No thanks. When I get stuck and can’t move in an arena or warzone because of 10 year old bugs that still haven’t been fixed, I would prefer to be able to /stuck and try again in round 2 or respawn without receiving a lockout.

This is ridiculous. Look at this guy’s average damage and average damage taken - it’s all 0... in 35 matches he has done zero damage, taken zero damage and managed to win most of them. Sure…. Even in your 5 losses you managed to take zero damage. You just queuing two groups and taking turns stucking it like cringe pve guilds were in preseason group ranked? Seems like it.

https://youtu.be/HgY1VeFl71A

You can already lose every single match of a season and then buy an old set of former ranked gear with your 20 tokens just for participating. There are 4 seasons per year now, and top of that, they just lowered the amount of matches played required to finish the weeklies. How much easier do you expect them to make it?

I disagree that 4 man premades in arenas is the main reason for people not queuing arenas, here’s why: I queue solo arenas all the time and hardly ever see 4 man groups in arenas but I see 4-8 man premades in almost every warzone I play. Removing ranked pvp made a large portion of arena enthusiasts quit the game, but the new pvp season rewards brought in lots of new players, and new players typically prefer warzones over arenas. So we lost arena players and gained warzone players and when new players dip their toes into arena they get absolutely destroyed by the remaining high level players even with no premades involved and either go back to warzones or keep queuing arenas and put no effort in since they will be rewarded for grinding losses anyway. This makes arena games less fun and therefore less popular. If they weren’t rewarded for losing they would be incentivised to try to improve.

There’s a difference between a “premade” and an “8 man premade.” Can’t believe I needed to even point that out.

8 man premades…

Since premades aren’t a new thing, no. And of course the first season of a new expansion is going to have a spike of new players getting involved… I believe the reason pvp queues are so dead has more to do with a combination of things; - ranked pvp getting deleted causing higher skilled pvpers to quit the game with the remaining ones being put into the same matches as people that have no idea how to pvp and no motivation to actually learn. - ranked rewards and other cosmetics being added to regs queue with the ability to grind losses to receive them, causing players to queue up and put no effort into playing which makes the matches far less fun for everyone involved (as someone recently admitted to doing on the forums) - class balance in pvp being terrible - premades being changed to 8 man. - removing the very low graphics option from the game. I think all of this combined has contributed to pvp being less popular more than just the existence of premades in the queues.

Of course your match making system would be less restrictive, I’m not arguing that it wouldn’t be less restrictive… I think I’ve already made it very clear in my previous posts that I’m concerned about the pops taking even longer than they already do. Last night I solo queued arenas on Starforge as a dps for 4 hours and waited 20-45 mins for arena pops that were still often one player short. I even got logged out once for being afk while waiting for a pop and doing stuff on another monitor. I can’t imagine how dead it would have been if those 7-sometimes 8 players in queue also had the option to tick that they only want to play solo and also only want certain maps.

But this would effectively separate the players that have ticked “solo only” from the 2 mixed queues, which has the exact same effect as having 4 queues in total. Or am I missing something? And you’re suggestion of adding even more control with things like map selection would slow the queue pops down even more.

I believe the changes that I’ve already suggested (reducing premade size back to 4, balancing the classes properly, stopping the pvp rewards from being participation rewards that you can grind losses to receive and fixing the group pvp challenges function) would be more effective at rebuilding the pvp community than the ones you are suggesting. I think if you had 4 queues (solo arena and WZ + mixed arena and WZ) all four queues would be too dead.

I honestly don’t know. And neither do you. Are we calling casual streamers who group up with their viewers for fun “premades”? Are we calling 2 friends that just started playing pvp and queue as a duo “premades” because if we are including everyone who groups up with another player and queues for pvp a “premade” and not only referring to high level players running as a premade, I think it’s possible that there’s actually a lot of people doing this and that splitting the current two queues into 4 queues would result in 4 pretty dead queues where everyone waits a long time for a match.

Yes. But also: Personally I think that reducing premade size back to 4, balancing the classes properly, stopping the pvp rewards from being participation rewards that you can grind losses to receive and fixing the group pvp challenges function would improve the pvp experience for everyone more than separating premades and solo queuers.

I don’t understand what you’re trying to say.

Honestly, if the game’s pvp population wasn’t so small I would agree that adding a solo queue for arenas and warzones would be really fun. But with the current pvp population I feel like one queue for arenas and one for warzones is already stretching the player base too thin for people that aren’t playing at peak server times. Personally I think that reducing premade size back to 4, balancing the classes properly, stopping the pvp rewards from being participation rewards than you can grind losses to receive and fixing the group pvp challenges function would improve the pvp experience for everyone more than separating premades and solo queuers.

Then don’t, and accept the random team you get given knowing that other people may and probably will decide to group up and have some control over who is on their team.

“Premade players” became a premade by doing exactly that.

You don’t have to do that. But you certainly have the option to do that.

I get what you’re saying, and you’re right, but you still have the option to just message anyone at the end of a match and see if they would like to group up with you. You don’t have to join an already established group or guild etc. For example; if you like to play objectives and you noticed there was one other person on your team that was also playing objectives, just invite them to a group.

No it’s still broken. It’s been broken for over 6 months now.

I was more saying that the fact that group challenges has no rewards is a good thing as it only attracts people legitimately interested in playing pvp since there’s no reward for participating, winning or losing. I wasn’t suggesting giving rewards to group challenge participants since (Except maybe the ability to add a wager) that would make it too easy to win trade by challenging the same group over and over again and stucking it as soon as match starts etc. Yeah that’s a cool idea.

Incredible… it’s been almost 6 months. @Shabir_Dhillon @JackieKo Are you able to provide some sort of update on this bug? Thanks.

Can anyone confirm if the group challenges are working again? Last time I tried there was a bug preventing you from starting the match. I also have some ideas on how group pvp challenges could be improved to potentially make them more useable and popular: 1. Add the ability to register your group for challenges and select arena or warzone. Other groups could then open the group challenges window and view all registered groups and accept any challenges. 2. Make pub side and Imp side groups both visible, so an Imp side group could view and accept a registered pub side group’s challenge. 3. Add a chat box to the pvp challenges window so after you accept a challenge, before hitting start match, all members of both teams ( both pub and Imp side) can communicate. 4. Add the option to set a wager for challenges. Currently, warzones and especially Arenas are full of players that are only there for the season rewards, have no interest in even participating and want to afk and stuck every match to get the grind finished. Since there are no rewards for group challenges, they really only attract the kind of players who pvp purely for the fun of pvp. After taking away ranked, players of drastically different skill levels are all forced to queue together and most people don’t seem to be enjoying it. Thoughts?

The pvp sets and crystals bind to legacy.

Not 100% sure what you mean by “worse” here. Would you agree that PT skanks are less in need of a damage nerf than jugg skanks? That was the point I was trying to make.