BGs Should Have A Surrender Vote

SundarahFr3akinrican · June 8

There should be a surrender option in BGs. Maybe after 10 min you can surrender? No matter which side you are on in a stomp, it feels bad. People shouldnt have to get farmed like a Dolmen when they are getting stomped.

preevious · June 8

After 10 minutes, yes ... that makes it so it's not exploitable, so good idea.

ganzaeso · June 8

You just need to get your team to all leave at once. The match will end an no credit will be earned by the opposing team.

fufu_from_ps4 · June 8

i agree. i dont like feeling like a bully, stomping the 1 player that didnt quit out. also i hate getting a penalty for leaving, if my whole team bails on a match.... cuz then i feel obligated to respect the lobbies time by giving myself a penalty.

also i'd personally like to see a ranked option for bgs, with an actual skill based (and not total time/ap accrued) rank. one that goes up and down, and is displayed on the opposite side of the cyrodiil rank.

barney2525 · June 8

SundarahFr3akinrican wrote: »

There should be a surrender option in BGs. Maybe after 10 min you can surrender? No matter which side you are on in a stomp, it feels bad. People shouldnt have to get farmed like a Dolmen when they are getting stomped.

I just do them for fun. I only do one in a session. just a nice break from other stuff.

Abstraqt · June 8

They seriously need to do something. Getting farmed in a match is no fun at all. I completely understand people of various abilities and builds playing is a nightmare to try and balance teams, but it's such a bad experience when you're on a team of low levels or unusual builds which stand no chance.

I think in TDM the teams should be shuffled in the gap between rounds, or the loosing team should get buffs, something to help balance the situation

xylena_lazarow · June 8

Entire teams are deliberately stretching out lopsided matches just to run up their personal KDA. This is going to create a toxic BGs environment, so yes the devs should address this with a mercy rule or forfeit vote system.

Chrisilis · June 9

I dont think they'll ever add a surrender option. Assuming there is some kind of managerial oversite these devs have to answer to, try explaining how 5-10-20% of matches end in whole teams giving up and quitting cus the balance is so abysmally terrible the match is unplayable. Kind of goes against the narative that new bg's are super peachy keen.

I think they should ditch MMR. Make your BG experience completely dependant on you level. Under 50, Under 300, Over 300. Or something like that. And then let the chips fall where they may. No resets, fewer 20 minute queue times if your MMR's to high, just fill up the bg and get to it. If over 300's to hard for ya but you still want to battleground make a new toon and play under 50's.

I play two team battlegrounds every day, all 3 BM Rivyn dailys at a minimum. I played three team battlegrounds every day the same. I dont recall MMR being such a thing or viewed as defective in that format. Just get rid of it, its kind of hard to fathom that random chance bg groupings of similar level players could be any worse than they are now with MMR.

Cooperharley · June 9

I think if the scoring gets to a certain point, regardless of time, it should be an automatic forfeit.

coop500 · June 9

Yes a surrender option would be great, cause it's so bad sometimes.

SundarahFr3akinrican · June 9

Cooperharley wrote: »

I think if the scoring gets to a certain point, regardless of time, it should be an automatic forfeit.

This is an interesting idea too and could be a solution. I think I'd like this solution more if it was implemented correctly. There could be multiple thresholds to win a match.

The best would be to have both surrendering and this though. Cuz I've run into the issue where say in CTR, a team is far superior, so they farm the team for kills, then after 14 min mark, they capture the relic once for the win. In this instance, there needs to be a way for the team losing to quit. It's just not a good experience.

CameraBeardThePirate · June 9

The big issue is the massive amount of people that have utterly no idea how to build for PvP. And I'm not saying that to put these people down - the game does absolutely nothing to tell new players what a decent PvP build looks like.

Every match I've been in since the BG update has half the players on either team sitting at about 20k health, and a large portion of those players going 0-10 or worse. A decent PvP build can do 20k damage in a single GCD. For a huge chunk of these players, they'd learn so much more if they would just build more tanky.

Players aren't learning PvP basics because A) ZOS doesn't even try to teach them and B ) there aren't really any good up to date guides online.

Cooperharley · June 9

CameraBeardThePirate wrote: »

The big issue is the massive amount of people that have utterly no idea how to build for PvP. And I'm not saying that to put these people down - the game does absolutely nothing to tell new players what a decent PvP build looks like.

Every match I've been in since the BG update has half the players on either team sitting at about 20k health, and a large portion of those players going 0-10 or worse. A decent PvP build can do 20k damage in a single GCD. For a huge chunk of these players, they'd learn so much more if they would just build more tanky.

Players aren't learning PvP basics because A) ZOS doesn't even try to teach them and B ) there aren't really any good up to date guides online.

Also coincides with base game difficulty. People don't know how to build for anything if we're being real, and that's not a jab, you just don't even need to to be successful in most of the game because the game is way too easy. That's why they roll into veteran dungeons light attacking with a bow or queue into a daily BG with 16.8k health and all light armor. You can kill end-of-story bosses in new zones with stuff like that, so there's nothing pushing them towards anything until someone tells them they need to or they get smacked in a BG or vote kicked from a dungeon group.

CameraBeardThePirate · June 9

Cooperharley wrote: »

CameraBeardThePirate wrote: »

The big issue is the massive amount of people that have utterly no idea how to build for PvP. And I'm not saying that to put these people down - the game does absolutely nothing to tell new players what a decent PvP build looks like.

Every match I've been in since the BG update has half the players on either team sitting at about 20k health, and a large portion of those players going 0-10 or worse. A decent PvP build can do 20k damage in a single GCD. For a huge chunk of these players, they'd learn so much more if they would just build more tanky.

Players aren't learning PvP basics because A) ZOS doesn't even try to teach them and B ) there aren't really any good up to date guides online.

Also coincides with base game difficulty. People don't know how to build for anything if we're being real, and that's not a jab, you just don't even need to to be successful in most of the game because the game is way too easy. That's why they roll into veteran dungeons light attacking with a bow or queue into a daily BG with 16.8k health and all light armor. You can kill end-of-story bosses in new zones with stuff like that, so there's nothing pushing them towards anything until someone tells them they need to or they get smacked in a BG or vote kicked from a dungeon group.

This x10000.

You can waltz through 90% or more of this game's content without even worrying about gear, rotations, etc etc. There's no reason for a lot of players to improve, so they just don't.

You wouldn't even need to make the game much harder; just make it necessary to perform defensive actions more often. The game has telegraphs already for things like blocking and interrupting - make the consequences for not doing those things heftier to teach players how to block, dodge, bash, and break free.

Add quests where you need to boost your health to a certain number using food buffs given to you by the quest giver.

Add quests that use a similar mechanic to Stone Garden, where you need to use your potions to regen your resources in order to teach people about the necessity of consumables.

Have quests that have more damaging mobs, with an NPC giving dialogue like "the mobs here are dangerous, you may want to equip some heavier armor!".

The game doesn't even have to be super hard-core, just make questing actually have some sort of danger to teach players how to deal with it.

Joy_Division · June 9

The main issue is that ZOS basically ignores every system the moment it is put on the PTS. Once something goes on the PTS, it is basically what we'll see it on Live no matter what bugs, problems, issues, etc., are brought up during what is supposed to be a month long process.

We get a bunch of "we're looking into that" and then nothing.

I can't imagine how incredibly frustrated I'd be if I were someone who liked Battlegrounds. You wait 6 years until finally ZOS acknowledges that Battlegrounds is a working active system in Elder Scrolls Online and you're getting an update. They're going to update matchmaking, leaderboards, scoring, provide new maps, even add some new mechanics like having some fun with being a huge werewolf. You're excited.

Then the PTS drops, and all these problems are identified. Shielders get no recognition on the scoreboard. Classes like Necros aren't credited an damage because their skills are considered pets. Frivolous medals such as critical heals are easily exploited for inflated scores. The MMR is a big secret, but clearly works poorly as I an eleven year PvP veteran am put in matches filled with 350 CP players with 18K health. Matches won't start because the game drags us into an instance before everyone indicates they are ready. All of this is brought up week 1 on the PTS. And here we still are.

Remember the 2020 letter we received from ZOS, which acknowledged that releasing new systems while current systems were bugged, marred by ongoing problems, or just were not up to the expected level of quality was a mistake?

ZOS wrote:

We kept our aggressive development schedule that, in hindsight, might not have been the right strategy. A combination of the normal ESO content cycle, investigating/fixing long-standing issues, optimizations to improve performance on lower-power devices (also fewer blue-screen errors), and the lack of team (both dev and QA) cohesion brought on by work from home led to a poor experience in many cases for you. The short version is that we kept up our usual frenetic pace, but didn't allow for the realities of working remotely. Each of our four Update launches were marred by errors and problems of various types. Patches to fix those issues sometimes led to more problems. Obviously, this is unacceptable, and we will be addressing this as a team throughout 2021.

Throughout 2021 apparently didn't mean after 2021.

I think BGs have a lot of problems, but without question the biggest one that is the source of many of the other issues is the matching is completely busted. Because I play infrequently and apparently because the MMR resets, when I get the itch to play, I join and many of all the other players have less than 900 CP and have like 21K health. In sum, people that should not be matched up against me who has been PvPing for over a decade. I also have little confidence in how the game determines what makes for a "good" player and worthy of a high MMR rating. I just shake my head when the scoreboard puts someone with a 24-1 kill to death ratio near the bottom. They might not be scoring any objective points, but when you are wondering why it is your are getting spawn camped and want to surrender, that is because players with high kill-to-death ratios are controlling the entire battlefield and demoralizing your teammates from even jumping down.

spartaxoxo · June 9

This is just a plain good idea

Weesacs · June 9

What game mode are you referring you?

If it's TDM then there is a 5 minute limit for each round, and if you get to the limit then your team isn't getting stomped. That aside, to speed games up, if your team is getting stomped I think there should be an auto respawn timer of 10 seconds or so to get the player(s) back into the match as quickly as possible. That way, if your team is getting stomped, then the game will end quickly anyway, and players on the losing team wont be able to troll the respawn timer.

If its Domination, I find those games tend to finish quite quickly if you're on a team getting stomped, so not sure how much use a surrender option would help in this game mode. I'm pretty sure you only really gain points in this game mode if you're at a flag so killing out-with the flag points wont yield much gain in terms of scoring.

CTR, on the other hand, is terrible and can drag out quite a bit therefore I could see it working in that game mode.

One concern I have by adding a surrender option is that players might give up too easily without actually trying to win, even if the chance is slim. Alternatively, others may abuse it. Therefore I think there would need to be specific criteria (e.g. a range in scoring) for it to trigger.

To be honest, I'm not sure how a surrender button could be implemented to work efficiently and without it being abused; it would need to be thought out carefully.

Danikat · June 9

One problem I see with this is there's a lot of things which encourage people who don't want to play battlegrounds to 'try them out'. Common examples include endeavours, golden pursuits and events. They only require you to be in a battleground when it ends to get credit, so if you're someone who hates PvP but "needs" to do that task the obvious solution is to surrender as soon as the option becomes available, no matter how your team is doing, to get the match finished ASAP.

There's a couple of things I think could help avoid that:
1) Only the losing team can surrender.
2) Everyone in the team must agree surrender.

I did consider saying matches which end in surrender shouldn't count towards things like golden pursuits and events, but that risks going the other way and opening up a way to troll people doing those activities, along with everyone else present.

I also like the idea that if one team can't win because they're too far behind the match should end immediately instead of waiting for the score to tick up. It should only be when it's genuinely impossible though, I don't do battlegrounds often and I've been in matches where my team quickly fell way behind then managed to turn it around mid-match.

tsaescishoeshiner · June 9

I think they should design matches so they can't be dragged our or farmed as easily, but groups games I've played with surrender options get far more toxic much faster. There will always be people who inspect every game for signs of loss or weakness. With a surrender option, the job of the most negative players becomes to convince other players to quit.

When you have the option to surrender, people see every minute as potentially wasted time and get more upset at their teammates over it. Compared to just accepting that a game is max 10 minutes (or however long) and waiting it out.

Personally, I never vote to surrender, but that means watching people have meltdowns over losing a match. I've seen so many surrender votes fail in other games just to have us come back and win, or at least spend another two minutes doing our best.

Being stuck in a totally lost match for a few minutes every now and then is way worth not having that kind of blame and negativity on a team in every game.

CameraBeardThePirate · June 9

tsaescishoeshiner wrote: »

I think they should design matches so they can't be dragged our or farmed as easily, but groups games I've played with surrender options get far more toxic much faster. There will always be people who inspect every game for signs of loss or weakness. With a surrender option, the job of the most negative players becomes to convince other players to quit.

This. If you give them the option, people will just give up after the first lost mid fight.

SundarahFr3akinrican · June 9

tsaescishoeshiner wrote: »

I think they should design matches so they can't be dragged our or farmed as easily, but groups games I've played with surrender options get far more toxic much faster. There will always be people who inspect every game for signs of loss or weakness. With a surrender option, the job of the most negative players becomes to convince other players to quit.

When you have the option to surrender, people see every minute as potentially wasted time and get more upset at their teammates over it. Compared to just accepting that a game is max 10 minutes (or however long) and waiting it out.

Personally, I never vote to surrender, but that means watching people have meltdowns over losing a match. I've seen so many surrender votes fail in other games just to have us come back and win, or at least spend another two minutes doing our best.

Being stuck in a totally lost match for a few minutes every now and then is way worth not having that kind of blame and negativity on a team in every game.

I agree with all that. However, ESO has no comeback mechanics. So most of the time, if you are getting stomped, your team is just worse and there is nothing else to it.