Battlegrounds & Misc. PvP Questions – Community Q&A

Thumbless_Bot · March 2025

karthrag_inak wrote: »

Khajiit thinks that if the current BG options remained and the old 4v4v4 options returned, things would be wonderful!

Nord agrees.

NoSoup · March 2025

karthrag_inak wrote: »

Khajiit thinks that if the current BG options remained and the old 4v4v4 options returned, things would be wonderful!

I struggle to understand this line of thought. Last night (Aus time) I had to wait 18 minutes for a queue pop on 4x4 (I'm guessing my higher leaning MMR doesn't help). Surely increasing the number of players required to get a match from 8 to 12 is only going to further exasberate the issue of long queue times.

My two biggest grips with the current setup is 4x4 being the default choice. When BGs participation is linked to endeavours/pursuits you get a lot of people queing that have 0 intention of playing, they simply stand at spawn and wait until the spawn timer pulls them down, throw off a few skills, die and then stand at spawn doing nothing. This is the single biggest frustration of BGs for me.

My next gripe is the very limited opportunities you are given to adjust your build to suit both the team you've been placed in and the opposition. Being able to use the Armor Assistant pre start, or even having an Armory station at spawn would be a god send.

ChaoticWings3 · March 2025

My participation in battlegrounds has generally decreased. Multiple reasons though, more games I'm playing besides ESO (although I still play for a couple hours every day I am playing other games to keep from burning out), events that are oriented to non-pvp related things because I like collecting motifs to customize my characters, and the death match set up is a bit disappointing in the 4v4 line.

I don't know if I'm in the minority of this but when the 4v4 came on for death match with the lives system I noticed an extreme disparity between teams. If one team is generally doing better and eliminates 1 or 2 players lives stock early on it then becomes a 2v4 and because of cross healing it can become a losing battle for the side with 2 since you won't have enough dps to score a kill. I especially noticed this when I had a match where 2 NBs were on the opposite team. My team focused on them until their lives ran out which only left 1 Sorc tank and a decent pvp player. Since the Sorc was mostly buffs, self heals, and debuffs the team focused on the one player that could do any real damage and because all of us had group heals our team was practically invincible by comparison. Its very rare where I see a close match between players. I wish the old format with no lives was available for a 4v4 so it won't feel unfair for one side. If the NBs remained a threat on the battlefield they would have gotten a few more kills and it would have been a closer game. Winning with like 7 heals going off every 3 seconds against 2 players feels very boring to me.

I didn't really say this before because I didn't realize there was a question related to BGs so I'm just saying this here. The elimination style is interesting but it feels a bit niche to me by comparison.

TumlinTheJolly · March 2025

ZOS_JessicaFolsom wrote: »

Spawn & Respawn Questions
Q. Will you introduce spawn immunity in Battlegrounds? - r0lyat
A. Introducing spawn immunity to Battlegrounds is something we’ve thought about. The way it would need to work, is spawn immunity would suppress all combat-related actions while a player is in that state. This means that when you have spawn immunity in a Battleground, you would not be able to use any skills, couldn’t activate buff effects before you get into combat, or heal allies who are fighting out of spawn as you come down, couldn’t gain Ultimate, etc.

Suppressing all combat-related actions could be pretty disruptive and interrupts the natural flow of combat, so while it is possible, it does come with some potentially negative trade-offs that we would need to consider.

I made a post about this a while ago. The idea I had was to just make all players spawn with a temporary buff that gives them damage reduction (perhaps halve all incoming damage) and a huge boost to their damage (perhaps 1.5-2x damage). This would incentivize players to jump down from spawn and use their big damage buff before it falls off, instead of just AFKing at spawn to avoid spawn campers. It'd also make enemy players far more wary of hanging out below enemy spawn and camping it.

From a coding perspective, this would also be FAR easier to implement than trying to apply immunity and ability disable to a specific area.

Chrisilis · March 2025

NoSoup wrote: »

karthrag_inak wrote: »

Khajiit thinks that if the current BG options remained and the old 4v4v4 options returned, things would be wonderful!

I struggle to understand this line of thought. Last night (Aus time) I had to wait 18 minutes for a queue pop on 4x4 (I'm guessing my higher leaning MMR doesn't help). Surely increasing the number of players required to get a match from 8 to 12 is only going to further exasberate the issue of long queue times.

My two biggest grips with the current setup is 4x4 being the default choice. When BGs participation is linked to endeavours/pursuits you get a lot of people queing that have 0 intention of playing, they simply stand at spawn and wait until the spawn timer pulls them down, throw off a few skills, die and then stand at spawn doing nothing. This is the single biggest frustration of BGs for me.

My next gripe is the very limited opportunities you are given to adjust your build to suit both the team you've been placed in and the opposition. Being able to use the Armor Assistant pre start, or even having an Armory station at spawn would be a god send.[/quote

Regarding queue times (mine are long as **** too, takes a whole hour to play two matches, its ridiculous), in 8v8 you'd go from 16 players to 12 players, you would need less people. So there's that.

Regarding three sided battlegrounds, still waiting on these special BG weekends/events that bring that mode back regularly.. It's been 117 days since update 44, just shy of 1/3 of a year. I get letting the new format set in and all but it would be nice if the "regularly scheduled" events were, you know, scheduled.

AngryNecro · March 2025

I've never been able to understand why you can't communicate with players on the forum in the form of a question and answer.

The main problem with the current BG is that there are too many options to use the loopholes that you have left for casualness.
Namely, the spawn zone, the ability to stay on it, the ability to fire it on the same map, and the height difference. I remember a lot of cases when players, knowing that they would lose at the bottom, stayed on the spawn and used long-range attacks or tried to disrupt the timing of the start of the battle. There is no need to go far. One of the players present at the last event in the top 10 used the tactics of healing the group directly from the spawn zone. He didn't do anything else but stand on the spawn and heal. As a result, he has a lot of points, and about 80% of his fights were losses.

From here, you can proceed to healers. Why do we even need clean healers in BG? We're gladiators. ZOS please look on last event 8/10 playrse from top 10 its HEALERS! how it can be normal? on forum we have too many team about healers on BG why nothing about that in yours intevio? how it can be? too many team about healers and medal score. how you can explane 8/10 healers in top 10?
All cross heall need be cut on BG more than on 50% and score for heal need be cuted too. Im realy tired found 1-3 DD in top 10 every week. You're just killing the original meaning of the Arenas. There should be gladiators in the Arenas. What kind of gladiators are you if you have healers in the first place? Healers are not gladiators. We don't need healers in BG.

About mmr reload. its weary tired play on wery hight mmr with today rules. it need realoded if you dont whant fix spawn zone heall and els problem. oh and playrs with low mmr must not forget that our battles last all the allotted time. When you play with a high mmr, you end the battle in time, not in points. Because of this, we earn less AP.

About team distribution. I just hate when weak teams dilute me. We don't have normal communication methods, it takes a long time to write in a chat, many people don't listen, often they don't even understand what you're talking about, they don't know tactics. Adding a strong player to a weak team is the worst thing you can think of. This only leads to conflict situations in which ZOS will always side with players who had no idea what to do on BG, and then took offense.

Score Score Score. Score is problem. no score for kills in flag mode, you need kill dude to nerly flag for get it. Healers in top 10, they dont must be theare. no score for control and buff/debuff. No score for tanking (tiny dude with bow and tiny nb parasitite on that and think they can do same when get damage).

Too many problem and no one solutions in 45up. too mony problem loose in that youre post. Enough time. Many of the problems are more than obvious. You've had the best gladiators and healers for a third of a year now. Well, how can you look at it every week and see that 90% of the top 10 consists of healers and not do anything about it? BG need serious work.

NoSoup · March 2025

AngryNecro wrote: »

I've never been able to understand why you can't communicate with players on the forum in the form of a question and answer.

The main problem with the current BG is that there are too many options to use the loopholes that you have left for casualness.
Namely, the spawn zone, the ability to stay on it, the ability to fire it on the same map, and the height difference. I remember a lot of cases when players, knowing that they would lose at the bottom, stayed on the spawn and used long-range attacks or tried to disrupt the timing of the start of the battle. There is no need to go far. One of the players present at the last event in the top 10 used the tactics of healing the group directly from the spawn zone. He didn't do anything else but stand on the spawn and heal. As a result, he has a lot of points, and about 80% of his fights were losses.

From here, you can proceed to healers. Why do we even need clean healers in BG? We're gladiators. ZOS please look on last event 8/10 playrse from top 10 its HEALERS! how it can be normal? on forum we have too many team about healers on BG why nothing about that in yours intevio? how it can be? too many team about healers and medal score. how you can explane 8/10 healers in top 10?
All cross heall need be cut on BG more than on 50% and score for heal need be cuted too. Im realy tired found 1-3 DD in top 10 every week. You're just killing the original meaning of the Arenas. There should be gladiators in the Arenas. What kind of gladiators are you if you have healers in the first place? Healers are not gladiators. We don't need healers in BG.

About mmr reload. its weary tired play on wery hight mmr with today rules. it need realoded if you dont whant fix spawn zone heall and els problem. oh and playrs with low mmr must not forget that our battles last all the allotted time. When you play with a high mmr, you end the battle in time, not in points. Because of this, we earn less AP.

About team distribution. I just hate when weak teams dilute me. We don't have normal communication methods, it takes a long time to write in a chat, many people don't listen, often they don't even understand what you're talking about, they don't know tactics. Adding a strong player to a weak team is the worst thing you can think of. This only leads to conflict situations in which ZOS will always side with players who had no idea what to do on BG, and then took offense.

Score Score Score. Score is problem. no score for kills in flag mode, you need kill dude to nerly flag for get it. Healers in top 10, they dont must be theare. no score for control and buff/debuff. No score for tanking (tiny dude with bow and tiny nb parasitite on that and think they can do same when get damage).

Too many problem and no one solutions in 45up. too mony problem loose in that youre post. Enough time. Many of the problems are more than obvious. You've had the best gladiators and healers for a third of a year now. Well, how can you look at it every week and see that 90% of the top 10 consists of healers and not do anything about it? BG need serious work.

I've been on the PC/NA leaderboard every week for the last 5 weeks, last week had 2 characters on it and this week on track for 3. I wouldn't consider any of my characters as "healers". Sure, they all have a healing skill because you can't rely on being grouped with someone that can effectively heal the whole team, so self heals are imperative. I don't do insane damage but generally finish first or second on that front. I've also become quite familiar with the names of frequent leaderboard attendees and for most part they're players that create a lot pressure for opponents more so than carrying their teams with heals (of course, there are a couple of exceptions)

The point of capture the flag is to capture the flag. Too many players join these matches running around just aimlessly trying to kill the first opposition player they see and their team generally ends up lossing, becasue you guessed it, they weren't capturing the flag. If they started awarding more points for killing in capture the flag you'd just get more lost souls thinking they were in a deathmatch and not a capture the flag.

AngryNecro · March 2025

NoSoup wrote: »

I've been on the PC/NA leaderboard every week for the last 5 weeks, last week had 2 characters on it and this week on track for 3. I wouldn't consider any of my characters as "healers". Sure, they all have a healing skill because you can't rely on being grouped with someone that can effectively heal the whole team, so self heals are imperative. I don't do insane damage but generally finish first or second on that front. I've also become quite familiar with the names of frequent leaderboard attendees and for most part they're players that create a lot pressure for opponents more so than carrying their teams with heals (of course, there are a couple of exceptions)

The point of capture the flag is to capture the flag. Too many players join these matches running around just aimlessly trying to kill the first opposition player they see and their team generally ends up lossing, becasue you guessed it, they weren't capturing the flag. If they started awarding more points for killing in capture the flag you'd just get more lost souls thinking they were in a deathmatch and not a capture the flag.

I play on PC/EU usualy in top 30-10. and in top 10 we realy have problem with full healers. i play with all playrse from that top in my team or in enemy and full healers alwayse on eye. Corse DD have self heall and cross heall but problem in abuse crit heall for score.

I see that only on low mmr. no i tell obout for example MotKa - centre flag, you need kill dude only on centre zone with cobblestones, but no some back. i meen if playre start in batele for flag them kill must be go in score be it in 5m from flag or 20. And what about NB who wanna kill dude on run to flag? Hunter's Fortress - we can kill enemy team in run to flag from bridge but it not go in score. Killing opponents on the approach to the flag is a good tactic that is not encouraged in any way

AngryNecro · March 2025

After solving the problem of healers I would like to see more cool and brutal cosmetics for BG high end players for rewards.

More skull masks, much more. (the last one was Kjalner's mask and it's pve, we don't have many skulls)

More brutal emotions (whatever the pieces of death-metal songs)

Wanna more brutality around BG. come on we gladiators, not cave explorers.

TyrantNikolai · March 2025

8v8 I can understand wanting to hurry up and get people into the action. 4v4 however is supposed to be competitive and you want to be matched up with people who at least attempted to make a pvp build and not a pve tank thinking they can taunt players lol.In other words there should NOT be a deserter buff or limit it to 2 minutes before the match is about to begin to avoid abuse. We should not force a player with the intention of winning with a troll tank or 16k health novice. Make a time period (30 seconds) to decide whether u want to commit with a group or bail followed by a 30 seconds prep which locks you in with a group.

Izanagi.Xiiib16_ESO · April 2025

@ZOS_Kevin Any update on when the next part it releasing? mainly PvP Combat & Itemization

Was this intentionally held back due to the changes coming with subclassing?

Kungfu · May 2025

ACK... how did I end up in this thread posting about Vengeance? lol whoops.
Moving it to the other Q&A pinned one.

Izanagi.Xiiib16_ESO · May 2025

Izanagi.Xiiib16_ESO wrote: »

@ZOS_Kevin Any update on when the next part it releasing? mainly PvP Combat & Itemization

Was this intentionally held back due to the changes coming with subclassing?

@ZOS_Kevin did the translation of the next batch of questions finish yet or is it likely to come after the subclassing patch? I fear that a lot of questions might be outdated anyway soon so might be worth gathering new ones or at least considering if the ones you are answering are still relevant.

xylena_lazarow · June 2025

Is MMR still being reset in the 8v8? If so, it needs to stop. We shouldn't be seeing basically entire teams of noobs against entire teams of vets like this. There's gotta be a better way to do it.

TumlinTheJolly · June 2025

@ZOS_JessicaFolsom Can we please let games start with 7 players?

Many games fail to start because 1 player is missing. This happens VERY often in group queue, because if one player fails to accept the queue pop it struggles to find a solo player to fill the single spot.

Everyone I've talked to would much prefer to play a 7v8 than wait out the timer and then have to sit through another queue.

Erickson9610 · June 2025

ZOS_JessicaFolsom wrote: »

We do still have a Cyrodiil & Imperial City and PvP Combat & Itemization sets in progress.

Is this still planned? Can we expect this after the next Vengeance test concludes?
@ZOS_JessicaFolsom @ZOS_Kevin

Xorious · June 2025

@ZOS_JessicaFolsom
With the Antiquity lancers being BoP, and not able to be stored in a bank or anything, I'm not sure why other players of the same faction are able to just hop on them and steal them. It's a growing trend of bad behavior that's just annoying. If it's BoP, it should be BoP... are there any plans to possibly fix this

I know it's a very minor thing in the grand scheme of things, but it doesn't hurt to ask.

Urzigurumash · June 2025

On Xbox we need a delay after the final round ends before pressing Y quits the Battleground. There is none at all, so if you're spamming an ability on Y just as the round ends you're out of the match and you don't get to see the final scoreboard.

Izanagi.Xiiib16_ESO · July 2025

@ZOS_Kevin @ZOS_JessicaFolsom
Any word on the follow up for parts 3 or 4? we're approaching 5 months since part 2.

ADawg · August 2025

Why does the que system fail when one player is missing and ends up wasting 7/8 people's time waiting for an 8th player?

xiZeroPointix · October 2025

The new 4 on 4 format is really intolerable. The overall experience and gameplay are flat. We have 3 factions in cyrodil and don't make sense to have a battleground that is 4 v 4. It locks the fight into stale gameplay and is really a hurtful experience overall. No one likes the new format and only used it for the new rewards system. We need the 4 v 4 v 4 old version back. It was more fun and engaging. 4 v 4 there is lockouts and steam rolling of the other team. 4v4v4 offers a third party to introduce a more balanced experience. We need to old version back and is reverberated throughout the community that the new system is a bad move. When it was 4v4v4 2 teams would fight and you had the opportunity for flanking or objective strategy. 4v4 creates a frustrating environment with no real counterplay. The new system just really is a bummer honestly and truthfully is horrible.

Erickson9610 · November 2025

When can we expect the next part of the PvP Q&A?

dwolfgheist · December 2025

Regarding:
Q. Are there any plans to fix the respawning systems in battlegrounds? There are currently 2 problems here:
From the offensive view, being able to attack your opponent at their base spawn area results in spawn camping and griefing.
From a defensive view, players don’t leave the spawn area to engage back in the battle, which breaks the flow of battle. As this basically frustrates the opponents and they have no other choice but to spawn camp as this is where the battle has gone to.- lizeswan
A. We’ve observed this behavior as well, and have talked about non-disruptive ways to combat it. To your point, it does result in a stalemate that isn’t much fun for anyone. Similar to the spawn immunity topic above, the most effective option would result in disabling all outgoing combat-related abilities for players in their spawn area, as well as blocking all incoming abilities into the spawn area from the attacking team. We aren’t confident in this solution and it’s pretty disruptive, so we’re still exploring other options.

The quick patch for this is a surrender button. How the maps are made also influence this, more intricate bases from which players have multiple escape avenues would certainly help. However I would say that it should be an automatic surrender, when no action is made by the team that stays in their base for more than 20 seconds, either that or it can be breached if all members are alive and in the base for more than 20 seconds to end the game, once all members are killed one last time in base. (20 sec is an example).

Can we have a lobby to discuss strategy if you go ahead with the group finder?
Currently we don't get to decide which kind of match we want, for Flags more tanky set ups have a chance, in death match they usually do not. I think combat would be more engaging for everyone, If we at least could strategize with our teammates our stregths and weakness depending on the type of match we get (solo queue), if there are no plans on allowing us to pick our preferred match type.

P.S: please make chaos ball optional, or an event game, but leave it out of the random match types we get.

AD_ThisIsTheWay · December 2025

ZOS_JessicaFolsom wrote: »

Q. What are your plans going forward when it comes to Battlegrounds? - Decimus
A. We always have new things we’d like to do, and player suggestions we’d like to explore. As we mentioned in the answer above, though, we have a couple Battlegrounds improvement priorities we need to hit first as well as the ongoing Cyrodiil improvement work. Once those are complete, we’ll see!

Please oh please, when the time presents itself, can you consider a PVP arena mode similar to world of warcraft. With an updated ranking system seasonal wards? The serious end game pvpers need a new place to go and compete. And I really, really think this would be a successful game mode that would draw a lot of people back to PVP.

Thanks!

l_AmWar · December 2025

Has there been much thought into possibly using Battle Spirit to help make things better in Cyrodiil or PVP instances? You've already used Battle Spirit to change how skills already work with-in PVP only, this can be possibly utilized to help make other changes. IE heal stacking, animation, skill cool down timers, increased cost for multiple casting, etc. These 4 things can possibly help the giant increase in the lag that we're experiencing in Cyrodiil during huge log in times. Not only can this help with how much ball groups are running over the map and killing PVP. And by sayign that you already use this on some skill, one is Merc resolve from the assassination skill line from nightblade. In PVP instances only, you can only have 5/10 stacks of it while in combat, while out of combat, it goes away. PVE I can run around for 3 days with 10 stacks on my bar if I Wanted too. Just an example. So recap, battle spirit...... Cross healing, skill cast cool down for skills that are actually known to cause issues due to over casting, skill cast cost increase and possibly no animation on these skills. All of these can possibly be done while battle spirit is active and help with the drain on server lag. Mainly less processing on the servers end. Hopefully this can give an idea to improve our joy in the game. And another thing, please stop listening to players that aren't actual long term PVPers about whats going wrong in Cyrodiil, reach out to the community of pvpers. Ask the players that are constantly in the "top what ever" in the leader boards. They all should be willing to answer questions and give some sort of insight on what we're experiencing and possible thoughts as to why it's happening. Especially since there's an issue with not being able to figure this out with-in the dev team it seems.(not to point fingers or put shame on any of the devs). We play the game day in and day out, we can see issues more. As an engineer working with robots for manifacturing, I ask the operators that run the machines daily their personal opinions about how to improve or actually what they've seen happen if something goes wrong and can not figure it out with data test.

ADawg · December 2025

This is an issue of power/build imbalance not an issue of spawning in it of itself. Bad players that fall over while light attacking 2-3 times per life will always be bad, regardless of how you re-work spawning in a battleground. Its just a fact.

You are trying to fix that root problem by forcing PVP ("potentially") into a vengeance systems to level the playing field, at least in Cyrodiil. That is not the real problem.

The real issue is in the foundational game design. Fix the following issues and you fix PVP:

#1. Detach OFFENSIVE stats scaling HEALING power. This is the most imbalanced issue in PVP IMO

- #1 Arguments: when players are able to enjoy massive heals because they stack offensive stats (weapon/spell damage), it results in a hard hitting, hard to kill build that can also provide healing support. This violates the fundamental concept of the "Holy Trinity" in an RPG/MMO.

#2: Reduce effectiveness of self heals unless it is inherent to the build style.

- #2 Arguments: Right now, offensive and tank players are able to heal "good enough" to act as a healer in PVP.

- #3: Make build design make sense. I often ask hard to kill players what gear they are wearing and many times they will list off 2x offensive sets, or 1x offensive set and 1x sustain set plus a mythic or a monster set. This makes no sense. They stack virtually zero defenses and yet soak damage like a tank. This relates to the above issues (1 and 2) because the self healing potential in build designs is utterly broken.

Bottom line: sweaty players will melt bad players regardless of a spawn immunity timer. You are simply delaying the kill that will happen anyway. And the solution is not to dumb down PVP so that players who can't figure out pressing 1-5 instead of left clicking 3 times can feel relevant in PVP. You can't make bad players good and you need to stop making good players GODS with broken build design.

RESTORE THE HOLY TRINITY OH HEAL/TANK/DPS!!!!

ADawg · December 2025

BradTheNord wrote: »

The reason battlegrounds became more popular is due to the incentives … and because it was the “New Update” I have 2 BG guilds that where keeping BGs alive when it was super stagnant before 4v4 8v8 hardly any of them touch it anymore not catering to the people that are there the most is what kills many systems in the game I feel if you don’t make the core audience happy they all leave, I don’t mean for this to come across as a scolding I’m just frustrated I hope y’all do something with the old ways of BGS even if you have to freshen it up a little.

You don't have to incentivize PVP to make PVP players want to PVP. We like PVP, that's why we play. LOL

Wheresthetea11 · December 2025

Wtb old 4v4v4 battlegrounds man 😔 the maps were cooler, fights were more fun. If you can completely remove all other cyrodiil campaigns for vengeance testing, don’t see why you can’t bring back old battlegrounds for just a weekend or hell, an event like whitestrakes