great. whiners win again.

so either you queue solo and have a sucky PuG with 50% afkers, no teamplay and the oh so delightfull BG chat, or you take your friends who you would like to play with and have increased waiting time. great solution.

Great way to over-generalize and make grand assumptions. I PuG BG's all the time. And there is maybe 1% of AFK'ers (and they are dealt with) on average, BG chat is better than I've seen for the premades, I tell you.

I understand you are biased, but you are also mistaken, considerably, as to what PuG BG's are, at least from what I've seen.

A decreased chance of getting pug stomped by a premade seems like a good change to me. An increased chance of getting a challenging game for a premade also seems like a good change.

i only pug bg. and i hate it.

that s why i avoid BG's as much as possible.

now more than ever.


to elaborate : i dont realy pvp. i got me some items with my chars over the years, but these were mostly items which were usable for pve and easy to get. therefore i did some honor grinds, but nothing serious. the odd 20k honor here, 40k honor there... but i was never so into PvP that i would organise meself and get a premade.

The PuG's on my server are terrible. Alliance loose 95% of all the BG's except Alterac. If the daily pvp quest is anything else than alterac, dont even think about it. once you are 1-0 down in warsong or 100 - 50 behind in arathi people start leaving the groups, whining in BG chat, zerging around with no startegy whatsoever. the usual thing it seems. Those are he lvl 62 people in nohing but green gear of course. Those that usualy just sit in th ebase and share their endless knowledge with the rest of the BG. in caps.

If i were anything near serious about Pv this would anger me to no end. I could not imagine any other SERIOUS way to play BG's than with a premade group.

As it is now i dont see why someone serious about pvp would spend more than the time he needs for his non arena pvp items in a BG.


i'd rather have the possibility to choose how to go into a BG and also have the chance to get stomped by a premade from time to time than blizzard forcing me to play in a team of flamers, whiners, afkers, leechers and the rest of the scum you meet in my battlegroup in random BG's.

I'd rather a more fair and exciting BG, than either being part of a premade, or going up against a premade that just rolls through without a challenge to speak of.

well, seems you got your way then.

i know blizzard giving in to anything the casuals want is part of the huge success of WoW. from a business perspective, you cannot blame them ^^ still i feel a bit let down.

i am not even part of a premade. i dont spend hours a day inside the game any more. in fact i am more of a casual nowadays.

but i liked the option of doing things the serious way if you are serious about the game. Blizzard is more and more protecting the casuals from those who play WoW the serious way. Call them nerds or whatever. Blizzard does not like them.

How dare Blizz cater to the vast majority of their base?

I can understand not being happy about it, but premades will still be able to play, go do dailies while waiting in queue. If I wanted to play AV, i used to have a 1.5 to 2 hour wait.

While I am surprised they made the change, it makes complete sense from a business standpoint. Hopefully the premade waits won't be much mroe than 10min, cause I fully understand the annoyance of long wait times.

Report AFK'ers asap - while defending, if I am not being attacked, I always check for AFK'ers, report them and tell others to report them also. I get people to drop out constantly doing that because they either have to fight (which they don't want to do) so they leave to try to AFK somewhere else.

what i see normaly in my battlegroup is people getting reported, having the debuff which gives them no honor and no marks, but they dont notice it since they are afk and just hang around in the base WITH the debuff till the BG ends.

and yes, as i said, i understand that blizzard takes the wishes of the majority of their player base serious. for most of the 3 years i played the game so far, i belonged to the elitist minority that spent ay too much time in the game. That s why my point of view is till rather on their side.

since i started going to university and i have not so muhc time any more i think i ll be rather happy about the whole casual friendly aproach from blizzard. Still it makes me wonder... Since BC we have seen blizz changing the aproach. Probably due to the naxxramas desaster. I wonder where this will go. WoW was easier to play and more acessable than most other MMORPG's right from day one, and they soften it up more and more. I wonder how long the hardcore guilds like nihilum will have a motivation to keep playing this game.

not that blizzard ha to worry about some hardcore guys leaving. they make maybe 5% of the player population. but it is a good feeling to have them around, IMO.

They need to be careful and balance it, that is for sure. My view is it should be like this

Top Tier Raid Gear - Hardest to obtain, but clearly better than anything else
Top Season Arena Gear - Rated to obtain best pieces
Badge Gear/S1 Gear/Heroic Drops - High cost, but able to farm it if you want for good gear.
Instance Gear/Blue World Drops/0.5 PvP gear - Fairly easy to obtain, but not comparable to gear.

Raiders should, bar none, have the best gear.
Top Arena Players should be decked out in the best PvP gear
Not all Arena gear from current season should be purchasable - keep it elite, but you can get last seasons.
Then you can farm BG for S1 gear, farm instances for badge gear, and Heroics have good drops.

Then you have everything else...

Casuals can easily get some decent gear - that is a plus.
Very good players who are casuals or dedicated players can get even better gear
Dedicated and Good arena players can get top gear.
Dedicated and good Raiders get the best.

Tons of choices and levels for everyone to advance.

How is the way I like to play BG's not "serious"? How is it preventing you from being able to play Premades. It just prevents the moronic premades made specifically to exploit the PuGs.

I'm really going to say what I think here and probably get bashed for it.

I think the majority of crap being spewed in bg's comes from people who can't get along well enough to advance in a raiding guild.

The #1 problem in raiding guilds is the fact that people can't get along long enough to stay together.

People who arena/bg primarily are the ones I constantly read about bashing pve players because their "scripted" content is lame and easy even though most of them have never tried it at the higher end levels.

I'm not lumping everyone into this, but I don't know a single individual who primarily pvp's with very little pve who is a nice person that I'd like to speak to. All of them are very difficult to talk to and the majority of them are egotistical elitist jerks who think they are better at the game because they have learned how to chase people around posts better than the next guy and their arena rating is xxxx.

I think thats why you see the bg's full of crap.

Again, i'm not saying everyone because I BG from time to time to get an item I need here and there but its a selfish hostile environment full of whiners.

At least thats my perception, and as always I could be totally wrong.

It also depends highly on your battlegroup, time of day, etc.

When I mostly played Alliance (same battlegroup) I experienced much of rgirty speaks of.

I've noticed that much less now that I'm on the horde side. But peak times, right after school, it does get much worse. Had tons of whiners on last night in almost every BG I was in.

Generally though, (i tend to play 10-1am) at later times I run into very good groups who call incomings, scout and report and generally work together.

I've also found many raiders claim to be the real players.

Of course, both sides are wrong - No need to be elitist on either side, just be proud if you are doing a good job. That's all anyone can ask.

I run Arena/BG's, because quite honestly, I've been utterly and completely burned out on the very notion of Raiding for a very long time. Raiding to me, is about as appealing as gargling with razor blades, but not nearly as exciting. I did the whole "uber-raiding" thing before. I've been in "top end guilds" in MMOs before, which were pushing to be the first to down this, or first to do that. I've been in the kinds of guilds where it was raids every day, every hour of the day (it seemed), where there was considerable pressure to be available for the raids to help with the competing, the constant strive to be #1. It was fast-paced, there was always something to do, that's for sure. And, for the game I was in (EverQuest), I was someone that the raid leader wouldn't start the raid *unless* I was present, because I could guarantee every pull I made would be flawless. And I did this probably for... oh..... 2 years.

What did I see from that? Well, I was pretty much mandated to be in raids... really couldn't do anything else *but* raiding when I logged on with any of my characters... so I ended up making an alt nobody knew about. Raiding started getting less appealing to me, because I was always raiding. And when you do it that much, it burns you out something fierce. I saw the guild form into cliques... people grouping together/helping each other out at the exclusion of the rest of the guild. I saw people being brought into the guild because they were "good" at playing their class/filling their roles, but these were people who existed in the guild just to get loot, or to screw over/harass other members. I saw political lines form, the guild go through several splits and then merges as it continued to progress.

I saw my main die so much in EverQuest that he went *backwards* in levels. Mainly because I'd refuse to pull anything I wasn't certain I got right, and would rather take a fall and die than wipe the whole raid. And EQ had the wonderful XP penalty. It would be more like in WoW... having racked up ridiculous repair bills potentially rather than wiping the raid. I saw myself as not even being afforded the opportunity to improve my situation, get those levels back... because I was pressured to be part of the raid because I was so essential to the raid's success in the raid leader's eyes.

I saw the absolute worst in people come to the surface. I saw people manipulate and backstab each other... mostly over loot. Time and again, I would continue to see that. I'd see people get into HUGE arguments if the smallest thing was not flawlessly executed... and the tempers raised as time progressed -- the more we were raiding, the longer we were raiding, the more and more pronounced it would get. The game stopped being fun and was equivalent to work (stress-wise). There was nothing fun I derived from it. The whole "raiding" thing killed it for me... and eventually I dropped EQ and never looked back.

Even now, when I look at raiding in WoW... I shudder. It just is not appealing to me. When I see a raid instance, I'm not thinking to myself "I'll never get there", or "wow, I'd like to see that", or anything like that. What I have is a complete lack of interest whatsoever. It is so totally unappealing to me, words cannot even begin to express it. I've tried some of the raid instances in WoW before... I saw the beginning "warning signs" of the exact same kind of scenario forming as I had experienced in the past... and it made me write the whole thing off.

Now, it is not that I have a problem working together with people, it is not that I'm somehow not "uber" or "leet" enough to do the raiding, or that somehow I'm in any way inferior to the raiders. I just plain loathe raiding, and anything to do with it. The closest I get to it is battlegrounds.

At least with the battlegrounds, there are no strings attached. There is no having to deal with the same people day in and day out, and watching people who were once your friends transform into some bizarre dark version of those people, manipulating and stabbing each other over something going on with the raids.

Arena teams are small and manageable -- the matches over quickly, and they tend to be a lot of fun. Battlegrounds are the type I can jump in, help with them, and move on. Considering the time constraints I have any more to play WoW (which have been curtailed in the last year or so), even if I wanted to do raiding, I simply can't afford to allot the time to do them. Heck, I can't even guarantee I have the time for a 5-man dungeon, sometimes not even a battleground (many a BG I've had to drop because real life came up).

So... I do find it a bit.... elitist of people to suggest that those who arena or battleground "just don't have what it takes to raid". I understand what rgirty was saying, I'm just making it clear with this, that my reasons for not raiding are not like pretty much anyone else's reasons that I've ever met. And, my roommate doesn't care for raiding mainly because he's heard me talk about my experiences in the past with them.

And yes, I know WoW raiding and EQ raiding aren't the same mechanically, but quite honestly, the mechanics of the raids aren't what bother me. It is the human/social interaction that happens and disintegrates that I've seen happen time and again, that has made me revolted by the notion.