MincMincMinc wrote: »

PvP died with the loss of dilution.

We see this in vengeance, where there are players of all skill levels literally everywhere. Newbies trying to solo in 2025, who would imagine? We can also see this effect in MyM where combat gets diluted with new players. What happened to the natural influx of new players though?

Earlier on there were entry stairs to climb through the lowbie u50 campaign then to the nocp and then to the vet campaign. The problem is that cyrodil was never designed to be low population. When unbalanced the winner is not only incentivized, but rewarded for holding the entire map. This simple effect of seeing the map all one color stopped new players from logging in. Keep in mind that over the years it got harder and harder to solo pvp so new players are never going to flip the map back. Simple skills like dk wings, harness magicka sustain, siphon strikes sap, etc gave solo players the ability to level the playing field when out numbered without being abuse able while grouped.

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u50 PvP over time dissolved when an imbalance happened enough times in a row for people to quit. For PCNA the main death factor was AD having all of the Aussie players night capping the map. EP never had a solid zerg guild and pugs got tired of logging in to have to fight uphill all night. Either players learned to solo and moved up to nocp on their own, or they had a 50/50 chance of a guild group surviving the swap to nocp.

NoCP then ran into the same issues where over time no new players came in from u50. It became a constant issue of night flipping and fighting an uphill battle. Eventually the night cappers get bored and everyone has moved to the one remaining pop locked campaign.

Vet now is the last functional pop balanced campaign, but it is such a laggy mess that probably half or more of the potential pvp population doesn't even consider logging in.

BGs played a unique roll in speeding up this process. Since u50 and nocp were non functional, people would dip their toes into a bg match and then get out. Unlike cyrodil where new players may group up and talk to people, bgs are non interactive and do not socially keep players together. Until you get to the pure endgame high mmr playerbase of like 50 people.

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Combat wise and cyrodil wise we could talk for days on things like Campaign rules, keep seiges, bridge fights, the Hammer, cross healing, Over time stacking, Unique skill loss to "standardization", Mount speed and stamina, etc

SeaGtGruff wrote: »

I don't think I've ever seen doors on resource towers; maybe they were removed before I started playing ESO, or maybe I just never noticed them whenever I went to Cyrodiil in my early days, since I was too busy sneaking across the countryside in stark terror trying to avoid anything resembling PvP while collecting skyshards and doing PvE quests.

Ah, those were the good old days!

As far as two-team BGs, there were people in these forums going on and on about how horrible three-team PvP is, and asking that Cyrodiil somehow be changed to have just two alliances fighting each other. Thank goodness we didn't get that, but we got two-sided BGs instead. It might not be a popular change, but it's something that some people were (sort of) asking for-- it didn't just come out of the blue in left field, so to speak.

My understanding is that the reduction in group sizes was done to help relieve the amount of work that the Cyrodiil servers are having to do. I don't know much it's helped-- if at all-- but it's pretty obvious that performance tends to drop dramatically whenever a bunch of grouped players are nearby, so there's something there that seems like it needs to be looked at.