Battlegrounds & Misc. PvP Questions – Community Q&A

Below is part two of our written PVP Q&A series, based on questions from the official ESO forums and ESO Reddit communities. We received over 150 unique questions, so we have batched them out into smaller sets. This next one covers questions and answers about Battlegrounds as well as a few miscellaneous PvP-related topics. We do still have a Cyrodiil & Imperial City and PvP Combat & Itemization sets in progress. Thank you to everyone who asked a question! Spawn & Respawn Questions Q. Will you introduce spawn immunity in Battlegrounds? - r0lyat A. Introducing spawn immunity to Battlegrounds is something we’ve thought about. The way it would need to work, is spawn immunity would suppress all combat-related actions while a player is in that state. This means that when you have spawn immunity in a Battleground, you would not be able to use any skills, couldn’t activate buff effects before you get into combat, or heal allies who are fighting out of spawn as you come down, couldn’t gain Ultimate, etc. Suppressing all combat-related actions could be pretty disruptive and interrupts the natural flow of combat, so while it is possible, it does come with some potentially negative trade-offs that we would need to consider. Q. Are there any plans to fix the respawning systems in battlegrounds? There are currently 2 problems here:

From the offensive view, being able to attack your opponent at their base spawn area results in spawn camping and griefing.
From a defensive view, players don’t leave the spawn area to engage back in the battle, which breaks the flow of battle. As this basically frustrates the opponents and they have no other choice but to spawn camp as this is where the battle has gone to.- lizeswan

A. We’ve observed this behavior as well, and have talked about non-disruptive ways to combat it. To your point, it does result in a stalemate that isn’t much fun for anyone. Similar to the spawn immunity topic above, the most effective option would result in disabling all outgoing combat-related abilities for players in their spawn area, as well as blocking all incoming abilities into the spawn area from the attacking team. We aren’t confident in this solution and it’s pretty disruptive, so we’re still exploring other options. Q. Why is the respawn timer so long for battlegrounds? 20 seconds seems too long. Can we see it shortened and/or removed in the future? - RonaldRegan18 A. The Battlegrounds respawn timer is currently set to a range of 1 to 20 seconds, with 20 being the maximum. We chose this rolling respawn range to allow for short breaks from combat to happen, versus a constant battle. It’s intended to be a small penalty/victory moment that allows teams a brief lull to breath, reinforce and capture areas, heal and buff, etc. Internally, we’ve experimented with shorter respawn timers and they didn't feel as good as the 1-20 second range we have now. Match-Making & Match-Making Rating Questions Q. We could see our MMR (match-making rating) during week one of Update 44 PTS. This was removed despite a lot of players enjoying seeing their own rating. Have you considered adding this feature back and perhaps allowing people to hide it if they want? It would also be nice to see how much MMR is gained/lost after each Battleground. - Decimus A. This is something we were planning to do, and in scoping out the work needed, we determined that it would require some fairly significant leaderboard updates. It’s not completely off the table – just on hold as we define the work needed to do this the way we want. One other thing we’re considering when it comes to MMR is we don’t want players to use the information against others. Even if we give players the ability to not publicize their own MMR – even if it’s only visible to them on their character window – it could be pulled out and viewable via the API. So, it would be universally on or off as far as the game API is concerned, and that’s an important consideration. Q. MMR resetting every month in Battlegrounds is a point of contention with players of all skill levels right now. As it stands, it takes 2 to 3 weeks before you start getting "relatively" balanced games, and then a week later it resets again. This leads to a majority of the games you play over a month being mismatched, and shooting people in spawn while they wait out the clock is only fun for about 30 seconds. Is the team aware of what a negative experience the MMR resets have been for players since U44? - ruskiii A. We have seen this feedback about the monthly MMR resets, yes. For context as to why we reset MMR each month, it’s to give everyone a fresh opportunity on the leaderboards. That said, we agree that the game matchmaking based on current MMR could be better. Our priority for Battlegrounds right now is getting the issue fixed where matches sometimes don’t fully populate as they should before the match starts. (For example, having only 7 out of 8 team members when the match starts should not be happening.) After we fix that issue, we will be looking at improving overall battlegrounds matchmaking based on MMR, so that groups are more equally matched. Q. If the team doesn't want to do away with the MMR resets altogether, are there any plans to make longer intervals between the resets, for example at the start of a major patch when there are actual build changes that might affect player performance? - ruskiii A. We've considered it, but there's a whole host of other things that are tied to this. (i.e. - leaderboard rewards, leaderboards being impossible to crack into because people are too far ahead...etc.) As noted in the question above, some of the pain of the resets is how MMR is calculated at the group level - that part of the system can be improved to make things more balanced and is on the list of things we'd like to address after we get the issue with teams not filling up completely fixed. Q. BG Matchmaking (particularly in 4v4) has been a very heated topic ever since the overhaul of the battlegrounds. Have you considered restructuring them a little bit and adding a team shuffle, similar to how WoW does their Arenas? - Decimus A. While the concept of letting you queue solo for a specific role (or two) for 4v4 mode like you can for dungeons would be possible, we want to avoid adding too many queue options for group content. The more options we add, the more the overall queue gets split and wait times go up. Long wait times are never great, especially for quicker “hop in and play a quick match” content like Battlegrounds. Battleground Match Types Questions Q. Are there plans to expand the new battleground system to allow players to create custom premade battleground matches with options of 2v2, 3v3, or even 8v8 for the larger maps? It would give players the ability to run their own team tournaments, or guilds the ability to create a training environment to bring new blood into the community. - _Satyrical_ A. We love the idea and it's something we've thought a lot about over the years. So many great ideas, so little time... Q. Is there any new information regarding making 8v8 the first "default" option in activity finder? This would further help matchmaking by guiding casual players towards the casual game mode. I had seen a post on Reddit that said the idea would be passed on to the team, and hopefully there is some interest in this simple change. During Chaosball weekend the queues are rearranged, but it's still competitive solo 4v4 as the default option. - ruskiii A. Adjusting which Battlegrounds option appears first in the list is on our list of things to try in the future – stay tuned! Q. Are there any BG UI improvements in the works? For example, the dropdown in PvE Dungeons is used to adjust "Normal, Veteran, Specific" difficulty, and Tales of Tribute dropdown shows "Ranked, Unranked." Why is the BG dropdown inconsistent and shows 4 different options? Ideally, the dropdown would let you choose between Unranked/Casual or Ranked/Competitive, and then nice big "8v8 Solo" "8v8 Grouped" buttons would show on the screen, and you have the option to queue for both. - ceruulean A. We currently have four Battlegrounds queue options based on PTS feedback. The more queues we have, the more fragmentation of the population and the longer it takes to get into BG matches. PTS feedback has been pretty clear that the most important things to players are knowing when they queue for a match as solo, they only get other solos, and vice versa for pre-made groups. Q. Given the feedback regarding the recent changes to Battlegrounds and the fact that many players have expressed a desire for the three team 4v4v4 format to be reinstated as an option, in addition to 4v4 and 8v8, will 4v4v4 be reinstated? - Chrisilis A. Not everyone wants just three-sided Battlegrounds. Some of our players do, and some don’t, and it’s okay to want and prefer different things. We’ve seen BG participation go up overall since the change to two-sided teams. We hear the feedback, though, that some players would like to do the three-sided Battlegrounds again, so we're looking at doing special BG weekends/events that bring that mode back regularly. Stay tuned for more info! Miscellaneous Battlegrounds Questions Q. Are there plans to add armory stations to the spawn areas of battlegrounds so people can swap to their PvP builds whilst waiting for the BG to populate with players? - RokuTheRed A. We’ve discussed the possibility of this and understand it’s something players would like to have. We’re looking into the work needed – stay tuned! Q. Will you consider resetting Ultimate before the start of a BG round? This is so fights have a buildup instead of a team getting dunked on right from the beginning. - galegone A. We hear you, and it's something we've talked a lot about over the years. In theory, it's fairly simple, but in practice there are a lot of complexities to sort out - lots of edge cases to solve. Q. What's the logic behind allowing people to zone into Battlegrounds before everyone accepts a queue if you're just going to cancel the Battleground completely when it can't find enough people? Wouldn't it make more sense to have some sort of pre-check like the dungeon finder system? - mahwaha A. When we first designed the queuing system that Battlegrounds uses, we wanted players to get into the action as quickly as possible. Improving the overall Battlegrounds queueing experience is on our list – we agree a pre-check like the dungeon finder system uses would be a nice addition. After we fix the current issue where Battlegrounds groups are sometimes not fully populating, we can look at queuing improvements such as this. Q. Are there any plans to add a proper (and visual) ranking system for the 4v4 battleground mode? And if not, why so? - Frequent_Car8717 A. We do have some improvements we’d like to make to the Battlegrounds match-making rank system and leaderboards. Our most immediate priorities for Battlegrounds are:

• Fixing the issue where groups sometimes don’t fully populate as they should before the match starts.
• Improving overall battlegrounds matchmaking based on MMR, so that groups are more equally
(and consistently) matched.

After we're in a good place with those two, we can look into future improvements and new additions. Q. What are your plans going forward when it comes to Battlegrounds? - Decimus A. We always have new things we’d like to do, and player suggestions we’d like to explore. As we mentioned in the answer above, though, we have a couple Battlegrounds improvement priorities we need to hit first as well as the ongoing Cyrodiil improvement work. Once those are complete, we’ll see! Miscellaneous PVP Questions Q. Have you discussed the opportunity to introduce a new PVP zone? Will underground zones be possible for free-for-all PVP? What about guild wars? Or PvX with zone mechanics in overland, where both PVE and PVP mix in some instanced battle? - Howdhell A. Yes, we've talked about some of these ideas over the years and enjoy hearing our community’s ideas. Our current priority is making improvements to the PvP modes we have, including the Battlegrounds priorities we mention above and the Cyrodiil Champions test. These are our focus for now, but we’d love to explore more PvP options at some point. As we move into trying new things in the future like Firor touched on in his Studio Director’s Letter – experimenting more to see what sticks – community feedback will be more important than ever. Q. How is the fixing of the 49710 hours long phantom negative effects bug going? A visual bug, yes, but it always raises questions for new PVP players. - BixenteN7Akantor A. The phantom negative effects bug has been a challenge. It crops up from time to time and has been very difficult to repro. To give a little more technical breakdown, we believe this to be a byproduct of an effect message not being properly sent or removed on the client. In such a case, the client knows there was an effect but it was removed/ended before it had time to process so it defaults to the longest possible duration effect as a backup. That can happen any multitude of ways and is dependent on things like your connection to the game, server frames (i.e how responsive the server is) at the time, and your client's ability to handle information (so your rig and what the game engine understands.) We've noticed that this tends to happen more in situations where there's a race condition of two or more processes that attempt to happen synchronously, but things like lag, client responsiveness, or even scripting errors cause them to happen asynchronously, causing a case where there is "phantom" effects or data to persist. TL:DR - we know about it and are trying to figure out a way to fix it, without breaking other things. It's complicated and frustrating for us too. :) Q. This is not an actual Cyrodiil question, but it should perhaps have the nostalgia of it: Can we get a keep as a housing building at some point in game? Perhaps for crowns (for keeps are big), and a tower or a post as a reward of some sort earnable in game? - Erissime A. We've actually talked about this on the housing team a few times. The core issue is that keeps are basically a bunch of building block pieces and use a lot of physics to handle all the destructibility. We can't do that in the housing system (the server would melt) and we feel that a keep without being destructible wouldn't really be all that compelling. We have loads of other castle/keep type homes, so there wouldn't really be anything unique with a static keep. Q. Why did the Quickslot overhaul not include a dedicated PvP-items (siege) wheel? And might you add one in the future? - peacenote A. The focus for the Quickslot overhaul was mostly on collectibles at the time since we were adding another quickslottable type (Companions). In some ways it freed up more space for items on the first page, but we weren't directly focused on items. It wouldn't be off the table to explore in the future, though. We just have to be careful with it as it would be a nightmare if every item category had its own page (to navigate and actually use quickly and efficiently.)