Resurrecting All Brackets

Mocha

Legendary
Click Here And Show Your Support If You Want Constant PUG Pops!

Recently I made a post in a similar thread. Although they may be similar threads, they do not by any means have the same goal, content, direction, or discussion so I'm dropping in a new thread. If you'd like to respond to the below discussion, feel free to do so.


Long story short... If we can somehow convince Blizzard to let EXP on players play with EXP off players in battlegrounds, every single twink bracket would be instantly resurrected overnight. The communities wouldn't be nearly as thriving as they were back in say, 2008, but there would be new life to previously dead communities nevertheless and that is a very special thing for anyone who has a passion for twinking.


Let me start by saying a very bold statement:

Here is what killed twink brackets:

Simply merging brackets to a more concentrated state
Although GY farming helped to finish off some brackets, it is by no means the ONLY reason why some brackets are gone.


Back in the day, realms PvPd together and did not PvP against other realms. Back at this time, every realm had MANY twink guilds. There were SO many guilds on nearly every single server... It was insane. Then they took down the barriers between realms and created battlegroups where now a handful of realms played together. What this did was created super guilds where guilds would merge and and there were dominant guilds in every battlegroup. Battlegroups did not play against each other so every battlegroup had their own unique level of competition and their own super guilds.


In Vengeance at this time (my home battlegroup), we still had MANY guilds per sever because Vengeance really is the source of 19 twinking as weird as that may sound. Without Vengeance twinkers, we would not have had Pwndepot, Twinkinfo, most if not all exploits originated in Vengeance between the realm Kul'Tiras and the realm Akama. We really had some of the most insane 19s and they paved the road for 19s. Keep in mind, Vengeance twinkers were scroll clicking back when people still were keyboard turners and clickers. Through word of mouth and PvP between battlegroups on the PTR, people found out what was really going on in Vengeance and picked up on some of our tactics. Then we moved to Cyclone back in TBC and a lot of twinkers over there were pretty much up to speed with what was going on back on Vengeance. Cyclone buzz died down and a lot of players went to Ruin (you can thank Drayner for this as he is responsible for creating the buzz which brought over most players from Cyclone and Vengeance.


Now when EXP lock became an option, it did 2 things for twinking: 1) it made it extremely easy and idiot proof to make a twink. 2) It killed pops on every single battlegroup besides Ruin. Although, there were MANY twinks back in the day, we needed the levelers to get pops as most games did not have more than 3 twinks per game and we always had at least 5 games going at once. It was instant pops all day long for 19s... Then exp toggle became a thing and now we had to sync queues between all of us to get a single pop after waiting in queue for a few hours. After a few days, 19s died on every battlegroup besides ruin.


Now we're looking at the entire 19 player base having to exist in one single battlegroup. What this did was basically created a small handful of Vengeance All-Star guilds and a small handful of Cyclone All-Star guilds to go against the small handful of Ruin All-Star guilds. This is WOTLk at this point and premades are happening often. Vengeance basically formed 1 guild on Skullcrusher known as Shield Bashed By Heysus (although we had a few other trial guilds such as Don't Talk Back To Silin etc before we really landed this Vengeance all-star guild) and we had the Ally guild on Zul Jin.


SO if you take a step back, looking at ONLY Vengeance... we've seen it go from having MANY twink guilds on every server in Vengeance, all the way down to only 1 Horde guild on Skullcrusher and 1 Ally guild on ZJ. The entire Vengeance community filtered down into 2 faction specific All-Star guilds. The same occurrence happened for the other former battlegroups that moved over to Ruin.


The problem is, many 19 twinkers quit at this point because they did not want to go to Ruin which was notes for having insane epeen and insane levels of Drama and elitism. Believe me, our Vengeance players were all about elitism, but we understood the community's needs and we would always play with amazing sportsmanlike conduct. Sure we would farm the heck out of levelers, but there were also some games where we would hide and then pop out and scare the heck out of them and then help them win against us. it was about fun... not winning in PUGs. Premades, oh my god you better bet yourself we rolled into every single Premade with 10 charges of really sticky glue, every buff obtainable at 19, demonic runestones, Halaani Whisky, the whole 9 yards.


Every time barriers in the twinking community were taken down, we compressed in numbers and as guilds and good players were either benched or just quit. We were filtered down to 1 battlegroup and lost a lot of members doing so.

Fastforward to Cata where now we're seeing ENDLESS GY farming in our ONLY battlegroup and I know there are several hundred 19 twinkers who quit because it's disgusting to see what 19s had become. We literally farmed ourselves into inactivity and we literally killed our own community by treating pugs like premades and farming our own community dry.



None of this is speculation. This is all factual information. There is no arguing against anything I've said here besides maybe a few exaggerations I've made, but in essence this post is 100% factual. If you don't take this post as accurate, chances are it's because your vision is still clouded by competition and you refuse to see that our own drive for elitism and competition is what drove the nail in the coffin. Blizzard downsized our entire community and we finished it off.


NOW if we can get Blizzard to remove the EXP separation between battlegrounds, every single twink bracket would be thriving once again and we'd have instant pops on nearly every single bracket. This is fact. If we made this happen, every bracket would be active once again. We wouldn't have the separation between battlegroups so our numbers would be condensed almost as if it were 1 battlegroup, but that will still be a huge step up from where we are now.


This is where we should be and should have been focusing our efforts on doing since Cataclysm. I'm not the best with trying to argue against Blizzard and I'm not sure if petitions actually hold any weight... But I'm sure we can at least be heard by Blizzard by some way or another. This is something that I've made very little progress with on my own and with me being a casual twinker, it's hard to have the drive to push this when I retired my competitive attitude back in 2009.


Please disregard the lack of formalities... I'm really just typing in a more casual manner.



TLDR: Yo. We have to try to get Blizzard to merge exp on with exp off players for battlegrounds if we want every bracket to have 100% reliable pops.



Cheers,
Mocha
 
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Didn't we all start to twink to be able to be the strongest player in the BG? We didn't start to twink to get competitive games, did we? I would like if blizzard changed to what it was in the past. It was a lot of fun, imo.
 
Assuming you're talking about my thread, you should link it so they know what you're referring to.
 
[MENTION=6446]Mocha[/MENTION] Forward to Blizz pls :p

Also, if I remember correctly the original reason behind Blizzard's logical decision in separating the brackets was the disadvantage between levelers and twinks; since twinks were much stronger.

In all honesty, there isn't much difference between old fat leveling Jo' and Billy the Twink now. BoAs are easier than ever to get. If JP couldnt buy "skill", gold can now.

Presenting a sound argument to Blizzard, I'm pretty sure we could get some agitation somewhere.
 
You should seriously make a post on the forums of WoW, you'd have a ton of support.
 
Bumping this! I really think EVERYONE Possible should go in and rate this up and throw it a good comment, this is one of the few possibilities for everyone to beomce happy please.
 
Mocha said:
TLDR: Yo. We have to try to get Blizzard to merge exp on with exp off players for battlegrounds if we want every bracket to have 100% reliable pops.

100% will never happen. They intentionally segregated XP locked players from the same games as XP enabled players as a solution to the problems twinking was causing in the game. If you recall, BG participation was really low before 3.2. A lot of players gave up on doing BGs at low levels, which is why Blizzard added XP to them to begin with.

They even added segregation to Skirmishes (which were added in 6.0), supporting the idea they just don't want twinks playing with levelers.

More to the point: twinking didn't die because they merged battlegroups. It died because they divided the player base into 'gains XP' and 'does not gain XP.' When that happened, anyone who wanted to play their twinks had to move to a central battle group to play. Despite the best efforts of twinks to build a community of XP locked players, the shit fell apart. When I posted in the other thread about what killed twinking, I was absolutely on the mark with my one sentence response. it wasn't any one thing that killed brackets, it was a combination of different things at different times that killed them.

XP segregation was the first major step. Removing leg armor kits/helm enchants was another. Allowing significant balance issues to go live in Wotlk, Cata, and MoP was another. Player egos, infighting, and the drama of getting a bracket going is another. If you look back on twinking brackets post 3.2, the most popular brackets have always been those that have a natural XP lock. 60s and 70s became popular during Wotlk. Then it was 70s and 80s in Cata. When they merged 60s, 70s, 80s and 85s with the Battle Chest (removing the natural caps), those brackets stopped being popular. When they added F2P accounts, that bracket became super popular, drawing most of the players who were involved in low-mid level brackets.

No one wants to deal with the drama associated reviving a dead bracket when they can just make a twink for a naturally capped bracket and be done with it. Especially when they have to deal with all the crap I just listed. If anything, you should be asking Blizzard to remove starter accounts from the game. That would have a much bigger impact on dead brackets than anything else.
 
Hello, most people probably don't know me around the retail twinking scene as I quit after patch 4.2ish.
I'm mostly known as Foda around the private community scene since 2012 (initially Druidafoda) and during my time on World of Warcraft's original realms I used to go by Onix, Kukits and some others.
I have always been a twink fan, I started at very young age when heirlooms first released. I was normally walking by (as I have since vanilla) when I saw a level 6 with these yellow shoulders and that shocked me entirely. I first though he was a hacker or even a game master, because for us early stage WoW players, it would be normal not seeing or using shoulders untill level 20ish. I was amazed for alot of time, I tried doing some investigation and asked my guildmates what was all that about, when they told me. I've always "twinked" before that though, not actually gearing my character up and enchanting it, but I used to like to hang out on Westfall and doing BGs, therefore I was stuck on low levels for quite some time.
I started reading about twinks and I felt in love with them. As a current hobby (same one since 3.0ish), I love to low level PvP with gimped out characters with amazing enchants and BiS items equipped. I'm no longer paying for WoW subscription, so I'm not allowed to post any of this on the Blizzard's forums, but since Cataclysm things started going downfall. 4.2 hit, I was gone to private servers.

Some brackets started dying off due to lack of population, some others due to not being balanced enough. I came back when MoP came out and I was just sad when I saw things were so much different. There now were so many heirlooms that being that "effortful twink" who fought for 2 AGMS, Lucky Fishing Hat and once upon a time Nat Pagle's fishing boots meant nothing. One could simply buy all heirlooms and have enough power to compete with twinks. Of course, they were in disadvantage still, but thats when I realized twinking was officially dead (also taking in consideration that from then brackets past 24 were already dead). Twinking didn't feel rewarding anymore, I didn't have that thrill that I used to have when I used to open my character panel and see all that I achieved.

I was playing 3.3.5a private servers, untill I read 5.4 notes (I think it was 5.4) and read one of the best notices of my WoW life: Enchants now scale with your level and can be applied to any piece; This... OMG! That just opened a HUGE wide range for experimentation and diversity that twinking actually felt like twinking for some time. I could now make twinks on different ways, balance the amount of stats or just go all into stats that would not be relevant untill then. Haste twinks became a thing, crit stack saw its return, oh it was just so beautiful! I came back ASAP, when I realized everything EXP off was pretty much dead. Either way, I had alot of joy with my 10 twink hunter haste stacked, beating ppl up to lvl 30, or even on my 24s that would actually see BG pops and get to actually PvP. I wanted to go back to my old habits, make my favorite twinks once again. I first though remaking my 39 mage (now a 72 but still kept the Pulsing Crystalline Hearth GFed necklace), doing some 1shot Pyroblast crits as I used to back on 3.2, but that was not a possibility because people would not see BG pops after 24 (very sadly). With the release of WoD, I didn't wan't to risk paying 45 bucks or w/e to only be locked to 1 bracket so I just sticked to the WoW private twink community for 3.3.5a, where I am and have been since 4.2 came out. I could go on, tell everything I've been through and all the things I miss, but I've been speaking for long already and I KNOW that twink lovers probably been through the same, and miss these times just like me.

I come here in favor of change. As a twink lover since I started, I fully support the idea of merging BGs (EXP ON and OFF) for a possible return. I see this as a great manner of Blizzard to actually see some of it's oldest player's return, like me. Sadly, their change of adding EXP to BGs lost me, and many, many others who retained to private servers. Perhaps, this is not only a way for them to aquire more money, as it's their possibility of resurrecting one great, effortful and time investing ancient community, that has been twinking.

NOSTALGIA TIME!

Somethings all of us miss ayyy ;(
Remember these BG 'nights' when people gathered at less populated brackets (as 39) so they would get EXP off BGs going?
Remember the thrill (and also annoyance) of getting characters items as Lucky Fishing Hat, Arena Grand Master, Nat Pagle's Fishing Boots, Furbolg Medicine Pouch, Inferno Robes, Glacial Stones, Shadowfangs and many, many others? Some of them are still used, I know, but is the accomplishment feeling the same for you?
Remember how influent and present guilds were, and how competitive were the games and brackets between MANY guilds, rather than couple elitist ones we see nowadays?
Remember how fun was it to exploit outside of BGs as Arathi Basing for faster starts on caps?
Remember how Suffix (Shadow SP, Fire SP, Frost SP etc) items were strong and BiS not to mention how hard to acquire on some brackets?
Remember how different flag carrying used to be? Twinks running full "stamina suffix" as I remember my 5k hp 39 twink FC pala? running double AGMs, Epic shield, stam suffix items and... MALLET OF ZUL'FARRAK... Please excuse me, I've always been a 39 fan and these things bring me great memories ;).
Remember how thrilling were Skirmishes back on WotLK or even TBC, with AGM's absorbtion and Heavy Runecloth Bandages actually being way more relevant due to lower damage on any twink or even the good old healing Lifeblood... Who doesn't miss these haha...
Remember how BoE (bind on equip) gear actually used to be so good, as the Darkweave Breaches or the Underworld Bands (bands probably still are huehue), and there were only a couple of heirloom choices?
Now some of us remembers when BGs gave experience at first, and we would, as levels #0- #2 , see these guys at skull level on BGs and be shocked, cause these would oftenly bribe the system so they join the BG almost about to ding and then become pretty much invincible aganist other lowbies. All these bla blas, things we've been through...
I could go on and on, but I'm sure alot of you has gone through way more than I have... Oh what a ride huh?

Anyway, this is my relate, its long yes, but I'm pretty sure alot of people will find this very funny and I'm sure it will bring alot of good memories to all of us. If anyone feels like posting this on WoW forums I authorize the copy of this (this is probably not going to happen, but hey!).
Untill next time friends ;)
 
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Point, Shadowburn had exp off 29 pops regularly until some kids decided to start recruiting us to cyclone, some transferred, pops got harder and harder to get until it died.

Once they merged Battlegroup ques it was bugged for months, multiple times we set up nights and put as many as 40 that we had in vent in que, no pops, broke the back of a lot of 29's.

You also left out a key point

MANY twinks made the toons with the express purpose of farming levelers, that is why 24's were so popular and why my bracket has now been "blessed" with oh so many GY farming afking scum.
 
Regardless of your opinions on this topic is is vital to the community for TI members to start being active on the Battle.net forms and in other social media platforms, we've been getting a little bit of attention lately, if we keep the momentum up than we can finally force blizzard to take a real look at us and the strength our community has.

I just Re-posted the EU thread on the US forms, bump it, comment on it, have a discussion: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/16274257281
 
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Blizzard will not comment on twinking and they certainly will not remove the segregation we have in this game. I would love to be wrong on this, but I'm afraid I won't be.
 
I’ll elaborate upon 2 points.

1) If exp on and exp off were merged and players don’t want to play with non twinks, wargames are still available and will continue to be available. There’s your solution for if you don’t want games to be merged.

2) The reasoning behind my overly ignorant and stern attitude is simple. (As is most of my posts) It’s bait. It’s bait to bring on a higher argument and it’s bait to sort out those who wish to only have a personal quarrel with me. If your response was about how ignorant and stupid I am, congrats, you wish to argue more than you wish to be proactive in regards to twinking and you just publicly displayed that.

Now there is a deeper meaning behind my attitude and it’s simple. If you do not want this change to occur, don’t worry, it won’t affect you as you can always queue wargames and have your way. For those of us not interested in wargames (which is the majority of the community considering those in our PUGs who we do not know) we would like to have constant games as this will also furthermore protect your interest as you will have more twinks to participate in wargames with.

As for the argument of people saying they would rather have 4-6 months of quality games: If anyone is exaggerating, it’s these people. Clearly 1) We have not had quality games in years. 2) I don’t know what bracket these people are playing in, but if we get 3 pops in 1 month, we shouldn’t count that as an entire month of pops.

Realistically speaking, 19s get about 2 months of pops per year which are then diluted across several months. Our longest string of PUG pops are during the summer time in which we still don’t have consecutive pops… we have bursty pops and then as they do every single time we get pops, they die out as soon as a small handful of members decide to destroy the other team relentlessly. The argument of rather having pops when schools are not in session are only thinking of the desires of those who are in school and ignoring those who are not in school. Now, if we had pops constantly, players both in school and out of school would have the ability to do so at their convenience.


The issue is, you can always make wargames happen whenever you want. However, we cannot always make PUGs happen whenever we want. Gaining 10 members in 2 parties is much easier than getting 20 people scattered across timezones, realms, factions and syncing queues at the same time, WHILE trying to get past the queue bug.


Another thing to consider is I was asked to make that thread. I personally can spend all day on my other toons and not have any urge to play 19s. I moved on from competitive 19s back in WOTLK for the most part… (with the exception of when WT asked me to FC for them as I was one of the only members left with a full bis and GFd prot warrior) However, this merge would also allow players such as myself to participate in twinks once again, as well as new members who have no clue what twinking in, and even the highly competitive members who want to destroy pugs, and even the highly competitive players who want games against other twinks only.


It’s a win/win/win/win. The only loss that can be imagined is if levelers become unhappy by getting stomped by those who want to stomp. The counter to this argument is simple: 1) They are already unhappy for getting stomped by anyone with BOAs. 2) Twinks aren’t going to stomp THAT much harder than an average leveler with EF and BOAs. 3) They’ll level out of the bracket within hours naturally 4) Twinks actually give a possibility to provide even games. Especially games where there are only 2-5 twinks per side which is going to frequently happen.
 
I’ll elaborate upon 2 points.

1) If exp on and exp off were merged and players don’t want to play with non twinks, wargames are still available and will continue to be available. There’s your solution for if you don’t want games to be merged.

2) The reasoning behind my overly ignorant and stern attitude is simple. (As is most of my posts) It’s bait. It’s bait to bring on a higher argument and it’s bait to sort out those who wish to only have a personal quarrel with me. If your response was about how ignorant and stupid I am, congrats, you wish to argue more than you wish to be proactive in regards to twinking and you just publicly displayed that.

Now there is a deeper meaning behind my attitude and it’s simple. If you do not want this change to occur, don’t worry, it won’t affect you as you can always queue wargames and have your way. For those of us not interested in wargames (which is the majority of the community considering those in our PUGs who we do not know) we would like to have constant games as this will also furthermore protect your interest as you will have more twinks to participate in wargames with.

As for the argument of people saying they would rather have 4-6 months of quality games: If anyone is exaggerating, it’s these people. Clearly 1) We have not had quality games in years. 2) I don’t know what bracket these people are playing in, but if we get 3 pops in 1 month, we shouldn’t count that as an entire month of pops.

Realistically speaking, 19s get about 2 months of pops per year which are then diluted across several months. Our longest string of PUG pops are during the summer time in which we still don’t have consecutive pops… we have bursty pops and then as they do every single time we get pops, they die out as soon as a small handful of members decide to destroy the other team relentlessly. The argument of rather having pops when schools are not in session are only thinking of the desires of those who are in school and ignoring those who are not in school. Now, if we had pops constantly, players both in school and out of school would have the ability to do so at their convenience.


The issue is, you can always make wargames happen whenever you want. However, we cannot always make PUGs happen whenever we want. Gaining 10 members in 2 parties is much easier than getting 20 people scattered across timezones, realms, factions and syncing queues at the same time, WHILE trying to get past the queue bug.


Another thing to consider is I was asked to make that thread. I personally can spend all day on my other toons and not have any urge to play 19s. I moved on from competitive 19s back in WOTLK for the most part… (with the exception of when WT asked me to FC for them as I was one of the only members left with a full bis and GFd prot warrior) However, this merge would also allow players such as myself to participate in twinks once again, as well as new members who have no clue what twinking in, and even the highly competitive members who want to destroy pugs, and even the highly competitive players who want games against other twinks only.


It’s a win/win/win/win. The only loss that can be imagined is if levelers become unhappy by getting stomped by those who want to stomp. The counter to this argument is simple: 1) They are already unhappy for getting stomped by anyone with BOAs. 2) Twinks aren’t going to stomp THAT much harder than an average leveler with EF and BOAs. 3) They’ll level out of the bracket within hours naturally 4) Twinks actually give a possibility to provide even games. Especially games where there are only 2-5 twinks per side which is going to frequently happen.


Please don't speak for other people, especially if you're unwilling or incapable of looking at things from any perspective other than your own.
 

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