Hello Everyone,

Most of you know me as Nordz and all I do in this wonderful game is spam battlegrounds all day on PC NA server as a nord stam DK. Love or hate me I am fairly known and accepted as a decent player, and I spend a lot of time in BG's. Lately I've been getting very frustrated with the design and decided I would voice my frustrations on the forums.

ESO PVP: we currently have 3 forms of PvP content in our game; Cyrodiil, Imperial City, and Battlegrounds. I will not pretend to know exactly how the other two work as I admit I myself have absolutely NO clue how to be successful in either of the other two. However, the general point of Cyrodiil is to be large scale combat that is supposed to feel like true Elder Scrolls warfare, with big, coordinated armies clashing. Imperial city is supposed to be the same kind of warfare, scaled down to support small group play and feel more like a survival looter. Battlegrounds are the instanced combat that we've been asking for for a very long time, and we got them, and while to me and many others like me it is the best PvP content in the game, there are still many problems that NEED to be addressed before another game does address the issues.


DEAD: I'm not sure if this is true or not. its hard for me to find exact numbers or identify exact causes, however it seems like I am being matched against and with the SAME people literally EVERY battleground I play. I've been told it's because of the games MMR system, and when I look at the leaderboards, this claim is a little more believable, however, we still have no public definition of what the MMR system in this game is. To be fairly honest, among the PvP community that I speak with, MMR is universally hated. Good players do not want to have to fight on the edge of their seat EVERY game simply because they are the most competitive and have earned their stripes. Most people I have spoken with believe a natural queue would be best, fighting MANY different people every game with MANY different skillsets, and good players will win more often. It seems to me that the addition of an MMR system to this game was unwarranted, and even if battlegrounds are as active as ever, being placed against the same enemies every single game feels degrading and makes veteran players want to leave.


ZERGING: The first comment I get on this thread is going to be some kid trolling me "bRuH, yOU tHInk FoUr plaYeRS Iz a ZERg??". Well yes. I believe anything more than one player can be a zerg. My point is, it seems like the best strategy to win just about every battleground (or at least the vast majority) is to group your entire team together and run to objective spamming AoE's. Pardon me, but the whole reason I play BG's exclusively was to get away from that crap in Cyrodiil. I'm sorry, I just think that there needs to be more emphasis on BREAKING this habit in battlegrounds not promoting it, it does not make sense to have two entirely separate PvP types in a game with the same exact tactic prevailing in both. I offer SEVERAL solutions to this problem.
-Scoring: Deathmatch is by far the worst when it comes to this issue of all the PvP modes, and will likely be the hardest to fix, followed by crazy king, chaos ball, capture the flag and then domination. Chaos Ball, CTF, and domination really aren't to bad, in chaos ball the zerging team is always eventually swallowed up by the damage of the ball anyways, and in both CTF and domination a coordinated group of non zergers can counter a zerging team. The main problem is deathmatch and crazy king. My fix for crazy king is simple; make flags worth more points as the game goes on. Towards the end of crazy king, it basically turns into domination, but often it is to late and the zerging team has already acquired a huge lead. editing the first flags to be worth less points would STILL give them a lead, just not one that is an automatic win. Deathmatch will be the most tricky, I completely avoid deathmatch as it is and never queue for it, and will likely never queue for deathmatch just because I believe it objectively wrong for instanced PvP, however I did come up with a solution for this as well: Make kills worth less points if you have nearby teammates. For example, if you have 4 teammates within a x yd radius from you, your KB is only worth 5 points, however, if you are the ONLY person within that radius, your KB is worth 25 points. Side note, adding an automatically applying zerker buff (like what used to be in the game mode) to the lowest scoring team could help make the game mode a little more wild and unpredictable. Personally I don't think there is any saving deathmatch and will likely not touch it no matter what. If I wanted to play like that, I would just gather up my friends and farm more AP in cyro.
-Population: The second the battleground format for ESO was announced I knew this was going to be a problem... 4v4v4.... wait a minute... whats the max size for a group in ESO? 4? yeah, premades are a problem? ya don't freakin say. Look at all of the best battleground style games that have ever existed; Allowing players to queue with a FULL team is absolutely the biggest mistake ZoS made with the format for battlegrounds. The only way to fix the premading issue is to add players to teams. Truth be told, I like the 3 team idea however it never works out in the way you want it to. The idea is, if one team starts to dominate, the other 2 teams band together and fight off the stronger one. The reality is, the 2 strongest teams gang bang the *** out of the weakest team, and laugh the whole time and even the middle team is happy with their second place finish. Really, the only fix to this problem is to increase the amount of players per team in ALL battlegrounds. 6v6v6 could work, however 7v7v7 seems more fair, and still only adds up to 21 people whole. This would also give us MORE players that could be spread across the map to accomplish objectives, which could naturally help the zerging issue.

REWARDS: I feel like many people just don't touch battlegrounds because the rewards are simply not good enough. I'm not going to sit here and say that battlegrounds should be the most economically lucrative thing in the game, but I do think a rewards rework could bring more attention to them and improve their popularity. Currently, Every day, every character you have can accept and complete 3 battlegrounds daily quests (one at a time). The rewards for this are 2k AP, and a pat on the back, and some of the objectives are actually fairly time consuming. basically, nobody who plays in battlegrounds ever plays them just to get their daily rewards. Battlegrounds players are all there because they already enjoy battlegrounds and likely wouldn't be doing anything else anyways. However, with a reworked rewards system, more traffic could be brought in from players who may not normally participate in BG's. My solution to the problem: Combine all 3 current daily quests into ONE quest, and slightly improve the rewards. the current total for AP gain through quests is 6k. Lets bump that up to 10-15k and offer a daily reward box with a little bit of transmute in them! Of course, there are also mail rewards and random daily rewards, however, I do not like the idea of rewarding random battlegrounds if we are going to put in such controversial game modes as deathmatch. I really believe the quest rewards system are the way to go.

It is late where I am and I am tired, I hope I managed to give a little bit of a voice to the more rational and objective Elite BGers out there who really want to have a better experience in this game. I tried to be as objective as possible. I have been playing ESO since 2014 and have quit many times due to terrible PvP, however, since BG's have been introduced is the longest time I've played the game continuously without quitting. I believe the game is improving, however this PvP, my favorite PvP, needs some serious remodeling before it can be considered anything more than a place that the elitist players go to slug it out. its simply not fun to anyone in the way that it is currently formatted.

Please take this post seriously.