Never ending discussion about Arena...

xxxJUSTICExxx · October 2023

What is the actual problem to make a really good PvP arena?

I've played Guild Wars 2 and WoW a lot. While WoW had (at least few years ago) problems with small scale arena modes, GW2 mastered it (who played - knows what I'm talking about). I've played for hundreds of hours on Arena along and NOT a single time felt an irritation. Maybe a bit, in some cases when class balance system tried to make fun of my team. But in TESO every time I enter Arena, after 2-3 matches I want to quit and never open that tab ever again.
Why?

1. Balance of classes.
I play as a Tank (Necro). Using abilities properly and having a good gear (not "I'm a god" tier).
And it's ok when I suffer because of high skill bow master. But in some cases (especially Arcanist the most often) I feel like my tank is made of paper and I get destroyed meanwhile enemy barely gets any scratches. I get it, I'm a tank with relatively low damage but I'm offsetting with max health and especially high armor.
Just yesterday I had a fight 1v2. That lasted for a minute or more (a sporty interest for 3 of us) and could last forever cause all their damage was pointless when I was playing with them and recovering health. Did I enjoy that? Absolutely. Did I expect to destroy those 2 players? Absolutely no. Obviously. Soon enough my teammate came and we annihilated them. Is it how teamfight supposed to work? Definitely.
2. Balance of abilities.
Playing as a Tank I don't feel that I have battleground covered. Since I don't have high damage I expect to have control abilities. Because just to survive with high health is a 0 gameplay. And as far as I see, other classes have MUCH more control abilities (or at least they are more severe). And it leads to the next point...
3. Too many people.
Why do we actually need 3 teams? Why can't just 2 factions have a fight? Why 3? It doesn't go against lore.
If it was target system then it would be ok I guess. But with non-target system (which means very fast moves and very fast camera turns) having, let's say 3v3v2 mayhem, fight becomes a nightmare.
And more importantly, since many players want to use their abilities, you can't see anything properly among all those video effects. Especially, when you have a close fight in crowd, you might think you got this, but eventually (and too late) you realize you were targeted all this time by mage or bowman from above and you just didn't see that because of brawl you had in crowd.
4. Leaderboard & Leagues/Ranked system.
It's not cool to fight 3v1 and that 1 player is able to destroy all 3 of us. It happens time to time. Even if they are gods of this game it shouldn't work like this. If you have an advantage at something you are supposed to have a disadvantage at something else.
Ok, if that player is that good then why can't he have a fight with equals?
Why on Earth game doesn't have PvP Leagues?
What? Experienced players don't want to see themselves in top 10, top 100? Or players don't want to compete with their "neighbors" for points to get to the better league? Or players don't want to have equal opponents, basing on league and efficiency/skill/mastery points?
I can't imagine someone saying "no, we don't need that, that's unnecessary and boring".

ceruulean · October 2023

For 1 and 2, tanks dont really get medals in BG so that makes it less rewarding to play. Necro has good AOE denial if you play stationary/land domination games, but it's not like high APM mobile nb/sorc gameplay

For 3 and 4 I agree, why is BG have to be 3 teams? And why does Tales of Tribute have a better leaderboard system than PvP? lol

Honestly if ZOS implements a ranking system like ToT for pvp, and ability to queue for 1v1 or 2v2 or 4v4, it would be more fun.

Freilauftomate · October 2023

Battlegrounds still feel like cheap unfinished copies of other games.

Nobody knows why they really dropped their plans for PvP. They just refuse to tell us the real reason and silence people when they ask (anyone watching their twitch streams, or reading interviews knows what i mean). ESO still has plenty of potential to be one of the best PvP experiences ever. It already has the unique and awesome alliance war in Cyrodiil. With a little work they could update BGs and add some more gamemodes (like group vs group fights in your home).

Maybe they really are struggling with fixing performance issues and bugs. That could have been solved by investing more resources years ago. But that still doesn't seem to happen. After the hardware update we saw what's possible, performance was great. But somehow everything is going downhill again. One of the most confusing things for me is: while Playstation players had an almost perfect performance with the new server hardware, PC players (who got their update one year before) already complained about issues again. How does this happen? Can't be the code like some people are claiming, it just doesn't make sense.

Maybe someone just stopped the funding for this part of the game. Or their PvP developers had to leave. Maybe the servers are running on energy saving mode because of too expensive electricity bills. Maybe they rent out parts of their servers to other games. Who knows what's going on. I have been trying to find out for years and i have been waiting for improvements, but it seems like nobody in this company is really interested in PvP anymore. Would be awesome to hear a full explanation one day. Maybe when some student writes a master thesis about ESO like some people did with WoW.

So now, after performance issues, bugs, negligence and all the other problems drove almost everyone away, we have a new problem. There are not enough PvP players left to make their current systems work (like low pop bonus in Cyrodiil). They say we can't have deathmatch queues because not enough people would play the objective modes. And even if we had a good ranking system in BGs i guess you would have to wait in queue for hours to find appropriate enemies.

It's really a shame what happened to PvP in ESO and i am afraid it's too late to fix it now, after almost everyone left. At least on console.

Minno · October 2023

problem is that arenas also dont work well in a MMO. The balance issue was already mentioned, but also how much of that balance doesnt work well with class fantasy.

The best pvp version of this game was launch when you had multiple types of group sizes supported and thrown into 1 pvp zone. The giant canvas mixed with the depth of groups made for a very interesting series of metas. All community driven, which made for some spicy content on both the forums and in game.

ESO Classic please!

Rhaegar75 · October 2023

Interesting conversation:

I’d defined wish we could have more PvP options. Give BG players a decent MMR - nothing fancy, just something along the lines of the card game.

It would be great to also have a new BG map.

A Team vs. Team arena would simply be awesome.

(Class) balance is and will always be an issue in a mmo: it’s undeniably present in all the other mmos out there. If they are not ranting about a specific class (GW2, FF14) they may complain about a specific playstyle or weapon (I.e. NW)

I still like ESO PvP but it could be, it should be so much better. I really hope that now that the servers are working they will finally drop something for the PvP community

Joy_Division · October 2023

For starters, ESO has no PvP dedicated developer and hasn't had one for over 4 years now.

There hasn't been anyone tasked with even thinking about the suggestions given to ZOS, let alone actually work on PvP related content.

Rhaegar75 · October 2023

Joy_Division wrote: »

For starters, ESO has no PvP dedicated developer and hasn't had one for over 4 years now.

There hasn't been anyone tasked with even thinking about the suggestions given to ZOS, let alone actually work on PvP related content.

that is a major concern! a really major concern!

xxxJUSTICExxx · November 2023

If it’s true what people say that devs don’t have intention to improve PvP aspect then it’s very sad. And it’s killing a game.
When I bought a base game (no subscription) I was disappointed. Yes, quests and open world are interesting to go through. But PvP arena was poorly made. And Dungeons (no sub) were all about grind, not cool dungeons like in GW2 (even free version) or WoW.
So point is when new player comes and sees only good quests as an option for gameplay and only subscription Dungeons that are good then how much of desire do they have to stay?
After quests and dungeons I bet even PvE players want to have some fun on Arena time to time. And I’m not even talking about big number of truly dedicated PvP players that see Arena as an essential part of MMORPG.

Brakkish · November 2023

I've acclimated to the way BGs are. Once I accepted the possibility they may never see improvement (historically there's been no love shown from the DEV team towards improvements for years); life was immediately better.

My only real wish remains for that of a more healthy BG PVP population; in its current state queue times are getting too long for my liking. They used to be near instant and could get a few in before work in the mornings. Also experiencing diminishing returns on time invested in the evenings after work and weekends.

Since BGs are all I do, I miss the days when I could do BGs back to back without delay and it wasn't the same 12 people shuffled to different teams. It wasn't as a predictable outcome as it is now.

I'm all for changes, or things that help others find their reasoning to play - ultimately helping us all have greater variety and shorter Queue times.

Necrotech_Master · November 2023

wilykcat wrote: »

Good post. I agree with options 1 - 3.

The ranking system I would like to add on that it should be optional because there are some who don't want to endlessly grind a score and who want to do pvp for fun. The ranking system is good for those who are really into pvp, are very competitive, and who do want to grind a score. There should be an unranked mode along with the added ranked mode system.

About champion points: I do agree that on CP ranked pvp should seperate groups based on the range of CP amount. Something like this for example:
1. Under 100 cp should be placed together with no higher cp (new comers group is under 100)
Basic ranked cp group.
3. cp 101 to 200
4. Cp 201 to 300
5. cp 301 to 400
6. cp 401 to 500
Then it goes into intermediate (average). After advanced (heroic). Then master. Then grandmaster, then legendary, and finally elite mythic legend cp-based ranking. Each one will have its own amount of cp range for cp pvp mode.

Option 3 I totally understand. 3 teams fighting eachother is very messy due to 2 teams gaining up on one or the other. It gets kind of overwhelming during team fights. I agree there should be only 2 teams of 5 fighting each other.

Pvp class balance is a difficult one. There shouldn't only be a strong class and super weak ones. Classes should get some small amounts of nerfs or buffs instead of major ones. Crowd control abilities should be nerfed in pvp.

Moba stylized pvp would be awesome for eso.

If pvp had it's own seperate queue ui that has more options when creating a group or joining one, then this would be possible.
Select pvp type, ranked or unranked, cp based rank or no cp mode, select map, select team size (amount of players on each team) and amount of teams, custom pvp modes, create custom pvp, queue by class or role, select match type, etc.

the problem with that is that just straight up would not work for several reasons

the ranges are far too small, there would be virtually no players in many of those and it would be impossible to get any matches (at cp 100-200 with an efficient xp farm can grind out over 100 cp in a day)
BGs in its current form are already no cp so cp score is irrelevant
the BG population is so small already that dividing it up further will just straight up kill the system entirely

wilykcat · November 2023

I don't have much information on this though as I'm still learning. Sorry.

My previous comment is removed.