I'm just going to share a non-PvPers point of view on the stream:

https://youtu.be/ybeSoIoj-EE?si=D1MLjBj0-6neYoWv


I mentioned players feeling like Zenimax was seeking the casual player at the expense of the veterans, and Eigh1 Puppies seems to be getting that impression as well.

https://youtu.be/Nb7vjDtj0cs

https://search.app?link=https://www.elderscrollsonline.com/en-us/news/post/64817&utm_campaign=aga&utm_source=agsadl1,sh/x/gs/m2/4


" 'What’s the most important skill for somebody who wishes to commentate for ESO’s PvE or PvP activities?'

'In my opinion, it’s knowledge and experience in your field. You can’t just talk about what’s going on. You must help people understand why it’s significant: why such a thrilling moment is so exciting. This is especially true in such an intricate and seemingly chaotic environment like an ESO Trial. You need to know enough to explain a dangerous situation quickly and fluently. You need experience being in that situation to reflect the excitement or panic in your own demeanor, and then you have to be a little dramatic—enough to help the audience feel the excitement that you do in that particular situation.' "

Why not just do it all on the forums. You can even make anonymous polls here. When was the last time anyone saw a poll from a member of staff here?

I don't see why reddit or any other medium should be used at all.

ZOS_JessicaFolsom wrote: »

Hey all, thank you for the additional replies - there are many good insights here. Increasing the amount of Q&As/AMAs we do, and adding more regular feedback surveys does seem doable. As Kevin touched on in this post earlier tonight, many of us are going to be out for Thanksgiving holiday, and we'll follow up when we return. We are making an effort to be here on the forums a bit more, and we don't want our lighter presence over the next week to send the wrong message. The Community team will still drop by as we're able in to check on things here. For those of you who celebrate, we hope you have a restful Thanksgiving with family and/or friends.

I should have acknowledged what a watershed the new Battlegrounds feel like, despite all the criticism. More feedback would be amazing, because I know PVPers have come to think, after years and years of hearing nothing: "No news is bad news". It is so incredibly welcome to have something new, and it is clear that effort went into crafting the new mode. Lobby issues aside, 8v8 is a success in my book. It is chaotic fun! 4v4 will be a success-ish in the long term, once it ceases to be the default queue, and ceases to place people who wanted to queue 8v8 back into 4v4.

In 4v4 the biggest barrier to their success is the poor state of the PVP gameplay at this moment. I know a huge number of people in the PVP community have come to feel the situation in PVP is beyond fixing, and that it's well past the point of "too little, too late". I struggle to imagine how we might get PVP back to a healthy place where core skills and gameplay really matter more than heal-stacking and big proc damage. Making Battle Spirit restrict the number of same-name heals over time you can stack to one stack over what you cast yourself would be a major contribution. Even with such an enormous nerf, ball groups and cross heals would still be incredibly powerful, but it would take bar space away from ball groups in particular who would have to run a wider range of HoT skills to achieve the effect they can currently get just by stacking up a dozen radiating regens and echoing vigors on each other. Ball grouping is a skillful playstyle, but it is painfully overtuned with very little counterplay beyond running an opposing ball group. It also lags the whole region around these groups. In Cyrodiil you can currently tell a ballgroup is coming to a keep just by the drastic drop in framerate as they approach. The huge lag spikes they can create add to the fact that - even if you aren't bait for them - it is very hard to form much counterplay. Right now, with the sheer amount of healing over time they can stack, even the huge DoTs applied by multiple fire ballista can struggle to make a dent. You will sometimes see ball groups just run right through very, very hot killboxes on a breach, and almost immediately recover off any of the damage. Without sets like Azureblight that can punish big cross-healing clusters, siege is some of the only counterplay to a ball group, but the healing is still just too strong, and modern ball groups are too fast and snare-immune to be caught in siege very often.

The sheer power of cross healing really is one of the biggest issues PVP faces. It is evident in BGs too, where you get lobbies that go the full 15minutes with barely a single kill because there are just so many cross heals stacking up.

Some form of "trap" siege in Cyrodiil that circumvents Snowtreaders and Banner Bearer would be nice. Spike traps, etc. You could set it down and you get a few seconds of immobilise to siege or attack ball groups or zergs. A way for smaller - but organised - groups to have counterplay to large, coordinated healing swarms would make Cyrodiil less discouraging.

There is also the fact that very, very tanky builds can output enormous damage with proc-sets. I think Sypher during his stream after the official one even did a brief little thought experiment about having Battle Spirit apply a damage debuff once you go over a certain health threshold. That honestly doesn't sound like an awful idea.

You already have Battle Spirit. Please use it more, or otherwise implement more similar PVP-instance specific effects. It could be the solution to a great number of PVP's issues. The one thing I can't even imagine a solution to is the sheer scope of power creep that proc sets have created, and how completely ineffective nearly all the "core ability" counterplay can be in the face of their power. They just don't cost enough to players for the damage they put out, but players also need that level of damage to cut through the power of all the healing over time. If cross healing is nerfed - which needs to happen - the power creep is effectively worse due to the sudden drop in effective bulk, and I just don't have the slightest idea how to solve that issue.

Please communicate with us more, and if devs already have a clear, concise vision for the kind of PVP they want to give us, then please outline for us what that is. Right now I don't think anyone feels there is a clear, concise vision from the devs for what PVP should look like, and often the few insights we've had seem to directly contradict what has actually happened in ESO PVP. For example, devs seem to genuinely not *want* a high power proc meta, but nevertheless a very extreme one has developed. Another example, devs seem to genuinely want to foster set diversity, but then very few sets - including even most of the ones released in the most recent patch - sit well below the baseline level devs have created for a set to have PVP viability.