Throne and Liberty is a game of queues
Almost every way to fight another player on demand in Throne and Liberty begins with a lobby. You open a menu, press a button and wait for the matchmaker to collect enough people.
- Arena queues you for a small-team match.
- Battlegrounds queue you for a larger objective match, and the available mode rotates by day of the week.
- Co-op dungeons queue you for a party, and the queue restarts when someone declines.
- Guild PvP such as Boonstone and Riftstone wars, Tax Delivery and Castle Siege is not queued at all. It runs on a schedule, which is a queue measured in days.
Each of these systems is reasonable on its own. Together they produce a game where the answer to "I have 20 minutes, can I PvP right now?" is usually "wait and find out."
Queues also fail in a way designers know well. When population is high, the wait is short and nobody notices. When population dips, in an off-peak hour, a quiet region or late in a season, waits grow. Longer waits push players out of the queue, which makes waits longer for everyone left. The mode looks dead even when plenty of people would play it if a match were available.
A queue converts player interest into a match only when enough players are interested at the same moment. That is the weakness a funnel removes.
What a funnel battleground is
A funnel battleground is a match that is already running when you arrive. There is no lobby and no minimum player count. The battle is on a timer, players pour in from the top at any moment, and when the timer ends the battleground scores, pays out and starts again.
The queue model gathers players and then starts a match. The funnel model starts the match and then gathers players.
| Traditional queue | Funnel battleground | |
|---|---|---|
| How you enter | Press queue, wait for a full lobby | Press join, spawn into a live battle |
| Time to first fight | Depends on population | Seconds |
| Match start | When the lobby fills | Always running on a timer |
| Low population | Waits grow, mode feels dead | Smaller fight, still playable |
| A player leaves | Team is short until the match ends | The next joiner fills the gap |
| Short play session | Risky, the wait may eat it | Safe, leave whenever you like |
| Best for | Ranked, balanced, competitive play | Casual, practice, daily PvP habit |
This is not a new idea. Guild Wars 2 lets players walk into World vs World at any time. PlanetSide 2 built a whole game on joining a fight in progress. Battlefield servers and Overwatch quick play backfill running matches. Throne and Liberty itself already does something close in its open-world conflict events, where anyone in the zone can take part.
The gap is that TL's drop-in PvP is tied to a timetable and a location, and its on-demand PvP is tied to a queue. Nothing in the game is both instant and always available.
How a funnel battleground could work in Throne and Liberty
Here is a version small enough to ship as one map and one mode.
- One persistent arena per region. A single cross-server battleground instance is always live. When it reaches its player cap, a second copy opens. When the copies empty out, they merge back.
- A fixed battle timer. Each round lasts 15 minutes. The remaining time is shown on the join button, so players know what they are walking into.
- Join anytime. A "Join Now" button sits in the same menu as Arena and Battlegrounds. Pressing it loads you straight into a spawn point. No ready check and no accept prompt.
- Automatic side assignment. New arrivals go to whichever team has fewer players or less total combat power. Parties stay together but count as a block when balancing.
- Rewards for time played. Payout at the end of the round scales with minutes of active participation and contribution, not with being present at the start. A minimum participation threshold stops people joining in the last 30 seconds for a reward.
- Simple objectives. Control points or a moving objective work best, because they still make sense with 6 players a side or 30. Modes that need exact team sizes belong in the queue.
- Leave without penalty. Leaving costs you the rewards you have not yet earned and nothing else. The next player through the funnel takes your place.
Two existing TL systems make this cheaper to build than it sounds. The battleground season framework already handles scoring, rewards and mode rotation. The conflict-zone events already handle players entering and leaving a live fight. A funnel battleground joins those two ideas.
It would also fit the game's identity. Throne and Liberty sells itself on large-scale battles, and a mode where the crowd grows through the round shows that off better than a fixed-size lobby does.
The objections, answered
"It will split the PvP population." It is more likely to feed it. A funnel mode is where players warm up, test a build and decide they want a serious match. Show the Arena and Battlegrounds queue buttons inside the funnel battleground, and let players stay in the fight while they wait. The funnel then becomes the waiting room for every other queue.
"Balance will be terrible." It will be looser than ranked play, and that is acceptable for an unranked mode. Side assignment by combat power, a cap on party size and optional gear normalisation keep it fair enough. Players forgive an uneven fight far more easily than a long wait.
"Players will farm it for rewards." Tie rewards to active contribution, set a daily or weekly cap, and keep the best rewards in ranked and guild content. The funnel should pay enough to respect a player's time and not enough to replace the rest of the game.
"Large guilds will stack one side." Limit party size on entry and balance by combat power. Castle Siege and the stone wars remain the place for organised guild play.
"An empty battleground looks bad." An empty funnel still gives the first player something to do if the objectives are capturable solo. One player capturing a point is a better advertisement than a lobby counter reading 1/20.
The ask
NCSoft does not need to remove a single queue. Ranked Arena and structured Battlegrounds need lobbies, and they should keep them. The request is for one mode, on one map, with a timer and an open door.
If I can log in with 15 minutes to spare and be in a fight before my coffee cools, I will log in more often. I suspect a lot of lapsed Throne and Liberty players would too.