OP 4 man teams are depopulating BG's, a rating system is needed.

max_only

Thogard wrote: »

Is it really that hard to put together a group of four?

I solo queue all the time. When I notice a bunch of premades getting on, I'll start building my own premade of players from PUGs that are good.

I really don't want everyone to be random because then there's always the chance that I'll get stuck without a decent healer... crazy how hard it is to win when you don't have a magplar in the group.

If they make a solo queue only option, I'll never join it. It'll just be a roll of the dice on the team composition... better to make my own premade than deal with that.

Really? No one appreciates my healer in BGs lol.

Thogard

max_only wrote: »

Thogard wrote: »

Is it really that hard to put together a group of four?

I solo queue all the time. When I notice a bunch of premades getting on, I'll start building my own premade of players from PUGs that are good.

I really don't want everyone to be random because then there's always the chance that I'll get stuck without a decent healer... crazy how hard it is to win when you don't have a magplar in the group.

If they make a solo queue only option, I'll never join it. It'll just be a roll of the dice on the team composition... better to make my own premade than deal with that.

Really? No one appreciates my healer in BGs lol.

There's nothing worse than queueing up as a healer in the solo queue for BGs

50% of the time you'll get a group of people who don't stay together.
45% of the time you'll get a group that stays together, but only knows how to look forwards and won't help you if you get two nightblades surprise attacking you
5% of the time you'll get a good player or two who are fully aware of their surroundings.

I just don't even bother queueing up solo on my magplar anymore. If I'm solo life is just easier if I'm on my orc DK with speedpots and trollking so that I can be fairly self sufficient in case my team overextends.

But if I am with a healer I always try to peel

Betsararie

I've never seen any aspect of a game implemented worse than BGs.

I really think it has the potential to be the best PvP mode but it lacks so many standard features that it just comes off as incomplete.

Sadly I doubt they will even try to improve it. Hope I'm wrong...

maxjapank

We formed two groups of four and managed to land in bgs together. Had quite a good time. But the fact remains, they need a que that caters to solo players. If they would do this, I would probably play bgs every day. Have no idea why they can't get this figured out. Two queing systems were promised. One for pre-mades. One for solo players. Keep your promises, zos.

Thogard

Blanco wrote: »

I've never seen any aspect of a game implemented worse than BGs.

I really think it has the potential to be the best PvP mode but it lacks so many standard features that it just comes off as incomplete.

Sadly I doubt they will even try to improve it. Hope I'm wrong...

Sadly, it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy for ZOS..

Because they implemented it poorly, few people want to play it now... and now, because few people play it, they won't want to spend the time and money to improve it.

Feanor

Played with PUGs against one of the best premades EU yesterday. Twice in a row. It wasn't even fun for them. The skill gap between PuG and premade is so huge most times that people will quit mid fight despite the 15 minute penalty. This just doesn't work without proper matchmaking.

IxskullzxI

kwisatz wrote: »

We need two things: a fair match matching, and .

1 - the ability to choose "playing leaderboard" or "just for fun" as it is in ES Legends, for exemple

after that :

2 - diferent queues for premade or solo

and then, a correct match matching.

I just don't think the population is high enough to implement that. It would probably take forever to find a game.

Biro123

IxskullzxI wrote: »

kwisatz wrote: »

We need two things: a fair match matching, and .

1 - the ability to choose "playing leaderboard" or "just for fun" as it is in ES Legends, for exemple

after that :

2 - diferent queues for premade or solo

and then, a correct match matching.

I just don't think the population is high enough to implement that. It would probably take forever to find a game.

The sad thing is that if it was implemented from the start and queuing worked from the start, then the population probably would have been high enough.

It was all reported/suggested in the pts, and predictions were made that have already been seen to come true...

Its a shame really. The potential player base has already tried it and gone.. Chance has been lost.

ecru

Reposting my comment from the thread I made about the issues with 4v4v4 here:

What you say about having the full pressure of a 4 man stambuild premade doesn't necessarily have to be true if you don't limit teams to 4 people each. 4v4 is very likely to be a miserable experience when it's a premade group vs a group of pugs, but 8v8 or 12v12 (on larger maps) is not. Premade groups being limited to 4 people when queueing would mean that all premades would queue in with pugs, and hopefully if two premades were queueing, each team would get a premade group, so you would end up with one premade and one or two pug groups vs one premade and one or two pug groups.

Rift did this very well. Despite the game's shortcomings in a lot of areas and it's population that was a fraction of what ESO has now (even years ago), it's instanced pvp was wildly more popular than BG's in ESO and a major reason (or the only reason) a lot of people logged on.

I spent over a few years interacting with the developers from Rift along with a handful of other serious, active PVPers in the game via a skype channel to help with balance changes, and that gave me a good chance to learn the ins and outs of what does and does not lead to balanced matchmaking in MMO PVP, and they ended up with a very reliable ELO system that kept everyone besides a few outliers (like myself) very close to a 50% win rate. My comments above are a reflection of my experience there, and IMO ZOS could learn a lot from that them, or players like myself, if they took the chance and listened.

Eventually having larger maps and two team game modes, while opening up instanced pvp to people who haven't bought Morrowind, would also be a step forward to hugely increasing the popularity of this kind of game mode and player retention in general. In Rift, simply queueing for bg's over and over again was a viable way to level and get experience. Even with matchmaking brackets every 10 levels or so (10-20, 21-30, etc), queues were instant 24 hours out of the day for years. More things to do/different ways to level and play with others is always a good thing for any MMO when it comes to player retention.

sorry for the wall of text lol

It's the game mode itself. You are never, ever going to have balanced matches with 4 person pugs vs 4 person premades. Ever.

Premades must queue against premades, but for 4v4v4, you need *three* premade groups for this to happen. The entire system needs to be reworked into larger maps and only two teams, with 8v8 or 12v12 depending on map size, or bg's will never be popular.

This is not just an issue that will be fixed by a ranking system by itself, the nature of small scale pvp on small maps will always lead to premades pug stomping unless they are queued in WITH pugs on their own team. Even with 4v4v4 and three premades, a ranking system needs a very large population to balance these matches out, as some premades will just be a group of friends, while other premades will be a group of pvpers in voip building a well balanced group.

With a reliable ELO matchmaking/ranking system and two teams, you will end up with fairly balanced matches, but only with larger teams. This leads to high ELO premades being queued in with low ELO pugs, against an entire opposing team of average ELO pugs, leading towards a more balanced match.

Actual 4v4 could be left as a very competitive ranked type mode, with a group queue option and a solo queue option. The rest (8v8, 12v12) would be mostly non-competitive and just for fun. This gives everyone who wants to enjoy instanced pvp options to do that in many different ways.

All of that said, gatekeeping BG's with an expansion will lead to less players, less interest, and less balanced matches due to a smaller player pool regardless of how the matches work. If BG's were eventually opened up to everyone, we'd see much more balanced matches too.

Betsararie

ecru wrote: »

Reposting my comment from the thread I made about the issues with 4v4v4 here:

What you say about having the full pressure of a 4 man stambuild premade doesn't necessarily have to be true if you don't limit teams to 4 people each. 4v4 is very likely to be a miserable experience when it's a premade group vs a group of pugs, but 8v8 or 12v12 (on larger maps) is not. Premade groups being limited to 4 people when queueing would mean that all premades would queue in with pugs, and hopefully if two premades were queueing, each team would get a premade group, so you would end up with one premade and one or two pug groups vs one premade and one or two pug groups.

Rift did this very well. Despite the game's shortcomings in a lot of areas and it's population that was a fraction of what ESO has now (even years ago), it's instanced pvp was wildly more popular than BG's in ESO and a major reason (or the only reason) a lot of people logged on.

I spent over a few years interacting with the developers from Rift along with a handful of other serious, active PVPers in the game via a skype channel to help with balance changes, and that gave me a good chance to learn the ins and outs of what does and does not lead to balanced matchmaking in MMO PVP, and they ended up with a very reliable ELO system that kept everyone besides a few outliers (like myself) very close to a 50% win rate. My comments above are a reflection of my experience there, and IMO ZOS could learn a lot from that them, or players like myself, if they took the chance and listened.

Eventually having larger maps and two team game modes, while opening up instanced pvp to people who haven't bought Morrowind, would also be a step forward to hugely increasing the popularity of this kind of game mode and player retention in general. In Rift, simply queueing for bg's over and over again was a viable way to level and get experience. Even with matchmaking brackets every 10 levels or so (10-20, 21-30, etc), queues were instant 24 hours out of the day for years. More things to do/different ways to level and play with others is always a good thing for any MMO when it comes to player retention.

sorry for the wall of text lol

It's the game mode itself. You are never, ever going to have balanced matches with 4 person pugs vs 4 person premades. Ever.

Premades must queue against premades, but for 4v4v4, you need *three* premade groups for this to happen. The entire system needs to be reworked into larger maps and only two teams, with 8v8 or 12v12 depending on map size, or bg's will never be popular.

8v8 or 12v12.

I'll assume you're being serious.

You miss the concept of BGs altogether, this is supposed to be small-scale. At least we have that much right now and you want it to be taken away

Go to Cyro for your Zergfest

max_only

Open BGs up to people who keep their membership current. That should inject some new life.

ecru

Blanco wrote: »

ecru wrote: »

Reposting my comment from the thread I made about the issues with 4v4v4 here:

What you say about having the full pressure of a 4 man stambuild premade doesn't necessarily have to be true if you don't limit teams to 4 people each. 4v4 is very likely to be a miserable experience when it's a premade group vs a group of pugs, but 8v8 or 12v12 (on larger maps) is not. Premade groups being limited to 4 people when queueing would mean that all premades would queue in with pugs, and hopefully if two premades were queueing, each team would get a premade group, so you would end up with one premade and one or two pug groups vs one premade and one or two pug groups.

Rift did this very well. Despite the game's shortcomings in a lot of areas and it's population that was a fraction of what ESO has now (even years ago), it's instanced pvp was wildly more popular than BG's in ESO and a major reason (or the only reason) a lot of people logged on.

I spent over a few years interacting with the developers from Rift along with a handful of other serious, active PVPers in the game via a skype channel to help with balance changes, and that gave me a good chance to learn the ins and outs of what does and does not lead to balanced matchmaking in MMO PVP, and they ended up with a very reliable ELO system that kept everyone besides a few outliers (like myself) very close to a 50% win rate. My comments above are a reflection of my experience there, and IMO ZOS could learn a lot from that them, or players like myself, if they took the chance and listened.

Eventually having larger maps and two team game modes, while opening up instanced pvp to people who haven't bought Morrowind, would also be a step forward to hugely increasing the popularity of this kind of game mode and player retention in general. In Rift, simply queueing for bg's over and over again was a viable way to level and get experience. Even with matchmaking brackets every 10 levels or so (10-20, 21-30, etc), queues were instant 24 hours out of the day for years. More things to do/different ways to level and play with others is always a good thing for any MMO when it comes to player retention.

sorry for the wall of text lol

It's the game mode itself. You are never, ever going to have balanced matches with 4 person pugs vs 4 person premades. Ever.

Premades must queue against premades, but for 4v4v4, you need *three* premade groups for this to happen. The entire system needs to be reworked into larger maps and only two teams, with 8v8 or 12v12 depending on map size, or bg's will never be popular.

8v8 or 12v12.

I'll assume you're being serious.

You miss the concept of BGs altogether, this is supposed to be small-scale. At least we have that much right now and you want it to be taken away

Go to Cyro for your Zergfest

Yeah, I totally missed the concept. There is obviously no difference between 50v50 in Cyrodil and potential 8v8, but 4v4v4 is super competitive unique smallscale pvp for really serious pvpers, right? 8v8 is small scale. 12v12 is small scale. The problem is that you're thinking too small, and too small leads to matches that are too unbalanced, even if you do end up with premade vs premade all of the time due to the fact that most premades will just be a group of friends rather than a serious, well-balanced group.

Did you even read the rest of my post where I suggested an actual 4v4 mode? Probably not. Might wanna work on your reading skills a bit.

Anyway, how are those BG queues working out for you with 4v4v4 and premades queueing vs pugs? Do you like waiting 10-30 minutes for a queue to pop? Is pug stomping with a premade fun? Is being pug stomped by a premade fun? I'll give you a hint--both lose their appeal very, very quickly, which is probably why the BG population is terrible at the moment.

If you want active, fun, instanced pvp in ESO, it will never be in the form of 4v4v4. Other games do it better. Rift, despite it's extremely low population, has and has had more active instanced pvp than ESO, and I guarantee way, way more people bought Morrowind than there have been active players in Rift for the past 2-3 years. WoW does it a lot better too.

Instead of trying to do something different, ZOS should have stuck to what has been proven to work, but in trying to innovate, they've left us with instanced BG's that most people simply do not want to queue for.

Baconlad

@ecro count not have said it better myself...i wanted BGs and was excited about them on announcment for one reason...competitive small scale (hell even up to 24man) 2 way balanced teams...what zos gave us is...a system that by its very nature ensures you will ALWAYS be the underdog. You will always have to fight double the amount of players than what you have...i find it extremely upsetting. Most of us who wanted battlegrounds were *** sick of getting zerged down...other than lag, running across twice your numbers is the biggest kill buzz in cyrodil. All they did woth BGs is take it from whole factions to little 4 man dickshows

Biro123

ecru wrote: »

Reposting my comment from the thread I made about the issues with 4v4v4 here:

What you say about having the full pressure of a 4 man stambuild premade doesn't necessarily have to be true if you don't limit teams to 4 people each. 4v4 is very likely to be a miserable experience when it's a premade group vs a group of pugs, but 8v8 or 12v12 (on larger maps) is not. Premade groups being limited to 4 people when queueing would mean that all premades would queue in with pugs, and hopefully if two premades were queueing, each team would get a premade group, so you would end up with one premade and one or two pug groups vs one premade and one or two pug groups.

Rift did this very well. Despite the game's shortcomings in a lot of areas and it's population that was a fraction of what ESO has now (even years ago), it's instanced pvp was wildly more popular than BG's in ESO and a major reason (or the only reason) a lot of people logged on.

I spent over a few years interacting with the developers from Rift along with a handful of other serious, active PVPers in the game via a skype channel to help with balance changes, and that gave me a good chance to learn the ins and outs of what does and does not lead to balanced matchmaking in MMO PVP, and they ended up with a very reliable ELO system that kept everyone besides a few outliers (like myself) very close to a 50% win rate. My comments above are a reflection of my experience there, and IMO ZOS could learn a lot from that them, or players like myself, if they took the chance and listened.

Eventually having larger maps and two team game modes, while opening up instanced pvp to people who haven't bought Morrowind, would also be a step forward to hugely increasing the popularity of this kind of game mode and player retention in general. In Rift, simply queueing for bg's over and over again was a viable way to level and get experience. Even with matchmaking brackets every 10 levels or so (10-20, 21-30, etc), queues were instant 24 hours out of the day for years. More things to do/different ways to level and play with others is always a good thing for any MMO when it comes to player retention.

sorry for the wall of text lol

It's the game mode itself. You are never, ever going to have balanced matches with 4 person pugs vs 4 person premades. Ever.

Premades must queue against premades, but for 4v4v4, you need *three* premade groups for this to happen. The entire system needs to be reworked into larger maps and only two teams, with 8v8 or 12v12 depending on map size, or bg's will never be popular.

This is not just an issue that will be fixed by a ranking system by itself, the nature of small scale pvp on small maps will always lead to premades pug stomping unless they are queued in WITH pugs on their own team. Even with 4v4v4 and three premades, a ranking system needs a very large population to balance these matches out, as some premades will just be a group of friends, while other premades will be a group of pvpers in voip building a well balanced group.

With a reliable ELO matchmaking/ranking system and two teams, you will end up with fairly balanced matches, but only with larger teams. This leads to high ELO premades being queued in with low ELO pugs, against an entire opposing team of average ELO pugs, leading towards a more balanced match.

Actual 4v4 could be left as a very competitive ranked type mode, with a group queue option and a solo queue option. The rest (8v8, 12v12) would be mostly non-competitive and just for fun. This gives everyone who wants to enjoy instanced pvp options to do that in many different ways.

All of that said, gatekeeping BG's with an expansion will lead to less players, less interest, and less balanced matches due to a smaller player pool regardless of how the matches work. If BG's were eventually opened up to everyone, we'd see much more balanced matches too.

Yep. I played Rift too and they did battlegrounds so, much better. They just needed a bigger map-rotation (at least when I played).. I would have thought it was obvious for ZOS to look at the competition like Rift to see what they should be looking to equal/beat..

ESO's strategy of adding more maps to a flawed system is wrong imho. The matchmaking system needs fixing, it then needs a re-launch/event to try to boost numbers - and only then they can look at extra maps..

gabriebe

I'd like to see a customizable up-to-12-men arena in next major update/DLC. Like you make up your own roster as a gamemaster, with guildies or friends, sort them beforehand in 2 teams of 6 , 3 teams of 4 or 4 teams of 3 and then select the mode. I don't care about leaderboards, but playing with friends in an environment where you can somewhat mitigate the skills gap would be great.

Or just dueling arenas, really, where you can have 3 people dueling 3 other people and such.

Feanor

Even from a premade standpoint queuing vs other premades is preferable. If you talk to the premade players they desperately want to play against other strong premades and not have these PuG slaughter fests...

Thogard

Feanor wrote: »

Even from a premade standpoint queuing vs other premades is preferable. If you talk to the premade players they desperately want to play against other strong premades and not have these PuG slaughter fests...

This is true. Lately, due to low populations, I've been talking to other premade group leaders before putting a group together. If there aren't any other premades on, I still might run one, but we'll go without a healplar

ecru

Thogard wrote: »

Feanor wrote: »

Even from a premade standpoint queuing vs other premades is preferable. If you talk to the premade players they desperately want to play against other strong premades and not have these PuG slaughter fests...

This is true. Lately, due to low populations, I've been talking to other premade group leaders before putting a group together. If there aren't any other premades on, I still might run one, but we'll go without a healplar

The fact that you run into the same people often enough to go out of your way to talk to other group leaders like this says a lot about the BG population atm. I honestly almost never see anyone in any of the five guilds I'm in talking about them, or asking people to queue for BG's

Biro123

Now I want to like BG's. I wanted to before they were released.. but as they came out - and they were no-CP only (which I didn't have a proper build for) - combined with the fact that queues were buggy as hell.. Well, I just decided to wait till they fixed it..

I knew the pug v premade thing would be a problem ahead of time.. and unfortunately when I tried it again, it seems that due to the earlier queuing bugs, all but the planned premades had given up, and gone back to Cyro.. so it was almost all against a premade.. and I still hadn't done a proper noCP build.. so I though *** it. Its unlikely I'll go back now. Premade V Pug is broken - and they've lost the population needed to have them separated.

I even did some BG's on a new sub-50 toon in the below-50 bgs... There were even premades there!!! Now that is just sealclubbing at its finest... Premades should be banned in sub-50.

So yeah.. BG's = huge fail for me. I mean they can be fun - but that's a rare, rare thing - and its all due to matchmaking. (which should have been in from the start ZOS!). Not worth all the pain for the odd glimpse of fun when Cyro is an alternative.

IcyDeadPeople

Thogard wrote: »

Is it really that hard to put together a group of four?

I solo queue all the time. When I notice a bunch of premades getting on, I'll start building my own premade of players from PUGs that are good.

I really don't want everyone to be random because then there's always the chance that I'll get stuck without a decent healer... crazy how hard it is to win when you don't have a magplar in the group.

If they make a solo queue only option, I'll never join it. It'll just be a roll of the dice on the team composition... better to make my own premade than deal with that.

Personally, I really enjoy deathmatch in FPS and other games where it is random who is on your team, who is on enemy team, and the match making systems tend to do a decent job pairing up players of similar skill level.

If you are random solo queue, it's boring to play against premade groups and it's also pretty boring to play on a premade group against randoms.

Premades should be playing against other premades. Randoms should be playing against other random solo queuers.

DeadlyRecluse

It's a circular problem.

It'll never be seriously competitive without MMR/ELO/matchmaking AND non-stupid score mechanics.

MMR/ELO/Matchmaking won't work until the population is higher. 90% of the time, you start repeating opponents within a few BGs. There aren't enough people playing to sort them into skill tiers, or probably even to split pre-mades vs pugs.

The population won't be higher until there is some kind of matchmaking, non-stupid score mechanics, and actual incentives (yay, another invigorating Vanguard's Challenge helm...).

So while fixing the inequities in the queue would be great, there's a lot more that needs tweaking, too.

Biro123

Yep. It basically needed to be working and have the right features when it was released.

CatchMeTrolling

The population isn't as high because it's no cp , plenty of people said they wouldn't play because of it . Premades can be annoying but not to the point that it's off putting.

Thogard

CatchMeTrolling wrote: »

The population isn't as high because it's no cp , plenty of people said they wouldn't play because of it . Premades can be annoying but not to the point that it's off putting.

CP in BGs would be disastrous. There are too many "troll builds" or unkillable builds that are possible in CP but not in No CP.

max_only

CatchMeTrolling wrote: »

The population isn't as high because it's no cp , plenty of people said they wouldn't play because of it . Premades can be annoying but not to the point that it's off putting.

The population isn't as high because it requires another purchase of majority pve content. Pvpers have spoken with their wallets. If they tied battlegrounds to the subscription then you will see more popularity.

**Please note: I preordered Morrowind, have a constant subscription, and buy crowns so this isn't a plea from a cheap scrub.

CatchMeTrolling

max_only wrote: »

CatchMeTrolling wrote: »

The population isn't as high because it's no cp , plenty of people said they wouldn't play because of it . Premades can be annoying but not to the point that it's off putting.

The population isn't as high because it requires another purchase of majority pve content. Pvpers have spoken with their wallets. If they tied battlegrounds to the subscription then you will see more popularity.

**Please note: I preordered Morrowind, have a constant subscription, and buy crowns so this isn't a plea from a cheap scrub.

That's not entirely true imperial city was disguised as pvp content but is mostly pve but people still bought it so yeah.

For awhile the majority has been against no cp, if you don't think that isn't playing a role I don't know what to tell you.

ecru

max_only wrote: »

CatchMeTrolling wrote: »

The population isn't as high because it's no cp , plenty of people said they wouldn't play because of it . Premades can be annoying but not to the point that it's off putting.

The population isn't as high because it requires another purchase of majority pve content. Pvpers have spoken with their wallets. If they tied battlegrounds to the subscription then you will see more popularity.

**Please note: I preordered Morrowind, have a constant subscription, and buy crowns so this isn't a plea from a cheap scrub.

I don't really think this is much of a factor, all of Vvardenfell is always packed and there are wardens everywhere. The expansion sold very well IMO, and it's even cheaper now.

Prince_of_all_Pugs

well to combat this premade meta, ive made a BG guild Called SoS on PC NA, we are doing pretty good thanks to my experienced team!

casparian

Prince_of_all_Pugs wrote: »

well to combat this premade meta, ive made a BG guild Called SoS on PC NA, we are doing pretty good thanks to my experienced team!

You can't combat a meta by participating in it

Prince_of_all_Pugs

hey some times you gotta fight fire with fire