What's the decision-making logic behing a ranked card game PvP mode but not BGs or duels?

Dem_kitkats1 · April 2022

Dagoth_Rac wrote: »

But does ZOS want to spend the time on that? With effort and determination, they might be able to split out what classes are overperforming and underperforming, what gear is overperforming and underperforming, what skills are overperforming and underperforming, and what combinations and permutations of all of those are overperforming and underperforming.

And then what? Adjust accordingly to balance BGs? Which battlegrounds? Deathmatch will likely see very different results than Crazy King. And what about PvE and Cyrodiil? Will buffing underperforming BG builds make them overpowered in Trials or Cyrodiil? Will nerfing overperforming BG builds make them useless in Trials or Cyrodiil?

It is hard to have battleground rankings and leaderboards mean much without well-balanced BG play. But it is hard to have well-balanced BG play without impacting endgame PvE and Cyrodiil.

You know what you can focus on balancing without worrying about breaking Trials and Cyrodiil in the process? A card game.

Exactly. In terms of gear, the data that ranked BGs provides is only accurate for the BGs setting, it would not take into account the balance needed for all other content, and ZOS will not adjust balance based on that. So unless there is standardization, there will never be true balance for BGs.

divnyi · April 2022

WordsOfPower wrote: »

divnyi wrote: »

@Dem_kitkats1 I've had maybe ~5 days a year when BGs were lagging. Network latency is definitely not the issue on PC EU if you have a good network connection. Not working gapclosers is another issue, but really, I don't care much. Especially if ranking would be seasonal so they can safely reset it with new patches.

You didn't mention many things, including ultimates not going off, breaking free not being possible even with a full stamina bar, dragon leap, booted from server mid-BG, and a whole host of other problems.

Except leap-chains-charge skills not working in some BGs (although with fairly good chance, like 5-10% maybe), I don't have the issues you mentioned.

CameraBeardThePirate · April 2022

Dem_kitkats1 wrote: »

Dagoth_Rac wrote: »

But does ZOS want to spend the time on that? With effort and determination, they might be able to split out what classes are overperforming and underperforming, what gear is overperforming and underperforming, what skills are overperforming and underperforming, and what combinations and permutations of all of those are overperforming and underperforming.

And then what? Adjust accordingly to balance BGs? Which battlegrounds? Deathmatch will likely see very different results than Crazy King. And what about PvE and Cyrodiil? Will buffing underperforming BG builds make them overpowered in Trials or Cyrodiil? Will nerfing overperforming BG builds make them useless in Trials or Cyrodiil?

It is hard to have battleground rankings and leaderboards mean much without well-balanced BG play. But it is hard to have well-balanced BG play without impacting endgame PvE and Cyrodiil.

You know what you can focus on balancing without worrying about breaking Trials and Cyrodiil in the process? A card game.

Exactly. In terms of gear, the data that ranked BGs provides is only accurate for the BGs setting, it would not take into account the balance needed for all other content, and ZOS will not adjust balance based on that. So unless there is standardization, there will never be true balance for BGs.

By this logic no balance changes would ever be made because builds, skills, and playstyles function completely differently in every aspect of the game. Despite popular opinion ZOS still does know how to develop a game. It would provide good data on what works, what doesn't, and what's overperforming in BGs, which would in turn give them info on what changes to make. It's not like they'd make balance changes in a vacuum and only take the BG information into account, that's not how they've ever developed this game.

Silversmith · May 2022

There are vastly more PvE players than PvP players in this game. It makes sense from a business perspective to cater to your biggest customer base.

CameraBeardThePirate · May 2022

Silversmith wrote: »

There are vastly more PvE players than PvP players in this game. It makes sense from a business perspective to cater to your biggest customer base.

There are almost always more PvE players in any MMO, but the fact that they haven't changed or added anything significant related to PvP isn't really helping the PvP population. It would take exactly one patch of adding something significant to keep players interested in PvP, whether that's adding ranked, or adding custom BG lobbies, or even just adding a new PvP zone. A single patch or update with a significant PvP addition really would go miles to shocking the PvP community back to life.

WordsOfPower · May 2022

Is everyone actually aware of the timeline of the game and what the ratio of PvP content added to the game vs. PvE content has been?

_adhyffbjjjf12 · May 2022

Silversmith wrote: »

There are vastly more PvE players than PvP players in this game. It makes sense from a business perspective to cater to your biggest customer base.

As per comments above, the PVE audience is always significantly larger than PVP. The point that's being missed that the PVeE players who also like to dabble in casual PVP are also losing out in addition to pure PVP players. Its a massive failing of ESO's long term end game.

To put things into perspective, even if 5% of the player base liked to dabble casually in PVP then there would be 0 population issues for PVP, giving scope for separate queues etc. The root problem is what puts off casual players from PVP, and that all comes back to core issues around gameplay and power differentials.

VaranisArano · May 2022

WordsOfPower wrote: »

Is everyone actually aware of the timeline of the game and what the ratio of PvP content added to the game vs. PvE content has been?

Cyrodiil - extremely popular until the accumulating performance issues drove most players away. A vestige of its former self, pun intended.

Imperial City - so unpopular that ZOS has to give it away for free AND shoehorn it into ticket events to get players to go there

Battlegrounds - unpopular enough that ZOS had to make it base game and despite trying a number of different queue options, can't get enough players to let people play the game modes they like AND have reasonable queue times.

Even before we consider the rearchitecture, it's not really a wonder why ZOS hasn't been adding more PVP content.

What they have, doesn't work. What they've added, is unpopular.

divnyi · May 2022

_adhyffbjjjf12 wrote: »

Silversmith wrote: »

There are vastly more PvE players than PvP players in this game. It makes sense from a business perspective to cater to your biggest customer base.

As per comments above, the PVE audience is always significantly larger than PVP.

Craglorn is less populated than biggest cyro campaign at any time of the day. What should it tell us?

If by PvE you mean casuals, then ye. But comparing harder content, PvE is likely approx the same size, but we get new trials all the time.

CameraBeardThePirate · May 2022

VaranisArano wrote: »

WordsOfPower wrote: »

Is everyone actually aware of the timeline of the game and what the ratio of PvP content added to the game vs. PvE content has been?

Cyrodiil - extremely popular until the accumulating performance issues drove most players away. A vestige of its former self, pun intended.

Imperial City - so unpopular that ZOS has to give it away for free AND shoehorn it into ticket events to get players to go there

Battlegrounds - unpopular enough that ZOS had to make it base game and despite trying a number of different queue options, can't get enough players to let people play the game modes they like AND have reasonable queue times.

Even before we consider the rearchitecture, it's not really a wonder why ZOS hasn't been adding more PVP content.

What they have, doesn't work. What they've added, is unpopular.

This is kind of misleading though. IC and BGs, at least among the more hardcore PvPers, are almost always considered the best PvP that the game has to offer. The reason theyre unpopular is that there's no incentive to do those things at all. No meaningful leaderboards (no leaderboard at all in the case of IC), pitiful rewards vs the time and effort spent in the activity.

In the case of BGs, pitifully designed gamemodes that split the population between those who are there to take advantage of the poorly designed modes and run from flag to flag, and those who have no interest in the poorly designed modes and don't even bother with the objective. It's no wonder the population is low because if a casual joins BGs, their options are struggle to keep up with turbo DMers on their team or get farmed by DMers and lose because they don't know how to take advantage of the objectives.

WordsOfPower · May 2022

VaranisArano wrote: »

WordsOfPower wrote: »

Is everyone actually aware of the timeline of the game and what the ratio of PvP content added to the game vs. PvE content has been?

Cyrodiil - extremely popular until the accumulating performance issues drove most players away. A vestige of its former self, pun intended.

Imperial City - so unpopular that ZOS has to give it away for free AND shoehorn it into ticket events to get players to go there

Battlegrounds - unpopular enough that ZOS had to make it base game and despite trying a number of different queue options, can't get enough players to let people play the game modes they like AND have reasonable queue times.

Even before we consider the rearchitecture, it's not really a wonder why ZOS hasn't been adding more PVP content.

What they have, doesn't work. What they've added, is unpopular.

It was a rhetorical question. I guess I'll have to release my video presentation on this and school y'all

Silversmith · May 2022

divnyi wrote: »

_adhyffbjjjf12 wrote: »

Silversmith wrote: »

There are vastly more PvE players than PvP players in this game. It makes sense from a business perspective to cater to your biggest customer base.

As per comments above, the PVE audience is always significantly larger than PVP.

Craglorn is less populated than biggest cyro campaign at any time of the day. What should it tell us?

If by PvE you mean casuals, then ye. But comparing harder content, PvE is likely approx the same size, but we get new trials all the time.

PvE is more than 1 zone of Craglorn like PvP is more than cyro.

There are vastly more players PvEing at any moment than PvPing in this game.

PvE is more polished and balanced than PvP in this game.

There are more people that RP at taverns than PvP in this game.

divnyi · May 2022

Silversmith wrote: »

divnyi wrote: »

_adhyffbjjjf12 wrote: »

Silversmith wrote: »

There are vastly more PvE players than PvP players in this game. It makes sense from a business perspective to cater to your biggest customer base.

As per comments above, the PVE audience is always significantly larger than PVP.

Craglorn is less populated than biggest cyro campaign at any time of the day. What should it tell us?

If by PvE you mean casuals, then ye. But comparing harder content, PvE is likely approx the same size, but we get new trials all the time.

PvE is more polished and balanced than PvP in this game.

It is not more balanced or anything like that. Especially item-wise PvE balance is much more horrible than PvP.
It's just most of the PvE content is so easy you can make it naked.

Which again comes to the point of what do we call PvE. Any content? Solo questing in overland? Well yeah there are more players on that than everything else. DLC vet? Trials vet? I surely don't have the numbers, but why do I feel like it wouldn't be anything breathtaking, even compared to PvP population?