TLDR: Axe the Competitive Section. Axe the U50 Section. Split the Solo Battlegrounds into Deathmatch and Objective Queues. Split the Group Battle Grounds into a 1/2 person queue and a 1/3/4 person queue. Add a dueling queue. Add and adjust leaderboards. Change the Queue UI. Revise BG Quests

I spent a bunch of last month in Solo Competitive, Solo Standard and Solo U50 Standard Battlegrounds and I don't think the current design is going to work in the long run.

The current design splits a relatively small number of players into six different queues that each include players with significantly different desires and capabilities. This can frequently produce low quality matches with long queue times that don't differ that much in experience from one queue to another. Over time, as players get annoyed or end up collecting all the cosmetic items they want the population will start to drop and the match quality and queue duration will likely get worse.

To illustrate the issue, some of the better and more competitive PvPers are using addons to queue for both the Competitive and the Standard Mode at the same time because getting a faster queue time is worth more to them than ending up in a specific mode under the current design. The competitive mode isn't competitive enough to have a significantly stronger appeal to them and it's likely shifting it into a more competitive direction will leave it with less players and thus have it struggle more to produce timely and balanced matches.

Regardless of which queue you are in you will find that people regularly blow off the objective because players would rather Deathmatch than win the match.

As a result, I'd suggest that it would be better for the design for solo queue to be split into Deathmatch and Objective based rather than Competitive and Standard.

This would allow the solo players that want to do Deathmatch in every match to do so and would make the Objective matches have less players that don't care about the objective.

I'd suggest splitting group play into a 1/2 person queue and a 1/3/4 person queue rather than Competitive and Standard.

I don't do group play myself but, my impression is that groups of friends generally get stomped by larger and more serious groups. If the group size is limited to two this can probably be somewhat reduced. Due to queue times, you wouldn't likely be able to split them up based on mode preferences. I would suggest at least temporarily rewarding the players in the 1/3/4 group queue with bound potions/tokens to buy bound potions. My impression is that potions can at times be a sore spot for some PvP players and providing them as a reward might increase the appeal of the mode without drawing in casual players or messing up the economy too much.

I think ZOS should seriously consider adding a dueling queue.

Personally, I don't care at all about dueling but, watching the PvP stream it was pretty clear that one of the streamers was quite into it, people were eager to duel them, and the developer on stream liked how interested the streamer was in doing it. I think you could potentially reuse the new Coldharbour Colosseum as a location for duels and reuse some of the matchmaking/ranking from Tales of Tribute. Since dueling is 1 vs 1 you aren't going to necessarily need a large audience for it to create matches. I'd suggest having players be separated into “weight classes” based on their hit points and have the gear they use locked when they queue. The idea behind the “weight classes” is to hope that one or more of the hit point ranges will provide meta PvP that people enjoy participating in and possibly watching.

I think the U50 Queues should be removed and instead allow the players to participate in Deathmatch and Objective queues with some stat bolstering.

In my U50 matches, queue times frequently ran 10 minutes+ and on rare occasions went over 30 minutes. During the longer queue periods match cancellations were more likely because people would likely have gotten into doing things and thus declined the queue when it actually popped. I generally tabbed out of game and did something else while I was in queue. As the queue had next to nobody in it finding replacements was hard when people decided not to go with the queue when it popped. When I actually got a match that started, a decent portion of the people in the matches were clearly people that were in min-maxed builds meant for beating the snot out of people in the lower bracket. I don't think the match quality would be that much worse if U50 players got put into matches with non-U50 players with a bit of stat bolstering and the queue times would be much better.

I think that all of the queues other than dueling should utilize 4 v 4, 8 v 8, and 4 v 4 v 4.

4 v 4 v 4 is best at producing enjoyable gameplay with uneven teams and it's larger spaces favor a wider range of builds and play styles as well as makes spawn camping somewhat less common. 4 v 4 queues take significantly less players to start a match and make your personal impact very clear. 8 v 8 offers larger engagements and puts less pressure on each individual to perform.

Both the new and the old maps have nice visuals that players can miss out on if they aren't options to be played on. You can also at times run into issues where players optimize so much for a gametype that it stops being fun for other players. For example, in 4 v 4 you can hit players that are slanted so heavily into durability you can't really do anything to them but, if they tried that in 8 v 8 or 4 v 4 v 4 they'd have a harder time. 8 v 8 can run into people using builds highly optimized for dealing with larger numbers of players that can end up not being fun to play against if it's too frequent.

You would likely want to shift the % chance for each a bit based on the mode and the population. For example, my impression is many of the people that like Deathmatch don't really like 4 v 4 v 4 as much as many of those that like Objective matches do so it would make sense to make it somewhat rare in Deathmatch and rather common in Objective matches. If you are having a low enough queue population that the matchmaker is stuck producing lots of 4 v 4 matches it might be better to not create as many of those when the population is a bit higher because people might get tired of them.

I think each queue should have a separate leaderboard with scoring that reflects the queue.

People like getting high scores and feeling like their efforts are appropriately rewarded. Right now, if you aren't in the competitive mode your score doesn't really matter outside of the ending display which can make people feel like their efforts don't really matter much in matches that are going badly. Right now, shielding and pet damage aren't really being rewarded and burst healing is frequently being rewarded too much. For more group slanted play and dueling, it likely makes more sense for the leaderboard to reward based primarily on the result rather than based on metrics as metrics aren't perfectly aligned with winning in more optimized situations.

For the UI, I'd suggest replacing Battlegrounds with Solo Battlegrounds, Group Battlegrounds, and Dueling with players being able to see and queue for the mode option in each category they want on the main screen without using a drop down.

The drop down interface can easily leave people being unaware of other options which can make players not queue for things they might otherwise be interested in. Having the options for each type be displayed on the main screen would help avoid this (Ex: Deathmatch/Objective and Duo/Small Group. Players currently will also accidentally end up in Competitive Matches because it occasionally pops back up as default after doing Standard matches.

Finally, I'd suggest redoing the Battleground Quests/Daily Reward so that the rewards pay out more evenly

First, I'd suggest shifting the Daily Reward from requiring a Battleground Win to requiring a Win or an amount of Medal Points. Some players that are just after the Daily Reward will leave matches when they think their team isn't going to win which can be disruptive. Others will end up getting frustrated if they end up on a long losing streak and don't end up getting credit.

Second, I'd suggest changing the intro quest For Glory to not require completing a Battlegrounds match and instead to reward the player with a PvP Variant of the Torc of the Last Ayleid King that levels with the player. The idea is to make it so anyone that wants to give PvP a whirl can toss that on and not get totally stomped from a gear standpoint.

Third, I'd suggest either allowing players to have Let the Games Begin, Test of Mettle, and To the Victor at the same time or having all of them reward a Battlemaster Token (You'd likely need to raise completion requirements for Test of Mettle to make it fair). Right now, players need to either accept and then cancel the quests repeatedly to get To the Victor or they need to do other quests first to get the daily Token. The former is an annoying hassle and the latter can be a long grind.

TLDR: Axe the Competitive Section. Axe the U50 Section. Split the Solo Battlegrounds into Deathmatch and Objective Queues. Split the Group Battle Grounds into a 1/2 person queue and a 1/3/4 person queue. Add a dueling queue. Add and adjust leaderboards. Change the Queue UI. Revise BG Quests