The problem is that in Cyrodiil you're confined to fighting people of other factions and in BGs you can't choose your opponents.

Some PvPers would like a "pre-arranged, formal combat between two groups, usually fought to settle a point of honor." Call it what you want. Personally I think the word duel suffices. But that's hardly what we should be focusing on.

Veryamedliel wrote: »

Duel: A prearranged, formal combat between two persons, usually fought to settle a point of honor.
This is already available. There's no such thing as a "group duel". That would be a war or skirmish. Which also already exists. It's called battlegrounds and is quite easy to arrange using the new group finder.

You want to "group duel" outside battlegrounds? There's an entire map dedicated to it. It's called Cyrodiil.

You would think "group vs group matches" (or whatever you want to call it) are available in a game like ESO, right? But no.

Almost 10 years after they released and advertised ESO as a multiplayer game with massive battles in the big Alliance War, PvP players still have an unfinished product that's not even working right most of the time. Since they seem to have dropped PvP development completely years ago, we had to endure downsizing, crazy useless tests and projects, neglect and victim blaming. We are still being bullied, gaslighted, ignored and shut down all the time. Even in official twitch streams, this forum and official interviews. Everyone seems to enjoy letting PvP players feel how unwanted they are, and how Cyrodiil should become a PvE zone...

But let's look at what's "already available".

I haven't played Battlegrounds in a while, but last time i checked:

• Champion Points were disabled,
• you couldn't choose your opposing team,
• Battlegrounds were team vs team vs team, not team vs team,
• Battlegrounds were limited to 4 player teams, what if you want to play 12 vs 12, or 5 vs 5 or something?
• you couldn't even choose between playing deathmatch, capture the flag or whatever,
• ...

So no, this doesn't work very well, does it?

Same with Cyrodiil:

• Depending on where you play and who you play with, Cyrodiil still has performance issues that can be gamebreaking.
• Fights in Cyrodiil are never 100% fair, because of scroll- and keep buffs. You would have to meet at a time when all factions have their own scrolls, there is no emperor, and every alliance has the same amount of keeps and homekeeps. And you would have to check if anyone is using the health buff from an Ayleid Well.
• Cyrodiil Campaigns have faction lock, low pop bonus, max players allowed, and other crazy rules making it almost impossible to do this right in Cyrodiil.
• Because you will always have players outside your "private match" messing everything up by trying to bomb you, siege you etc. for whatever reason. Like "There is a war going on here, go play your tournaments somewhere else, we need to win the campaign!"...
• ...

ESO would have been a great game for PvP, but for some reason it became a "single player MMORPG". Whatever that is. I am not sure why this happened, but it's a shame. I would even call it a tragedy.

It would be nice to get "new content" in the form of "finally fixed and finished content after it was released years ago". But instead we get face paintings, and more broken sets and changes nobody asked for.

While dragons, new maps, new artifact weapons, new sets and all that shiny new stuff could be great, i don't trust the current developers to get it right. Everything they have done (and not done) for years drove more and more PvP players away. But that's not their fault, they are not PvP developers. How would they know what to do?

If the company doesn't want to focus on PvP anymore, i fear we will have to accept that. ESO stopped being a competitive game long ago anyway. Even the leaderboards are broken again and again. Most players who care about endgame content already moved on to other games. Even if they fixed everything and added great new content, i guess nobody would come back to play ESO, because the trust is gone. Like "If it's fixed now, it will be broken again in a month".

But please, at least give us some gamemodes where we can choose what to play and who to play with. After all the quality of life updates for new players, this would be a nice gift for the few remaining PvP enthusiasts.