@ZoS, you need to hear King Richard's idea for PvP Arenas. Easy implementation.

KenaPKK · January 2016

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPtT84pBTqo

The man is a genius. This could be implemented so quickly, and we would be all over it.

I'd pay for a whole new DLC for this, and I know many, many people who would.

Good ideas that have been suggested in comments:

Multiple losses until elimination. 3-5 seems fair. Quality of items or chance of a Maelstrom weapon drop in chests can be affected by W/L ratio.
Solo queue, where random players are teamed up together, and preset team queue.
Player or team elo ranking aimed at pairing teams with approximately equal chances of winning.

@ZOS_GinaBruno @Wrobel @ZOS_BrianWheeler @ZOS_KaiSchober @ZOS_JanS @Sypher @rishardnelsonb14_ESO @OdinForge @Shelgon

Tag more people please. Thx all

Hektik_V · January 2016

This is a cool idea.

However if my math is correct you would need approximately 512 four man teams (2048 players) to enter this arena and still end up with enough people at the end to have a 4v4 on the ninth stage.

512 teams, half being eliminated the first round = 256 teams
256 teams, half being eliminated the second round = 128 teams
....
....
....
....
....
....
2 teams, half being eliminated the ninth round = 1 winner

Is the game's population still high enough to facilitate that kind of large scale tournament in a consistent way? i.e. If I queue up in Aussie time would I still be able to find enough matches going on that we would eventually make it to the last stage?

Sypher · January 2016

Hektik_V wrote: »

This is a cool idea.

However if my math is correct you would need approximately 512 four man teams (2048 players) to enter this arena and still end up with enough people at the end to have a 4v4 on the ninth stage.

512 teams, half being eliminated the first round = 256 teams
256 teams, half being eliminated the second round = 128 teams
....
....
....
....
....
....
2 teams, half being eliminated the ninth round = 1 winner

Is the game's population still high enough to facilitate that kind of large scale tournament in a consistent way? i.e. If I queue up in Aussie time would I still be able to find enough matches going on that we would eventually make it to the last stage?

They would have to add a 3 loss elimination instead of 1 loss. Kind of like Hearthstone Arena. Which would keep more teams in circulation.

The idea can use some touch ups but it's definitely something that could be huge if done properly.

KenaPKK · January 2016

Good point. You could also give final chests after whatever round you're eliminated at with a chance to drop Maelstrom weapons starting at 100% for the 9th round and dropping in tiers at lower rounds.

CatchMeTrolling · January 2016

They would have to make more builds viable also for this to not get old, just would come across people running the same builds most of the time. Also rebalance classes so you just won't see nbs and sorcs...

Sypher · January 2016

CatchMeTrolling wrote: »

They would have to make more builds viable also for this to not get old, just would come across people running the same builds most of the time. Also rebalance classes so you just won't see nbs and sorcs...

1v1's have plenty of build/class issues, but this game isn't really designed around that. As far as 4v4 goes, the classes don't have as many issues. I bet you'll see a lot of build/class variety in my honest opinion.

Chori · January 2016

Sounds fun and all but, if the queue is not random as for only one person going up for it and being teamed up with other 3 random people I wouldn't even support it just for the fact you can gather the best 4 players around and be unbeatable in there.

Too much bias in here, this ideas/content should be targeted to the majority of the player base and not for a selected few, just my honest opinion.

Psilent · January 2016

Chori wrote: »

Sounds fun and all but, if the queue is not random as for only one person going up for it and being teamed up with other 3 random people I wouldn't even support it just for the fact you can gather the best 4 players around and be unbeatable in there.

Too much bias in here, this ideas/content should be targeted to the majority of the player base and not for a selected few, just my honest opinion.

Most likely you'd have two modes: Random Generated teams & Preset Teams.

If you chose the random option you'd only fight those who are also randomly generated; preset would fight other preset teams.

Also, a system like this would take player skill into account, except for opening week, the good players would have much higher ratings and would always face players of equal or higher ratings. That way you wouldn't have players that have been playing in pvp since release fighting a guy who just bought the game for easy wins.

Overall I love the idea of arena and this looks awesome, but a week ago or so when I checked the vMSA boards we had a grand total of less than 400 players who even completed it. That's solo PvE content, which you would think more than 400 players would have completed by this time. I don't know if the game has the population to make this even viable at this time and if it does the queue for it would be very long.

I used to play arenas all the time in World of Warcraft, led a nice 5v5 team, and there were nights that I had to wait 30 to 45 minutes for 1 arena match; it was even worse in the 2v2 and 3v3 bracket. The reason I bring this up, is at the time WoW had over 11 million subscribers, which is way more than ESO has currently. You'll either end up fighting the same teams over and over and over again or be waiting in a long queue for a match.

KenaPKK · January 2016

@Psilent the idea of having queued players and preset teams facing those of similar ranking is good too.

We're going full MOBA mode with this. lol

bikerangelo · January 2016

This sounds cool, but it also sounds very time consuming.

Could we also have a non competitive tiered format where we just randomly queue in for any arena without random maelstrom weapon drops at the end? I don't want to have to commit to 3 hours of arena pvp every time I queue in, sometimes I'd probably just have time for 1 or 2 fights.

Soulac · January 2016

Whatever, just gimme arenas.

Poxheart · January 2016

I doubt there are enough people to support this kind of gameplay. It would be the same groups facing off against each other.

KenaPKK · January 2016

Poxheart wrote: »

I doubt there are enough people to support this kind of gameplay. It would be the same groups facing off against each other.

If this were true, it would go for arenas of any kind.

Sanct16 · January 2016

Well a normal Arena with just a simple battlefield would be enough for me. Queue up, fight another group in a BO5, winner goes up in scoring, loser goes down. Easy.

Darnathian · January 2016

NO. DO NOT WASTE RESOURCES SO THAT SOME STREAMERS CAN CHANGE THE WAY THE GAME WAS FUNDAMENTALLY DESIGNED. FIX WHAT WE HAVE FIRST. THEN MAYBE LATER DO THIS.

Poxheart · January 2016

KenaPKK wrote: »

Poxheart wrote: »

I doubt there are enough people to support this kind of gameplay. It would be the same groups facing off against each other.

If this were true, it would go for arenas of any kind.

Arenas, battlegrounds, and/or scenarios aren't reliant on a playoff style ladder progression; they simply need enough people queued at any one time to create new instanced fights. I bet Warhammer Online's scenarios were probably popping right up until the time they shut the game down.

Look at Hektik's post again, King Richard's idea requires a minimum pool of 2048 players who are online and prepared to go through all 9 stages at the same time (that is have the time to do so). The European server might have the population to support this, but the US server probably doesn't. Something else to consider is what happens to the tournament match ups when a winning team drops out?

I can get behind the idea of using the vMA maps for instanced fights, but the tournament just seems non-viable.

Huckdabuck · January 2016

If you think balance QQ is insane now.....just wait until you see the QQ that would come from this style of play. No thank you.

tinythinker · January 2016

My thoughts from a similar thread based on the same video...

Have it be a 3 or 4 round competition, and have the actual arena setting be random. So you fight round one of the 4 person PvP competition but it may be the setting from level four from the single player version or maybe the setting from level eight of the single player version. You could have the PvP option unlock once you beat Maelstrom on non-vet mode (which is very accessible) or vet mode as part of going back to show off more moves as you are invited to do.

With only 3-4 levels, you still have to fight to the top round but there could be multiple versions going at once. Multiple round ones, multiple round twos, multiple round threes, and if you want four rounds multiple round fours. Losing a round means you can't advance but you don't get knocked down a round. Each loss lowers your team score.

MormondPayne_EP · January 2016

I'm not spending any money on ZOS' DLC that they seems to keep pulling out of their arses until they fix the *** LAG AND FPS ISSUES that have only gotten worse since that marathon server maintenance last week.

This is [snip] [snip]!!!!!!

[Moderator Note: Edited per our rules on Cursing & Profanity]

Huckdabuck · January 2016

From the other thread that Tiny linked....

iamnotweakrwb17_ESO wrote: »

I wont. I don't care about arenas ad they sure as hell wont kill cyrodill They've been done to bits in other games and the typical problems with arenas never get resolved.

*When people start losing, they stop queuing.
* People abuse the system and create fake teams on the opposing side and queue up for thrown games just to get the loot, rating, whatever.
* People create one super team which discourages everyone from playing.
* If they create a solo queue, you get guys who queue sync constantly to get on the same team.
* People queue up at offpeak times when queues are dead and abuse the system that way.
* people queue to deliberately grief or troll others. They might go AFK, They might run in and die. They might quit as soon as they get in, etc, etc.
* Blatant class imbalance problems get highlighted and pretty soon everyone runs the exact same build.
* This list goes on and on.

If all these things don't get addressed, arenas will suck horribly. I'd still prefer they fix what they have. We all came here for cyrodill PvP until Zenimax broke it.

Just another view point to consider.

kevlarto_ESO · January 2016

Nothing is as easy as it seems, plus they said it is coming, question is how many of you will still be around to play it.

Paraflex · January 2016

I hope they give more options like 2v2 all the way to 10v10. Just use a arena point system for ranking people. I think a leaderboard would be nice.

Takllin · January 2016

Huckdabuck wrote: »

From the other thread that Tiny linked....

iamnotweakrwb17_ESO wrote: »

I wont. I don't care about arenas ad they sure as hell wont kill cyrodill They've been done to bits in other games and the typical problems with arenas never get resolved.

*When people start losing, they stop queuing.
* People abuse the system and create fake teams on the opposing side and queue up for thrown games just to get the loot, rating, whatever.
* People create one super team which discourages everyone from playing.
* If they create a solo queue, you get guys who queue sync constantly to get on the same team.
* People queue up at offpeak times when queues are dead and abuse the system that way.
* people queue to deliberately grief or troll others. They might go AFK, They might run in and die. They might quit as soon as they get in, etc, etc.
* Blatant class imbalance problems get highlighted and pretty soon everyone runs the exact same build.
* This list goes on and on.

If all these things don't get addressed, arenas will suck horribly. I'd still prefer they fix what they have. We all came here for cyrodill PvP until Zenimax broke it.

Just another view point to consider.

Me thinks they should go play SWTOR and see if they are so optimistic about it working well...

Amica · January 2016

A would settle for three keeps, one for each faction to spawn at. A nice size aria between them so we can just duel without running half way across the map. I had a nice little duel pit going at bleaks in under vets, then the zergs went and foobared it, Just because they could.

Huckdabuck · January 2016

Takllin wrote: »

Huckdabuck wrote: »

From the other thread that Tiny linked....

iamnotweakrwb17_ESO wrote: »

I wont. I don't care about arenas ad they sure as hell wont kill cyrodill They've been done to bits in other games and the typical problems with arenas never get resolved.

*When people start losing, they stop queuing.
* People abuse the system and create fake teams on the opposing side and queue up for thrown games just to get the loot, rating, whatever.
* People create one super team which discourages everyone from playing.
* If they create a solo queue, you get guys who queue sync constantly to get on the same team.
* People queue up at offpeak times when queues are dead and abuse the system that way.
* people queue to deliberately grief or troll others. They might go AFK, They might run in and die. They might quit as soon as they get in, etc, etc.
* Blatant class imbalance problems get highlighted and pretty soon everyone runs the exact same build.
* This list goes on and on.

If all these things don't get addressed, arenas will suck horribly. I'd still prefer they fix what they have. We all came here for cyrodill PvP until Zenimax broke it.

Just another view point to consider.

Me thinks they should go play SWTOR and see if they are so optimistic about it working well...

Or any other MMO that has arenas/battlegrounds but yeah it ain't all roses and the grass ain't greener once arenas/battlegrounds are introduced into a game.

Nafirian · January 2016

Stop letting them be lazy dammit but hey whatever gives us arenas.

JaJaLuka · January 2016

Darnathian wrote: »

NO. DO NOT WASTE RESOURCES SO THAT SOME STREAMERS CAN CHANGE THE WAY THE GAME WAS FUNDAMENTALLY DESIGNED. FIX WHAT WE HAVE FIRST. THEN MAYBE LATER DO THIS.

I agree with what you're fundamentally saying, but at the same time considering how long it takes to fix things in this game and the level at which the issues get ignored, putting fun things into the content that would take less time to implement than the fixes that are needed to help players have fun would also liven up the population and help the game stay afloat. If I'm really being honest, this sort of thing should have been in at launch, it was a mistake to release the game missing this smaller scale element for a larger diversity of play styles. It created an extremely unhealthy meta in Cyrodiil of stack and roll around with AoE abilities.

JaJaLuka · January 2016

Takllin wrote: »

Huckdabuck wrote: »

From the other thread that Tiny linked....

iamnotweakrwb17_ESO wrote: »

I wont. I don't care about arenas ad they sure as hell wont kill cyrodill They've been done to bits in other games and the typical problems with arenas never get resolved.

*When people start losing, they stop queuing.
* People abuse the system and create fake teams on the opposing side and queue up for thrown games just to get the loot, rating, whatever.
* People create one super team which discourages everyone from playing.
* If they create a solo queue, you get guys who queue sync constantly to get on the same team.
* People queue up at offpeak times when queues are dead and abuse the system that way.
* people queue to deliberately grief or troll others. They might go AFK, They might run in and die. They might quit as soon as they get in, etc, etc.
* Blatant class imbalance problems get highlighted and pretty soon everyone runs the exact same build.
* This list goes on and on.

If all these things don't get addressed, arenas will suck horribly. I'd still prefer they fix what they have. We all came here for cyrodill PvP until Zenimax broke it.

Just another view point to consider.

Me thinks they should go play SWTOR and see if they are so optimistic about it working well...

I played SWTOR, liked the duelling and PvP in general far better than the stack and AoE meta in this game, it was waaay more interesting than hurling chunks of stone at an empty keep (I miss things like Huttball XD ) or getting rolled by a stack of 24-50 people.
SWTOR's problem currently though is actually getting into PvP if you're not in a PvP guild/group, an issue ZoS could learn from.

Alcast · January 2016

JaJaLuka wrote: »

Takllin wrote: »

Huckdabuck wrote: »

From the other thread that Tiny linked....

iamnotweakrwb17_ESO wrote: »

I wont. I don't care about arenas ad they sure as hell wont kill cyrodill They've been done to bits in other games and the typical problems with arenas never get resolved.

*When people start losing, they stop queuing.
* People abuse the system and create fake teams on the opposing side and queue up for thrown games just to get the loot, rating, whatever.
* People create one super team which discourages everyone from playing.
* If they create a solo queue, you get guys who queue sync constantly to get on the same team.
* People queue up at offpeak times when queues are dead and abuse the system that way.
* people queue to deliberately grief or troll others. They might go AFK, They might run in and die. They might quit as soon as they get in, etc, etc.
* Blatant class imbalance problems get highlighted and pretty soon everyone runs the exact same build.
* This list goes on and on.

If all these things don't get addressed, arenas will suck horribly. I'd still prefer they fix what they have. We all came here for cyrodill PvP until Zenimax broke it.

Just another view point to consider.

Me thinks they should go play SWTOR and see if they are so optimistic about it working well...

I played SWTOR, liked the duelling and PvP in general far better than the stack and AoE meta in this game, it was waaay more interesting than hurling chunks of stone at an empty keep (I miss things like Huttball XD ) or getting rolled by a stack of 24-50 people.
SWTOR's problem currently though is actually getting into PvP if you're not in a PvP guild/group, an issue ZoS could learn from.

Huttball!!!!! That gamemode was so omfg amazing...

Septimus_Magna · January 2016

The basis of the idea is definitely good but 9 rounds is way too much for most players.
It would be very frustrating to play through 8 rounds only to face a team of extremely skilled streamers/youtubers in the final round.

If this would be 3-5 (random) rounds the time investment and luck factor would be a little more bare-able.

Also I think it would be better to add a Token system instead of chance to get a Maelstrom weapon at the end. Good teams would be able to farm Maelstrom weapons very quickly and random groups would have a very small chance to get them.

Daily Tokens could help to balance the farming rate, similar to Monster Shoulders without the annoying RNG part.

Every day you would be able to get Tokens for the following events:
Completing round 1 - 10 Tokens.
Completing round 2 - 15 Tokens.
Completing round 3 - 20 Tokens.
Completing round 4 - 30 Tokens.
Completing round 5 - 50 Tokens.

This will limit the amount of Tokens to 125 per day.

Maelstrom weapons with 'bad' traits could sell for 500 Tokens, with 'good' trait 1500 and with Nirnhoned 3000 for example.

This would give players of every skill level something to work for without making it too easy/quick for pro-players.

Uberkull · January 2016

iamnotweakrwb17_ESO wrote: »

I wont. I don't care about arenas ad they sure as hell wont kill cyrodill They've been done to bits in other games and the typical problems with arenas never get resolved.

*When people start losing, they stop queuing.
* People abuse the system and create fake teams on the opposing side and queue up for thrown games just to get the loot, rating, whatever.
* People create one super team which discourages everyone from playing.
* If they create a solo queue, you get guys who queue sync constantly to get on the same team.
* People queue up at offpeak times when queues are dead and abuse the system that way.
* people queue to deliberately grief or troll others. They might go AFK, They might run in and die. They might quit as soon as they get in, etc, etc.
* Blatant class imbalance problems get highlighted and pretty soon everyone runs the exact same build.
* This list goes on and on.

If all these things don't get addressed, arenas will suck horribly. I'd still prefer they fix what they have. We all came here for cyrodill PvP until Zenimax broke it.

Just looking at this list, thinking back to WoW arenas, and realizing ZOS is in way over their head. ZOS has a long way to go to implement something workable for Arenas. I would start with something on PTS or weekend only test Arenas to collect player feedback.

Again, I said it before, ZOS don't go into a dark room for months and come out with something that you think the players want, let the players help you mold the right solution with play testing as you develop.