ToddIngram wrote: »

MincMincMinc wrote: »

SeaGtGruff wrote: »

GimpyPorcupine wrote: »

Oh, the hyperbole and histrionics.

Entered Cyro, 5 minutes to set up skills, checked the map, found a fight, went there, and found maybe 20 other blues.

The population was certainly lower than the previous Vengeance campaign, but a lot of that is because there's no Golden Pursuit to drive people there, and it's running concurrently with the Undaunted event which has a lot of people farming boxes.

I'd really like to see Vengeance replace U50 and no-CP, which would allow newer players to hop right into Cyrodiil and not get immediately auto-deleted.

Yeah, I think the Undaunted event is definitely putting a dent in the levels of participation. Just go to any Undaunted enclave and look at how busy and overrun it is. But this is just day 2 of the Vengeance test, and by now a lot of players should have earned, or be very close to earning, the Golden Pursuits apex reward, so hopefully there will be more players joining in the test before it ends next week.

I spent most of yesterday soloing dungeons, and when I finally queued for Vengeance on PCEU it was late night USA Eastern Time and Cyrodiil appeared to be mostly dead. As far as I could tell, I was the only DC player on, and 2 EP players were trying to slowly PvDoor the map. I don't know what it had been like earlier in the day, so maybe all the red keeps and resources and outposts and towns had been captured earlier when more players were on?

In any case, I tried to solo-capture a resource but could not stay alive against the guards, so I gave up and logged out to play on PCNA for the rest of the night.

After doing endeavors and Undaunted on PCNA, I queued for Vengeance and the populations were much better than on PCEU, which is frankly to be expected at that time of night. I still couldn't solo-capture a resource, but I did find a PvP fight or two to get into before I had to log out and go to bed.

Last night while doing Undaunted pledges on PCNA I watched one PvP streamer who was in Vengeance (evidently on PCNA), figuring out which skills were best at keeping him alive and helping him win 1v1 duels with other players. And this afternoon I was watching another PvP streamer who I assume was on PCNA. So there are definitely some PvP players participating in the Vengeance test, despite other PvP players being very vocal about boycotting the test.

TheAwesomeChimpanzee wrote: »

MincMincMinc wrote: »

TheAwesomeChimpanzee wrote: »

MincMincMinc wrote: »

Well you should at least be accurate in your comparison. Vengeance pop lock is 4x the population. So vengeance at 1-2 bar is going to be pop lock on greyhost. If anything there is the same amount of people playing, however it should be noted that a good portion of pvp players are boycotting the test because they are worried zos is going to replace live pvp with vengeance as it is. So even if the population was about even with live pvp most of the people playing are probably newer players who normally wouldn't have played cyrodil. (kind of a good thing knowing there is an untapped market of new pvp players waiting for pvp to be playable)

Who knows if zos planned this or not. They didnt add much this test, so maybe they are using the undaunted event as a way to gauge how much of the vengeance population was PVE specific players.

Test 4 is going to have a week of overlap too where greyhost is available. So then they would be able to gauge how much of the population would be pvp specific players. During that test we would see how many people solely like vengeance on its own.

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It would be better to just replace u50 and nocp with a permanent vengeance campaign. Its good to combine the dead servers so new players have a more populated campaign to learn in. At the same time zos could keep adding to vengeance and do simple one or two day incentivized test events instead of full weeks.

It’s not that PvP players are “boycotting” Vengeance. We’re simply not playing it because we don’t enjoy it. The whole design feels like a separate mode being built from the ground up rather than a testbed to improve Cyrodiil.

And that’s where the concern comes from: since the very first test people have asked whether ZOS intends to use Vengeance to replace live PvP, not just experiment with mechanics for Greyhost. The fact that ZOS hasn’t doubled down on saying “these tests are to make current Cyrodiil better” leaves the community with a lot of uncertainty, and that uncertainty, combined with a mode many of us find terrible, is why you see the backlash. If the goal really were to test improvements for current PvP, most of the community would happily participate to help ZOS improve Greyhost. But that doesn’t seem to be the case.

It’s also very clear after the day one populations that the PvP playerbase does not like Vengeance. There simply aren’t enough PvP players overall, and even fewer who want to play this watered-down version to sustain the kind of populations it was supposedly designed to attract. Even when it’s enforced as the only option, the numbers just aren’t there. A permanent implementation of this campaign will never work.

I mean that's what boycotting is, but whatever you want to call it is fine by me.

The question is what would even make you trust zos saying these are just tests? Obviously them saying it repeatedly every livestream gets ignored. PvP players including me have said since day one that they need build elements and stat choices back or else people wont be happy. They made a generic toggle menu to choose basic stats to satisfy that demand and people are using that as a further reason to not like it. All i'm pointing out is the inconsistencies on the player side, being devil's advocate here. One of the bigger holes in the worry of replacing greyhost is where does the money come from? If zos is spending a year of dev time on this how do they recoup their money? If vengeance is the only gamemode. They would lose what 20-30% of their overall subscriber base? Then those players would never purchase a $50 DLC mythic again? Everytime this is brought up nobody has an answer to this hole in zos's money making strategy. Do we really think the PvE players will subscribe and buy PVE dlc more because they now have a cyrodil campaign?

Zos has PLENTY of inconsistencies we can point out. Don't misconstrued me as a zos fanboy. Ive been waiting nearly 10 years for cyrodil to get fixes

• Why is the test a full week even though from their data it only looks like you need a day or two?
• If they are coding from scratch why not rewrite the stats with hybridization in mind. Why still have weapon and spell crit? Unless they plan on combining old systems like gear sets or potions back into vengeance without reworking them. Why is physical and spell penetration back on the veng character sheet.....I thought it was supposed to be "offensive pen" Or was that just a cover up years ago?
• Why are they not talking about more rule changes. The main benefit to splitting pve and pvp is to change how the game handles aoe caps, over time effects, crosshealing, etc.
• Why do we have parts of the team discovering that the game cant handle the bloated effects......then on live they keep releasing bloated effects?
• If ballgroups and groups clustering up why are we incentivizing groups to ball up? Why keep pushing group combat sets instead of solo playstyles?
• If aoes are a problem why keep releasing sets that incentivize you to spam aoes to meet proc conditions? It gets even worse for aoe dots and hots being incentivized.

We could go on for days here.

It’s not a boycott. A boycott implies people are deliberately refusing to play even though they might otherwise want to. What’s happening here is much simpler: PvP players just don’t like Vengeance, so they don’t log in for it. That’s not a boycott — that’s a rejection of a design that doesn’t appeal to the PvP community.

And to your point about ZOS’ messaging: yes, they keep calling these “tests” in livestreams, but they’ve never once addressed the real elephant in the room — whether Vengeance is being built as a permanent replacement for live Cyrodiil. That lingering uncertainty is exactly why players are worried. If these were genuinely about improving Greyhost, people would show up in droves to help test changes that matter to the current game. But this doesn’t feel like that.

I actually agree with your money angle — it doesn’t make sense for ZOS to risk losing a big chunk of their long-term PvP subs who also buy PvE content. But even if they do decide to implement Vengeance permanently alongside Greyhost, the outcome is obvious from the second and third test populations: no one will play it. Or worse, it’ll limp along for a short time and then slowly die.

At the end of the day the answer isn’t another parallel “mode.” Just fix Greyhost. That’s all the PvP community has been asking for, for years.

First of all, your explanation of why some (not all) PvP players are not participating in the Vengeance test seems to fit your definition of what a boycott is, so I don't think you're being honest with yourself. I mean, if you want to boycott the test then fine, boycott it. What's the big deal about not wanting to admit to yourself that you're boycotting it?

As for fixing Gray Host, you say the PvP community wants Gray Host to get fixed, but it seems to me like a lot of the PvP community is content to be part of the problem and doesn't want to help be part of finding a solution. If the only way that Gray Host can be "fixed" is to make some unpopular decisions such as (speaking hypothetically) further reducing the maximum size of groups, limiting the range on AOE damage and healing skills, nerfing popular proc sets which form the core of some players' builds and play strategies, or balancing classes and skills that you personally like to use because they're META, is that something you'd be okay with, or not? Are you willing to be part of a potential solution by gracefully giving up skills and sets or whatevers that are problematic, or do you prefer to be part of the problem while loudly demanding that ZOS "Fix it!" even though your actions are seeming to say that you don't really want Cyrodiil to be changed at all?

I didnt continue the boycott discussion since it wont go anywhere or progress in any meaningful way. I say it is boycotting because they enjoy PvP and are refusing to play it because of the proposed changes. The argument they have is they do not see vengeance as PvP or enjoyable PvP so refusing is not boycotting since they do not even associate with it. Really not worth arguing over the definition or manfighting over the topic. The next step in the argument would have been for me to claim that vengeance or testing in general leads to a future pvp where they might find enjoyment, which still meets their definition of boycotting......then their counterargument will be that zos never follows through. Which at this point we are not even talking about boycotting and are just ranting about a company none of us work at or have any impact in their work ethic/drive.

Just to save pages of forum being wasted off topic

For a few weeks now every anti vengeance post has been responded to by you, usually in less than an hour.

What's going on?