Why PVP Failed?

I_killed_Vivec

Parasaurolophus wrote: »

I_killed_Vivec wrote: »

The ganker mentality is something that turns off PvE players. Sorry, but that's a major disincentive - why enter PvP, spend time and resources preparing for it, only to be insta-killed (or what looks like it to the unaware) by someone you never saw? All part of PvP, but not part of the romantic notion of a big battle... it turns people off and they never go back.

But the overriding reason for me is the contrast between wasting tons of time looking for a fight (horse simulator mode) only to find one and have the screen freeze as all hell breaks loose, AoEs go off everywhere and you hammer keys hoping that you will still be alive when the screen unfreezes.

I have absolutely no idea how anyone can complain about gankers when the balance is shattered by kiters in heavy builds and ballgroups? Seriously?

The phrase in bold is part of why PvP fails. You can' t conceive of a newbie's experience so you aren't interested. Meanwhile PvE players who venture into PvP to see what it's all about get turned off very quickly.

The vast majority of players come from Elder Scrolls games and try out ESO. PvE is fine, it's familiar, and there's the added dimension working with other players. PvP? Not so much. So how to start in Cyrodiil? Pick up some quests and see what happens, get stuck into some fights, it's all good! Go to turn in the quest, get ganked by someone you never even saw... not so good, you wonder about the mentality of people who only want to destroy your fun. Look for help, get told to "get good" and that gankers aren't an issue...

But your time is limited, you have PvE stuff to do. Stuff that you actually enjoy... why bother ever going into Cyrodiil again?

ZOS_Icy

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Mr_Stach

Broken meta and bad balance

I mean that's how it is in Every MMO, you Can't Ease into PvP. You jump in, there's no training wheels, you either stay in to get better or you realize it's not your scene and Dip out.

I've seen people suggest a Bot Mode to help you get better, but really, that's just PvE with Extra Steps.

The best experience will almost always be when you group with people that you can talk to and strategize with.

Dunking on people will always happen, that's why Ball Groups are a thing and people in Ball groups don't get better because they don't feel pressured to.

Zos will never really be able to balance ESO PvP, because you can't Balance people, they will always find a way to cheese the system.

DMuehlhausen

Blame the casual direction of the ESO

I'm not. I'm going by the numbers. Seriously if every PvP player quit right now people wouldn't notice really at all. <snip>. PvP only ruins the game by requiring all the PvE skills and items be balanced for a system it will never work in. You can never balance items and skills designed to kill enemies with millions of HP and enemies with 40k hp. it's no possible it never will be possible. It's a mini game add on at best.

<snipped for baiting>

danno8

<snip>

To be fair, you could also say that PvE ruins the game for PvP for the same reasons.

I still don't quite understand why ZoS does not balance skills separately for the two different game modes. Other games do it and it works just fine. They said they want all skills to transfer seamlessly from one mode to the next but there needs to be an acknowledgement that it just isn't possible for the exact reasons you give. People and game AI approach fights fundamentally different.

<snipped quote>

EdmondDontes

Terrible performance in Cyrodiil

DMuehlhausen wrote: »

EdmondDontes wrote: »

DMuehlhausen wrote: »

EdmondDontes wrote: »

DMuehlhausen wrote: »

I love how one of the options ( I chose it) is to blame a PvE based game where PvP is basically a tacked on mini game to appease 4% of the playerbase.

The only reason Cyrodil wasn't covnerted years ago to a PvE zone is because of how loudly the minor pvp community complains. If it disappeared tomorrow practically nobody would notice and they wouldn't even see much of a loss in revenue from the couple thousand probably subs that pvp regularly.

The keep it to keep your money coming in.

You couldn't be more wrong. PvP is now and always has been advertised as the end game in ESO.

Just because you don't like PvP doesn't mean nobody plays it or likes it.

PvP is all the PvE plus a ton more time, money and investment into the game. That's how it is now and how it has always been.

I mean it's not. It never has been. I hate PvP in all games like this for the issues it causes. You can never balance it and PvE yet developers keep screwing it up and trying.

If you go out to Cyrodil during none event times you see like the same couple thousand players if that. Nobody cares about it, at least not enough to where it should stay. If they just made Cyrodil disappear nobody would really notice. The forums would be a little quieter and a few less elitist jerks in the dungeon queue, but nothing that would make anybody worry about the future of the game.

You couldn't be more wrong. You're just trying to justify your personal views with factual inaccuracies.

Thecompton73 wrote: »

This thread is proof that the PvE population is WAAAYYYY more toxic than the PvP population.

I'm not. I'm going by the numbers. Seriously if every PvP player quit right now people wouldn't notice really at all. Stop trying to inflate your importance. PvP only ruins the game by requiring all the PvE skills and items be balanced for a system it will never work in. You can never balance items and skills designed to kill enemies with millions of HP and enemies with 40k hp. it's no possible it never will be possible. It's a mini game add on at best.

PvP is now and always has been advertised as the end game in ESO. It's right there on the back of the box the game comes in. So just please stop.

Thecompton73

Broken meta and bad balance

BuildMan wrote: »

EdmondDontes wrote: »

DMuehlhausen wrote: »

EdmondDontes wrote: »

DMuehlhausen wrote: »

I love how one of the options ( I chose it) is to blame a PvE based game where PvP is basically a tacked on mini game to appease 4% of the playerbase.

The only reason Cyrodil wasn't covnerted years ago to a PvE zone is because of how loudly the minor pvp community complains. If it disappeared tomorrow practically nobody would notice and they wouldn't even see much of a loss in revenue from the couple thousand probably subs that pvp regularly.

The keep it to keep your money coming in.

You couldn't be more wrong. PvP is now and always has been advertised as the end game in ESO.

Just because you don't like PvP doesn't mean nobody plays it or likes it.

PvP is all the PvE plus a ton more time, money and investment into the game. That's how it is now and how it has always been.

I mean it's not. It never has been. I hate PvP in all games like this for the issues it causes. You can never balance it and PvE yet developers keep screwing it up and trying.

If you go out to Cyrodil during none event times you see like the same couple thousand players if that. Nobody cares about it, at least not enough to where it should stay. If they just made Cyrodil disappear nobody would really notice. The forums would be a little quieter and a few less elitist jerks in the dungeon queue, but nothing that would make anybody worry about the future of the game.

You couldn't be more wrong. You're just trying to justify your personal views with factual inaccuracies.

Thecompton73 wrote: »

This thread is proof that the PvE population is WAAAYYYY more toxic than the PvP population.

A lot of PvE players fail to acknowledge that we have lost a significant amount of PvP players over the years due to lack of content and support. If PvP got even a fraction of the content PvE got then maybe we would have seen a more stable population (assuming lag would also be solved since that is a significant issue as well).

What these people also fail to acknowledge is that the population doing HM Vet dungeons and trails is probably about the same as the amount of people doing PvP regularly. The huge majority of people that "PvE" are super casual and consider fighting bosses in public dungeons a challenging experience.

Snow_White

Honestly, I found PVP boring. Only reason I went was to farm AP to unlock skills for my PVE tank.

I had one really fun battle that was probably 30 minutes of back and forth defending some place I can’t remember (wasn’t a keep, was something else). They would push us back inside our building, we’d defend against the siege, then we push back out and force them away for a bit before they would push us back inside our gate. It was great. Way more fun than repairing walls.

After that I spent a few days trying to find that same sort of fight, watching zone chat, running around looking for combat flags, its a giant waste of time. There’s either nothing there of consequence or it’s a ball group on farm. After a few days of spending hours riding around on a horse accomplishing nothing I went back to repairing walls as it’s more efficient.

Same with IC. I’m not there to PVP, I’m there to farm Tel Var, and it’s more efficient to ignore the PVP side and focus on killing trash. If someone ganks me for a couple of Tel Var I ignore them and go back to farming trash because I can make up whatever I lost faster than it took them to farm me.

Mr_Stach

Broken meta and bad balance

PvP is the "Endgame" for PvPers. But in reality, PvP is kept relevant because of PvE Content. New PvE sets are added consistently Shaking things up in both PvE and PvP.

But when was the last time we had a real PvP Update? Not Events. Not Technical Fixes. Actual new PvP Content.

Let's see:
-Imperial City back in Update 7 - 2015
-BGs launched in the Update 18 (Morrowind)- 2017
-Artifact Weapons Launched in Update 22 (Elsweyr) - 2019

Let me know if I missed something

PvP needs a real Update. Not a new event or something inconsequential. An actual big Update.

I personally would like a Free-for-all elimination type thing, I hate to use the Term Battle Royale, but inside of Cyrodiil that could be an interesting thing.

Wolfpaw

Cyrodiil, performance a side, is ZOS ESO biggest accomplishment.

It's a system that has seen little updates (compared to pve), poor rewards, performance swings, no battle pass, etc...and still 8 years later it has one of the most popular events, and a daily queue can go from 20m-1.5h+ with new players joining and many still here from beta release! Not many games/devs can boast about a system like that, this long...esports or battle royale games come close, but even those games see map change, updates, and much better reward systems.

Unlike PvE that needs constant content releases to retain players.

ZOS could easily RDR2 Online/Ghosts of Tsushima standalone ESO Cyrodiil with some new hubs, battle pass, bigger updated map, different era wars to change maps, crown store, changing lore to era, etc...& it would be a huge success in popularity/profit f2p game on PSN.

all in all @ZOS_MattFiror @ZOS_RichLambert and anyone else that had a hand in making this pvp system should be extremely proud.

dem0n1k

PVP has failed!? Oh no!, the players in Cyrodiil seem to have missed that memo!

If PVP went away... who would players blame the nerfs on then? Casuals? Elitests? Themselves!?... oh the hilarity!

LordRukia

When skills actually started firing and people could play the game cyrodiil was packed after the server upgrade on NA. I can't speak for EU but NA is very active, and cyrodiil was probably equally as dead as EU until recently. So #1 issue would be server performance. Balance is fine, meta is always changing with new sets, gives us something to farm and new things to play. If you want a stagnant meta that lasts for a year or longer and never change a single piece of gear then play GW2. The rest of us are excited to try new things. Complaining about gankers dates back to the stone age, its very tiring. Maybe battling a 10million hp target dummy in a safe environment would tickle your fancy, or perhaps overworld questing where nothing can damage you. Hell you could even build a bit tankier, but let's not get crazy.

JoeCapricorn

Terrible performance in Cyrodiil

Worsening performance issues and the halving of group sizes down to 12 really killed PVP for me. Although I hear performance is better on PC-NA with the server refresh, I've been out of PVP for so long I don't know what the heck I am doing whenever I go in and I always get ganked. I intentionally created a fast moving retreat-based build for PVP because it is easier to be a squirrel than it is to DPS. I prefer playing with large siege-based groups and capping keeps, as build is less important in those instances and teamwork is more fun, but that was killed when they halved group sizes.

It would be nice if they brought back 24-player groups, since, that was part of the original game's functionality.

ccfeeling

Terrible performance in Cyrodiil

I can't even fire my skills in Cyrodill .

Yeah , ZOS say they will do something , I heard that for years .

Dem_kitkats1

I_killed_Vivec wrote: »

The phrase in bold is part of why PvP fails. You can' t conceive of a newbie's experience so you aren't interested. Meanwhile PvE players who venture into PvP to see what it's all about get turned off very quickly.

The vast majority of players come from Elder Scrolls games and try out ESO. PvE is fine, it's familiar, and there's the added dimension working with other players. PvP? Not so much. So how to start in Cyrodiil? Pick up some quests and see what happens, get stuck into some fights, it's all good! Go to turn in the quest, get ganked by someone you never even saw... not so good, you wonder about the mentality of people who only want to destroy your fun. Look for help, get told to "get good" and that gankers aren't an issue...

But your time is limited, you have PvE stuff to do. Stuff that you actually enjoy... why bother ever going into Cyrodiil again?

I mean PvPers are not destroying your fun, they're simply doing what they love to do (engage in combat with other players), in an area reserved for precisely that. If you're in a PvP zone outside of events, they're going to assume you're there to PvP. There are so many zones for questing and PvE, that I'm not sure why you would be in a PvP zone to begin with if you dislike it so much.

Those venturing into PvP should be aware that it takes just as much practice and preparation as any PvE trial/dungeon. (It really is a different kind of end game for players and should be treated as such). There is a great deal of skill progression in PvP as there is in PvE. So you can't go in blind and spontaneously, and then be mad when you didn't perform well, and someone more skilled took you out easily. Trial group members lack just as much sympathy towards those who jump into content without any kind of preparation. Like bosses, and mobs, the classes, themselves, have different mechanics and counters to them that PvP players have become very well acquainted with. You can't fault a trial boss for killing you because you missed a mechanic; the same goes for "gankers". Gankers target anyone unsuspecting; that is their purpose. PvPers just have a better understanding of them, and know of ways to counter them, which is why they're not seen as a problem atm. If new players continued to work on their combat skills instead of immediately giving up on trying to understand the mechanics, they would also come to find this to be true. Pvp is not meant for all players, which is completely fine, and there is some truth in that PvP is difficult for new players to get into. However, blaming the "ganker" playstyle on why PvP is failing, when you have little understanding or even interest in learning PvP combat, is why seasoned PvPers get annoyed.

ATomiX69

No new content

Terrible performance since 2017, last "real" PvP content we got were BGs which are mediocre at best and were tied to an expansion where it wasnt even the main selling point.
Clearly no interest in investing resources from ZOS side since its really hard to make money from PvP without having people cry about P2W.
Theyre also not even trying to encourage people to PvP since there are no rewards to be had that are better than the PvE equivalents, there used to be stuff from PvP that was actually good ("meta") for PvE, but with more and more new dungeon/trial-sets and convenient nerfs of "PvP-sets" before new content releases, theres nothing left to PvP for these days, theres not a single Bind on Pickup set which is used in PvE in any of the meta-setups, and the only Bind on Equip set that comes to mind is Powerful Assault for some healer setups which well you can just buy from guild stores.
Even during the "PvP-Events", youre just gonna have people who never or barely ever played PvP (aka a large majority of the playerbase) just quest around in the towns getting their *** kicked in by actual PvP players who play dont play for rewards and hear them cry on the forums about PvP in a PvP zone until ZOS does something.
Its just the same *** in every MMORPG, as soon as there is nothing exclusive from PvP besides some *** cosmetics no one cares about, it just dies down over time.

SimonThesis

Its poplocked in PC/NA Grayhost with over 200 Queues, the new hardware updates greatly improved performance. Still a complete lack of content and neglect for one of the best systems for pvp in an MMO.

wolfie1.0.

The answer to the poll is yes...

neferpitou73

Terrible performance in Cyrodiil

PVP "failed" (someone should alert the players in Cyrodiil about that, because they don't seem to have noticed) because of performance. This isn't even debatable, as soon as the hardware updates made the game playable there were queues in almost every campaign on PC NA. Unfortunately it doesn't look like it'll stay that way.

katanagirl1

neferpitou73 wrote: »

PVP "failed" (someone should alert the players in Cyrodiil about that, because they don't seem to have noticed) because of performance. This isn't even debatable, as soon as the hardware updates made the game playable there were queues in almost every campaign on PC NA. Unfortunately it doesn't look like it'll stay that way.

We know about the performance, we feel it every day. What choice do we have if we want to play the content that we enjoy the most? Some quit but a lot of us try to keep going the best we can.

After the thrill of combat with other players, going back to PvE seems very dull.

Parasaurolophus

Broken meta and bad balance

neferpitou73 wrote: »

PVP "failed" (someone should alert the players in Cyrodiil about that, because they don't seem to have noticed) because of performance. This isn't even debatable, as soon as the hardware updates made the game playable there were queues in almost every campaign on PC NA. Unfortunately it doesn't look like it'll stay that way.

If two or three hundred players for all campaigns in Cyrodiil in prime time and queues for BG`s for 8-10 minutes is normal, then I don’t know what to say...

FeedbackOnly

I wonder if it's mmr. I see different people in battlegrounds personally

Olen_Mikko

I used to be solely a pvp player and really really loved the pvp in ESO's early years. I have always played nothing but nightblades and they have had their glory days as well as had their share of hard nerf hammers.

For me, the biggest issues that have killed my interest in pvp totally, is the lagfest that ballgroups bring with them and the overall favoring of ballgroups. I get it , there's safe in numbers, but almost every solution ZOS has done just caters ballgroups even more.

There are solutions for reducing the ballgroup meta. They could limit the effectiveness of healing the more people are on the group and same goes to buffs, synergies, aoe skills etc. But that's a totally different topic.

But it is not fun to play, when you can't effectively defend anything without a counterballgroup. And that is just the vicious circle nobody wants.

Performance is, to me, in okayish level most of the time. I don't mind the balance issue, as i tend to think it so that a ganker nightblade shouldn't be able to fight tanks anyways. I mean a lightly armored melee combatant would be in trouble with heavily armored enemy wielding a big battleaxe in real fight too.

One needs to pick his battle and not to expect to kill everyone.

deleted220614-000183

Blame the casual direction of the ESO

PVP in ESO failed because players changed and ESO didn't reacted.
It is not fancy anymore to farm gear thousand ingame hours and spend millions golds on it and then see it was nerfed because of new update so happy grinding everything again.

Developers in other games were able solve it and started concepts like Fortnite, which is pure fun with no grind aspects.
Something that ESO stubornly refuses and tries ballance their hundreds of sets and thousands or probably millions of possible combinations of PVP builds and synergies and variants instead.

The other aspect is that in PVP you simply can't tolerate performance problems and lags.
This is the answer why PVP in ESO failed.

I don't see any reason why play PVP in ESO as other games can offer much more fun and much less tears.

KiltMaster

ResidentContrarian wrote: »

"Learning curve"

When a guy stands still and takes no damage, vs the other player utilizing roll, block, interrupt, and the guy standing still wins because his gear is superior?

Yeah, not really a learning curve.

There are ways to beat everyone and ways to be strong. You just need to figure it out. Shoot fire ballistae bolts at him, do light attacks, work down his resources, etc.

No one is ever invincible.

KiltMaster

Castagere wrote: »

As a non PVPer I wish they would just dump PVP period. I am so sick and tired of my abilities being nerfed because of it. It is not fair to non-PVPer to have to keep going through this. this.

That's the most selfish comment I've read here. Just because you don't like something, other people shouldn't be able to enjoy it? SMH ....

Remathilis

Broken meta and bad balance

I play PvP for two reasons

1. Assault
2. Support

The fact several important skills for stamina and healing are locked behind PvP means I go and get killed for a bit until I level those lines enough.

Oh, and a few times a year I die for event tickets.

Inaya

Even as a non PVP'er there is not much to do and the things I'd like to do are always ruined by gankers. I don't get what is so exciting about killing someone who doesn't fight back over and over and over. It's just a mentality I'll never understand.

There isn't even any chance you can "learn" to like it when people do this to PVE players trying to get interested.

Androrix

Tales of gankers. Zero interest in playing somoeone's victim in my down time.

Mr_Stach

Broken meta and bad balance

PvP Fails because Zos does not listen to the feedback of players. And by the time they do, those players have left. This is an issue of responding to feedback when it happens, not two years down the road. Even just acknowledging feedback would be a serious push in the right direction