Battlegrounds: First Impressions

Rickter

here's a break down of my BGs experience:

I played 5 matches which was about all i could stomach. Went back to overworld Cyrodiil with a 6 man group that eventually grew to 9 and we had an absolute blast. Out of those 5 matches, really only one was enjoyable/what i was hoping for. 2 of those matches were about what i expected and 2 of those matches were down right miserable.

Functionality/Matchmaking: COULD NOT GROUP QUEUE every time id group up then queue, it said "You or a member of your group does not have the DLC required to access this content" - when we all clearly did. We would drop group, queue solo, then it worked but left us obviously disappointed. I know this is a known issue and will be fixed soon but it was disappointing nonetheless. Matchmaking is a mess. Will elaborate more on that throughout the post. Performance-wise the lag was very minimal, I only saw the lava map (seriously in 5 games only one map, one team, one game mode) and it seemed well designed enough. Joining the queue was odd, I had to press the Join Queue button 11 times before it actually would queue me. Queueing could be instant, to 12 minutes long. Idk if this is because of the player pool it was drawing from being low or what. . .

I do want to note that I thought the coloring for the teams was rather clever on ZOS' part. A lot of times we complain that the "teaming" up of DC and EP or AD and EP are "Team Green"(AD+DC) or "Team Orange"(EP+AD) or "Team Purple"(DC+AD) - and those are the exact colors of the three BG teams. . . well played ZOS - well played

Please note: When speaking in the next section on "Rewards" I never won a match.

Rewards: There arent any worth noting. I think i got just under 3k AP and a mail with some purple gear per match. Matches lasted in the ball park of 7-10 mins. That gear happened to be 2 pants, 1 belt, and 1 ring of the Coward's Gear Set 2 of which were Training, and 1 was Impenetrable. The Ring was Robust. And my 5th reward was 1 piece of the Knight Slayer Set which was in Reinforced. When I went to Overworld Cyro - i was able to obtain 80k AP in an hour and a half. which was about 3 times more AP than what BGs currently offers. Aside from that gear and nominal AP, I believe I obtained some leaderboard score which I innately felt was less significant than being in the top 10 in a 30 day Overworld Campaign.

I want to pick a particular experience and please note: this was the WORST experience but I want to detail it as the other experiences werent that much better than this one.

• So i queue in, and I start the match (TDM, Fire Drakes, Lava Arena) and I notice there was only one other person on my team. I ask "where is everyone else" the response I received was "I guess this is it, I'm a healer though so at least there's that".
• The match begins: 2v2v2
• I notice very quickly my "partner" is a level 18. da. . .***. . .
• "im a healer" consisted of Rapid Regeneration spam.
• It became very evident that the Pit Demons (Green) which consisted of a Stamplar and MagDK were very organized and deadly.
• They figured out that in 1v1 situations I could kill them, and so they remedied that by always fighting me as a pair.
• Purple Team gave up and began jumping from their spawn location and standing there letting Green team kill them so they could end the match early.

Please reference the end of match screen shot for the AP/XP rewards and overall scoring. It shows clear PD domination and aside from Green Team, I was the only other person with kills.



Overall experience across all 5 matches: 5/10

BGs seems geared towards a very specific crowd, kinda like that Overwatch/League of Legends score junkie kind of games that is just not what I signed up for in ESO. I am issuing the disclaimer in that I do feel like if I could group as a team, have voice comms, and actually employ strategy, I may enjoy BGs very much. Its a nice alternative / diversion / break in contrast to Cyro-Overworld, but not a replacement. Maybe it is for some but not myself. As I stated at the top - solo grouping kinda bummed everyone out, so I formed a cyro-overworld group that started at around 4 players, which grew to 7 which grew to 9 and we pvp'd as we always did on Sotha Sil and it was VERY enjoyable.

I play this game for my friends, for my guild, and right now BGs cant fulfill that desire. As far as the concerns I had in This Thread - They still stand. I did not encounter poisons, nor Wardens - but the unkillable tanks are still around. the proc sets were ridiculous. Look at that poll. Look at the overwhelming positivity. It was all smoke and mirrors. BGs are broken and I would love to see it improve over time. It has a lot of potential and I'd love to revisit it.

Lord_Eomer

You made some excellent feedback,

I believe when group can join Battle Ground queue then it would be more fun, again balance is important and especially CP 630 (experienced player, even currently CP are disabled) VS Level 10 is unfair and should be addressed in a better way!

lientier

I also have this issue that I have to press queue a lot of times before actually queing. also I really would like to team up with friends.

Rickter

the inability to group was probably the most disappointing. I will need to edit this post once I can experience a team oriented grouping as I imagine it will be almost an entirely different experience.

With the current extremely low TTK and vastly imbalanced grouping in terms of player level - I really hope something will get altered before June 6th because a month of this and players will lose interest.

in cyro-overworld - i already saw a lot of familiar faces. There are a lot of people that will continue to pursue the rewards of overworld pvp which is why i made the comment that BGs seems to be geared to a very specific crowd. The player pool was still small and regardless of whether this was "the first day" its very telling of the interest level in BGs.

Ive never seen this game so packed since One Tamriel. First day or not, BGs has a very small player pool and its only going to shrink as time goes by.