Patch 2.4 seemed to take the game in a good direction, but suddenly a bombshell realization came out and destroyed any shred of hope I had for WoW. Blizzard nerfed premade battleground teams by giving them insanely long queues to wait in. How insanely long? Try 90 minutes or more!

PUG is an abbreviation that means "pick up group", but it's not even really a pick up group in battlegrounds. If you solo queue you are randomly matched with allies and put into the game. Sometimes this has good results with a nice mix of healers and skilled players. Other times however PUG groups in BGs are a nightmare. Players AFK bot, you get no healers, or you just simply get stuck with total noob scrubs who are horrible at the game.

Until patch 2.4 many organized PVP guilds would field teams and dominate the battlegrounds. Getting faced against a premade group when you randomly queued up is basically a sure loss (though I've won some and they were amazing games) which is a bad thing, but it's not even remotely close to as bad a raising the queues for these organized teams to unplayable heights. The only "real" games in battlegrounds were between two organized teams who happened to face each other.

Lets examine the situation. Pre 2.4 any player had the option to play solo and if they hated occasionally facing premades they also had the option to form an organized team. Now, post 2.4 because of the whines of these players who refused to make teams of their own anyone who enjoys playing with friends has NO OPTION to do what they want. They can sit in a queue and twiddle their thumbs for an hour to get a game or they can not play. How is that remotely reasonable? Even if organized players are a minority, which they are, they still have the right to play the game. The fact that before we had both options available to anyone and now we can only pug is ridiculous. Pug games have huge issues that I already mentioned. Why should I have to play with AFK botters and total scrubs if I am a great PVPer? Why should I be unable to play the game the fun way I desire with my friends?

There is this concept of "majority rules" but I've explained on this site many times why it's not always a good idea, especially when it comes to MMORPGs. When the south decided to secede from the union we didn't let them. Why? Because even though it's a minority of people there who wanted to stay they were our citizens. We had a responsibility to them to prevent them from essentially being abducted out of our union and forced into a new one because they were American citizens. This same sort of principle applies. The organized players have rights. It's horrible form to suddenly deny them their preferred method of playing. I'm not saying Organized team vs Pug games had to continue. I'm just saying if you are going to segregate them you need to simultaneously add incentives to make more people organize teams and thus lower the queues. You can't just force them to have SUPER long queues and then say "see, no one is really doing it anymore... you must have just wanted to farm pugs" That type of logic and stupidity is prevailing right now, and if the situation continues for a few more weeks there are going to be a lot of PVP players canceling their accounts and permanently damaging the game.

Blizzard just haphazardly makes massive changes like this. Making organized only face other organized with no incentives is horrible. There should be specific rewards you can ONLY get from making an organized battleground team and winning. A rating system for the BGs just like arena games would work, or simply giving different types of marks as rewards for win / losses in that bracket and then having special rewards for those. Instead of forcing every organized player to wait in hour + queues then they would have fast games and the PUG players would be the ones who would feel forced to organize and group. Instead of putting WoW onto the short bus they would have made it take more skill and organization. Dragging the bad players up is far preferable to forcing the good players down. This change is like some Orwellian nightmare come to visit PvPers in WoW. Oh, you are more organized? Have an hour long queue you elitist bastard! You don't like playing with the worst random scrubs in the game? TOO BAD! You don't see why you should have to run BGs with no healers occasionally? Well get used to it!

The sad truth is that they just don't test things or think things through. Look at the Druid changes in 2.4. They nerfed the range of cyclone and they removed their set bonus for speed. Ok, do they think that is going to actually balance Druids? It isn't! I can tell you that right now. In a few months when the new arena representation data comes out Druids are going to be WAY over-represented in the 2200+ rated teams. Know how I know this? I played my 2v2 matches this week, Blizzard clearly didn't. It's still rather simple to cyclone, root, bash, feral charge, and then escape as a druid. You can just drop into cat form and go stealth, then sneak off and drink anywhere you like in the arena. You can put a ton of instant cast heals on your partner and CC the crap out of the enemy and be immune to mana burn effects unlike any other healer in the game. It's just stupid. What made Blizzard think their tiny little minor changes were going to impact the class at all? They obviously didn't test it. They just said to themselves "lets put this into the game and let the players suffer through a few more months of this garbage while we see how this pans out" like they always seem to do. How did druids even get into this state in the first place?

It's unacceptable. They spent all this time changing their forums for April fools day, making a bard class with screen shots and making a whole molten core movie joke. Yet they have no time to balance PVP in their own game! They are having a 3v3 tournament which they took entry fees for but the servers aren't even WORKING and the tournament was supposed to begin already. They just spit on PVP guilds and good PVPers in general in the biggest way. Very dangerous ground to be treading on with the release of Age of Conan in the very near future. I suggest making a big investment in Funcom right now because that game is getting a HUGE percent of WoWs pvp community. I said I was really pissed that they aren't having a loot server, but they will when players vote for one. It's not like WoW has one now even with their billions of dollars. Blizzard (really Vivendi) is a bunch of talentless assclowns with no ambition, no balls, and no respect for their players.