Battlegrounds is a complete failure and you need to do something about it

Carbonised

1) The premade/solo/MMR discussion just goes on and on for pages after pages. It's completely incomprehensible how you could not, even after a year now, come up with a system that would provide a fairly enjoyable experience for the majority of the people in BG's. especially since the obvious solution is to abolish group queueing altogether, abolish the stupid MMR system that doesn't even work, and have everyone queue in for a complete random group against complete random people. For a company that loves their RNG like a newborn baby, I cannot fathom how you couldn't just keep the BG groups completely random. The people who prefer premade groups is a vast minority to everyone else, and the tactical advantages of premades with coordination and voice com is vastly superior to even the best random group. Get rid of every type of BG queueing other than solo and people will have a lot less grief in BGs

2) The rewards of outfit pages from BGs is a complete and utter fiasco. Not only does it only give you a scrap of a piece of an outfit page (torsos are split into 3 pages, arms are split into 3 pages, legs into 3 pages etc), there is also a diminishing returns which is kept invisible from the player, where every time you are awarded a page, it finds a random page - even from among the pages you already have collected! And if you happen to get rewarded a page you already have, you just get nothing, it doesn't show any page rewards at all. Meaning even if you have only collected a few handful of these pieces of pages, your chance to get a new page goes down drastically, to the point where it is close to impossible to collect them all, or even complete a full outfit style.
On top of that - the pages are all BoP and unsellable! This exploitative scheme is clearly there to incentivize people queueing over and over in BGs with the lure of rewards that they will never get, after the few 1-2 handful of pages.

3) The countless times people have queued into a BG, waited for 10-15 minutes for the groups to fill up and the match to start, only to find that the match is bugged and no more people will come, is a complete and utter disrespect of people's playing time. Not only that, leaving the glitched match will actually incur a 15 min deserter penalty until you can requeue! 15 minute penalty for leaving a bugged match that ZOS put you in in the first place!

People spend half an hour to an hour getting into an actualy BG match due to glitched group creator and 15 min penalty for leaving a glitched match. They then get steamrolled by a premade group, end up losing spot and get nothing for their time, due to the incompetent rewarding system.

Fix the matchmaking system and fix the reward system so this disgrace you call Battlegrounds can at least be somewhat worthy of anyone's time.

Skoomah

I just want to play BGs but I have to wait 15 minutes between waiting in queues. I just fiddle my thumbs most of the time between matches.

Where else can solo or small group players go to get pvp in? Even when I solo queue, I still have to fight premade who blow me up nearly instantly when in a match.

Penalized for having friends. Penalized for having no friends.

VaranisArano

Battlegrounds was designed in part as a small group PVP alternative to Cyrodiil, giving small scale PVP to groups without the zergs and PUGs of Cyrodiil or having to farm a resource.

Taking away the "playing with friends" aspect and turning BGs into a solo queue only type match would represent a major shift in design philosophy for battlegrounds.

I suspect the failure of BGs has more to do with its rather low population of players who are interested in 4v4v4 PVP whether as a team or as randoms.

As for the rewards, yeah...it was bad when ZOS used that method for the Random Dungeon Event rewards and its a bad method now.

Carbonised

VaranisArano wrote: »

Battlegrounds was designed in part as a small group PVP alternative to Cyrodiil, giving small scale PVP to groups without the zergs and PUGs of Cyrodiil or having to farm a resource.

Taking away the "playing with friends" aspect and turning BGs into a solo queue only type match would represent a major shift in design philosophy for battlegrounds.

As for the rewards, yeah...it was bad when ZOS used that method for the Random Dungeon Event rewards and its a bad method now.

Battlegrounds was designed for everyone. Everyone. If they get rid of all the outfits, furnishings and dye colours and put them elsewhere, you can all have Battlegrounds for small scale premade groups and I wouldn't give a duck.
But seeing as they do put more and more rewards in BGs, even unique rewards such as dye colours and outfit styles, then BGs are clearly designed for everyone.
You can't please everyone, and in this case, the majority of people who run BGs are PUGs and randoms. The concerns of the majority means that they should abolish group queueing, sorry but that's how it is.

Or, if they deem the population is large enough, they can have 2 queues for premades and solo separately, I'm ok with that too. But any type of hybrid where they try and match premades with PUGs is doomed to fail, no matter how much they try and band-aid it with an MMR system.

EDIT: In fact, it's not really that different from PUGs in the group tool. If you want to "play with friends" in PvE, you can go directly to a dungeon together. If you want to "play with friends" in PvP, you can make your own teams 4v4 or whatever, and do some small scale fights in a remote part of the map in Cyrodiil. But using the group tool for PvE means you'll have to deal with random people, just like using the BG tool should only be for people willing to "play with people other than only your friends". Either that, or completely separate queues for PUG and premade.

Marabornwingrion

@ZOS_BrianWheeler

Carbonised

Astrid_V wrote: »

@ZOS_BrianWheeler

TY.

Oathunbound

Yea something needs to be done about BGs. I like the small scale aspect of it and the fact i can play a few rounds and get my pvp fill for the day rather then having to commit a whole play session in cyrodil (i could just pop in and get enough for my rewards for the worthy but i feel i didn't commit much to the overall fight that way). I think making the random que totally random (as in no groups can que for random) would be a good start but then it would split the already small population even further.

Also i think moving the motif pages things into the bg reward vendors to purchase for AP would be nice but you need to get the BG rating achievements before you can buy them but can get them as random rewards in the meantime.

Androconium

Carbonised wrote: »

1) The premade/solo/MMR discussion just goes on and on for pages after pages. It's completely incomprehensible how you could not, even after a year now, come up with a system that would provide a fairly enjoyable experience for the majority of the people in BG's. especially since the obvious solution is to abolish group queueing altogether, abolish the stupid MMR system that doesn't even work, and have everyone queue in for a complete random group against complete random people. For a company that loves their RNG like a newborn baby, I cannot fathom how you couldn't just keep the BG groups completely random. The people who prefer premade groups is a vast minority to everyone else, and the tactical advantages of premades with coordination and voice com is vastly superior to even the best random group. Get rid of every type of BG queueing other than solo and people will have a lot less grief in BGs

2) The rewards of outfit pages from BGs is a complete and utter fiasco. Not only does it only give you a scrap of a piece of an outfit page (torsos are split into 3 pages, arms are split into 3 pages, legs into 3 pages etc), there is also a diminishing returns which is kept invisible from the player, where every time you are awarded a page, it finds a random page - even from among the pages you already have collected! And if you happen to get rewarded a page you already have, you just get nothing, it doesn't show any page rewards at all. Meaning even if you have only collected a few handful of these pieces of pages, your chance to get a new page goes down drastically, to the point where it is close to impossible to collect them all, or even complete a full outfit style.
On top of that - the pages are all BoP and unsellable! This exploitative scheme is clearly there to incentivize people queueing over and over in BGs with the lure of rewards that they will never get, after the few 1-2 handful of pages.

3) The countless times people have queued into a BG, waited for 10-15 minutes for the groups to fill up and the match to start, only to find that the match is bugged and no more people will come, is a complete and utter disrespect of people's playing time. Not only that, leaving the glitched match will actually incur a 15 min deserter penalty until you can requeue! 15 minute penalty for leaving a bugged match that ZOS put you in in the first place!

People spend half an hour to an hour getting into an actualy BG match due to glitched group creator and 15 min penalty for leaving a glitched match. They then get steamrolled by a premade group, end up losing spot and get nothing for their time, due to the incompetent rewarding system.

Fix the matchmaking system and fix the reward system so this disgrace you call Battlegrounds can at least be somewhat worthy of anyone's time.

Thank you so much for your considered and thoughtful post.
If you meant "they keep changing things to slow us down" - then I agree with you.

Cr4p0w3

I Just started playing BGs. I generally queue solo. Sometimes I won and sometimes I get my ass kicked, I see no problem at that.

You can always use voive chat to strategise with your group even if it's not pre-made so I think in this point the OP complaint is not valid.

About the rewards you get it winning or loosing, just have to stay in second. Not a problem for me too.

I would love to play on Cyrondil but my lag and latency would'nt let me have a good experience there.
I'm noob in PvP and have a lot to work on but it's being fun doing BGs.

I play in PS4 NA, the queues are fast and I never got into a glitched BG game.

Kel

My bigger issue is that battlegrounds are a cesspit of cancerous builds. Full of snipe spammers and sorcs wearing sloads.
Yes, you find these things in Cyrodiil, but in Cyrodiil you have the CP to deal with what's thrown at you. Without it, you just get ground up.

Not advocating for CP battlegrounds here, just stating the reality. Players will gravitate to what is easy, and battlegrounds are a good source of AP, so naturally they want to get that easy AP and will bring whats easy to accomplish that, not necessarily what is skillful.

Thought about running my own sloads/healing debuff/annoying proc set monster set combo, but that just adds to the issue.

Yes, matchmaking is bad, but so are the number of downright filthy builds you run into.

Time to craft my own sloads, I guess....

Takes-No-Prisoner

Cr4p0w3 wrote: »

I Just started playing BGs. I generally queue solo. Sometimes I won and sometimes I get my ass kicked, I see no problem at that.

You can always use voive chat to strategise with your group even if it's not pre-made so I think in this point the OP complaint is not valid.

About the rewards you get it winning or loosing, just have to stay in second. Not a problem for me too.

I would love to play on Cyrondil but my lag and latency would'nt let me have a good experience there.
I'm noob in PvP and have a lot to work on but it's being fun doing BGs.

I play in PS4 NA, the queues are fast and I never got into a glitched BG game.

I am also on PS4 NA. I agree with this post, as it also reflects my own experiences with BGs.

Carbonised

Cr4p0w3 wrote: »

You can always use voive chat to strategise with your group even if it's not pre-made so I think in this point the OP complaint is not valid.

You do realise that some of us play on PC with no inherent voice chat ....

Whereas the premades are sitting on TS or Discord, which exacerbates the issue even further.

Carbonised

jabrone77 wrote: »

Yes, matchmaking is bad, but so are the number of downright filthy builds you run into.

At least with a complete random group matcher, you would find those OP builds on your team just as many times as you would find them on the opponent team. That's balance.

Kel

Carbonised wrote: »

jabrone77 wrote: »

Yes, matchmaking is bad, but so are the number of downright filthy builds you run into.

At least with a complete random group matcher, you would find those OP builds on your team just as many times as you would find them on the opponent team. That's balance.

Fully agree.

Carbonised

Cr4p0w3 wrote: »

I play in PS4 NA, the queues are fast and I never got into a glitched BG game.

There are people playing in BGs on other servers than yours. PC has had huge problems with gliched matches for many months now, there has been plenty of threads about it on the forums too. No reason to be ignorant about that, even if it doesn't happen on PS.

People with high MMR have also complained about waiting 1hr+ to get into matches.

With a random group matcher with no MMR, those people would be put into groups instantly.

Waffennacht

Carbonised wrote: »

The rewards of outfit pages from BGs is a complete and utter fiasco. Not only does it only give you a scrap of a piece of an outfit page (torsos are split into 3 pages, arms are split into 3 pages, legs into 3 pages etc), there is also a diminishing returns which is kept invisible from the player, where every time you are awarded a page, it finds a random page - even from among the pages you already have collected! And if you happen to get rewarded a page you already have, you just get nothing, it doesn't show any page rewards at all. Meaning even if you have only collected a few handful of these pieces of pages, your chance to get a new page goes down drastically, to the point where it is close to impossible to collect them all, or even complete a full outfit style.
On top of that - the pages are all BoP and unsellable! This exploitative scheme is clearly there to incentivize people queueing over and over in BGs with the lure of rewards that they will never get, after the few 1-2 handful of pages.

Drat, really hoping this wasn't the case

Edit: fairly sure random doesn't include MMR.

Edit again, glad I'm farming the drops now, I have received 2 every night this far. Worried about the drops getting diluted after WW drops

RANKK7

I agree overall and the threads already existing about premade groups gone utterly ignored, the bug I have encountered that too (3 times one day, all had to leave because one group wasn't filling and all got penalty of course! We get penalty because ZOS cannot fix bugs) though the thing that really gets on my nerve over everything else about BGs is the motifs.


- Fist of all, these motifs cannot be traded and this alone is utterly BS.

- Then there is the incredible craptastic idea to SPLIT the pages by weight (light, medium, heavy). It's freaking incredible. That's an awful grind and it's better they stop at these ones to do so, game is getting tedious instead of funny.

- If it wasn't enough, there is the pinnacle of all BSs, we also get doubles and the grind is absolutely unacceptable! Yesterday I found ZERO motifs with 12 characters and I don't even have that many pages, all in right positions to get them, time wasted, hours!

I really have no words left to say @ZOS how much I contempt choices like these.

Awful, @ZOS.

Reverb

The glitches matches are a real problem. I'm also sick of getting put into an in-progress patch, usually onto a last place team with 1 min left on the clock. Overall though my BG experience is far more positive than negative.

jcm2606

Cr4p0w3 wrote: »

I Just started playing BGs. I generally queue solo. Sometimes I won and sometimes I get my ass kicked, I see no problem at that.

You can always use voive chat to strategise with your group even if it's not pre-made so I think in this point the OP complaint is not valid.

About the rewards you get it winning or loosing, just have to stay in second. Not a problem for me too.

I would love to play on Cyrondil but my lag and latency would'nt let me have a good experience there.
I'm noob in PvP and have a lot to work on but it's being fun doing BGs.

I play in PS4 NA, the queues are fast and I never got into a glitched BG game.

No voice chat on PC. And voice chat isn't the only problem with premades, having a complete group with a dedicated healer and knowing each other's strengths and weaknesses are both huge advantages.

TequilaFire

What I don't get even when we have built in voice coms on PS4 and you are automatically put into them, I rarely hear anyone in a PUG even use them in BG.

scipionumatia

over all I like battle grounds. the motif drop rates I kinda view as insignificant cause it just changes appearance, doesn't effect your characters stats or anything (and we already have tons of ways to make our characters look how we want), though I do think they should be sellable/tradeable.
The premade groups running over PUG groups is just going to happen. Its part of the game and the same thing has been going on in imperial city since the DLC release. personally I que solo 99% of the time and sometimes our thrown together group of misfits demolishes premades.
The desertion penalty is my biggest issue with BGs, been in far to many lobbies that never get filled and you end up wasting a bunch of time waiting for deserter penalty to go away. (usually when this happens ill go fishing or que for a random dungeon just to kill the time)

I do miss all battleground game types being random, now you can que for capture the relic, quick slot cowards gear, throw on some immobilize pots and go to town. and while its entirely possible that people could do that anyway in a random lobby while waiting for the game to start, I found that overall people simply didn't.

Also if in TDM we could start awarding 'kill' points based on who took the largest chunk of the dead players health instead of who delivered the final blow that would be great. getting super tired of having 20+ something assists and a sorc somewhere spamming mages fury racking up the kills. Just food for thought

Beardimus

Clickbait subject line just isn't factual. Ive played BG from launch, and aside from the CP enabled months had alot of fun. Win or lose its gaming and learning. And it reads like you have played a ton of BG ton. Hence its not a total failure. Fun can be had.

I agree with some of your points however. Neither PUG or Pro Pre made like that pairing of a matchup. That said however decent players in a PUG can look premade as they just 'get' BG and how to win often the issue is less of a problem than on the surface.

Grouped play is 100% needed, and whilst open to a split queue I think pop may struggle at times.

What my suggestion would be is a premade league, decent rewards and you only score points in the league if same team and entered in the league queue. Making a competitive area. Sure some will still want to pug stomp, but it's incentive.

Also we need private battlegrounds 100%. For guilds to train in, invite only against other teams to duke it out, competitions, cups, leagues etc. Be ace @ZOS_BrianWheeler

crazy_catman21

Just take away MMR until they can fix it.

Valabrog

Cr4p0w3 wrote: »

I Just started playing BGs. I generally queue solo. Sometimes I won and sometimes I get my ass kicked, I see no problem at that.

You can always use voive chat to strategise with your group even if it's not pre-made so I think in this point the OP complaint is not valid.

About the rewards you get it winning or loosing, just have to stay in second. Not a problem for me too.

I would love to play on Cyrondil but my lag and latency would'nt let me have a good experience there.
I'm noob in PvP and have a lot to work on but it's being fun doing BGs.

I play in PS4 NA, the queues are fast and I never got into a glitched BG game.

Wait till you play like 50 bgs solo..even if you are new, you will be put in games against premades almost non stop. Thanks to the MMR system which thinks that if you play a lot you are worthy to play against premades - doesnt matter if its your first pvp char or you are grand warlord on all other pvp toons.

Takes-No-Prisoner

TequilaFire wrote: »

What I don't get even when we have built in voice coms on PS4 and you are automatically put into them, I rarely hear anyone in a PUG even use them in BG.

Same. Only once did I hear people use it and even then it was to say "good games".

idk

BGs are clearly not a failure but I understand the title since it’s a good dramatic pull.

OP must not spend much time in these forums. Players cried for separation between premades and solo queues which obviously is a poor idea. MMR was ans is the next best solution to separate out the skills from the less skilled but it clearly needs some tweaks. Even at its best it’ll still slow down the queue and never be perfect. Nothing ever is.

brandonv516

Liam12548 wrote: »

Should be two seperate ques. 1-2 man is que #1. 3-4 man is que #2.

Players entering the 1-2 man que will only be matched with other solo/duos.

Players entering the 3-4 man que will be placed into matches with other 3-4 man groups. Entering with 3 is agreeing to gimp yourself a player, in favor of outnumbered combat. I know that myself and MANY other high level PvPer's would be happy to go up against some of the 4 man bg squads on our server as 3. Entering with 4 guarantees you will be matching other pre made groups. Thus, group queing becomes competitive and solo/duo queing becomes casual. Very simple concept.

Reposting.

This is the best idea out there.

The other two problems still exist yes.

Sergykid

i ask myself, how is possible for a game to not have enough players. Doesn't a BG to start need all the 12 people to confirm the join by pressing F? how can a BG start and not have all 12 players? do they alt-f4 while loading screen? do they crash during the loading screen?

AhPook_Is_Here

There aren't that many 3 way competitive sports, are there? Where is 3-way football? Where is 3-way baseball, basketball or cricket? Where is 3-way soccer? 3-way wrestling or MMA fighting, or boxing; nope! This is one of the only examples of 3 way competitive games, even if it's e-games, so I for one think it's a very special and unique idea to ESO that should be appreciated for what it is.

idk

brandonv516 wrote: »

Liam12548 wrote: »

Should be two seperate ques. 1-2 man is que #1. 3-4 man is que #2.

Players entering the 1-2 man que will only be matched with other solo/duos.

Players entering the 3-4 man que will be placed into matches with other 3-4 man groups. Entering with 3 is agreeing to gimp yourself a player, in favor of outnumbered combat. I know that myself and MANY other high level PvPer's would be happy to go up against some of the 4 man bg squads on our server as 3. Entering with 4 guarantees you will be matching other pre made groups. Thus, group queing becomes competitive and solo/duo queing becomes casual. Very simple concept.

Reposting.

This is the best idea out there.

The other two problems still exist yes.

Great idea if you really want to bog down the queues prob more than the current MMR settings have it.

The issue isn’t going up against premades as many premades suck. The issue many have is going up again teams of players with much more skill than their team.

But heck. If you want to keep it simple to understand and have long virtually meaningless queues then great idea your suggesting.

jypcy

Oathunbound wrote: »

Also i think moving the motif pages things into the bg reward vendors to purchase for AP would be nice but you need to get the BG rating achievements before you can buy them but can get them as random rewards in the meantime.

I didn’t read the whole thread so maybe it’s brought back later, but I’m surprised that this got glossed over. Sure there are some issues with matchmaking and such, but I actually find bgs fun... in principle. But since the introduction of these styles, which I both like using and want as a collector, the majority of my games are either 1) I win but don’t get a style and have to wait a day before I have another chance at it, or 2) I don’t win and have to hope my next match isn’t as bad, so either way, about 9/10 times it’s a tiresome experience farming these.

Making the styles achievement-locked but directly purchasable with AP (or whatever currency) would be an awesome fix to this system. A lot of the bgs achievements require a lot of matches to complete, so this approach still offers a ton of replayability, while also (more or less) removing the time-bound, RNG-based grind to get all 64 pages.