ZOS plans concerning BALL GROUPS?

Kartalin

WaywardArgonian wrote: »

Izanagi.Xiiib16_ESO wrote: »

danwtayl wrote: »

This will be unpopular but if you want to kill off 80% of the ball groups, get rid of the pull sets and VD. These sets are HARD carries for most of these groups.

I'm sorry to tell you but groups still function without these sets as evidenced on Ravenwatch. I agree with you though it might be healthier for the game with the population remaining at this point.

Ballgrouping is possible on Ravenwatch but it is generally much more difficult since the absence of sets like VD, Plaguebreak, Snow-Treaders, RoA etc. makes it a lot more challenging to tank large groups of players. I disagree with OP that said sets should be removed, but they are right in saying that those sets can carry groups and many ballgroups would fall off a cliff without them.

We stuck it out for a while, but once you start getting outnumbered by 2.5 or 3 to 1 it’s just untenable.

Edit: I mean constantly outnumbered, like the fights start out manageable but we never truly get a win as they keep adding more and more until we’re overwhelmed. This was when AD was dominating Raven on PC/NA. Both my DC and EP groups eventually had to leave the campaign as we were starting to hemorrhage players from our rosters.

Izanagi.Xiiib16_ESO

WaywardArgonian wrote: »

Izanagi.Xiiib16_ESO wrote: »

danwtayl wrote: »

This will be unpopular but if you want to kill off 80% of the ball groups, get rid of the pull sets and VD. These sets are HARD carries for most of these groups.

I'm sorry to tell you but groups still function without these sets as evidenced on Ravenwatch. I agree with you though it might be healthier for the game with the population remaining at this point.

Ballgrouping is possible on Ravenwatch but it is generally much more difficult since the absence of sets like VD, Plaguebreak, Snow-Treaders, RoA etc. makes it a lot more challenging to tank large groups of players. I disagree with OP that said sets should be removed, but they are right in saying that those sets can carry groups and many ballgroups would fall off a cliff without them.

No CP you can purge spam which makes it easier to deal with everything, the only thing you lack is kill potential but that is dealt with by stacking damage sets

xylena_lazarow

Buff the useless siege engines like Ice Trebs so randoms have better tools to fight back against the ball.

WaywardArgonian

Izanagi.Xiiib16_ESO wrote: »

No CP you can purge spam which makes it easier to deal with everything, the only thing you lack is kill potential but that is dealt with by stacking damage sets

The lack of kill potential is what will end up hurting you a lot because it's the domino effect of sets like VD and Plaguebreak that even the playing field against bigger groups. No-CP ballgrouping definitely is more difficult to get right than CP ballgrouping, especially because the campaign is very zergy, at least on EU.

Major_Toughness

xylena_lazarow wrote: »

Buff the useless siege engines like Ice Trebs so randoms have better tools to fight back against the ball.

Hell *** no. All siege damage needs reducing by like 50% in CP.

kiwi_tea

Major_Toughness wrote: »

xylena_lazarow wrote: »

Buff the useless siege engines like Ice Trebs so randoms have better tools to fight back against the ball.

Hell *** no. All siege damage needs reducing by like 50% in CP.

Siege is by the far the best current answer to ball groups, though. Even with them running siege shield, sufficient siege with good timing completely wipes them on a choke. It's just almost nobody wants to learn to *do* that cos, like ball groups, it requires group coordination.

Keep defense is already trivialised, nerfing siege would make it even moreso. If you think siege needs nerfing into *actual oblivion*, why not just go play Battlegrounds or IC where you can have fights literally without it?

Major_Toughness

kiwi_tea wrote: »

Major_Toughness wrote: »

xylena_lazarow wrote: »

Buff the useless siege engines like Ice Trebs so randoms have better tools to fight back against the ball.

Hell *** no. All siege damage needs reducing by like 50% in CP.

Siege is by the far the best current answer to ball groups, though. Even with them running siege shield, sufficient siege with good timing completely wipes them on a choke. It's just almost nobody wants to learn to *do* that cos, like ball groups, it requires group coordination.

Keep defense is already trivialised, nerfing siege would make it even moreso. If you think siege needs nerfing into *actual oblivion*, why not just go play Battlegrounds or IC where you can have fights literally without it?

No it is not, azureblight is. Most people just think I'm joking or can't be bothered running a certain setup, even if it will wipe the groups they spend hours complaining about.

On PCEU Gray Host we pretty much stopped any ballgroup attacking EP during prime time as 3/4 of us on Azureblight sorcs builds wipe them.

Keep defense in CP is so easy. It's pretty much impossible to lose a keep if you have meatbags and oils at breaches. 5k ticks from meatbags, 10k oil, 10k ticks from cold fire ballista. No non-ballgroup can survive without a zerg full of purges.

Zama666

I love ball groups! They get picked off one by one.
Usually you see another group for to combat them. #tactics

It's part of the game and not a problem.

mzprx

someone has mentioned it here - address HoT stacking via Battle Spirit. put a cap on it. the only issue i have with ball groups is that some of them are rerally rubbish, they can't kill anything and the only thing that makes them go "yay! we're really good at this!" is the simple fact that they just outheal everything..

and also people that will just blindly go and try to fight them, die, respawn and go right back to get farmed again. i must admit i have been guilty of this a handful of times as well. but the easiest way to deal with ball groups is just to ignore them. if they're camping a resource don't go following them into that tower. let them sit there, spam heals and get bored to death by waiting for players who will never come. if they run around Bleakers don't try to get in their way thinking you alone can do anything to them. get out of their way and let them run arould like fools with no one to kill. that kind of playstyle will get pretty boring pretty fast and we'll see a rapid decrease in ball groups..

The_Butter

I agree. It's the worst when people decide to group up and coordinate their builds in a multiplayer game like this

Four_Fingers

Yeah, we could use some more group buffs.

xylena_lazarow

Major_Toughness wrote: »

Hell *** no. All siege damage needs reducing by like 50% in CP.

Siege should be like Proxy Det. Absolute trash hitting 1 player, absolute nuke hitting 6 players.

Prionyx

Túrin_Vidsmidr wrote: »

This goes on every evening, in every faction, for hours. It's not even gameplay anymore.
Players are forced into two choices: abandon your castle/keep and hope the ballgroup moves on or keep getting spawn killed and farmed.
Do you plan to do anything about this [snip] that's destroying the PvP zone experience or will you keep pretending the problem does not exist?
@ZOS_GinaBruno @ZOS_Kevin
Just asking so that I can decide whether to renew my ESO+ that expires next week.



edit: typos.

[edited for minor bait]

In what world do you live if you think that insanely organized team with builds perfectly adapted for this exact gameplay(remove one player from the group - it's efficiency will go down significantly, remove some specific role like speeder or lead and your group will likely just go down in a lot of situations) who spent dozens or hundreds of hours training should lose to a bunch of PvE players?

Vizir

So just to take a step back, I'm not speaking from my personal position. I don't have all that much of a problem with ball groups personally because I can simply avoid fighting them and can survive running around them picking off solos and pugs. Most of my builds are fast/tanky enough to avoid getting killed by a ball group when they come after me burning their siege. I can read the flow of combat to start to prep for the ult dump.

I am speaking more for the average player who can't do any of that. Of which there are plenty and ultimately there are alot more of them than us.

Disregarding this specific topic, pvp is not in a good state right now. The population has been declining for years now and really doesn't seem to be turning around any time soon. We have no pvp content coming in 2023 partially because there are just so few of us (yes speculation but it is a sound business decision so very plausible). Will there be pvp content in 2024? After the population is going to be lower than it was when they made the decision to have no new pvp content this year? I don't know, and that worries me. How long have we had lag problems? If it impacted 5,000 players instead of the actual 600ish, then maybe we would have seen more attention on it. If an apple seller is 10 different types of apples and only a few people like one of the types, it makes sense for them to stop selling it and focus more on the popular types.

We need new players, we need people to play MYM and love pvp and continue playing it. Not get the tickets and hate every second of it. I think it was the 2nd week of the endeavor system and the weeklies were either kill 30 wbs or do some amount of siege damage, I was in Blackwood crafting HConq and people were complaining in zone about killing 30 wbs. I said that the siege damage was alot faster and I could just go to an out of the way keep and drop a ram and they could just dump oils on repeat. Then chat became an absolute dumpster fire of how they all hated even stepping foot in cyro. They'd genuinely rather spend all that time farming 30 wbs than dump oils on a ram for a minute, wouldn't even have to fight another player.

I do think that the 1vxing and ball groups contribute to that. The pvp rewards aren't enough to force people to pvp, you have to want to. And when a group of new players join together and get x'd, think they'll stay? What about the 2nd time? 3rd? 10th? Remember when Summit1g played eso and got x'd and ranted about how 1 person was able to kill his group of like 4? Guess he isn't coming back. Now imagine how many people join, hate it and leave that don't make it known on the forums or in vids. And unfortunately we need those people. I want more pvp content and therefore I want more people to pvp so that we get more attention. And imho addressing ball groups and 1vxing would increase new player retention.

Desiato

Vizir wrote: »

I do think that the 1vxing and ball groups contribute to that. The pvp rewards aren't enough to force people to pvp, you have to want to. And when a group of new players join together and get x'd, think they'll stay? What about the 2nd time? 3rd? 10th? Remember when Summit1g played eso and got x'd and ranted about how 1 person was able to kill his group of like 4? Guess he isn't coming back. Now imagine how many people join, hate it and leave that don't make it known on the forums or in vids. And unfortunately we need those people. I want more pvp content and therefore I want more people to pvp so that we get more attention. And imho addressing ball groups and 1vxing would increase new player retention.

There's a lot to it, but this is what the pvp communities of backwater pvp games are usually like. Instead of competitive players who want to go at other competitive players, you have average players who like to pugstomp the less experienced and less capable players. This applies to groups of all sizes.

For example, a normal scenario in this game is for groups of Faction A and B to be at the resources of Faction C. A and B ignore each other, or often help each other out, while they farm disorganized randoms together. Meanwhile the groups of faction C who can deal with groups like that are at the the resources of one of the other factions doing the same.

And if you're a decent player who tries to help the randoms fight organized groups, the organized groups will often hate you for it!

In the open world pvp game I played during the years I was away from ESO, it was always the bad and mediocre players who would punch down, while the competitive groups would challenge each other to prove who was "on top".

I also think the influence of streamer culture has something to do with it as well -- because to their audience, it looks impressive when streamers pub/pugstomp. Many streamers in other games hate ranked matchmaking for this reason. And they are role models to many players who try to emulate them.

I'm such a big fan of AvA. I know it could be so much more than this with more support and if it was more accessible to the greater PVP gaming community.

LuciusOctavio

"To enhance siege effectiveness, simply add another tick of burning damage, lasting for 4 ticks instead of 3. Additionally, increase the tracking speed of ballistas, as players are moving incredibly fast now. Siege that responds quickly in placement and tracking would greatly improve the situation."

dvonpm

LuciusOctavio wrote: »

"To enhance siege effectiveness, simply add another tick of burning damage, lasting for 4 ticks instead of 3. Additionally, increase the tracking speed of ballistas, as players are moving incredibly fast now. Siege that responds quickly in placement and tracking would greatly improve the situation."

Realistically, this would still hurt pugs and new players far more than ball groups.

The whole elf bane siege debacle was amazingly fun, but ball groups could still more easily cope with it because 12 builds to work with and more room to adjust strategies is just an advantage a solo player with siege will not have.

Remember the good old days when we could use purge? Good times.

Heals_With_Orbs

Prionyx wrote: »

Túrin_Vidsmidr wrote: »

This goes on every evening, in every faction, for hours. It's not even gameplay anymore.
Players are forced into two choices: abandon your castle/keep and hope the ballgroup moves on or keep getting spawn killed and farmed.
Do you plan to do anything about this [snip] that's destroying the PvP zone experience or will you keep pretending the problem does not exist?
@ZOS_GinaBruno @ZOS_Kevin
Just asking so that I can decide whether to renew my ESO+ that expires next week.



edit: typos.

[edited for minor bait]

In what world do you live if you think that insanely organized team with builds perfectly adapted for this exact gameplay(remove one player from the group - it's efficiency will go down significantly, remove some specific role like speeder or lead and your group will likely just go down in a lot of situations) who spent dozens or hundreds of hours training should lose to a bunch of PvE players?

Thats not really the issue though is it, and you are assuming that groups that try to tackle them are all PVE players but they arent. That just isnt so.

A lot of the players in Cyro have equally spent years or training, spent 1000s of hours and money investing into builds etc so why should players get wiped by a bunch of people who come round the corner in 2 minutes while you are sieging and roll over everyone?

Ball groups cause lag, desyncs and skills not to work while 12 people spam vigor and rapid regen. Are you ok with that?

Isnt the game about capturing the elder scrolls and taking rhem back to home keeps or running around keep walls for 30 minutes with the scroll harrassing and trolling? Is it about hovering over portals so people get killed when they teleport? Is it about tbagging people? Are ball groups from AD and DC supposed to join forces and both siege EP keeps at the same time?

Ok with all the above?

Well im not and neither are 100s of other players, and proof of that are the dozens of forum posts on the topic.

By the way, I completely agree, an organised group should have an advantage over "PVE" players or unorganised randoms, but there should be a limit to what that advantage is and it shouldnt be at the expense of players game performance and not if theres no genuine counter.

Freilauftomate

Heals_With_Orbs wrote: »

Ball groups cause lag, desyncs and skills not to work while 12 people spam vigor and rapid regen. Are you ok with that?

Not ok, because it' not true.

Heals_With_Orbs wrote: »

Isnt the game about capturing the elder scrolls and taking rhem back to home keeps or running around keep walls for 30 minutes with the scroll harrassing and trolling? Is it about hovering over portals so people get killed when they teleport? Is it about tbagging people? Are ball groups from AD and DC supposed to join forces and both siege EP keeps at the same time?

Ok with all the above?

Not ok, because you are using words like "harrassing" to describe completely meaningless and harmless actions in a video game. Why would anyone care about the scrolls or any of the other stuff you are listing?

Heals_With_Orbs wrote: »

By the way, I completely agree, an organised group should have an advantage over "PVE" players or unorganised randoms, but there should be a limit to what that advantage is and it shouldnt be at the expense of players game performance and not if theres no genuine counter.

Shameful game performance has nothing to do with how people play the game. It's a decision ZOS made years ago. They alone are responsible for the poor technical state this game is in. They could fix it, but they don't. And there are plenty of easy ways to deal with ballgroups. Everyone please stop acting like 12 noobs become john wick after slotting vigor....

Freilauftomate

Heals_With_Orbs wrote: »

A lot of the players in Cyro have equally spent years or training, spent 1000s of hours and money investing into builds etc so why should players get wiped by a bunch of people who come round the corner in 2 minutes while you are sieging and roll over everyone?

Yeah i see 5 star zone chat generals die to oils in the ram all the time... Just because you are doing something for a long time doesn't mean your are good at it.

acastanza_ESO

I'd like to point out the upcoming changes to Rush of Agony to the people here. It doesn't seem like a lot but I've now tried this on PTS, and it is a massive nerf to the set that will have substantial adverse impact to ballgroups.

Stridig

acastanza_ESO wrote: »

I'd like to point out the upcoming changes to Rush of Agony to the people here. It doesn't seem like a lot but I've now tried this on PTS, and it is a massive nerf to the set that will have substantial adverse impact to ballgroups.

They've also moved a quest marker to its correct location. Another major change that's sure to help.

acastanza_ESO

Stridig wrote: »

acastanza_ESO wrote: »

I'd like to point out the upcoming changes to Rush of Agony to the people here. It doesn't seem like a lot but I've now tried this on PTS, and it is a massive nerf to the set that will have substantial adverse impact to ballgroups.

They've also moved a quest marker to its correct location. Another major change that's sure to help.

You can't seriously pretend that a massive nerf to the #1 pull set used by ballgroups won't hurt them any. Did you even try the set on PTS? I'm guessing no. I did. It's a big change, the timing no longer works in combination with fear, at all. No other pull doesn't give you CC immunity. This nerf completely changes the counter-play against ballgroups.

Photosniper89

Asmelia wrote: »

Ball group need to be banned, they over abuse healing skills and kill the pvp. There is no point a random group can be invulnerable for almost everything for a long period of time its like cheating without using cheat engine because you over abuse skills that is in game and the need a fix. So for me it's cheating and they must be banned for that over abuse. @ZOS_GinaBruno, @ZOS_Kevin, @ZOS_JessicaFolsom, @ZOS_BrianWheeler

ZERGS NEED TO BE BANNED THEY ARE CHEATING

Heals_With_Orbs

Freilauftomate wrote: »

Heals_With_Orbs wrote: »

Ball groups cause lag, desyncs and skills not to work while 12 people spam vigor and rapid regen. Are you ok with that?

>Not ok, because it' not true.

Actually it is true. I suggest reading some articles on the forum that go back to 2015......2015....regarding the problems ball groups create regarding lag and performance drops.

Making a one line statement like "its not true" isnt proof you are correct. Theres literrally dozens and dozens of articles on this forum on the subject.

I play PVP every day, and see the issues they cause and so do many others.

But yeh "its not true"

What kind of a response is that?

Ok Bob....

Tommy_The_Gun

Judging by the PTS - plans regarding ball groups are:
More insane buffs.

TechMaybeHic

Its not cheating. Its just the optimal way to run and it could be used to push keeps for the campaign but for some people its somehow fun to just run around a keep for long periods of time. To each their own.

It really comes down to how ZOS wants Cyrodiil to look and looking at more sets that buff groups, or scribing abilities that will most certainly help ball groups, by design or folly; thats the way it is. And it does drive off players from Cyrodiil, but again: by folly or design?

Tommy_The_Gun

TechMaybeHic wrote: »

Its not cheating. Its just the optimal way to run and it could be used to push keeps for the campaign but for some people its somehow fun to just run around a keep for long periods of time. To each their own.

It really comes down to how ZOS wants Cyrodiil to look and looking at more sets that buff groups, or scribing abilities that will most certainly help ball groups, by design or folly; thats the way it is. And it does drive off players from Cyrodiil, but again: by folly or design?

I remember that during some "tests" on live server when ZOS was testing some "under the hood" stuff to gather data what is causing lag or de-sync, during one of the tests they disabled cross healing.

And the result was that even on ESO forms players who regularly play in sa called "ball groups" were complaining that all they fight against are also other ball groups. There were no "zegs", no armies running back and forth between Keeps, no small scale or solo players. There was a moment in Cyro when there were only ball groups.

Current trends will actually lead to this happening again eventually. If one meta playstyle style is so far ahead over the others and it keeps getting buffed over & over then, well... if nothing will be adjusted or pvp group enviroment won't receive any target-nerf then we'll... like I have said. You will have only ball groups in Cyro & IC at some point.

TechMaybeHic

Tommy_The_Gun wrote: »

TechMaybeHic wrote: »

Its not cheating. Its just the optimal way to run and it could be used to push keeps for the campaign but for some people its somehow fun to just run around a keep for long periods of time. To each their own.

It really comes down to how ZOS wants Cyrodiil to look and looking at more sets that buff groups, or scribing abilities that will most certainly help ball groups, by design or folly; thats the way it is. And it does drive off players from Cyrodiil, but again: by folly or design?

I remember that during some "tests" on live server when ZOS was testing some "under the hood" stuff to gather data what is causing lag or de-sync, during one of the tests they disabled cross healing.

And the result was that even on ESO forms players who regularly play in sa called "ball groups" were complaining that all they fight against are also other ball groups. There were no "zegs", no armies running back and forth between Keeps, no small scale or solo players. There was a moment in Cyro when there were only ball groups.

Current trends will actually lead to this happening again eventually. If one meta playstyle style is so far ahead over the others and it keeps getting buffed over & over then, well... if nothing will be adjusted or pvp group enviroment won't receive any target-nerf then we'll... like I have said. You will have only ball groups in Cyro & IC at some point.

Yep. People I run with have pretty much dropped to 3 times a week at best. Impacted more by recent game issues. Really only had been showing up to play with friends but now thats starting to just happen in other games

Stridig

You can't seriously pretend that a massive nerf to the #1 pull set used by ballgroups won't hurt them any. Did you even try the set on PTS? I'm guessing no. I did. It's a big change, the timing no longer works in combination with fear, at all. No other pull doesn't give you CC immunity. This nerf completely changes the counter-play against ballgroups.[/quote]

Uhhh.... I was making a joke about the patch notes. Calm down