First let me take a moment to explain what has prompted yet another thread on this topic. A friend which I met during the alpha stages of the game quit today due to what appeared to be the issue concerning premades in OPR’s. It is not fun to queue into an instance with a score sitting at 450 to 20, and you do not even have time to pve your way to 500 points, if you quit you have a one hour penalty. When you loose the match you get less rewards. When instances like this happen back to back it can be so frustrating you may want to log. I have felt this way myself several times, so I understand and respect his desire to leave the game.
I have taken considerable amount of time reading post covering both pro’s and con’s of premades in OPR and arenas.
Should pre-mades not be allowed to join OPR? I believe an alternative solution would be the best answer to this issue. I understand that some hard-core pvpers use OPR as a method to practice their team coordination. Honestly this makes some good common sense, however definitely not 100% of the time and if you are on one of those groups that is able to port into OPR triple cap within the first 5 minutes and the match is over by the 7 minute mark. Let’s face it there is really little to no practice, as seemingly you truly did not have much competition and good competition makes for good practice… This same issue appears to be occurring in arenas. (I have no desire to ever do arenas, but have read posts regarding the same issue., therefore someone feels the issue occurs in those instances as well.)
The issue on premades is not by any chance limited to this game. ESO had/has an issue with premade in their battlegrounds, their solution was to limit the number of members that could be grouped. In other words 5 man pre-made groups was not allowed. If my memory serves me correctly it was limited to 3 players in a group that could que together. From my understanding WOW had the same issue, and the disallowed premades altogether. I have not played WOW so I cannot confirm or deny this. The issue is real, and we need to find an alternative solution that would have the ability to make the majority of players happy.
Looking at the issue from the development teams perspective, I get it the coding on queues like this most likely is not a simple task, It is much simpler to put four, five man groups together and put randoms together on the other side, this leads to the issue of 20 vs 12 when entering, which is really out of balance and should be addressed by the devs. To evenly balance out randoms with premades is difficult, I understand that. Now some readers of this post will be thinking, no it’s easy. It really is not, I have talked to devs of other games about the way queues for instances like this can be handled, I see where challenges occur. It is not a simple task, and issues like this are rarely simple to solve.
Now for an alternative solution:
Why not have two instances of OPR and Arenas? One instance where no “premades” (pre-made consisting of 3 or more players grouped together) and one instance that allows only solo or duo groups? Solo and duo players have the alternative of queuing into the pre-made instance but at least you know what you are getting into?
If a system like there were implemented I could see where the premades that use OPR as practice would have more competition. There could also be longer queue times for the non-premade instances.
Either way there are pro’s and con’s to any and all solutions.