Removal of premade vs. premade priority

[Taco]

Hey,

so I read the Nost team removed a premade vs. premade matching priority ca. a week ago - https://twitter.com/NostalBegins/status ... 1873412096 .

Maybe I've just missed the discussion, but what was the rationale behind that?
And what's everyonce opinion & experience on this, good or bad change?

----------------------------

My opinion:


Generally, I think BGs are most fun when both parties are very similarly skilled and equipped; the pinnacle of PVP, imho, is winning a match, but just winning it by a tiny margin (as that usually means you really had to fight hard for the win, and narrow outcomes tend to be very exciting). Completeting crushing the enemy team might be fun once or twice, but tends to get boring after a while imho.
Same goes for losing - well, its actually never really fun, but if you lose a match that felt fair and balanced, fair enough. If you're just being stomped into the ground, it's simply demotivating (and usually ends up in some people ragequitting while the other ones yell around in the chat).

In short, in terms of fun: 1) Winning > Losing (duh), and 2) narrow results > landslide outcomes (imho).
So ideally, an ideal match for me would be two similarly skilled teams facing each other, and on average, the win/loss ratio should be somewhere around 50%.

My experience may be rather limitted as I've just recently turned 60, so I don't have much of a comparison to how it was before this change.
I have, however, been playing a ton of BGs (AB) this week. I haven't counted specifically, but I'd guess around a third of them was versus premades. And, not too surprisingly, not a single one of them was won, the vast majority of them could probably best be descripbed as "being hopelessly stomped" where the premade won 4:1 (sometimes 5:0, in rare cases with "low rank premades" we could hold 3:2 for at least some time before losing).

So what's the outcome?

- For random groups, its rather demotivating. You face many matches with little realistic chance of winning, often meaning you queue up for 20-30 minutes, get stomped, and re-queue for another 20-30 minutes hoping to face a random team next time
- Assuming something like 1/3 of matches being vs premades means ~1/3 of the matches are essentially outright lost. 2/3 of the matches would be "fair", i.e. against other non-premade teams, so let's assume you'd win 50% of these. That would imply that by queueing in random groups, you'd lose 2/3 of all your matches. Not really a great outcome, given nobody particularly likes losing and a fair outcome should be closer to 50% than to 2/3.
- Not sure if premades get a ton of enjoyment out of decimating random groups anymore? In terms of honor, I don't think there's much of a benefit for them - sure, they'll get some very easy honor out of these matches, but their main competitors for the higher ranks are other premades, and they get that easy honor just as well. So your relative standing probably won't improve much.

TL;DR: I think matching premades vs. other premades where possible actually makes more sense; certainly more enjoyable for randoms, while being rather neutral for premades themselves. But maybe there are some points that I'm missing?

[Nano]

It was removed because the mechanic that was implemented did not prevent widespread abuse of the honor system like it was intended. Currently the queue system is the exact same as it was during vanilla retail and is unlikely to be changed again.

If you'd like to pursue more winning games, perhaps you should find some friends and organize yourselves together to queue.