The truth about ESO's small scale pvp culture - from an actual PVPer

ATomiX69

PvP makes no money = very little time investment from their side.
Unless they somehow can tie in PvP Features (no, not just broken sets) with Expansions, we wont ever get anything major.

slimwaffle

Moriz wrote: »

Hello,
Quick intro on who am I so you understand the roots:
I'm an mmorpg pvp gamer since always, and I love small scale structured pvp. Arenas to be exact, where you queue up and fight other compeitive players who also seek to play arenas. It's much more competitive and fun for me in every single mmo where you have access to arenas.

One of the notable games i've played for a while when it was ultra competitive was guild wars 2, where the main competitive mode is 5v5 with domination type mode, where it's crazy how you have to rotate, play the macro of the match but still be able to win your team fights, your 1v1s, 2v2s and so on.

Then I met ESO..I've been playing ESO on and off since 2017, pretty much exclusively for PvP and BGs. don't particularly care about cyro too much, 80% walking 20% figthing, imperial city is fun to go and make a crap ton of gold to supply for all my builds.
For many years i've played BGs my own way, which to kill as many players as I could but to also win the match no matter what the game mode was.
I got to know more of the "high end" battleground community this time around in NA-PC, and i've learned that in this game culturally speaking, no player who is actually good and actually performing well every match consistently, cares about ANYTHING other than how many kills you get in a BG.

From that point on, wanting to be relevant with the other "cool kids" i've also embraced this mentality and completely stopped playing objectives and only ever focused on kills...
Not gonna lie, some of the craziest BG matches i've had in my life were games where you had other sick pvp players too and everyone was playing to win the game mode, and of course killing as many players as you can as well.
But it's undeniable that due to this games nature of having 3 teams, that a lot of the time in other modes like domination or crazy king, the least skilled players will win the match because they literally just avoid pvp and run from point A to point B to score points. That takes 0 skill.

The main issue to why actual pvp players don't play for objectives and can't see any other mode other than TDM being competitive, is the fact that you have 3 teams really, that has always been the biggest issue of this game and why BGs will never be successful.
If you have a solid 5v5 team v team, every single match of any objective will be competitive and fun, less cluster fuky, more organized.
Theres literally no reason to have the only queueable structured pvp be 3 teams in a game like ESO, it will NEVER fix itself and no matter what ZOS tries you are NEVER going to be able to break through this barrier where serious pvp players will see every other mode as a joke and completely ignore it to just play for kills.

Unless you change this to a two teams, 5v5 or 4v4 even, maybe make an actual solo queue ranked mode with actual rewards, and non ranked for premades. Such a simple solution really.



TL;DR
all game modes are a joke for true PVP gamers because it's 3 teams and usually objective pvp is won by bads who avoid pvp and just afk on circle
make the game 2 teams only, 5v5 or 4v4 and add an actual solo queue ranked system and premade for unranked.
You'll see how all your game modes will be played by everyone then, if its only 2 teams.

So to give some background. I was actually one of the players who originally spoke out to get them to add battlegrounds in the first place.

I had just come from playing games like swotor and wow. Games with lets be honest much better pvp. It took a fairly long time to convince @ZOS to add the small scale pvp. The thing that was asked for the most was the arena style pvp (2v2, 3v3 etc). Even back then it was the thing asked for the most.

We asked for ranked battlegrounds that we never got.
We asked for ranked arenas that we never got.
We asked for the leader-boards to matter and never got them.

But even back at the beginning when they first added battlegrounds, a lot of us said "please don't do 3 teams", "Please make it 2 teams".This is a request that kept coming up over and over.

3 teams is just bad design.

I personally have done a bunch of posts over the years saying that maps and battles don't flow. That pvp can't be balanced. That small scale pvp lacks skill. And it is all because of the whole 3 teams thing.

The small scale pvp in this game is just constantly being 1 upped. What I mean by this is there is no skill. The team getting attacked from behind 9 times out of 10 is the one that dies.

This is why you get players with large kill counts that are avoiding being part of the main fight. They are just constantly manoeuvring to catch people off guard.

Now granted the pvp is alot better these days compared to way back in the beginning. But eso follows a format of surprise people and burst. Its that format that really stops it from being truly great.

_adhyffbjjjf12

3 teams is not bad design. Case in point GW2 has very successful 3 team capture the flag etc and has done for many years, with a casual queue. I think the main issue is the spikiness of damage for new players. Now GW2 deals with this by fixing gear and setting everyones level to be max, and ESO has partially went down this road with No CP, so maybe the answer is to do exactly what GW2 does - when you join BG you are auto set to max level, no CP and a set of fixed Armor sets to choose from. Playing diversity comes from skills rather than shiny numbers from gear.

Aldoss

_adhyffbjjjf12 wrote: »

so maybe the answer is to do exactly what GW2 does

If people like the way GW2 plays, then they should play GW2.

I don't think the solution to the complaints being shared on these forums should be to just rip the design from another game. Changing from a 3 team format to a 2 team format to emulate literally every competitive fame ever is a much simpler solution and still keeps the atmosphere and environment that drew players to ESO in the first place.

_adhyffbjjjf12

Aldoss wrote: »

_adhyffbjjjf12 wrote: »

so maybe the answer is to do exactly what GW2 does

If people like the way GW2 plays, then they should play GW2.

I don't think the solution to the complaints being shared on these forums should be to just rip the design from another game. Changing from a 3 team format to a 2 team format to emulate literally every competitive fame ever is a much simpler solution and still keeps the atmosphere and environment that drew players to ESO in the first place.

its actually you that's suggesting ripping things up and changing to 2 teams (sounds like dull simplification to me) My point is there is no need, its a proven model, GW2 is an example where they went after the core issues and found a solution. So perhaps not 'exactly' but there is a well known saying in software - don't reinvent the wheel.

Aldoss

_adhyffbjjjf12 wrote: »

its a proven model

Please list other successful games that follow this model.

One data point does not make a model.

_adhyffbjjjf12

Aldoss wrote: »

_adhyffbjjjf12 wrote: »

its a proven model

Please list other successful games that follow this model.

One data point does not make a model.

mm as I said it works in GW2 and has done for many a year.

_adhyffbjjjf12

_adhyffbjjjf12 wrote: »

Aldoss wrote: »

_adhyffbjjjf12 wrote: »

its a proven model

Please list other successful games that follow this model.

One data point does not make a model.

mm as I said it works in GW2 and has done for many a year.

Your also confusing .'model that works' to 'a single model that should be applied across the industry' I was talking about the former

Aldoss

_adhyffbjjjf12 wrote: »

its a proven model

Emphasis mine to explain why I disagree with your proposal. I'll abstain from having a non-relevant argument of semantics.

Thank you for sharing your opinion, even though I don't agree with it.

xDeusEJRx

_adhyffbjjjf12 wrote: »

3 teams is not bad design. Case in point GW2 has very successful 3 team capture the flag etc and has done for many years, with a casual queue. I think the main issue is the spikiness of damage for new players. Now GW2 deals with this by fixing gear and setting everyones level to be max, and ESO has partially went down this road with No CP, so maybe the answer is to do exactly what GW2 does - when you join BG you are auto set to max level, no CP and a set of fixed Armor sets to choose from. Playing diversity comes from skills rather than shiny numbers from gear.

That's not gonna make BG's any better. During no proc tests, lots of people were struggling immensely despite there being about 10 or so armor sets to use in cyrodiil and that's with CP enabled. Doubt with CP gone that will make it easier, lots rely on proc sets and limiting the amount of sets they can use will gimp some players substantially. If anything it'll just make the well accustomed players do better and the casuals do worse.

I personally wouldn't be opposed to this idea, but I remember no proc tanking substantially in population mainly because of lack of gear choice, can't see this holding up well in BG's

thesarahandcompany

gariondavey wrote: »

You are correct about the objective modes, however. They do need a rework to encourage pvp. This can be done with 2 teams on objective matches, or having 1 relic for capture the relic, fewer flags for flag games, and adding snares to chaosball and relic.
Heals over time of the same name should not stack, as well. (Radiating regen only 1 on you at a time, etc).

I don't think we should nerf HOTs like that. Because that would entail also needing to limit other dot procs and dot skills from stacking. E.g., you can't have two DK engulfing flames on you.

That would stale a lot of the pvp and be problematic in match making.

At the highest of levels, teams should be dot-stacking and hot-stacking to maximize pressure and counterpressure.

aerobar104

Aldoss wrote: »

_adhyffbjjjf12 wrote: »

so maybe the answer is to do exactly what GW2 does

If people like the way GW2 plays, then they should play GW2.

I don't think the solution to the complaints being shared on these forums should be to just rip the design from another game. Changing from a 3 team format to a 2 team format to emulate literally every competitive fame ever is a much simpler solution and still keeps the atmosphere and environment that drew players to ESO in the first place.

Oh, so you want the Vet twinks to continue dominating Bgs then? More people would play PVP if they did not spend most of their time in a GY.

Aldoss

aerobar104 wrote: »

Oh, so you want the Vet twinks to continue dominating Bgs then? More people would play PVP if they did not spend most of their time in a GY.

How is this at all relevant to this discussion?

Rohamad_Ali

ESO forum pvp is best balance.

Casul

Rohamad_Ali wrote: »

ESO forum pvp is best balance.

If my sentence has more words than yours does that mean I am OP? Nerf hammer incoming.