Update 44 PVP Battlegrounds Follow-up

kiwi_tea · December 13

I appreciate the response.

The two pain points you mention warrant an immediate response, so fair enough.

As to longer term issues - Two things that aren't mentioned in your post is your team's perspective on the health and balance of ESO PVP, and what the development team's overall vision is for PVP. Regular communication about this would be earthshattering. I'd also like to briefly second the call for more transparency. Is the incredibly powerful healing in PVP intentional (eg, intended to allow more players to participate without dying)? How do developers perceive the so-called "tank meta"? What is the reasoning behind hiding MMR ratings in BGs? Does this reflect the aforesaid vision that developers have for PVP?

I look forward to hearing more about plans for ESO's PVP systems, and hope what we hear can be (a) more candid (b) much more frequent.

Please don't let the intemperate reactions of some PVP players (who, in their very limited defense, have felt ignored and abandoned for a very long time now) prevent you from being frank with us.

[Edit: I also appreciate the acknowledgement that the *way* the VOD was removed was tactless, while also appreciating the desire to unlist it. A little would have gone a long way there, and it has just in this acknowledgement. Thanks.]

Zabagad · December 13

ZOS_JessicaFolsom wrote: »

Ultimately, with how much the game has grown and changed in the last 10 years, just raising the population cap to what it was at launch does not result in the play experience we want. Some larger changes will be needed to get us there. More on that very soon. 

Thanks for the follow up, but...

While the "More on that very soon" sounds promising, I'm really worried about the part in bold (bold by me).
I know it's your game, but I haven't heard a single voice from any of the players who took part in that test who would sign: "does not result in the play experience we want" (we = the players)

Yes, there were some laggy moments (not sig. more then now), but the overall experience was so much more fun for us.
At least that was my (and based on the threads and chats) many others experience of the test...

For all the rest I 100% agree with the answer from @Joy_Division (actual #21 before mods

)

Sarannah · December 13

Currently only using two team BG's for the daily BG bonus, and this has been a bad experience!

My biggest issue with two team BG's is not being able to get the daily bonus in any reasonable fashion. Make this daily bonus a 100% to gain, maybe 50% on the first loss, and the other 50% on the second loss, on top of the already existing BG bonusses. And if one wins, reduce the bonus to what was left of the daily BG bonus if players have already received part of it.

This may even increase BG populations, as casuals would be more enticed to queue for the daily bonus.

PS: Other issues with two team BG's: Too much incoming damage, too many lopsided matches, no tactics at all, gear/dps gap too noticable, too easily getting outnumbered in small side area fights, balance issues too noticable, comebacks are practically impossible, spawncamping, etc.

Necrotech_Master · December 13

johnJrant wrote: »

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

if you havent played 4v4, why do you want the 4v4 to stay as the default when you have to manually go and change the queue dropdown?

the 8v8 is a much better casual BG experience because the team is larger

I forgot to put the quotation marks. That was your quote. I only play 4x4 myself.
8x8 fights are the best experience for you because you are hoping for a big team. It will be very difficult for you to learn anything there and it will be more difficult to move on to rating fights. You want to put "casual" in the first place again. Leave at least some aspect of the game to players who want to face some difficulties. 90% of the game now can be completed by holding down one button. Isn't "casual" enough for you in the game? Maybe BG is just not for you then?

Moreover, you say that you haven't even tried to try the "main" rated fights at all, why do you want to ruin the lives of players who spend 90% of the game in rated battles with an extra action?

because i dont enjoy sweaty competitive play, i want to have fun with it

8v8 is a much more enjoyable fun experience to me, so its almost annoying that 4v4 is the default option

if you want people to learn or get interested in pvp, they need to do 8v8 first to get a taste for it, not get curbstomped in a 4v4 right from the get go with ultra sweaty people looking for good fights, that just turns people off of the experience, and provides a worse uncompetitive experience for those sweaty players

competitive mode is just that, for competitive sweaty players who care about using meta builds and all that, but for a casual that is the worst experience possible for them when they dont fully understand whats going on

you have said before that you want the highly competitive fights and want less casual/inexperienced players in there, well the best way to prevent that is by changing the default queue as most casuals will just queue into the first option available

ive been playing the game since launch and have dabbled in every form of pvp in the game as they came out (cyro, IC, and BGs), and have at least 1 grand overlord toon so im not inexperienced with pvp, but i would say i take a more non-competitive casual approach to it, i play to have fun, not to get curbstomped by overly sweaty tryhards

IndigoDreams · December 14

Let me know when 3 teams is a topic again.

JonnytheKing · December 15

ZOS_JessicaFolsom wrote: »

Hey all, we wanted to give you a short update on some fixes and improvements we have in progress for PVP Battlegrounds, following Update 44, as well as respond to just a bit of your related feedback. 

First, we wanted to lightly touch on the Update 44 livestream. Sometimes we try new things, and they don't land the way we’d planned. We take these experiences, learn from them, and move forward with the goal of applying those learnings to and making the “next time” better. Part of that process includes listening to our community’s feedback and taking that into consideration as we plan future efforts. We also want to acknowledge that we did set the Update 44 livestream VOD to unlisted on Twitch. While no one on the stream did or said anything wrong, we were seeing an increase in abusive comments and harassment toward our developers as a result and decided to do what was right for them. That said, we recognize that we should have mentioned to you all that we took that action when we did, and why. 

Going back a bit to earlier this year, we’ve seen some of you ask what became of the Cyrodiil testing we did. While we did post a short post-test follow-up here, we recognize that we could have provided a bit more detail. Ultimately, the test – a stress test, really – was to measure game performance and overall player experience in Cyrodiil when we raise the population cap closer to what it was at launch. It was a “What’s possible” test. The results of that test were valuable, and have informed discussions we’ve been having since then about next steps. Ultimately, with how much the game has grown and changed in the last 10 years, just raising the population cap to what it was at launch does not result in the play experience we want. Some larger changes will be needed to get us there. More on that very soon. 

Onto the present and the Update 44 PVP Battlegrounds changes. Since we launched Update 44, we have seen a significant increase in PVP Battlegrounds participation. This was one of our primary goals for the Update 44 PVP Battlegrounds changes. We wanted to streamline the overall battlegrounds experience in ESO and make it more fun, easier to hop into and enjoy, the structure easier to understand, and generally make them more accessible for all our players. We acknowledge that some of our players have expressed enjoying the previous 3-sided format more and are continuing to monitor feedback paired with in-game data. We are not planning any other major changes to ESO’s PVP Battlegrounds in the near future; rather, we’ll be focusing on addressing some of the main pain points outside of general personal preferences between the 3-sided versus 2-sided formats. The main two fixes and improvements are: 
Continuing to investigate cases where Battlegrounds matches sometimes still start with less than full teams. This is a high priority and includes adding additional logging to help aid the investigation. 

Improvements to the MMR matchmaking logic, with the goal that teams which are formed by the matchmaker being more equal MMR-wise. (i.e. - total MMR score for each team is more equal, vs just individual players.) 

Thank you all for continuing to share your constructive feedback and suggestions with us!  

Where there's smoke, there's fire. Reading between the lines of the PR speech, all I hear is that you've learned nothing and that nothing will change because, as you stated, no one did anything wrong. Once again, it seems we'll be treated like the troublemakers, Playing the victim won't help anyone. I fail to see how criticizing someone's job performance qualifies as bullying.

we need actions, we need to see those actions, your words mean nothing.

i know you can do better jess.

JonnytheKing · December 15

VixxVexx wrote: »

So a bunch of tests, discussions, investigations, and promises. Been there done that.
What about some action and execution?

its crazy they think this is ok

XSTRONG · December 15

One thing I noticed on PS5eu is that Battleground que is really short now, it takes no time at all to get a 8vs8 or 4vs4 solo.

Before the update you could be in que for ages, now you can do alot of battlegrounds without having to wait in que for the whole evening.

I think Capture the relic needs a rework, as soon as a team get 100 points it ends up in a tank and healing stalemate

Lags · December 15

ZOS_JessicaFolsom wrote: »

Hey all, we wanted to give you a short update on some fixes and improvements we have in progress for PVP Battlegrounds, following Update 44, as well as respond to just a bit of your related feedback. 

First, we wanted to lightly touch on the Update 44 livestream. Sometimes we try new things, and they don't land the way we’d planned. We take these experiences, learn from them, and move forward with the goal of applying those learnings to and making the “next time” better. Part of that process includes listening to our community’s feedback and taking that into consideration as we plan future efforts. We also want to acknowledge that we did set the Update 44 livestream VOD to unlisted on Twitch. While no one on the stream did or said anything wrong, we were seeing an increase in abusive comments and harassment toward our developers as a result and decided to do what was right for them. That said, we recognize that we should have mentioned to you all that we took that action when we did, and why. 

Going back a bit to earlier this year, we’ve seen some of you ask what became of the Cyrodiil testing we did. While we did post a short post-test follow-up here, we recognize that we could have provided a bit more detail. Ultimately, the test – a stress test, really – was to measure game performance and overall player experience in Cyrodiil when we raise the population cap closer to what it was at launch. It was a “What’s possible” test. The results of that test were valuable, and have informed discussions we’ve been having since then about next steps. Ultimately, with how much the game has grown and changed in the last 10 years, just raising the population cap to what it was at launch does not result in the play experience we want. Some larger changes will be needed to get us there. More on that very soon. 

Onto the present and the Update 44 PVP Battlegrounds changes. Since we launched Update 44, we have seen a significant increase in PVP Battlegrounds participation. This was one of our primary goals for the Update 44 PVP Battlegrounds changes. We wanted to streamline the overall battlegrounds experience in ESO and make it more fun, easier to hop into and enjoy, the structure easier to understand, and generally make them more accessible for all our players. We acknowledge that some of our players have expressed enjoying the previous 3-sided format more and are continuing to monitor feedback paired with in-game data. We are not planning any other major changes to ESO’s PVP Battlegrounds in the near future; rather, we’ll be focusing on addressing some of the main pain points outside of general personal preferences between the 3-sided versus 2-sided formats. The main two fixes and improvements are: 
Continuing to investigate cases where Battlegrounds matches sometimes still start with less than full teams. This is a high priority and includes adding additional logging to help aid the investigation. 

Improvements to the MMR matchmaking logic, with the goal that teams which are formed by the matchmaker being more equal MMR-wise. (i.e. - total MMR score for each team is more equal, vs just individual players.) 

Thank you all for continuing to share your constructive feedback and suggestions with us!  

id like to reiterate this one more time. If the game was in a good place, if performance was in a good place, if pvp was in a good place, if the BG que was in a good place, if you guys hadn't made so many bad combat choices over the last few years, then i doubt anyone would have complained or questioned brians knowledge or skill at the game.

I dont know how many people need to say it but ill say it again, we do not expect the employees at zos to be top tier players. In pvp or whatever. That being said, when someone has the title of "lead pvp and combat designer" and you see them playing, and it looks like they dont have a lot of game knowledge, or understanding of mechanics, or things that over all concern a lot of pvp players, it is going to make you question if this is part of the reason things have been going so wrong.

From terrible balance, to mechanics, to broken sets, to extreme overhealing, to bad combat changes that make things feel more clunky, to bugs, to over powered things people are constantly complaining about, there are many things that pvpers are concerned about, and when it seems like the person who we would imagine is running this part of the game isnt really aware of any of it, or many of the intricacies of the combat of the game, it can be concerning.

This is the internet, and twitch chat is one of the worst places for stupid comments, right next to twitter. So im sorry if people were rude to brian. Brian seems like a great guy, but people have a right to be concerned when things seem to be going in the opposite way of where many of us would like them to go.

I really believe that if things were in a better place, specifically with combat, balance, and how broken healing is atm, people would not have been so up in arms about this. I have been playing since 2016. I have seen many people from zenimax play the game. And every time its about the same, they seem like an average player who doesnt really pvp much. But to be fair, we dont often see zos people pvp. Except for rich, he seems like he can sweat a bit. And over all these years i have never seen so many people complain about how zos employees play. I really think there is a connection there.

otherwise im pretty interested in this comment "Some larger changes will be needed to get us there. More on that very soon. " im about all out of hope for things changing in eso in the way that i want, especially performance after all these years, but im always following and hoping to see you guys try something new to improve things, and hoping it will work. Id love for eso to be my game again.

Above anything else though, if you guys communicated better things would get better. Both by listening to player feedback and talking to players more. Talking to cyrodiil players about cyrodiil, and trials players about trials, and newer players about the new player experience, and all players about the bad reward structure. Communication goes a long way and really could help things in this game and community. GG.

Chrisilis · December 16

XSTRONG wrote: »

One thing I noticed on PS5eu is that Battleground que is really short now, it takes no time at all to get a 8vs8 or 4vs4 solo.

Before the update you could be in que for ages, now you can do alot of battlegrounds without having to wait in que for the whole evening.

I think Capture the relic needs a rework, as soon as a team get 100 points it ends up in a tank and healing stalemate

PS5 NA here and my experience is the exact opposite, queues are taking FOREVER. 15, 20, 25 minutes per game easy and that doesnt count sitting in spawn waiting for the game to start. Example, while waiting in que for BG's yesterday I caught 149 fish and then I stopped counting.

johnJrant · December 17

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

because i dont enjoy sweaty competitive play, i want to have fun with it

8v8 is a much more enjoyable fun experience to me, so its almost annoying that 4v4 is the default option

if you want people to learn or get interested in pvp, they need to do 8v8 first to get a taste for it, not get curbstomped in a 4v4 right from the get go with ultra sweaty people looking for good fights, that just turns people off of the experience, and provides a worse uncompetitive experience for those sweaty players

competitive mode is just that, for competitive sweaty players who care about using meta builds and all that, but for a casual that is the worst experience possible for them when they dont fully understand whats going on

you have said before that you want the highly competitive fights and want less casual/inexperienced players in there, well the best way to prevent that is by changing the default queue as most casuals will just queue into the first option available

ive been playing the game since launch and have dabbled in every form of pvp in the game as they came out (cyro, IC, and BGs), and have at least 1 grand overlord toon so im not inexperienced with pvp, but i would say i take a more non-competitive casual approach to it, i play to have fun, not to get curbstomped by overly sweaty tryhards

It is incredible what complex expressions and syntaxes people try to justify their inability to do anything.
You know, when you talk about BG, you must say how much you play there. I get 8 to 20 fights a day and I'm in the top almost every week. I doubt you play as much. You are not the main consumer of this content. To be honest, it's clearly not for you if you need something simpler. if you play 10 years and cant understand how that works.

After a week of reading forums and opinions and looking at the reaction of ZOS.
I no longer want new players who don't want to do anything to win and don't understand the simplest things in 4x4.

I don't give a damn about your 8x8 swamp, what's going on there, what problems are there. for me, this is an absolutely unnecessary mode that simply repeats the mini cyrodiil. I am in favor of this mode remaining and developing to pull off all the casual trash. But this is not BG. The bad players won't get better there, the good ones have nothing to do there.
I'm even ready to apologize to ZOS for the suggestion and the negativity towards pulling players to non-competitive modes.

I fully accepted the fact that TESO will have a huge layer of players who, not being capable of anything, will still want to receive rewards that they did not deserve. I do not mind and fully support the appearance of the "get rewards without participating in battle" button.

In general, all I need is just:
correction of current errors in 4x4 (4x4 players know about them and have said everything)

In no case should spoil the competitive mode even more.

To see at least some development of the competitive mode for "adults"

Not so much.

I can also say the following. If it's hard for you now, then imagine what kind of matches you will have when the guys from the top 50 fly to you without accidentally switching the mode? They will be very angry because they got into this swamp. And two good players from the top 50 will cooperate very quickly and all your 8 8x8 fans, along with the most boring current warden, will be incinerated very quickly and painfully. And imagine forgetting to switch the mode to as many as three players? And imagine the competitive mode will be completely broken? How difficult will it be for you in this case? All your gameplay will come down to the fact that you will be happy to be in a team with these players. Although it may still be like that.

*I apologize in advance if something offended anyone. Everything is written in extremely neutral tones and is intended only to express an opinion, and not to offend anyone. [snip]

[edited for trolling]

johnJrant · December 17

In order not to create a new theme, I will leave this screenshot here.

The losing team in this case did not just lose, but as you can see by the score was not very able to approach the flags. This is not even an approximately equal score, they were defeated even with such a huge amount of hill. But nevertheless, they have a huge gap in the top ranking. This needs to be fixed somehow.

I will add from the new one. The necromancer does not only have incorrect damage figures. here it's about 500k and when you see 1kk, it's actually 1.5-1.7kk. But the medal standings do not take into account buffs, debuffs, camp and other contributions to the victory. And specifically in this match, the necromancer was one of the keys to victory, but the medal standings do not take this into account.

johnJrant · December 17

That's what I think you need to do first. (applies only to BG 4x4 and the main consumers of this content)

1. Recycling of medals. Hill shouldn't have that much weight. Buffs, debuffs, and control must be taken into account. The losing team should have a lowering percentage, especially on the hill. As for me, hill losers may not be counted in the top standings at all, only damage and debuffs.

2. Do something about Hill. Fights at the end of the week for the top 50-1 turn into a terrible tedium. The only option how to remove excessive vitality without hitting the necessary one, I see in cutting AOE hill. 30 maybe 50% (Players, don't forget that Hill on target works for the group as well.)

3. Until there are interesting battles for the flag, I suggest we redo all the modes into three DM modes.
- DM 3 lives. only the general changes in the medal standings that are necessary.
- DM with point retention (fixed). A hybrid medal count of DM and capture the flag. Holding points should increase points for kills.
- DM with point retention (moving).

4. Remove all rocks and trees from 4x4 maps. Or just disable their collision. Reduce it at the corners. I don't know. The stones get in the way.

These are relatively non-demanding changes that, in my opinion, will make 4x4 much better and more honest by adding more competitive moments.

Turtle_Bot · December 17

ZOS_JessicaFolsom wrote: »

Hey all, we wanted to give you a short update on some fixes and improvements we have in progress for PVP Battlegrounds, following Update 44, as well as respond to just a bit of your related feedback. 

Thank you all for continuing to share your constructive feedback and suggestions with us!  

@ZOS_JessicaFolsom First off, thanks for opening this thread to talk to us a bit more directly on this topic, hopefully this improved communication continues and doesn't just get left as this thread. I haven't been able to sit down properly to respond to this thread until now (Christmas/December is always super busy for me with family and even more so this year).

On to the meat of this thread though:

Live Stream:

First, we wanted to lightly touch on the Update 44 livestream. Sometimes we try new things, and they don't land the way we’d planned. We take these experiences, learn from them, and move forward with the goal of applying those learnings to and making the “next time” better. Part of that process includes listening to our community’s feedback and taking that into consideration as we plan future efforts. We also want to acknowledge that we did set the Update 44 livestream VOD to unlisted on Twitch. While no one on the stream did or said anything wrong, we were seeing an increase in abusive comments and harassment toward our developers as a result and decided to do what was right for them. That said, we recognize that we should have mentioned to you all that we took that action when we did, and why. 

Thanks for clarifying why it was taken down, it's understandable and I agree that no-one should be on the receiving end of abusive comments.
That being said, I really do hope that you continue to do more of these types of streams and take on board the feedback given as with some additional planning as has been outlined in the other thread, it would help make these things better in the future:
1. having a dedicated "host" of the stream so the dev can focus on providing answers, taking on board feedback and just generally providing insightful information without the added responsibilities of being the host/moderator etc of the stream.
2. additional research being done for the upcoming stream, this gives the dev some prior information and engagement before the stream even happens. By getting the community involved via community polls (across multiple social media platforms) in the lead up, that also gives the dev some early insights into potential topics that might come up during the stream (allowing time to gather thoughts and formulate potential answers should such a topic arise).
3. barring community engagement before the stream, reach out to some current experienced players who's primary engagement with the game is the part the stream is about, and have them on-hand (even just watching the stream but with a way to message the dev/host to help answer questions or reword questions to be more thought provoking as I outlined in my examples on the other thread here.

I also want to mention that as overboard as some of the comments were, the fact that there was still a massive amount of engagement after the stream, shows that the players/community are still very passionate about the success of the game and this is a good sign. While players are still speaking up for the game to get better, there is always that chance to make things right, but when that willingness to speak up completely disappears, that is when it has become too late and it is a lost cause and no amount of promises or even actions will save it.
This sign of player willingness to speak up needs to be encouraged, engaged with and maintained via pushing forward with more open, honest and transparent communication and not reverting back to retreating back into the shell. It can be a rough process, but, there is a quote that will always stick with me: "The hardest choices in life, are the right ones. The ones that are easy, are the wrong ones."
In this case, the hard choice is getting back out there, engaging more with the community, listening to, and understanding their concerns, frustrations, hopes and dreams for the game, explaining the teams vision for the direction of the game, and the reasoning behind that vision/direction, but it's the right choice because it brings everyone on to the same page so that the game and players can move forward.
The performance tests

Going back a bit to earlier this year, we’ve seen some of you ask what became of the Cyrodiil testing we did. While we did post a short post-test follow-up here, we recognize that we could have provided a bit more detail. Ultimately, the test – a stress test, really – was to measure game performance and overall player experience in Cyrodiil when we raise the population cap closer to what it was at launch. It was a “What’s possible” test. The results of that test were valuable, and have informed discussions we’ve been having since then about next steps. Ultimately, with how much the game has grown and changed in the last 10 years, just raising the population cap to what it was at launch does not result in the play experience we want. Some larger changes will be needed to get us there. More on that very soon. 

In relation to this point, I feel that the majority (that I have talked to) understand that things can't easily be returned to those levels due to how much has been added to the game since launch and I don't think anyone (at least those who are reasonable) will be upset that the populations can't go back to what they were at launch (as much as we miss those times). But the message I have been seeing from the players is that something urgent does need to be done to increase the populations to a good midpoint between the current caps and those launch population caps, that alleviates a lot of the current issues the low population caps are currently causing (such as the disproportionately overwhelming power of organized raids that there's simply not enough numbers to fight against such raids) while a more long term solution is worked on.
The other important thing that comes alongside finding this middle ground for population caps is the open and honest communication to bring the community along with you guys when these tests are done. As @Joy_Division pointed out, things like explaining the overall results of a test is important, for example: "X test has found that there are certain mechanics such as stacking/healing/shielding/other, that are creating additional strain when taken to the extreme that needs to be looked into adjusting and we are looking to adjust/rework some of these abilities/sets/mechanics over the next few patches to see if/what improvements can be gained or if such interactions need to be added to the "long term" plan."
It's still vague enough as to not break any potential IP clauses, but it does help the players to understand the reasoning for the tests, what the team has learnt from the tests and the direction the team is looking to potentially address those issues. This last point also helps those in the community who are knowledgeable on the subject to provide relevant feedback on some of the looked into changes, highlighting concerns/effects that such changes may have in other areas/ways that can then be used to better achieve the desired goals.

I hope to hear more from you guys on the results/things learnt of these performance tests soon and what the devs are looking into on this. I am one player that really does miss the large scale battles that the PvP of this game was originally advertised for. Those same large scale battles that very casual friendly by allowing the casual players to dip their toes into PvP and join the action as part of a large group (as we still occasionally see during mid-year mayhem events) without dreading the inevitable encounter with the organized raids that just farm everything in their path with no reliable way to fight back except for just leaving the campaign and hope said groups get bored and leave.
BGs
Onto the present and the Update 44 PVP Battlegrounds changes. Since we launched Update 44, we have seen a significant increase in PVP Battlegrounds participation. This was one of our primary goals for the Update 44 PVP Battlegrounds changes. We wanted to streamline the overall battlegrounds experience in ESO and make it more fun, easier to hop into and enjoy, the structure easier to understand, and generally make them more accessible for all our players. We acknowledge that some of our players have expressed enjoying the previous 3-sided format more and are continuing to monitor feedback paired with in-game data. We are not planning any other major changes to ESO’s PVP Battlegrounds in the near future; rather, we’ll be focusing on addressing some of the main pain points outside of general personal preferences between the 3-sided versus 2-sided formats. The main two fixes and improvements are: 
Continuing to investigate cases where Battlegrounds matches sometimes still start with less than full teams. This is a high priority and includes adding additional logging to help aid the investigation. 

Improvements to the MMR matchmaking logic, with the goal that teams which are formed by the matchmaker being more equal MMR-wise. (i.e. - total MMR score for each team is more equal, vs just individual players.) 

Thank you all for continuing to share your constructive feedback and suggestions with us!  
Battlegrounds are not my main way to PvP, so I will leave this point to those who will be able to provide more insightful feedback into this.

There is something I do want to add when it comes to complaints about balance in PvP. Battle spirit (and against monsters/against players clauses) exist in this game as a tool to separate PvP and PvE content and is, imo, one of the best tools to use to address something that is over (or under) performing in PvP or PvE without ruining it for the other. It would be awesome to see those clauses be more utilized as a way to quickly address something for either PvP or PvE without affecting the other in a negative way while a more long term solution/rework is worked on.

P.s. I also just want to give props where due and point out a recent example of good communication by ZOS. The recent outage regarding the data centers where @ZOS_GinaBruno created a thread/post and kept it frequently updated with where the team was at, until the issue was resolved. It was very refreshing to see the consistent updates, explanations of what the overall problem was, that the team is working on the issue and roughly where the team was at with fixing it. The follow up posts from @ZOS_Kevin and @ZOS_MattFiror were great to see as well, providing a brief version of what is essentially the "results" and the "moving forward" from the data center issue.

Necrotech_Master · December 17

johnJrant wrote: »

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

because i dont enjoy sweaty competitive play, i want to have fun with it

8v8 is a much more enjoyable fun experience to me, so its almost annoying that 4v4 is the default option

if you want people to learn or get interested in pvp, they need to do 8v8 first to get a taste for it, not get curbstomped in a 4v4 right from the get go with ultra sweaty people looking for good fights, that just turns people off of the experience, and provides a worse uncompetitive experience for those sweaty players

competitive mode is just that, for competitive sweaty players who care about using meta builds and all that, but for a casual that is the worst experience possible for them when they dont fully understand whats going on

you have said before that you want the highly competitive fights and want less casual/inexperienced players in there, well the best way to prevent that is by changing the default queue as most casuals will just queue into the first option available

ive been playing the game since launch and have dabbled in every form of pvp in the game as they came out (cyro, IC, and BGs), and have at least 1 grand overlord toon so im not inexperienced with pvp, but i would say i take a more non-competitive casual approach to it, i play to have fun, not to get curbstomped by overly sweaty tryhards

It is incredible what complex expressions and syntaxes people try to justify their inability to do anything.
You know, when you talk about BG, you must say how much you play there. I get 8 to 20 fights a day and I'm in the top almost every week. I doubt you play as much. You are not the main consumer of this content. To be honest, it's clearly not for you if you need something simpler. if you play 10 years and cant understand how that works.

After a week of reading forums and opinions and looking at the reaction of ZOS.
I no longer want new players who don't want to do anything to win and don't understand the simplest things in 4x4.

I don't give a damn about your 8x8 swamp, what's going on there, what problems are there. for me, this is an absolutely unnecessary mode that simply repeats the mini cyrodiil. I am in favor of this mode remaining and developing to pull off all the casual trash. But this is not BG. The bad players won't get better there, the good ones have nothing to do there.
I'm even ready to apologize to ZOS for the suggestion and the negativity towards pulling players to non-competitive modes.

I fully accepted the fact that TESO will have a huge layer of players who, not being capable of anything, will still want to receive rewards that they did not deserve. I do not mind and fully support the appearance of the "get rewards without participating in battle" button.

In general, all I need is just:
correction of current errors in 4x4 (4x4 players know about them and have said everything)

In no case should spoil the competitive mode even more.

To see at least some development of the competitive mode for "adults"

Not so much.

I can also say the following. If it's hard for you now, then imagine what kind of matches you will have when the guys from the top 50 fly to you without accidentally switching the mode? They will be very angry because they got into this swamp. And two good players from the top 50 will cooperate very quickly and all your 8 8x8 fans, along with the most boring current warden, will be incinerated very quickly and painfully. And imagine forgetting to switch the mode to as many as three players? And imagine the competitive mode will be completely broken? How difficult will it be for you in this case? All your gameplay will come down to the fact that you will be happy to be in a team with these players. Although it may still be like that.

*I apologize in advance if something offended anyone. Everything is written in extremely neutral tones and is intended only to express an opinion, and not to offend anyone. (I do not know how to write further on the forum without this postscript, because the number of insults exceeds reasonable limits. I also apologize for this postscript if it offended someone. Dudes that is a big planet, not everyone lives in San Francisco and LaLa land.)

im not sure what your getting at, all i said was i dont enjoy 4v4, and wish that the 8v8 was the default option

this would also have more casuals jumping in 8v8 because its the default option, and the first option is what most people would end up joining anyway, to as you say, keep the "casual trash" out of the 4v4 queue

i never once mentioned or talked about game balance, medals, win loss, ratings (because 8v8 has no leaderboard to begin with)

if you want to play 4v4, theres nothing wrong with that and it doesnt affect me in the slightest

8v8 IS a good place to start learning pvp for new players if they have little to no experience there, you have to start learning somewhere, and jumping right into the deep end of the pool with the sharks is not a good way to learn for most people

if you see people who are not trying to do anything to win (or anything at all) its likely because they were a casual player who picked the 4v4 queue, got their face stomped in several times and just gave up (could it have been an AFK player who auto accepted the queue maybe, but im betting its more of the former right now)

i know 4v4 isnt where it needs to be yet, with leaderboards based on medal score instead of the win/loss, amongst other combat related balance issues

KingNutella · December 19

I mostly play in the alliance war nowadays, but I PvP'd almost exclusively in BGs when I was learning PvP and probably spent 2 years as playing BGs as my main PvP game mode by far. Here are my thoughs:

4v4 I dont think is good. As it stands, I prefer 4v4v4. The only redeeming quality is slightly faster queue times in my experience, but not sure if that's because it's 8 players instead of 12 or because the game mode is still new and people are giving it a chance. Main issues:

- Match-ups are extremely lopsided. In my experience, one team will almost always dominate the first fight and whoever wins the first brawl, wins the game. I've won most of my fights, but gets boring after the first confrontation because the other team will just camp out. I'm sure it sucks to be consistently losing like this. Demoralizing even. With 4v4v4, the third team would've been able to balance this out.
- Issues that were present before, such as matches starting with an incomplete team, have become more pronounced.

8v8, on the other hand, I think is pretty fun. There's more room for error and in my experience the matches felt less like a spiteful boxing match (prime Mike Tyson vs an elderly) and more like a tennis match. I may prefer this even over 4v4v4. I definitely prefer Capture the Relic in this format over the previous one (where it used to be my least favorite kind of BG).

In an ideal world, we would have 4v4v4, 8v8, and no matchmaking bugs.

Thumbless_Bot · December 19

Chrisilis wrote: »

XSTRONG wrote: »

One thing I noticed on PS5eu is that Battleground que is really short now, it takes no time at all to get a 8vs8 or 4vs4 solo.

Before the update you could be in que for ages, now you can do alot of battlegrounds without having to wait in que for the whole evening.

I think Capture the relic needs a rework, as soon as a team get 100 points it ends up in a tank and healing stalemate

PS5 NA here and my experience is the exact opposite, queues are taking FOREVER. 15, 20, 25 minutes per game easy and that doesnt count sitting in spawn waiting for the game to start. Example, while waiting in que for BG's yesterday I caught 149 fish and then I stopped counting.

I stopped playing competitve queues about two weeks ago and maybe do one bg a day on my new necro. I am getting low queue times, but likely due to my mmr going doen due to lack of consistent participation.

Perhaps there is something to the higher mmr pyramid where there are less players so longer times... I don't really know because zos doesn't share the logic.

@Haki_7
@Chrisilis
@ZOS_Kevin

Aldoss · December 19

ZOS_JessicaFolsom wrote: »

Hey all, we wanted to give you a short update on some fixes and improvements we have in progress for PVP Battlegrounds, following Update 44, as well as respond to just a bit of your related feedback. 

First, we wanted to lightly touch on the Update 44 livestream. Sometimes we try new things, and they don't land the way we’d planned. We take these experiences, learn from them, and move forward with the goal of applying those learnings to and making the “next time” better. Part of that process includes listening to our community’s feedback and taking that into consideration as we plan future efforts. We also want to acknowledge that we did set the Update 44 livestream VOD to unlisted on Twitch. While no one on the stream did or said anything wrong, we were seeing an increase in abusive comments and harassment toward our developers as a result and decided to do what was right for them. That said, we recognize that we should have mentioned to you all that we took that action when we did, and why. 

Going back a bit to earlier this year, we’ve seen some of you ask what became of the Cyrodiil testing we did. While we did post a short post-test follow-up here, we recognize that we could have provided a bit more detail. Ultimately, the test – a stress test, really – was to measure game performance and overall player experience in Cyrodiil when we raise the population cap closer to what it was at launch. It was a “What’s possible” test. The results of that test were valuable, and have informed discussions we’ve been having since then about next steps. Ultimately, with how much the game has grown and changed in the last 10 years, just raising the population cap to what it was at launch does not result in the play experience we want. Some larger changes will be needed to get us there. More on that very soon. 

Onto the present and the Update 44 PVP Battlegrounds changes. Since we launched Update 44, we have seen a significant increase in PVP Battlegrounds participation. This was one of our primary goals for the Update 44 PVP Battlegrounds changes. We wanted to streamline the overall battlegrounds experience in ESO and make it more fun, easier to hop into and enjoy, the structure easier to understand, and generally make them more accessible for all our players. We acknowledge that some of our players have expressed enjoying the previous 3-sided format more and are continuing to monitor feedback paired with in-game data. We are not planning any other major changes to ESO’s PVP Battlegrounds in the near future; rather, we’ll be focusing on addressing some of the main pain points outside of general personal preferences between the 3-sided versus 2-sided formats. The main two fixes and improvements are: 
Continuing to investigate cases where Battlegrounds matches sometimes still start with less than full teams. This is a high priority and includes adding additional logging to help aid the investigation. 

Improvements to the MMR matchmaking logic, with the goal that teams which are formed by the matchmaker being more equal MMR-wise. (i.e. - total MMR score for each team is more equal, vs just individual players.) 

Thank you all for continuing to share your constructive feedback and suggestions with us!  

Hi Jessica and/or @ZOS_Kevin,

It's been a week since this thread was created, which was done with some of the usual "we're going to do better" verbiage that often surrounds viral threads regarding ZOS' multiple failures.

ZOS_JessicaFolsom wrote: »

I know we've said this before, but we can always do better with our communication. In that line of thought, beyond forum posts what method do you all most prefer for answers to questions? What is the most visible? A Q&A post/article? A Reddit AMA? Something else?

ZOS_JessicaFolsom wrote: »

Aldoss wrote: »

I'm very eager to read the replies from @ZOS_Kevin and @ZOS_JessicaFolsom (and hopefully a statement from @ZOS_BrianWheeler or even @ZOS_MattFiror, as well) about this thread, now that the holiday is over.

I hope your vacation was enjoyable and I hope the extra time to aggregate player feedback in this thread was constructive. Should we expect a reply this week or will there be more time with internal discussions before addressing the concerns shared within this thread?

Thanks y'all!

Hi @Aldoss! Thank you and thanks for the ping. I've been fighting the inbox boss all day today, catching up. Kevin is out this week, enjoying a much sunnier locale than Maryland. We're all very jealous.

We're putting together our thoughts on some steps we'd like to take to improve overall communication, especially the cadence consistency. And much of that is taking into consideration the recommendations here. We'd like to share that soon (it its own thread) to get everyone's input.

For this thread, we've all been reading it and taking the feedback to heart. There are things we can improve for future streams, for sure, and opportunities to utilize members of the dev team.

Are there specific questions you have regarding Update 44 and battlegrounds for which we could help get you answers?

Your players are communicating, but there's been nothing back. You started this thread in response to the other one, said that you wanted to improve communication, but so far haven't been participating in it.

You asked for questions. We gave you questions. You asked for feedback. We gave it.

Now what?

ZOS_Kevin · December 19

Hi @Aldoss. We are still collecting feedback here. We're planning to have more conversations about this feedback and associated questions once everyone is back in the office in the New Year. We appreciate everyone's feedback so far and should make for a good starting point in addressing your concerns with Battlegrounds and PvP generally.

johnJrant · December 19

ZOS_Kevin wrote: »

Hi @Aldoss. We are still collecting feedback here. We're planning to have more conversations about this feedback and associated questions once everyone is back in the office in the New Year. We appreciate everyone's feedback so far and should make for a good starting point in addressing your concerns with Battlegrounds and PvP generally.

Necromancers can't wait that long. Will you leave this one the most nerf class without at least a small New Year's update? No sustaine, no major protection from a class skill? Did you regret givin even such a small thing to necromancers for the new year? It's incredibly tough. It's hard to imagine harsher treatment of players as the treatment of necromancers. Kevin, why do you hate this class so much?

Overamera · December 19

Instead of only focusing on being able to inrease the cap of Cyrodiil population, It would be nice with new content of PvP. Cyrodiil has been out for so many years and even if the cap was increased and performance was better, many players are bored of it. I would personally like a new PvP zone like Imperial City or a complete change to it's map. Perhaps a new campaign with a different map to Cyrodiil. A new PvP zone would bring alot of old players back and would be a good selling point.

Something I've wished ZOS would do for their advertising/streams/trailers is to show how off highly skilled gameplay and what is possible to achive when you reach endgame. But that has never really been the case. For example the lastest PvP stream for Battlegrounds. As a player who plays both endgame for PvE and PvP and has learned light, bash, animation canceling and all these things, watching these streams and trailers the gameplay seems very slow and clunky. This gameplay for me is not very atttractive to watch. Specially nowdays with games being so fast paced. What got me into ESO was seeing gameplay of good players like SypherPK back in the days on Youtube, not the trailers which always showcased a slow and clunky playstyle without light attack weaving etc. It would be nice if ZOS could somehow showcase this more, specially for PvP.

As for the performance, the only thing that seemed to fix it for awhile was the hardware update which eventually was deteriorating after each patch. But performace is still much better than it was before it, perhaps beacuse of the lower population cap.

CameraBeardThePirate · December 19

It's great youre still trying to solve the backend issues with BGs, but it'sfrustrating that we've had no communication on the other fundamental issues in this "competitive" PvP system.

e.g., that winning literally doesn't matter as a losing player can climb the leaderboard by 3x as much as the winning team even in a blowout loss due to the way Medal Score functions even in a Deathmatch, or that Necromancers and Shielders are at an inherent disadvantage on the leaderboard, since Pets and Shields don't count for anything on the scoreboard.

johnJrant · December 20

CameraBeardThePirate wrote: »

It's great youre still trying to solve the backend issues with BGs, but it'sfrustrating that we've had no communication on the other fundamental issues in this "competitive" PvP system.

e.g., that winning literally doesn't matter as a losing player can climb the leaderboard by 3x as much as the winning team even in a blowout loss due to the way Medal Score functions even in a Deathmatch, or that Necromancers and Shielders are at an inherent disadvantage on the leaderboard, since Pets and Shields don't count for anything on the scoreboard.

Not counting damage is infuriating. Everyone has 1.5Kk and mine shows 1kk, although the real one is 1.7kk. But this is not such a big problem as nerf necro. And according to the medal standings, yes, it's a complete mess. There are already a lot of screenshots on the forum. I hope they fix it before April. And will make a hybrid of a flag and a DM instead of simple flags. But nevertheless, you can still easily occupy the top 30-10 using a regular tenacious backbar. But this week Hill's problem is especially pressing on BG. The matches have been very stuffy all week.

peacenote · December 20

Thank you for the thread and the update! This is appreciated and I'm glad you all are watching the input from the community. One very positive thing I feel I've seen from the BG update is more discussion on the topic with the forums.

ZOS_JessicaFolsom wrote: »

We are not planning any other major changes to ESO’s PVP Battlegrounds in the near future; rather, we’ll be focusing on addressing some of the main pain points outside of general personal preferences between the 3-sided versus 2-sided formats. The main two fixes and improvements are: 
Continuing to investigate cases where Battlegrounds matches sometimes still start with less than full teams. This is a high priority and includes adding additional logging to help aid the investigation. 

Improvements to the MMR matchmaking logic, with the goal that teams which are formed by the matchmaker being more equal MMR-wise. (i.e. - total MMR score for each team is more equal, vs just individual players.) 

Thank you all for continuing to share your constructive feedback and suggestions with us!  

However, I am not sure these are the best conclusions.

First, some of the opinions preferring 3-sided formats are not pure preferences but are really highlighting problems introduced with the new format, save for the folks who were sad about the retirement of the third team name. There are some good things about the new BG's, but also some new problems. I hope this is recognized when reading the feedback about 2 vs 3 person teams.

Second, based on what I've heard, improving MMR would have to be a major change because, from what I understand, part of the issue with MMR is how it is measured. There have many posts and suggestions on this topic so I will not repeat that here, as others explain it better than I could.

Third, a big issue is the extremely long queue time for duos. This should really be acknowledged and fixed, even if it takes a "major change" to BG's to do this.

Anyway, thank you again!