It doesn’t matter which PvP weekend event is active—whether it’s Deathmatch PvP Weekend, Crazy King, Domination, or any other mode—small maps continue to appear in the 8v8 format during these events.

@ZOS_Kevin, @ZOS_GinaBruno, I sincerely ask you to pay attention to this issue. The balance in Battlegrounds is already far from ideal, but on small maps in 8v8 matches, games are essentially decided within 30 seconds. Even with a slight power difference between teams, the stronger team almost instantly locks the weaker team at their respawn point, making the match frustrating and one-sided.

Please consider adjusting map selection for 8v8 events to improve gameplay fairness.

In the few 8v8 deathmatches I played this weekend, on the small maps, the team that wiped the first would always try to stay in their own spawn during the remainder of the match. This sometimes happens on the regular 8v8 maps as well, but at least there, people feel a bit more confident to come down even with a potato team, as there is enough space to lose some of the pressure from a stronger team. On small maps it's just one and done, it seems.

i11ionward wrote: »

It doesn’t matter which PvP weekend event is active—whether it’s Deathmatch PvP Weekend, Crazy King, Domination, or any other mode—small maps continue to appear in the 8v8 format during these events.

@ZOS_Kevin, @ZOS_GinaBruno, I sincerely ask you to pay attention to this issue. The balance in Battlegrounds is already far from ideal, but on small maps in 8v8 matches, games are essentially decided within 30 seconds. Even with a slight power difference between teams, the stronger team almost instantly locks the weaker team at their respawn point, making the match frustrating and one-sided.

Please consider adjusting map selection for 8v8 events to improve gameplay fairness.

It's funny but I had the same observation last night, I think it was the high isle one. Pretty much an open small arena with a bridge in the middle, nothing to hide behind. Our team locked them to their spawn point right off the bat and that was that. I was thinking before we started how small it was as I play my NB with hardly any defense but all offense.

ZOS_Kevin wrote: »

Thanks for the feedback here. We will pass this along to the team for their consideration about map selection for 8v8 battlegrounds.

For the record, a large part of the BG community enjoy playing 8v8 on these maps, it is felt the main cause of the lopsided games on these maps is mostly a matchmaking issue. We already dont get to play these maps in 8s during regular gameplay, taking them away from events too seems a bit harsh.

xylena_lazarow wrote: »

Some of my BGs guildies have told me they love the small arenas and want to see them stay. I can accept this if we do something about players shooting/healing from/at the spawn areas, it makes it pointless to push the opposing team back, you'll immediately be dealing with constant spam from the enemy's spawn point.

its annoying for a melee character to deal with an enemy team that won't jump down, it would be nice if they greatly shortened the time you can stay in spawn, like from 2 minutes, to 20 seconds. At least for now it's the job of your teams ranged dps to "encourage" the other team to leave their safe space. It's pretty effective at moving them, or ending the deathmatch faster if they refuse to leave spawn and want to die there ad infinitum.

ruskiii wrote: »

It's pretty effective at moving them, or ending the deathmatch faster if they refuse to leave spawn and want to die there ad infinitum.

Until they move further backwards in their spawn to get out of range, or hide behind an object up there. No idea why there isn't like a 20sec or whatever limit on standing in spawn, nor why it's interactable at all, especially when they already have the code for noninteractive safe zones being used in Cyro town spawns and IC gates.

Some sort of Mercy rule, or a forfeit option that pops up when the score gap hits 300+ or whatever, would also help.

Iriidius wrote: »

In 4v4v4 players usually left spawn without a limit on time you can stay in spawn. Maybe it would help if the full winning team would not wait below spawn to immediately Xv1 the first player jumping out and if the battleground would not continue if there is only 1 player left on one team versus 4 on the other expecting this player to jump alone into 4 player.
Even a suicide/surrender option would help.

There was plenty of times players would sit in spawn in 4v4v4 if they were pinned, and it was worse because you couldn't get to them if they did. In the new BGs there's even been a couple times Ive been able to win while pinned because i have ranged bomb and gank set ups for my NB. 9/10 you get wiped vs all 4/8, if they are half decent, but making it so you cant attack at all in the spawn would mean there is no oppurtunities to create space for the team to push out.

If your whole team is pinned and have no way to deal with it, it is 100% a skill issue. Maybe not your skill but the other people on the team probably clueless as to how they can play from that position. To be fair, sometimes you might just have a *** comp (no healer other team has a good healer) but thats bound to happen sometimes in solo q, chalk it up to bad rng. I'll say instead that "most" times it is a team skill issue.

I do agree the 2 minute timer is way too long. They should reduce that. But the biggest single change they could make to prevent these situations from happening is to stop resetting mmr monthly.

I really don't see anything productive in wanting maps changed, game mechanics changed, or anything else, before they stop the mmr resets. Give the mmr a chance to work people into the right brackets and then talk about what the real issues are.

Right now you could give people 20 second invincibility and 1000 wd when they leave spawn and people will still get smoked if its a low mmr player with high mmr players waiting for them.

Oblivion_Protocol wrote: »

There’s another issue with small maps in BGs that doesn’t seem to get brought up at all.

Bombers.

There’s realistically not enough space for everyone to separate enough to avoid a Dark Convergence or Rush of Agony proc (though you could be a mile away and still get pulled by RoA, but that’s neither here nor there). A competent bomber can literally carry an entire team by themselves with virtually no effort if even ONE person fails to recognize the threat and mitigate it in time.

The 8v8 Deathmatch weekend was an absolute feasting ground for good bombers, from what I saw.

Root cause here is the sets, not the maps. They may be a lot of fun, but both are both completely unbalanced. The team that has roa or DC usually wins even when their team is less skilled.. unless you consider slotting these sets skillful.

Thumbless_Bot wrote: »

Root cause here is the sets, not the maps. They may be a lot of fun, but both are both completely unbalanced. The team that has roa or DC usually wins even when their team is less skilled.. unless you consider slotting these sets skillful.

The sets are a problem, but that doesn’t change the fact that not being able to separate effectively makes groups more susceptible to being bombed.

There’s a reason I said “competent” bombers. For every one successful bomb I’ve seen, there have been three bad ones that do nothing because their timing is off or people see them. The problem is that the one successful bomb will damn near guarantee victory, which is why there has been (I kid you not) a bomb build in 95% of the Deathmatch BGs I played in this weekend.

Squishing everyone together on a small map just increases the odds of a bomber getting multiple kills, which is the problem I’m referring to.

Thumbless_Bot wrote: »

I also wish sigils had flags that you had to take to gain the effect, so teams could fight over them and not fight over who could aim their reticle and click x faster.

These sigils should also show up on the maps and have pointers in the compass at the top of the screen.

Now that would be fun... and competitive.

No, that would lead to a game of who’s got the biggest speed boost to get to the damage sigil the fastest. And I’ve seen that happen in PvP modes of games that had similar mechanics.

xylena_lazarow wrote: »

Oblivion_Protocol wrote: »

The 8v8 Deathmatch weekend was an absolute feasting ground for good bombers, from what I saw.

FTFY, with all the event noobs, was seeing a lot of mid bombers enjoying pure carries by Rushing Agony builds. Even if I perfectly recover from being pulled by an off screen or bugged long range RoA proc, break the fear, hold block, shield myself and allies... not much I can do if my shielded allies still die and explode me with 60k of VD's through block.

Never realized until recently there's a subtle but very serious problem with VD or the death explosion concept in general: it punishes carrying. When ball groups say why they don't fight other balls, they often cite risk of being exploded by dying pugs VD'ing them. This artificially changes the behavior of sweatlords, who now deliberately avoid trying to carry noobs or faction players, even if they otherwise would want to help the team, further dividing tryhards from casuals.

The function of 8v8 depends on sweatlords being able to carry. If I can't get up close with my teammates without a bunch of sudden random procs blowing everyone up, that severely limits my ability to time my Thrive Talon bombs (skills not procs) or use my 8m radius shields (skills not procs), making it much harder to carry even in the larger arenas, and near impossible in the small ones where the entire arena is within Rushing Agony pull bomb range.

My deathmatch event autopsy concludes that Rush of Agony pull bombing may have been an even bigger factor in the lopsided 8v8 matches than arena size. Cyro is dead, if RoA sticks around, the 8v8 BGs will die too.

This is what people don’t understand about RoA

It not only drives away newer players from pvp, because who wants to get pulled from seemingly nowhere, but it drives veteran players away from newer players because who wants to get hit by 3 procs of VD on top of the bomb through block?

With this combination, pvp will surely die.

The small maps are badly designed. Doesn't matter if it is 8v8 or 4v4. Standing on the central flag and being parsed on by one to eight people in spawn is just that... bad design.