Is this exploiting?

[Firebert]

Do we have a word from Blizzard on this kind of premade Bgs and possible sanctions?

From a thread I made on it a long time ago:

This is not something that we are encouraging, but it is also something that we currently have no realistic way to prevent. That being said, this is something that may change soon, which is why we always advise people to not use any type of add-on designed to circumvent or bend our balancing safeguards... using such add-ons can lead to severe account penalties!

(Source)
This clearly leads to the following question.

Does the use of the Preform AV Enabler addon by many players constitute circumvention of the balancing safeguards in place?

The Battleground queueing system currently supports easy entry into Battlegrounds for groups of players of size five or less. This could possibly be a technological limitation, and as such an unintended limit.

The "balancing safeguards" of Blizzard's queueing system for Battlegrounds is unknown, but, they have said in the past about the LFD system that they try to mix high- and low-geared players together for dungeons. This means that if a similar balancing safeguard is used for the PvP queueing system, premades made up of mostly high-geared players (most premades have a reasonbly high resilience prerequisite to join) could be breaking the rules by attempting to fill a battleground with such a group.

An easy way around this is to have a wide spread of gear levels in your premade, as this would constitute a "balanced" group of players, and premades would still be able to accomplish their goal of farming HKs or getting achievements by the sheer amount of organisation they have over a (highly likely) random opposing team.

Vaneras does say that "this is something they may change soon". Either they are going to ban the addon and attempt to prevent multiple groups from entering the same battleground, or they are going to allow raids to enter battlegrounds. Note that Vaneras said "this is not something we are encouraging" as opposed to "this is something we are discouraging".

Just some thoughts. But, please, be aware. If you believe that Preform AV Enabler is causing an imbalance in battlegrounds, you're liable to be actioned.

[Gnu]

OK thanks for the answer.

I'm guessing that if more and more premades appear and if more people complain about them they will pull the ban hammer.

[Casisiempre]

I enjoyed doing premade AVs. One organizer on Openraid scheduled several different events. One of them was an all stealther run. We all went into our boss's room and waited for them stealthed. When they came in, we all unstealthed and assaulted them together and then pushed them back and won the game. They still had a chance to win, but not a big one.

Another that was organized was an all DK run. The plan was to have all the DKs pop army at the same time when they came in. I didn't have a DK at the time, but I heard it didn't go as well as hoped.

[Firebert]

I'm guessing that if more and more premades appear and if more people complain about them they will pull the ban hammer.

Eventually, yes. And it'll be easy (enough) to spot if a player is exploiting: do they consistently join random battlegrounds whilst in a raid group and also end up in the same battleground as the rest of his raid? If so, hello penalty volcano.

[Rinse]

But there is an i in "pie", more specifically, "meat pie", and an anagram of "meat" is "team".

^^ This guy.

[Deleted]

From a thread I made on it a long time ago:

This is old and outdated, they since then broke addons like AV enabler and made some other statements. I'll get to hunting them down when I feel like it. Anyway their stance by now is that anything above 5 people isn't intended.

Found it. http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/7199643338#1

In patch 5.1, we resolved some issues regarding how Addons interact with the Battleground queue system. It is no longer possible to automate queuing for standard or random Battlegrounds in groups larger than 5. We decided to make this change in order to improve the experience for all players who are queueing into random groups normally and expecting to face similarly random groups, only to find themselves crushed by a full team of coordinated opponents.

We understand that players want to enjoy coordinated team play, and we invite those players to queue into Rated Battlegrounds or play Wargames to have that experience. Players can continue to use Addons to queue for Rated Battlegrounds as well.