As promised, Harrowstorm – the first DLC headed to The Elder Scrolls Online in 2020 – landed on the public test server alongside update 25, and it’s packed full of stuff you already knew was coming, along with stuff that’s gonna send your eyebrows up to the sky.
We did know about the two new dungeons, Icereach and Unhallowed Grave, of course, plus there are multiple new gear sets, new collectibles and dyes, another round of framerate and stability enhancements, the quartet of new PvP campaigns, two new houses, and the prologue quest. There’s also a pretty hefty change to the game’s PvP map buried under spoiler tags deep in the patch notes: “You can now only queue as a solo player into Battlegrounds.”
“This is a big change to Battlegrounds matchmaking which we are executing partially in response to player feedback and partially as an experiment. We recognize the change will prevent players from being able to reliably team up with friends in Battlegrounds, but it should also improve both the speed of matchmaking and the competitiveness of PvP matches. As part of the change, we are resetting the matchmaking rating (MMR) of all players, so going forward, the system more properly evaluates individuals based on their performance in the solo queue. We’ll be closely monitoring both player feedback and the impact of these changes on the system.”
Reddit hasn’t blown up too much over it, but there are gobs of threads on the PTS feedback forums from people upset (or at least upset about this specific fix for the problem) and begging for some sort of lobby system instead, while a few are praising the move. It definitely doesn’t seem as if this argument will be put to rest any time soon, as there’s a huge divide in the PvP crowd right now over whether it’s more important to be able to queue with friends or fix the problem of premades dominating PUGs in the mode.
The houses, we note, are Forgemaster Falls – Orcish with a village setting and smithy – and Thieves’ Oasis – a Redguard hideaway to stash all your swindles.
YouTuber Stardancer has done a walkthrough of some of the new furnishings too!
Solo only BGs has to be the worst change to PvP ever, the inability to play with friends/guildmates in an MMO is a huge step back. Hopefully it doesn’t pass through to live.
After months of trying, I was finally able to convince a group of my friends to come to ESO. They are avid PvPers, and they had previously held out as ESO didn’t have something like arenas. But the promise of instanced group PvP in battlegrounds, the type of combat ESO had, and the build complexity, finally drew them in over the last experience event. On Sunday, my friends started to finally hit max gear level CP.
On Monday, one of them found out about this PTS change. They have all said they’re just going to quit if it goes live. A couple won’t even bother logging in until ZOS comments on the issue.
None of us wanted to “pug stomp” or anything. We have only really queued as duos and hardly stomp anything. We just like to play with each other in instanced PvP settings. ESO’s other PvP Offerings are relatively poor for what we are after. Cyrodil has rare PvP punctuated by massive zergs. Imperial City can be fun, and I hope they get into it, but right now it is totally dead.
If this goes live, I doubt I can keep any of them playing.
A ‘simple’ solution would be two queues, one that allows groups, one that doesn’t. But that does not seem in the cards…
I don’t understand the drama, it’s on PTS for a reason, just give constructive criticism and they’ll probably change it.
We are trying to give them feedback, but there hasn’t been a response other than the warn/ban some of the posters involved in the discussions.
There are dozens of threads about it, but no evidence ZOS will do anything.
That’s why I said constructive criticism….
It’s not an actual solution, it’s a band-aid fix. ZOS has proven incapable of improving the performance of the activity finder for years. This change and the resetting of mmr will drastically reduce the strain on the activity finder, temporarily. It’s a very short sighted and shallow change that is less than 25% effective for the problem at hand. There should simply be a ranked and non ranked que option; with ranked allowing for groups.
That would be a great solution and make sense, but this is the company who thought leaving in animation cancelling was a good idea.
I don’t think they can fix animation cancel, so they keep it as a feature. This is not something just from ZOS, happened at DCUO too.
It’s terrible for their rep, tho because it defines them as a hackfix enterprise. Which is exactly what they are doing here.
Pre-mades should be fighting other pre-mades and PUGs should be fighting other PUGs, how is this not obvious? o.O
It does seem obvious! I’m not sure there are actually enough PvP players at any given time to make that tenable, though.
The only game I can remember that really working well was Aion 2009-2011 (I haven’t played it recently). You could only queue for the Dredgion during certain hours of the day, so getting your premade together and getting a quick queue was pretty easy since you only had a certain window in which to do it. It’s honestly not a bad system. Even better when you’re only looking at small groups. WoW has the Rated Battleground system which sounds great in theory, but I suspect getting large enough groups together is the hard part – 2 and 3 man arena teams are easier to put together.
Honestly?
That’s their problem. Not the game’s problem.
I’d rather a match didn’t start at all than it start and be a one-sided stompfest, perhaps more people would queue up if they didn’t get stomped by a pre-made everytime they try.
Yeah, not enough players for that. ESO is not a PvP game after all.
All I do in ESO is pvp. It’s great fun. There are plenty of us pvping.
Hard truth here: if all you do in ESO is pvp, you have little incentive to subscribe and/or buy new content. Zenimax therefore has little financial reason to keep you happy. I’m not dumping on pvp’ers (I myself enjoy the occasional battleground.) I’m just pointing out that there’s a reason dedicated pvp’ers are treated as second class citizens.
ESO has multiple PVP modes and was once quite focused on PVP. That has changed a little but many in the community are still PvPers
People seem to have more fun dueling on landscape. Vulkul Guard has long been a dueling center and there are constant battles there in the evenings and on the weekends.
I think you need a critical mass of people for that to work, which i don’t think ESO has at this point.