The difference is, with a priv it prevents people who wait to hop onto your team and claim the reward for something they did not work for. Let's take example of today, stacked pub, i joined the lesser pub freq and rushed and based. Apparently these people on my team I will choose not to name, was lancing and was doing quite well. But due to the team lacking organization and some careless errors, the rushes were stopped and cleared. Lanc A: apparently was being attacked and swarmed by people who decided that bricking them was the best choice of plan, and three people constantly bricking him pissed him off and he decides to quit. We keep pushing on and on until the teams were awkward and imbalanced. I started a private freq with the selected people that was on the public freq that I viewed as people who know what they were doing. Started a 5 person private freq. We managed to do considerably well. The pub freq which we left started getting back on it's feet and the priv fought off both the flank and kept advancing. It was neither a question of the teams being unevened or stacked. After awhile, zone spiked, eveyrone got sent into spec. The people in pub, being the quitters as they were, left and chose to blame the privs for stacking. HOWEVER, the private freq consists of the same few people and the same amount. Yet everyone blamed the priv for being stacked. Which was quite unreasonable. And as you suggested "squads" are stacked and start up privs and make the gameplay unbalanced. That I have viewed to be quite subjective. When I was playing during the "Ignescent" era, I managed to convince some people from my squad in another zone to play, while everyone was crying and complaining, being the pessimistic people they are, just gave up whenever they saw ignescent and basically follow them around whereever they go, until they went priv. Those people I would assume ask to join whichever priv they were in. I chose to make another priv to go against them and usually didn't do too bad, until a pub flanks and we get killed off. I do believe it's not the problem of stacking but the problem that people don't persist and get a group together and play well. Oppressors, yes that was somewhat like Ignescent, but again it was not impossible. THey did have many members that were relatively well off and made good basing ships. In my opinion they were more monopolizing then Ignescents were, but I wasn't there for half the reset so I wouldn't know. As I recall there were at least 10+ members on the squad. Now you drag berserk into this, a squad i made up to have a nice squad vs squad with the squads that existed earlier on in this reset. Timestrain/Stellarwin or whatever that group of people traced,CDB,Linear-Key,Theserpentmage + Whoever was together. Berserk consists of like 4-5 people, it is a more controlled variable compared to ignescent or oppressors. I am pretty sure anyone could do that now, form a group and just hold together and keep trying. I see other squads that I was hoping to thrive, some to list, Art and extremis. Brickwarp gotten active the past 2-3 weeks and has been doing alot better than anyone have since the reset began and they started 2 months later than everyone. So I really don't see a valid excuse for your argument. The only real reason I see for making just pubs again, is that so people can just bandwagon people who actually do make an impact on the games. To be honest that just makes it less fun, watching people hop back and forth and stacking a team even worse than it is. At least then you can differentiate the quitters and the people who actually try their best to win. Did you spend a chunk of your life trying to argue against what everyone thinks is right?