Folks across the Bloodlust Battlegroup will no doubt be familiar with “LFM QQ Battleground Premades: Good fun, easy honour, need vent. 80s only, cross-realm, PST for info!” appearing in their trade chats over the last few months. After having run with them and joined up with them as a member, Serephim suggested we contact the guys who run it for an interview.

I was immediately intrigued – I’d seen the messages in trade chat but had no idea how it all worked. Cross Realm Premade PvP? Not only do they manage to coordinate it all but they maintain an amazingly high win rate! Serephim and I caught up with the founder, QueueQ, and his right hand man, Zevia, to chat about their runaway success.

Want to listen? Download the MP3 of our chat below!
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Saate: Welcome! While I’m sure many folks across the Bloodlust Battlegroup will have seen and be familiar with what QQ Premades are about. For the rest of us can you tell us a little bit about what you do?

QueueQ: Sure thing. I started on this Battlegroup about 4 months ago, I came from a previous battlegroup that had something of a similar vein. I like to think that I moved it to a new battlegroup and improved upon the idea of cross realm queuing.

What we do is queue people in from different realms on the same group into Alterac Valley. Most often for the purposes of farming honor. An average game goes for 10 minutes and returns 1500-2000 honor.

Serephim: So when you talk about improvements on the previous premades you’ve been involved with what improvements are you talking about? What’s the difference between those and QQ premades?

QueueQ: Well I’m a lot more involved with them. I’m probably the one person, aside from Zevia, that is online every day making sure stuff runs smoothly and making sure that everything is going accordingly.

Checking feedback and making sure that people don’t have complaints that need to be addressed. Running the day to day operations. With similar operations I’ve seen its been pretty hands-off ‘get as many battlegroups going as you can’ kind of thing.

Actually this type of operation started years ago pre-bc but has adapted and evolved since then. The most recent incarnation that I was aware of before I created what we have is an organisation called X-Realms. It was started by a guy who, in my opinion, was entirely out to make money. His plan was to get memberships coming in from all battlegroups.

He would set up, appoint one leader, and move on and do another battlegroup. What that meant was there was very little development, low quality in the leadership, generally disorganised and no real sense of community.

So that’s what I really meant about me being more involved. Pretty much anyone who gets online can leave feedback for me and other leaders so we can find out what’s working well and improve what isnt. As a result I think we’ve got a lot of really good leaders and high quality people.

Saate: So when did you actually get started with all this? and at what point did you realise that it was really taking off?

QueueQ: Around August last year, and it didnt take very long! I was pretty committed to making sure it was a success. I think this game and especially this battlegroup was really looking for something like this. It kinda revises PvP I think – for a lot of people PvP had become pretty monotonous and was just not fun. It was only a matter of days and we were running with a full 40 people and I was getting really positive feedback.

It was really only when I started getting people onboard with membership and people onboard to lead that I realised it was going to snowball..and it did!

Serephim: So Zevia, how long have you been doing QQ Premades and how did you get involved?

Zevia: I actually didnt know QueueQ before I started playing in premades. It was just a coincidence that we were on the same server. I started running with QQ around early October in response to all the spamming in trade chat. I’m always leary of people saying you can get things really quickly but I was bored one day and I checked it out and was impressed with it. One day I put my hand up and said I’d like to lead and it’s gone from there.

Saate: So your track record for wins and losses in AV. What’s it like? I read something on your website that stated that as of September you were something like 400 wins and 3 losses. Has that ratio been maintained as you’ve grown?

QueueQ: Well it did get a bit more challenging when they changed the bracket from 71-80 to 80 only. Prior to that change we had a minimum level of 75 in the premades. So it did get a bit more challenging being always up against similarly levelled people. Also we’ve been running with the same strategy for the last 4 or 5 months and the horde seem to be playing a little more defensively now.

It’s still a very good ratio compared to pugs it’s probably not as good as the 400:3 ratio anymore. Actually I’ve just checked and on this toon I have 704 Alterac Valley Battles and 673 victories on this character.

Zevia: A large portion of our losses seem to come from small coordinated Horde groups skipping straight to Van with a good tank and taking him out fast.

Serephim: Are you finding that you’re getting whispers from horde on level 1 alt characters abusing you?

QueueQ: Surprisingly that has never once happened! I have never gotten a whisper from a level 1 character that was a horde feeling like they’ve been griefed. I think that’s because if you’re a horde on the opposing side we don’t LOOK like an organised group because we’re all from different guilds and servers.

Saate: What’s your coverage like these days? Is it 24/7 or what?

QueueQ: Leading up to the recent 3.3 content patch it was definitely 24/7. Since the patch a lot of people have had the new content to play with and there hasnt been as much of a demand for gear. That’ll change as the arena seen ends and we’re already seeing an increase in the population.

Zevia: One benefit, I think, to having a slightly smaller population at the moment is we’re able to be more hands-on with our leaders. On the weekends we’d have over 120 people constantly going and not really enough leaders to go around so we didnt get to catch up as much. At the moment we’ve really been able to be a bit more hands on.

QueueQ: It’s a little bit less ‘honor farming’ and a bit more community based as it stands right now. I think the people that are playing with us right now are the people that come to play to have fun as opposed to honor farming. Obviously honor is a massive benefit but I think the reason people become members and stay is because of the community and it’s a fun place to hang out. It’s more of a cross-realm guild than anything.

QueueQ: One of the alternate strats we’ve devised for fun is the Cave Farm. These are so popular that one night it got so bad that I had to say “Ok the next person that says Cave Farm adds 30 minutes on to the time before we do one” because so many people were clamouring to do one. A cave farm is basically where we deliberately don’t take any objectives for the sake of keeping the number of reinforcements higher so we can kill more horde.

We don’t cap any objectives. We just kill Galv and leave all of the towers and bunkers. Then we cap every graveyard forcing the horde to spawn at their further starting point in their cave. Once we’ve got them pushed back there we just AOE farm them till we’ve got 450 honorable kills.

Zevia: A good indicator of how often people were asking for these is we actually created a ‘day of the week’ for it.

Saate: For anyone who’s interested in joining QQ Premades what should they do?

QueueQ: Well, first of all you need to be on the Bloodlust Battlegroup (US). Basically just jump onto vent with us, be level 80, listen to your leader and go where he or she says to go. Our vent info is very frequently spammed in trade chat also you can go to http://www.queueq.net/ and get the information. There’s no gear requirement, no resilience requirement, the only requirement is that you come ready to follow the strategy.

Saate: Thanks very much for your time today!

You can find out more by clicking here to visit the QueueQ.net website.