On premade frequency

[accel]

(Everything below is for the EU.)

I only started pvping on level 20 recently. Naturally, I was wary of premades and my low-tech plan to counter them was to have equal toons on both sides.

To learn which side I should be queuing on to minimize the chance of being roflstomped, I kept notes. I was queueing strictly solo, always on the Alliance. In each game, I would check the number of level 20 twinks on each side and try to detect premades. It is possible I failed to detect some, but in reality you quickly start seeing them because you see the same people together over and over. Sometimes people end up in the same bg even if they queued separately, eg, this happened to me a couple of times, but frankly, this does not matter, because if you then play together in a bg, you might as well have been a premade (sure, no voice, but coordination makes a big difference even without voice).

The results are:

60 bgs total, 35:25 in favor of the Alliance.
Bgs with Alliance premades: 6 (two times a party of three, rest a party of two).
Bgs with Horde premades: 11 (ten of those a full five-man party, once a party of three from same server and same guild).

I was never roflstomped when the Horde had no premade. I guess that's one of the main perks of being a twink. I did lose games when the Horde had an equal number of twinks or less. That happened because I could have played better myself, plus because that's random bgs and so people do random stuff for no reason (nobody should be surprised at 5 people capping a node then all mounting up and running off, leaving it undefended).

There were two games when both sides had a premade, we lost both because the Horde had a five-man party vs a two-man party for the Alliance.

When the Alliance had a premade and the Horde didn't, the Alliance won. However the worst roflstomps were when the Horde had no twinks and the non-twinks on the Alliance didn't do stupid things like giving free kills.

All in all, I am not terribly surprised by the results. It seems that the Alliance have more twinks in general, they don't feel like they have to premade, but the Horde do. I will finish gearing up my Horde character and will try to queue on him as well, maybe the picture will look different then (my humble expectation is that the winrate will move slightly due to my small contribution, we'll see).

 

[Billyballo]

Hi, since you put effort into this I feel it could be worth discussing.

First of all, I feel you should considerer different queue times, number of total players queuing per faction and number of simultaneous bgs going on in a specific time.

I'll make an example why this is important: if you have 30 ally and 15 horde queuing (considereing levelers), so only 1 bg going on, you will get all solo horde twinks together in the same bg and statistically just half of ally twinks. But that's not a premade, and it actually matters, not only for coordination and class composition (premades normally always have a healer or a good hybrid, solo don't)- if 2 bgs were going on, you would have solo horde twinks split into both bgs, if a premade was queing up, you would have all horde twinks in 1 bgs and no twinks in the other, creating a huge imbalance in both (this is among the problems of premades at certains levels of queuing players).

Second, I have some problems on how you determine premades -

Sometimes people end up in the same bg even if they queued separately, eg, this happened to me a couple of times, but frankly, this does not matter, because if you then play together in a bg, you might as well have been a premade (sure, no voice, but coordination makes a big difference even without voice).

this way it seems than having 2 twinks in the same bg counts as a premade, so every bg were you had at least 1 twink with you counted as a premade, but your numbers don't seem to support this.

Third -

I was never roflstomped when the Horde had no premade. I guess that's one of the main perks of being a twink.

To answer this, I would say that's one of the main perks of being ally given ally normally better average team, both as you said by number of twinks and normally better levelers- on ally I can play a fire mage no problem and stomp horde untill a heavy premade comes and stomps me (this is why I quickly went back horde, found it very boring and with way too long queues).

Fourth: when considering which factions feels he needs to premade more, you have to consider that RuAlly and RuHorde are totally different beasts (and I don't mean the twinks premading with eu, I mean the full realm teams) - when playing ally I never lost againts RuHorde (worst was a wsg tie, couldn't both score and return), RuAlly will give you a run for your money every time, even when not twink heavy.

Final: depending on when you ran this tests, I have to mention that while leveling my new chars this 2 weeks after I subbed I found lvl 20 ally premades in the 10-19 bracket (lol really guys wtf)

 

[accel]

First of all, I feel you should considerer different queue times, number of total players queuing per faction and number of simultaneous bgs going on in a specific time.

I agree this is important. I don't currently know what were the queue times on each side for each bg (they have to be measured at the same moment and I didn't do that). When I finish a Horde twink, I'll repeat the test and will do these measurements as well.

this way it seems than having 2 twinks in the same bg counts as a premade, so every bg were you had at least 1 twink with you counted as a premade, but your numbers don't seem to support this.

I didn't count cases of other twinks with myself in the same bg as a premade because I was not playing off them, we were each doing our own thing.

Will check out RuAlliance, only saw RuHorde so far. They did have some twinks, but not many, indeed. Maybe RuAlliance have more as you say. If they do, that could be a big factor because I could never see them, as I queue from a EN server and teams for small bgs are not mixed between language groups.

Final: depending on when you ran this tests, I have to mention that while leveling my new chars this 2 weeks after I subbed I found lvl 20 ally premades in the 10-19 bracket (lol really guys wtf)

Do you mean they were going to a bracket lower than they already are? Via party sync? If so, rofl, someone is trying too hard.

I was queuing between 18-21 GMT.

 

[Phonebook]

the reason why you see people on horde group que more is because of the RU alliance. their 20 population is rather high and most of the time their teams are stacked with 20s, like 8 out of 10 and some times even a full 10. this is just from my experience but i will say facing RU hordes playing as alliance isn't even close to being the same, and it seems the small group of 20 RU horde players try to que with EN players from the in-game community when possible.

overall there aren't that many 20 guilds on EU currently, it's only really 1-2 guilds on stormscale horde and ravencrest alliance that seems to have groups queing somewhat frequently.

 

[accel]

Hearing so many nice things about RU alliance, it is tempting to transfer there. (LOL)

 

[Shocking]

Hearing so many nice things about RU alliance, it is tempting to transfer there. (LOL)

You can't play on Russian servers without having your whole game language in Russian. There's plenty of RU Alliance in the communities so you could group up. Some will known enough English to party with you

 

[Yayo]

Wargames?

 

[accel]

On RU alliance.

I found a stream of one of the RU guys on twitch. Picked a video, started watching. The very first game was against a Horde premade (one of those I saw myself, I recognized three guys but from experience it was pretty certainly a full 5-man). The streamer himself was queuing solo. The result? A victory towards RU alliance. A hard one, but a victory nonetheless. (What seems like) no premade vs a premade.

Mother. Of. God.

For those interested, here's the video, the game I am referring to starts at 14:00 or so: Maiks33 - Twitch

 

[alain]

have you tried to queue as a premade too? i mean with friends of yours or guildm8's or do you prefer to play solo? better xperience overall?