low hanging pvp fruit

plasmab3ard

while there are details/balance/etc that could be worked out to improve the pvp experience, I love ESO and my main issue is that it feels like I spend more than half of my playtime trying to find a fight rather than actually fighting. here are some suggestions which should be really easy to implement (?):

- remove some of the waiting timers: why do we have to wait another 45 seconds for "match to start" after already "waiting for players" for several minutes, after queueing for several minutes?
- let us start bgs when there are 7v7, 6v6 etc players, especially in group queue. queue times are already
a bit long and surely everyone would prefer, having queued for 5-20 minutes, playing a 7v7 to going back into the queue
- consider only letting teams of size 2 or 4 queue. matches where one side gets 7 players almost never start (understandably there are very few solo players who join the group queue)
- consider folding 8v8 solo and duo queue into one
- add a dueling queue. literally just a bit of desert and the tot ranking system. ideally integrate this with the regular bg queues (best of 3 and a timer and let us switch armory builds once at the beginning of a duel/team match)
- the better scoreboard feature of letting you join multiple queues should be in the base game
- team shuffling in 4v4, feels like 80% of the matches are extremely one sided (and often the losing team griefs the winning team by maxing out respawn / base kick timers -> more waiting)
- does anyone think its a good idea to be able to queue out into ic/cyro while in combat in a pvp zone, especially since avoiding the gamemode is supposed to be a bannable offense?
- let us run tournaments etc by allowing us to host our own bg lobbies

stretch goals:
- show us win/loss/kills/deaths/etc statistics, account wide. in pvp there's essentially nothing to work towards (rewards are nice but if you pvp a lot youll get all of them in a week or two anyway), bg outcomes are irrelevant (win one and youve got the xp bonus and battlemaster token) and just having some sort of number to improve would be something (of course a skill based mmr system would be even better)
- make cyro smaller to reduce riding around on a horse time

MincMincMinc

Problem is the declining population and most systems in the game were never designed to function.

Unlike other BG or match making games, ESO has the inherent issue of matching players who are at wildly at different tiers in terms of player skill and progression. Imagine COD except new players only have pistols unlocked for the first few months of gameplay in pvp. This forces Zos to incorporate an MMR system of sorts.

The problem with MMR systems is your match population vs your Qued population. Like in COD a 16 player lobby with 675k players in que, there are no issues finding matches. However in ESO where you have 16 player lobbies pulling from a very small portion of 10k players you can see there will be issues.

Lets break down the 10k players
30% probably log in solely for dailies
60% probably log in for PvE reasons
The remaining generous 10% are pvp players. == 1k players

From the 1k players we need to split up the pvp playerbase
75% cyrodil
10% dueling or IC
15% in bgs (based around bg guild and cyro pop cap+que) == 150 players a day

From the 150 bg players a day split it up by hour.
Most people log on around dinner time 6pmEST- 10pmPST == 7hr window
Next assumption would be the average playtime of 1-2 hours in bgs

At any given hour there are maybe 21-42 pvpers in que for a 16 player lobby

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Go make a new toon and see how absurdly quickly your que pops. For players simply logging in for dailies ques are near instant. However after about 5-10 games you will find yourself out of this mmr range and stuck waiting for an actual pvp playerbase que.

Zos's BIG pvp update was geared towards BGs likely because the number of players that simply log in to do dailies far exceeds the 10-20% of players who actively pvp. I'd be curious to see the actual numbers because it is likely worse than we think.