It might be worth stopping to pretend this is a real social game, if most of the content is for solo players. The premade players are not the majority, the majority are solo players. Is there a big price to pay for improving the quality of the game if a small fraction of the players wait longer? So far, a significant part of the players suffer from the actions of the minority. And here on the forum they constantly defend this ability to destroy casuals. According premade players they prefer competition anyway)

 

Make it possible to choose for solo players, as suggested above. If they want to play without groups, then let them play. If it turns out, that there are very few people, who want to play with premades, then the solo players majority satisfied with the current situation is a fiction.

You can't have it both ways. Either premades are frequent in which case a lot of players are in premades or premades are the tiny minority in which case this is also a tiny problem. Choose one.

You're not talking about making them "wait longer" like the queue will be 10 min longer before a pop. You're talking about premades not being able to get any pops at all outside of a tiny window, every day, just like group ranked.

There are not so many of them, but the negative impact is large. With one premade 12 people in the game, assuming all other solos. So 2-3 premades can simply destroy the q. And we take into account that they can either get against each other or in the same team. Or not meet at all. Solo players will find themselves in games with premades one way or another, especially if they have already come across a premade and immediately started searching for a new game.

If the search for premades slows down significantly, they can try to convince players in the fleet to create their premades, as they do on the forum. The failure of group ranked arenas is the result of the attitude of the pvp community. But many still say that BW killed the popular (lul) ranked mode 8 x 8.

You can't have it both ways. Either premades are frequent in which case a lot of players are in premades or premades are the tiny minority in which case this is also a tiny problem. Choose one.

 

You're not talking about making them "wait longer" like the queue will be 10 min longer before a pop. You're talking about premades not being able to get any pops at all outside of a tiny window, every day, just like group ranked.

it's rare on SF that there's only one premade in the queue. the only exception to this rule is very late night when there aren't even enough players to fill a WZ, and only arenas pop.

imo, the biggest problem with premades in 6.x is class stacking. there's nothing you can really do about 3+ ops opening on you. bear in mind they can just mezz your nearby teammates before they open, so it's not as if you're just a fool running around solo on the map. hell, 2 ops opening on you can lock you down w/o white bar just by alternating there root that doesn't let you turn with a stun. this is a huge problem in WZs b/c unlike arenas, CDs don't reset when you die. there are good reasons for this, b/c you respawn immediately. but you might as well run and hide for 1-2 mins after you've exhausted your DCDs and died. 2 PTs is even worse. and just one PT with a pocket healer and guard is a god amongst mortals in regs. thankfully there aren't a lot of PTs vis-a-vis ops, sins, sorcs, mercs in regs. cuz as bad as the op armies are, I imagine the PTs would literally kill the queue.

however, premades with trinity comps are the epitome of playing the game as intended. premades focusing down single targets are doing exactly what they should be doing and are a role model for everyone else in the WZ. that they use that ability for TDM rather than objectives...well...ok. complain about that. but cooperating to focus down targets one at a time is exactly the way everyone should play the game.

This topic gets made every month and every month it gets ignored. This is an MMO. Creating any kind of barrier or penalty because people want to play the game with their friends would be the end of the game. Yes, it sucks when premades are trolling PUGs. Unfortunately, this is not WoW. Come back next month and this game will still not be WoW. World of Warcraft can afford to segregate its communities behind several walls and no one would notice because it has a gigantic population. SWTOR has a significantly smaller population. If premades could only fight other premades, then for people playing with their friends, regs would pop about as often as group ranked (not very often). The end.

There is a middle ground and that is to make premades wait until another premade is in the queue. The queue isn't segregated into separate premade & PUG queues but matchmaking prioritizes balance over fast pops. That is the way it should work quite frankly. If they aren't getting a pop they can spam "Q premade Regs" just like how solo Ranked matches form. The tradeoff for queuing premade should be maybe having to wait 10 minutes instead of 30 seconds for the next pop.

There is no reason for anyone to be against that except for preferring matches to be imbalanced. Premades aren't so rare that anyone would sit in a queue without pops. 10 minutes should probably be the maximum limit as well. After that it just pops even if the teams aren't balanced.

it

however, premades with trinity comps are the epitome of playing the game as intended. premades focusing down single targets are doing exactly what they should be doing and are a role model for everyone else in the WZ. that they use that ability for TDM rather than objectives...well...ok. complain about that. but cooperating to focus down targets one at a time is exactly the way everyone should play the game.

That is all true but PUG teams for whatever reason can never match a premade one for coordination, even if the PUG team has 3 or 4 solid players. There's just some weird psychological barrier where people fail to cooperate if the other 7 players are strangers that they didn't group with prior. As a PUG player you can even mark targets that should be focused or call it out in Ops at the start of a match and more often than not people still don't focus the right targets even if it is an arena where failing to do so usually means a loss. Or they fail to suggest an alternative target for that matter if they disagree. In arenas you'll often get 4 people on 4 different targets or in WZs frustration like being the only one on an unguarded and marked healer, but nets, CC, and knockbacks from teammates limit your pressure while they get some breathing room to freecast, because you don't have a teammate applying pressure while you're eating that CC or root.

Invite some of those people to a team, or they invite you, and all of a sudden cooperation starts happening. It's weird.

Happens with PVE too.

The obvious question to that is why would people who like to pug, keep on queuing for your personal gratification?

The answer is they don’t. Many stop playing which drives player numbers down.

 

So what are you going to do when you’ve got no pugs to stomp and only ranked premades to play against who then stomp you into the ground every match. How much fun is that going to be when you become their personal gratification tool?

 

Your last statement is the sort of justification that bullies make when they pick on weaker people. Are you a bully in the real world too because it makes you feel good?

^^^^

This, in a nutshell, I use to PvP religiously on a daily basis. I'd PUG and I'd be a Premade leader. Over time the players in the PvP warzones became very toxic, to the point where most decent player (Myself included) began to leave not wanting to deal with the headache. It is very sad that bullies are can't be reported for their antics.

I am not for pug stomping, Not at all. A fair and close-score match is where it is at IMHO. Fights that you have to earn. When I am in a group and we are all in Discord, we win 90+% of our matches. If I am solo, needless to say, with backfill ...that number drops drastically. Not only are pug players dealing with loses from close WZs they also contend with backfills into a 4 to nothing Hutball with the enemy team just passing the ball between themselves at mid and focusing down players for the next 5 mins... You leave? Well no warzone for you for the next 15 mins. You stay? Get farmed repeatedly while people drop flags on you for 5 mins.

Either way you lost at least five to 15 mins. Guaranteed as soon as you enter.

Premades are a huge advantage - unless you are all scrubs, or run up on on equally/better skilled and coordinated team, you will/should win nearly every match.

I am not for pug stomping, Not at all. A fair and close-score match is where it is at IMHO. Fights that you have to earn. When I am in a group and we are all in Discord, we win 90+% of our matches. If I am solo, needless to say, with backfill ...that number drops drastically. Not only are pug players dealing with loses from close WZs they also contend with backfills into a 4 to nothing Hutball with the enemy team just passing the ball between themselves at mid and focusing down players for the next 5 mins... You leave? Well no warzone for you for the next 15 mins. You stay? Get farmed repeatedly while people drop flags on you for 5 mins.

 

Either way you lost at least five to 15 mins. Guaranteed as soon as you enter.

 

Premades are a huge advantage - unless you are all scrubs, or run up on on equally/better skilled and coordinated team, you will/should win nearly every match.

Even the scrub premade has a built in advantage. Put four people on a premade team that don't know when to use their defensive abilities at the right time, are bad at positioning, and using offensive abilities in a subpar manner...and they'll still win a kill battle versus 95% of PUG teams if they just manage to focus the same targets at the same time. They'll spend the entire match getting mismatches and deleting people in 4v1 matchups because the target PUG players aren't going to get much if any support.

Premading is basically EZ mode which is why there are some players who won't enter a warzone without one.

I PUG & premade depending on my mood and who is on, so I can see the pluses & minuses from both sides. Premades shouldn't be removed from the queue because playing with friends is fun and should be an option in an MMO, but more should be done to balance teams.

It is hard to know what goes on under the hood but matchmaking seems to prioritize fast pops because even during peak hours when you have multiple premades in the queue, more often than not instead of facing off they'll usually be in separate warzones facing separate PUGs. You can see it through Who searches.

Math also tends to screw over the PUG players because while they'll get some matches with a premade on their team versus one without, the odds are greater than they'll be on the all PUG team. If you have 16 players in the queue and 4 are on a premade team, 8 of the remaining 12 are going to be on the all PUG team. Since most players queue for multiple warzones the way that will all shake out is that the PUG player in the queue is going to be against the premade most of the time. That maybe more than anything is probably why you get threads like this. People would probably accept the broken matchmaking as a fact of life if they had one bad match from it, but the people who create these threads have probably just come from half a dozen matches where it was a PUG team versus a premade.

That said sometimes salt leads people accuse to teams ofbeing premade that aren't as well. I know I've had trash talk thrown my way in Say about premading when in fact I was solo for that match. Sometimes you do get a couple random players thrown together that coordinate well.

There is a middle ground and that is to make premades wait until another premade is in the queue. The queue isn't segregated into separate premade & PUG queues but matchmaking prioritizes balance over fast pops. That is the way it should work quite frankly. If they aren't getting a pop they can spam "Q premade Regs" just like how solo Ranked matches form. The tradeoff for queuing premade should be maybe having to wait 10 minutes instead of 30 seconds for the next pop.

 

There is no reason for anyone to be against that except for preferring matches to be imbalanced. Premades aren't so rare that anyone would sit in a queue without pops. 10 minutes should probably be the maximum limit as well. After that it just pops even if the teams aren't balanced.

 

 

I suggested something like this last year too because the problem with the current system is you can have 6 premade’s in the queue system, but each one is in a seperate game full of pugs and not against each other.

It only makes sense for the queue to speed up or slow down its matchmaking priorities to aline the premades in the queue so they are placed against each other more often then not.

It could take it one step further and rate those premades so it tries to aline the better ones against each other and not on the same same team vs the weaker premades.

The ranked ELO system is supposed to do something like this for solo ranked. So they have the algorithms available to use.