Really need to talk about BG matchmaking...

adamsmith42

As far as I can tell, the only matchmaking is putting people into tiers based on how many BGs they've been in on some timeframe, but there's nothing accounting for W/L record, K/D/A ratio, or damage/healing done... things that I think would be fairly easy to implement in a matchmaking system. The fallout of this is that the general BG experience is pretty bad; I'd say that 6.5/10 matches are just one team steamrolling the other two, 3.4/10 are two teams fighting with one team unable to do anything, and maybe 0.1/10 where there are actually balanced teams and a good match... is this just bad luck on my part or does everyone have this experience? And I know that the Q3 patch is supposed to have some PvP improvements, @ZOS_Kevin what are the chances of some BG matchmaking refinements in this update?

Sluggy

Simply put, there aren't enough people engaged with the system to do any of that.

HowlKimchi

They should make BGs more rewarding (i think to an insane level) to appeal to more people before they even think about extending queue times with more intricate matchmaking algorithms

Urvoth

Sluggy wrote: »

Simply put, there aren't enough people engaged with the system to do any of that.

Because most of them have quit over the last few years with ZOS getting rid of DM queue, having solo queue only for nearly a year, not adding any new maps or modes, no reward structure or proper leaderboard, poor balancing, no custom lobbies, and a general disregard towards more serious BG players despite for a long time there being substantial interest in tournaments and gvg play.

fizzylu

Sluggy wrote: »

Simply put, there aren't enough people engaged with the system to do any of that.

Seriously. BGs were never super popular, but then the solo queue only time period made things even worse. So many people I know who preferred smaller scale PvP quit back then and never came back, not even when Zenimax did finally add the "separate" group queue. It's crazy how many matches I can get back to back with basically all the same players just because so few people queue for them.

That being said, group queue and solo queue being separate is definitely a lie (I run into people from my PvP guild grouped together when I solo queue often).... so yeah, the one team steamrolling is usually a stacked group even still.
Then with the two teams just dominating and one getting wrecked.... I feel like that just comes naturally with the three teams of four players setup (statistically). And I know I've been on plenty of teams that just tunnel vision on one team, leaving them completely open to getting destroyed by both since they don't position to defend from a second enemy team and ultimately just get caught in a death sandwich.... over and over again.
And I don't even think K/D/A or damage/healing done is a good way to matchmake BGs.... since some are objective based, it's not rare to see the players with the most damage or kills still lose.
Honestly though, I personally think the biggest difference comes down to whether the teams have a healer or not.... and obviously with the way "class" building works in this game, even if Zenimax added a healer role queue to BGs it probably wouldn't be very helpful and would most likely just make BG queue times even longer.

notyuu

Urvoth wrote: »

Sluggy wrote: »

Simply put, there aren't enough people engaged with the system to do any of that.

Because most of them have quit over the last few years with ZOS getting rid of DM queue, having solo queue only for nearly a year, not adding any new maps or modes, no reward structure or proper leaderboard, poor balancing, no custom lobbies, and a general disregard towards more serious BG players despite for a long time there being substantial interest in tournaments and gvg play.

I'm going to guess it's a cultural thing, as over here when BG went "whoops, all death match" the queue times went through the roof and you only ended up with the same 8-10 people in each match

gariondavey

Falling on deaf ears.
Zos hasn't even added a new map in 5+ years. Myself and many others have been advocating for a multitude of simple, easy changes that would increase interest and improve gameplay.
[snip]
[edited for bashing]

Aurielle

notyuu wrote: »

Urvoth wrote: »

Sluggy wrote: »

Simply put, there aren't enough people engaged with the system to do any of that.

Because most of them have quit over the last few years with ZOS getting rid of DM queue, having solo queue only for nearly a year, not adding any new maps or modes, no reward structure or proper leaderboard, poor balancing, no custom lobbies, and a general disregard towards more serious BG players despite for a long time there being substantial interest in tournaments and gvg play.

I'm going to guess it's a cultural thing, as over here when BG went "whoops, all death match" the queue times went through the roof and you only ended up with the same 8-10 people in each match

I personally run far fewer BGs than I did in the past, because I’m lucky to get DM maybe once per play session. Nothing bums me out more than accepting the match and queuing in to see “CAPTURE THE RELIC” across my screen. I sometimes quit immediately upon entering if it’s a game mode I hate, like CTR. I only like DM and can tolerate Crazy King/Domination.

LadyLavina

gariondavey wrote: »

Zos simply just doesn't care about pvp in general

fixed that for you lol

Urvoth

notyuu wrote: »

Urvoth wrote: »

Sluggy wrote: »

Simply put, there aren't enough people engaged with the system to do any of that.

Because most of them have quit over the last few years with ZOS getting rid of DM queue, having solo queue only for nearly a year, not adding any new maps or modes, no reward structure or proper leaderboard, poor balancing, no custom lobbies, and a general disregard towards more serious BG players despite for a long time there being substantial interest in tournaments and gvg play.

I'm going to guess it's a cultural thing, as over here when BG went "whoops, all death match" the queue times went through the roof and you only ended up with the same 8-10 people in each match

notyuu wrote: »

Urvoth wrote: »

Sluggy wrote: »

Simply put, there aren't enough people engaged with the system to do any of that.

Because most of them have quit over the last few years with ZOS getting rid of DM queue, having solo queue only for nearly a year, not adding any new maps or modes, no reward structure or proper leaderboard, poor balancing, no custom lobbies, and a general disregard towards more serious BG players despite for a long time there being substantial interest in tournaments and gvg play.

I'm going to guess it's a cultural thing, as over here when BG went "whoops, all death match" the queue times went through the roof and you only ended up with the same 8-10 people in each match

What platform are you on? On PC NA, queues got faster, people came back, and activity looked like it actually started to recover when the DM only experiment was a thing.

moo_2021

fizzylu wrote: »

And I don't even think K/D/A or damage/healing done is a good way to matchmake BGs.... since some are objective based, it's not rare to see the players with the most damage or kills still lose.

Which would be fine.

People are not upset about losing, but instant death in every encounter.

fizzylu

moo_2021 wrote: »

Which would be fine.

People are not upset about losing, but instant death in every encounter.

I hate to be that person, but if someone is dying that fast in every encounter then I'd have to say the matchmaking isn't the issue.
And I'm just saying.... in point holding games, I can have scores that are like 3/7/2 with less than 500k damage.... but put me in a deathmatch and I can easily do over 1m with 10+ kills. So unless they were to base it off of a certain game mode alone, it wouldn't really average people out well. And even still, where would that put healers or tanky for no reason people who get low everything but are super useful in some match types? Honestly, they'd even be better off using medal score for matchmaking than K/D/A or damage/healing done.

the1andonlyskwex

fizzylu wrote: »

moo_2021 wrote: »

Which would be fine.

People are not upset about losing, but instant death in every encounter.

I hate to be that person, but if someone is dying that fast in every encounter then I'd have to say the matchmaking isn't the issue.
And I'm just saying.... in point holding games, I can have scores that are like 3/7/2 with less than 500k damage.... but put me in a deathmatch and I can easily do over 1m with 10+ kills. So unless they were to base it off of a certain game mode alone, it wouldn't really average people out well. And even still, where would that put healers or tanky for no reason people who get low everything but are super useful in some match types? Honestly, they'd even be better off using medal score for matchmaking than K/D/A or damage/healing done.

Medal score or something like ELO would be best if people actually played the objectives. Unfortunately, BGs have too many people who treat every match like a Deathmatch who would wind up badly mis-ranked in either of those systems. Those people would then proceed to ruin BGs for everyone else in the lower rankings.

I don't know the right solution, but I do know that the current approach where your MMR never seems to decay isn't it.

El_Borracho

K/D/A ratios are the worst thing to ever hit MMOs. It promotes the extremes of ganking and turtling and punishes players who actually engage in combat.

One thing BGs could do to win back players is to hand out ALL PVP/Cyrodiil sets as rewards. Technically, they do because of "Rewards of the Worthy," but to put them in the rewards you get from BGs. Right now those only contain the 5 sets specific to BGs.

moo_2021

fizzylu wrote: »

moo_2021 wrote: »

Which would be fine.

People are not upset about losing, but instant death in every encounter.

I hate to be that person, but if someone is dying that fast in every encounter then I'd have to say the matchmaking isn't the issue.

I'm not talking about one person dying.

Have you seen entire team of 4 melted in every 4 vs 4 encounters? Happens a lot. I even had a few encounters of 1 vs 4 or 1 vs 3 and wiped entire team myself in a few seconds, and I'm very, very far from the pros.

If it's not bad matching I don't know what that is.


There could be separated ranking for healers, as they need to be allocated evenly for each team, not based on scores.

Same for tanks who get a lot of scores in certain objectives but do little damage. They have enough records to determine that. It's common sense not to have an entire team of tanks, healers or cloaking NBs.

Also they should just remove the roles and use statistics instead. All roles in BG are fake.

sharquez

You can't account for bad gear in matchmaking. If someone comes in all divines Trial DPS gear or whatever overland concoction they are rocking for RP purposes that's unfortunately on them.

Other games have solved this by standardizing the way PVP works.

ESO opted for invisible MMR based on Medal score which all that does is make people who play the objective go up until they hit the wall of high MMR players that stomp the desire to play out of them. There is no easing into it or beginner level with standardized gear or anything to help people get into it.

Poor support for a system will lead to its failure. If all players were thrown into the random grab bag of standardized casual after completing beginner tier bot matches, and there were ranked custom game-mode lobbies like in games of old, maybe we could see some progress towards bringing BGS back to a beloved game type everyone could enjoy. As it is right now if you want to learn PVP you either need a patient teacher or to go in raw and figure it out the hard way.

moo_2021

standardizing would help but won't fix the matching itself. You give the same sets to pros, with no higher damage or resistance, but they'd still kill me in seconds.

They need to adjust matching based on relative K/D/A and damage output between players, taking into account of total team strength, and making special adjustment for cloaking NBs, and allocating real healers and real tanks.

silky_soft

Feels like they don't even have something as simple as last 5 games logged as W/L, then evenly distribute those players haha. You'll see winning teams rematched. It's just full random and if you're on new characters you can easily solo que with your friends.

fizzylu

moo_2021 wrote: »

They need to adjust matching based on relative K/D/A and damage output between players, taking into account of total team strength, and making special adjustment for cloaking NBs, and allocating real healers and real tanks.

I can't think of a single game that does this much, haha.

moo_2021 wrote: »

Have you seen entire team of 4 melted in every 4 vs 4 encounters? Happens a lot. I even had a few encounters of 1 vs 4 or 1 vs 3 and wiped entire team myself in a few seconds, and I'm very, very far from the pros.

And no, not often actually.

SalamanNZ

Sometimes I get amazed when someone with 19k health does well in a bg. But that happens 1 in 20 games

SerafinaWaterstar

I would play BGs far more if other players actually played the objectives & did not treat every match as a Death Match.

Yes, you may have got 20 kills but your team came last as you were supposed to capture the flag. But hey, you do you.

HowlKimchi

SerafinaWaterstar wrote: »

I would play BGs far more if other players actually played the objectives & did not treat every match as a Death Match.

Yes, you may have got 20 kills but your team came last as you were supposed to capture the flag. But hey, you do you.

This circles back to BG matches not being rewarding enough when you win. Give players a good incentive to win and they will try to win.

SerafinaWaterstar

HowlKimchi wrote: »

SerafinaWaterstar wrote: »

I would play BGs far more if other players actually played the objectives & did not treat every match as a Death Match.

Yes, you may have got 20 kills but your team came last as you were supposed to capture the flag. But hey, you do you.

This circles back to BG matches not being rewarding enough when you win. Give players a good incentive to win and they will try to win.

Sadly I doubt that. There are some players who only care about their kill score.

Perhaps if kills do not count if not a DM? That would work.

HowlKimchi

SerafinaWaterstar wrote: »

HowlKimchi wrote: »

SerafinaWaterstar wrote: »

I would play BGs far more if other players actually played the objectives & did not treat every match as a Death Match.

Yes, you may have got 20 kills but your team came last as you were supposed to capture the flag. But hey, you do you.

This circles back to BG matches not being rewarding enough when you win. Give players a good incentive to win and they will try to win.

Sadly I doubt that. There are some players who only care about their kill score.

Perhaps if kills do not count if not a DM? That would work.

If so, I think a good compromise would be to remove deathmatch entirely, but every other game mode would award points to the team when the team gets a kill. Of course numbers would be adjusted so that kills don't become *the* best way to win in any game mode, but would contribute to it instead.

fizzylu

SerafinaWaterstar wrote: »

Perhaps if kills do not count if not a DM? That would work.

I think some people just enjoy killing other players because they can. Even for people who stream.... they're more about getting kills, no matter how not even the fight was, than getting wins.

HowlKimchi wrote: »

If so, I think a good compromise would be to remove deathmatch entirely, but every other game mode would award points to the team when the team gets a kill. Of course numbers would be adjusted so that kills don't become *the* best way to win in any game mode, but would contribute to it instead.

And this sounds terrible considering some of the game modes revolve around having to kill the enemy players to get or take control of the objective.

GuuMoonRyoung

Sluggy wrote: »

Simply put, there aren't enough people engaged with the system to do any of that.

I never do BG after reaching level 50. As soon as we hit level 50, our stats take a huge automatic hit. Before level 50, we would have at least 20K hp, magicka and stamina. Not to mention other bonus stats that make bgs enjoyable. As soon as we hit 50, not only hp, magicka and stamina drops, even those bonus stats go away, making bgs completely unplayable without a dedicated pvp gear build.

I think there are a lot of people like me who can see that the experience has changed drastically for the worse and stop doing bgs after hitting 50. This causes the queue pool to shorten by a great deal.

moo_2021

SerafinaWaterstar wrote: »

I would play BGs far more if other players actually played the objectives & did not treat every match as a Death Match.

Yes, you may have got 20 kills but your team came last as you were supposed to capture the flag. But hey, you do you.

Have you been in those games where the other teams are just much better and they actually focus on objectives?


You have zero chance of winning.

xDeusEJRx

HowlKimchi wrote: »

SerafinaWaterstar wrote: »

HowlKimchi wrote: »

SerafinaWaterstar wrote: »

I would play BGs far more if other players actually played the objectives & did not treat every match as a Death Match.

Yes, you may have got 20 kills but your team came last as you were supposed to capture the flag. But hey, you do you.

This circles back to BG matches not being rewarding enough when you win. Give players a good incentive to win and they will try to win.

Sadly I doubt that. There are some players who only care about their kill score.

Perhaps if kills do not count if not a DM? That would work.

If so, I think a good compromise would be to remove deathmatch entirely, but every other game mode would award points to the team when the team gets a kill. Of course numbers would be adjusted so that kills don't become *the* best way to win in any game mode, but would contribute to it instead.

Removing team death match would be a horrible idea because people will just ignore objectives even more than they already do now.

The reason being because there's still too many players who build into 1 stat to win the objectives in 5 minutes. Question, would you even bother doing objective if you were playing against people like this in this video?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THjxeZ5y3ok

notyuu

Urvoth wrote: »

notyuu wrote: »

Urvoth wrote: »

Sluggy wrote: »

Simply put, there aren't enough people engaged with the system to do any of that.

Because most of them have quit over the last few years with ZOS getting rid of DM queue, having solo queue only for nearly a year, not adding any new maps or modes, no reward structure or proper leaderboard, poor balancing, no custom lobbies, and a general disregard towards more serious BG players despite for a long time there being substantial interest in tournaments and gvg play.

I'm going to guess it's a cultural thing, as over here when BG went "whoops, all death match" the queue times went through the roof and you only ended up with the same 8-10 people in each match

notyuu wrote: »

Urvoth wrote: »

Sluggy wrote: »

Simply put, there aren't enough people engaged with the system to do any of that.

Because most of them have quit over the last few years with ZOS getting rid of DM queue, having solo queue only for nearly a year, not adding any new maps or modes, no reward structure or proper leaderboard, poor balancing, no custom lobbies, and a general disregard towards more serious BG players despite for a long time there being substantial interest in tournaments and gvg play.

I'm going to guess it's a cultural thing, as over here when BG went "whoops, all death match" the queue times went through the roof and you only ended up with the same 8-10 people in each match

What platform are you on? On PC NA, queues got faster, people came back, and activity looked like it actually started to recover when the DM only experiment was a thing.

PC/EU

like I said most likely a cultural thing, valuing fun over efficiency

Aurielle

HowlKimchi wrote: »

SerafinaWaterstar wrote: »

HowlKimchi wrote: »

SerafinaWaterstar wrote: »

I would play BGs far more if other players actually played the objectives & did not treat every match as a Death Match.

Yes, you may have got 20 kills but your team came last as you were supposed to capture the flag. But hey, you do you.

This circles back to BG matches not being rewarding enough when you win. Give players a good incentive to win and they will try to win.

Sadly I doubt that. There are some players who only care about their kill score.

Perhaps if kills do not count if not a DM? That would work.

If so, I think a good compromise would be to remove deathmatch entirely, but every other game mode would award points to the team when the team gets a kill. Of course numbers would be adjusted so that kills don't become *the* best way to win in any game mode, but would contribute to it instead.

Many people would simply stop playing BGs if ZOS removed Deathmatch. I would be one of them.