I would say it increased population in battlegrounds, at least on pseu.

4vs4 or 8v8 takes me a couple of mins in que when I play them

8v8 solo BGs have felt a lot more lively than Cyro lately, especially in the off hours.

I dont think we know yet whether population has gone up or down long term. I would say that the novelty has caused an increase. Whether that holds is TBD.

Most matches are incredibly lopsided. Whether it's 8v8 or 4v4. They are less about strategy, tactics, skill and ability and lack the excitement and dynamics twists and turns of three teams. Winning is now more about who has more proc mechanics and which team happens to have fewer 17k targets.

In 4v4 the meta has shifted to a very tanky healer meta largely due to the imbalanced medal scoring in competitve bgs that encourage this. I've been in more than my share of 4v4 dm that gets a grand total of 2 kills with the team healing more winning on medal score. It is the antithesis of exciting and engaging gameplay and doesn't seem to me to be all that repeatable.

8v8 is more fun for casuals and for those that like to stroke their ego by going 30-0 against a bunch of pve'ers doing their dailies with pve builds, but it's not more fun for me personally because the quality of combat has gone down significantly. One shotting people over and over gets boring.

The rewards system is better and I would recommend doing the battlemaster quests for tokens and swag. I believe they've also added in new rewards with u45. So there's that. This could also be a factor in any increase in population. Zos is really good at masking the quality or lack of quality of new chapters and dlc by placing broken sets or really nice swag in those places, so they can say it's popular, when it might not be the gameplay thats popular. Time will tell.

Udrath wrote: »

8v8 is pretty fun, I like trying to keep the PVE players alive and it’s really chaotic at times in a fun way. And it’s a lot better than the old bgs.

I do the same when on my plar. It's like, "come with me if you want to live". Encouraging newer players is something veteran players should be doing imho. It makes the game better for everyone. Helping them live is part of this.

buzzclops wrote: »

It’s been weird. The 8v8 is actually sweatier than the 4v4 for some reason even though 4v4 is the “competitive” one. Whenever I queu for 4v4 and I’ve done a lot of em i always play vs low rank low cp players with 19-20k hp. And in 8v8 you get all the sweaty players with agony and cheese setups.

4v4 is just pointless lopsided games that end after the initial fight.

In retrospect I’d keep the 8v8 and bring back the 4v4v4 instead of 4v4. They also need to remove some queues. I think 8v8 should just be one queu this way it would pop all the time and you wouldn’t face the same players each game.

I think this is because most of the sweaties avoid 4v4 like the plague unless they want to top the leaderboards, which few do. Additionally, streamers and content creators probably avoid 4v4 because you cant look good if you are on the wrong team, and there is almost always a wrong team in 4v4. In 8v8 you can do your thing no matter what.

Mostly what I see in 4v4 is people with pve builds who do not know better or people with troll healbot builds trying to get medal scores and don't care about wins. If there were an eso dictionary, a picture of 4v4 would be next to the word toxic.

4v4 is picking up on Xbox NA, short queues, great fights.

4v4 is almost always a floor parse fest where one team dominates the other so bad it’s not when worth trying (for perspective, I’ve had rounds where the other team was all squish and could barely even leave their spawn because we’d obliterate them immediately). I’ve only had a few close games. 8v8 feels more balanced.

Don't merge the group 8v8 and solo 8v8 queue together. 8v8 solo is a great addition and should be the default queue. The best way to ruin it would be to have 4 man premades in them with solo's.