New BGs are trash

katanagirl1

L_Nici wrote: »

The new BGs are heavily unbalanced due to their 2 Team build. Especially Deathmatch gets decided in the first fight and then for 12 minutes 8 people camp on top of Spawn and 8 below. Its stupid. Before there was a third team to mix it up, but thats gone.
Same for Relic Hunt, the first team who takes one relic wins after 15 minutes, as they just camp their own relic with 8 people.

I did some BGs for the Golden Pursuits, haven’t done them much since the change. My teammates probably thought I was stupid but I could not stand up on the spawn point and attack the other team below. It felt like cheating. I jumped down into the fray and frequently got killed while they stood up above.

Orbital78

They need to ditch the chaos ball one and do more quick matches of death match. Unless they can fix the balancing of teams, it isn't fun dealing with 100% lopsided teams for 12-15mins.

XSTRONG

I think the new battlegrounds are fun, I liked 8vs8 the most at first but now I think 4vs4 is more fun, the new maps are great to.

ajkb78

To be fair I've been playing BGs a lot more since the update. Probably that has a lot to do with the grind to get the warbear mount - good incentivisation to engage with a game mode I didn't normally bother with, ZoS! Well done.

I think by and large after a few BGs MMR does a reasonable job. That's not to say that all BGs are now evenly matched, close-fought things that turn on a few points right at the close of the match - I still sometimes get absolutely hammered and still sometimes absolutely hammer the opposing team - but I win pretty much 50% of the time.

But there's a weird and possibly unintended consequence of that. If MMR ensures that I will always win 50% of matches no matter how bad or good I am, because the overall MMR of my team will always be matched with the overall MMR of the opposition, there is never any sense of progression. If you get more skillful and improve your MMR, you just get matched against better players (or assigned worse teammates) so you are still just as likely to win as to lose. So there is no incentive to improve. This seems to be borne out by my recent results grinding the warbear: almost without exception I have to play either 1 or 2 matches to get my daily win for the BG token, occasionally 3 and I don't think more than 3 ever so far. Usually if I am in a group that smashes the opposition I can be fairly sure I'll be put in a worse group next time and that group will lose.

Whereas before, when the grouping was completely random, on average your teammates would rank say 0.5 on a scale of 0-1, so your team's total ability would be 0.5*3 + your contribution, compared with 0.5 *4 for your opponents. By improving your own contribution yes you would still sometimes get put in some absolute donkey teams but on average as your personal contribution improved so would your average result.

I understand the intent, and it's not really annoying in the short term (in fact the consistency of the win/lose ratio makes it tolerable to grind the battlemaster tokens) but in the long term I'm not sure that MMR matching feels hugely motivating. Even if I end up as some absolute 1vXing monster (I'm far from that!!) I get the impression I'll just get grouped with a bunch of donkeys and still only win half my matches.

ajkb78

Rexalv wrote: »

This is the worst upgrade EVER.
Now we have Mayhem and you can't get some achivements, because they require 4v4v4.
This game is a disgrace.

Which ones? I looked through my achievements and none of the Whitestrake achievements require 4v4v4 as far as I can see. There's one for winning a BG, there's another for earning 25 medals during Mayhem, none of the others require BGs. The only one I can see that I'm not completely sure is possible at the moment is Tactician, which requires capturing "both enemy relics within 10 seconds"; I'm not sure if the opposing team can ever spawn two relics in the current modes. But AIUI 3-team matches are intended to be brought back for special events from time to time, so I doubt the achievement is off the cards forever.

Estin

ajkb78 wrote: »

To be fair I've been playing BGs a lot more since the update. Probably that has a lot to do with the grind to get the warbear mount - good incentivisation to engage with a game mode I didn't normally bother with, ZoS! Well done.

I think by and large after a few BGs MMR does a reasonable job. That's not to say that all BGs are now evenly matched, close-fought things that turn on a few points right at the close of the match - I still sometimes get absolutely hammered and still sometimes absolutely hammer the opposing team - but I win pretty much 50% of the time.

But there's a weird and possibly unintended consequence of that. If MMR ensures that I will always win 50% of matches no matter how bad or good I am, because the overall MMR of my team will always be matched with the overall MMR of the opposition, there is never any sense of progression. If you get more skillful and improve your MMR, you just get matched against better players (or assigned worse teammates) so you are still just as likely to win as to lose. So there is no incentive to improve. This seems to be borne out by my recent results grinding the warbear: almost without exception I have to play either 1 or 2 matches to get my daily win for the BG token, occasionally 3 and I don't think more than 3 ever so far. Usually if I am in a group that smashes the opposition I can be fairly sure I'll be put in a worse group next time and that group will lose.

Whereas before, when the grouping was completely random, on average your teammates would rank say 0.5 on a scale of 0-1, so your team's total ability would be 0.5*3 + your contribution, compared with 0.5 *4 for your opponents. By improving your own contribution yes you would still sometimes get put in some absolute donkey teams but on average as your personal contribution improved so would your average result.

I understand the intent, and it's not really annoying in the short term (in fact the consistency of the win/lose ratio makes it tolerable to grind the battlemaster tokens) but in the long term I'm not sure that MMR matching feels hugely motivating. Even if I end up as some absolute 1vXing monster (I'm far from that!!) I get the impression I'll just get grouped with a bunch of donkeys and still only win half my matches.

I haven't touched new BGs since a couple of weeks after it's launch due to it being horribly unbalanced. Since the event was happening and it's a great way to get AP, I've started to do a lot of BGs. Since I had 0 MMR, I had some very easy matches, but eventually started to get very fun and fair matches. My MMR got too high though, and now I'm back in the horribly unbalanced queues again. The other day it took me 2 hours to win a single match because the other team kept getting more healers and meta abusers (crit warden, NB RoA bombers, ranged proc spammers). I still contributed my fair share despite my team being absolutely steam rolled. I finally won a match because I won the lottery and got 3 healers on my team while the other had none.

I'm not sure how the MMR works, but I feel like if it considers you good enough, it'll put less skilled players on your team and expect you to carry them. Something like you having 80 MMR while the rest of your team has only 20 MMR, but everybody on the other team has 50 MMR. It doesn't matter how good you are, once you start getting into those matches, you'll always lose. It's all RNG for who you get on your team, and you do not improve or learn anything whether you're on the winning or losing team. I've read that if you wanted to play fair matches, you need to wait at least 2-3 weeks after each monthly reset so the healers and meta abusers to be filtered out of your queue pool. I still much rather have old BGs back because it was never this bad.

Thumbless_Bot

Estin wrote: »

ajkb78 wrote: »

To be fair I've been playing BGs a lot more since the update. Probably that has a lot to do with the grind to get the warbear mount - good incentivisation to engage with a game mode I didn't normally bother with, ZoS! Well done.

I think by and large after a few BGs MMR does a reasonable job. That's not to say that all BGs are now evenly matched, close-fought things that turn on a few points right at the close of the match - I still sometimes get absolutely hammered and still sometimes absolutely hammer the opposing team - but I win pretty much 50% of the time.

But there's a weird and possibly unintended consequence of that. If MMR ensures that I will always win 50% of matches no matter how bad or good I am, because the overall MMR of my team will always be matched with the overall MMR of the opposition, there is never any sense of progression. If you get more skillful and improve your MMR, you just get matched against better players (or assigned worse teammates) so you are still just as likely to win as to lose. So there is no incentive to improve. This seems to be borne out by my recent results grinding the warbear: almost without exception I have to play either 1 or 2 matches to get my daily win for the BG token, occasionally 3 and I don't think more than 3 ever so far. Usually if I am in a group that smashes the opposition I can be fairly sure I'll be put in a worse group next time and that group will lose.

Whereas before, when the grouping was completely random, on average your teammates would rank say 0.5 on a scale of 0-1, so your team's total ability would be 0.5*3 + your contribution, compared with 0.5 *4 for your opponents. By improving your own contribution yes you would still sometimes get put in some absolute donkey teams but on average as your personal contribution improved so would your average result.

I understand the intent, and it's not really annoying in the short term (in fact the consistency of the win/lose ratio makes it tolerable to grind the battlemaster tokens) but in the long term I'm not sure that MMR matching feels hugely motivating. Even if I end up as some absolute 1vXing monster (I'm far from that!!) I get the impression I'll just get grouped with a bunch of donkeys and still only win half my matches.

I haven't touched new BGs since a couple of weeks after it's launch due to it being horribly unbalanced. Since the event was happening and it's a great way to get AP, I've started to do a lot of BGs. Since I had 0 MMR, I had some very easy matches, but eventually started to get very fun and fair matches. My MMR got too high though, and now I'm back in the horribly unbalanced queues again. The other day it took me 2 hours to win a single match because the other team kept getting more healers and meta abusers (crit warden, NB RoA bombers, ranged proc spammers). I still contributed my fair share despite my team being absolutely steam rolled. I finally won a match because I won the lottery and got 3 healers on my team while the other had none.

I'm not sure how the MMR works, but I feel like if it considers you good enough, it'll put less skilled players on your team and expect you to carry them. Something like you having 80 MMR while the rest of your team has only 20 MMR, but everybody on the other team has 50 MMR. It doesn't matter how good you are, once you start getting into those matches, you'll always lose. It's all RNG for who you get on your team, and you do not improve or learn anything whether you're on the winning or losing team. I've read that if you wanted to play fair matches, you need to wait at least 2-3 weeks after each monthly reset so the healers and meta abusers to be filtered out of your queue pool. I still much rather have old BGs back because it was never this bad.

I do not mean to take away from of your points, but I want to reiterate that these new, quicker bgs, are, in fact, a great way to level alliance skills due to the high ap received... especially during Mayhem.

Estin

Thumbless_Bot wrote: »

Estin wrote: »

ajkb78 wrote: »

To be fair I've been playing BGs a lot more since the update. Probably that has a lot to do with the grind to get the warbear mount - good incentivisation to engage with a game mode I didn't normally bother with, ZoS! Well done.

I think by and large after a few BGs MMR does a reasonable job. That's not to say that all BGs are now evenly matched, close-fought things that turn on a few points right at the close of the match - I still sometimes get absolutely hammered and still sometimes absolutely hammer the opposing team - but I win pretty much 50% of the time.

But there's a weird and possibly unintended consequence of that. If MMR ensures that I will always win 50% of matches no matter how bad or good I am, because the overall MMR of my team will always be matched with the overall MMR of the opposition, there is never any sense of progression. If you get more skillful and improve your MMR, you just get matched against better players (or assigned worse teammates) so you are still just as likely to win as to lose. So there is no incentive to improve. This seems to be borne out by my recent results grinding the warbear: almost without exception I have to play either 1 or 2 matches to get my daily win for the BG token, occasionally 3 and I don't think more than 3 ever so far. Usually if I am in a group that smashes the opposition I can be fairly sure I'll be put in a worse group next time and that group will lose.

Whereas before, when the grouping was completely random, on average your teammates would rank say 0.5 on a scale of 0-1, so your team's total ability would be 0.5*3 + your contribution, compared with 0.5 *4 for your opponents. By improving your own contribution yes you would still sometimes get put in some absolute donkey teams but on average as your personal contribution improved so would your average result.

I understand the intent, and it's not really annoying in the short term (in fact the consistency of the win/lose ratio makes it tolerable to grind the battlemaster tokens) but in the long term I'm not sure that MMR matching feels hugely motivating. Even if I end up as some absolute 1vXing monster (I'm far from that!!) I get the impression I'll just get grouped with a bunch of donkeys and still only win half my matches.

I haven't touched new BGs since a couple of weeks after it's launch due to it being horribly unbalanced. Since the event was happening and it's a great way to get AP, I've started to do a lot of BGs. Since I had 0 MMR, I had some very easy matches, but eventually started to get very fun and fair matches. My MMR got too high though, and now I'm back in the horribly unbalanced queues again. The other day it took me 2 hours to win a single match because the other team kept getting more healers and meta abusers (crit warden, NB RoA bombers, ranged proc spammers). I still contributed my fair share despite my team being absolutely steam rolled. I finally won a match because I won the lottery and got 3 healers on my team while the other had none.

I'm not sure how the MMR works, but I feel like if it considers you good enough, it'll put less skilled players on your team and expect you to carry them. Something like you having 80 MMR while the rest of your team has only 20 MMR, but everybody on the other team has 50 MMR. It doesn't matter how good you are, once you start getting into those matches, you'll always lose. It's all RNG for who you get on your team, and you do not improve or learn anything whether you're on the winning or losing team. I've read that if you wanted to play fair matches, you need to wait at least 2-3 weeks after each monthly reset so the healers and meta abusers to be filtered out of your queue pool. I still much rather have old BGs back because it was never this bad.

I do not mean to take away from of your points, but I want to reiterate that these new, quicker bgs, are, in fact, a great way to level alliance skills due to the high ap received... especially during Mayhem.

It's pretty great, but depends on the game mode. Capture the relic takes the full 15 minutes about 80% of the time once you get to a high MMR because there's so much healing and too many players bashing on either relic for anyone to take it. There really needs to be more than one relic in that game mode in a spot far enough away from the spawn relic so teams can remain split instead of heal stacking 1 relic.

Just to spitball ideas, I think the alikr and town map can have 2 extras while the sewers and river mpa can have 1 extra. Either the extras can be worth 100 points and be turned in anywhere, only be turned into the primary one, or the extras and anything turned into their locations can give 50 points. It'll be just like the transformation chaos balls where they give less points than the regular one.

And speaking of the transformations, they really need a boost to damage mitigation and health if they're going to be worth less than the primary ball. They already have somewhat decent damage, but with no healer, you're already dead when picking it up.

moo_2021

katanagirl1 wrote: »

I did some BGs for the Golden Pursuits, haven’t done them much since the change. My teammates probably thought I was stupid but I could not stand up on the spawn point and attack the other team below. It felt like cheating. I jumped down into the fray and frequently got killed while they stood up above.

Only once did such tactic work in my experience, when they used it to cover their teammates below in a DM.

Usually it's just desperate and useless. They can't do anything that way but insist on hiding and waiting until timeout.

Since the 2 sided change, we got a lot of such toxic players in additional to quitters - I too quit once because 2 of my team simply refused to fight in DM.