One thing I am not quite sure about when you propose that teams should be ranked and not individuals is the following. What happens if the 4 friends A,B,C,D play together all the time and on a 0-1000 rating scale (where everyone starts at 500) they have attained 900 points. Now, tonight, D cannot play, so he gets replaced with player E. Is the team A,B,C,E a new team that has to start at 500 ranking points? If so, then you are going to have a lot of angry guilds, in which you always have to have the exact same people play together and you are going to splinter into 'fixed groups' instead of being one guild. Unlike PvE where you can each week mix and match the players that are there and want to go, you would NOT be able to do that here! For 2v2 deathmatch that format may actually be ok, but for 4v4, or even much more so for 8v8 this seems like non-sense. The ranking has to be individual and then put together as a team rank. If you ALWAYS play in the exact same setup, you're fine and your ranking will be the same, but in my above example, even assuming player E never played a game before, the team's rating should be 3/4 * 900 + 1/4 * 500 (new player) = 800, so they can face some competition instead of walk-overs.

This leads to the next, interesting, question: Is a 'premade' for ranked warzones 4 people, and then put together with another group of 4? Or will it be actually 8 people queueing together? Again, anything any of us can do until we get more information is tp speculate, assume, or (without knowledge!) simply postulate, that: - of course, 8 man only - of course, 4 mans that get combined - of course, mix of solo, 2, 3 and 4 mans We just DO NOT KNOW at this time. Finding out about this will be the key piece of information once patch 1.2 is actually playable by people that are not under an NDA, which the initial tests probably are.

Well, if their ranking and match-making systems are any good, and if ALL pre-mades are so much better than ANY solo players, then after a short few games of losing as solo queue player you will only be put against other solo players, or maybe partial groups. One thing that no one has actually touched on yet is what to do when you only have 3 of the 4 needed players (or 7 of 8). Are you expecting it to be impossible to queue then? Wouldn't it make more sense to just have 1 solo join that?

Each player gets their own ranking. Ranking is purely based on WIN/LOSS. Now, if you always play with the same 3 other players, then all of you would have exactly the same ranking, of course. There is no need, or indeed, as you say, no way to figure out exact player contribution. Now, if you play with different teams, you take your ranking with you, it gets averaged with your new team mates, and it gets adjusted at the end based on your teams average rank, enemy average rank, and the expected probability of winning. E.g., your teams average rank is much higher than the enemies and you win, you will only get very few points. Their rank much higher and you win, then there's a bigger gain.

It is NOT a PREMADE BRACKET! NOT !!! NOT !!! Sorry for that, but it seems needed to get that into you. And I would be fine if you need to get a certain ranking level to be able to get any of the gear. Also, then, you need to KEEP that level, or you won't be able to keep using the gear. Good players will get it, pre-made or not; bad players won't! Of course, I would personally be happiest if all gear was equal, but I realize this is the wrong genre...

Troll stays troll. No need to ask you any more questions or for any of your 'opinions', if that is all the answer you can come up with.

You realize it is called "ranked warzones", not "premade warzones"? Just checking...

When you say 'casual hamster wheel' I don't think you understand rating systems. That is, if they lose, their rating will be decreased, and thus they will face players of EQUAL (potentially bad) skill. That is the whole point of a rating system, to make more EVEN matches. Now of course you can argue if: 1) the developers will get it right, and 2) if there is a big enough pool of players in queue at any one time to make fair matches, without excessively long queue times!

That would be horrible, indeed. The ranking should belong to each player, and then when you form a pre-made it gets averaged out. For solo queuers there will probably some modifier to take into account the advantage a pre-made would have, and their *effective* rating for match-making accordingly lowered.

Actually no, they are not. They are for pitting teams of even skill against each other! Be they pre-made, or not. So, if your pre-made does end up getting put against "terrible PUGs" all day long, it will mean that your team is not as good as you think...

If you get smashed by a pre-made, than your 'rating' will be lower, and over time you *should* be matched against teams with a 'rating' similar to yours, see any ELO rating system for teams. Alternatively consider the Starcraft2 match-making for 2v2 solo players: it just combines the score of 2 solo players and (often!) pits them against an arranged team of 2 if the scores are close.

You say this, as if it was actually in the game this way. As far as I can tell this feature is not yet on the PTS, and therefore no one in this forum knows the answer. At least no one, that is allowed to talk about it... If you only base this upon "THIS IS HOW IT IS IN WOW !!11!" then please state that it is your assumption things will be the same here, instead of presenting it as 'true' for this game. Thank you!

Whenever a fight happens in Ilum with groups of similar size (yes, it happens on my server) it turns into a ranged shoot-out with no one willing to push into the enemy because *gasp* they might die! Why are they so scared? Well, once dead you do not get valor or credit for weekly/daily quests. If you die fighting you should still get credit for the next 30 seconds to 1 minute! That way there would be actual movement, and melee classes would not be totally out of the fight for most of it as they are too scared to engage. Before this patch, abusing /stuck allowed people to suicide-charge in once every 2 minutes, knowing they could get back quickly. With that option gone now, I am worried it will be even more of a back-pedaling, max-range potshot and fishing (grapple, force pull, etc.) affair than it already is...

After death in Ilum you can respawn [return to medcenter] and immediately type /stuck to get back to your old position. I assume this is unintended and it is being abused a LOT. In big fights it seems understandable that people want credit for kills which they don't get otherwise (design flaw?). But for small scale, this really breaks things. You just fought 1v1 or 2v2, are low health, and the enemy you defeated pops up on top of you with full health... Can you please acknowledge this as either a bug or state it is working as intended? Thanks!

Good change. It was about time, too, as it was getting more and more widespread. I admit it was fun while it lasted! Oh, and DPS crying about not being able to get heal medals, just stop and realize how many more DPS medals there are than heal medals. Heal: 2.5k heal 5k heal 75k healing 300k healing =4 medals DPS: 2.5k damage 5k damage 75k damage 300k damage solo kill killing blow 10 kills 25 kills =8 medals So, stop the whining! Sure healers can get some of those medals, maybe a lucky killing blow and the 10 kills, but that's it!