get that last slot filled because solo queue'ers aren't eligible for your "join as group" games, but I'm willing to write that off as an acceptable risk.
3) Remove the ability to multi-queue BG's. Again, change #1 above fixes the potential queue wait problems with this, because it completely removes the over-represented faction from having to wait for opponents.
Now, in my mind, this would fix virtually every problem with today's BG system. You completely eliminate queue delays, which allows us to have solo join only BG's. You fix the problem of "Alliance just don't even try anymore in AV" or "Horde lose every PUG AB" etc because everyone gets mixed and matched with everyone else, so it's impossible to set a win or loss trend. The only problem I see with this is hard-core lore fanatics saying "But that's just not Warcraft, Horde and Alliance hate each other!!!" and to that I say, I don't care, I want a functioning, balanced, fun PvP system.
You can't simplify it to say "premade vs. premade, pug vs. pug", because what happens when a group of 9 joins the queue? Do they get thrown in with the premades or the pugs? If they get thrown in with the premades, how is the 10th slot filled? Answer: with a pug. Then the pug says, "Hey, I thought I joined the pug queue!"
Where do you draw the line with the premade vs. pug stuff anyway? Is a group of 2 a premade?
You draw the line at a set number of pugs. For instance you define a premade as 6 or more people for a 15 man BG. you then set a hard cap of 2 pugs to start a BG and a max of 4 pugs after the game starts. If you have 4 pugs and a guy in a premade leaves you don't get a replacement. If the BG drops below maybe 12 or 13 people on a side you end the game and award both sides one or two tokens and what ever honor they have already earned. It really wouldn't be that hard to put in place.
Also nothing is stopping blizzard from adjusting the rules based on how busy the queue is. IF you've got 40 ABs running the rules on the AB queue applay hard and fast and a preform will never be matched with a pug. You've got 5 games going on a battle group and the rules relax to their current state.
Want to see people start defending and playing to win?
Change things so that only the winning side gets any honor for their HKs. Losers get nothing, much like life.
As the battle goes on your HK total rises. The stakes get higher and higher. People CARE about winning.
This will reward coordination and defensive play. Pre-mades will no longer steam-roll anybody. There will be a trend towards cooperation and strategic play.
From what I've seen in some games.... That wouldn't work. You're missing one important foundation. If winning is the only thing, people will only play if they can win. Trying to win won't be enough.
Therefore they stop playing, and, oh, look, your queue times are completely messed up. You may get more premades versus premades. Although, I suspect you may also get more queue shifting. After all, the moment you decide you can't win, the quicker you _should_ /afk, wait out the debuff and try a new game.
Rewarding people for winning is good. You also have to reward people for trying. (Rewarding for attending is a poor second. But if you can't figure out 'trying', it's maybe the best alternative). After all in order to have winners, you have to have losers as well. Why should they queue?
I think your proposal would be better for a smaller group. The ones that are already winning. Everyone else will be having a worse time. And I suspect even the winners might be annoyed with the change in queue time.
The real root of the problem here is that there's no reason for anyone to do battlegrounds other than the most honor they can possible get in the fastest amount of time. Sure it may be "rewarding" to have a competitive game against another group of players, but I highly doubt your team feels that way. There can be no fix to battlegrounds until there is an incentive to play a competitive game as opposed to quickly winning and collecting your honor.
Possibly a multiplier on the total honor for the battleground based on certain time intervals?
ie: (keep in mind, it's been so long since I've had to do a battleground that I'm not familiar with actual honor amounts gained...so for this idea keep that in mind)
15 man group 5 caps 15 man pug: 100 honor, ~5 minutes
15 man group 3 caps 15 man group: 500 honor, ~25 minutes
15 man pug 3 caps 15 man pug: 500 honor, ~25 minutes
In the end, it boils out to the same amount of honor, and you can actually play the game it was meant to be played: competively.
The real root of the problem here is that there's no reason for anyone to do battlegrounds other than the most honor they can possible get in the fastest amount of time. Sure it may be "rewarding" to have a competitive game against another group of players, but I highly doubt your team feels that way. There can be no fix to battlegrounds until there is an incentive to play a competitive game as opposed to quickly winning and collecting your honor.
Possibly a multiplier on the total honor for the battleground based on certain time intervals?
ie: (keep in mind, it's been so long since I've had to do a battleground that I'm not familiar with actual honor amounts gained...so for this idea keep that in mind)
15 man group 5 caps 15 man pug: 100 honor, ~5 minutes
15 man group 3 caps 15 man group: 500 honor, ~25 minutes
15 man pug 3 caps 15 man pug: 500 honor, ~25 minutes
In the end, it boils out to the same amount of honor, and you can actually play the game it was meant to be played: competively.
The problem with that is it discourages trying to win quickly. Assuming you have two evenly matched teams(if they played 100 games they'd each win ~50), and a competitive game, if one team ends up just doing really well and outplaying the other on one game, they should get more honor/minute than the other team. Of course, the only real way to measure "outplay" is "time to win", so you can do the same honor and just count on the earlier time.
Maybe the extra marks of honor earned early make enough difference (with the new repeatable turn-in)
Maybe it shouldn't be linear. A 5 minute game is 100 honor, a 25 minute game is 300 honor.
Or maybe, as someone suggested in another topic, you could do a ranking system like arenas, and reward arena points outside the honor. Obviously, for people at arena point cap, this doesn't do as much, but for everyone else it provides additional incentive to win, and more competitive games reward more highly because you're closer in rank.
With the new absolute premade matching system, perhaps the extra honor concept would become more viable. If you can guarantee a premade vs premade match, why not make them provide 1.5x or 2x the honor gain? This would encourage people to queue in premades and prevent the 30-45 minute queue times that premade groups are currently suffering. Perhaps this might encourage so called 'pugmades' because of the lure of extra honor, but getting rolled by the real premades would probably make that a less than viable option.
You can't simplify it to say "premade vs. premade, pug vs. pug", because what happens when a group of 9 joins the queue? Do they get thrown in with the premades or the pugs? If they get thrown in with the premades, how is the 10th slot filled? Answer: with a pug. Then the pug says, "Hey, I thought I joined the pug queue!"
Where do you draw the line with the premade vs. pug stuff anyway? Is a group of 2 a premade?
At the moment it seems that any RAID is a considered a premade.
We queued with 6, waited 8 mins (instead of the <1 min given), then requed waited 20 mins (wtill < 1 min queue accordign to blizz) gave up, tossed one from our group signed again as a party and got in the game in mere seconds.
Didn't want to test what a 5man raid would do though.
A group of 5 can definitely turn the tides immensely if played well if they are in a pug game. If they play well together, ie arena, they can take on probably 2:1 if defending a node. Pre 2.4 I seen groups like this and get worried, sometimes it was warranted, other times it was just a fluke. None the less, anything more than 5 should be considered premade, not sure about less, but definitely more than 5.
So you think one BG should reward more honor than another in general? So what is the incentive to do different BGs? You don't think Pre-made vs Pre-made should award the best honor/hr? So what is the incentive to organize/fight good teams?
There already is a system for better rewards for organized teams, its called Arena. BGs are for casual players. Unfortunately, Blizzard also requires Arena players to farm 200k+ honor for their Vindicator items as a rite of passage for Arena competitiveness.
Everyone should get relatively decent rewards, even PuGs, for their time in BGs, because that is the primary audience. If only the winners got honor for their kills or some of the other suggestions here were implemented, the only games you would ever find in BGs were premade vs. premade.
The reward for organizing your premade typically is you get to stomp the PuGs for great honor/hr. Premades don't need additional rewards. For those people that truly want to pit their 10man or 15man premades against others, ask Blizzard for 10 on 10 or 15 on 15 Arena, that would be a more reasonable suggestion.
Except your system wouldn't rewards players for playing 'right', it rewards them for close games. To my mind, playing 'right' means that your team plays to the best of its ability to achieve a win as quickly as possible.
In a match between equally geared premades, if one team wins by a large margin by virtue of better teamwork and individual skills then surely that winning team should be rewarded with extra honor for such an outstanding performance? Instead your system would actually penalise them for playing so well.
I think you're imagining an incentive for the winning side. I think the side that needs to be better rewarded for a close game is the losing side. They're the ones whose incentives need adjusting. Currently, if one side is as you say playing right, it is better for the losing side to give up, and that is what should be addressed, imo.
So in other words, let the skilled teams make more honor for a blowout, but let the losers make keeping it competitive worth it as compared to trying to hasten the defeat to queue again.
I like the idea of an "Arenaground" mixture of arena combat and battleground combat.
What if there was an arena you could queue for where you could be matched up against the same faction? Everything would still award honorable kills, and it would be the "Blue" team versus the "Red" team or whatever. Not only would you have a more interesting time fighting different enemies, stakes would be much higher because individual deaths would be much more devastating... Once you die, you're out for the count, death-match style.
See I don't think I would want a 1 death bg at all.
This is most likely class envy speaking, but I feel like my classes strength in BGs is that I can usually survive and hold off a zerg until help arrives. Be that a call from across the map, or a graveyard re-spawn. Its hard to remove a paladin flag defender in less than 30 seconds if they don't want to be moved.
There is a certain amount of strategy (cc the graveyard, ninjaing flags, pushing the front lines, suicide AoEing and other things) that make the bgs different than arenas.
I would love "rated" bgs, or mixed team bgs, but to have 1 death bgs I think would hurt more than help.
03/15/08, 6:10 PM
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