Either rebalance the modes or add back DM queue; the current system benefits no one.

CameraBeardThePirate · October 2022

There is far too much toxicity with the current way that BGs work. This is caused by a number of things that have been discussed to death on this forum, but lets go by use-case for the 3 main groups of players. Keep in mind it is not my intention to put down any of the following groups of players, and that i will be making a few generalizations based on my observations over thousands of BGs played. Not all players will fit into one of these categories, but I believe that most players tend to fit into at least one. The goal of this game is play how you want after all, I'm just trying to show how the current BG system works against that goal:

1) Every match is deathmatch. Players that want quick small man fights in no-cp. These are the "turbo DM-ers" that only want to death match. Whether you agree or disagree with their view-point, at the end of the day BGs are the only way to play Non-CP PvP reliably (not even going to count the non-Proc abominations of No-CP IC and No-CP Cyrodiil). CP PvP is unfun for a lot of people as it drastically increases time to kill with the insane resistance and mitigation CP can provide. Cyrodiil PvP is unreliable, as you may ride 10 minutes and find no fights at all or ride another 10 just to get zerged down. IC is rarely populated. BGs on the other hand are fast, reliable, and consistent in the sense that you're never going to get Zerged down by a faction stack. These players aren't interested in the Objective Modes because the objective modes don't encourage engagement. They queue to get fights, so they get frustrated when they just wanna have a good time DMing, spend 10 minutes in a queue, and find that the match ends in 2 minutes because someone cheesed the objective. Some players in this group will make it their secondary objective to extend the match, not win, just so that they can continue to fight without having to wait in queue again. Without a DM queue, there isn't really a way to log in and find quick and reliable fights anymore. These players would benefit from either split queues or rebalanced modes. If the modes encouraged more conflict and fighting, they could get their DM fix no matter the game mode, matches would last longer (as it wouldnt be as easy to end the match quickly), and wouldn't be at odds with teammates in the following group.

2) Objective Enjoyers. These players generally don't care about getting fights, they instead want to win, get achievements, or purposefully cheese the o jective to highlight the imbalances. The most active/veteran players in this group will usually have special builds not designed to kill, but to instead stay alive, run fast/invisibly, and at times will even use sets such as Meridia's Blessed Armor to pick up relics without allowing anyone to bash, removing counterplay. Some of these players know of specific spots on the map that are hidden, glitched, or extremely difficult to get to and will utilize these spots in Chaos Ball. Some players in this group won't even bother fighting, and will instead run from attackers to go to an unguarded objective. These players get frustrated when their teammates ignore the objective because it makes it more difficult to win. This can cause friction on the team between these players and players in the first group; if one or 2 people are constantly running away to an unguarded objective, it makes it near impossible for those that want to stay and fight to fight effectively while down a player or 2. I don't personally fault these players - they are playing the game as the game was designed. These players would benefit from split queues and rebalanced game modes as well. If the game modes encouraged more conflict, group 1 players and group 2 players would be working together, and you wouldn't have teammates splitting off from each other as often.

3) "I'm just here for my daily." These players might have some overlap with group 2, but generally don't play BGs nearly as much and thus don't understand the strategies you can abuse to win with little effort. Thus, these players get frustrated because they are usually running suboptimal PvP sets, far too little health, and have a lower skill at DMing. Group 3 players can have friction with both group 1 and 2. This is because these players generally get farmed by DMers on the other team and left out in the open by group 1 and 2 teammates. Some of these players have genuine interest in learning the ropes of BGs, whether it's DMing or Objectiv-ing, but most are just trying to get a quick win. I've seen a number of players that join my team, claim they're just there for the daily, and then get frustrated about dying over and over because they're running off on their own. At the end of the day, these players don't play nearly as much and will really only learn/improve if they have the desire to. However, they would still benefit from rebalanced objectives because the heavy-hitter DM players would now likely be working in tandem with them, meaning they'd have much more support.

Adding back DM queue would help some of these issues, but there would still likely be friction among these different types of players. Instead, if the objective modes were more engaging and forced more conflict, I believe a lot of the tension among these different types of players would be greatly reduced. Players that enjoy the objectives and trying to win would now have more support from people that just want fun fights. DMers would be able to find good fights, no matter the objective. New and inexperienced players would also have a better time if teammates weren't split between completely ignoring fights and completely ignoring the objective. As it stands on live, the BG playerbase is fractured due to differing goals of wanting to win and wanting to fight. If the objectives encouraged more fighting, this split wouldn't occur.

TL;DR: BGs are toxic because of differing goals among players. Some players want good fights with a low queue to match time ratio, and some players just want to win. If the objectives instead encouraged more fighting, matches would last longer and teams would be more focused into a common goal.

OBJnoob · October 2022

I disagree with some small things you said but I'm not going to nitpick because you are entitled to generalize a little bit-- you'd have to, since you can't speak for everybody or know what they're thinking. And in general I agree with your premise.

But so what's the solution you're proposing? Specifically... Because you say the objectives should produce more fighting but you don't say how.

My concern is that you, like others, might want to suggest there is only one relic in the middle of the map or only one flag in crazy king.

Any change this extreme that forces everyone to a central location is a poor compromise in my opinion because it will be an ongoing 4v4v4 fight and, albeit taking place near an objective, is really just a death match with a predetermined location. Where one player manages to grab a relic (almost certainly because their team deathmatched the other two, because there are no distractions or other things going on or reasons to be anywhere else,) returns it to their home and runs back to death match again.

Which almost certainly means that the best comp group of 4 who got the first relic will get all the others as well because no dynamic alteration of numbers, locations, or strategies can occur.

Playing objectives-- even just having them (more than one,) isn't a way to avoid fighting honestly its a way to split the fighting up and have chances for 1v1s 2v2s and 1v3s.

Stacked teams of talented DMers may come across teams of objective players who, after getting wrecked in team fights, split off to try and win another way. But it isn't necessarily what they came in there to do... And getting farmed is probably what steered them that way.

So the people that tend to ignore the objectives to only fight feel as though they see people running away all the time. But they are skewing their own numbers because their behavior causes that behavior as a reaction and thus they feel it is more widespread than it is.

But so I am curious what your solution is?

CameraBeardThePirate · October 2022

OBJnoob wrote: »

I disagree with some small things you said but I'm not going to nitpick because you are entitled to generalize a little bit-- you'd have to, since you can't speak for everybody or know what they're thinking. And in general I agree with your premise.

But so what's the solution you're proposing? Specifically... Because you say the objectives should produce more fighting but you don't say how.

My concern is that you, like others, might want to suggest there is only one relic in the middle of the map or only one flag in crazy king.

Any change this extreme that forces everyone to a central location is a poor compromise in my opinion because it will be an ongoing 4v4v4 fight and, albeit taking place near an objective, is really just a death match with a predetermined location. Where one player manages to grab a relic (almost certainly because their team deathmatched the other two, because there are no distractions or other things going on or reasons to be anywhere else,) returns it to their home and runs back to death match again.

Which almost certainly means that the best comp group of 4 who got the first relic will get all the others as well because no dynamic alteration of numbers, locations, or strategies can occur.

Playing objectives-- even just having them (more than one,) isn't a way to avoid fighting honestly its a way to split the fighting up and have chances for 1v1s 2v2s and 1v3s.

Stacked teams of talented DMers may come across teams of objective players who, after getting wrecked in team fights, split off to try and win another way. But it isn't necessarily what they came in there to do... And getting farmed is probably what steered them that way.

So the people that tend to ignore the objectives to only fight feel as though they see people running away all the time. But they are skewing their own numbers because their behavior causes that behavior as a reaction and thus they feel it is more widespread than it is.

But so I am curious what your solution is?

For Crazy King I definitely don't think there should only be 1 flag, but I do think there should be fewer flags then 4.

For Relic, you could implement a sort of system similar to Headhunters in Halo: Reach. Have generic relics spawn at various places on the map randomly. A player can pick up a relic and must bring it back to their base. You could implement a system where you can pick up more than 1 relic, but with each relic giving you a stacking snare. Killing a player holding a relic would drop all of their relics. Basically people would then have to find a balance between running relics one at a time for a small score or running around killing enemies or grabbing more relics to get a whole bunch at once for a big score. The goal here would be to push players out of spawn; with the current relic game mode, attacking/pushing is often a sure fire way to lose, since you leave your own relic unguarded. With this system, people would be pushed into certain areas, and there would always be the option of going somewhere else if you can't manage to win the engagement. Sneakier players would still be able to run around solo to grab relics, but sticking around to get a larger number before "depositing" would be encouraged as it would lead to a bigger score.

Editing to add some clarification: this version of the mode would change the scoring a bit since relic capping would be more frequent. Say, 10 points for a single relic, 25 for 2, 50 for 3, and 100 for 4, with 4 being the max amount you can carry at once, and giving you a big snare (maybe 20% or so for each relic after the first)

gariondavey · October 2022

Excellent post, Cam.
@ZOS_Kevin please read this well written and thought out post from camerabeardthestudlycuddlynecromancypirate

OBJnoob · October 2022

I agree with you about crazy king.

I disagree about capture the relic, but not in like a severe way. So... Basically the crux of my disagreement centers around one thing you said. You said that attacking and/or fighting is a sure way to lose because you leave your relic unguarded. I believe this is untrue, and could only be true if we're assuming a 4-man premade who always wants to stick together. This is death match strategy. This is a poor strategy to have for capture the relic and doesn't need to be made more viable. The correct thing to do in this game mode, premade group or not, is to split up. Let's say a 2/2 split just to keep things simple... Some trying to get relics and some guarding your own.

I like this about capture the relic because it is unique that you have to defend something and it promotes fighting. No, it doesn't guarantee fighting, but the idea promotes it. The only way you won't fight is if nobody comes to try and take your relic. Which is good for your team and you can better allocate your troops accordingly.

I think a more simple solution would be to just move the relic spawns farther away from the player spawns. That way if you do manage to kill the other team they don't get a lucky respawn and just drop down to keep bashing you.

Also... Your idea about the snare is pretty good. Nothing too crazy... 30% and uncleansable, so that if you have a source of major expedition you can still go "regular" speed.

CameraBeardThePirate · October 2022

OBJnoob wrote: »

I agree with you about crazy king.

I disagree about capture the relic, but not in like a severe way. So... Basically the crux of my disagreement centers around one thing you said. You said that attacking and/or fighting is a sure way to lose because you leave your relic unguarded. I believe this is untrue, and could only be true if we're assuming a 4-man premade who always wants to stick together. This is death match strategy. This is a poor strategy to have for capture the relic and doesn't need to be made more viable. The correct thing to do in this game mode, premade group or not, is to split up. Let's say a 2/2 split just to keep things simple... Some trying to get relics and some guarding your own.

I like this about capture the relic because it is unique that you have to defend something and it promotes fighting. No, it doesn't guarantee fighting, but the idea promotes it. The only way you won't fight is if nobody comes to try and take your relic. Which is good for your team and you can better allocate your troops accordingly.

So I get the point you're trying to make, and in certain matches against even teams with no one on a cheesy block tank/meridias blessed armor build, absolutely. Relegating people to defense can be fun. However, in practice I've noticed that what ends up happening more often than not is if you split your team up, youll never be able to kill the defenders, as 2 people (or even 3 in some cases) just won't have the damage to kill a tank. All the tank has to do is sit in place and bash, waiting for their teammates. Relic ends up turning into a stalematey mess half the time because of this. The other half of the time the opposite happens; someone who's really tanky/speedy/wearing Meridia's Blessed Armor comes in to take your relic and because there's only 2 people defending, they don't have enough damage to kill said attacker. The attacker can just endlessly try to pick up the relic until the defender is out of stam or they activate Meridia's and there's nothing that can be done to stop them from getting the relic.

While yes, moving the relic spawn might help this, I don't really see that ever happening as they would have to change the assets/structures on every single map. At the absolute minimum imo, if they don't want to completely redo relic, they need to at least 1) add a snare to the relic (and chaos ball while we're at it) and 2) fix the bugs and exploits such as negating the relic to make it disappear or wearing Meridia's to remove counterplay.

Necrotech_Master · October 2022

i personally had no problem with the idea of having a DM only queue, and a random queue

the zos implementation of it was botched though by allowing random to dip into the DM-only queue, which as we all saw ended with like 80%+ of the games being DM, instead of random having an equal chance to get any game mode

DrNukenstein · October 2022

#5pointsperkillinobjectivemodes

Amottica · October 2022

I think some of the objective matches are not designed well. It makes no sense to grab a node, move on to the next node and grab that and not care about the first node. The design should require defending a node. Fighting at a node provides either offensive or defensive points. Attaching or healing (or guarding) the player with the chaos ball can also provide offensive or defensive points.

That forces actual PvP in an objective-based match.

They can also tweak it so that doing DM in an objective-based match where the fighting is not directly related to the objectives brings fewer rewards or some sort of penalty. Not sure how to work this.

Firstmep · October 2022

I understand there are players who are just after the motifs or the daily xp bonus, but pvp is pvp.
It is by nature a competitive mode.
I think among the many issues with bgs is the abysmal matchmaking.
I am by no means a crem de la crop top tier sweatlord, but man some of these lobbies I get put into are just ridiculous.
Walking away with 20-30 kills with my opponents mostly being very inexperienced players.
It's just not fun.
And the way mmr works, you can go up against some of the sweatiest people after just a few weeks of playing bgs.
In an effort to make bgs more beginner friendly, zos actually made it worse.
There is a reason why any pvp game will have a well thought out matchmaking system, specifically to avoid these scenarios.
Ofc it doesnt help, that due to the lackluster rewards and the general abandonment of this game mode from the devs have culled the bg population hard over the years.

Bgs need sweeping rework to game modes a better matchmaking system, and far better rewards.
And then once we have a good base, we can start splintering of the playerbase.
[snip]
[edited for bashing]

Necrotech_Master · October 2022

Firstmep wrote: »

I understand there are players who are just after the motifs or the daily xp bonus, but pvp is pvp.
It is by nature a competitive mode.
I think among the many issues with bgs is the abysmal matchmaking.
I am by no means a crem de la crop top tier sweatlord, but man some of these lobbies I get put into are just ridiculous.
Walking away with 20-30 kills with my opponents mostly being very inexperienced players.
It's just not fun.
And the way mmr works, you can go up against some of the sweatiest people after just a few weeks of playing bgs.
In an effort to make bgs more beginner friendly, zos actually made it worse.
There is a reason why any pvp game will have a well thought out matchmaking system, specifically to avoid these scenarios.
Ofc it doesnt help, that due to the lackluster rewards and the general abandonment of this game mode from the devs have culled the bg population hard over the years.

Bgs need sweeping rework to game modes a better matchmaking system, and far better rewards.
And then once we have a good base, we can start splintering of the playerbase.
[snip]

the funny thing is i think tales of tribute competitive mode has a better ranking/MMR system than BGs lol, with actual brackets, and a score gain/loss depending on if you win or not lol

[edited to remove quote]

OBJnoob · October 2022

I like nukensteins idea and necrotechs also. Of course we've all heard that there isn't enough people to warrant more than 2 ques so I'll go ahead and take it a step further. Group que can be deathmatch and solo que can be objective.

I don't know if people would like that or not but to me it has seemed like the deathmatch lovers are also group queu.

As far as you go, Mr. OP, I'm enjoying this thread and your ideas. In response to the relic thing... Yeah, you make good points and I'd prefer they not have to redesign all the maps. I don't know the answer, but I do very much want there to be 3 relics.

Let's just start with a snare (sure, chaosball too,) and see how it goes? I don't think tanks are exclusive to capture the relic nor is meridias blessed armor. It could be that these problems have nothing to do with the mode. I wouldn't say, for example, that high level deathmatches are NOT stalematey. Or similar skill level GvG encounters in cyrodiil.

PhoenixGrey · October 2022

Separate queue for PVP and PVE.

xDeusEJRx · October 2022

I genuinely believe the split queue would be the best solution to BG's that we've seen so far. I'd honesty love it if ZoS tested speciffic queuing for a battleground weekend allowing participants to queue into any game mode and see how that fares.

No one will be too mad about it because it'll only be about 5 days like CTR weekend was and they get to see player consensus.
I personally think it'd work well, but ZoS is adamant about it because they think it will hurt player population, but for 5 days of the split queue modes I think shouldn't have long term adverse effects.

At least food for thought I suppose.

OBJnoob · October 2022

Having separate ques is the only thing we can all agree we want, lol, unfortunately it seems we can't have it.

I think making the solo queu obj and the group queu deathmatch would be okay.

Dem_kitkats1 · October 2022

At this point I think it's going to take more than separate queues to help liven up the population. Sure, a DM only queue will bring back and satisfy a few vets, but I'm not sure it'll do all that much in the long run, unless you're fine playing against the same people all of the time. I don't think the BG population has ever been all that healthy since I started getting more involved in PvP. And now even more experienced players have become disillusioned by the game.

So, as other's have said, BGs need an overhaul of the game modes, new maps, a rebalanced scoring system, and better rewards and incentives in order to achieve a larger and more varied population. With a larger population it would make more sense, and be more feasible to split queues and implement an actual ranking system.

Amottica · October 2022

xDeusEJRx wrote: »

I genuinely believe the split queue would be the best solution to BG's that we've seen so far. I'd honesty love it if ZoS tested speciffic queuing for a battleground weekend allowing participants to queue into any game mode and see how that fares.

No one will be too mad about it because it'll only be about 5 days like CTR weekend was and they get to see player consensus.
I personally think it'd work well, but ZoS is adamant about it because they think it will hurt player population, but for 5 days of the split queue modes I think shouldn't have long term adverse effects.

At least food for thought I suppose.

It is only the best option if the DM queue does not draw from the queue that includes all BGs. As it was, it drew from the random queue making it much less than random and lean heavily towards DM which was the complaint.

There should be no objection to this even though it would mean waiting longer for a queue to pop if a separate DM queue is what DM people really want.

OBJnoob · October 2022

^

this. Exactly this. Do it the way they tried to do it last time... Only actually do it right.

CameraBeardThePirate · October 2022

While I agree that adding back DM only queue would be great, I still think the objective modes need a rework, otherwise those modes will always remain divisive and unfun for a lot of players. Adding back a DM only queue would just be a band-aid, while rebalancing the modes would greatly increase the health of BGs.

Caribou77 · October 2022

The most practical short-term fix is to make the queue Deathmatch or Other.

This should not be hard to do?

All players would love some NEW BG CONTENT. 🙂

jtm1018 · October 2022

Group 3 member here, as in, I try so hard but never get anywhere. Getting 2nd place is a win for me.

I die more than a dozen times per match, get a lot of hate mail for being not good, whatever.

I just like bg because its a quick pvp, unlike cyrodiil which is not to my liking.