Battlegrounds still Deathmatch Only

AlbertVonMoosseedorf · November 2021

CyberOnEso wrote: »

With the change to the Battleground queue, nearly all battleground matches are deathmatch only.

Thank you very much for this explanation !

As I have read the announcement of Gina Bruno for random queuing after they finished the test, I knew that this is a fake. I gave them a chance and tried several times to get a random BG with non deathmatch, but nope then i cancelled the BG. Maybe I will try again after they make a real working random BG, but until then - no BG's at all.

LordRukia · November 2021

Listen it's really simple

Nothing was wrong with bgs before , and I don't understand AT ALL what they are trying to do. Just give us back random bgs. Dm only is gonna kill pvp and it already has sucked most the fun out of them, then what are we gonna do , play the lag fest that is cyrodiil ? No thanks bro. How to destroy your game 101 , fix things until they're broken. Taking the blizzard route I see

spartaxoxo · November 2021

Here is an extremely rough transcript of what Rich said about BGs on the stream. Please don't quote this as it's not cleaned up and may have inaccuracies. It should be mostly right but I typed this as I listened and have NOT had the chance to listen a second time and read the chat to edit for accuracy.

QcellESO: turns out that BGs are still only-deathmatch, even when queueing for random is the team aware? Any hotfixes planned?

Rich: So, that was the problem right? When you click random. Random is gonna put you into the queue with everybody. And what it does is...there's a bucket, right? So, for each game mode it puts you into each one of those buckets. If people are just queuing deathmatch and solo deathmatch is the top one, random is gonna be always deathmatch. Because, it just goes to try to make a game and if sees that if everybody is queued up, or the majority of people are queued up for deathmatch, then it's just gonna start deathmatch. So, told everybody that was gonna happen. And now it happens, so um, we're gonna watch it. We'll see. But it definitely does work. But, the majority of people are just queuing for deathmatch.

Brokenmolde: If no one queues for anything other than DM, all randos will be DM lol

Rich: Yup, because that's what the buckets are. Everybody is in the bucket, and it looks at people, and that's the way it goes.

QcellESO: Someone did the math and the chance of a non-DM is <0.1%, since a single DM can make 11 others end up in DM. Is this seen as an issue? Should we expect changes before the Q1 DLC?

Rich: Haha, someone did the math? Let me see here, I'm gonna go...Let me go see here. Uh, Battlegrounds (dogs barks, rich to dog: Shut the front door) This report takes a little while to load. And we can't really do anything, if everyone is queueing up for Deathmatch still. We can't really change that, right? Like, the only thing we could possibly do is have a deathmatch only and a non-deathmatch only. But, then that fragments the player base even more than it already is. Like, let's see...Yup, there are definitely other than deathmatch games going on. There's not a lot. Everyone is still queuing up for deathmatch, as it's the top queue. That's kinda what, that's absolutely what I thought was gonna happen, so...um, there's a choice there. And y'all can choose. But, because this is the first one, everybody clicks that. If solo random was there, it would be random. But, you'd still get Deathmatch games. Especially if people switched it down to Deathmatch.

doinstrun: I've only had 1 objective game since the patch. 99% deathmatch. That's random btw

Rich: I don't know if you ever heard what I said doinkstrun, but what random does is puts an entry into each of the buckets. So if there's 4 game types, what random does is put you into 4 different queues or 4 different buckets. And then everybody else goes in and clicks deathmatch only, they just go in the deathmatch only queue. And what the queue does is it goes and looks "how many players are in here?" and "What are the likelihood of me starting s game in anything other than deathmatch?" Or you know, and it goes "Oh hey, look! The likelihood of me starting a game of deathmatch is higher!" So, it starts a deathmatch game. That's how it works. That's how we said it was gonna work. I'm not sure what to say, or how we could change it. Like we could totally split it out, like I said, and say "Random is everything but Deathmatch." But then, randoms just won't ever start up because people are still going and queuing for Deathmatch. So, right, like how do you want to do it? WoW has the exact same problem with Battlegrounds. When they do, you know, Warsong Gultch. People back in the day hated Warsong Gultch and never queued up. And people were like "Hey, your queue is broken. Warsong Gultch never pops," and it's like "yeah, because nobody is queuing up for Warsong Gultch." Like, I'm not sure how to fix that. At least this way Deathmatch is playing the objectives instead of everything being Deathmatch. It's one of those things, it's glass half full, glass half empty kind of weirdness there.

FioFioFIO: It worked before you combined the queues tho

Rich: So people used to say that Deathmatch only popped up, and the reason we combined the queues is you couldn't specifically choose the game types.

Brokenmolde: would it be a bad idea to do like only x% of matches started per timeframe can be DM?

Rich: yes, it would be a very bad idea Brokenmolde. Because then games just wouldn't start at all. And players would be complaining that games don't start at all.

Caindele: make it two buttons, join DM join non-DM, the drop down isn't intuititive.

Rich: So if we do that, players will actually get to a point where they could never get a game. The game could never start, which is bad. Which is why we've done the system we've done where it's buckets. If they are exclusive buckets then 3 people can be in 1 queue, and 6 people could be in another queue, and a Battleground could never start. That would be bad, right? Never want that to happen. In my opinon, any battleground is better than no battleground, even if it's not necessarily a game type that I want to play. Same thing, you know, perfect example, when I was queuing earlier on my tank I was queuing specifically for dread cellar, and I was waiting forever. Soon as I did random, I got in right away instantly.

Elistix: People complain that objective maps don't get any pvp, so they go for DM where they face other players. But what if objective modes just had 1 objective that players had to fight over? It would be deathmatch but with an extra step.

Rich: I'm not sure what you mean by that. There's an objective if you have to do but you have to fight over it? Isn't that Capture the Flag is, you capture the flag? Isn't that what holding an area is?

QcellESO: Last question: If non-DM BGs are inaccessible, is removing the non-DM achievements something you guys would consider?

Rich: Maybe so, if it ever gets to that point. I don't think it will ever get to that point but...

NesESO: the issue with Battlegrounds that many players have is dm is seen as pvp. the other game modes other ppl can avoid pvp the entire match and still win and this is why ppl love or hate obj game modes.

Rich: (reading comment I can't see?) You'd be surprised how many go into pvp but don't actually want to pvp. (seems to be answering question) They just want to run around on the flags. Yup. It's a huge divide in playstyles. (reading comment I can't see?) 80% of your players want to DM (seems to be answering question) I mean it depends on the circles you run in bro. All the elites just want to kill people, right? They want to prove they are better than everybody else and they do that by killing them. There's a lot of other people that enjoy being in pvp but not necessarily having to kill players. Objective based stuff is a ton of fun, Sammy.

(I also can't see this question) Can you move the dropdown rate below the button or is the dropdown not the problem?

Rich: So the problem and you see this everywhere is most players just click the button, they don't change the dropdown, right? So, that is one thing. But, the exact same thing happens in campaigns. They see this list of campaigns here, right, and they just click and they do the first one. They don't click on these other things. It's just human nature. You see the first thing, you click it, you go, right? And we've experimented with changing that so this patch we actually changed this to solo, it used to be group being the top one. We changed it to solo to see what would happen. And guess what happened? More people are queuing solo than they were before. It is just because we changed the drop down. It's all we did was change the dropdown.

doinkstrun: I just want fast bgs

Rich: That's what we all want. for sure

(answering unseen question) Elites in pvp won't fight each other? yeah, they want to hunt the sheep. They want the easy kills. BTW, I am a sheep. So I'm not being mean. (question I can't see) Wait times are gross? Not sure how to solve that problem Doink. To be perfectly honest, if people aren't queueing for specific things or the thing you're queueing up for it's tough to solve. But, we have ideas of things we could do. But ultimately it comes down to, players gotta queue. [transcriber note: I think this might be about dungeons]

NagualV · November 2021

I believe the core issue ZOS has is that contrary to popular opinion on this forum, Deathmatch is indeed the most popular battleground option, and if they truly split the queues, the objective based queues will suffer from long wait times, possibly hurting the playerbase. It's a predicament for sure, and also an indicator of the overall battlegrounds population in ESO.

Something I find amusing -

In the gigantic "overland content is too easy/give vet overland option" thread(there was a huge one that eventually got closed, and now theres another giant one that's "official"), the people who argue for not increasing overland difficulty quote rich Lambert and use his words to effectively say "trust ZOS, they are the experts, they have access to the data, they have made wise choices and ESO is hugely successful, they will not add veteran option for overworld content, the majority of playerbase enjoys the current difficulty, etc"....

Those same people, when THEY dont like something, when something doesnt "go their way", all of a sudden, they guy/people in charge doesnt understand..........

For the record, although I personally would not have minded a difficulty slider, or harder overland mode, I agree with the folks who say the majority of the playerbase doesnt want it and that ZOS had made a wise business decision in not implementing it.

Well guess what folks, those same informed folks have spoken on the battleground issue- according to their analysis of their data(which we dont have access to), DEATHMATCH IS THE MOST POPULAR GAME MODE, and if they split the queues, non deathmatch queue wait times are going to go up, possibly hurting the overall player experience.

When it was argued that ZOS made the right decision based on data, and that the players who wanted harder overland content were a loud and vocal minority..........it almost sounds like the people complaining about current battlegrounds are a loud but vocal minority......

the1andonlyskwex · November 2021

spartaxoxo wrote: »

Here is an extremely rough transcript of what Rich said about BGs on the stream. Please don't quote this as it's not cleaned up and may have inaccuracies. It should be mostly right but I typed this as I listened and have NOT had the chance to listen a second time and read the chat to edit for accuracy.

QcellESO: turns out that BGs are still only-deathmatch, even when queueing for random is the team aware? Any hotfixes planned?

Rich: So, that was the problem right? When you click random. Random is gonna put you into the queue with everybody. And what it does is...there's a bucket, right? So, for each game mode it puts you into each one of those buckets. If people are just queuing deathmatch and solo deathmatch is the top one, random is gonna be always deathmatch. Because, it just goes to try to make a game and if sees that if everybody is queued up, or the majority of people are queued up for deathmatch, then it's just gonna start deathmatch. So, told everybody that was gonna happen. And now it happens, so um, we're gonna watch it. We'll see. But it definitely does work. But, the majority of people are just queuing for deathmatch.

Brokenmolde: If no one queues for anything other than DM, all randos will be DM lol

Rich: Yup, because that's what the buckets are. Everybody is in the bucket, and it looks at people, and that's the way it goes.

QcellESO: Someone did the math and the chance of a non-DM is <0.1%, since a single DM can make 11 others end up in DM. Is this seen as an issue? Should we expect changes before the Q1 DLC?

Rich: Haha, someone did the math? Let me see here, I'm gonna go...Let me go see here. Uh, Battlegrounds (dogs barks, rich to dog: Shut the front door) This report takes a little while to load. And we can't really do anything, if everyone is queueing up for Deathmatch still. We can't really change that, right? Like, the only thing we could possibly do is have a deathmatch only and a non-deathmatch only. But, then that fragments the player base even more than it already is. Like, let's see...Yup, there are definitely other than deathmatch games going on. There's not a lot. Everyone is still queuing up for deathmatch, as it's the top queue. That's kinda what, that's absolutely what I thought was gonna happen, so...um, there's a choice there. And y'all can choose. But, because this is the first one, everybody clicks that. If solo random was there, it would be random. But, you'd still get Deathmatch games. Especially if people switched it down to Deathmatch.

doinstrun: I've only had 1 objective game since the patch. 99% deathmatch. That's random btw

Rich: I don't know if you ever heard what I said doinkstrun, but what random does is puts an entry into each of the buckets. So if there's 4 game types, what random does is put you into 4 different queues or 4 different buckets. And then everybody else goes in and clicks deathmatch only, they just go in the deathmatch only queue. And what the queue does is it goes and looks "how many players are in here?" and "What are the likelihood of me starting s game in anything other than deathmatch?" Or you know, and it goes "Oh hey, look! The likelihood of me starting a game of deathmatch is higher!" So, it starts a deathmatch game. That's how it works. That's how we said it was gonna work. I'm not sure what to say, or how we could change it. Like we could totally split it out, like I said, and say "Random is everything but Deathmatch." But then, randoms just won't ever start up because people are still going and queuing for Deathmatch. So, right, like how do you want to do it? WoW has the exact same problem with Battlegrounds. When they do, you know, Warsong Gultch. People back in the day hated Warsong Gultch and never queued up. And people were like "Hey, your queue is broken. Warsong Gultch never pops," and it's like "yeah, because nobody is queuing up for Warsong Gultch." Like, I'm not sure how to fix that. At least this way Deathmatch is playing the objectives instead of everything being Deathmatch. It's one of those things, it's glass half full, glass half empty kind of weirdness there.

FioFioFIO: It worked before you combined the queues tho

Rich: So people used to say that Deathmatch only popped up, and the reason we combined the queues is you couldn't specifically choose the game types.

Brokenmolde: would it be a bad idea to do like only x% of matches started per timeframe can be DM?

Rich: yes, it would be a very bad idea Brokenmolde. Because then games just wouldn't start at all. And players would be complaining that games don't start at all.

Caindele: make it two buttons, join DM join non-DM, the drop down isn't intuititive.

Rich: So if we do that, players will actually get to a point where they could never get a game. The game could never start, which is bad. Which is why we've done the system we've done where it's buckets. If they are exclusive buckets then 3 people can be in 1 queue, and 6 people could be in another queue, and a Battleground could never start. That would be bad, right? Never want that to happen. In my opinon, any battleground is better than no battleground, even if it's not necessarily a game type that I want to play. Same thing, you know, perfect example, when I was queuing earlier on my tank I was queuing specifically for dread cellar, and I was waiting forever. Soon as I did random, I got in right away instantly.

Elistix: People complain that objective maps don't get any pvp, so they go for DM where they face other players. But what if objective modes just had 1 objective that players had to fight over? It would be deathmatch but with an extra step.

Rich: I'm not sure what you mean by that. There's an objective if you have to do but you have to fight over it? Isn't that Capture the Flag is, you capture the flag? Isn't that what holding an area is?

QcellESO: Last question: If non-DM BGs are inaccessible, is removing the non-DM achievements something you guys would consider?

Rich: Maybe so, if it ever gets to that point. I don't think it will ever get to that point but...

NesESO: the issue with Battlegrounds that many players have is dm is seen as pvp. the other game modes other ppl can avoid pvp the entire match and still win and this is why ppl love or hate obj game modes.

Rich: (reading comment I can't see?) You'd be surprised how many go into pvp but don't actually want to pvp. (seems to be answering question) They just want to run around on the flags. Yup. It's a huge divide in playstyles. (reading comment I can't see?) 80% of your players want to DM (seems to be answering question) I mean it depends on the circles you run in bro. All the elites just want to kill people, right? They want to prove they are better than everybody else and they do that by killing them. There's a lot of other people that enjoy being in pvp but not necessarily having to kill players. Objective based stuff is a ton of fun, Sammy.

(I also can't see this question) Can you move the dropdown rate below the button or is the dropdown not the problem?

Rich: So the problem and you see this everywhere is most players just click the button, they don't change the dropdown, right? So, that is one thing. But, the exact same thing happens in campaigns. They see this list of campaigns here, right, and they just click and they do the first one. They don't click on these other things. It's just human nature. You see the first thing, you click it, you go, right? And we've experimented with changing that so this patch we actually changed this to solo, it used to be group being the top one. We changed it to solo to see what would happen. And guess what happened? More people are queuing solo than they were before. It is just because we changed the drop down. It's all we did was change the dropdown.

doinkstrun: I just want fast bgs

Rich: That's what we all want. for sure

(answering unseen question) Elites in pvp won't fight each other? yeah, they want to hunt the sheep. They want the easy kills. BTW, I am a sheep. So I'm not being mean. (question I can't see) Wait times are gross? Not sure how to solve that problem Doink. To be perfectly honest, if people aren't queueing for specific things or the thing you're queueing up for it's tough to solve. But, we have ideas of things we could do. But ultimately it comes down to, players gotta queue. [transcriber note: I think this might be about dungeons]

Ugh, Rich clearly doesn't understand the math as it relates to his own system. All it takes is one person in the DM queue to drag 11 people from the "random" queue into a DM. He talks like 99% of the games being deathmatch means that 99% of people queueing are in the deathmatch queue.

As-is (assuming he described it accurately), if 90% of people were in the "random" queue, you would still get over 70% deathmatches, and with the queues split 50/50 you'll get 99.98% deathmatches. There needs to be a mechanism to delay queue popping so that there's a chance for 12 randoms to accumulate before a DM pops.

CyberOnEso · November 2021

NagualV wrote: »

The point I hoped to get across was not is 'deathmatch only' good or bad.

However, ZOS did a Deathmatch only test and they said this

And in the case of this test, the data appeared to back that up as well. Although we initially saw a very slight bump in participation, it quickly declined and has left Battleground populations in a fairly unhealthy state.

That is the only "data" we have from ZOS. ZOS did a Deathmatch-only test, and it failed, they said it failed, and now they implemented a system that gives 99% Deathmatch games.

Something has gone wrong here, either ZOS got the tests wrong, or the new system is somewhat not ideal. I am suggesting that somewhere someone made a wrong assumption that resulted in this issue, I am not saying they're wrong or stupid. Mistakes happen, it's a very complicated system. I am simply saying the way they have implemented this new queue system is not ideal.

We do have data via the leaderboards of the approx number of games of each type occurring, and it does suggest that nearly all games are Deathmatch, and there is no real way to indicate that you as a player would like to be in another game type, so any assumption that 99% of people want to be in a Deathmatch is in my opinion flawed.

jaws343 · November 2021

the1andonlyskwex wrote: »

spartaxoxo wrote: »

Here is an extremely rough transcript of what Rich said about BGs on the stream. Please don't quote this as it's not cleaned up and may have inaccuracies. It should be mostly right but I typed this as I listened and have NOT had the chance to listen a second time and read the chat to edit for accuracy.

QcellESO: turns out that BGs are still only-deathmatch, even when queueing for random is the team aware? Any hotfixes planned?

Rich: So, that was the problem right? When you click random. Random is gonna put you into the queue with everybody. And what it does is...there's a bucket, right? So, for each game mode it puts you into each one of those buckets. If people are just queuing deathmatch and solo deathmatch is the top one, random is gonna be always deathmatch. Because, it just goes to try to make a game and if sees that if everybody is queued up, or the majority of people are queued up for deathmatch, then it's just gonna start deathmatch. So, told everybody that was gonna happen. And now it happens, so um, we're gonna watch it. We'll see. But it definitely does work. But, the majority of people are just queuing for deathmatch.

Brokenmolde: If no one queues for anything other than DM, all randos will be DM lol

Rich: Yup, because that's what the buckets are. Everybody is in the bucket, and it looks at people, and that's the way it goes.

QcellESO: Someone did the math and the chance of a non-DM is <0.1%, since a single DM can make 11 others end up in DM. Is this seen as an issue? Should we expect changes before the Q1 DLC?

Rich: Haha, someone did the math? Let me see here, I'm gonna go...Let me go see here. Uh, Battlegrounds (dogs barks, rich to dog: Shut the front door) This report takes a little while to load. And we can't really do anything, if everyone is queueing up for Deathmatch still. We can't really change that, right? Like, the only thing we could possibly do is have a deathmatch only and a non-deathmatch only. But, then that fragments the player base even more than it already is. Like, let's see...Yup, there are definitely other than deathmatch games going on. There's not a lot. Everyone is still queuing up for deathmatch, as it's the top queue. That's kinda what, that's absolutely what I thought was gonna happen, so...um, there's a choice there. And y'all can choose. But, because this is the first one, everybody clicks that. If solo random was there, it would be random. But, you'd still get Deathmatch games. Especially if people switched it down to Deathmatch.

doinstrun: I've only had 1 objective game since the patch. 99% deathmatch. That's random btw

Rich: I don't know if you ever heard what I said doinkstrun, but what random does is puts an entry into each of the buckets. So if there's 4 game types, what random does is put you into 4 different queues or 4 different buckets. And then everybody else goes in and clicks deathmatch only, they just go in the deathmatch only queue. And what the queue does is it goes and looks "how many players are in here?" and "What are the likelihood of me starting s game in anything other than deathmatch?" Or you know, and it goes "Oh hey, look! The likelihood of me starting a game of deathmatch is higher!" So, it starts a deathmatch game. That's how it works. That's how we said it was gonna work. I'm not sure what to say, or how we could change it. Like we could totally split it out, like I said, and say "Random is everything but Deathmatch." But then, randoms just won't ever start up because people are still going and queuing for Deathmatch. So, right, like how do you want to do it? WoW has the exact same problem with Battlegrounds. When they do, you know, Warsong Gultch. People back in the day hated Warsong Gultch and never queued up. And people were like "Hey, your queue is broken. Warsong Gultch never pops," and it's like "yeah, because nobody is queuing up for Warsong Gultch." Like, I'm not sure how to fix that. At least this way Deathmatch is playing the objectives instead of everything being Deathmatch. It's one of those things, it's glass half full, glass half empty kind of weirdness there.

FioFioFIO: It worked before you combined the queues tho

Rich: So people used to say that Deathmatch only popped up, and the reason we combined the queues is you couldn't specifically choose the game types.

Brokenmolde: would it be a bad idea to do like only x% of matches started per timeframe can be DM?

Rich: yes, it would be a very bad idea Brokenmolde. Because then games just wouldn't start at all. And players would be complaining that games don't start at all.

Caindele: make it two buttons, join DM join non-DM, the drop down isn't intuititive.

Rich: So if we do that, players will actually get to a point where they could never get a game. The game could never start, which is bad. Which is why we've done the system we've done where it's buckets. If they are exclusive buckets then 3 people can be in 1 queue, and 6 people could be in another queue, and a Battleground could never start. That would be bad, right? Never want that to happen. In my opinon, any battleground is better than no battleground, even if it's not necessarily a game type that I want to play. Same thing, you know, perfect example, when I was queuing earlier on my tank I was queuing specifically for dread cellar, and I was waiting forever. Soon as I did random, I got in right away instantly.

Elistix: People complain that objective maps don't get any pvp, so they go for DM where they face other players. But what if objective modes just had 1 objective that players had to fight over? It would be deathmatch but with an extra step.

Rich: I'm not sure what you mean by that. There's an objective if you have to do but you have to fight over it? Isn't that Capture the Flag is, you capture the flag? Isn't that what holding an area is?

QcellESO: Last question: If non-DM BGs are inaccessible, is removing the non-DM achievements something you guys would consider?

Rich: Maybe so, if it ever gets to that point. I don't think it will ever get to that point but...

NesESO: the issue with Battlegrounds that many players have is dm is seen as pvp. the other game modes other ppl can avoid pvp the entire match and still win and this is why ppl love or hate obj game modes.

Rich: (reading comment I can't see?) You'd be surprised how many go into pvp but don't actually want to pvp. (seems to be answering question) They just want to run around on the flags. Yup. It's a huge divide in playstyles. (reading comment I can't see?) 80% of your players want to DM (seems to be answering question) I mean it depends on the circles you run in bro. All the elites just want to kill people, right? They want to prove they are better than everybody else and they do that by killing them. There's a lot of other people that enjoy being in pvp but not necessarily having to kill players. Objective based stuff is a ton of fun, Sammy.

(I also can't see this question) Can you move the dropdown rate below the button or is the dropdown not the problem?

Rich: So the problem and you see this everywhere is most players just click the button, they don't change the dropdown, right? So, that is one thing. But, the exact same thing happens in campaigns. They see this list of campaigns here, right, and they just click and they do the first one. They don't click on these other things. It's just human nature. You see the first thing, you click it, you go, right? And we've experimented with changing that so this patch we actually changed this to solo, it used to be group being the top one. We changed it to solo to see what would happen. And guess what happened? More people are queuing solo than they were before. It is just because we changed the drop down. It's all we did was change the dropdown.

doinkstrun: I just want fast bgs

Rich: That's what we all want. for sure

(answering unseen question) Elites in pvp won't fight each other? yeah, they want to hunt the sheep. They want the easy kills. BTW, I am a sheep. So I'm not being mean. (question I can't see) Wait times are gross? Not sure how to solve that problem Doink. To be perfectly honest, if people aren't queueing for specific things or the thing you're queueing up for it's tough to solve. But, we have ideas of things we could do. But ultimately it comes down to, players gotta queue. [transcriber note: I think this might be about dungeons]

Ugh, Rich clearly doesn't understand the math as it relates to his own system. All it takes is one person in the DM queue to drag 11 people from the "random" queue into a DM. He talks like 99% of the games being deathmatch means that 99% of people queueing are in the deathmatch queue.

As-is (assuming he described it accurately), if 90% of people were in the "random" queue, you would still get over 70% deathmatches, and with the queues split 50/50 you'll get 99.98% deathmatches. There needs to be a mechanism to delay queue popping so that there's a chance for 12 randoms to accumulate before a DM pops.

But he is directly saying that more people are actually queuing for Deathmatch. Which, I'd imagine, they have direct data to track that. The questions are about the queues not being random. And his response is that more people are queuing for Deathmatch. He even explains that it could be due to the order (which is confirming something many of us have been saying regarding Cyrodil campaigns with the lock/no lock issue). It has absolutely nothing to do with math when he can literally look at the numbers of players queuing in each queue. This just isn't a case of a few people queuing deathmatch and forcing the queue.

Honestly, I would 100% be onboard with removing DM from the random queue so that we can get an end to this and people can realize how unpopular the objective modes are while they wait in endless random queues and never get a match.

Lady_Galadhiel · November 2021

I didnt read through the comments so I dont know if it was mentioned before or not.
By default and the top option is Solo deathmatch queue so people who aren't aware that there are other option just press start queue and go with the first default option.
Not such a big mystery why only DM pops up all the time,because the average player who does a BG a day for xp or crystals or now for endeaovers just presses queue up and does not even know about the other options.

IMO ZOS should change this asap and the top option should be Solo Random battleground not solo dm.
I did play 2 Bgs today,of course both were DMs and I had one CP 200 dark elf archer in my team who looked lost,I whispered him after it was done and asked if he knew there where other options besides DM and he said no he didnt know about it he just presses queue up and thats it.
Like he did I bet so does the most people,so if 90% queue up for DM only because its the top and first option then no wonder we dont get to see other modes anymore.
I already can forget about completing my achievements from capture the relic or flag games at this point.Thanks ZOS.

Sarannah · November 2021

NagualV wrote: »

Well guess what folks, those same informed folks have spoken on the battleground issue- according to their analysis of their data(which we dont have access to), DEATHMATCH IS THE MOST POPULAR GAME MODE, and if they split the queues, non deathmatch queue wait times are going to go up, possibly hurting the overall player experience.

How do we know deathmatch is the most favorite queue? ... ZOS stated so yes, but before ZOS changed it to only deathmatch, the random queue also included deathmatch. Which means the data doesn't show the amount of players who were avoiding the random queue due to the chance of getting a deathmatch to pop AND the amount of players who would only have queue'd for an objectives-only random queue. The only way to know for sure if the deathmatch population really outweights the objective-BG population is to now create an objective-only queue period, or by creating a deathmatch queue and a non-deathmatch random queue. And to see what happens. For all we know, taking deathmatch out of the queue might get more players to try BG's/PvP.

**Ideas** Another solution for BG's could be to rotate the different BG types every hour, or to disable BG's completely and only allow BG queueing when the golden vendor is also active(weekends).
Or maybe ZOS needs to cut back on the daily PvE tasks, so more players will have time to queue for BG's. ZOS could do this by making dungeons dailies into a weekly and adjust the rewards accordingly, by changing pledges to weeklies and adjust the key-gain accordingly, or by removing the daily endeavours while raising the weekly amount accordingly. Or anything else which could allow players more time to queue for BG's. **/ideas**
To just throw out some ideas.

PS: When the BG queue was deathmatch-only, this was also promoted by weekly and daily andeavours which required BG complete(s).

NagualV · November 2021

CyberOnEso wrote: »

NagualV wrote: »

The point I hoped to get across was not is 'deathmatch only' good or bad.

However, ZOS did a Deathmatch only test and they said this

And in the case of this test, the data appeared to back that up as well. Although we initially saw a very slight bump in participation, it quickly declined and has left Battleground populations in a fairly unhealthy state.

That is the only "data" we have from ZOS. ZOS did a Deathmatch-only test, and it failed, they said it failed, and now they implemented a system that gives 99% Deathmatch games.

Something has gone wrong here, either ZOS got the tests wrong, or the new system is somewhat not ideal. I am suggesting that somewhere someone made a wrong assumption that resulted in this issue, I am not saying they're wrong or stupid. Mistakes happen, it's a very complicated system. I am simply saying the way they have implemented this new queue system is not ideal.

We do have data via the leaderboards of the approx number of games of each type occurring, and it does suggest that nearly all games are Deathmatch, and there is no real way to indicate that you as a player would like to be in another game type, so any assumption that 99% of people want to be in a Deathmatch is in my opinion flawed.

I understand fully what you and others are saying.......

I'm really saying this in a friendly way, I dont say this with any ill will, or as a disgruntled person, or in an argumentative tone.....but...

You and others are wrong in your interpretation.....Deathmatch is the most popular mode, like it or not......they wouldnt have made the decision to structure the queues the way they did if it wasnt.

I'll repeat - the issue they face is that if they truly split the queues, the objective queues are going to take a while, this isnt an easy issue for them to fix I'm afraid...

the1andonlyskwex · November 2021

jaws343 wrote: »

the1andonlyskwex wrote: »

spartaxoxo wrote: »

Here is an extremely rough transcript of what Rich said about BGs on the stream. Please don't quote this as it's not cleaned up and may have inaccuracies. It should be mostly right but I typed this as I listened and have NOT had the chance to listen a second time and read the chat to edit for accuracy.

QcellESO: turns out that BGs are still only-deathmatch, even when queueing for random is the team aware? Any hotfixes planned?

Rich: So, that was the problem right? When you click random. Random is gonna put you into the queue with everybody. And what it does is...there's a bucket, right? So, for each game mode it puts you into each one of those buckets. If people are just queuing deathmatch and solo deathmatch is the top one, random is gonna be always deathmatch. Because, it just goes to try to make a game and if sees that if everybody is queued up, or the majority of people are queued up for deathmatch, then it's just gonna start deathmatch. So, told everybody that was gonna happen. And now it happens, so um, we're gonna watch it. We'll see. But it definitely does work. But, the majority of people are just queuing for deathmatch.

Brokenmolde: If no one queues for anything other than DM, all randos will be DM lol

Rich: Yup, because that's what the buckets are. Everybody is in the bucket, and it looks at people, and that's the way it goes.

QcellESO: Someone did the math and the chance of a non-DM is <0.1%, since a single DM can make 11 others end up in DM. Is this seen as an issue? Should we expect changes before the Q1 DLC?

Rich: Haha, someone did the math? Let me see here, I'm gonna go...Let me go see here. Uh, Battlegrounds (dogs barks, rich to dog: Shut the front door) This report takes a little while to load. And we can't really do anything, if everyone is queueing up for Deathmatch still. We can't really change that, right? Like, the only thing we could possibly do is have a deathmatch only and a non-deathmatch only. But, then that fragments the player base even more than it already is. Like, let's see...Yup, there are definitely other than deathmatch games going on. There's not a lot. Everyone is still queuing up for deathmatch, as it's the top queue. That's kinda what, that's absolutely what I thought was gonna happen, so...um, there's a choice there. And y'all can choose. But, because this is the first one, everybody clicks that. If solo random was there, it would be random. But, you'd still get Deathmatch games. Especially if people switched it down to Deathmatch.

doinstrun: I've only had 1 objective game since the patch. 99% deathmatch. That's random btw

Rich: I don't know if you ever heard what I said doinkstrun, but what random does is puts an entry into each of the buckets. So if there's 4 game types, what random does is put you into 4 different queues or 4 different buckets. And then everybody else goes in and clicks deathmatch only, they just go in the deathmatch only queue. And what the queue does is it goes and looks "how many players are in here?" and "What are the likelihood of me starting s game in anything other than deathmatch?" Or you know, and it goes "Oh hey, look! The likelihood of me starting a game of deathmatch is higher!" So, it starts a deathmatch game. That's how it works. That's how we said it was gonna work. I'm not sure what to say, or how we could change it. Like we could totally split it out, like I said, and say "Random is everything but Deathmatch." But then, randoms just won't ever start up because people are still going and queuing for Deathmatch. So, right, like how do you want to do it? WoW has the exact same problem with Battlegrounds. When they do, you know, Warsong Gultch. People back in the day hated Warsong Gultch and never queued up. And people were like "Hey, your queue is broken. Warsong Gultch never pops," and it's like "yeah, because nobody is queuing up for Warsong Gultch." Like, I'm not sure how to fix that. At least this way Deathmatch is playing the objectives instead of everything being Deathmatch. It's one of those things, it's glass half full, glass half empty kind of weirdness there.

FioFioFIO: It worked before you combined the queues tho

Rich: So people used to say that Deathmatch only popped up, and the reason we combined the queues is you couldn't specifically choose the game types.

Brokenmolde: would it be a bad idea to do like only x% of matches started per timeframe can be DM?

Rich: yes, it would be a very bad idea Brokenmolde. Because then games just wouldn't start at all. And players would be complaining that games don't start at all.

Caindele: make it two buttons, join DM join non-DM, the drop down isn't intuititive.

Rich: So if we do that, players will actually get to a point where they could never get a game. The game could never start, which is bad. Which is why we've done the system we've done where it's buckets. If they are exclusive buckets then 3 people can be in 1 queue, and 6 people could be in another queue, and a Battleground could never start. That would be bad, right? Never want that to happen. In my opinon, any battleground is better than no battleground, even if it's not necessarily a game type that I want to play. Same thing, you know, perfect example, when I was queuing earlier on my tank I was queuing specifically for dread cellar, and I was waiting forever. Soon as I did random, I got in right away instantly.

Elistix: People complain that objective maps don't get any pvp, so they go for DM where they face other players. But what if objective modes just had 1 objective that players had to fight over? It would be deathmatch but with an extra step.

Rich: I'm not sure what you mean by that. There's an objective if you have to do but you have to fight over it? Isn't that Capture the Flag is, you capture the flag? Isn't that what holding an area is?

QcellESO: Last question: If non-DM BGs are inaccessible, is removing the non-DM achievements something you guys would consider?

Rich: Maybe so, if it ever gets to that point. I don't think it will ever get to that point but...

NesESO: the issue with Battlegrounds that many players have is dm is seen as pvp. the other game modes other ppl can avoid pvp the entire match and still win and this is why ppl love or hate obj game modes.

Rich: (reading comment I can't see?) You'd be surprised how many go into pvp but don't actually want to pvp. (seems to be answering question) They just want to run around on the flags. Yup. It's a huge divide in playstyles. (reading comment I can't see?) 80% of your players want to DM (seems to be answering question) I mean it depends on the circles you run in bro. All the elites just want to kill people, right? They want to prove they are better than everybody else and they do that by killing them. There's a lot of other people that enjoy being in pvp but not necessarily having to kill players. Objective based stuff is a ton of fun, Sammy.

(I also can't see this question) Can you move the dropdown rate below the button or is the dropdown not the problem?

Rich: So the problem and you see this everywhere is most players just click the button, they don't change the dropdown, right? So, that is one thing. But, the exact same thing happens in campaigns. They see this list of campaigns here, right, and they just click and they do the first one. They don't click on these other things. It's just human nature. You see the first thing, you click it, you go, right? And we've experimented with changing that so this patch we actually changed this to solo, it used to be group being the top one. We changed it to solo to see what would happen. And guess what happened? More people are queuing solo than they were before. It is just because we changed the drop down. It's all we did was change the dropdown.

doinkstrun: I just want fast bgs

Rich: That's what we all want. for sure

(answering unseen question) Elites in pvp won't fight each other? yeah, they want to hunt the sheep. They want the easy kills. BTW, I am a sheep. So I'm not being mean. (question I can't see) Wait times are gross? Not sure how to solve that problem Doink. To be perfectly honest, if people aren't queueing for specific things or the thing you're queueing up for it's tough to solve. But, we have ideas of things we could do. But ultimately it comes down to, players gotta queue. [transcriber note: I think this might be about dungeons]

Ugh, Rich clearly doesn't understand the math as it relates to his own system. All it takes is one person in the DM queue to drag 11 people from the "random" queue into a DM. He talks like 99% of the games being deathmatch means that 99% of people queueing are in the deathmatch queue.

As-is (assuming he described it accurately), if 90% of people were in the "random" queue, you would still get over 70% deathmatches, and with the queues split 50/50 you'll get 99.98% deathmatches. There needs to be a mechanism to delay queue popping so that there's a chance for 12 randoms to accumulate before a DM pops.

But he is directly saying that more people are actually queuing for Deathmatch. Which, I'd imagine, they have direct data to track that. The questions are about the queues not being random. And his response is that more people are queuing for Deathmatch. He even explains that it could be due to the order (which is confirming something many of us have been saying regarding Cyrodil campaigns with the lock/no lock issue). It has absolutely nothing to do with math when he can literally look at the numbers of players queuing in each queue. This just isn't a case of a few people queuing deathmatch and forcing the queue.

Honestly, I would 100% be onboard with removing DM from the random queue so that we can get an end to this and people can realize how unpopular the objective modes are while they wait in endless random queues and never get a match.

A well designed queue shouldn't require 90% of players to queue "random" before you start getting a significant number of non-deathmatch games. In fact, a well designed queue should probably pop non-deathmatch games roughly proportionally to the number of people in the random queue.

Also, all of the data regarding the current queue populations is skewed by the fact that the month long DM-only "test" drove away everyone that doesn't like 100% deathmatch.

ZOS made a decision to get rid of the random queue based on questionable data (comments from a small forum minority and maybe some stats related to people dropping out of matches). That drove all of the players who prefer random queues (and/or non-DM modes) out of the game (or at least out of BGs), as evidenced by the drop in BG populations. Then they brought back a new "random" queue that's heavily slanted in favor of DM, and didn't particularly advertise the change.

It shouldn't be all that surprising that the number of non-DM players is low. They poisoned their own well with the DM-only "test".

Honestly, I don't know how they fix things at this point. Most people who prefer non-DM modes have probably moved on to other games (or have at least given up on BGs).

CyberOnEso · November 2021

NagualV wrote: »

I'm really saying this in a friendly way, I dont say this with any ill will, or as a disgruntled person, or in an argumentative tone.....but...

You and others are wrong in your interpretation.....Deathmatch is the most popular mode, like it or not......they wouldnt have made the decision to structure the queues the way they did if it wasnt.

I'll repeat - the issue they face is that if they truly split the queues, the objective queues are going to take a while, this isnt an easy issue for them to fix I'm afraid...

I really don't disagree with you that Deathmatch is the most popular mode, it almost certainly is.

And Vaults of Madness is the most popular dungeon.

Maybe Deathmatch is more popular than all the other modes combined, and if they have the data for that I would love to see it. If they want to remove all the other modes then that's fine, but I am saying they tried it, and it failed.

Just because Deathmatch is the most popular mode, and I agree with you that it probably is, there is no need for it to be the only mode. They have achievements and item drops that are exclusive to the other modes that people will want to collect and it is nearly impossible to do so.

I am aware they don't want queue fragmentation, of course not. But lying to people by making them think they have a choice is not the way forward, if they truly believe Deathmatch only is the way forward then why did they not say so.

ealdwin · November 2021

The least that could be done is switching the Solo Random to be the default. Maybe it changes something, maybe it doesn't. It wouldn't hurt to try something.

Tarbs01 · November 2021

Their next test should be to have 3 queues.

Deathmatch only
Objective only
Truly Random

Then they can see the data for how many people queue into each on a hourly, daily or, weekly basis. This in turn should help to decide where they focus their devs for further BGs improvements. And it should give a better picture as to where the average BG player would rather play. Yes you will still have those guys that queue for objective based games so they can play DM and get "easy kills'". But that shouldn't be enough to skew the numbers in any significant way.
They can set this up to run as a short term test they way they did the DM only test or, they could just change to this model and see how the community sways over time.

Lady_Galadhiel · November 2021

Please @ZOS_GinaBruno @ZOS_RichLambert @ZOS_Kevin
Could you consider changing the Solo Random BG as first option please?Lot of folks aren't aware there being more options and making the solo DM as default results in ending up only having DM bgs for everyone.
Thanks

NagualV · November 2021

jaws343 wrote: »

the1andonlyskwex wrote: »

spartaxoxo wrote: »

Here is an extremely rough transcript of what Rich said about BGs on the stream. Please don't quote this as it's not cleaned up and may have inaccuracies. It should be mostly right but I typed this as I listened and have NOT had the chance to listen a second time and read the chat to edit for accuracy.

QcellESO: turns out that BGs are still only-deathmatch, even when queueing for random is the team aware? Any hotfixes planned?

Rich: So, that was the problem right? When you click random. Random is gonna put you into the queue with everybody. And what it does is...there's a bucket, right? So, for each game mode it puts you into each one of those buckets. If people are just queuing deathmatch and solo deathmatch is the top one, random is gonna be always deathmatch. Because, it just goes to try to make a game and if sees that if everybody is queued up, or the majority of people are queued up for deathmatch, then it's just gonna start deathmatch. So, told everybody that was gonna happen. And now it happens, so um, we're gonna watch it. We'll see. But it definitely does work. But, the majority of people are just queuing for deathmatch.

Brokenmolde: If no one queues for anything other than DM, all randos will be DM lol

Rich: Yup, because that's what the buckets are. Everybody is in the bucket, and it looks at people, and that's the way it goes.

QcellESO: Someone did the math and the chance of a non-DM is <0.1%, since a single DM can make 11 others end up in DM. Is this seen as an issue? Should we expect changes before the Q1 DLC?

Rich: Haha, someone did the math? Let me see here, I'm gonna go...Let me go see here. Uh, Battlegrounds (dogs barks, rich to dog: Shut the front door) This report takes a little while to load. And we can't really do anything, if everyone is queueing up for Deathmatch still. We can't really change that, right? Like, the only thing we could possibly do is have a deathmatch only and a non-deathmatch only. But, then that fragments the player base even more than it already is. Like, let's see...Yup, there are definitely other than deathmatch games going on. There's not a lot. Everyone is still queuing up for deathmatch, as it's the top queue. That's kinda what, that's absolutely what I thought was gonna happen, so...um, there's a choice there. And y'all can choose. But, because this is the first one, everybody clicks that. If solo random was there, it would be random. But, you'd still get Deathmatch games. Especially if people switched it down to Deathmatch.

doinstrun: I've only had 1 objective game since the patch. 99% deathmatch. That's random btw

Rich: I don't know if you ever heard what I said doinkstrun, but what random does is puts an entry into each of the buckets. So if there's 4 game types, what random does is put you into 4 different queues or 4 different buckets. And then everybody else goes in and clicks deathmatch only, they just go in the deathmatch only queue. And what the queue does is it goes and looks "how many players are in here?" and "What are the likelihood of me starting s game in anything other than deathmatch?" Or you know, and it goes "Oh hey, look! The likelihood of me starting a game of deathmatch is higher!" So, it starts a deathmatch game. That's how it works. That's how we said it was gonna work. I'm not sure what to say, or how we could change it. Like we could totally split it out, like I said, and say "Random is everything but Deathmatch." But then, randoms just won't ever start up because people are still going and queuing for Deathmatch. So, right, like how do you want to do it? WoW has the exact same problem with Battlegrounds. When they do, you know, Warsong Gultch. People back in the day hated Warsong Gultch and never queued up. And people were like "Hey, your queue is broken. Warsong Gultch never pops," and it's like "yeah, because nobody is queuing up for Warsong Gultch." Like, I'm not sure how to fix that. At least this way Deathmatch is playing the objectives instead of everything being Deathmatch. It's one of those things, it's glass half full, glass half empty kind of weirdness there.

FioFioFIO: It worked before you combined the queues tho

Rich: So people used to say that Deathmatch only popped up, and the reason we combined the queues is you couldn't specifically choose the game types.

Brokenmolde: would it be a bad idea to do like only x% of matches started per timeframe can be DM?

Rich: yes, it would be a very bad idea Brokenmolde. Because then games just wouldn't start at all. And players would be complaining that games don't start at all.

Caindele: make it two buttons, join DM join non-DM, the drop down isn't intuititive.

Rich: So if we do that, players will actually get to a point where they could never get a game. The game could never start, which is bad. Which is why we've done the system we've done where it's buckets. If they are exclusive buckets then 3 people can be in 1 queue, and 6 people could be in another queue, and a Battleground could never start. That would be bad, right? Never want that to happen. In my opinon, any battleground is better than no battleground, even if it's not necessarily a game type that I want to play. Same thing, you know, perfect example, when I was queuing earlier on my tank I was queuing specifically for dread cellar, and I was waiting forever. Soon as I did random, I got in right away instantly.

Elistix: People complain that objective maps don't get any pvp, so they go for DM where they face other players. But what if objective modes just had 1 objective that players had to fight over? It would be deathmatch but with an extra step.

Rich: I'm not sure what you mean by that. There's an objective if you have to do but you have to fight over it? Isn't that Capture the Flag is, you capture the flag? Isn't that what holding an area is?

QcellESO: Last question: If non-DM BGs are inaccessible, is removing the non-DM achievements something you guys would consider?

Rich: Maybe so, if it ever gets to that point. I don't think it will ever get to that point but...

NesESO: the issue with Battlegrounds that many players have is dm is seen as pvp. the other game modes other ppl can avoid pvp the entire match and still win and this is why ppl love or hate obj game modes.

Rich: (reading comment I can't see?) You'd be surprised how many go into pvp but don't actually want to pvp. (seems to be answering question) They just want to run around on the flags. Yup. It's a huge divide in playstyles. (reading comment I can't see?) 80% of your players want to DM (seems to be answering question) I mean it depends on the circles you run in bro. All the elites just want to kill people, right? They want to prove they are better than everybody else and they do that by killing them. There's a lot of other people that enjoy being in pvp but not necessarily having to kill players. Objective based stuff is a ton of fun, Sammy.

(I also can't see this question) Can you move the dropdown rate below the button or is the dropdown not the problem?

Rich: So the problem and you see this everywhere is most players just click the button, they don't change the dropdown, right? So, that is one thing. But, the exact same thing happens in campaigns. They see this list of campaigns here, right, and they just click and they do the first one. They don't click on these other things. It's just human nature. You see the first thing, you click it, you go, right? And we've experimented with changing that so this patch we actually changed this to solo, it used to be group being the top one. We changed it to solo to see what would happen. And guess what happened? More people are queuing solo than they were before. It is just because we changed the drop down. It's all we did was change the dropdown.

doinkstrun: I just want fast bgs

Rich: That's what we all want. for sure

(answering unseen question) Elites in pvp won't fight each other? yeah, they want to hunt the sheep. They want the easy kills. BTW, I am a sheep. So I'm not being mean. (question I can't see) Wait times are gross? Not sure how to solve that problem Doink. To be perfectly honest, if people aren't queueing for specific things or the thing you're queueing up for it's tough to solve. But, we have ideas of things we could do. But ultimately it comes down to, players gotta queue. [transcriber note: I think this might be about dungeons]

Ugh, Rich clearly doesn't understand the math as it relates to his own system. All it takes is one person in the DM queue to drag 11 people from the "random" queue into a DM. He talks like 99% of the games being deathmatch means that 99% of people queueing are in the deathmatch queue.

As-is (assuming he described it accurately), if 90% of people were in the "random" queue, you would still get over 70% deathmatches, and with the queues split 50/50 you'll get 99.98% deathmatches. There needs to be a mechanism to delay queue popping so that there's a chance for 12 randoms to accumulate before a DM pops.

But he is directly saying that more people are actually queuing for Deathmatch. Which, I'd imagine, they have direct data to track that. The questions

Honestly, I would 100% be onboard with removing DM from the random queue so that we can get an end to this and people can realize how unpopular the objective modes are while they wait in endless random queues and never get a match.

CyberOnEso wrote: »

NagualV wrote: »

I'm really saying this in a friendly way, I dont say this with any ill will, or as a disgruntled person, or in an argumentative tone.....but...

You and others are wrong in your interpretation.....Deathmatch is the most popular mode, like it or not......they wouldnt have made the decision to structure the queues the way they did if it wasnt.

I'll repeat - the issue they face is that if they truly split the queues, the objective queues are going to take a while, this isnt an easy issue for them to fix I'm afraid...

I really don't disagree with you that Deathmatch is the most popular mode, it almost certainly is.

And Vaults of Madness is the most popular dungeon.

Maybe Deathmatch is more popular than all the other modes combined, and if they have the data for that I would love to see it. If they want to remove all the other modes then that's fine, but I am saying they tried it, and it failed.

Just because Deathmatch is the most popular mode, and I agree with you that it probably is, there is no need for it to be the only mode. They have achievements and item drops that are exclusive to the other modes that people will want to collect and it is nearly impossible to do so.

I am aware they don't want queue fragmentation, of course not. But lying to people by making them think they have a choice is not the way forward, if they truly believe Deathmatch only is the way forward then why did they not say so.

I hear you....

Thing is, although the "drop down issue" was acknowledged by them, I still dont think that will alleviate the situation much.

Think of it from their perspective for a moment - they truly do separate the queues, allowing for deathmatch only, and then random non-deathmatch only. Random non-deathmatch queues then begin to take forever.....the people that want this mode come back to complain. Newer people, or people who are looking for achievements and dont want to do it via deathmatch, take forever to find a group...what happens then? The battleground pop is small. This is a tricky, complicated issue....

MurderMostFoul · November 2021

@ZOS_GinaBruno @ZOS_RichLambert

As I said elsewhere:

MurderMostFoul wrote: »

I prefer death match, but I also prefer folks to have options to play other modes if they want. The fix:

1. Make random default
2. Make the daily win bonus only active for the random queues.

I would expect these two changes to drive enough traffic toward the random queues resulting in a much higher likelihood of modes other than deathmatch.

Taggund · November 2021

The way i interpreted Rich's first statement in the video was as an 'I told you so' in reference to what would happen with deathmatch as the default option. As long as that is the default I think it's still not clear as to whether deathmatch is actually the most popular, or that people just choose join queue without looking at the dropdown.

As for me, being bored with PVE, I know what I was primarily spending my time playing prior to the deatchmatch only "test" is no longer an option. I hope that a random queue that really includes objective BGs returns in some form.

NagualV · November 2021

Lady_Galadhiel wrote: »

Please @ZOS_GinaBruno @ZOS_RichLambert @ZOS_Kevin
Could you consider changing the Solo Random BG as first option please?Lot of folks aren't aware there being more options and making the solo DM as default results in ending up only having DM bgs for everyone.
Thanks

I say this from a kind place........

You said in a prior post that you didnt read all the comments. I think you should, theres good info In this thread.

ZOS acknowledged the drop down issue....I dont believe, however, that that is what's causing DM matches to pop so frequently.

CyberOnEso · November 2021

NagualV wrote: »

Think of it from their perspective for a moment - they truly do separate the queues, allowing for deathmatch only, and then random non-deathmatch only. Random non-deathmatch queues then begin to take forever.....the people that want this mode come back to complain. Newer people, or people who are looking for achievements and dont want to do it via deathmatch, take forever to find a group...what happens then? The battleground pop is small. This is a tricky, complicated issue....

I agree it's complicated, however, you have to agree that if ZOS saw the result of this change ahead of time they would not have implemented it like this. Surely? Or why would they have turned Deathmatch only off in the first place?

I did suggest a solution to your issue at end of my original post, I would be curious to hear your thoughts on that.

GuildedLilly · November 2021

Honestly? Separate the queues.

Solo Random Objective (non-death Match)
Solo Death match

Group Random Objective (non-death Match)
Group Death Match

Make solo Random the default, and SAY IN THE UI that the drop down menu contains options for Death match BGs and Groups BGs.

Stop letting DM back fill from people who want to play objectives. Stop letting DM queue rip people out of Random Queue and stick them in DM. We've heard ad nauseum how Death Match is the most popular mode---if that's really the case, they shouldn't have any problems keeping the DM queue popping with players who actually WANT to play it.

Separate the Objective modes, and put them all into the same queue--no DM pull or backfill allowed. Allow Objective players to play a random Relic, Domination, Crazy King, or Chaos Ball. I don't care if the Queue time might be longer...DM is my least favorite mode.

Frankly-- something about the new 'random' queue doesn't add up for me. The DM only test failed, and it failed so spectacularly that even when 'random' BG's were put back, the devs decided to heavily weight the Queue so that DM is running 98-99% of the time, powered by Random queue rips and backfills.

SEPARATE the queues.

DM very well might be the most popular game mode out of 5--but I don't think they would have weighted things so heavily in it's favor on Queue pops if it was AS popular overall between DM and Objectives as we keep hearing. Why would they need to? DM queue could and should be capable of self-sustaining if it's really as popular as the devs and certain players would like us to believe--it shouldn't need to be buffed up by objective players who want a fair shot at random. The players who enjoy both types of games can still queue for them, so I don't see the problem in truly separating the queues. It's the ONLY way to get an accurate assessment of who is playing what, and how often-- vs. trolling objective players with 'random' matches that are basically guaranteed to be DM only.

trackdemon5512 · November 2021

NagualV wrote: »

jaws343 wrote: »

the1andonlyskwex wrote: »

spartaxoxo wrote: »

Here is an extremely rough transcript of what Rich said about BGs on the stream. Please don't quote this as it's not cleaned up and may have inaccuracies. It should be mostly right but I typed this as I listened and have NOT had the chance to listen a second time and read the chat to edit for accuracy.

QcellESO: turns out that BGs are still only-deathmatch, even when queueing for random is the team aware? Any hotfixes planned?

Rich: So, that was the problem right? When you click random. Random is gonna put you into the queue with everybody. And what it does is...there's a bucket, right? So, for each game mode it puts you into each one of those buckets. If people are just queuing deathmatch and solo deathmatch is the top one, random is gonna be always deathmatch. Because, it just goes to try to make a game and if sees that if everybody is queued up, or the majority of people are queued up for deathmatch, then it's just gonna start deathmatch. So, told everybody that was gonna happen. And now it happens, so um, we're gonna watch it. We'll see. But it definitely does work. But, the majority of people are just queuing for deathmatch.

Brokenmolde: If no one queues for anything other than DM, all randos will be DM lol

Rich: Yup, because that's what the buckets are. Everybody is in the bucket, and it looks at people, and that's the way it goes.

QcellESO: Someone did the math and the chance of a non-DM is <0.1%, since a single DM can make 11 others end up in DM. Is this seen as an issue? Should we expect changes before the Q1 DLC?

Rich: Haha, someone did the math? Let me see here, I'm gonna go...Let me go see here. Uh, Battlegrounds (dogs barks, rich to dog: Shut the front door) This report takes a little while to load. And we can't really do anything, if everyone is queueing up for Deathmatch still. We can't really change that, right? Like, the only thing we could possibly do is have a deathmatch only and a non-deathmatch only. But, then that fragments the player base even more than it already is. Like, let's see...Yup, there are definitely other than deathmatch games going on. There's not a lot. Everyone is still queuing up for deathmatch, as it's the top queue. That's kinda what, that's absolutely what I thought was gonna happen, so...um, there's a choice there. And y'all can choose. But, because this is the first one, everybody clicks that. If solo random was there, it would be random. But, you'd still get Deathmatch games. Especially if people switched it down to Deathmatch.

doinstrun: I've only had 1 objective game since the patch. 99% deathmatch. That's random btw

Rich: I don't know if you ever heard what I said doinkstrun, but what random does is puts an entry into each of the buckets. So if there's 4 game types, what random does is put you into 4 different queues or 4 different buckets. And then everybody else goes in and clicks deathmatch only, they just go in the deathmatch only queue. And what the queue does is it goes and looks "how many players are in here?" and "What are the likelihood of me starting s game in anything other than deathmatch?" Or you know, and it goes "Oh hey, look! The likelihood of me starting a game of deathmatch is higher!" So, it starts a deathmatch game. That's how it works. That's how we said it was gonna work. I'm not sure what to say, or how we could change it. Like we could totally split it out, like I said, and say "Random is everything but Deathmatch." But then, randoms just won't ever start up because people are still going and queuing for Deathmatch. So, right, like how do you want to do it? WoW has the exact same problem with Battlegrounds. When they do, you know, Warsong Gultch. People back in the day hated Warsong Gultch and never queued up. And people were like "Hey, your queue is broken. Warsong Gultch never pops," and it's like "yeah, because nobody is queuing up for Warsong Gultch." Like, I'm not sure how to fix that. At least this way Deathmatch is playing the objectives instead of everything being Deathmatch. It's one of those things, it's glass half full, glass half empty kind of weirdness there.

FioFioFIO: It worked before you combined the queues tho

Rich: So people used to say that Deathmatch only popped up, and the reason we combined the queues is you couldn't specifically choose the game types.

Brokenmolde: would it be a bad idea to do like only x% of matches started per timeframe can be DM?

Rich: yes, it would be a very bad idea Brokenmolde. Because then games just wouldn't start at all. And players would be complaining that games don't start at all.

Caindele: make it two buttons, join DM join non-DM, the drop down isn't intuititive.

Rich: So if we do that, players will actually get to a point where they could never get a game. The game could never start, which is bad. Which is why we've done the system we've done where it's buckets. If they are exclusive buckets then 3 people can be in 1 queue, and 6 people could be in another queue, and a Battleground could never start. That would be bad, right? Never want that to happen. In my opinon, any battleground is better than no battleground, even if it's not necessarily a game type that I want to play. Same thing, you know, perfect example, when I was queuing earlier on my tank I was queuing specifically for dread cellar, and I was waiting forever. Soon as I did random, I got in right away instantly.

Elistix: People complain that objective maps don't get any pvp, so they go for DM where they face other players. But what if objective modes just had 1 objective that players had to fight over? It would be deathmatch but with an extra step.

Rich: I'm not sure what you mean by that. There's an objective if you have to do but you have to fight over it? Isn't that Capture the Flag is, you capture the flag? Isn't that what holding an area is?

QcellESO: Last question: If non-DM BGs are inaccessible, is removing the non-DM achievements something you guys would consider?

Rich: Maybe so, if it ever gets to that point. I don't think it will ever get to that point but...

NesESO: the issue with Battlegrounds that many players have is dm is seen as pvp. the other game modes other ppl can avoid pvp the entire match and still win and this is why ppl love or hate obj game modes.

Rich: (reading comment I can't see?) You'd be surprised how many go into pvp but don't actually want to pvp. (seems to be answering question) They just want to run around on the flags. Yup. It's a huge divide in playstyles. (reading comment I can't see?) 80% of your players want to DM (seems to be answering question) I mean it depends on the circles you run in bro. All the elites just want to kill people, right? They want to prove they are better than everybody else and they do that by killing them. There's a lot of other people that enjoy being in pvp but not necessarily having to kill players. Objective based stuff is a ton of fun, Sammy.

(I also can't see this question) Can you move the dropdown rate below the button or is the dropdown not the problem?

Rich: So the problem and you see this everywhere is most players just click the button, they don't change the dropdown, right? So, that is one thing. But, the exact same thing happens in campaigns. They see this list of campaigns here, right, and they just click and they do the first one. They don't click on these other things. It's just human nature. You see the first thing, you click it, you go, right? And we've experimented with changing that so this patch we actually changed this to solo, it used to be group being the top one. We changed it to solo to see what would happen. And guess what happened? More people are queuing solo than they were before. It is just because we changed the drop down. It's all we did was change the dropdown.

doinkstrun: I just want fast bgs

Rich: That's what we all want. for sure

(answering unseen question) Elites in pvp won't fight each other? yeah, they want to hunt the sheep. They want the easy kills. BTW, I am a sheep. So I'm not being mean. (question I can't see) Wait times are gross? Not sure how to solve that problem Doink. To be perfectly honest, if people aren't queueing for specific things or the thing you're queueing up for it's tough to solve. But, we have ideas of things we could do. But ultimately it comes down to, players gotta queue. [transcriber note: I think this might be about dungeons]

Ugh, Rich clearly doesn't understand the math as it relates to his own system. All it takes is one person in the DM queue to drag 11 people from the "random" queue into a DM. He talks like 99% of the games being deathmatch means that 99% of people queueing are in the deathmatch queue.

As-is (assuming he described it accurately), if 90% of people were in the "random" queue, you would still get over 70% deathmatches, and with the queues split 50/50 you'll get 99.98% deathmatches. There needs to be a mechanism to delay queue popping so that there's a chance for 12 randoms to accumulate before a DM pops.

But he is directly saying that more people are actually queuing for Deathmatch. Which, I'd imagine, they have direct data to track that. The questions

Honestly, I would 100% be onboard with removing DM from the random queue so that we can get an end to this and people can realize how unpopular the objective modes are while they wait in endless random queues and never get a match.

CyberOnEso wrote: »

NagualV wrote: »

I'm really saying this in a friendly way, I dont say this with any ill will, or as a disgruntled person, or in an argumentative tone.....but...

You and others are wrong in your interpretation.....Deathmatch is the most popular mode, like it or not......they wouldnt have made the decision to structure the queues the way they did if it wasnt.

I'll repeat - the issue they face is that if they truly split the queues, the objective queues are going to take a while, this isnt an easy issue for them to fix I'm afraid...

I really don't disagree with you that Deathmatch is the most popular mode, it almost certainly is.

And Vaults of Madness is the most popular dungeon.

Maybe Deathmatch is more popular than all the other modes combined, and if they have the data for that I would love to see it. If they want to remove all the other modes then that's fine, but I am saying they tried it, and it failed.

Just because Deathmatch is the most popular mode, and I agree with you that it probably is, there is no need for it to be the only mode. They have achievements and item drops that are exclusive to the other modes that people will want to collect and it is nearly impossible to do so.

I am aware they don't want queue fragmentation, of course not. But lying to people by making them think they have a choice is not the way forward, if they truly believe Deathmatch only is the way forward then why did they not say so.

I hear you....

Thing is, although the "drop down issue" was acknowledged by them, I still dont think that will alleviate the situation much.

Think of it from their perspective for a moment - they truly do separate the queues, allowing for deathmatch only, and then random non-deathmatch only. Random non-deathmatch queues then begin to take forever.....the people that want this mode come back to complain. Newer people, or people who are looking for achievements and dont want to do it via deathmatch, take forever to find a group...what happens then? The battleground pop is small. This is a tricky, complicated issue....

It’s not tricky. Switch “random solo battleground” with “random solo deathmatch” in the drop down. See then if the participation for all 4 game types evens out. If it does then based upon what has happened for the last few days is clearly a result of people choosing the first thing available.

If it looks the same as it has then people really are choosing Deathmatch over random battleground choice. If it balances out with a skew toward Deathmatch then some really are using the drop down to choose and Deathmatch may in fact be more popular. That last point can be contested though because Deathmatches still have a biased weighting to them for them to appear.

Also I think at this point we can need to remember a lot of these issues is because BGs has a small population that has extremely effectively ran casuals out of it and that’s a huge problem. ZOS should let be trying to cater to the diehards but trying to get casuals back. Instead every action done over the last two months has been doing the opposite.

jaws343 · November 2021

CyberOnEso wrote: »

NagualV wrote: »

Think of it from their perspective for a moment - they truly do separate the queues, allowing for deathmatch only, and then random non-deathmatch only. Random non-deathmatch queues then begin to take forever.....the people that want this mode come back to complain. Newer people, or people who are looking for achievements and dont want to do it via deathmatch, take forever to find a group...what happens then? The battleground pop is small. This is a tricky, complicated issue....

I agree it's complicated, however, you have to agree that if ZOS saw the result of this change ahead of time they would not have implemented it like this. Surely? Or why would they have turned Deathmatch only off in the first place?

I did suggest a solution to your issue at end of my original post, I would be curious to hear your thoughts on that.

They turned Deathmatch only off in the first place for a few reasons:

1. More players queued into deathmatch only, which made deathmatch the primary gamemode in the random queue. Something we are now seeing again.
2. Solo queue players being pitted against pre-made groups is a complete nightmare of an experience.

So they removed direct queue for all game modes to consolidate the queues to provide a solo and group queue. But in doing so, they made DM, the only non objective mode, appear far less frequently. Which is the problem they were trying to address.

I personally think that a better solution to all of this would have been to weight DM in the queue differently. Should be 50% chance to get DM, and 50% chance to get objective. With the objective modes further broken out within that 50% chance. So the game first says: Will this be DM or Objective. If Objective, then it randomly pulls based on the percentage for each objective.

CyberOnEso · November 2021

trackdemon5512 wrote: »

It’s not tricky. Switch “random solo battleground” with “random solo deathmatch” in the drop down. See then if the participation for all 4 game types evens out. If it does then based upon what has happened for the last few days is clearly a result of people choosing the first thing available.

If it looks the same as it has then people really are choosing Deathmatch over random battleground choice. If it balances out with a skew toward Deathmatch then some really are using the drop down to choose and Deathmatch may in fact be more popular. That last point can be contested though because Deathmatches still have a biased weighting to them for them to appear.

Hi, I actually don't the think solution would be switching the labels in the drop-down menu, it would certainly help. I am not suggesting that it wouldn't help, at all.

But if you look at this graph

This graph is plotting

1-(((1-[% of people queuing for Deathmatch Only])^12)*0.8)

As I think the way the queue works, and how Rich Lambert described it working, as soon as it can find a match of 12 people it will create a game, which even if one of those 12 picks "Deathmatch Only" it will be Deathmatch.

(1-X)^12 = The probability that 12 people queue into the 'Random Battlegrounds' queue without anyone else queuing into the 'Deathmatch only' mode, presuming 30% of people choose 'Deathmatch only'

*0.8 Because even if that happens it's only an 80% chance that it will be a non- deathmatch mode.

Link to sheet

The queue at the moment is so more more likely to produce Deathmatch games that if even 10% of players selected "Deathmatch only" 77.41% of matches would be Deathmatch. And if 20% of players selected "Deatchmatch only" 94.5% of matches would be Deathmatch.

Araneae6537 · November 2021

I hope that ZOS will consider completely separating the two queues. I’ve not gotten anything but deathmatch in the “random” queue and last night was pitted against players obviously waaay more experienced in deathmatch mode PVP. On the plus side, I’ve no complaints about any sets or abilities in particular; I was killed in a variety of ways and it was obvious to me the difference was in player skill.

I wouldn’t mind waiting longer in a completely separate random or even objective-only queue. I enjoy variety and would be glad for ZOS to add even additional modes. GW2 had an interested one where you had to deploy NPC siege of a sort to get into your opponent’s keep and defeat their lord and it was challenging to balance offense and defense — just throwing that out there.

I can even enjoy deathmatch when it’s evenly matched but that would require basing it on wins.

NagualV · November 2021

CyberOnEso wrote: »

NagualV wrote: »

Think of it from their perspective for a moment - they truly do separate the queues, allowing for deathmatch only, and then random non-deathmatch only. Random non-deathmatch queues then begin to take forever.....the people that want this mode come back to complain. Newer people, or people who are looking for achievements and dont want to do it via deathmatch, take forever to find a group...what happens then? The battleground pop is small. This is a tricky, complicated issue....

I agree it's complicated, however, you have to agree that if ZOS saw the result of this change ahead of time they would not have implemented it like this. Surely? Or why would they have turned Deathmatch only off in the first place?

I did suggest a solution to your issue at end of my original post, I would be curious to hear your thoughts on that.

@Jaws343 answered your question about why they turned deathmatch only off in the first place, in a thread below.

I'm all for solutions, trust me. It wasnt exactly "fair" either when the folks who wanted to play the most popular mode were actually forced to rarely play it, if at all. Weve come full circle it looks like, now the objective based crowd is experiencing the same frustration.

I would love for there to be a way for the objective folks to have their choice, and the DM to have their choice....but were talking about a small population to begin with....

NagualV · November 2021

trackdemon5512 wrote: »

NagualV wrote: »

jaws343 wrote: »

the1andonlyskwex wrote: »

spartaxoxo wrote: »

Here is an extremely rough transcript of what Rich said about BGs on the stream. Please don't quote this as it's not cleaned up and may have inaccuracies. It should be mostly right but I typed this as I listened and have NOT had the chance to listen a second time and read the chat to edit for accuracy.

QcellESO: turns out that BGs are still only-deathmatch, even when queueing for random is the team aware? Any hotfixes planned?

Rich: So, that was the problem right? When you click random. Random is gonna put you into the queue with everybody. And what it does is...there's a bucket, right? So, for each game mode it puts you into each one of those buckets. If people are just queuing deathmatch and solo deathmatch is the top one, random is gonna be always deathmatch. Because, it just goes to try to make a game and if sees that if everybody is queued up, or the majority of people are queued up for deathmatch, then it's just gonna start deathmatch. So, told everybody that was gonna happen. And now it happens, so um, we're gonna watch it. We'll see. But it definitely does work. But, the majority of people are just queuing for deathmatch.

Brokenmolde: If no one queues for anything other than DM, all randos will be DM lol

Rich: Yup, because that's what the buckets are. Everybody is in the bucket, and it looks at people, and that's the way it goes.

QcellESO: Someone did the math and the chance of a non-DM is <0.1%, since a single DM can make 11 others end up in DM. Is this seen as an issue? Should we expect changes before the Q1 DLC?

Rich: Haha, someone did the math? Let me see here, I'm gonna go...Let me go see here. Uh, Battlegrounds (dogs barks, rich to dog: Shut the front door) This report takes a little while to load. And we can't really do anything, if everyone is queueing up for Deathmatch still. We can't really change that, right? Like, the only thing we could possibly do is have a deathmatch only and a non-deathmatch only. But, then that fragments the player base even more than it already is. Like, let's see...Yup, there are definitely other than deathmatch games going on. There's not a lot. Everyone is still queuing up for deathmatch, as it's the top queue. That's kinda what, that's absolutely what I thought was gonna happen, so...um, there's a choice there. And y'all can choose. But, because this is the first one, everybody clicks that. If solo random was there, it would be random. But, you'd still get Deathmatch games. Especially if people switched it down to Deathmatch.

doinstrun: I've only had 1 objective game since the patch. 99% deathmatch. That's random btw

Rich: I don't know if you ever heard what I said doinkstrun, but what random does is puts an entry into each of the buckets. So if there's 4 game types, what random does is put you into 4 different queues or 4 different buckets. And then everybody else goes in and clicks deathmatch only, they just go in the deathmatch only queue. And what the queue does is it goes and looks "how many players are in here?" and "What are the likelihood of me starting s game in anything other than deathmatch?" Or you know, and it goes "Oh hey, look! The likelihood of me starting a game of deathmatch is higher!" So, it starts a deathmatch game. That's how it works. That's how we said it was gonna work. I'm not sure what to say, or how we could change it. Like we could totally split it out, like I said, and say "Random is everything but Deathmatch." But then, randoms just won't ever start up because people are still going and queuing for Deathmatch. So, right, like how do you want to do it? WoW has the exact same problem with Battlegrounds. When they do, you know, Warsong Gultch. People back in the day hated Warsong Gultch and never queued up. And people were like "Hey, your queue is broken. Warsong Gultch never pops," and it's like "yeah, because nobody is queuing up for Warsong Gultch." Like, I'm not sure how to fix that. At least this way Deathmatch is playing the objectives instead of everything being Deathmatch. It's one of those things, it's glass half full, glass half empty kind of weirdness there.

FioFioFIO: It worked before you combined the queues tho

Rich: So people used to say that Deathmatch only popped up, and the reason we combined the queues is you couldn't specifically choose the game types.

Brokenmolde: would it be a bad idea to do like only x% of matches started per timeframe can be DM?

Rich: yes, it would be a very bad idea Brokenmolde. Because then games just wouldn't start at all. And players would be complaining that games don't start at all.

Caindele: make it two buttons, join DM join non-DM, the drop down isn't intuititive.

Rich: So if we do that, players will actually get to a point where they could never get a game. The game could never start, which is bad. Which is why we've done the system we've done where it's buckets. If they are exclusive buckets then 3 people can be in 1 queue, and 6 people could be in another queue, and a Battleground could never start. That would be bad, right? Never want that to happen. In my opinon, any battleground is better than no battleground, even if it's not necessarily a game type that I want to play. Same thing, you know, perfect example, when I was queuing earlier on my tank I was queuing specifically for dread cellar, and I was waiting forever. Soon as I did random, I got in right away instantly.

Elistix: People complain that objective maps don't get any pvp, so they go for DM where they face other players. But what if objective modes just had 1 objective that players had to fight over? It would be deathmatch but with an extra step.

Rich: I'm not sure what you mean by that. There's an objective if you have to do but you have to fight over it? Isn't that Capture the Flag is, you capture the flag? Isn't that what holding an area is?

QcellESO: Last question: If non-DM BGs are inaccessible, is removing the non-DM achievements something you guys would consider?

Rich: Maybe so, if it ever gets to that point. I don't think it will ever get to that point but...

NesESO: the issue with Battlegrounds that many players have is dm is seen as pvp. the other game modes other ppl can avoid pvp the entire match and still win and this is why ppl love or hate obj game modes.

Rich: (reading comment I can't see?) You'd be surprised how many go into pvp but don't actually want to pvp. (seems to be answering question) They just want to run around on the flags. Yup. It's a huge divide in playstyles. (reading comment I can't see?) 80% of your players want to DM (seems to be answering question) I mean it depends on the circles you run in bro. All the elites just want to kill people, right? They want to prove they are better than everybody else and they do that by killing them. There's a lot of other people that enjoy being in pvp but not necessarily having to kill players. Objective based stuff is a ton of fun, Sammy.

(I also can't see this question) Can you move the dropdown rate below the button or is the dropdown not the problem?

Rich: So the problem and you see this everywhere is most players just click the button, they don't change the dropdown, right? So, that is one thing. But, the exact same thing happens in campaigns. They see this list of campaigns here, right, and they just click and they do the first one. They don't click on these other things. It's just human nature. You see the first thing, you click it, you go, right? And we've experimented with changing that so this patch we actually changed this to solo, it used to be group being the top one. We changed it to solo to see what would happen. And guess what happened? More people are queuing solo than they were before. It is just because we changed the drop down. It's all we did was change the dropdown.

doinkstrun: I just want fast bgs

Rich: That's what we all want. for sure

(answering unseen question) Elites in pvp won't fight each other? yeah, they want to hunt the sheep. They want the easy kills. BTW, I am a sheep. So I'm not being mean. (question I can't see) Wait times are gross? Not sure how to solve that problem Doink. To be perfectly honest, if people aren't queueing for specific things or the thing you're queueing up for it's tough to solve. But, we have ideas of things we could do. But ultimately it comes down to, players gotta queue. [transcriber note: I think this might be about dungeons]

Ugh, Rich clearly doesn't understand the math as it relates to his own system. All it takes is one person in the DM queue to drag 11 people from the "random" queue into a DM. He talks like 99% of the games being deathmatch means that 99% of people queueing are in the deathmatch queue.

As-is (assuming he described it accurately), if 90% of people were in the "random" queue, you would still get over 70% deathmatches, and with the queues split 50/50 you'll get 99.98% deathmatches. There needs to be a mechanism to delay queue popping so that there's a chance for 12 randoms to accumulate before a DM pops.

But he is directly saying that more people are actually queuing for Deathmatch. Which, I'd imagine, they have direct data to track that. The questions

Honestly, I would 100% be onboard with removing DM from the random queue so that we can get an end to this and people can realize how unpopular the objective modes are while they wait in endless random queues and never get a match.

CyberOnEso wrote: »

NagualV wrote: »

I'm really saying this in a friendly way, I dont say this with any ill will, or as a disgruntled person, or in an argumentative tone.....but...

You and others are wrong in your interpretation.....Deathmatch is the most popular mode, like it or not......they wouldnt have made the decision to structure the queues the way they did if it wasnt.

I'll repeat - the issue they face is that if they truly split the queues, the objective queues are going to take a while, this isnt an easy issue for them to fix I'm afraid...

I really don't disagree with you that Deathmatch is the most popular mode, it almost certainly is.

And Vaults of Madness is the most popular dungeon.

Maybe Deathmatch is more popular than all the other modes combined, and if they have the data for that I would love to see it. If they want to remove all the other modes then that's fine, but I am saying they tried it, and it failed.

Just because Deathmatch is the most popular mode, and I agree with you that it probably is, there is no need for it to be the only mode. They have achievements and item drops that are exclusive to the other modes that people will want to collect and it is nearly impossible to do so.

I am aware they don't want queue fragmentation, of course not. But lying to people by making them think they have a choice is not the way forward, if they truly believe Deathmatch only is the way forward then why did they not say so.

I hear you....

Thing is, although the "drop down issue" was acknowledged by them, I still dont think that will alleviate the situation much.

Think of it from their perspective for a moment - they truly do separate the queues, allowing for deathmatch only, and then random non-deathmatch only. Random non-deathmatch queues then begin to take forever.....the people that want this mode come back to complain. Newer people, or people who are looking for achievements and dont want to do it via deathmatch, take forever to find a group...what happens then? The battleground pop is small. This is a tricky, complicated issue....

Also I think at this point we can need to remember a lot of these issues is because BGs has a small population that has extremely effectively ran casuals out of it and that’s a huge problem. ZOS should let be trying to cater to the diehards but trying to get casuals back. Instead every action done over the last two months has been doing the opposite.

So let me ask you this....

I'm sure ZOS wants to increase the BG population, I mean they dont want it to decrease...

And if they want more "casuals" to participate, and casuals tend to prefer objective based modes, what happens if they separate the queues, and the objective non-Dom queue suffers from very long wait times ..how would that affect players willingness to participate in BG....long waits might discourage them.. ...

Again, tricky situation in my opinion...

etchedpixels · November 2021

the1andonlyskwex wrote: »

Ugh, Rich clearly doesn't understand the math as it relates to his own system. All it takes is one person in the DM queue to drag 11 people from the "random" queue into a DM. He talks like 99% of the games being deathmatch means that 99% of people queueing are in the deathmatch queue.

And it works out worse than that because everyone who finds DM boring is not queueing at all so it's going to be DM every time which means even less people will queue for anything else.

The same is true for dungeons as I understand it - if there were a line of tanks all queueing for moonhunter keep because something there became a tank meta then DDs would get a lot of moonhunter keep practice 8)

trackdemon5512 · November 2021

CyberOnEso wrote: »
trackdemon5512 wrote: »

It’s not tricky. Switch “random solo battleground” with “random solo deathmatch” in the drop down. See then if the participation for all 4 game types evens out. If it does then based upon what has happened for the last few days is clearly a result of people choosing the first thing available.

If it looks the same as it has then people really are choosing Deathmatch over random battleground choice. If it balances out with a skew toward Deathmatch then some really are using the drop down to choose and Deathmatch may in fact be more popular. That last point can be contested though because Deathmatches still have a biased weighting to them for them to appear.

Hi, I actually don't the think solution would be switching the labels in the drop-down menu, it would certainly help. I am not suggesting that it wouldn't help, at all.

But if you look at this graph

This graph is plotting
1-(((1-[% of people queuing for Deathmatch Only])^12)*0.8)
As I think the way the queue works, and how Rich Lambert described it working, as soon as it can find a match of 12 people it will create a game, which even if one of those 12 picks "Deathmatch Only" it will be Deathmatch.
(1-X)^12 = The probability that 12 people queue into the 'Random Battlegrounds' queue without anyone else queuing into the 'Deathmatch only' mode, presuming 30% of people choose 'Deathmatch only'

*0.8 Because even if that happens it's only an 80% chance that it will be a non- deathmatch mode.

Link to sheet

The queue at the moment is so more more likely to produce Deathmatch games that if even 10% of players selected "Deathmatch only" 77.41% of matches would be Deathmatch. And if 20% of players selected "Deatchmatch only" 94.5% of matches would be Deathmatch.

Yes I agree.

What I’m also saying is that DM has an even higher chance than the straight stats because like Rich said “people will choose the easiest/fastest path to accomplish something”. Solo Random DM being first in the drop down means anyone is pretty likely to just click that even without realizing the implications.

If players were consciously, at all times, cognizant of what they were choosing then we could easily see what’s most popular. Instead ZOS has obfuscated it behind a system that gives them extremely bad data. Rich speaks as if the data he has is correct but he’s clearly looking at just number of Deathmatches played at best recently. There is NO WAY for him to tell with this new system what BG mode is in fact more popular or, more importantly, the degree to which each individual mode is preferred.

Switching the drop down order is the smallest step towards at least collecting better data. Otherwise we will get a repeat of what happened with the last test. Maybe a small temporary bump in BG population before it crashes because it’s ALL DMs again. And when people try to say “we knew this is going to happen” the pro-DM crowd will argue that mitigating factors like a competing MMO or Dark Convergence or a new zone are to blame rather than seeing what the obvious truth could be that beyond die hards people don’t really like playing DMs.

CyberOnEso · November 2021

jaws343 wrote: »

They turned Deathmatch only off in the first place for a few reasons:

1. More players queued into deathmatch only, which made deathmatch the primary gamemode in the random queue. Something we are now seeing again.
2. Solo queue players being pitted against pre-made groups is a complete nightmare of an experience.

So they removed direct queue for all game modes to consolidate the queues to provide a solo and group queue. But in doing so, they made DM, the only non objective mode, appear far less frequently. Which is the problem they were trying to address

I am talking about the "Deathmatch only" test, which they said "left Battleground populations in a fairly unhealthy state.". I am unsure if we are discussing the same thing.

I personally think that a better solution to all of this would have been to weight DM in the queue differently. Should be 50% chance to get DM, and 50% chance to get objective. With the objective modes further broken out within that 50% chance. So the game first says: Will this be DM or Objective. If Objective, then it randomly pulls based on the percentage for each objective.

I think this is a better solution than what is happening at the moment, especially for times of low queue population, however, during prime time I see no reason as to why there cannot be a Deathmatch only queue and a genuinely Random queue. And then only merge the queues when required, which is what I essentially suggested in my original post.