Of all the contentious areas of discussion in World of Warcraft: Season of Discovery, few have been more heated than PvP instanced matchmaking. In a recent round of updates on the game, Blizzard has confirmed that a change is coming.
With far fewer instanced PvP options in Classic WoW than in Retail, much of the player base is funneled into the same activity – Warsong Gulch. Without further matchmaking filters, there has been an abundance of matches in which a random group has come up against a full premade squad.
More often than not, this leads to an overwhelming victory for the premade, with some camping the graveyard and farming kills, rather than securing the win early. This led to immense frustration among solo and duo players, who found themselves on the receiving end of this often.
Now, the developer has released full details of upcoming changes that should go some way to addressing this issue.
PvP queues will have partial group matchmaking in Season of Discovery
In a detailed post on the upcoming changes in Phase Two of Season of Discovery, the developer behind the game confirmed several updates that should go some way to placating concerns.
As the post details, the upcoming changes are a little more complicated in nature than just premades vs premades only in PvP.
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Specifically, players in a group of five or fewer will have a higher chance to match with players in the same scenario. At the same time, full groups of six are more likely to come up against complete premades.
As a contingency, these new rules will be ignored by the matchmaking queue after a certain period of time, to avoid players waiting too long to get into a game.
Though these changes are undoubtedly positive, some will likely feel that five is too high when many are playing solo. That said, Blizzard does have a delicate balance to strike between fairness and viable queue time.
With Phase Two set to launch on February 8, players won’t have long to wait to see how successful the changes have been. There will likely be significant balancing after launch, as there was with Ashenvale.
