Suggestion: Dynamic population caps.

Sharee

What: Instead of a hard population cap of 500 per faction, the cap would be set to the lowest faction's population, plus 10%(this number is negotiable).

Why: Because finding cyrodiil painted in single color every morning due to unopposed night capping by one faction makes people stop caring about the alliance war as a whole(both on the winning and on the losing sides), which is a shame.

The good: you will never be outnumbered by more than 9 vs 10 by a single enemy alliance, no matter what time of day you play.

The bad: some players might have to move to a server in their home territory (US to US, and EU to EU) to avoid queues. Some players(oceanic) might have to split their numbers between different alliances to provide opposition for themselves, instead of all playing one faction(and thus facing queues).

What do you think?

Agrippa_Invisus

I think this is a great idea. I question ZOS's ability to implement it, though.

Rune_Relic

I think this is the best way with multiple shards opening and closing dynamically as required and the populations fill up.
The problem is having preset rigid campaigns instead of dynamically adding and taking them away.

Rune_Relic

Rune_Relic wrote: »

I think this is the best way with multiple shards opening and closing dynamically as required and the populations fill up.
The problem is having preset rigid campaigns instead of dynamically adding and taking them away.

I thin the original idea was to have population controlled in this way with the megaserver. I really don't understand what went wrong.

Problem is 1000 EP and 100 AD and 100 DC.....where do you put the remaining 900 EP. Do they just sit in a queue forever ?

Turelus

This isn't going to solve the issues though.
On the EU servers AD and DC have enough players to fight EP and keep that battled back (even in night-cap times) the problems started when players from those two factions jumped ship to a campaign they could dominate on and not queue for.

What ZOS need is less campaigns with higher caps and making them stable.
This will stop people being spread out over multiple campaigns and having what we once again have which is one campaign for each faction to be dominate in.
There should also be some kind of intensive for players to fight for a losing faction, but balancing this vs the reward for winning is hard.

Sharee

Turelus wrote: »

This isn't going to solve the issues though.
On the EU servers AD and DC have enough players to fight EP and keep that battled back (even in night-cap times) the problems started when players from those two factions jumped ship to a campaign they could dominate on and not queue for.

On EU Thornblade, the campaign was extremely well-balanced for two weeks. No scrolls captures, and the battle front moved by one, or at most two keeps, back and forth.

The problems started when an EP guild from the US started to paint the whole map red while every EU player was asleep. When DC and AD woke up, they pushed EP back all the way to their scroll gates. But the next morning the situation repeated itself. And again. And again. And again.

There is only so many times you can wake up to find the whole map red(and red pop locked while AD and DC have one population bar) before you say 'eff it'.

Only then did the other two factions 'jump ship'. And i don't blame them.

In this particular case, my proposed solution will make that guild either
1, move to the US where they belong, or
2, split their numbers across all factions and fight each other, or
3, face a very long queue while there are next to no opponents to fight.

Either of these will stop the map from being single-colored every morning, and people will no longer give up on the campaign in disgust, either by jumping ship or giving up on pvp alltogether.

Turelus

EP to my knowledge doesn't have any US guilds.
I'm actually a member of the guild/alliance which does the night capping and we can achieve this because we have a lot of students or shift workers in our faction. When most of the captures happen we are only 20-40 online in the faction to my knowledge.

We actually tried this the first nights in the campaign and were destroyed by Shido and DC raids who had far superior numbers and tactics, it honestly only became the problem it is now when those groups left the campaign thus leaving us uncontested.

The issue of EP superiority could also be fixed if DC and AD worked together to keep us pushed back, although there is a lot of dislike for faction alliance this is the reason for three of them, two can beat down on the winning one.

I'm almost sure that all the other factions have the numbers needed in the early hours, the problem is none of them want to play on Thornblade now they're losing or the stupid queues have pushed them elsewhere. The only real solution I can see is to force people into one singular campaign, but ZOS doesn't have the technology or skill to make that work.

Sharee

Turelus wrote: »

EP to my knowledge doesn't have any US guilds.

From the Thornblade EU thread:

Volla wrote: »

I just gonna make people to be aware that there is a US guild playing on Thornblade atm. They were on Dawnbreaker before and we had same problem.
They call em self " Elite " guild. in what way i can't see when they apparently need to play when all is sleeping to be " Elite "...

Well there you have it.

I think maybe Zenimax can offer them a transfer to the US Server so we can have the balance back. And maybe don't allow US to play on EU or something like that, or force move em back where they belong

... and i'll stop there. This is getting off-topic for this thread.

Turelus

Well, I can 100% confirm to you that the guilds night-capping are not American, because it's my alliance. They're all EU players living in the EU.

Guilds in question are mostly (but not exclusively) The Wabbajack, Heroes of Skyrim & The Renegades. We share a TS server open to all EP members with a microphone and able to listen/work with our commanders.

I have yet to encounter any US players or guilds in all my time on Thornblade working into the early hours, there is another German guild which does it, as well as Greif's group (all EU players again I believe). Most people who have been posting that we're American don't actually know us and have just assumed that we are.

Back onto the topic though the dynamic cap is a nice idea but also going to just cause more queues and waits and cause people to spread all over the campaigns never playing with their guilds.
Should I really be punished into not playing with my guild because I come home from work at peak time, all my guild are already on the campaign from getting home earlier and there are no DC or AD players playing right now.
Honestly I think just making Chillrend into a 30day and removing the 7day and veteran camapigns would be enough to consolidate the playerbase into more fair numbers.

Again the issues are not that we have more players by default, it's that all the AD/DC players left Thornblade because of the lag/queues, then we were able to night cap and gain a lead which further pushed people away.
Now AD have their own campaign, DC have their own campaign and EP have their own campaign, we're back to where we were a month ago just with less campaigns.

IcyDeadPeople

Sharee wrote: »

What: Instead of a hard population cap of 500 per faction, the cap would be set to the lowest faction's population, plus 10%(this number is negotiable).

Why: Because finding cyrodiil painted in single color every morning due to unopposed night capping by one faction makes people stop caring about the alliance war as a whole(both on the winning and on the losing sides), which is a shame.

The good: you will never be outnumbered by more than 9 vs 10 by a single enemy alliance, no matter what time of day you play.

The bad: some players might have to move to a server in their home territory (US to US, and EU to EU) to avoid queues. Some players(oceanic) might have to split their numbers between different alliances to provide opposition for themselves, instead of all playing one faction(and thus facing queues).

What do you think?

For many of us, we just want to be able to log on at any time and find some fun battles to get into.

I'd much rather see the enemy faction having more players from other time zones, or capping all the keeps at certain times of day, than to log on to find the campaign dead and have trouble finding enemy players to fight.

Cyrodiil is fun when there are lots of enemies and battles all over the map, boring when there are not enough.

Sharee

IcyDeadPeople wrote: »

Sharee wrote: »

What: Instead of a hard population cap of 500 per faction, the cap would be set to the lowest faction's population, plus 10%(this number is negotiable).

Why: Because finding cyrodiil painted in single color every morning due to unopposed night capping by one faction makes people stop caring about the alliance war as a whole(both on the winning and on the losing sides), which is a shame.

The good: you will never be outnumbered by more than 9 vs 10 by a single enemy alliance, no matter what time of day you play.

The bad: some players might have to move to a server in their home territory (US to US, and EU to EU) to avoid queues. Some players(oceanic) might have to split their numbers between different alliances to provide opposition for themselves, instead of all playing one faction(and thus facing queues).

What do you think?

For many of us, we just want to be able to log on at any time and find some fun battles to get into.

I'd much rather see the enemy faction having more players from other time zones, or capping all the keeps at certain times of day, than to log on to find the campaign dead and have trouble finding enemy players to fight.

Cyrodiil is fun when there are lots of enemies and battles all over the map, boring when there are not enough.

You can find fun battles to get into even if the whole cyrodiil only has five players playing for each alliance. Just attack a keep and wait for them to come.

Battles all over the map are fine and dandy, but when you have one faction with twice the number of other 2 combined, there are no fun battles all over the map - it's the whole map painted in a single color with no action, except for a huge zerg camping enemy spawn hoping someone will be dumb enough to jump down.

IcyDeadPeople

Sharee wrote: »

You can find fun battles to get into even if the whole cyrodiil only has five players playing for each alliance. Just attack a keep and wait for them to come.

No, I've played on ghost town campaigns and had to do that kind of stuff to try to find enemy players. It's boring as hell.

The only campaigns worth playing on are high pop campaigns where there are lots of enemy players.

We need more players in Cyrodiil, not fewer. Currently it seems we don't even have enough of a player base to fill both Chillrend and Thornblade.

The more Oceanic and EU players on the NA server the better IMO. I like being able to log on at any time and easily find enemies and battles.

Sharee wrote: »

Battles all over the map are fine and dandy, but when you have one faction with twice the number of other 2 combined, there are no fun battles all over the map - it's the whole map painted in a single color with no action, except for a huge zerg camping enemy spawn hoping someone will be dumb enough to jump down.

Although I've participated in some fun, epic battles inside my own faction's gates, I understand how discouraging it can be for some players to be stuck at your gate.

However, reducing the number of enemy players in the context you describe would simply result in a dead campaign. Not enough of your faction, not enough enemies to support a fun high pop campaign.

Pathfinder

All we really need are three 30 day servers. Each faction will end up trying to use one as its home buff server and be resigned to guesting at one of the other two to "invade".

Turelus

Pathfinder wrote: »

All we really need are three 30 day servers. Each faction will end up trying to use one as its home buff server and be resigned to guesting at one of the other two to "invade".

That's not going to solve the issues though, it's just going to make them worse and we already have this now just with the 30/14/7 day ones.
We need LESS campaigns so people can't cut and run as soon as things look bad, however to make that work ZOS needs to find a way to remove the crippling lag and raise the caps enough to actually let entire guilds play.

Sharee

IcyDeadPeople wrote: »

No, I've played on ghost town campaigns and had to do that kind of stuff to try to find enemy players. It's boring as hell.

What do you mean, try to find? Attack their keep. They will come. You don't have to look for them at all.

IcyDeadPeople wrote: »

However, reducing the number of enemy players in the context you describe would simply result in a dead campaign. Not enough of your faction, not enough enemies to support a fun high pop campaign.

It would not be dead during primetime. And i don't see anything wrong with a campaign being low overall population when it's timezone is all in bed. If you find yourself often playing at such times, consider changing server to one that is populated at that time.

frosth.darkomenb16_ESO

This is a terrible idea.

The game is about cooperation in a large scale war. At no point should you resent your allies for login in.

As the overpoped faction, every other player would be taking your spot and force you in queue far more often than now.
As the underpoped faction, every other player login in is a potential noob that unlocks 2 more enemies.
This would lead to elitism and harassement.

Having a slot on a campaign should only be limited to technical capabilities of the servers.
If you want to balance population, just give more ap and xp when killing enemies:

Xp = base xp X (their pop / your pop)
If they have 500 and you have 100, bam, x5.
For the reasons stated above, if you are equal or the higgest pop, you just earn normal xp/ap.

I bet people will log in, the two small factions will focus the large one and the large members will pull out.(teehee)

IcyDeadPeople

Sharee wrote: »

IcyDeadPeople wrote: »

No, I've played on ghost town campaigns and had to do that kind of stuff to try to find enemy players. It's boring as hell.

What do you mean, try to find? Attack their keep. They will come. You don't have to look for them at all.

IcyDeadPeople wrote: »

However, reducing the number of enemy players in the context you describe would simply result in a dead campaign. Not enough of your faction, not enough enemies to support a fun high pop campaign.

It would not be dead during primetime. And i don't see anything wrong with a campaign being low overall population when it's timezone is all in bed. If you find yourself often playing at such times, consider changing server to one that is populated at that time.

Have you played this kind of campaign? It is insanely boring compared to the campaigns most people enjoy playing on, the high pop campaigns. If people have to sit there and flag a keep in order to have 3 people appear, the game is dead. (And sometimes nobody appears when you flag a keep on those campaigns.)

I live in Pacific Time zone, and I sometimes play very late at night or early in the morning. My "primetime" starts around 8 or 9pm PST, already midnight on the East Coast. Several campaigns were a lot of fun shortly after launch, and subsequently on Wabbajack when you could log on at any time of day or night and find many fun battles all over the map.

The game is more fun to play if your faction is losing, but there are lots of enemy players and battles everywhere, compared to a ghost town campaign where your faction might be winning, but you have to flag a keep in the hopes that you can find 2 or 3 enemy players to come out and fight. That is more like PVE, not really the full PVP experience.

Tintinabula

I totally support this idea. I would much rather wait in a que for an even playing field than wait at a gate for 4 hours for a Population bar to appear.

WarrioroftheWind_ESO

Normally I would be firmly opposed to this as it would impose more of a 'battleground' restriction on Cyro (i.e. Alterac Valley, Arathi Basin etc.) But the whole "buff server" BS alot of factions keep pulling ruins things so badly for the casual pvper. Since launch we've gone down from ten servers to upcoming four. That's not a good thing that means so many people got outright disgusted with pvp. As long as factions are able to get away with exploiting the campaign buffs, next setup might see each faction with its own 'buff server'. and everyone trying to pile into the leftover camp.

If they can get the coding right it might help things out, but the logic of a 3 way war is usually the 2 lesser facs gang up on the dominant one. "Enemy of my enemy" and all that. Unfortunately people sitting at their computers don't seem to have a grasp of military strategy and end up shooting themselves in the foot. I'd rather they just localize the buffs or remove them all together than trying to add in caps of any kind.

IcyDeadPeople

WarrioroftheWind_ESO wrote: »

Normally I would be firmly opposed to this as it would impose more of a 'battleground' restriction on Cyro (i.e. Alterac Valley, Arathi Basin etc.) But the whole "buff server" BS alot of factions keep pulling ruins things so badly for the casual pvper. Since launch we've gone down from ten servers to upcoming four. That's not a good thing that means so many people got outright disgusted with pvp. As long as factions are able to get away with exploiting the campaign buffs, next setup might see each faction with its own 'buff server'. and everyone trying to pile into the leftover camp.

If they can get the coding right it might help things out, but the logic of a 3 way war is usually the 2 lesser facs gang up on the dominant one. "Enemy of my enemy" and all that. Unfortunately people sitting at their computers don't seem to have a grasp of military strategy and end up shooting themselves in the foot. I'd rather they just localize the buffs or remove them all together than trying to add in caps of any kind.

The traveling home campaign buffs are going away. Players will only receive the buffs related to the status of their faction in their local campaign, not home campaign. This provides greater incentive to work hard to hold emperorship and scrolls on the campaigns people actually play on.

There won't be a reason to use a dead campaign for buffs while playing on the high pop campaigns.

ZOS_BrianWheeler wrote: »

Home Campaign Buffs – Originally, home campaign buffs were intended as a means to attach ownership to your Campaign, however it’s been observed (at great length) that Alliances have chosen various home campaigns and guest into other campaigns to earn as many buffs as possible. In the future, we plan on having home buffs travel with you into PVE, but while in Cyrodiil, you only get buffs from your local campaign (the campaign you’re physically located in at that time).

Sharee

frosth.darkomenb16_ESO wrote: »

This is a terrible idea.

The game is about cooperation in a large scale war. At no point should you resent your allies for login in.

As the overpoped faction, every other player would be taking your spot and force you in queue far more often than now.

Well, that's the whole point. Few enemies=long queues for you=you have an incentive to go to a server with more enemies, or change faction. Either will balance out the population, and you won't have to wait in a queue anymore.

frosth.darkomenb16_ESO wrote: »

As the underpoped faction, every other player login in is a potential noob that unlocks 2 more enemies.

That's not a problem at all, as there is just as high a chance those 2 enemies will be noobs as well.

Not to mention that under current rules those 2 already are unlocked anyway.

Tavore1138

Sorry OP but it can be hard to enough to get into one of the active campaigns without adding even more artificial restrictions.

To support this they would need to add more campaigns and allow you to roam between them freely, which introduces a different set of problems.

You'd have peolple exploiting it by colouring the map their colour and then having the whole alliance log out en masse so the others couldn't get enough players in to trun it back.

What would you do if two alliances were active but the 3rd was not?

I appreciate the problem but this is not the solution.

And there is a point at which ZOS should not be expected to cater to factions who can't get numbers to come and play by artificially gimping the others so they can't have fun either... forcing people to switch alliances just to get some time in campaigns is mental... punishing people for not being in the core hours of a server is not going to work either.

Sharee

SuraklinPrime wrote: »

You'd have peolple exploiting it by colouring the map their colour and then having the whole alliance log out en masse so the others couldn't get enough players in to trun it back.

1, They won't be able to colour the whole map their colour, because at no point will they be able to take keeps unopposed. The enemy numbers will roughly match their own at all times. If they are able to colour the whole map despite not outnumbering the enemies, then they won fair and square, and i see no problem with that.

2, The defeated side will always have enough players to take their keeps back. The fights will just become smaller scale skirmishes instead of zerg fights. You don't need a zerg to take a keep if the enemy is not defending it with a zerg of their own.

Besides, even if a whole alliance logs out en masse, they have no way to force other players of their side to follow suit. No matter how big an alliance is, the megaserver population is bigger. If the alliance logs out during primetime, they just open the spots for other players.

Bushrat

Turelus wrote: »

EP to my knowledge doesn't have any US guilds.
I'm actually a member of the guild/alliance which does the night capping and we can achieve this because we have a lot of students or shift workers in our faction. When most of the captures happen we are only 20-40 online in the faction to my knowledge.

We actually tried this the first nights in the campaign and were destroyed by Shido and DC raids who had far superior numbers and tactics, it honestly only became the problem it is now when those groups left the campaign thus leaving us uncontested.

The issue of EP superiority could also be fixed if DC and AD worked together to keep us pushed back, although there is a lot of dislike for faction alliance this is the reason for three of them, two can beat down on the winning one.

I'm almost sure that all the other factions have the numbers needed in the early hours, the problem is none of them want to play on Thornblade now they're losing or the stupid queues have pushed them elsewhere. The only real solution I can see is to force people into one singular campaign, but ZOS doesn't have the technology or skill to make that work.

I believe you are correct about everything you are saying. However, the imbalance of players in different factions is the root of the problem in many ways. There are many ways to deal with this and many threads about the same topic. Lets just hope Zenimax deals with it soon so we can all enjoy this great game.

Matuzes

I like this. People will be winning by skill not by numbers, but its only part of Cyrodiil problems.
Keep walls and doors hit points should be tripled, now few players can just burst down both keep walls in 2 minutes.
Respawn only in connected to base keeps, in range of FC, in range of unconnected keeps. Blood porting is stupid.
AoE. Delete aoe cap and increase damage based on players hit(1 player 25% base damage, 10 players 300% base damage etc)this i think will prevent zerg train/ball.
Awards, items, gold for holding keeps by guilds, guild leaderboard, some other objectives on map(people tend to stuck in one keep fights, and this cause lags, fps drop etc).

Sharee

Matuzes wrote: »

I like this. People will be winning by skill not by numbers, but its only part of Cyrodiil problems.
Keep walls and doors hit points should be tripled, now few players can just burst down both keep walls in 2 minutes.
Respawn only in connected to base keeps, in range of FC, in range of unconnected keeps. Blood porting is stupid.
AoE. Delete aoe cap and increase damage based on players hit(1 player 25% base damage, 10 players 300% base damage etc)this i think will prevent zerg train/ball.
Awards, items, gold for holding keeps by guilds, guild leaderboard, some other objectives on map(people tend to stuck in one keep fights, and this cause lags, fps drop etc).

Agreed on most points, except perhaps the keep wall hitpoints. I agree that they go down way too easily, but i think a better solution would be limiting the number of siege engines that can damage a wall portion at once(or alternatively, limit the damage-per-second a wall can take). This will make walls tougher to kill for zergs, but will still allow a small team with few siege engines to take a wall down in reasonable time.

frosth.darkomenb16_ESO

Sharee wrote: »

frosth.darkomenb16_ESO wrote: »

This is a terrible idea.

The game is about cooperation in a large scale war. At no point should you resent your allies for login in.

As the overpoped faction, every other player would be taking your spot and force you in queue far more often than now.

Well, that's the whole point. Few enemies=long queues for you=you have an incentive to go to a server with more enemies, or change faction. Either will balance out the population, and you won't have to wait in a queue anymore.

frosth.darkomenb16_ESO wrote: »

As the underpoped faction, every other player login in is a potential noob that unlocks 2 more enemies.

That's not a problem at all, as there is just as high a chance those 2 enemies will be noobs as well.

Not to mention that under current rules those 2 already are unlocked anyway.

You are missing my point.
I'm not talking about rational response but emotional responses.

You should not add features to the game that make allies resent each other.

Especially when there are other ways of fixing the issue.
One of which I explained.

And as an added note, RvR is not about fair figbts or sport. It's supposed to emulate war.
Artificial limitations such as these are counter-productive.

Arkath

A relative/sliding population soft lock is a great partial solution for the faction stacking/overpopulation problems. Don't want to wait in queue? Guest to a campaign in which your faction isn't locked.

The argument against this is made by people who can't imagine how to play without overwhelming numbers in their favor.

Aside from dynamic population caps, we still need to see Cyrodiil buffs only present in the campaign from which they are earned - and not in PVE at all.

frosth.darkomenb16_ESO

Or you could just admit you have no idea how RvR games should behave.
Asking to remove buffs in pve? Seriously?

Thank you for the dumb generalization.
I play as DC on an AD buff campaign.
I could say that those in favor of this solution are lamers that need the game to win their battles.

But I don't. Instead I'm trying to explain how it is a bad solution.

Sure it will work, but it is a bandaid fix.
The issue is not that one faction can have more people logged in but that there are absolutely no incentives to gang up on the larger faction and no incentives to fight back.

You'd just frustrate both side of the equation for no good reason.

Sharee

frosth.darkomenb16_ESO wrote: »

And as an added note, RvR is not about fair figbts or sport. It's supposed to emulate war.
Artificial limitations such as these are counter-productive.

If that was true, and the way the devs imagined cyrodiil, they would not have put any population caps at all.

According to you, any population balance is irrelevant, the only thing that counts is that there are player in cyrodiil, right?

Then why limit EP to 500 if the campaign can support 1500? Give the first alliance that comes all the spots! Who cares that the 1300 EP will roll over 100 DC and 100 AD, everyone will be having great fun, right?

Right?

/rollseyes.

frosth.darkomenb16_ESO

As I said in one of my first comment here, any population caps should be tied mainly to technical limitations.

If the server can handle only 1500 players, then the total available slots should be at all time 1500.
Not xx, xx+10% and xx+10%

Why divide it by 3 instead of being free for all?
Because balance is about fairness, not equality.
With 500 cap for each faction, they each have equal opportunity to max out.

You shouldn't punish a faction that is doing well to force equality.
It's driving away people that have done absolutely nothing wrong.
Remember, there needs to be a bandwagon for people to jump on, and that's a non negligible portion of the faction that are innocent and just won by playing by the rules of the game.

What you should do is reward people for fighting back. For trying and succeeding at breaking the status quo.