The truth about ESO's small scale pvp culture - from an actual PVPer

Moriz

Hello,
Quick intro on who am I so you understand the roots:
I'm an mmorpg pvp gamer since always, and I love small scale structured pvp. Arenas to be exact, where you queue up and fight other compeitive players who also seek to play arenas. It's much more competitive and fun for me in every single mmo where you have access to arenas.

One of the notable games i've played for a while when it was ultra competitive was guild wars 2, where the main competitive mode is 5v5 with domination type mode, where it's crazy how you have to rotate, play the macro of the match but still be able to win your team fights, your 1v1s, 2v2s and so on.

Then I met ESO..I've been playing ESO on and off since 2017, pretty much exclusively for PvP and BGs. don't particularly care about cyro too much, 80% walking 20% figthing, imperial city is fun to go and make a crap ton of gold to supply for all my builds.
For many years i've played BGs my own way, which to kill as many players as I could but to also win the match no matter what the game mode was.
I got to know more of the "high end" battleground community this time around in NA-PC, and i've learned that in this game culturally speaking, no player who is actually good and actually performing well every match consistently, cares about ANYTHING other than how many kills you get in a BG.

From that point on, wanting to be relevant with the other "cool kids" i've also embraced this mentality and completely stopped playing objectives and only ever focused on kills...
Not gonna lie, some of the craziest BG matches i've had in my life were games where you had other sick pvp players too and everyone was playing to win the game mode, and of course killing as many players as you can as well.
But it's undeniable that due to this games nature of having 3 teams, that a lot of the time in other modes like domination or crazy king, the least skilled players will win the match because they literally just avoid pvp and run from point A to point B to score points. That takes 0 skill.

The main issue to why actual pvp players don't play for objectives and can't see any other mode other than TDM being competitive, is the fact that you have 3 teams really, that has always been the biggest issue of this game and why BGs will never be successful.
If you have a solid 5v5 team v team, every single match of any objective will be competitive and fun, less cluster fuky, more organized.
Theres literally no reason to have the only queueable structured pvp be 3 teams in a game like ESO, it will NEVER fix itself and no matter what ZOS tries you are NEVER going to be able to break through this barrier where serious pvp players will see every other mode as a joke and completely ignore it to just play for kills.

Unless you change this to a two teams, 5v5 or 4v4 even, maybe make an actual solo queue ranked mode with actual rewards, and non ranked for premades. Such a simple solution really.



TL;DR
all game modes are a joke for true PVP gamers because it's 3 teams and usually objective pvp is won by bads who avoid pvp and just afk on circle
make the game 2 teams only, 5v5 or 4v4 and add an actual solo queue ranked system and premade for unranked.
You'll see how all your game modes will be played by everyone then, if its only 2 teams.

Aldoss

As a PvPer, I would love for ZOS to motivate me to care about objectives.

It's not even like the 3 team thing is important for the lore either because you can have all 3 alliances represented in the same BG team.

Team vs Team is the easiest way to instantly make objective games more motivating to the PvP community.

GypsyKing22

I only want 2 things for BGs, one is as you said team v team instead of the 3 way free for all [snip] we have now, and the other one is a simple dueling queue

[edited for language]

_adhyffbjjjf12

Moriz wrote: »

Hello,
Quick intro on who am I so you understand the roots:
I'm an mmorpg pvp gamer since always, and I love small scale structured pvp. Arenas to be exact, where you queue up and fight other compeitive players who also seek to play arenas. It's much more competitive and fun for me in every single mmo where you have access to arenas.

One of the notable games i've played for a while when it was ultra competitive was guild wars 2, where the main competitive mode is 5v5 with domination type mode, where it's crazy how you have to rotate, play the macro of the match but still be able to win your team fights, your 1v1s, 2v2s and so on.

Then I met ESO..I've been playing ESO on and off since 2017, pretty much exclusively for PvP and BGs. don't particularly care about cyro too much, 80% walking 20% figthing, imperial city is fun to go and make a crap ton of gold to supply for all my builds.
For many years i've played BGs my own way, which to kill as many players as I could but to also win the match no matter what the game mode was.
I got to know more of the "high end" battleground community this time around in NA-PC, and i've learned that in this game culturally speaking, no player who is actually good and actually performing well every match consistently, cares about ANYTHING other than how many kills you get in a BG.

From that point on, wanting to be relevant with the other "cool kids" i've also embraced this mentality and completely stopped playing objectives and only ever focused on kills...
Not gonna lie, some of the craziest BG matches i've had in my life were games where you had other sick pvp players too and everyone was playing to win the game mode, and of course killing as many players as you can as well.
But it's undeniable that due to this games nature of having 3 teams, that a lot of the time in other modes like domination or crazy king, the least skilled players will win the match because they literally just avoid pvp and run from point A to point B to score points. That takes 0 skill.

The main issue to why actual pvp players don't play for objectives and can't see any other mode other than TDM being competitive, is the fact that you have 3 teams really, that has always been the biggest issue of this game and why BGs will never be successful.
If you have a solid 5v5 team v team, every single match of any objective will be competitive and fun, less cluster fuky, more organized.
Theres literally no reason to have the only queueable structured pvp be 3 teams in a game like ESO, it will NEVER fix itself and no matter what ZOS tries you are NEVER going to be able to break through this barrier where serious pvp players will see every other mode as a joke and completely ignore it to just play for kills.

Unless you change this to a two teams, 5v5 or 4v4 even, maybe make an actual solo queue ranked mode with actual rewards, and non ranked for premades. Such a simple solution really.



TL;DR
all game modes are a joke for true PVP gamers because it's 3 teams and usually objective pvp is won by bads who avoid pvp and just afk on circle
make the game 2 teams only, 5v5 or 4v4 and add an actual solo queue ranked system and premade for unranked.
You'll see how all your game modes will be played by everyone then, if its only 2 teams.

There is no such thing as a 'true pvper' This is a game with players who have varying levels of skill. I've also played GW (5k+, Wow (10k on main alone) and ESO (2k) I also play very casually now etc etc. That aside, GW2 has really good BG with 3 team objective based PVP.

Only a tiny subset of the player base really cares about ranking so having random solo with rewards makes sense. For me it should be:

Random solo = not ranked, solo, has rewards, all games modes are equal.
Random queue = ranked, groups, has rewards, preference for DM, specific titles and achievements.
Private Arena? allow guild versus Guild activities - not sure if the population can support this though.

NerfSeige

You how people can care about objectives? SEASON RANKING WITH GREAT REWARDS

Now if you get ranking that is transparent and with progression per season, roleplayers will actually try to do the BGs instead of just hiding in the spawn point when things get south.

Also, tdm enjoyers will also kill to help with the objective players instead of doing their thing cause losing means a rank down instead of this hidden ranking system right now which is basically wothless.

Moriz

_adhyffbjjjf12 wrote: »

Moriz wrote: »

Hello,
Quick intro on who am I so you understand the roots:
I'm an mmorpg pvp gamer since always, and I love small scale structured pvp. Arenas to be exact, where you queue up and fight other compeitive players who also seek to play arenas. It's much more competitive and fun for me in every single mmo where you have access to arenas.

One of the notable games i've played for a while when it was ultra competitive was guild wars 2, where the main competitive mode is 5v5 with domination type mode, where it's crazy how you have to rotate, play the macro of the match but still be able to win your team fights, your 1v1s, 2v2s and so on.

Then I met ESO..I've been playing ESO on and off since 2017, pretty much exclusively for PvP and BGs. don't particularly care about cyro too much, 80% walking 20% figthing, imperial city is fun to go and make a crap ton of gold to supply for all my builds.
For many years i've played BGs my own way, which to kill as many players as I could but to also win the match no matter what the game mode was.
I got to know more of the "high end" battleground community this time around in NA-PC, and i've learned that in this game culturally speaking, no player who is actually good and actually performing well every match consistently, cares about ANYTHING other than how many kills you get in a BG.

From that point on, wanting to be relevant with the other "cool kids" i've also embraced this mentality and completely stopped playing objectives and only ever focused on kills...
Not gonna lie, some of the craziest BG matches i've had in my life were games where you had other sick pvp players too and everyone was playing to win the game mode, and of course killing as many players as you can as well.
But it's undeniable that due to this games nature of having 3 teams, that a lot of the time in other modes like domination or crazy king, the least skilled players will win the match because they literally just avoid pvp and run from point A to point B to score points. That takes 0 skill.

The main issue to why actual pvp players don't play for objectives and can't see any other mode other than TDM being competitive, is the fact that you have 3 teams really, that has always been the biggest issue of this game and why BGs will never be successful.
If you have a solid 5v5 team v team, every single match of any objective will be competitive and fun, less cluster fuky, more organized.
Theres literally no reason to have the only queueable structured pvp be 3 teams in a game like ESO, it will NEVER fix itself and no matter what ZOS tries you are NEVER going to be able to break through this barrier where serious pvp players will see every other mode as a joke and completely ignore it to just play for kills.

Unless you change this to a two teams, 5v5 or 4v4 even, maybe make an actual solo queue ranked mode with actual rewards, and non ranked for premades. Such a simple solution really.



TL;DR
all game modes are a joke for true PVP gamers because it's 3 teams and usually objective pvp is won by bads who avoid pvp and just afk on circle
make the game 2 teams only, 5v5 or 4v4 and add an actual solo queue ranked system and premade for unranked.
You'll see how all your game modes will be played by everyone then, if its only 2 teams.

There is no such thing as a 'true pvper' This is a game with players who have varying levels of skill. I've also played GW (5k+, Wow (10k on main alone) and ESO (2k) I also play very casually now etc etc. That aside, GW2 has really good BG with 3 team objective based PVP.

Only a tiny subset of the player base really cares about ranking so having random solo with rewards makes sense. For me it should be:

Random solo = not ranked, solo, has rewards, all games modes are equal.
Random queue = ranked, groups, has rewards, preference for DM, specific titles and achievements.
Private Arena? allow guild versus Guild activities - not sure if the population can support this though.

of course there is such a thing.
someone who queues up to do their daily is very different to someone whos only purpose is to play and improve at pvp, with the best builds, classes, skills. people who actually take time to master that specific side of a game are the actual pvpers.
not people who just queue up a match for fun.

Nobody who plays structured pvp in gw2 gives a damn about anything but the traditional 5v5 conquest mode, which has always been the main focus of the game and always super competitive.

Reason why Gw2 is even brought up here is because it's one of the few if not the only relevant mmorpg with an objective game mode that is ultra competitive and we are comparing why it works there and doesn't work here.
There should never be premade ranks as the main mode, at best allow it to be duo queue. It doesn't work in 2021 anymore, it never will anymore.
Premades have to have their own separate thing to do while allowing people to compete on equal ground on solo queue.

5 v 5
actual ranked where you gain/lose points on a solo queue
actual rewards
who would ever be upset at that?

thesarahandcompany

This is a good start.

My initial thoughts are that we need to do more than just remove the unique 3 team set-up. You also need to do things like reduce the number of flags in land grab, add a snare to chaos ball and relics, reduce the number of relics, etc.

KhajiitLivesMatter

the reason why i dont play as much bgs is because there are no cps and there is no way i make 2 builds [snip]

[Edited for Bashing]

Magio_

Moriz wrote: »

Not gonna lie, some of the craziest BG matches i've had in my life were games where you had other sick pvp players too and everyone was playing to win the game mode, and of course killing as many players as you can as well.

I agree with everything said, just want to add that Deathmatch is also epic and poggers when there's 12 sick pvp players in the field. Specially in organized 4v4v4 nights or tournaments.

Ah... what BGs could be if it was Head-to-Head and had enough population to separate people by skill with ranks.

HiImRex

IMO the ideal ESO pvp that plays to all its strengths would be a 2 team MOBA-lite lane pusher with side objectives.

Take the best parts of Cyrodil’s strategic objectives and IC’s pvpve and condense it down into an instanced pvp arena.

Lane Pve and pvp kills generate scores that give light scaling to each team (1% dmg done /mitigated every 1000 points or such like), primary objectives determine who wins the match, and finally death timers that increase every couple minutes so that late game team wipe ends the game or begins a comeback.

GypsyKing22

HiImRex wrote: »

IMO the ideal ESO pvp that plays to all its strengths would be a 2 team MOBA-lite lane pusher with side objectives.

Take the best parts of Cyrodil’s strategic objectives and IC’s pvpve and condense it down into an instanced pvp arena.

Lane Pve and pvp kills generate scores that give light scaling to each team (1% dmg done /mitigated every 1000 points or such like), primary objectives determine who wins the match, and finally death timers that increase every couple minutes so that late game team wipe ends the game or begins a comeback.

Glad to see someone else see how weirdly similar eso combat plays to dota and other mobas and how well those games mechanics could translate over to eso

SkaraMinoc

thesarahandcompany wrote: »

add a snare to chaos ball

That's the cheesiest win for Chaosball. Max +movespeed build and sprint around the battleground for an easy +200 points. It's not balanced and should be nerfed. -1% movespeed every 2 seconds up to a maximum of -50% would fix it.

Or, alternatively, just remove +movespeed effects from the player when carrying the ball.

Sythen88411

This was all written for nothing. End game pve..housing....sucks bit it is what it is..

Moriz

it really hurts..
i love the pvp in ESO and i think its one of the best if not the best in the market, but it just feels pointless to play really.
the only form of structured PvP is so neglected by the devs, but you can see the potential, it has so much potential.

This game could've been borderline esports competitive if they simply had a proper balance team (no ridiculous proc sets), and a proper competitive mode without 3 teams and some small adjustments to the modes as they are.
I quit this game a week after Hrothgar and Dark Convergence got added and any and all build diversity was gone, any skill expression was gone too.

It has been like a toxic relationship for me throughout the years. I come back to this game whenever I find it in a healthy state where you build to make your actual character strong, not some braindead procs.
40 days later **NEW SHINY PROC META** and it all falls apart and pvp dies out, I quit the game and have to wait a year for the whole process to do another loop.

Thing is, other mmos are finally getting released. There will be very little reason other than not being able to move on to play my beloved ESO if they don't get their sht together....

Amottica

Aldoss wrote: »

As a PvPer, I would love for ZOS to motivate me to care about objectives.

It's not even like the 3 team thing is important for the lore either because you can have all 3 alliances represented in the same BG team.

Team vs Team is the easiest way to instantly make objective games more motivating to the PvP community.

I agree that the objective designs are not interesting even if they are similar to objective pvp I have seen in other games.

So as a PvP player (which anyone who enters into PvP from time to time is one) something is very much missing from what we have in ESO. I do not think catering to DM is the way, and apparently, Zenimax saw proof of that. Some of the best PvP fights I have seen occurred in objective-based PvP and we were not ignoring the objectives.

NerfSeige

HiImRex wrote: »

IMO the ideal ESO pvp that plays to all its strengths would be a 2 team MOBA-lite lane pusher with side objectives.

Take the best parts of Cyrodil’s strategic objectives and IC’s pvpve and condense it down into an instanced pvp arena.

Lane Pve and pvp kills generate scores that give light scaling to each team (1% dmg done /mitigated every 1000 points or such like), primary objectives determine who wins the match, and finally death timers that increase every couple minutes so that late game team wipe ends the game or begins a comeback.

Bro, LOL/DoTA with eso combat?? SIGN ME THE F UP.

You want objectives? Push the tower!

You wanna kill? Push back!

WIN-WIN.

I just hope if it happens that the rewards are better, lol

gariondavey

Sorry you feel this way. I'm part of the sweaty bg crowd. I'm in a bg guild with hundreds of people, many of which are the best players in the game. They are helpful. We have an attitude of helpfulness in our guild. People share builds and help each other and give advice to fine tune builds. People duo with you to help you get better. We do guild 4v4v4s multiple times a week. People duo and queue as teams on a nightly basis.
In short, you are very very wrong about how the community is. If you are on pc na and willing to change your outlook, send me mail and I'll invite you to our guild. Same name in game as on the forums.

gariondavey

You are correct about the objective modes, however. They do need a rework to encourage pvp. This can be done with 2 teams on objective matches, or having 1 relic for capture the relic, fewer flags for flag games, and adding snares to chaosball and relic.
Heals over time of the same name should not stack, as well. (Radiating regen only 1 on you at a time, etc).

Moriz

gariondavey wrote: »

Sorry you feel this way. I'm part of the sweaty bg crowd. I'm in a bg guild with hundreds of people, many of which are the best players in the game. They are helpful. We have an attitude of helpfulness in our guild. People share builds and help each other and give advice to fine tune builds. People duo with you to help you get better. We do guild 4v4v4s multiple times a week. People duo and queue as teams on a nightly basis.
In short, you are very very wrong about how the community is. If you are on pc na and willing to change your outlook, send me mail and I'll invite you to our guild. Same name in game as on the forums.

the game has a semi functional mmr system
i played countless of thousands of bgs throughout the years and i basically just play with/against the same 30-40 players realistically
solo queue was actually fun for the most part, you could almost call it "competitive".
that still has nothing to do with the subject here though, it doesn't change what i said towards why people specifically on ESO don't play for objectives and everyone (who isn't bad for the most part) just plays TDM every game no matter the mode.

ESO will just continiously lose competitive pvp gamers because i don't see them ever actually caring to change it. Actual rewards, only 2 teams, small adjustments to the current modes, gg you've got youself a great pvp mmorpg
one can only dream right..

[snip]

[edited for advertising]

Dem_kitkats1

Ahh finally a thread about the culture in small scale PVP. I too have been playing mostly solo, apart from a of couple of friends, since 2018. So the journey from noob player to now is still very fresh in my mind. Reading all of the threads since the que changes, it's clear that there is a lot of anger, animosity, and misunderstanding between players within the small scale PVP community. There is a clear division between Objective and DM players, which is concerning and sad considering the state that PVP has been in the past year. But having been on the rollercoaster ride that is BGs I have seen and felt the frustrations of both sides myself.

As a new player lowbies were fun, and more lighthearted as everyone was on a more level playing field. Objective modes were honestly fantastic as a new player, because you were able to get a feel for PVP without being constantly bombarded by other players like you would in DMs.

However, when I reached max level I got a very rude awakening. I understand why so many players quit when they reach max level and why different mode players become frustrated with each other. As a newer, more casual player, playing with the competitive sweaty DM crowd was honestly a really terrible and frustrating experience. At the time Objective modes were my favorite as I enjoyed the small scale skirmishes between teams, and I had had some of the best 1v1s in trying to capture a flag. However, when the "cool DM kids" queued, it all went to hell as kills were the priority to the point of excessiveness. You were either constantly hunted down and steamrolled, or if you happened to have a couple sweaty BG people on your team you would be belittled for your "lack of skill".
DMs as a new player/casual player was even worse and I understand why "DM" players get a rep. I remember a few instances where I would be put into a DM where players in opposing teams would completely ignore each other and gang up on other players simply because they knew each other and could get easier kills (that's not really competing in my books). Or in other cases a "cool kid" would be be put on to my team and after dying one or two times they would rage quit or completely refuse to play. If wasn't for my friends I would have quit right then. I definitely agree that a large part of this is a flaw in the game's MMR system, but as of now this is what the culture has been like and I'm not sure if it'll be looked at by ZOS in the near future. People are concerned about the population in BGs, yet newer/less skilled players get constantly berated and abandoned by "competitive players". I understand being competitive, but the lack of respect and understanding towards newer/less skilled players, and the blatant elitism from "top tier" players makes the experience very unpleasant for players who want to get involved in PVP. Thus, the population doesn't grow. And how is it even competitive if players will only play with or against the same 30-40 players?

After a couple of years of practicing and grinding it through, I've gotten a lot better and can hold my own with the "cool kids", so I can also understand the frustration of the DM crowd. BGs is a PVP mode, which means that there should be competition and combat between players no matter the mode. It doesn't make sense that a player can win and reap the rewards without even having to engage in combat. There have been instances where I would be trying to gain or defend an objective and my teammate would just abandon me at the first sight of combat. Yet they would win because they snuck around and took points. Or whole teams would sneak around and follow other teams to steal points and not engage with them. And before the que changes, the majority of matches would be objective, so when you queued for a PVP match and there would be little to no combat it would be frustrating. So I understand why DM players became bored with playing the objectives when they got maybe %10 DM and began making every mode a DM. I agree with what many people have said, that the modes need to be reworked to make it more PVP engaging.

Sorry to rant, just some insights from my own experience. It would be interesting to hear other people's perspectives on the small scale PVP culture, the good and the bad.

Moriz

Dem_kitkats1 wrote: »

Ahh finally a thread about the culture in small scale PVP. I too have been playing mostly solo, apart from a of couple of friends, since 2018. So the journey from noob player to now is still very fresh in my mind. Reading all of the threads since the que changes, it's clear that there is a lot of anger, animosity, and misunderstanding between players within the small scale PVP community. There is a clear division between Objective and DM players, which is concerning and sad considering the state that PVP has been in the past year. But having been on the rollercoaster ride that is BGs I have seen and felt the frustrations of both sides myself.

As a new player lowbies were fun, and more lighthearted as everyone was on a more level playing field. Objective modes were honestly fantastic as a new player, because you were able to get a feel for PVP without being constantly bombarded by other players like you would in DMs.

However, when I reached max level I got a very rude awakening. I understand why so many players quit when they reach max level and why different mode players become frustrated with each other. As a newer, more casual player, playing with the competitive sweaty DM crowd was honestly a really terrible and frustrating experience. At the time Objective modes were my favorite as I enjoyed the small scale skirmishes between teams, and I had had some of the best 1v1s in trying to capture a flag. However, when the "cool DM kids" queued, it all went to hell as kills were the priority to the point of excessiveness. You were either constantly hunted down and steamrolled, or if you happened to have a couple sweaty BG people on your team you would be belittled for your "lack of skill".
DMs as a new player/casual player was even worse and I understand why "DM" players get a rep. I remember a few instances where I would be put into a DM where players in opposing teams would completely ignore each other and gang up on other players simply because they new each other and could get easier kills (that's not really competing my books). Or in other cases a "cool kid" would be be put on to my team and after dying one or two times they would rage quit or completely refuse to play. If wasn't for my friends I would have quit right then. I definitely agree that a large part of this is a flaw in the game's mmr system, but as of now this is what the culture has been like. People are concerned about the population in BGs, yet newer/less skilled players get constantly berated and abandoned by "competitive players". And how is it even competitive if players will only play with or against the same 30-40 players?

After a couple of years of practicing and grinding it through, I've gotten a lot better and can hold my own with the "cool kids", I can also understand the frustration of the DM crowd. BGs is a PVP mode, which means that there should be competition and combat between players no matter the mode. It doesn't make sense that a player can win and reap the rewards without even having to engage in combat. There have been instances where I would be trying to gain or defend an objective and my teammate would just abandon me at the first sight of combat. Yet they would win because they suck around and took points. Or whole teams would sneak around and follow other teams to steal points and not engage with them. And before the que changes, the majority of matches would be objective, so when you queued for a PVP match and there would be little to no combat it would be frustrating. So I understand why DM became bored with playing the objectives when they got maybe %10 DM and began making every mode a DM. I agree with what many people have said, that the modes need to be reworked to make it more PVP engaging.

Sorry to rant, just some insights from my own experience. It would be interesting to hear other people's perspectives on the small scale PVP culture, the good and the bad.

much respect my small scale veteran solo player brother
i could almost copy paste your story and make it my own.

[snip]
[edited for discussing moderator action]

GypsyKing22

Just to add some further insight, from an ex pro fighting game player who also played a ton of dota 2 although nowhere near at the same level

I personally think the game has the potential to have one of the best pvp out there. It currently has the often brought up issues with performance and balancing, both of which obviously leave a bad taste in people's mouths, but despite these problems, there is definitely still a reasonably sized battlegrounds community (on pc-eu anyhow).

I think as it has also been previously stated, that even though there is incredible potential in this games pvp and which is why all of us who love it want to see it improve and flourish, that doesn't go together with the PvE focused vision of ZoS.

All that said, I think that some things could be done with relatively little effort on the back-end that would improve the BG pvp experience greatly. Do note this is for deathmatches only, since that is what I have experience in, so if some numbers look off for objective modes then ofc that can be handled separately.

1. MMR system and medal score revamp

Instead of the "up only" style of mmr we currently have, make it so that you can lose mmr if you play badly. For starters you could do this by making any medal score under 1500 count as "negative medal score" for the purpose of mmr rating and anything above 2000 count as "positive medal score" - this way people who play well enough to actually be very useful for their team can climb in mmr, people who are useful but not quite as useful as they could be stay in the same skill bracket, and people who aren't as skilled as their mmr bracket can drop down to a skill level where they belong and can again be useful to their team and improve with matches that are actually fun for them. (and maybe a scaling can be introduced so that in higher mmr brackets the score requirement for going down/up changes, say to 2000/2500 and then 2500/3000 for the top bracket). Even freaking Nioh PvP had a system like this, and while it was a fun game, ESO PvP with all it's issues and problems is still lightyears ahead of what Nioh PvP was.

In addition to this change, increase the medal score awarded for kills and assists (and make kills count for ever so slightly more, say 150 for kills and 140 for assists), and fix enemy team kills counting towards assists. If we are going to have proper MMR, I don't want to see a 1 - 4 - 45 MagDK with top medal score on the losing team which only ended up getting 90 points total.

Speaking of losing and winning teams, make it so that the winning team members get a 500 medal score bonus each for winning, and the losing team gets a 500 medal score penalty for losing.

These simple changes to how MMR is calculated for matchmaking purposes, and how medal scores work would improve the BG experience for every skill level involved and would probably already allow for a rise in the population of BGs. How?

For lower skill levels, people who actually don't want to fight "sweaty tryhards" won't have to almost ever, since their MMR will basically prevent them from it. They will keep playing with the other low MMR people who there are currently a crapton of actively trying battlegrounds on PC-EU - every time I level a new character and try them in BGs for the first time at level 50+, I get fast matches with almost always 11 random unknown players.

For medium skill levels, this will give fun matches at the cost of a slightly higher queue time, but at least they can learn and improve at their own pace instead of getting dunked on by actual top tier pvpers. Once they are so good that they are getting enough medal score to actually move up in MMR, they will be able to hold their own better and be more useful to the teams they get assigned to.

For highest skill level, this would come with one big negative, which is a noticably increased queue time, but I think we can all agree that if every match we get at the highest skill level actually only involves people who are all very good players and are always useful to their teams, then the quality of the games will more than make up for the increase in waiting time between matches.

This is the case in every single game with a proper MMR rating, the higher you go in the brackets, the higher the queue times get, but this is just the price you have to pay for getting quality games. I wouldn't mind having to wait 15-20 minutes or even more for a battlegrounds game if I knew for a fact that all three teams would be packed with killers, instead of getting a 3 minute queue where every second game I either get thrown in a game with "why deathmatch again?" or arms of relequen pve gear setup players who get a train ran on them.

Not bashing them, because neither of us are having as much fun as we could if we were just never allowed to get matched up in the first place. (wink wink nudge nudge if you do none of this at least change random queue to not include deathmatch @ZOS_GinaBruno ) If anything I'm sure they are having way less fun on the receiving end of 25k AoE burst combos and calurions nightblade 1hko ganks than I am on the delivering end.

2. Leaderboards Changes

With the proposed changes to the MMR system, a change in leaderboards would also need to be included, since the high frequency of low MMR games would mean that low MMR players would overall potentially amass more medal score than high MMR players. (though I don't necessarily think that would be the case, my proposed solution would still make more sense overall)

My proposed solution is to have an MMR leaderboard instead of the medal score aggregate. This would also immensely boost the BG population, simply by introducing an actual competitive element to getting on the leaderboards as well as fighting for the top places. The best players would be more likely to queue up trying to chase that top spot, and those in lower spots would want to get higher, and those not even on the top 100 would of course want to be on there.

Also, any player who hasn't had at least 5 BG matches that week shouldn't count as active for the leaderboards, so you couldn't just get a really high MMR and then not play but keep getting the rewards. Speaking of rewards...

3. Better Rewards from Leaderboards and PvP in general

This has been brought up numerous times before, but I feel like it truly is important to give better rewards for PvP. Just some ideas for daily and repeating rewards:

- BG Daily should give 10 transmutes, same as the Random Normal Dungeon. It's way less effort to run through fungal grotto 1 for the 100th time than it is to place at least 2nd in a BG game.
- BG winning team always gets 5 transmutes, which is the same as a vet hard mode pledge. BG 2nd place gets 3, losing team gets 1.
- MVP (highest medal score) gets a special lootbox similar to the "rewards for the worthy" we have now.
- Speaking of rewards for the worthy, change it so that it contains "battlegrounds keys", simlarly to how undaunted keys work, and make those exchangable at one of the BG vendors for stuff like the militant ordinator motifs, set lootboxes (dark convergence, plaguebreak, basically the sets we already get from it anyway, etc.)
- I feel like Alliance point gain from BGs is fine as it is so that should be kept

As for leaderboards rewards:

- Instead of the gold quality knights slayer epaulets, I'm sure most players would be more incentivized if the reward table was expanded to cyrodiil and imperial city pvp sets, as well as making it progressively better the higher up you are in the rankings. Say, first place gets 100k gold + random gold quality PvP jewelry + weapon + armor piece, second place 70k + random gold quality jewelry+weapon+armor piece, 3rd place 50k + random gold quality jewelry+weapon+armor piece, and then from 4th til 10th you get only the random 3 gold quality items, and from 11th to 50th you only get 2 random gold quality items, and from 51st to 100th you get same as now with 1 random gold quality item. In addition you could give 30 transmutes to top 3, 20 to 4-10, 15 to 11-50, and 10 to 51-100.

With just these 3 changes, while nothing would change as far as balancing or performance goes, and no changes to game modes, I feel like the pvp would already improve immensely simply by giving it an actual framework, instead of what it currently is. I truly believe that with such simple changes, as I said, with relatively little back-end work, there would already be an influx of both new as well as old returning pvp players. It would be very easy to market it as an introduction of "ranked pvp" (which it technically would be), and trust me any pvper worth his weight in salt (hehe) would be IN on it.

Moriz

GypsyKing22 wrote: »

Just to add some further insight, from an ex pro fighting game player who also played a ton of dota 2 although nowhere near at the same level

I personally think the game has the potential to have one of the best pvp out there. It currently has the often brought up issues with performance and balancing, both of which obviously leave a bad taste in people's mouths, but despite these problems, there is definitely still a reasonably sized battlegrounds community (on pc-eu anyhow).

I think as it has also been previously stated, that even though there is incredible potential in this games pvp and which is why all of us who love it want to see it improve and flourish, that doesn't go together with the PvE focused vision of ZoS.

All that said, I think that some things could be done with relatively little effort on the back-end that would improve the BG pvp experience greatly. Do note this is for deathmatches only, since that is what I have experience in, so if some numbers look off for objective modes then ofc that can be handled separately.

1. MMR system and medal score revamp

Instead of the "up only" style of mmr we currently have, make it so that you can lose mmr if you play badly. For starters you could do this by making any medal score under 1500 count as "negative medal score" for the purpose of mmr rating and anything above 2000 count as "positive medal score" - this way people who play well enough to actually be very useful for their team can climb in mmr, people who are useful but not quite as useful as they could be stay in the same skill bracket, and people who aren't as skilled as their mmr bracket can drop down to a skill level where they belong and can again be useful to their team and improve with matches that are actually fun for them. (and maybe a scaling can be introduced so that in higher mmr brackets the score requirement for going down/up changes, say to 2000/2500 and then 2500/3000 for the top bracket). Even freaking Nioh PvP had a system like this, and while it was a fun game, ESO PvP with all it's issues and problems is still lightyears ahead of what Nioh PvP was.

In addition to this change, increase the medal score awarded for kills and assists (and make kills count for ever so slightly more, say 150 for kills and 140 for assists), and fix enemy team kills counting towards assists. If we are going to have proper MMR, I don't want to see a 1 - 4 - 45 MagDK with top medal score on the losing team which only ended up getting 90 points total.

Speaking of losing and winning teams, make it so that the winning team members get a 500 medal score bonus each for winning, and the losing team gets a 500 medal score penalty for losing.

These simple changes to how MMR is calculated for matchmaking purposes, and how medal scores work would improve the BG experience for every skill level involved and would probably already allow for a rise in the population of BGs. How?

For lower skill levels, people who actually don't want to fight "sweaty tryhards" won't have to almost ever, since their MMR will basically prevent them from it. They will keep playing with the other low MMR people who there are currently a crapton of actively trying battlegrounds on PC-EU - every time I level a new character and try them in BGs for the first time at level 50+, I get fast matches with almost always 11 random unknown players.

For medium skill levels, this will give fun matches at the cost of a slightly higher queue time, but at least they can learn and improve at their own pace instead of getting dunked on by actual top tier pvpers. Once they are so good that they are getting enough medal score to actually move up in MMR, they will be able to hold their own better and be more useful to the teams they get assigned to.

For highest skill level, this would come with one big negative, which is a noticably increased queue time, but I think we can all agree that if every match we get at the highest skill level actually only involves people who are all very good players and are always useful to their teams, then the quality of the games will more than make up for the increase in waiting time between matches.

This is the case in every single game with a proper MMR rating, the higher you go in the brackets, the higher the queue times get, but this is just the price you have to pay for getting quality games. I wouldn't mind having to wait 15-20 minutes or even more for a battlegrounds game if I knew for a fact that all three teams would be packed with killers, instead of getting a 3 minute queue where every second game I either get thrown in a game with "why deathmatch again?" or arms of relequen pve gear setup players who get a train ran on them.

Not bashing them, because neither of us are having as much fun as we could if we were just never allowed to get matched up in the first place. (wink wink nudge nudge if you do none of this at least change random queue to not include deathmatch @ZOS_GinaBruno ) If anything I'm sure they are having way less fun on the receiving end of 25k AoE burst combos and calurions nightblade 1hko ganks than I am on the delivering end.

2. Leaderboards Changes

With the proposed changes to the MMR system, a change in leaderboards would also need to be included, since the high frequency of low MMR games would mean that low MMR players would overall potentially amass more medal score than high MMR players. (though I don't necessarily think that would be the case, my proposed solution would still make more sense overall)

My proposed solution is to have an MMR leaderboard instead of the medal score aggregate. This would also immensely boost the BG population, simply by introducing an actual competitive element to getting on the leaderboards as well as fighting for the top places. The best players would be more likely to queue up trying to chase that top spot, and those in lower spots would want to get higher, and those not even on the top 100 would of course want to be on there.

Also, any player who hasn't had at least 5 BG matches that week shouldn't count as active for the leaderboards, so you couldn't just get a really high MMR and then not play but keep getting the rewards. Speaking of rewards...

3. Better Rewards from Leaderboards and PvP in general

This has been brought up numerous times before, but I feel like it truly is important to give better rewards for PvP. Just some ideas for daily and repeating rewards:

- BG Daily should give 10 transmutes, same as the Random Normal Dungeon. It's way less effort to run through fungal grotto 1 for the 100th time than it is to place at least 2nd in a BG game.
- BG winning team always gets 5 transmutes, which is the same as a vet hard mode pledge. BG 2nd place gets 3, losing team gets 1.
- MVP (highest medal score) gets a special lootbox similar to the "rewards for the worthy" we have now.
- Speaking of rewards for the worthy, change it so that it contains "battlegrounds keys", simlarly to how undaunted keys work, and make those exchangable at one of the BG vendors for stuff like the militant ordinator motifs, set lootboxes (dark convergence, plaguebreak, basically the sets we already get from it anyway, etc.)
- I feel like Alliance point gain from BGs is fine as it is so that should be kept

As for leaderboards rewards:

- Instead of the gold quality knights slayer epaulets, I'm sure most players would be more incentivized if the reward table was expanded to cyrodiil and imperial city pvp sets, as well as making it progressively better the higher up you are in the rankings. Say, first place gets 100k gold + random gold quality PvP jewelry + weapon + armor piece, second place 70k + random gold quality jewelry+weapon+armor piece, 3rd place 50k + random gold quality jewelry+weapon+armor piece, and then from 4th til 10th you get only the random 3 gold quality items, and from 11th to 50th you only get 2 random gold quality items, and from 51st to 100th you get same as now with 1 random gold quality item. In addition you could give 30 transmutes to top 3, 20 to 4-10, 15 to 11-50, and 10 to 51-100.

With just these 3 changes, while nothing would change as far as balancing or performance goes, and no changes to game modes, I feel like the pvp would already improve immensely simply by giving it an actual framework, instead of what it currently is. I truly believe that with such simple changes, as I said, with relatively little back-end work, there would already be an influx of both new as well as old returning pvp players. It would be very easy to market it as an introduction of "ranked pvp" (which it technically would be), and trust me any pvper worth his weight in salt (hehe) would be IN on it.

lets make this guy our president
well spoken brother, agree with every word

Dem_kitkats1

GypsyKing22 wrote: »

Just to add some further insight, from an ex pro fighting game player who also played a ton of dota 2 although nowhere near at the same level

I personally think the game has the potential to have one of the best pvp out there. It currently has the often brought up issues with performance and balancing, both of which obviously leave a bad taste in people's mouths, but despite these problems, there is definitely still a reasonably sized battlegrounds community (on pc-eu anyhow).

I think as it has also been previously stated, that even though there is incredible potential in this games pvp and which is why all of us who love it want to see it improve and flourish, that doesn't go together with the PvE focused vision of ZoS.

All that said, I think that some things could be done with relatively little effort on the back-end that would improve the BG pvp experience greatly. Do note this is for deathmatches only, since that is what I have experience in, so if some numbers look off for objective modes then ofc that can be handled separately.

1. MMR system and medal score revamp

Instead of the "up only" style of mmr we currently have, make it so that you can lose mmr if you play badly. For starters you could do this by making any medal score under 1500 count as "negative medal score" for the purpose of mmr rating and anything above 2000 count as "positive medal score" - this way people who play well enough to actually be very useful for their team can climb in mmr, people who are useful but not quite as useful as they could be stay in the same skill bracket, and people who aren't as skilled as their mmr bracket can drop down to a skill level where they belong and can again be useful to their team and improve with matches that are actually fun for them. (and maybe a scaling can be introduced so that in higher mmr brackets the score requirement for going down/up changes, say to 2000/2500 and then 2500/3000 for the top bracket). Even freaking Nioh PvP had a system like this, and while it was a fun game, ESO PvP with all it's issues and problems is still lightyears ahead of what Nioh PvP was.

In addition to this change, increase the medal score awarded for kills and assists (and make kills count for ever so slightly more, say 150 for kills and 140 for assists), and fix enemy team kills counting towards assists. If we are going to have proper MMR, I don't want to see a 1 - 4 - 45 MagDK with top medal score on the losing team which only ended up getting 90 points total.

Speaking of losing and winning teams, make it so that the winning team members get a 500 medal score bonus each for winning, and the losing team gets a 500 medal score penalty for losing.

These simple changes to how MMR is calculated for matchmaking purposes, and how medal scores work would improve the BG experience for every skill level involved and would probably already allow for a rise in the population of BGs. How?

For lower skill levels, people who actually don't want to fight "sweaty tryhards" won't have to almost ever, since their MMR will basically prevent them from it. They will keep playing with the other low MMR people who there are currently a crapton of actively trying battlegrounds on PC-EU - every time I level a new character and try them in BGs for the first time at level 50+, I get fast matches with almost always 11 random unknown players.

For medium skill levels, this will give fun matches at the cost of a slightly higher queue time, but at least they can learn and improve at their own pace instead of getting dunked on by actual top tier pvpers. Once they are so good that they are getting enough medal score to actually move up in MMR, they will be able to hold their own better and be more useful to the teams they get assigned to.

For highest skill level, this would come with one big negative, which is a noticably increased queue time, but I think we can all agree that if every match we get at the highest skill level actually only involves people who are all very good players and are always useful to their teams, then the quality of the games will more than make up for the increase in waiting time between matches.

This is the case in every single game with a proper MMR rating, the higher you go in the brackets, the higher the queue times get, but this is just the price you have to pay for getting quality games. I wouldn't mind having to wait 15-20 minutes or even more for a battlegrounds game if I knew for a fact that all three teams would be packed with killers, instead of getting a 3 minute queue where every second game I either get thrown in a game with "why deathmatch again?" or arms of relequen pve gear setup players who get a train ran on them.

Not bashing them, because neither of us are having as much fun as we could if we were just never allowed to get matched up in the first place. (wink wink nudge nudge if you do none of this at least change random queue to not include deathmatch @ZOS_GinaBruno ) If anything I'm sure they are having way less fun on the receiving end of 25k AoE burst combos and calurions nightblade 1hko ganks than I am on the delivering end.

2. Leaderboards Changes

With the proposed changes to the MMR system, a change in leaderboards would also need to be included, since the high frequency of low MMR games would mean that low MMR players would overall potentially amass more medal score than high MMR players. (though I don't necessarily think that would be the case, my proposed solution would still make more sense overall)

My proposed solution is to have an MMR leaderboard instead of the medal score aggregate. This would also immensely boost the BG population, simply by introducing an actual competitive element to getting on the leaderboards as well as fighting for the top places. The best players would be more likely to queue up trying to chase that top spot, and those in lower spots would want to get higher, and those not even on the top 100 would of course want to be on there.

Also, any player who hasn't had at least 5 BG matches that week shouldn't count as active for the leaderboards, so you couldn't just get a really high MMR and then not play but keep getting the rewards. Speaking of rewards...

3. Better Rewards from Leaderboards and PvP in general

This has been brought up numerous times before, but I feel like it truly is important to give better rewards for PvP. Just some ideas for daily and repeating rewards:

- BG Daily should give 10 transmutes, same as the Random Normal Dungeon. It's way less effort to run through fungal grotto 1 for the 100th time than it is to place at least 2nd in a BG game.
- BG winning team always gets 5 transmutes, which is the same as a vet hard mode pledge. BG 2nd place gets 3, losing team gets 1.
- MVP (highest medal score) gets a special lootbox similar to the "rewards for the worthy" we have now.
- Speaking of rewards for the worthy, change it so that it contains "battlegrounds keys", simlarly to how undaunted keys work, and make those exchangable at one of the BG vendors for stuff like the militant ordinator motifs, set lootboxes (dark convergence, plaguebreak, basically the sets we already get from it anyway, etc.)
- I feel like Alliance point gain from BGs is fine as it is so that should be kept

As for leaderboards rewards:

- Instead of the gold quality knights slayer epaulets, I'm sure most players would be more incentivized if the reward table was expanded to cyrodiil and imperial city pvp sets, as well as making it progressively better the higher up you are in the rankings. Say, first place gets 100k gold + random gold quality PvP jewelry + weapon + armor piece, second place 70k + random gold quality jewelry+weapon+armor piece, 3rd place 50k + random gold quality jewelry+weapon+armor piece, and then from 4th til 10th you get only the random 3 gold quality items, and from 11th to 50th you only get 2 random gold quality items, and from 51st to 100th you get same as now with 1 random gold quality item. In addition you could give 30 transmutes to top 3, 20 to 4-10, 15 to 11-50, and 10 to 51-100.

With just these 3 changes, while nothing would change as far as balancing or performance goes, and no changes to game modes, I feel like the pvp would already improve immensely simply by giving it an actual framework, instead of what it currently is. I truly believe that with such simple changes, as I said, with relatively little back-end work, there would already be an influx of both new as well as old returning pvp players. It would be very easy to market it as an introduction of "ranked pvp" (which it technically would be), and trust me any pvper worth his weight in salt (hehe) would be IN on it.

Yes! These are some really great ideas to get the BG population to rise while keeping it still competitve for vet players.

NoodleESO

Heres an idea, at the half way time/score of the match the losing team is yeeted from the battleground with no rewards.

Magio_

PvP desperately needs something. Truth is, PvP in this game is casual af while PvP is naturally competitive, so those ideas clash. The only real competition has been community driven. Cyrodiil GvGs or BG tournaments. Yet, ZOS refuses to give the PvP community the tools, such as custom lobbies, for us to literally create our own content.

Every community event has suffered from lack of tools. Either being at the mercy of griefers that interrupt GvGs in open world, teams on the same alliance not being able to fight each other, or hours literally wasted on queue times for BG tournaments.

Everything @GypsyKing22 said is true. A real MMR system that separates people by skill would do a lot to grow the PvP community. It would give hardcore PvPers a ladder to climb and it would protect newbies from being demolished by said hardcore PvPers. How many newbies have jumped into a BG just to get demolished and never come back? It's a vicious cycle.

We need real rewards for real PvPers that play the game to PvP, and not just Role Playing rewards to try to get new people hooked on PvP. What real PvPer cares about some useless Siege Engine or Chaosball Emote? C'mon... Once you hook a player to PvP, they have not real achievement to work towards. For he ones we do, most of the "cool" PvP achievements, titles, etc just measure time played.

Emperor - "Did you play the most during a campaing?", don't even get started on the fact that the most efficient way to achieve it is by PvDooring. What a great "PvP" achievement. It's literally a joke.
Grand Overlord - "Have you played for 2 years on one character?", also possible to acquire it by just repairing walls and doors. Joke.

The very few ones that would require "skill", like getting a Quadruple Kill in a Battleground, can be acquired in your first match against newbies. So they are literally worthless.

TLDR; The PvP gameplay in this game is great, but he structure around it is either nonexistent or caters to PvErs/casuals.

Rhaegar75

I used to actually like BGs but after returning to Cyro (for some miracle I have not been lagging too much over the last 2 months) I've been finding BGs a rather toxic environment to play in: a proc fest packed with rage quitters and flavour of the month uber builds.

Mind you...there are also some really truly talented PvPers!

However, most of the times, if you play well you get angry messages by players you kill...if you don't play well you have to contend with the nerd rage of people who seem to value nothing else in life apart from winning DMs

I feel that not being stuck in a DM grind can help dilute players with anger management issues.

Fundamentally I like having a choice with regards to game modalities and, if I don't end up playing with/against Charles Manson and Ted Bundy...well, that's another massive massive plus

GypsyKing22

Magio_ wrote: »

PvP desperately needs something. Truth is, PvP in this game is casual af while PvP is naturally competitive, so those ideas clash. The only real competition has been community driven. Cyrodiil GvGs or BG tournaments. Yet, ZOS refuses to give the PvP community the tools, such as custom lobbies, for us to literally create our own content.

Every community event has suffered from lack of tools. Either being at the mercy of griefers that interrupt GvGs in open world, teams on the same alliance not being able to fight each other, or hours literally wasted on queue times for BG tournaments.

Everything @GypsyKing22 said is true. A real MMR system that separates people by skill would do a lot to grow the PvP community. It would give hardcore PvPers a ladder to climb and it would protect newbies from being demolished by said hardcore PvPers. How many newbies have jumped into a BG just to get demolished and never come back? It's a vicious cycle.

We need real rewards for real PvPers that play the game to PvP, and not just Role Playing rewards to try to get new people hooked on PvP. What real PvPer cares about some useless Siege Engine or Chaosball Emote? C'mon... Once you hook a player to PvP, they have not real achievement to work towards. For he ones we do, most of the "cool" PvP achievements, titles, etc just measure time played.

Emperor - "Did you play the most during a campaing?", don't even get started on the fact that the most efficient way to achieve it is by PvDooring. What a great "PvP" achievement. It's literally a joke.
Grand Overlord - "Have you played for 2 years on one character?", also possible to acquire it by just repairing walls and doors. Joke.

The very few ones that would require "skill", like getting a Quadruple Kill in a Battleground, can be acquired in your first match against newbies. So they are literally worthless.

TLDR; The PvP gameplay in this game is great, but he structure around it is either nonexistent or caters to PvErs/casuals.

The funniest thing is, I was initially put off by ESO pvp because for the first few weeks I didn't understand how to gear myself for it and how to set up my skills etc., and I kept getting wrecked so hard I legit thought this game's pvp is just too much like a shooter for me and I'll never be good at it.

And thats from someone who has a lot of competitive pvp+competitive combat sport background... let's not even talk about how much of a turn off it would be to the average PvE player who just tries pvp because of an event for example.

edit: oh and thats the funniest part, as you said, the structure around it caters to pve players and casuals, and yet the matchmaking system and IC/cyrodil are all extremely unwelcoming for these very groups...

master_vanargand

It is good for the less skilled player to win.
They have a good brain.

HiImRex

GypsyKing22 wrote: »

Just to add some further insight, from an ex pro fighting game player who also played a ton of dota 2 although nowhere near at the same level

I personally think the game has the potential to have one of the best pvp out there. It currently has the often brought up issues with performance and balancing, both of which obviously leave a bad taste in people's mouths, but despite these problems, there is definitely still a reasonably sized battlegrounds community (on pc-eu anyhow).

I think as it has also been previously stated, that even though there is incredible potential in this games pvp and which is why all of us who love it want to see it improve and flourish, that doesn't go together with the PvE focused vision of ZoS.

All that said, I think that some things could be done with relatively little effort on the back-end that would improve the BG pvp experience greatly. Do note this is for deathmatches only, since that is what I have experience in, so if some numbers look off for objective modes then ofc that can be handled separately.

1. MMR system and medal score revamp

Instead of the "up only" style of mmr we currently have, make it so that you can lose mmr if you play badly. For starters you could do this by making any medal score under 1500 count as "negative medal score" for the purpose of mmr rating and anything above 2000 count as "positive medal score" - this way people who play well enough to actually be very useful for their team can climb in mmr, people who are useful but not quite as useful as they could be stay in the same skill bracket, and people who aren't as skilled as their mmr bracket can drop down to a skill level where they belong and can again be useful to their team and improve with matches that are actually fun for them. (and maybe a scaling can be introduced so that in higher mmr brackets the score requirement for going down/up changes, say to 2000/2500 and then 2500/3000 for the top bracket). Even freaking Nioh PvP had a system like this, and while it was a fun game, ESO PvP with all it's issues and problems is still lightyears ahead of what Nioh PvP was.

In addition to this change, increase the medal score awarded for kills and assists (and make kills count for ever so slightly more, say 150 for kills and 140 for assists), and fix enemy team kills counting towards assists. If we are going to have proper MMR, I don't want to see a 1 - 4 - 45 MagDK with top medal score on the losing team which only ended up getting 90 points total.

Speaking of losing and winning teams, make it so that the winning team members get a 500 medal score bonus each for winning, and the losing team gets a 500 medal score penalty for losing.

These simple changes to how MMR is calculated for matchmaking purposes, and how medal scores work would improve the BG experience for every skill level involved and would probably already allow for a rise in the population of BGs. How?

For lower skill levels, people who actually don't want to fight "sweaty tryhards" won't have to almost ever, since their MMR will basically prevent them from it. They will keep playing with the other low MMR people who there are currently a crapton of actively trying battlegrounds on PC-EU - every time I level a new character and try them in BGs for the first time at level 50+, I get fast matches with almost always 11 random unknown players.

For medium skill levels, this will give fun matches at the cost of a slightly higher queue time, but at least they can learn and improve at their own pace instead of getting dunked on by actual top tier pvpers. Once they are so good that they are getting enough medal score to actually move up in MMR, they will be able to hold their own better and be more useful to the teams they get assigned to.

For highest skill level, this would come with one big negative, which is a noticably increased queue time, but I think we can all agree that if every match we get at the highest skill level actually only involves people who are all very good players and are always useful to their teams, then the quality of the games will more than make up for the increase in waiting time between matches.

This is the case in every single game with a proper MMR rating, the higher you go in the brackets, the higher the queue times get, but this is just the price you have to pay for getting quality games. I wouldn't mind having to wait 15-20 minutes or even more for a battlegrounds game if I knew for a fact that all three teams would be packed with killers, instead of getting a 3 minute queue where every second game I either get thrown in a game with "why deathmatch again?" or arms of relequen pve gear setup players who get a train ran on them.

Not bashing them, because neither of us are having as much fun as we could if we were just never allowed to get matched up in the first place. (wink wink nudge nudge if you do none of this at least change random queue to not include deathmatch @ZOS_GinaBruno ) If anything I'm sure they are having way less fun on the receiving end of 25k AoE burst combos and calurions nightblade 1hko ganks than I am on the delivering end.

2. Leaderboards Changes

With the proposed changes to the MMR system, a change in leaderboards would also need to be included, since the high frequency of low MMR games would mean that low MMR players would overall potentially amass more medal score than high MMR players. (though I don't necessarily think that would be the case, my proposed solution would still make more sense overall)

My proposed solution is to have an MMR leaderboard instead of the medal score aggregate. This would also immensely boost the BG population, simply by introducing an actual competitive element to getting on the leaderboards as well as fighting for the top places. The best players would be more likely to queue up trying to chase that top spot, and those in lower spots would want to get higher, and those not even on the top 100 would of course want to be on there.

Also, any player who hasn't had at least 5 BG matches that week shouldn't count as active for the leaderboards, so you couldn't just get a really high MMR and then not play but keep getting the rewards. Speaking of rewards...

3. Better Rewards from Leaderboards and PvP in general

This has been brought up numerous times before, but I feel like it truly is important to give better rewards for PvP. Just some ideas for daily and repeating rewards:

- BG Daily should give 10 transmutes, same as the Random Normal Dungeon. It's way less effort to run through fungal grotto 1 for the 100th time than it is to place at least 2nd in a BG game.
- BG winning team always gets 5 transmutes, which is the same as a vet hard mode pledge. BG 2nd place gets 3, losing team gets 1.
- MVP (highest medal score) gets a special lootbox similar to the "rewards for the worthy" we have now.
- Speaking of rewards for the worthy, change it so that it contains "battlegrounds keys", simlarly to how undaunted keys work, and make those exchangable at one of the BG vendors for stuff like the militant ordinator motifs, set lootboxes (dark convergence, plaguebreak, basically the sets we already get from it anyway, etc.)
- I feel like Alliance point gain from BGs is fine as it is so that should be kept

As for leaderboards rewards:

- Instead of the gold quality knights slayer epaulets, I'm sure most players would be more incentivized if the reward table was expanded to cyrodiil and imperial city pvp sets, as well as making it progressively better the higher up you are in the rankings. Say, first place gets 100k gold + random gold quality PvP jewelry + weapon + armor piece, second place 70k + random gold quality jewelry+weapon+armor piece, 3rd place 50k + random gold quality jewelry+weapon+armor piece, and then from 4th til 10th you get only the random 3 gold quality items, and from 11th to 50th you only get 2 random gold quality items, and from 51st to 100th you get same as now with 1 random gold quality item. In addition you could give 30 transmutes to top 3, 20 to 4-10, 15 to 11-50, and 10 to 51-100.

With just these 3 changes, while nothing would change as far as balancing or performance goes, and no changes to game modes, I feel like the pvp would already improve immensely simply by giving it an actual framework, instead of what it currently is. I truly believe that with such simple changes, as I said, with relatively little back-end work, there would already be an influx of both new as well as old returning pvp players. It would be very easy to market it as an introduction of "ranked pvp" (which it technically would be), and trust me any pvper worth his weight in salt (hehe) would be IN on it.

This is a great idea, very simple as the man said and will make a huge impact. Would love for zenimax to see this write up.

TheImperfect

IMO just having 2 teams would make it a lot more boring as sometimes having an extra team can mix things up. I don't really see how making it 5x5 would be very much differen't really than 4x4. I think 2x2 is just duelling pretty much. If players don't do the objectives well then that's on them.