Non-Champ Unlock = Scroll Trolls, spies and traitors. I can't take the campaign seriously anymore.

Soul_Demon · March 2020

idk wrote: »

Soul_Demon wrote: »

idk wrote: »

pieratsos wrote: »

KINGOFTHESKULLS wrote: »

Funny , I've never seen a faction loyalist with a bad behavior but every time I see a filthy swapper they seem to be the toxic one and trolly one.

There is always good and bad people in groups , factions and clans and I personally have a lot of friends that change factions and I don't really have a problem with the "idea" of swapping factions itself but lets be honest here there are more people that abuse it than the ones that actually use it the right way , which it's balancing the population and playing with their friends Fairly.

This is a MMO RPG after all , you choose to be a proud Ebonheart Pact warrior and it should stay that way , same thing with other factions.

I've spent thousands of hours in no cp , leading groups and helping my faction win and dealt with countless scroll/volendrung and zone trolls and sure as hell I can tell that faction lock never stopped trolls from being sad miserable wastes of flesh but it did have a great impact on lessening it.
Not being able to switch to a different faction any time you want helped a lot.

Now for spies , If they are really that miserable to buy a new account just to be pests again well you can't really do anything about it.
Now let me explain it to you how spies are ; there are few types of them :
- ones that tell their friends where your camps are.
- ones that simply read the zone chat to find out your next move.
- ones that tell their friends where you are stealthed at.
- ones that follow you around or even get into your group to constantly know where you are going.
Now imagine that happening to you , would you be able to have fun with that happening ?
And they always happen to be the ones that support no faction lock , funny right?
Which ones harder for them to do ? being able to switch whenever they want without a faction lock or buying another copy of the game?

Here's the thing , by simply having a score indicator in PvP , that just automatically encourages people to fight for a singular Cause : Winning, but there problem is when there is no faction lock , the scores don't really mean anything and for people that are used to it is annoying.
After all what is the point of fighting a war when there is no goal and cause ? that's what faction lock does , it ruins the score and takes away the thrill and competitiveness of winning the war.
So why even have a score indicator when there is no faction lock? because people will home whatever campaign that it winning anyways.

Now there are other things that ZoS could implement to try keep both parties happy :
1 - Add a cooldown to switching factions , could be a day , could be an hour but a cooldown would definitely help.
2 - Add a locked no CP campaign (unfortunately with the game's current state it would be extremely dead).
3 - Give out better end of campaign rewards to encourage players fight for a cause.
4 - Placing No CP on top of the campaign list instead of CP.
5 - Removing the score indicator for no locked campaigns.
6 - Create a blacklist for those who abuse the game features and troll visible for everyone in the campaign to see.

I don't blame you for supporting no faction lock but don't forget that there are many of you who abuses and it make you all look bad and that is a FACT.

Faction lock doesn't prevent you from talking to people from a different faction so pretty much all ur spy arguments go out the window. They can happen either way.

Campaigns are not competitive because the rules governing the campaign are not promoting a competitive game. If u want people to play for their faction then u need to encourage them to do so. Not force them into one faction. People don't care about campaign scoring cause there is really no reason to do so. You are knocking on the wrong doors.

True. Spies were used in the early months of the game when there was no such thing as an unlocked campaign. The groups that form from Zone are the best targets. They are easy to detect if the leader pays attention.

Another tib bit of information. The first scroll was stolen in the first week of the game using a character from the alliance that owned the scroll. Once again, faction lock was in place from day one.

So faction lock never stopped any of this and never will.

Just a minor thing but I have been told by some reputable sources that even back then when you were not supposed to be able to home enemy factions on a server, many exploiters used to 'guest' the camps as there was hole in game mechanic that allowed them to do that. So, there have been exploiting players since game came out- not so much anything else. The locks discouraged the behaviors and kept things somewhat controlled to just a few vs much larger volume lifting them caused.

I do not recall as most of my characters are in one faction. However, I do recall not being able to enter a campaign I had an alt of a difference allainc homed in no matter what I did. So it may have been the case at one point then eliminated later.

Regardless, locks do not really discourage the behavior fans of faction lock think it does. It might pretend it for some that do not have a second account but I guarantee I have played more than one faction in a locked campaign by using my alt account and Zos has publicly stated it is not against the ToS.

Faction locks do not stop anything.

See....here is the thing. We keep hearing how many don't like the locks and don't care about score. Yet since inception of all and any non locked have crashed and burned miserably. As I asked before, how are they doing now? It was rhetorical as we can all see they are again failing miserably. The reasons why have been argued ad nausium at this point and it just doesn't matter why.......the swappers cant populate a server and keep it playable.

So why keep up the demands others accept this ridiculous charade any longer. People who do want locked populate and keep alive any server they are on with constant fights- exploiting players are and have always been the dirtbags of the game and now is no different- Locks dont stop all of it...... but they keep it to minimum of true losers who can think of nothing else to do. Any further discussion is academic at best since swappers can NOT populate anywhere and keep gameplay going on any server....bottom line is you cant populate and are not the majority of players in the game. Never were.

Qbiken · March 2020

Soul_Demon wrote: »

idk wrote: »

Soul_Demon wrote: »

idk wrote: »

pieratsos wrote: »

KINGOFTHESKULLS wrote: »

Funny , I've never seen a faction loyalist with a bad behavior but every time I see a filthy swapper they seem to be the toxic one and trolly one.

There is always good and bad people in groups , factions and clans and I personally have a lot of friends that change factions and I don't really have a problem with the "idea" of swapping factions itself but lets be honest here there are more people that abuse it than the ones that actually use it the right way , which it's balancing the population and playing with their friends Fairly.

This is a MMO RPG after all , you choose to be a proud Ebonheart Pact warrior and it should stay that way , same thing with other factions.

I've spent thousands of hours in no cp , leading groups and helping my faction win and dealt with countless scroll/volendrung and zone trolls and sure as hell I can tell that faction lock never stopped trolls from being sad miserable wastes of flesh but it did have a great impact on lessening it.
Not being able to switch to a different faction any time you want helped a lot.

Now for spies , If they are really that miserable to buy a new account just to be pests again well you can't really do anything about it.
Now let me explain it to you how spies are ; there are few types of them :
- ones that tell their friends where your camps are.
- ones that simply read the zone chat to find out your next move.
- ones that tell their friends where you are stealthed at.
- ones that follow you around or even get into your group to constantly know where you are going.
Now imagine that happening to you , would you be able to have fun with that happening ?
And they always happen to be the ones that support no faction lock , funny right?
Which ones harder for them to do ? being able to switch whenever they want without a faction lock or buying another copy of the game?

Here's the thing , by simply having a score indicator in PvP , that just automatically encourages people to fight for a singular Cause : Winning, but there problem is when there is no faction lock , the scores don't really mean anything and for people that are used to it is annoying.
After all what is the point of fighting a war when there is no goal and cause ? that's what faction lock does , it ruins the score and takes away the thrill and competitiveness of winning the war.
So why even have a score indicator when there is no faction lock? because people will home whatever campaign that it winning anyways.

Now there are other things that ZoS could implement to try keep both parties happy :
1 - Add a cooldown to switching factions , could be a day , could be an hour but a cooldown would definitely help.
2 - Add a locked no CP campaign (unfortunately with the game's current state it would be extremely dead).
3 - Give out better end of campaign rewards to encourage players fight for a cause.
4 - Placing No CP on top of the campaign list instead of CP.
5 - Removing the score indicator for no locked campaigns.
6 - Create a blacklist for those who abuse the game features and troll visible for everyone in the campaign to see.

I don't blame you for supporting no faction lock but don't forget that there are many of you who abuses and it make you all look bad and that is a FACT.

Faction lock doesn't prevent you from talking to people from a different faction so pretty much all ur spy arguments go out the window. They can happen either way.

Campaigns are not competitive because the rules governing the campaign are not promoting a competitive game. If u want people to play for their faction then u need to encourage them to do so. Not force them into one faction. People don't care about campaign scoring cause there is really no reason to do so. You are knocking on the wrong doors.

True. Spies were used in the early months of the game when there was no such thing as an unlocked campaign. The groups that form from Zone are the best targets. They are easy to detect if the leader pays attention.

Another tib bit of information. The first scroll was stolen in the first week of the game using a character from the alliance that owned the scroll. Once again, faction lock was in place from day one.

So faction lock never stopped any of this and never will.

Just a minor thing but I have been told by some reputable sources that even back then when you were not supposed to be able to home enemy factions on a server, many exploiters used to 'guest' the camps as there was hole in game mechanic that allowed them to do that. So, there have been exploiting players since game came out- not so much anything else. The locks discouraged the behaviors and kept things somewhat controlled to just a few vs much larger volume lifting them caused.

I do not recall as most of my characters are in one faction. However, I do recall not being able to enter a campaign I had an alt of a difference allainc homed in no matter what I did. So it may have been the case at one point then eliminated later.

Regardless, locks do not really discourage the behavior fans of faction lock think it does. It might pretend it for some that do not have a second account but I guarantee I have played more than one faction in a locked campaign by using my alt account and Zos has publicly stated it is not against the ToS.

Faction locks do not stop anything.

See....here is the thing. We keep hearing how many don't like the locks and don't care about score. Yet since inception of all and any non locked have crashed and burned miserably. As I asked before, how are they doing now? It was rhetorical as we can all see they are again failing miserably. The reasons why have been argued ad nausium at this point and it just doesn't matter why.......the swappers cant populate a server and keep it playable.

So why keep up the demands others accept this ridiculous charade any longer. People who do want locked populate and keep alive any server they are on with constant fights- exploiting players are and have always been the dirtbags of the game and now is no different- Locks dont stop all of it...... but they keep it to minimum of true losers who can think of nothing else to do. Any further discussion is academic at best since swappers can NOT populate anywhere and keep gameplay going on any server....bottom line is you cant populate and are not the majority of players in the game. Never were.

It´s fairly easy to prove that there´s no correlation between faction locks and populated campaigns. Take the 30 day NO-CP campaign as a prime example (will only speak from PC-EU perspective since I´m not on NA or play console). Regardless of faction locks being implemented or not, the campaign has always been filled with people.

Now you may say that it´s cause people that want to play NO-CP have no other choice, but the same pattern can be seen on campaigns such as the main 30 day CP one (Vivec, Kaalgrontid, Trueflame etc...). No matter if faction locks has been in the game or not, the "main" 30 day CP campaign has always been the most populate one.

I´m not saying you can´t prefer one or the other when it comes to faction locks, but there´s no correlation between population and faction locks.

VaranisArano · March 2020

Qbiken wrote: »

Soul_Demon wrote: »

idk wrote: »

Soul_Demon wrote: »

idk wrote: »

pieratsos wrote: »

KINGOFTHESKULLS wrote: »

Funny , I've never seen a faction loyalist with a bad behavior but every time I see a filthy swapper they seem to be the toxic one and trolly one.

There is always good and bad people in groups , factions and clans and I personally have a lot of friends that change factions and I don't really have a problem with the "idea" of swapping factions itself but lets be honest here there are more people that abuse it than the ones that actually use it the right way , which it's balancing the population and playing with their friends Fairly.

This is a MMO RPG after all , you choose to be a proud Ebonheart Pact warrior and it should stay that way , same thing with other factions.

I've spent thousands of hours in no cp , leading groups and helping my faction win and dealt with countless scroll/volendrung and zone trolls and sure as hell I can tell that faction lock never stopped trolls from being sad miserable wastes of flesh but it did have a great impact on lessening it.
Not being able to switch to a different faction any time you want helped a lot.

Now for spies , If they are really that miserable to buy a new account just to be pests again well you can't really do anything about it.
Now let me explain it to you how spies are ; there are few types of them :
- ones that tell their friends where your camps are.
- ones that simply read the zone chat to find out your next move.
- ones that tell their friends where you are stealthed at.
- ones that follow you around or even get into your group to constantly know where you are going.
Now imagine that happening to you , would you be able to have fun with that happening ?
And they always happen to be the ones that support no faction lock , funny right?
Which ones harder for them to do ? being able to switch whenever they want without a faction lock or buying another copy of the game?

Here's the thing , by simply having a score indicator in PvP , that just automatically encourages people to fight for a singular Cause : Winning, but there problem is when there is no faction lock , the scores don't really mean anything and for people that are used to it is annoying.
After all what is the point of fighting a war when there is no goal and cause ? that's what faction lock does , it ruins the score and takes away the thrill and competitiveness of winning the war.
So why even have a score indicator when there is no faction lock? because people will home whatever campaign that it winning anyways.

Now there are other things that ZoS could implement to try keep both parties happy :
1 - Add a cooldown to switching factions , could be a day , could be an hour but a cooldown would definitely help.
2 - Add a locked no CP campaign (unfortunately with the game's current state it would be extremely dead).
3 - Give out better end of campaign rewards to encourage players fight for a cause.
4 - Placing No CP on top of the campaign list instead of CP.
5 - Removing the score indicator for no locked campaigns.
6 - Create a blacklist for those who abuse the game features and troll visible for everyone in the campaign to see.

I don't blame you for supporting no faction lock but don't forget that there are many of you who abuses and it make you all look bad and that is a FACT.

Faction lock doesn't prevent you from talking to people from a different faction so pretty much all ur spy arguments go out the window. They can happen either way.

Campaigns are not competitive because the rules governing the campaign are not promoting a competitive game. If u want people to play for their faction then u need to encourage them to do so. Not force them into one faction. People don't care about campaign scoring cause there is really no reason to do so. You are knocking on the wrong doors.

True. Spies were used in the early months of the game when there was no such thing as an unlocked campaign. The groups that form from Zone are the best targets. They are easy to detect if the leader pays attention.

Another tib bit of information. The first scroll was stolen in the first week of the game using a character from the alliance that owned the scroll. Once again, faction lock was in place from day one.

So faction lock never stopped any of this and never will.

Just a minor thing but I have been told by some reputable sources that even back then when you were not supposed to be able to home enemy factions on a server, many exploiters used to 'guest' the camps as there was hole in game mechanic that allowed them to do that. So, there have been exploiting players since game came out- not so much anything else. The locks discouraged the behaviors and kept things somewhat controlled to just a few vs much larger volume lifting them caused.

I do not recall as most of my characters are in one faction. However, I do recall not being able to enter a campaign I had an alt of a difference allainc homed in no matter what I did. So it may have been the case at one point then eliminated later.

Regardless, locks do not really discourage the behavior fans of faction lock think it does. It might pretend it for some that do not have a second account but I guarantee I have played more than one faction in a locked campaign by using my alt account and Zos has publicly stated it is not against the ToS.

Faction locks do not stop anything.

See....here is the thing. We keep hearing how many don't like the locks and don't care about score. Yet since inception of all and any non locked have crashed and burned miserably. As I asked before, how are they doing now? It was rhetorical as we can all see they are again failing miserably. The reasons why have been argued ad nausium at this point and it just doesn't matter why.......the swappers cant populate a server and keep it playable.

So why keep up the demands others accept this ridiculous charade any longer. People who do want locked populate and keep alive any server they are on with constant fights- exploiting players are and have always been the dirtbags of the game and now is no different- Locks dont stop all of it...... but they keep it to minimum of true losers who can think of nothing else to do. Any further discussion is academic at best since swappers can NOT populate anywhere and keep gameplay going on any server....bottom line is you cant populate and are not the majority of players in the game. Never were.

It´s fairly easy to prove that there´s no correlation between faction locks and populated campaigns. Take the 30 day NO-CP campaign as a prime example (will only speak from PC-EU perspective since I´m not on NA or play console). Regardless of faction locks being implemented or not, the campaign has always been filled with people.

Now you may say that it´s cause people that want to play NO-CP have no other choice, but the same pattern can be seen on campaigns such as the main 30 day CP one (Vivec, Kaalgrontid, Trueflame etc...). No matter if faction locks has been in the game or not, the "main" 30 day CP campaign has always been the most populate one.

I´m not saying you can´t prefer one or the other when it comes to faction locks, but there´s no correlation between population and faction locks.

Or it merely proves that the preference for No CP is stronger than the preference for alliance locked play when alliance-locked means swapping their builds and characters over to play in a CP campaign.

Which is the far more likely situation. No CP vs CP is a much bigger difference when it comes to gameplay.

Now, you might have a case if No CP players actually had a choice. But they don't. ZOS hasn't offered a second No CP campaign since Morrowind after Almalexia flopped. Where players have had a choice, CP players have twice chosen the Alliance Locked campaign - and one of those choices was an equal "everyone is removed, choose your campaign again" unless you think PVPers are too dumb to read the rulesets before they pick a campaign.

In other words, what you can prove from the No CP campaigns is:
A. Last update, No CP players stayed in the Alliance Locked No CP campaign rather than play in the only unlocked CP option
B. This update, No CP players stayed in the unlocked No CP campaign rather than play in the only alliance locked CP option

What I'm seeing?
Most No CP players don't want to play in a CP campaign.
This is not exactly surprisingly given, oh, years of arguments over the merits of CP and No CP PVP. Or the way CP players packed into Vivec when it was the only CP option. Most players don't swap from No CP to CP and vice versa lightly.

Soul_Demon · March 2020

Qbiken wrote: »

Soul_Demon wrote: »

idk wrote: »

Soul_Demon wrote: »

idk wrote: »

pieratsos wrote: »

KINGOFTHESKULLS wrote: »

Funny , I've never seen a faction loyalist with a bad behavior but every time I see a filthy swapper they seem to be the toxic one and trolly one.

There is always good and bad people in groups , factions and clans and I personally have a lot of friends that change factions and I don't really have a problem with the "idea" of swapping factions itself but lets be honest here there are more people that abuse it than the ones that actually use it the right way , which it's balancing the population and playing with their friends Fairly.

This is a MMO RPG after all , you choose to be a proud Ebonheart Pact warrior and it should stay that way , same thing with other factions.

I've spent thousands of hours in no cp , leading groups and helping my faction win and dealt with countless scroll/volendrung and zone trolls and sure as hell I can tell that faction lock never stopped trolls from being sad miserable wastes of flesh but it did have a great impact on lessening it.
Not being able to switch to a different faction any time you want helped a lot.

Now for spies , If they are really that miserable to buy a new account just to be pests again well you can't really do anything about it.
Now let me explain it to you how spies are ; there are few types of them :
- ones that tell their friends where your camps are.
- ones that simply read the zone chat to find out your next move.
- ones that tell their friends where you are stealthed at.
- ones that follow you around or even get into your group to constantly know where you are going.
Now imagine that happening to you , would you be able to have fun with that happening ?
And they always happen to be the ones that support no faction lock , funny right?
Which ones harder for them to do ? being able to switch whenever they want without a faction lock or buying another copy of the game?

Here's the thing , by simply having a score indicator in PvP , that just automatically encourages people to fight for a singular Cause : Winning, but there problem is when there is no faction lock , the scores don't really mean anything and for people that are used to it is annoying.
After all what is the point of fighting a war when there is no goal and cause ? that's what faction lock does , it ruins the score and takes away the thrill and competitiveness of winning the war.
So why even have a score indicator when there is no faction lock? because people will home whatever campaign that it winning anyways.

Now there are other things that ZoS could implement to try keep both parties happy :
1 - Add a cooldown to switching factions , could be a day , could be an hour but a cooldown would definitely help.
2 - Add a locked no CP campaign (unfortunately with the game's current state it would be extremely dead).
3 - Give out better end of campaign rewards to encourage players fight for a cause.
4 - Placing No CP on top of the campaign list instead of CP.
5 - Removing the score indicator for no locked campaigns.
6 - Create a blacklist for those who abuse the game features and troll visible for everyone in the campaign to see.

I don't blame you for supporting no faction lock but don't forget that there are many of you who abuses and it make you all look bad and that is a FACT.

Faction lock doesn't prevent you from talking to people from a different faction so pretty much all ur spy arguments go out the window. They can happen either way.

Campaigns are not competitive because the rules governing the campaign are not promoting a competitive game. If u want people to play for their faction then u need to encourage them to do so. Not force them into one faction. People don't care about campaign scoring cause there is really no reason to do so. You are knocking on the wrong doors.

True. Spies were used in the early months of the game when there was no such thing as an unlocked campaign. The groups that form from Zone are the best targets. They are easy to detect if the leader pays attention.

Another tib bit of information. The first scroll was stolen in the first week of the game using a character from the alliance that owned the scroll. Once again, faction lock was in place from day one.

So faction lock never stopped any of this and never will.

Just a minor thing but I have been told by some reputable sources that even back then when you were not supposed to be able to home enemy factions on a server, many exploiters used to 'guest' the camps as there was hole in game mechanic that allowed them to do that. So, there have been exploiting players since game came out- not so much anything else. The locks discouraged the behaviors and kept things somewhat controlled to just a few vs much larger volume lifting them caused.

I do not recall as most of my characters are in one faction. However, I do recall not being able to enter a campaign I had an alt of a difference allainc homed in no matter what I did. So it may have been the case at one point then eliminated later.

Regardless, locks do not really discourage the behavior fans of faction lock think it does. It might pretend it for some that do not have a second account but I guarantee I have played more than one faction in a locked campaign by using my alt account and Zos has publicly stated it is not against the ToS.

Faction locks do not stop anything.

See....here is the thing. We keep hearing how many don't like the locks and don't care about score. Yet since inception of all and any non locked have crashed and burned miserably. As I asked before, how are they doing now? It was rhetorical as we can all see they are again failing miserably. The reasons why have been argued ad nausium at this point and it just doesn't matter why.......the swappers cant populate a server and keep it playable.

So why keep up the demands others accept this ridiculous charade any longer. People who do want locked populate and keep alive any server they are on with constant fights- exploiting players are and have always been the dirtbags of the game and now is no different- Locks dont stop all of it...... but they keep it to minimum of true losers who can think of nothing else to do. Any further discussion is academic at best since swappers can NOT populate anywhere and keep gameplay going on any server....bottom line is you cant populate and are not the majority of players in the game. Never were.

It´s fairly easy to prove that there´s no correlation between faction locks and populated campaigns. Take the 30 day NO-CP campaign as a prime example (will only speak from PC-EU perspective since I´m not on NA or play console). Regardless of faction locks being implemented or not, the campaign has always been filled with people.

Now you may say that it´s cause people that want to play NO-CP have no other choice, but the same pattern can be seen on campaigns such as the main 30 day CP one (Vivec, Kaalgrontid, Trueflame etc...). No matter if faction locks has been in the game or not, the "main" 30 day CP campaign has always been the most populate one.

I´m not saying you can´t prefer one or the other when it comes to faction locks, but there´s no correlation between population and faction locks.

I think its clear and absolutely so at this point that those who prefer locked populate wherever they go and create active servers with good fights. Non locked has bombed every single server attempt for that play-style and this iteration is no different. So- if you are no lock proponent you wont shut up in the forums because you need everyone else to play on your servers to populate them....so you move goalposts and make excuses.

If you are lock proponent you dont need and in most cases dont want the non lock players at all....anywhere at anytime. Its really simple. By forcing a populated no CP server to go non locked and then claiming its populated anyway is a sad joke- and I am sure you see it as well. Its a textbook example of what happens when you take choice out of the equation. Create two servers for no CP- one locked and one non locked to see.....oh wait- whats that? We did that with CP and the non locked was a ghost town? Yeah....maybe just stop here in forums trying to explain how the confluence of the stars were what keeps the non locked from being populated or maybe the unicorns were not out- whatever the excuses are- they dont hold up.

Rianai · March 2020

Those that prefer locked campaigns never had to "go and create active servers with good fights", because everyone could just stay in the campaigns that have always been the most popular ones - locks or not.

And not moving to the dead campaigns and populating them has nothing to do with "not being able to read". But just like with cp vs nocp, players seem to value an active campaign more than playing on a locked/unlocked one, so they go to the one that is most likely to be active - and that has always been the one on top of the list. Prime example for a self-fulfilling prophecy.

If ZOS had moved the unlocked cp campaign to the top with the reset and the locked one would still be more popular an argument could be made about locks being a deciding factor - but unfortunately they did not, so the whole "the locked one is more populated because the majority prefers locks" argument is moot.

pieratsos · March 2020

VaranisArano wrote: »

Qbiken wrote: »

Soul_Demon wrote: »

idk wrote: »

Soul_Demon wrote: »

idk wrote: »

pieratsos wrote: »

KINGOFTHESKULLS wrote: »

Funny , I've never seen a faction loyalist with a bad behavior but every time I see a filthy swapper they seem to be the toxic one and trolly one.

There is always good and bad people in groups , factions and clans and I personally have a lot of friends that change factions and I don't really have a problem with the "idea" of swapping factions itself but lets be honest here there are more people that abuse it than the ones that actually use it the right way , which it's balancing the population and playing with their friends Fairly.

This is a MMO RPG after all , you choose to be a proud Ebonheart Pact warrior and it should stay that way , same thing with other factions.

I've spent thousands of hours in no cp , leading groups and helping my faction win and dealt with countless scroll/volendrung and zone trolls and sure as hell I can tell that faction lock never stopped trolls from being sad miserable wastes of flesh but it did have a great impact on lessening it.
Not being able to switch to a different faction any time you want helped a lot.

Now for spies , If they are really that miserable to buy a new account just to be pests again well you can't really do anything about it.
Now let me explain it to you how spies are ; there are few types of them :
- ones that tell their friends where your camps are.
- ones that simply read the zone chat to find out your next move.
- ones that tell their friends where you are stealthed at.
- ones that follow you around or even get into your group to constantly know where you are going.
Now imagine that happening to you , would you be able to have fun with that happening ?
And they always happen to be the ones that support no faction lock , funny right?
Which ones harder for them to do ? being able to switch whenever they want without a faction lock or buying another copy of the game?

Here's the thing , by simply having a score indicator in PvP , that just automatically encourages people to fight for a singular Cause : Winning, but there problem is when there is no faction lock , the scores don't really mean anything and for people that are used to it is annoying.
After all what is the point of fighting a war when there is no goal and cause ? that's what faction lock does , it ruins the score and takes away the thrill and competitiveness of winning the war.
So why even have a score indicator when there is no faction lock? because people will home whatever campaign that it winning anyways.

Now there are other things that ZoS could implement to try keep both parties happy :
1 - Add a cooldown to switching factions , could be a day , could be an hour but a cooldown would definitely help.
2 - Add a locked no CP campaign (unfortunately with the game's current state it would be extremely dead).
3 - Give out better end of campaign rewards to encourage players fight for a cause.
4 - Placing No CP on top of the campaign list instead of CP.
5 - Removing the score indicator for no locked campaigns.
6 - Create a blacklist for those who abuse the game features and troll visible for everyone in the campaign to see.

I don't blame you for supporting no faction lock but don't forget that there are many of you who abuses and it make you all look bad and that is a FACT.

Faction lock doesn't prevent you from talking to people from a different faction so pretty much all ur spy arguments go out the window. They can happen either way.

Campaigns are not competitive because the rules governing the campaign are not promoting a competitive game. If u want people to play for their faction then u need to encourage them to do so. Not force them into one faction. People don't care about campaign scoring cause there is really no reason to do so. You are knocking on the wrong doors.

True. Spies were used in the early months of the game when there was no such thing as an unlocked campaign. The groups that form from Zone are the best targets. They are easy to detect if the leader pays attention.

Another tib bit of information. The first scroll was stolen in the first week of the game using a character from the alliance that owned the scroll. Once again, faction lock was in place from day one.

So faction lock never stopped any of this and never will.

Just a minor thing but I have been told by some reputable sources that even back then when you were not supposed to be able to home enemy factions on a server, many exploiters used to 'guest' the camps as there was hole in game mechanic that allowed them to do that. So, there have been exploiting players since game came out- not so much anything else. The locks discouraged the behaviors and kept things somewhat controlled to just a few vs much larger volume lifting them caused.

I do not recall as most of my characters are in one faction. However, I do recall not being able to enter a campaign I had an alt of a difference allainc homed in no matter what I did. So it may have been the case at one point then eliminated later.

Regardless, locks do not really discourage the behavior fans of faction lock think it does. It might pretend it for some that do not have a second account but I guarantee I have played more than one faction in a locked campaign by using my alt account and Zos has publicly stated it is not against the ToS.

Faction locks do not stop anything.

See....here is the thing. We keep hearing how many don't like the locks and don't care about score. Yet since inception of all and any non locked have crashed and burned miserably. As I asked before, how are they doing now? It was rhetorical as we can all see they are again failing miserably. The reasons why have been argued ad nausium at this point and it just doesn't matter why.......the swappers cant populate a server and keep it playable.

So why keep up the demands others accept this ridiculous charade any longer. People who do want locked populate and keep alive any server they are on with constant fights- exploiting players are and have always been the dirtbags of the game and now is no different- Locks dont stop all of it...... but they keep it to minimum of true losers who can think of nothing else to do. Any further discussion is academic at best since swappers can NOT populate anywhere and keep gameplay going on any server....bottom line is you cant populate and are not the majority of players in the game. Never were.

It´s fairly easy to prove that there´s no correlation between faction locks and populated campaigns. Take the 30 day NO-CP campaign as a prime example (will only speak from PC-EU perspective since I´m not on NA or play console). Regardless of faction locks being implemented or not, the campaign has always been filled with people.

Now you may say that it´s cause people that want to play NO-CP have no other choice, but the same pattern can be seen on campaigns such as the main 30 day CP one (Vivec, Kaalgrontid, Trueflame etc...). No matter if faction locks has been in the game or not, the "main" 30 day CP campaign has always been the most populate one.

I´m not saying you can´t prefer one or the other when it comes to faction locks, but there´s no correlation between population and faction locks.

Or it merely proves that the preference for No CP is stronger than the preference for alliance locked play when alliance-locked means swapping their builds and characters over to play in a CP campaign.

Which is the far more likely situation. No CP vs CP is a much bigger difference when it comes to gameplay.

Now, you might have a case if No CP players actually had a choice. But they don't. ZOS hasn't offered a second No CP campaign since Morrowind after Almalexia flopped. Where players have had a choice, CP players have twice chosen the Alliance Locked campaign - and one of those choices was an equal "everyone is removed, choose your campaign again" unless you think PVPers are too dumb to read the rulesets before they pick a campaign.

In other words, what you can prove from the No CP campaigns is:
A. Last update, No CP players stayed in the Alliance Locked No CP campaign rather than play in the only unlocked CP option
B. This update, No CP players stayed in the unlocked No CP campaign rather than play in the only alliance locked CP option

What I'm seeing?
Most No CP players don't want to play in a CP campaign.
This is not exactly surprisingly given, oh, years of arguments over the merits of CP and No CP PVP. Or the way CP players packed into Vivec when it was the only CP option. Most players don't swap from No CP to CP and vice versa lightly.

There is no choice if there is no population to support both. Period.

And no one picked alliance lock cp. They all picked the most populated main campaign cause they actually had no choice unless they wanted a dead campaign. Whether it was trueflame vivec, unlocked, locked, different scoring rules or whatever it was always the main cp campaign and the most populated one. Period. Attempting to give credits to faction lock for the main cp campaign being populated is the dumbest thing ever.

idk · March 2020

Soul_Demon wrote: »

idk wrote: »

Soul_Demon wrote: »

idk wrote: »

pieratsos wrote: »

KINGOFTHESKULLS wrote: »

Funny , I've never seen a faction loyalist with a bad behavior but every time I see a filthy swapper they seem to be the toxic one and trolly one.

There is always good and bad people in groups , factions and clans and I personally have a lot of friends that change factions and I don't really have a problem with the "idea" of swapping factions itself but lets be honest here there are more people that abuse it than the ones that actually use it the right way , which it's balancing the population and playing with their friends Fairly.

This is a MMO RPG after all , you choose to be a proud Ebonheart Pact warrior and it should stay that way , same thing with other factions.

I've spent thousands of hours in no cp , leading groups and helping my faction win and dealt with countless scroll/volendrung and zone trolls and sure as hell I can tell that faction lock never stopped trolls from being sad miserable wastes of flesh but it did have a great impact on lessening it.
Not being able to switch to a different faction any time you want helped a lot.

Now for spies , If they are really that miserable to buy a new account just to be pests again well you can't really do anything about it.
Now let me explain it to you how spies are ; there are few types of them :
- ones that tell their friends where your camps are.
- ones that simply read the zone chat to find out your next move.
- ones that tell their friends where you are stealthed at.
- ones that follow you around or even get into your group to constantly know where you are going.
Now imagine that happening to you , would you be able to have fun with that happening ?
And they always happen to be the ones that support no faction lock , funny right?
Which ones harder for them to do ? being able to switch whenever they want without a faction lock or buying another copy of the game?

Here's the thing , by simply having a score indicator in PvP , that just automatically encourages people to fight for a singular Cause : Winning, but there problem is when there is no faction lock , the scores don't really mean anything and for people that are used to it is annoying.
After all what is the point of fighting a war when there is no goal and cause ? that's what faction lock does , it ruins the score and takes away the thrill and competitiveness of winning the war.
So why even have a score indicator when there is no faction lock? because people will home whatever campaign that it winning anyways.

Now there are other things that ZoS could implement to try keep both parties happy :
1 - Add a cooldown to switching factions , could be a day , could be an hour but a cooldown would definitely help.
2 - Add a locked no CP campaign (unfortunately with the game's current state it would be extremely dead).
3 - Give out better end of campaign rewards to encourage players fight for a cause.
4 - Placing No CP on top of the campaign list instead of CP.
5 - Removing the score indicator for no locked campaigns.
6 - Create a blacklist for those who abuse the game features and troll visible for everyone in the campaign to see.

I don't blame you for supporting no faction lock but don't forget that there are many of you who abuses and it make you all look bad and that is a FACT.

Faction lock doesn't prevent you from talking to people from a different faction so pretty much all ur spy arguments go out the window. They can happen either way.

Campaigns are not competitive because the rules governing the campaign are not promoting a competitive game. If u want people to play for their faction then u need to encourage them to do so. Not force them into one faction. People don't care about campaign scoring cause there is really no reason to do so. You are knocking on the wrong doors.

True. Spies were used in the early months of the game when there was no such thing as an unlocked campaign. The groups that form from Zone are the best targets. They are easy to detect if the leader pays attention.

Another tib bit of information. The first scroll was stolen in the first week of the game using a character from the alliance that owned the scroll. Once again, faction lock was in place from day one.

So faction lock never stopped any of this and never will.

Just a minor thing but I have been told by some reputable sources that even back then when you were not supposed to be able to home enemy factions on a server, many exploiters used to 'guest' the camps as there was hole in game mechanic that allowed them to do that. So, there have been exploiting players since game came out- not so much anything else. The locks discouraged the behaviors and kept things somewhat controlled to just a few vs much larger volume lifting them caused.

I do not recall as most of my characters are in one faction. However, I do recall not being able to enter a campaign I had an alt of a difference allainc homed in no matter what I did. So it may have been the case at one point then eliminated later.

Regardless, locks do not really discourage the behavior fans of faction lock think it does. It might pretend it for some that do not have a second account but I guarantee I have played more than one faction in a locked campaign by using my alt account and Zos has publicly stated it is not against the ToS.

Faction locks do not stop anything.

See....here is the thing. We keep hearing how many don't like the locks and don't care about score. Yet since inception of all and any non locked have crashed and burned miserably. As I asked before, how are they doing now? It was rhetorical as we can all see they are again failing miserably. The reasons why have been argued ad nausium at this point and it just doesn't matter why.......the swappers cant populate a server and keep it playable.

So why keep up the demands others accept this ridiculous charade any longer. People who do want locked populate and keep alive any server they are on with constant fights- exploiting players are and have always been the dirtbags of the game and now is no different- Locks dont stop all of it...... but they keep it to minimum of true losers who can think of nothing else to do. Any further discussion is academic at best since swappers can NOT populate anywhere and keep gameplay going on any server....bottom line is you cant populate and are not the majority of players in the game. Never were.

You are making a huge assumption based on an extremely small group of vocal players on both sides of the issue. Those active in the forums are a very small part of the player base to begin with. Those threads arguing back and forth were an even smaller group mostly making baseless arguments as you are here.

The reality is most players just want to PvP and avoid petty arguments such as faction locks and lack of them. They have always flocked to the most populated campaign. You are correct any further discussion is purely academic because I doubt you have any idea what most people think about faction locks. Heck, the fact you are calling players who like faction lock campaigns losers and dirtbag demonstrate you are just salty about this and biased about your opinion on the matter.

Squidgaurd · March 2020

litteraly no one cares about faction rp this game lacks faction identity one tamriel changes killed faction identity so no one litteraly no one is going to spy for other factions or is significant enough to make a difference.

edges_endgame · March 2020

Squidgaurd wrote: »

litteraly no one cares about faction rp this game lacks faction identity one tamriel changes killed faction identity so no one litteraly no one is going to spy for other factions or is significant enough to make a difference.

That.

I don't give a skeevers arse anymore. Is the map blue, I play red. Is it yellow, I play blue etc. If my friends play yellow that day and I feel peoplish, I join them. Period.
That isn't trolling or messing up your experience. That is playing the game how it is intented.

If you do not like that, go to the faction lock CP campaign. Suck it up. THAT is your choice. So can you please for the love of the divines just stop crying about it? I am so very tired of it.

PS: I am not sure what pvdooring the map, gate camping and zerging down that one enemy player online has anything to do with faction pride.

josh.lackey_ESO · March 2020

It's a game. It's not supposed to be serious. Who are you to dictate that other people must play the game the way you want them to play it? That main draw of Elder Scrolls games is being able to play however you want.

thatESOdude · March 2020

Soul_Demon wrote: »

idk wrote: »

Soul_Demon wrote: »

idk wrote: »

Soul_Demon wrote: »

idk wrote: »

pieratsos wrote: »

KINGOFTHESKULLS wrote: »

Funny , I've never seen a faction loyalist with a bad behavior but every time I see a filthy swapper they seem to be the toxic one and trolly one.

There is always good and bad people in groups , factions and clans and I personally have a lot of friends that change factions and I don't really have a problem with the "idea" of swapping factions itself but lets be honest here there are more people that abuse it than the ones that actually use it the right way , which it's balancing the population and playing with their friends Fairly.

This is a MMO RPG after all , you choose to be a proud Ebonheart Pact warrior and it should stay that way , same thing with other factions.

I've spent thousands of hours in no cp , leading groups and helping my faction win and dealt with countless scroll/volendrung and zone trolls and sure as hell I can tell that faction lock never stopped trolls from being sad miserable wastes of flesh but it did have a great impact on lessening it.
Not being able to switch to a different faction any time you want helped a lot.

Now for spies , If they are really that miserable to buy a new account just to be pests again well you can't really do anything about it.
Now let me explain it to you how spies are ; there are few types of them :
- ones that tell their friends where your camps are.
- ones that simply read the zone chat to find out your next move.
- ones that tell their friends where you are stealthed at.
- ones that follow you around or even get into your group to constantly know where you are going.
Now imagine that happening to you , would you be able to have fun with that happening ?
And they always happen to be the ones that support no faction lock , funny right?
Which ones harder for them to do ? being able to switch whenever they want without a faction lock or buying another copy of the game?

Here's the thing , by simply having a score indicator in PvP , that just automatically encourages people to fight for a singular Cause : Winning, but there problem is when there is no faction lock , the scores don't really mean anything and for people that are used to it is annoying.
After all what is the point of fighting a war when there is no goal and cause ? that's what faction lock does , it ruins the score and takes away the thrill and competitiveness of winning the war.
So why even have a score indicator when there is no faction lock? because people will home whatever campaign that it winning anyways.

Now there are other things that ZoS could implement to try keep both parties happy :
1 - Add a cooldown to switching factions , could be a day , could be an hour but a cooldown would definitely help.
2 - Add a locked no CP campaign (unfortunately with the game's current state it would be extremely dead).
3 - Give out better end of campaign rewards to encourage players fight for a cause.
4 - Placing No CP on top of the campaign list instead of CP.
5 - Removing the score indicator for no locked campaigns.
6 - Create a blacklist for those who abuse the game features and troll visible for everyone in the campaign to see.

I don't blame you for supporting no faction lock but don't forget that there are many of you who abuses and it make you all look bad and that is a FACT.

Faction lock doesn't prevent you from talking to people from a different faction so pretty much all ur spy arguments go out the window. They can happen either way.

Campaigns are not competitive because the rules governing the campaign are not promoting a competitive game. If u want people to play for their faction then u need to encourage them to do so. Not force them into one faction. People don't care about campaign scoring cause there is really no reason to do so. You are knocking on the wrong doors.

True. Spies were used in the early months of the game when there was no such thing as an unlocked campaign. The groups that form from Zone are the best targets. They are easy to detect if the leader pays attention.

Another tib bit of information. The first scroll was stolen in the first week of the game using a character from the alliance that owned the scroll. Once again, faction lock was in place from day one.

So faction lock never stopped any of this and never will.

Just a minor thing but I have been told by some reputable sources that even back then when you were not supposed to be able to home enemy factions on a server, many exploiters used to 'guest' the camps as there was hole in game mechanic that allowed them to do that. So, there have been exploiting players since game came out- not so much anything else. The locks discouraged the behaviors and kept things somewhat controlled to just a few vs much larger volume lifting them caused.

I do not recall as most of my characters are in one faction. However, I do recall not being able to enter a campaign I had an alt of a difference allainc homed in no matter what I did. So it may have been the case at one point then eliminated later.

Regardless, locks do not really discourage the behavior fans of faction lock think it does. It might pretend it for some that do not have a second account but I guarantee I have played more than one faction in a locked campaign by using my alt account and Zos has publicly stated it is not against the ToS.

Faction locks do not stop anything.

See....here is the thing. We keep hearing how many don't like the locks and don't care about score. Yet since inception of all and any non locked have crashed and burned miserably. As I asked before, how are they doing now? It was rhetorical as we can all see they are again failing miserably. The reasons why have been argued ad nausium at this point and it just doesn't matter why.......the swappers cant populate a server and keep it playable.

So why keep up the demands others accept this ridiculous charade any longer. People who do want locked populate and keep alive any server they are on with constant fights- exploiting players are and have always been the dirtbags of the game and now is no different- Locks dont stop all of it...... but they keep it to minimum of true losers who can think of nothing else to do. Any further discussion is academic at best since swappers can NOT populate anywhere and keep gameplay going on any server....bottom line is you cant populate and are not the majority of players in the game. Never were.

You are making a huge assumption based on an extremely small group of vocal players on both sides of the issue. Those active in the forums are a very small part of the player base to begin with. Those threads arguing back and forth were an even smaller group mostly making baseless arguments as you are here.

The reality is most players just want to PvP and avoid petty arguments such as faction locks and lack of them. They have always flocked to the most populated campaign. You are correct any further discussion is purely academic because I doubt you have any idea what most people think about faction locks. Heck, the fact you are calling players who like faction lock campaigns losers and dirtbag demonstrate you are just salty about this and biased about your opinion on the matter.

Nope....its just fact. No matter what the vocal and rabid no lock forum posters keep telling us they are majority of players in the game and yet over time they have failed time and again to populate even a single server. Even with the no CP server 'held hostage' the population plummeted to near non existent levels and that is a fairly dedicated group of players there who were given no choice at all.

Fact is when given the choice players in much larger numbers play locked campaigns. So the locked portion of the community will populate and make the most populated any server when given the choice- all the non locked screeching mass can do is argue about why.....it just doesn't matter why, fact is you can't play with each other and populate a server you have to be parasites on the locked servers to play while constantly opining about why you need 'just one more' campaign to be rolled out.

Literally none of these are facts

Ranger209 · March 2020

pieratsos wrote: »

There is no choice if there is no population to support both. Period.

And no one picked alliance lock cp. They all picked the most populated main campaign cause they actually had no choice unless they wanted a dead campaign. Whether it was trueflame vivec, unlocked, locked, different scoring rules or whatever it was always the main cp campaign and the most populated one. Period. Attempting to give credits to faction lock for the main cp campaign being populated is the dumbest thing ever.

Here's the deal, at least on PC NA, there are very large guilds on each faction that are faction loyal and do choose the faction locked campaign to guess what, wait for it, play with friends and fight for their faction with them, friends that are in those very large faction loyal guilds. They play during prime time when the servers are locked and as a result that is where the action is at prime time and where it stays because of it. These guilds are the reason that faction locked is the most populated server. All off hours population trickles down from this because when people get on during off hours this is still where the most population is at that time, even though it is substantially less than prime time. These large guilds of faction loyal players did in fact choose the locked campaign and play on them for that reason.

VaranisArano · March 2020

pieratsos wrote: »

VaranisArano wrote: »

Qbiken wrote: »

Soul_Demon wrote: »

idk wrote: »

Soul_Demon wrote: »

idk wrote: »

pieratsos wrote: »

KINGOFTHESKULLS wrote: »

Funny , I've never seen a faction loyalist with a bad behavior but every time I see a filthy swapper they seem to be the toxic one and trolly one.

There is always good and bad people in groups , factions and clans and I personally have a lot of friends that change factions and I don't really have a problem with the "idea" of swapping factions itself but lets be honest here there are more people that abuse it than the ones that actually use it the right way , which it's balancing the population and playing with their friends Fairly.

This is a MMO RPG after all , you choose to be a proud Ebonheart Pact warrior and it should stay that way , same thing with other factions.

I've spent thousands of hours in no cp , leading groups and helping my faction win and dealt with countless scroll/volendrung and zone trolls and sure as hell I can tell that faction lock never stopped trolls from being sad miserable wastes of flesh but it did have a great impact on lessening it.
Not being able to switch to a different faction any time you want helped a lot.

Now for spies , If they are really that miserable to buy a new account just to be pests again well you can't really do anything about it.
Now let me explain it to you how spies are ; there are few types of them :
- ones that tell their friends where your camps are.
- ones that simply read the zone chat to find out your next move.
- ones that tell their friends where you are stealthed at.
- ones that follow you around or even get into your group to constantly know where you are going.
Now imagine that happening to you , would you be able to have fun with that happening ?
And they always happen to be the ones that support no faction lock , funny right?
Which ones harder for them to do ? being able to switch whenever they want without a faction lock or buying another copy of the game?

Here's the thing , by simply having a score indicator in PvP , that just automatically encourages people to fight for a singular Cause : Winning, but there problem is when there is no faction lock , the scores don't really mean anything and for people that are used to it is annoying.
After all what is the point of fighting a war when there is no goal and cause ? that's what faction lock does , it ruins the score and takes away the thrill and competitiveness of winning the war.
So why even have a score indicator when there is no faction lock? because people will home whatever campaign that it winning anyways.

Now there are other things that ZoS could implement to try keep both parties happy :
1 - Add a cooldown to switching factions , could be a day , could be an hour but a cooldown would definitely help.
2 - Add a locked no CP campaign (unfortunately with the game's current state it would be extremely dead).
3 - Give out better end of campaign rewards to encourage players fight for a cause.
4 - Placing No CP on top of the campaign list instead of CP.
5 - Removing the score indicator for no locked campaigns.
6 - Create a blacklist for those who abuse the game features and troll visible for everyone in the campaign to see.

I don't blame you for supporting no faction lock but don't forget that there are many of you who abuses and it make you all look bad and that is a FACT.

Faction lock doesn't prevent you from talking to people from a different faction so pretty much all ur spy arguments go out the window. They can happen either way.

Campaigns are not competitive because the rules governing the campaign are not promoting a competitive game. If u want people to play for their faction then u need to encourage them to do so. Not force them into one faction. People don't care about campaign scoring cause there is really no reason to do so. You are knocking on the wrong doors.

True. Spies were used in the early months of the game when there was no such thing as an unlocked campaign. The groups that form from Zone are the best targets. They are easy to detect if the leader pays attention.

Another tib bit of information. The first scroll was stolen in the first week of the game using a character from the alliance that owned the scroll. Once again, faction lock was in place from day one.

So faction lock never stopped any of this and never will.

Just a minor thing but I have been told by some reputable sources that even back then when you were not supposed to be able to home enemy factions on a server, many exploiters used to 'guest' the camps as there was hole in game mechanic that allowed them to do that. So, there have been exploiting players since game came out- not so much anything else. The locks discouraged the behaviors and kept things somewhat controlled to just a few vs much larger volume lifting them caused.

I do not recall as most of my characters are in one faction. However, I do recall not being able to enter a campaign I had an alt of a difference allainc homed in no matter what I did. So it may have been the case at one point then eliminated later.

Regardless, locks do not really discourage the behavior fans of faction lock think it does. It might pretend it for some that do not have a second account but I guarantee I have played more than one faction in a locked campaign by using my alt account and Zos has publicly stated it is not against the ToS.

Faction locks do not stop anything.

See....here is the thing. We keep hearing how many don't like the locks and don't care about score. Yet since inception of all and any non locked have crashed and burned miserably. As I asked before, how are they doing now? It was rhetorical as we can all see they are again failing miserably. The reasons why have been argued ad nausium at this point and it just doesn't matter why.......the swappers cant populate a server and keep it playable.

So why keep up the demands others accept this ridiculous charade any longer. People who do want locked populate and keep alive any server they are on with constant fights- exploiting players are and have always been the dirtbags of the game and now is no different- Locks dont stop all of it...... but they keep it to minimum of true losers who can think of nothing else to do. Any further discussion is academic at best since swappers can NOT populate anywhere and keep gameplay going on any server....bottom line is you cant populate and are not the majority of players in the game. Never were.

It´s fairly easy to prove that there´s no correlation between faction locks and populated campaigns. Take the 30 day NO-CP campaign as a prime example (will only speak from PC-EU perspective since I´m not on NA or play console). Regardless of faction locks being implemented or not, the campaign has always been filled with people.

Now you may say that it´s cause people that want to play NO-CP have no other choice, but the same pattern can be seen on campaigns such as the main 30 day CP one (Vivec, Kaalgrontid, Trueflame etc...). No matter if faction locks has been in the game or not, the "main" 30 day CP campaign has always been the most populate one.

I´m not saying you can´t prefer one or the other when it comes to faction locks, but there´s no correlation between population and faction locks.

Or it merely proves that the preference for No CP is stronger than the preference for alliance locked play when alliance-locked means swapping their builds and characters over to play in a CP campaign.

Which is the far more likely situation. No CP vs CP is a much bigger difference when it comes to gameplay.

Now, you might have a case if No CP players actually had a choice. But they don't. ZOS hasn't offered a second No CP campaign since Morrowind after Almalexia flopped. Where players have had a choice, CP players have twice chosen the Alliance Locked campaign - and one of those choices was an equal "everyone is removed, choose your campaign again" unless you think PVPers are too dumb to read the rulesets before they pick a campaign.

In other words, what you can prove from the No CP campaigns is:
A. Last update, No CP players stayed in the Alliance Locked No CP campaign rather than play in the only unlocked CP option
B. This update, No CP players stayed in the unlocked No CP campaign rather than play in the only alliance locked CP option

What I'm seeing?
Most No CP players don't want to play in a CP campaign.
This is not exactly surprisingly given, oh, years of arguments over the merits of CP and No CP PVP. Or the way CP players packed into Vivec when it was the only CP option. Most players don't swap from No CP to CP and vice versa lightly.

There is no choice if there is no population to support both. Period.

And no one picked alliance lock cp. They all picked the most populated main campaign cause they actually had no choice unless they wanted a dead campaign. Whether it was trueflame vivec, unlocked, locked, different scoring rules or whatever it was always the main cp campaign and the most populated one. Period. Attempting to give credits to faction lock for the main cp campaign being populated is the dumbest thing ever.

First up, is there a reason you can't seem to engage with what I'm actually saying when you reply to a comment?
I'm not trying to give credit to anything.
I'm pointing out that we can't use the No CP Campaign to draw conclusions about the CP Campaigns because it is, to use your phrase, "apples to oranges."
The entirety of that above comment is about how we can't tell jack-diddly about No CP players' preference for either ruleset from the No CP Campaign, because No CP players literally had no choice about the alliance locked/unlocked ruleset. Their only choice was No CP Unlocked. If they stayed in No CP Locked and No CP Unlocked over the last two campaign changes, that's a really good indication that what they really care about is playing in No CP PVP over and above caring about locked/unlocked.
Its hard to have a conversation when you keep changing the topic from what I was talking about. I don't enjoy repeating myself to clarify what I was actually talking about and if you continue to ignore what I've said in order to talk about your pet topic, I probably won't continue engaging with you.

But to respond to what you seem to want to discuss instead about : Choice and the CP Campaigns
Yeah, yeah, CP Players had no choice at all.

We didn't all get removed from the campaigns at the same time.
We didn't get to look at the rulesets to decide which ones we wanted to play.
We didn't know ahead of time that this was going to happen or have any chance to rally players or guilds to our chosen campaign ruleset beforehand.
We had no chance, no chance whatsoever, to make any CP campaign other than the one listed first (the one with the big ol' Alliance Locked ruleset written by it) the main campaign by getting players to log in and make it look like the most populated, most competitive campaign, thereby attracting more players.

That's, uh, not the case.
My guild decided we were playing in the faction locked campaign before the switch, no matter the order of the campaign listings. "Look for the Alliance Locked option. We want that one." As soon as I redownloaded the game, I hopped into Gray Host, because I knew players would go to the more populated of the two. If I wanted Gray Host to be the main campaign, I needed to do my part to show that it was going to be the most populated, most competitive campaign.

Did anyone do that for the unlocked Blackreach?
Did guilds decide beforehand that they were going to play in Blackreach en masse and make it look like the attractive, popular, competitive option from Day 1?
Did multifaction players and guilds use this opportunity to boycott Gray Host and bring people to Blackreach?

After all, if there are enough people and guilds who really care about multifaction PVP, there should have been enough people to do all that, making Blackreach a lot more attractive to the players who don't care. There was nothing preventing multifaction players from making Blackreach look like the most populated, most competitive option, which would have drawn all the players who just want a populated, competitive campaign like flies to honey. (Unless you are one of those who think most PVPers are too dumb to check out the different campaigns.)

In all practicality? The multifaction players seem to have banked on that oh-so-magical-effect of being placed first on the list to attract players to Blackreach instead of, you know, trying to rally guilds and players beforehand to be ready and willing to swap to the unlocked campaign and make it the new main campaign no matter where it was on the list.
While I can't speak to how many players actually made a concerted effort to bulk up the population on Blackreach Day 1, I could tell that Gray Host had won the "we're gonna be the most populated, most competitive campaign" by the time we hit PC/NA primetime. Much of that is undoubtedly that incoming players looked at the available campaigns, said "That one's more popular" and jumped in, but the work to make it the most popular started as soon as players logged in. That could have easily been Blackreach if more players and guilds were willing to dedicate effort and play time to making the multifaction campaign the main one from the very beginning.

Now, I wouldn't say that the current pre-eminence of Gray Host says anything much about the desire of the general PVP playerbase for alliance-locked play. Most players care about having a populated, competitive campaign more than anything else. So I will say that if Blackreach had made a stronger early showing by attracting a strong core of multifaction players and guilds when everyone swapped campaigns, it would probably be the main campaign right now.

Joy_Division · March 2020

Soul_Demon wrote: »

idk wrote: »

Soul_Demon wrote: »

idk wrote: »

pieratsos wrote: »

KINGOFTHESKULLS wrote: »

Funny , I've never seen a faction loyalist with a bad behavior but every time I see a filthy swapper they seem to be the toxic one and trolly one.

There is always good and bad people in groups , factions and clans and I personally have a lot of friends that change factions and I don't really have a problem with the "idea" of swapping factions itself but lets be honest here there are more people that abuse it than the ones that actually use it the right way , which it's balancing the population and playing with their friends Fairly.

This is a MMO RPG after all , you choose to be a proud Ebonheart Pact warrior and it should stay that way , same thing with other factions.

I've spent thousands of hours in no cp , leading groups and helping my faction win and dealt with countless scroll/volendrung and zone trolls and sure as hell I can tell that faction lock never stopped trolls from being sad miserable wastes of flesh but it did have a great impact on lessening it.
Not being able to switch to a different faction any time you want helped a lot.

Now for spies , If they are really that miserable to buy a new account just to be pests again well you can't really do anything about it.
Now let me explain it to you how spies are ; there are few types of them :
- ones that tell their friends where your camps are.
- ones that simply read the zone chat to find out your next move.
- ones that tell their friends where you are stealthed at.
- ones that follow you around or even get into your group to constantly know where you are going.
Now imagine that happening to you , would you be able to have fun with that happening ?
And they always happen to be the ones that support no faction lock , funny right?
Which ones harder for them to do ? being able to switch whenever they want without a faction lock or buying another copy of the game?

Here's the thing , by simply having a score indicator in PvP , that just automatically encourages people to fight for a singular Cause : Winning, but there problem is when there is no faction lock , the scores don't really mean anything and for people that are used to it is annoying.
After all what is the point of fighting a war when there is no goal and cause ? that's what faction lock does , it ruins the score and takes away the thrill and competitiveness of winning the war.
So why even have a score indicator when there is no faction lock? because people will home whatever campaign that it winning anyways.

Now there are other things that ZoS could implement to try keep both parties happy :
1 - Add a cooldown to switching factions , could be a day , could be an hour but a cooldown would definitely help.
2 - Add a locked no CP campaign (unfortunately with the game's current state it would be extremely dead).
3 - Give out better end of campaign rewards to encourage players fight for a cause.
4 - Placing No CP on top of the campaign list instead of CP.
5 - Removing the score indicator for no locked campaigns.
6 - Create a blacklist for those who abuse the game features and troll visible for everyone in the campaign to see.

I don't blame you for supporting no faction lock but don't forget that there are many of you who abuses and it make you all look bad and that is a FACT.

Faction lock doesn't prevent you from talking to people from a different faction so pretty much all ur spy arguments go out the window. They can happen either way.

Campaigns are not competitive because the rules governing the campaign are not promoting a competitive game. If u want people to play for their faction then u need to encourage them to do so. Not force them into one faction. People don't care about campaign scoring cause there is really no reason to do so. You are knocking on the wrong doors.

True. Spies were used in the early months of the game when there was no such thing as an unlocked campaign. The groups that form from Zone are the best targets. They are easy to detect if the leader pays attention.

Another tib bit of information. The first scroll was stolen in the first week of the game using a character from the alliance that owned the scroll. Once again, faction lock was in place from day one.

So faction lock never stopped any of this and never will.

Just a minor thing but I have been told by some reputable sources that even back then when you were not supposed to be able to home enemy factions on a server, many exploiters used to 'guest' the camps as there was hole in game mechanic that allowed them to do that. So, there have been exploiting players since game came out- not so much anything else. The locks discouraged the behaviors and kept things somewhat controlled to just a few vs much larger volume lifting them caused.

I do not recall as most of my characters are in one faction. However, I do recall not being able to enter a campaign I had an alt of a difference allainc homed in no matter what I did. So it may have been the case at one point then eliminated later.

Regardless, locks do not really discourage the behavior fans of faction lock think it does. It might pretend it for some that do not have a second account but I guarantee I have played more than one faction in a locked campaign by using my alt account and Zos has publicly stated it is not against the ToS.

Faction locks do not stop anything.

See....here is the thing. We keep hearing how many don't like the locks and don't care about score. Yet since inception of all and any non locked have crashed and burned miserably. As I asked before, how are they doing now? It was rhetorical as we can all see they are again failing miserably. The reasons why have been argued ad nausium at this point and it just doesn't matter why.......the swappers cant populate a server and keep it playable.

So why keep up the demands others accept this ridiculous charade any longer. People who do want locked populate and keep alive any server they are on with constant fights- exploiting players are and have always been the dirtbags of the game and now is no different- Locks dont stop all of it...... but they keep it to minimum of true losers who can think of nothing else to do. Any further discussion is academic at best since swappers can NOT populate anywhere and keep gameplay going on any server....bottom line is you cant populate and are not the majority of players in the game. Never were.

You don;t get it do you? You are just seeing things the way you want to.

Yes, we "losers" aren't the unlocked campaign. You're right. But do not count my participation in the locked campaign as some sort of evidence that I like it or I applaud ZOS's decision. I'm just there because the people I like to fight are there.

You can keep saying we "dirtbags" are being kept to a minimum, but you own statement contradicts that. Because the dirtbags and losers aren't on the unlocked campaign, take a wild guess where they are?

ellahellabella · March 2020

@VaranisArano The problem we have with no cp campaigns is that eso just doesn't have the population to support two servers for no cp. So the choices were:
* strict to semi cut down on trolling and deny people their other toons
* suffer a little for a while but everyone gets to play all their toons.

For once, Zos chose the sensible answer. Only one no cp campaign, let people play all their toons to populate it.

If people don't like that, they can suck it up like i had to as an Oceanic (cp 30 day is always the populated one, which forced me into locked pvp). If they have a problem with that, they can join the club.

I honestly think this mess could have been dealt with by meeting in the middle. At the moment we are doing exactly what I predicted we would do: be completely divided and at war with each other.

VaranisArano · March 2020

ellahellabella wrote: »

@VaranisArano The problem we have with no cp campaigns is that eso just doesn't have the population to support two servers for no cp. So the choices were:
* strict to semi cut down on trolling and deny people their other toons
* suffer a little for a while but everyone gets to play all their toons.

For once, Zos chose the sensible answer. Only one no cp campaign, let people play all their toons to populate it.

If people don't like that, they can suck it up like i had to as an Oceanic (cp 30 day is always the populated one, which forced me into locked pvp). If they have a problem with that, they can join the club.

I honestly think this mess could have been dealt with by meeting in the middle. At the moment we are doing exactly what I predicted we would do: be completely divided and at war with each other.

I don't play No CP, but I generally agree. If ZOS is only going to give one option, the unlocked campaign is probably the best choice to offer. That also was my stance last update as well when No CP only had the single alliance locked option. Having only one option kinda sucks if you don't like that option. (That we lack population for both options I blame on ZOS for their failure to fix longstanding performance issues that have driven away many players over the years.)

My objection in the earlier comment was to someone using the No CP campaign, in which players had no choice in either update, to make a point about the CP campaigns where CP players did have a choice about which campaign they were going to join. We can't compare having no choice to the CP campaigns where there was a choice at the campaign reset.

Honestly, if there had been a stronger demand for Blackreach at the campaign reset from CP players and guilds who really wanted multifaction play, I suspect it would be the main campaign instead of Gray Host.

ellahellabella · March 2020

VaranisArano wrote: »

ellahellabella wrote: »

@VaranisArano The problem we have with no cp campaigns is that eso just doesn't have the population to support two servers for no cp. So the choices were:
* strict to semi cut down on trolling and deny people their other toons
* suffer a little for a while but everyone gets to play all their toons.

For once, Zos chose the sensible answer. Only one no cp campaign, let people play all their toons to populate it.

If people don't like that, they can suck it up like i had to as an Oceanic (cp 30 day is always the populated one, which forced me into locked pvp). If they have a problem with that, they can join the club.

I honestly think this mess could have been dealt with by meeting in the middle. At the moment we are doing exactly what I predicted we would do: be completely divided and at war with each other.

I don't play No CP, but I generally agree. If ZOS is only going to give one option, the unlocked campaign is probably the best choice to offer. That also was my stance last update as well when No CP only had the single alliance locked option. Having only one option kinda sucks if you don't like that option. (That we lack population for both options I blame on ZOS for their failure to fix longstanding performance issues that have driven away many players over the years.)

My objection in the earlier comment was to someone using the No CP campaign, in which players had no choice in either update, to make a point about the CP campaigns where CP players did have a choice about which campaign they were going to join. We can't compare having no choice to the CP campaigns where there was a choice at the campaign reset.

Honestly, if there had been a stronger demand for Blackreach at the campaign reset from CP players and guilds who really wanted multifaction play, I suspect it would be the main campaign instead of Gray Host.

Ah, in that case, I completely agree. For Prime time anyway. Anyone out of prime time gets screwed pretty hard by the lock sadly. Luck of the minority i guess

pieratsos · March 2020

VaranisArano wrote: »

pieratsos wrote: »

VaranisArano wrote: »

Qbiken wrote: »

Soul_Demon wrote: »

idk wrote: »

Soul_Demon wrote: »

idk wrote: »

pieratsos wrote: »

KINGOFTHESKULLS wrote: »

Funny , I've never seen a faction loyalist with a bad behavior but every time I see a filthy swapper they seem to be the toxic one and trolly one.

There is always good and bad people in groups , factions and clans and I personally have a lot of friends that change factions and I don't really have a problem with the "idea" of swapping factions itself but lets be honest here there are more people that abuse it than the ones that actually use it the right way , which it's balancing the population and playing with their friends Fairly.

This is a MMO RPG after all , you choose to be a proud Ebonheart Pact warrior and it should stay that way , same thing with other factions.

I've spent thousands of hours in no cp , leading groups and helping my faction win and dealt with countless scroll/volendrung and zone trolls and sure as hell I can tell that faction lock never stopped trolls from being sad miserable wastes of flesh but it did have a great impact on lessening it.
Not being able to switch to a different faction any time you want helped a lot.

Now for spies , If they are really that miserable to buy a new account just to be pests again well you can't really do anything about it.
Now let me explain it to you how spies are ; there are few types of them :
- ones that tell their friends where your camps are.
- ones that simply read the zone chat to find out your next move.
- ones that tell their friends where you are stealthed at.
- ones that follow you around or even get into your group to constantly know where you are going.
Now imagine that happening to you , would you be able to have fun with that happening ?
And they always happen to be the ones that support no faction lock , funny right?
Which ones harder for them to do ? being able to switch whenever they want without a faction lock or buying another copy of the game?

Here's the thing , by simply having a score indicator in PvP , that just automatically encourages people to fight for a singular Cause : Winning, but there problem is when there is no faction lock , the scores don't really mean anything and for people that are used to it is annoying.
After all what is the point of fighting a war when there is no goal and cause ? that's what faction lock does , it ruins the score and takes away the thrill and competitiveness of winning the war.
So why even have a score indicator when there is no faction lock? because people will home whatever campaign that it winning anyways.

Now there are other things that ZoS could implement to try keep both parties happy :
1 - Add a cooldown to switching factions , could be a day , could be an hour but a cooldown would definitely help.
2 - Add a locked no CP campaign (unfortunately with the game's current state it would be extremely dead).
3 - Give out better end of campaign rewards to encourage players fight for a cause.
4 - Placing No CP on top of the campaign list instead of CP.
5 - Removing the score indicator for no locked campaigns.
6 - Create a blacklist for those who abuse the game features and troll visible for everyone in the campaign to see.

I don't blame you for supporting no faction lock but don't forget that there are many of you who abuses and it make you all look bad and that is a FACT.

Faction lock doesn't prevent you from talking to people from a different faction so pretty much all ur spy arguments go out the window. They can happen either way.

Campaigns are not competitive because the rules governing the campaign are not promoting a competitive game. If u want people to play for their faction then u need to encourage them to do so. Not force them into one faction. People don't care about campaign scoring cause there is really no reason to do so. You are knocking on the wrong doors.

True. Spies were used in the early months of the game when there was no such thing as an unlocked campaign. The groups that form from Zone are the best targets. They are easy to detect if the leader pays attention.

Another tib bit of information. The first scroll was stolen in the first week of the game using a character from the alliance that owned the scroll. Once again, faction lock was in place from day one.

So faction lock never stopped any of this and never will.

Just a minor thing but I have been told by some reputable sources that even back then when you were not supposed to be able to home enemy factions on a server, many exploiters used to 'guest' the camps as there was hole in game mechanic that allowed them to do that. So, there have been exploiting players since game came out- not so much anything else. The locks discouraged the behaviors and kept things somewhat controlled to just a few vs much larger volume lifting them caused.

I do not recall as most of my characters are in one faction. However, I do recall not being able to enter a campaign I had an alt of a difference allainc homed in no matter what I did. So it may have been the case at one point then eliminated later.

Regardless, locks do not really discourage the behavior fans of faction lock think it does. It might pretend it for some that do not have a second account but I guarantee I have played more than one faction in a locked campaign by using my alt account and Zos has publicly stated it is not against the ToS.

Faction locks do not stop anything.

See....here is the thing. We keep hearing how many don't like the locks and don't care about score. Yet since inception of all and any non locked have crashed and burned miserably. As I asked before, how are they doing now? It was rhetorical as we can all see they are again failing miserably. The reasons why have been argued ad nausium at this point and it just doesn't matter why.......the swappers cant populate a server and keep it playable.

So why keep up the demands others accept this ridiculous charade any longer. People who do want locked populate and keep alive any server they are on with constant fights- exploiting players are and have always been the dirtbags of the game and now is no different- Locks dont stop all of it...... but they keep it to minimum of true losers who can think of nothing else to do. Any further discussion is academic at best since swappers can NOT populate anywhere and keep gameplay going on any server....bottom line is you cant populate and are not the majority of players in the game. Never were.

It´s fairly easy to prove that there´s no correlation between faction locks and populated campaigns. Take the 30 day NO-CP campaign as a prime example (will only speak from PC-EU perspective since I´m not on NA or play console). Regardless of faction locks being implemented or not, the campaign has always been filled with people.

Now you may say that it´s cause people that want to play NO-CP have no other choice, but the same pattern can be seen on campaigns such as the main 30 day CP one (Vivec, Kaalgrontid, Trueflame etc...). No matter if faction locks has been in the game or not, the "main" 30 day CP campaign has always been the most populate one.

I´m not saying you can´t prefer one or the other when it comes to faction locks, but there´s no correlation between population and faction locks.

Or it merely proves that the preference for No CP is stronger than the preference for alliance locked play when alliance-locked means swapping their builds and characters over to play in a CP campaign.

Which is the far more likely situation. No CP vs CP is a much bigger difference when it comes to gameplay.

Now, you might have a case if No CP players actually had a choice. But they don't. ZOS hasn't offered a second No CP campaign since Morrowind after Almalexia flopped. Where players have had a choice, CP players have twice chosen the Alliance Locked campaign - and one of those choices was an equal "everyone is removed, choose your campaign again" unless you think PVPers are too dumb to read the rulesets before they pick a campaign.

In other words, what you can prove from the No CP campaigns is:
A. Last update, No CP players stayed in the Alliance Locked No CP campaign rather than play in the only unlocked CP option
B. This update, No CP players stayed in the unlocked No CP campaign rather than play in the only alliance locked CP option

What I'm seeing?
Most No CP players don't want to play in a CP campaign.
This is not exactly surprisingly given, oh, years of arguments over the merits of CP and No CP PVP. Or the way CP players packed into Vivec when it was the only CP option. Most players don't swap from No CP to CP and vice versa lightly.

There is no choice if there is no population to support both. Period.

And no one picked alliance lock cp. They all picked the most populated main campaign cause they actually had no choice unless they wanted a dead campaign. Whether it was trueflame vivec, unlocked, locked, different scoring rules or whatever it was always the main cp campaign and the most populated one. Period. Attempting to give credits to faction lock for the main cp campaign being populated is the dumbest thing ever.

First up, is there a reason you can't seem to engage with what I'm actually saying when you reply to a comment?
I'm not trying to give credit to anything.
I'm pointing out that we can't use the No CP Campaign to draw conclusions about the CP Campaigns because it is, to use your phrase, "apples to oranges."
The entirety of that above comment is about how we can't tell jack-diddly about No CP players' preference for either ruleset from the No CP Campaign, because No CP players literally had no choice about the alliance locked/unlocked ruleset. Their only choice was No CP Unlocked. If they stayed in No CP Locked and No CP Unlocked over the last two campaign changes, that's a really good indication that what they really care about is playing in No CP PVP over and above caring about locked/unlocked.
Its hard to have a conversation when you keep changing the topic from what I was talking about. I don't enjoy repeating myself to clarify what I was actually talking about and if you continue to ignore what I've said in order to talk about your pet topic, I probably won't continue engaging with you.

But to respond to what you seem to want to discuss instead about : Choice and the CP Campaigns
Yeah, yeah, CP Players had no choice at all.

We didn't all get removed from the campaigns at the same time.
We didn't get to look at the rulesets to decide which ones we wanted to play.
We didn't know ahead of time that this was going to happen or have any chance to rally players or guilds to our chosen campaign ruleset beforehand.
We had no chance, no chance whatsoever, to make any CP campaign other than the one listed first (the one with the big ol' Alliance Locked ruleset written by it) the main campaign by getting players to log in and make it look like the most populated, most competitive campaign, thereby attracting more players.

That's, uh, not the case.
My guild decided we were playing in the faction locked campaign before the switch, no matter the order of the campaign listings. "Look for the Alliance Locked option. We want that one." As soon as I redownloaded the game, I hopped into Gray Host, because I knew players would go to the more populated of the two. If I wanted Gray Host to be the main campaign, I needed to do my part to show that it was going to be the most populated, most competitive campaign.

Did anyone do that for the unlocked Blackreach?
Did guilds decide beforehand that they were going to play in Blackreach en masse and make it look like the attractive, popular, competitive option from Day 1?
Did multifaction players and guilds use this opportunity to boycott Gray Host and bring people to Blackreach?

After all, if there are enough people and guilds who really care about multifaction PVP, there should have been enough people to do all that, making Blackreach a lot more attractive to the players who don't care. There was nothing preventing multifaction players from making Blackreach look like the most populated, most competitive option, which would have drawn all the players who just want a populated, competitive campaign like flies to honey. (Unless you are one of those who think most PVPers are too dumb to check out the different campaigns.)

In all practicality? The multifaction players seem to have banked on that oh-so-magical-effect of being placed first on the list to attract players to Blackreach instead of, you know, trying to rally guilds and players beforehand to be ready and willing to swap to the unlocked campaign and make it the new main campaign no matter where it was on the list.
While I can't speak to how many players actually made a concerted effort to bulk up the population on Blackreach Day 1, I could tell that Gray Host had won the "we're gonna be the most populated, most competitive campaign" by the time we hit PC/NA primetime. Much of that is undoubtedly that incoming players looked at the available campaigns, said "That one's more popular" and jumped in, but the work to make it the most popular started as soon as players logged in. That could have easily been Blackreach if more players and guilds were willing to dedicate effort and play time to making the multifaction campaign the main one from the very beginning.

Now, I wouldn't say that the current pre-eminence of Gray Host says anything much about the desire of the general PVP playerbase for alliance-locked play. Most players care about having a populated, competitive campaign more than anything else. So I will say that if Blackreach had made a stronger early showing by attracting a strong core of multifaction players and guilds when everyone swapped campaigns, it would probably be the main campaign right now.

What do you mean not engaging with what you said. I literally addressed ur point that " where players have had a choice, CP players have chosen locked campaign". You are the one who said that so im not even sure what u are even talking about when u are telling me that im changing the topic and that you never gave credit to faction lock when i literally addressed what you said and that is exactly what u did.

Again, the concept of choice is based on the premise that you can actually make that choice. When the population cant support multiple campaigns to give players the freedom of making a choice then you dont really have a choice. The only choices u have are CP or no CP and populated or dead campaign and those will always be more important than lock or unlock. The CP main was always the most populated regardless of lock, unlock or whatever. Let me give you an example. I always preferred 7 day campaign over 30 day campaigns. And yet i never felt like i had a choice to play what i want because simply there was no population to support both campaigns and i was simply playing in the 30 day campaign too. It doesnt matter what you and ur guild does. Most people are playing casually, they dont go on discord with their guild to choose which campaign to home. They hop on, open the alliance war tab check which one is the most populated and home it. And yes which one is first probably does make a difference. Simply put i couldnt care less for faction lock or not and this is probably true for the majority of players. But if i logged on first after a patch and wanted to home a campaign before anyone else, i would simply home the first campaign in the list. It was always the most populated regardless of lock or unlock and most likely will always be the most populated.

[Deleted User] · March 2020

Hello everyone,

With a few posts having to be removed for flaming, we'd like to remind everyone to keep the Forum Rules in mind to avoid thread derailment. For further posts be sure to stay constructive and respectful for further discussion.

Thank you for understanding.

Joy_Division · March 2020

Soul_Demon wrote: »

Joy_Division wrote: »

Soul_Demon wrote: »

idk wrote: »

Soul_Demon wrote: »

idk wrote: »

pieratsos wrote: »

KINGOFTHESKULLS wrote: »

Funny , I've never seen a faction loyalist with a bad behavior but every time I see a filthy swapper they seem to be the toxic one and trolly one.

There is always good and bad people in groups , factions and clans and I personally have a lot of friends that change factions and I don't really have a problem with the "idea" of swapping factions itself but lets be honest here there are more people that abuse it than the ones that actually use it the right way , which it's balancing the population and playing with their friends Fairly.

This is a MMO RPG after all , you choose to be a proud Ebonheart Pact warrior and it should stay that way , same thing with other factions.

I've spent thousands of hours in no cp , leading groups and helping my faction win and dealt with countless scroll/volendrung and zone trolls and sure as hell I can tell that faction lock never stopped trolls from being sad miserable wastes of flesh but it did have a great impact on lessening it.
Not being able to switch to a different faction any time you want helped a lot.

Now for spies , If they are really that miserable to buy a new account just to be pests again well you can't really do anything about it.
Now let me explain it to you how spies are ; there are few types of them :
- ones that tell their friends where your camps are.
- ones that simply read the zone chat to find out your next move.
- ones that tell their friends where you are stealthed at.
- ones that follow you around or even get into your group to constantly know where you are going.
Now imagine that happening to you , would you be able to have fun with that happening ?
And they always happen to be the ones that support no faction lock , funny right?
Which ones harder for them to do ? being able to switch whenever they want without a faction lock or buying another copy of the game?

Here's the thing , by simply having a score indicator in PvP , that just automatically encourages people to fight for a singular Cause : Winning, but there problem is when there is no faction lock , the scores don't really mean anything and for people that are used to it is annoying.
After all what is the point of fighting a war when there is no goal and cause ? that's what faction lock does , it ruins the score and takes away the thrill and competitiveness of winning the war.
So why even have a score indicator when there is no faction lock? because people will home whatever campaign that it winning anyways.

Now there are other things that ZoS could implement to try keep both parties happy :
1 - Add a cooldown to switching factions , could be a day , could be an hour but a cooldown would definitely help.
2 - Add a locked no CP campaign (unfortunately with the game's current state it would be extremely dead).
3 - Give out better end of campaign rewards to encourage players fight for a cause.
4 - Placing No CP on top of the campaign list instead of CP.
5 - Removing the score indicator for no locked campaigns.
6 - Create a blacklist for those who abuse the game features and troll visible for everyone in the campaign to see.

I don't blame you for supporting no faction lock but don't forget that there are many of you who abuses and it make you all look bad and that is a FACT.

Faction lock doesn't prevent you from talking to people from a different faction so pretty much all ur spy arguments go out the window. They can happen either way.

Campaigns are not competitive because the rules governing the campaign are not promoting a competitive game. If u want people to play for their faction then u need to encourage them to do so. Not force them into one faction. People don't care about campaign scoring cause there is really no reason to do so. You are knocking on the wrong doors.

True. Spies were used in the early months of the game when there was no such thing as an unlocked campaign. The groups that form from Zone are the best targets. They are easy to detect if the leader pays attention.

Another tib bit of information. The first scroll was stolen in the first week of the game using a character from the alliance that owned the scroll. Once again, faction lock was in place from day one.

So faction lock never stopped any of this and never will.

Just a minor thing but I have been told by some reputable sources that even back then when you were not supposed to be able to home enemy factions on a server, many exploiters used to 'guest' the camps as there was hole in game mechanic that allowed them to do that. So, there have been exploiting players since game came out- not so much anything else. The locks discouraged the behaviors and kept things somewhat controlled to just a few vs much larger volume lifting them caused.

I do not recall as most of my characters are in one faction. However, I do recall not being able to enter a campaign I had an alt of a difference allainc homed in no matter what I did. So it may have been the case at one point then eliminated later.

Regardless, locks do not really discourage the behavior fans of faction lock think it does. It might pretend it for some that do not have a second account but I guarantee I have played more than one faction in a locked campaign by using my alt account and Zos has publicly stated it is not against the ToS.

Faction locks do not stop anything.

See....here is the thing. We keep hearing how many don't like the locks and don't care about score. Yet since inception of all and any non locked have crashed and burned miserably. As I asked before, how are they doing now? It was rhetorical as we can all see they are again failing miserably. The reasons why have been argued ad nausium at this point and it just doesn't matter why.......the swappers cant populate a server and keep it playable.

So why keep up the demands others accept this ridiculous charade any longer. People who do want locked populate and keep alive any server they are on with constant fights- exploiting players are and have always been the dirtbags of the game and now is no different- Locks dont stop all of it...... but they keep it to minimum of true losers who can think of nothing else to do. Any further discussion is academic at best since swappers can NOT populate anywhere and keep gameplay going on any server....bottom line is you cant populate and are not the majority of players in the game. Never were.

You don;t get it do you? You are just seeing things the way you want to.

Yes, we "losers" aren't the unlocked campaign. You're right. But do not count my participation in the locked campaign as some sort of evidence that I like it or I applaud ZOS's decision. I'm just there because the people I like to fight are there.

You can keep saying we "dirtbags" are being kept to a minimum, but you own statement contradicts that. Because the dirtbags and losers aren't on the unlocked campaign, take a wild guess where they are?

This is real easy...what does a parasite do? It lives off a 'host' and needs that host to survive. Dirtbags, exploiters and trolls will follow their 'host' wherever they go. The locks dont end this- they control it. The rest is non discussion as I mentioned before, when you cant populate a server with a play-style .....guess what? You are one of the parasites.

Its time the swappers just sit down and stop struggling with excuses and demands on others and accept they are not necessary to game-play here......They are not needed and not instrumental in populated servers to keep them packed with players.....locked campaign players are necessary and control the play. Simply stated stop pretending you can fight or play without being parasitic in nature on others who prefer a completely different play style- you have to follow them to even play....so stop making demands for ZOS' finite resources be spent catering to a bunch of players in denial about what it is they do or offer to the player-base here in ESO.

Its time for the limited resources be used to work on lag and bugs to improve the game and stop with stories about the unicorn maffia and elite shadow gerbils who keep making it so the swappers cant populate anywhere or keep servers active when those resources keep being wasted while they cry. It failed and has many times now- stop making excuses and let the rest of the game get some fixes done.

Nice, we're "losers" "dirtbags" "exploiters" and "parasites" who ought to just shut up and never voice our opinions. I wonder if you appreciate the irony when faction-loyalists present themselves as victims or as upstanding members of the gaming community.

Soul_Demon · March 2020

Joy_Division wrote: »

Soul_Demon wrote: »

Joy_Division wrote: »

Soul_Demon wrote: »

idk wrote: »

Soul_Demon wrote: »

idk wrote: »

pieratsos wrote: »

KINGOFTHESKULLS wrote: »

Funny , I've never seen a faction loyalist with a bad behavior but every time I see a filthy swapper they seem to be the toxic one and trolly one.

There is always good and bad people in groups , factions and clans and I personally have a lot of friends that change factions and I don't really have a problem with the "idea" of swapping factions itself but lets be honest here there are more people that abuse it than the ones that actually use it the right way , which it's balancing the population and playing with their friends Fairly.

This is a MMO RPG after all , you choose to be a proud Ebonheart Pact warrior and it should stay that way , same thing with other factions.

I've spent thousands of hours in no cp , leading groups and helping my faction win and dealt with countless scroll/volendrung and zone trolls and sure as hell I can tell that faction lock never stopped trolls from being sad miserable wastes of flesh but it did have a great impact on lessening it.
Not being able to switch to a different faction any time you want helped a lot.

Now for spies , If they are really that miserable to buy a new account just to be pests again well you can't really do anything about it.
Now let me explain it to you how spies are ; there are few types of them :
- ones that tell their friends where your camps are.
- ones that simply read the zone chat to find out your next move.
- ones that tell their friends where you are stealthed at.
- ones that follow you around or even get into your group to constantly know where you are going.
Now imagine that happening to you , would you be able to have fun with that happening ?
And they always happen to be the ones that support no faction lock , funny right?
Which ones harder for them to do ? being able to switch whenever they want without a faction lock or buying another copy of the game?

Here's the thing , by simply having a score indicator in PvP , that just automatically encourages people to fight for a singular Cause : Winning, but there problem is when there is no faction lock , the scores don't really mean anything and for people that are used to it is annoying.
After all what is the point of fighting a war when there is no goal and cause ? that's what faction lock does , it ruins the score and takes away the thrill and competitiveness of winning the war.
So why even have a score indicator when there is no faction lock? because people will home whatever campaign that it winning anyways.

Now there are other things that ZoS could implement to try keep both parties happy :
1 - Add a cooldown to switching factions , could be a day , could be an hour but a cooldown would definitely help.
2 - Add a locked no CP campaign (unfortunately with the game's current state it would be extremely dead).
3 - Give out better end of campaign rewards to encourage players fight for a cause.
4 - Placing No CP on top of the campaign list instead of CP.
5 - Removing the score indicator for no locked campaigns.
6 - Create a blacklist for those who abuse the game features and troll visible for everyone in the campaign to see.

I don't blame you for supporting no faction lock but don't forget that there are many of you who abuses and it make you all look bad and that is a FACT.

Faction lock doesn't prevent you from talking to people from a different faction so pretty much all ur spy arguments go out the window. They can happen either way.

Campaigns are not competitive because the rules governing the campaign are not promoting a competitive game. If u want people to play for their faction then u need to encourage them to do so. Not force them into one faction. People don't care about campaign scoring cause there is really no reason to do so. You are knocking on the wrong doors.

True. Spies were used in the early months of the game when there was no such thing as an unlocked campaign. The groups that form from Zone are the best targets. They are easy to detect if the leader pays attention.

Another tib bit of information. The first scroll was stolen in the first week of the game using a character from the alliance that owned the scroll. Once again, faction lock was in place from day one.

So faction lock never stopped any of this and never will.

Just a minor thing but I have been told by some reputable sources that even back then when you were not supposed to be able to home enemy factions on a server, many exploiters used to 'guest' the camps as there was hole in game mechanic that allowed them to do that. So, there have been exploiting players since game came out- not so much anything else. The locks discouraged the behaviors and kept things somewhat controlled to just a few vs much larger volume lifting them caused.

I do not recall as most of my characters are in one faction. However, I do recall not being able to enter a campaign I had an alt of a difference allainc homed in no matter what I did. So it may have been the case at one point then eliminated later.

Regardless, locks do not really discourage the behavior fans of faction lock think it does. It might pretend it for some that do not have a second account but I guarantee I have played more than one faction in a locked campaign by using my alt account and Zos has publicly stated it is not against the ToS.

Faction locks do not stop anything.

See....here is the thing. We keep hearing how many don't like the locks and don't care about score. Yet since inception of all and any non locked have crashed and burned miserably. As I asked before, how are they doing now? It was rhetorical as we can all see they are again failing miserably. The reasons why have been argued ad nausium at this point and it just doesn't matter why.......the swappers cant populate a server and keep it playable.

So why keep up the demands others accept this ridiculous charade any longer. People who do want locked populate and keep alive any server they are on with constant fights- exploiting players are and have always been the dirtbags of the game and now is no different- Locks dont stop all of it...... but they keep it to minimum of true losers who can think of nothing else to do. Any further discussion is academic at best since swappers can NOT populate anywhere and keep gameplay going on any server....bottom line is you cant populate and are not the majority of players in the game. Never were.

You don;t get it do you? You are just seeing things the way you want to.

Yes, we "losers" aren't the unlocked campaign. You're right. But do not count my participation in the locked campaign as some sort of evidence that I like it or I applaud ZOS's decision. I'm just there because the people I like to fight are there.

You can keep saying we "dirtbags" are being kept to a minimum, but you own statement contradicts that. Because the dirtbags and losers aren't on the unlocked campaign, take a wild guess where they are?

This is real easy...what does a parasite do? It lives off a 'host' and needs that host to survive. Dirtbags, exploiters and trolls will follow their 'host' wherever they go. The locks dont end this- they control it. The rest is non discussion as I mentioned before, when you cant populate a server with a play-style .....guess what? You are one of the parasites.

Its time the swappers just sit down and stop struggling with excuses and demands on others and accept they are not necessary to game-play here......They are not needed and not instrumental in populated servers to keep them packed with players.....locked campaign players are necessary and control the play. Simply stated stop pretending you can fight or play without being parasitic in nature on others who prefer a completely different play style- you have to follow them to even play....so stop making demands for ZOS' finite resources be spent catering to a bunch of players in denial about what it is they do or offer to the player-base here in ESO.

Its time for the limited resources be used to work on lag and bugs to improve the game and stop with stories about the unicorn maffia and elite shadow gerbils who keep making it so the swappers cant populate anywhere or keep servers active when those resources keep being wasted while they cry. It failed and has many times now- stop making excuses and let the rest of the game get some fixes done.

Nice, we're "losers" "dirtbags" "exploiters" and "parasites" who ought to just shut up and never voice our opinions. I wonder if you appreciate the irony when faction-loyalists present themselves as victims or as upstanding members of the gaming community.

If I label something and talk about it, you then go on to attribute that to yourself....dont insinuate anyone put those labels on you personally.

[Edit to remove bait and discussing disciplinary actions]

VaranisArano · March 2020

pieratsos wrote: »

VaranisArano wrote: »

pieratsos wrote: »

VaranisArano wrote: »

Qbiken wrote: »

Soul_Demon wrote: »

idk wrote: »

Soul_Demon wrote: »

idk wrote: »

pieratsos wrote: »

KINGOFTHESKULLS wrote: »

Funny , I've never seen a faction loyalist with a bad behavior but every time I see a filthy swapper they seem to be the toxic one and trolly one.

There is always good and bad people in groups , factions and clans and I personally have a lot of friends that change factions and I don't really have a problem with the "idea" of swapping factions itself but lets be honest here there are more people that abuse it than the ones that actually use it the right way , which it's balancing the population and playing with their friends Fairly.

This is a MMO RPG after all , you choose to be a proud Ebonheart Pact warrior and it should stay that way , same thing with other factions.

I've spent thousands of hours in no cp , leading groups and helping my faction win and dealt with countless scroll/volendrung and zone trolls and sure as hell I can tell that faction lock never stopped trolls from being sad miserable wastes of flesh but it did have a great impact on lessening it.
Not being able to switch to a different faction any time you want helped a lot.

Now for spies , If they are really that miserable to buy a new account just to be pests again well you can't really do anything about it.
Now let me explain it to you how spies are ; there are few types of them :
- ones that tell their friends where your camps are.
- ones that simply read the zone chat to find out your next move.
- ones that tell their friends where you are stealthed at.
- ones that follow you around or even get into your group to constantly know where you are going.
Now imagine that happening to you , would you be able to have fun with that happening ?
And they always happen to be the ones that support no faction lock , funny right?
Which ones harder for them to do ? being able to switch whenever they want without a faction lock or buying another copy of the game?

Here's the thing , by simply having a score indicator in PvP , that just automatically encourages people to fight for a singular Cause : Winning, but there problem is when there is no faction lock , the scores don't really mean anything and for people that are used to it is annoying.
After all what is the point of fighting a war when there is no goal and cause ? that's what faction lock does , it ruins the score and takes away the thrill and competitiveness of winning the war.
So why even have a score indicator when there is no faction lock? because people will home whatever campaign that it winning anyways.

Now there are other things that ZoS could implement to try keep both parties happy :
1 - Add a cooldown to switching factions , could be a day , could be an hour but a cooldown would definitely help.
2 - Add a locked no CP campaign (unfortunately with the game's current state it would be extremely dead).
3 - Give out better end of campaign rewards to encourage players fight for a cause.
4 - Placing No CP on top of the campaign list instead of CP.
5 - Removing the score indicator for no locked campaigns.
6 - Create a blacklist for those who abuse the game features and troll visible for everyone in the campaign to see.

I don't blame you for supporting no faction lock but don't forget that there are many of you who abuses and it make you all look bad and that is a FACT.

Faction lock doesn't prevent you from talking to people from a different faction so pretty much all ur spy arguments go out the window. They can happen either way.

Campaigns are not competitive because the rules governing the campaign are not promoting a competitive game. If u want people to play for their faction then u need to encourage them to do so. Not force them into one faction. People don't care about campaign scoring cause there is really no reason to do so. You are knocking on the wrong doors.

True. Spies were used in the early months of the game when there was no such thing as an unlocked campaign. The groups that form from Zone are the best targets. They are easy to detect if the leader pays attention.

Another tib bit of information. The first scroll was stolen in the first week of the game using a character from the alliance that owned the scroll. Once again, faction lock was in place from day one.

So faction lock never stopped any of this and never will.

Just a minor thing but I have been told by some reputable sources that even back then when you were not supposed to be able to home enemy factions on a server, many exploiters used to 'guest' the camps as there was hole in game mechanic that allowed them to do that. So, there have been exploiting players since game came out- not so much anything else. The locks discouraged the behaviors and kept things somewhat controlled to just a few vs much larger volume lifting them caused.

I do not recall as most of my characters are in one faction. However, I do recall not being able to enter a campaign I had an alt of a difference allainc homed in no matter what I did. So it may have been the case at one point then eliminated later.

Regardless, locks do not really discourage the behavior fans of faction lock think it does. It might pretend it for some that do not have a second account but I guarantee I have played more than one faction in a locked campaign by using my alt account and Zos has publicly stated it is not against the ToS.

Faction locks do not stop anything.

See....here is the thing. We keep hearing how many don't like the locks and don't care about score. Yet since inception of all and any non locked have crashed and burned miserably. As I asked before, how are they doing now? It was rhetorical as we can all see they are again failing miserably. The reasons why have been argued ad nausium at this point and it just doesn't matter why.......the swappers cant populate a server and keep it playable.

So why keep up the demands others accept this ridiculous charade any longer. People who do want locked populate and keep alive any server they are on with constant fights- exploiting players are and have always been the dirtbags of the game and now is no different- Locks dont stop all of it...... but they keep it to minimum of true losers who can think of nothing else to do. Any further discussion is academic at best since swappers can NOT populate anywhere and keep gameplay going on any server....bottom line is you cant populate and are not the majority of players in the game. Never were.

It´s fairly easy to prove that there´s no correlation between faction locks and populated campaigns. Take the 30 day NO-CP campaign as a prime example (will only speak from PC-EU perspective since I´m not on NA or play console). Regardless of faction locks being implemented or not, the campaign has always been filled with people.

Now you may say that it´s cause people that want to play NO-CP have no other choice, but the same pattern can be seen on campaigns such as the main 30 day CP one (Vivec, Kaalgrontid, Trueflame etc...). No matter if faction locks has been in the game or not, the "main" 30 day CP campaign has always been the most populate one.

I´m not saying you can´t prefer one or the other when it comes to faction locks, but there´s no correlation between population and faction locks.

Or it merely proves that the preference for No CP is stronger than the preference for alliance locked play when alliance-locked means swapping their builds and characters over to play in a CP campaign.

Which is the far more likely situation. No CP vs CP is a much bigger difference when it comes to gameplay.

Now, you might have a case if No CP players actually had a choice. But they don't. ZOS hasn't offered a second No CP campaign since Morrowind after Almalexia flopped. Where players have had a choice, CP players have twice chosen the Alliance Locked campaign - and one of those choices was an equal "everyone is removed, choose your campaign again" unless you think PVPers are too dumb to read the rulesets before they pick a campaign.

In other words, what you can prove from the No CP campaigns is:
A. Last update, No CP players stayed in the Alliance Locked No CP campaign rather than play in the only unlocked CP option
B. This update, No CP players stayed in the unlocked No CP campaign rather than play in the only alliance locked CP option

What I'm seeing?
Most No CP players don't want to play in a CP campaign.
This is not exactly surprisingly given, oh, years of arguments over the merits of CP and No CP PVP. Or the way CP players packed into Vivec when it was the only CP option. Most players don't swap from No CP to CP and vice versa lightly.

There is no choice if there is no population to support both. Period.

And no one picked alliance lock cp. They all picked the most populated main campaign cause they actually had no choice unless they wanted a dead campaign. Whether it was trueflame vivec, unlocked, locked, different scoring rules or whatever it was always the main cp campaign and the most populated one. Period. Attempting to give credits to faction lock for the main cp campaign being populated is the dumbest thing ever.

First up, is there a reason you can't seem to engage with what I'm actually saying when you reply to a comment?
I'm not trying to give credit to anything.
I'm pointing out that we can't use the No CP Campaign to draw conclusions about the CP Campaigns because it is, to use your phrase, "apples to oranges."
The entirety of that above comment is about how we can't tell jack-diddly about No CP players' preference for either ruleset from the No CP Campaign, because No CP players literally had no choice about the alliance locked/unlocked ruleset. Their only choice was No CP Unlocked. If they stayed in No CP Locked and No CP Unlocked over the last two campaign changes, that's a really good indication that what they really care about is playing in No CP PVP over and above caring about locked/unlocked.
Its hard to have a conversation when you keep changing the topic from what I was talking about. I don't enjoy repeating myself to clarify what I was actually talking about and if you continue to ignore what I've said in order to talk about your pet topic, I probably won't continue engaging with you.

But to respond to what you seem to want to discuss instead about : Choice and the CP Campaigns
Yeah, yeah, CP Players had no choice at all.

We didn't all get removed from the campaigns at the same time.
We didn't get to look at the rulesets to decide which ones we wanted to play.
We didn't know ahead of time that this was going to happen or have any chance to rally players or guilds to our chosen campaign ruleset beforehand.
We had no chance, no chance whatsoever, to make any CP campaign other than the one listed first (the one with the big ol' Alliance Locked ruleset written by it) the main campaign by getting players to log in and make it look like the most populated, most competitive campaign, thereby attracting more players.

That's, uh, not the case.
My guild decided we were playing in the faction locked campaign before the switch, no matter the order of the campaign listings. "Look for the Alliance Locked option. We want that one." As soon as I redownloaded the game, I hopped into Gray Host, because I knew players would go to the more populated of the two. If I wanted Gray Host to be the main campaign, I needed to do my part to show that it was going to be the most populated, most competitive campaign.

Did anyone do that for the unlocked Blackreach?
Did guilds decide beforehand that they were going to play in Blackreach en masse and make it look like the attractive, popular, competitive option from Day 1?
Did multifaction players and guilds use this opportunity to boycott Gray Host and bring people to Blackreach?

After all, if there are enough people and guilds who really care about multifaction PVP, there should have been enough people to do all that, making Blackreach a lot more attractive to the players who don't care. There was nothing preventing multifaction players from making Blackreach look like the most populated, most competitive option, which would have drawn all the players who just want a populated, competitive campaign like flies to honey. (Unless you are one of those who think most PVPers are too dumb to check out the different campaigns.)

In all practicality? The multifaction players seem to have banked on that oh-so-magical-effect of being placed first on the list to attract players to Blackreach instead of, you know, trying to rally guilds and players beforehand to be ready and willing to swap to the unlocked campaign and make it the new main campaign no matter where it was on the list.
While I can't speak to how many players actually made a concerted effort to bulk up the population on Blackreach Day 1, I could tell that Gray Host had won the "we're gonna be the most populated, most competitive campaign" by the time we hit PC/NA primetime. Much of that is undoubtedly that incoming players looked at the available campaigns, said "That one's more popular" and jumped in, but the work to make it the most popular started as soon as players logged in. That could have easily been Blackreach if more players and guilds were willing to dedicate effort and play time to making the multifaction campaign the main one from the very beginning.

Now, I wouldn't say that the current pre-eminence of Gray Host says anything much about the desire of the general PVP playerbase for alliance-locked play. Most players care about having a populated, competitive campaign more than anything else. So I will say that if Blackreach had made a stronger early showing by attracting a strong core of multifaction players and guilds when everyone swapped campaigns, it would probably be the main campaign right now.

What do you mean not engaging with what you said. I literally addressed ur point that " where players have had a choice, CP players have chosen locked campaign". You are the one who said that so im not even sure what u are even talking about when u are telling me that im changing the topic and that you never gave credit to faction lock when i literally addressed what you said and that is exactly what u did.

Again, the concept of choice is based on the premise that you can actually make that choice. When the population cant support multiple campaigns to give players the freedom of making a choice then you dont really have a choice. The only choices u have are CP or no CP and populated or dead campaign and those will always be more important than lock or unlock. The CP main was always the most populated regardless of lock, unlock or whatever. Let me give you an example. I always preferred 7 day campaign over 30 day campaigns. And yet i never felt like i had a choice to play what i want because simply there was no population to support both campaigns and i was simply playing in the 30 day campaign too. It doesnt matter what you and ur guild does. Most people are playing casually, they dont go on discord with their guild to choose which campaign to home. They hop on, open the alliance war tab check which one is the most populated and home it. And yes which one is first probably does make a difference. Simply put i couldnt care less for faction lock or not and this is probably true for the majority of players. But if i logged on first after a patch and wanted to home a campaign before anyone else, i would simply home the first campaign in the list. It was always the most populated regardless of lock or unlock and most likely will always be the most populated.

It appears that what I meant as a simple statement of fact "Where players have had a choice, CP players have twice chosen the Alliance Locked campaign - and one of those choices was an equal "everyone is removed, choose your campaign again" unless you think PVPers are too dumb to read the rulesets before they pick a campaign" has been misunderstood as something far different.

Because they did choose the Alliance locked campaign. Most CP players, when they were removed from their campaigns and told to choose a new one to be their home campaign, homed themselves to the Alliance Locked campaigns. That's a fact, easily proven by looking at the relative populations of the campaign.

As to why that was? In my original comment, I made no claim as to why most CP players homed themselves on the alliance locked campaigns. But since you asked...

This might surprise you, but I don't think its because everyone loves faction lock. That would be silly, given that there's a ton of other reasons why players joined Gray Host, including feeling like they had no other choice once Gray Host filled up and became the most populated, competitive campaign. There's plenty of players on Gray Host because they like faction lock, plenty of players on Gray host who don't care, and plenty of players on Gray Host who dislike the faction-locked ruleset and are there anyway perhaps because they feel they now have no other choice unless they are willing to put in a lot of work in Blackreach now that the horse is out of the barn door.

At least this time, everyone got removed from their campaigns and given the choice as to which ruleset they were going to make their home campaign. That's in marked contrast to the last time, when ZOS completely mishandled the campaign reset and left unlocked Laatvulon dead on arrival.

So I'll thank you not to jump to conclusions, since I'm rather far from giving all the credit to the alliance-locked ruleset for why most players homed themselves to Gray Host or Kaal.

Beardimus · March 2020

josh.lackey_ESO wrote: »

It's a game. It's not supposed to be serious. Who are you to dictate that other people must play the game the way you want them to play it? That main draw of Elder Scrolls games is being able to play however you want.

But that's the exact point of us pro lock. @josh.lackey_ESO is that without lock people absolutely have an easier time messing about with how people want to play, by trolling / AP boosting / Emp flipping..

That's the exact reason why we want lock.

And......on cp..... Lock is clearly more popular. Proven time and again it has the most pop.

idk · March 2020

VaranisArano wrote: »

pieratsos wrote: »

VaranisArano wrote: »

pieratsos wrote: »

VaranisArano wrote: »

Qbiken wrote: »

Soul_Demon wrote: »

idk wrote: »

Soul_Demon wrote: »

idk wrote: »

pieratsos wrote: »

KINGOFTHESKULLS wrote: »

Funny , I've never seen a faction loyalist with a bad behavior but every time I see a filthy swapper they seem to be the toxic one and trolly one.

There is always good and bad people in groups , factions and clans and I personally have a lot of friends that change factions and I don't really have a problem with the "idea" of swapping factions itself but lets be honest here there are more people that abuse it than the ones that actually use it the right way , which it's balancing the population and playing with their friends Fairly.

This is a MMO RPG after all , you choose to be a proud Ebonheart Pact warrior and it should stay that way , same thing with other factions.

I've spent thousands of hours in no cp , leading groups and helping my faction win and dealt with countless scroll/volendrung and zone trolls and sure as hell I can tell that faction lock never stopped trolls from being sad miserable wastes of flesh but it did have a great impact on lessening it.
Not being able to switch to a different faction any time you want helped a lot.

Now for spies , If they are really that miserable to buy a new account just to be pests again well you can't really do anything about it.
Now let me explain it to you how spies are ; there are few types of them :
- ones that tell their friends where your camps are.
- ones that simply read the zone chat to find out your next move.
- ones that tell their friends where you are stealthed at.
- ones that follow you around or even get into your group to constantly know where you are going.
Now imagine that happening to you , would you be able to have fun with that happening ?
And they always happen to be the ones that support no faction lock , funny right?
Which ones harder for them to do ? being able to switch whenever they want without a faction lock or buying another copy of the game?

Here's the thing , by simply having a score indicator in PvP , that just automatically encourages people to fight for a singular Cause : Winning, but there problem is when there is no faction lock , the scores don't really mean anything and for people that are used to it is annoying.
After all what is the point of fighting a war when there is no goal and cause ? that's what faction lock does , it ruins the score and takes away the thrill and competitiveness of winning the war.
So why even have a score indicator when there is no faction lock? because people will home whatever campaign that it winning anyways.

Now there are other things that ZoS could implement to try keep both parties happy :
1 - Add a cooldown to switching factions , could be a day , could be an hour but a cooldown would definitely help.
2 - Add a locked no CP campaign (unfortunately with the game's current state it would be extremely dead).
3 - Give out better end of campaign rewards to encourage players fight for a cause.
4 - Placing No CP on top of the campaign list instead of CP.
5 - Removing the score indicator for no locked campaigns.
6 - Create a blacklist for those who abuse the game features and troll visible for everyone in the campaign to see.

I don't blame you for supporting no faction lock but don't forget that there are many of you who abuses and it make you all look bad and that is a FACT.

Faction lock doesn't prevent you from talking to people from a different faction so pretty much all ur spy arguments go out the window. They can happen either way.

Campaigns are not competitive because the rules governing the campaign are not promoting a competitive game. If u want people to play for their faction then u need to encourage them to do so. Not force them into one faction. People don't care about campaign scoring cause there is really no reason to do so. You are knocking on the wrong doors.

True. Spies were used in the early months of the game when there was no such thing as an unlocked campaign. The groups that form from Zone are the best targets. They are easy to detect if the leader pays attention.

Another tib bit of information. The first scroll was stolen in the first week of the game using a character from the alliance that owned the scroll. Once again, faction lock was in place from day one.

So faction lock never stopped any of this and never will.

Just a minor thing but I have been told by some reputable sources that even back then when you were not supposed to be able to home enemy factions on a server, many exploiters used to 'guest' the camps as there was hole in game mechanic that allowed them to do that. So, there have been exploiting players since game came out- not so much anything else. The locks discouraged the behaviors and kept things somewhat controlled to just a few vs much larger volume lifting them caused.

I do not recall as most of my characters are in one faction. However, I do recall not being able to enter a campaign I had an alt of a difference allainc homed in no matter what I did. So it may have been the case at one point then eliminated later.

Regardless, locks do not really discourage the behavior fans of faction lock think it does. It might pretend it for some that do not have a second account but I guarantee I have played more than one faction in a locked campaign by using my alt account and Zos has publicly stated it is not against the ToS.

Faction locks do not stop anything.

See....here is the thing. We keep hearing how many don't like the locks and don't care about score. Yet since inception of all and any non locked have crashed and burned miserably. As I asked before, how are they doing now? It was rhetorical as we can all see they are again failing miserably. The reasons why have been argued ad nausium at this point and it just doesn't matter why.......the swappers cant populate a server and keep it playable.

So why keep up the demands others accept this ridiculous charade any longer. People who do want locked populate and keep alive any server they are on with constant fights- exploiting players are and have always been the dirtbags of the game and now is no different- Locks dont stop all of it...... but they keep it to minimum of true losers who can think of nothing else to do. Any further discussion is academic at best since swappers can NOT populate anywhere and keep gameplay going on any server....bottom line is you cant populate and are not the majority of players in the game. Never were.

It´s fairly easy to prove that there´s no correlation between faction locks and populated campaigns. Take the 30 day NO-CP campaign as a prime example (will only speak from PC-EU perspective since I´m not on NA or play console). Regardless of faction locks being implemented or not, the campaign has always been filled with people.

Now you may say that it´s cause people that want to play NO-CP have no other choice, but the same pattern can be seen on campaigns such as the main 30 day CP one (Vivec, Kaalgrontid, Trueflame etc...). No matter if faction locks has been in the game or not, the "main" 30 day CP campaign has always been the most populate one.

I´m not saying you can´t prefer one or the other when it comes to faction locks, but there´s no correlation between population and faction locks.

Or it merely proves that the preference for No CP is stronger than the preference for alliance locked play when alliance-locked means swapping their builds and characters over to play in a CP campaign.

Which is the far more likely situation. No CP vs CP is a much bigger difference when it comes to gameplay.

Now, you might have a case if No CP players actually had a choice. But they don't. ZOS hasn't offered a second No CP campaign since Morrowind after Almalexia flopped. Where players have had a choice, CP players have twice chosen the Alliance Locked campaign - and one of those choices was an equal "everyone is removed, choose your campaign again" unless you think PVPers are too dumb to read the rulesets before they pick a campaign.

In other words, what you can prove from the No CP campaigns is:
A. Last update, No CP players stayed in the Alliance Locked No CP campaign rather than play in the only unlocked CP option
B. This update, No CP players stayed in the unlocked No CP campaign rather than play in the only alliance locked CP option

What I'm seeing?
Most No CP players don't want to play in a CP campaign.
This is not exactly surprisingly given, oh, years of arguments over the merits of CP and No CP PVP. Or the way CP players packed into Vivec when it was the only CP option. Most players don't swap from No CP to CP and vice versa lightly.

There is no choice if there is no population to support both. Period.

And no one picked alliance lock cp. They all picked the most populated main campaign cause they actually had no choice unless they wanted a dead campaign. Whether it was trueflame vivec, unlocked, locked, different scoring rules or whatever it was always the main cp campaign and the most populated one. Period. Attempting to give credits to faction lock for the main cp campaign being populated is the dumbest thing ever.

First up, is there a reason you can't seem to engage with what I'm actually saying when you reply to a comment?
I'm not trying to give credit to anything.
I'm pointing out that we can't use the No CP Campaign to draw conclusions about the CP Campaigns because it is, to use your phrase, "apples to oranges."
The entirety of that above comment is about how we can't tell jack-diddly about No CP players' preference for either ruleset from the No CP Campaign, because No CP players literally had no choice about the alliance locked/unlocked ruleset. Their only choice was No CP Unlocked. If they stayed in No CP Locked and No CP Unlocked over the last two campaign changes, that's a really good indication that what they really care about is playing in No CP PVP over and above caring about locked/unlocked.
Its hard to have a conversation when you keep changing the topic from what I was talking about. I don't enjoy repeating myself to clarify what I was actually talking about and if you continue to ignore what I've said in order to talk about your pet topic, I probably won't continue engaging with you.

But to respond to what you seem to want to discuss instead about : Choice and the CP Campaigns
Yeah, yeah, CP Players had no choice at all.

We didn't all get removed from the campaigns at the same time.
We didn't get to look at the rulesets to decide which ones we wanted to play.
We didn't know ahead of time that this was going to happen or have any chance to rally players or guilds to our chosen campaign ruleset beforehand.
We had no chance, no chance whatsoever, to make any CP campaign other than the one listed first (the one with the big ol' Alliance Locked ruleset written by it) the main campaign by getting players to log in and make it look like the most populated, most competitive campaign, thereby attracting more players.

That's, uh, not the case.
My guild decided we were playing in the faction locked campaign before the switch, no matter the order of the campaign listings. "Look for the Alliance Locked option. We want that one." As soon as I redownloaded the game, I hopped into Gray Host, because I knew players would go to the more populated of the two. If I wanted Gray Host to be the main campaign, I needed to do my part to show that it was going to be the most populated, most competitive campaign.

Did anyone do that for the unlocked Blackreach?
Did guilds decide beforehand that they were going to play in Blackreach en masse and make it look like the attractive, popular, competitive option from Day 1?
Did multifaction players and guilds use this opportunity to boycott Gray Host and bring people to Blackreach?

After all, if there are enough people and guilds who really care about multifaction PVP, there should have been enough people to do all that, making Blackreach a lot more attractive to the players who don't care. There was nothing preventing multifaction players from making Blackreach look like the most populated, most competitive option, which would have drawn all the players who just want a populated, competitive campaign like flies to honey. (Unless you are one of those who think most PVPers are too dumb to check out the different campaigns.)

In all practicality? The multifaction players seem to have banked on that oh-so-magical-effect of being placed first on the list to attract players to Blackreach instead of, you know, trying to rally guilds and players beforehand to be ready and willing to swap to the unlocked campaign and make it the new main campaign no matter where it was on the list.
While I can't speak to how many players actually made a concerted effort to bulk up the population on Blackreach Day 1, I could tell that Gray Host had won the "we're gonna be the most populated, most competitive campaign" by the time we hit PC/NA primetime. Much of that is undoubtedly that incoming players looked at the available campaigns, said "That one's more popular" and jumped in, but the work to make it the most popular started as soon as players logged in. That could have easily been Blackreach if more players and guilds were willing to dedicate effort and play time to making the multifaction campaign the main one from the very beginning.

Now, I wouldn't say that the current pre-eminence of Gray Host says anything much about the desire of the general PVP playerbase for alliance-locked play. Most players care about having a populated, competitive campaign more than anything else. So I will say that if Blackreach had made a stronger early showing by attracting a strong core of multifaction players and guilds when everyone swapped campaigns, it would probably be the main campaign right now.

What do you mean not engaging with what you said. I literally addressed ur point that " where players have had a choice, CP players have chosen locked campaign". You are the one who said that so im not even sure what u are even talking about when u are telling me that im changing the topic and that you never gave credit to faction lock when i literally addressed what you said and that is exactly what u did.

Again, the concept of choice is based on the premise that you can actually make that choice. When the population cant support multiple campaigns to give players the freedom of making a choice then you dont really have a choice. The only choices u have are CP or no CP and populated or dead campaign and those will always be more important than lock or unlock. The CP main was always the most populated regardless of lock, unlock or whatever. Let me give you an example. I always preferred 7 day campaign over 30 day campaigns. And yet i never felt like i had a choice to play what i want because simply there was no population to support both campaigns and i was simply playing in the 30 day campaign too. It doesnt matter what you and ur guild does. Most people are playing casually, they dont go on discord with their guild to choose which campaign to home. They hop on, open the alliance war tab check which one is the most populated and home it. And yes which one is first probably does make a difference. Simply put i couldnt care less for faction lock or not and this is probably true for the majority of players. But if i logged on first after a patch and wanted to home a campaign before anyone else, i would simply home the first campaign in the list. It was always the most populated regardless of lock or unlock and most likely will always be the most populated.

It appears that what I meant as a simple statement of fact "Where players have had a choice, CP players have twice chosen the Alliance Locked campaign - and one of those choices was an equal "everyone is removed, choose your campaign again" unless you think PVPers are too dumb to read the rulesets before they pick a campaign" has been misunderstood as something far different.

Because they did choose the Alliance locked campaign. Most CP players, when they were removed from their campaigns and told to choose a new one to be their home campaign, homed themselves to the Alliance Locked campaigns. That's a fact, easily proven by looking at the relative populations of the campaign.

As to why that was? In my original comment, I made no claim as to why most CP players homed themselves on the alliance locked campaigns. But since you asked...

This might surprise you, but I don't think its because everyone loves faction lock. That would be silly, given that there's a ton of other reasons why players joined Gray Host, including feeling like they had no other choice once Gray Host filled up and became the most populated, competitive campaign. There's plenty of players on Gray Host because they like faction lock, plenty of players on Gray host who don't care, and plenty of players on Gray Host who dislike the faction-locked ruleset and are there anyway perhaps because they feel they now have no other choice unless they are willing to put in a lot of work in Blackreach now that the horse is out of the barn door.

At least this time, everyone got removed from their campaigns and given the choice as to which ruleset they were going to make their home campaign. That's in marked contrast to the last time, when ZOS completely mishandled the campaign reset and left unlocked Laatvulon dead on arrival.

So I'll thank you not to jump to conclusions, since I'm rather far from giving all the credit to the alliance-locked ruleset for why most players homed themselves to Gray Host or Kaal.

I agree with your suggestion that most players are not choosing the campaign because it is faction locked but that is where the masses have flocked to.

The reality is most are not worked up about faction locks and the lack of it or we would have seen a much larger number of players expressing their opinions on the subject. In the end, the only thing we can say about players that choose the full campaign is they are seriously interested in PvP. Heck, we have players that do not support faction locks in locked campaigns which demonstrates the pint that PvP is the biggest interest when choosing a campaign for many. Anything beyond that is nothing more than guessing.

edges_endgame · March 2020

Beardimus wrote: »

josh.lackey_ESO wrote: »

It's a game. It's not supposed to be serious. Who are you to dictate that other people must play the game the way you want them to play it? That main draw of Elder Scrolls games is being able to play however you want.

But that's the exact point of us pro lock. @josh.lackey_ESO is that without lock people absolutely have an easier time messing about with how people want to play, by trolling / AP boosting / Emp flipping..

That's the exact reason why we want lock.

And......on cp..... Lock is clearly more popular. Proven time and again it has the most pop.

No its not. Most people on no Cp do not want faction locks. Facts.

OH wait... Maybe it's just all a point of view thing and unless everybody is forced to vote on that matter.... Mmmh...i just felt a braincell cry.

pieratsos · March 2020

VaranisArano wrote: »

pieratsos wrote: »

VaranisArano wrote: »

pieratsos wrote: »

VaranisArano wrote: »

Qbiken wrote: »

Soul_Demon wrote: »

idk wrote: »

Soul_Demon wrote: »

idk wrote: »

pieratsos wrote: »

KINGOFTHESKULLS wrote: »

Funny , I've never seen a faction loyalist with a bad behavior but every time I see a filthy swapper they seem to be the toxic one and trolly one.

There is always good and bad people in groups , factions and clans and I personally have a lot of friends that change factions and I don't really have a problem with the "idea" of swapping factions itself but lets be honest here there are more people that abuse it than the ones that actually use it the right way , which it's balancing the population and playing with their friends Fairly.

This is a MMO RPG after all , you choose to be a proud Ebonheart Pact warrior and it should stay that way , same thing with other factions.

I've spent thousands of hours in no cp , leading groups and helping my faction win and dealt with countless scroll/volendrung and zone trolls and sure as hell I can tell that faction lock never stopped trolls from being sad miserable wastes of flesh but it did have a great impact on lessening it.
Not being able to switch to a different faction any time you want helped a lot.

Now for spies , If they are really that miserable to buy a new account just to be pests again well you can't really do anything about it.
Now let me explain it to you how spies are ; there are few types of them :
- ones that tell their friends where your camps are.
- ones that simply read the zone chat to find out your next move.
- ones that tell their friends where you are stealthed at.
- ones that follow you around or even get into your group to constantly know where you are going.
Now imagine that happening to you , would you be able to have fun with that happening ?
And they always happen to be the ones that support no faction lock , funny right?
Which ones harder for them to do ? being able to switch whenever they want without a faction lock or buying another copy of the game?

Here's the thing , by simply having a score indicator in PvP , that just automatically encourages people to fight for a singular Cause : Winning, but there problem is when there is no faction lock , the scores don't really mean anything and for people that are used to it is annoying.
After all what is the point of fighting a war when there is no goal and cause ? that's what faction lock does , it ruins the score and takes away the thrill and competitiveness of winning the war.
So why even have a score indicator when there is no faction lock? because people will home whatever campaign that it winning anyways.

Now there are other things that ZoS could implement to try keep both parties happy :
1 - Add a cooldown to switching factions , could be a day , could be an hour but a cooldown would definitely help.
2 - Add a locked no CP campaign (unfortunately with the game's current state it would be extremely dead).
3 - Give out better end of campaign rewards to encourage players fight for a cause.
4 - Placing No CP on top of the campaign list instead of CP.
5 - Removing the score indicator for no locked campaigns.
6 - Create a blacklist for those who abuse the game features and troll visible for everyone in the campaign to see.

I don't blame you for supporting no faction lock but don't forget that there are many of you who abuses and it make you all look bad and that is a FACT.

Faction lock doesn't prevent you from talking to people from a different faction so pretty much all ur spy arguments go out the window. They can happen either way.

Campaigns are not competitive because the rules governing the campaign are not promoting a competitive game. If u want people to play for their faction then u need to encourage them to do so. Not force them into one faction. People don't care about campaign scoring cause there is really no reason to do so. You are knocking on the wrong doors.

True. Spies were used in the early months of the game when there was no such thing as an unlocked campaign. The groups that form from Zone are the best targets. They are easy to detect if the leader pays attention.

Another tib bit of information. The first scroll was stolen in the first week of the game using a character from the alliance that owned the scroll. Once again, faction lock was in place from day one.

So faction lock never stopped any of this and never will.

Just a minor thing but I have been told by some reputable sources that even back then when you were not supposed to be able to home enemy factions on a server, many exploiters used to 'guest' the camps as there was hole in game mechanic that allowed them to do that. So, there have been exploiting players since game came out- not so much anything else. The locks discouraged the behaviors and kept things somewhat controlled to just a few vs much larger volume lifting them caused.

I do not recall as most of my characters are in one faction. However, I do recall not being able to enter a campaign I had an alt of a difference allainc homed in no matter what I did. So it may have been the case at one point then eliminated later.

Regardless, locks do not really discourage the behavior fans of faction lock think it does. It might pretend it for some that do not have a second account but I guarantee I have played more than one faction in a locked campaign by using my alt account and Zos has publicly stated it is not against the ToS.

Faction locks do not stop anything.

See....here is the thing. We keep hearing how many don't like the locks and don't care about score. Yet since inception of all and any non locked have crashed and burned miserably. As I asked before, how are they doing now? It was rhetorical as we can all see they are again failing miserably. The reasons why have been argued ad nausium at this point and it just doesn't matter why.......the swappers cant populate a server and keep it playable.

So why keep up the demands others accept this ridiculous charade any longer. People who do want locked populate and keep alive any server they are on with constant fights- exploiting players are and have always been the dirtbags of the game and now is no different- Locks dont stop all of it...... but they keep it to minimum of true losers who can think of nothing else to do. Any further discussion is academic at best since swappers can NOT populate anywhere and keep gameplay going on any server....bottom line is you cant populate and are not the majority of players in the game. Never were.

It´s fairly easy to prove that there´s no correlation between faction locks and populated campaigns. Take the 30 day NO-CP campaign as a prime example (will only speak from PC-EU perspective since I´m not on NA or play console). Regardless of faction locks being implemented or not, the campaign has always been filled with people.

Now you may say that it´s cause people that want to play NO-CP have no other choice, but the same pattern can be seen on campaigns such as the main 30 day CP one (Vivec, Kaalgrontid, Trueflame etc...). No matter if faction locks has been in the game or not, the "main" 30 day CP campaign has always been the most populate one.

I´m not saying you can´t prefer one or the other when it comes to faction locks, but there´s no correlation between population and faction locks.

Or it merely proves that the preference for No CP is stronger than the preference for alliance locked play when alliance-locked means swapping their builds and characters over to play in a CP campaign.

Which is the far more likely situation. No CP vs CP is a much bigger difference when it comes to gameplay.

Now, you might have a case if No CP players actually had a choice. But they don't. ZOS hasn't offered a second No CP campaign since Morrowind after Almalexia flopped. Where players have had a choice, CP players have twice chosen the Alliance Locked campaign - and one of those choices was an equal "everyone is removed, choose your campaign again" unless you think PVPers are too dumb to read the rulesets before they pick a campaign.

In other words, what you can prove from the No CP campaigns is:
A. Last update, No CP players stayed in the Alliance Locked No CP campaign rather than play in the only unlocked CP option
B. This update, No CP players stayed in the unlocked No CP campaign rather than play in the only alliance locked CP option

What I'm seeing?
Most No CP players don't want to play in a CP campaign.
This is not exactly surprisingly given, oh, years of arguments over the merits of CP and No CP PVP. Or the way CP players packed into Vivec when it was the only CP option. Most players don't swap from No CP to CP and vice versa lightly.

There is no choice if there is no population to support both. Period.

And no one picked alliance lock cp. They all picked the most populated main campaign cause they actually had no choice unless they wanted a dead campaign. Whether it was trueflame vivec, unlocked, locked, different scoring rules or whatever it was always the main cp campaign and the most populated one. Period. Attempting to give credits to faction lock for the main cp campaign being populated is the dumbest thing ever.

First up, is there a reason you can't seem to engage with what I'm actually saying when you reply to a comment?
I'm not trying to give credit to anything.
I'm pointing out that we can't use the No CP Campaign to draw conclusions about the CP Campaigns because it is, to use your phrase, "apples to oranges."
The entirety of that above comment is about how we can't tell jack-diddly about No CP players' preference for either ruleset from the No CP Campaign, because No CP players literally had no choice about the alliance locked/unlocked ruleset. Their only choice was No CP Unlocked. If they stayed in No CP Locked and No CP Unlocked over the last two campaign changes, that's a really good indication that what they really care about is playing in No CP PVP over and above caring about locked/unlocked.
Its hard to have a conversation when you keep changing the topic from what I was talking about. I don't enjoy repeating myself to clarify what I was actually talking about and if you continue to ignore what I've said in order to talk about your pet topic, I probably won't continue engaging with you.

But to respond to what you seem to want to discuss instead about : Choice and the CP Campaigns
Yeah, yeah, CP Players had no choice at all.

We didn't all get removed from the campaigns at the same time.
We didn't get to look at the rulesets to decide which ones we wanted to play.
We didn't know ahead of time that this was going to happen or have any chance to rally players or guilds to our chosen campaign ruleset beforehand.
We had no chance, no chance whatsoever, to make any CP campaign other than the one listed first (the one with the big ol' Alliance Locked ruleset written by it) the main campaign by getting players to log in and make it look like the most populated, most competitive campaign, thereby attracting more players.

That's, uh, not the case.
My guild decided we were playing in the faction locked campaign before the switch, no matter the order of the campaign listings. "Look for the Alliance Locked option. We want that one." As soon as I redownloaded the game, I hopped into Gray Host, because I knew players would go to the more populated of the two. If I wanted Gray Host to be the main campaign, I needed to do my part to show that it was going to be the most populated, most competitive campaign.

Did anyone do that for the unlocked Blackreach?
Did guilds decide beforehand that they were going to play in Blackreach en masse and make it look like the attractive, popular, competitive option from Day 1?
Did multifaction players and guilds use this opportunity to boycott Gray Host and bring people to Blackreach?

After all, if there are enough people and guilds who really care about multifaction PVP, there should have been enough people to do all that, making Blackreach a lot more attractive to the players who don't care. There was nothing preventing multifaction players from making Blackreach look like the most populated, most competitive option, which would have drawn all the players who just want a populated, competitive campaign like flies to honey. (Unless you are one of those who think most PVPers are too dumb to check out the different campaigns.)

In all practicality? The multifaction players seem to have banked on that oh-so-magical-effect of being placed first on the list to attract players to Blackreach instead of, you know, trying to rally guilds and players beforehand to be ready and willing to swap to the unlocked campaign and make it the new main campaign no matter where it was on the list.
While I can't speak to how many players actually made a concerted effort to bulk up the population on Blackreach Day 1, I could tell that Gray Host had won the "we're gonna be the most populated, most competitive campaign" by the time we hit PC/NA primetime. Much of that is undoubtedly that incoming players looked at the available campaigns, said "That one's more popular" and jumped in, but the work to make it the most popular started as soon as players logged in. That could have easily been Blackreach if more players and guilds were willing to dedicate effort and play time to making the multifaction campaign the main one from the very beginning.

Now, I wouldn't say that the current pre-eminence of Gray Host says anything much about the desire of the general PVP playerbase for alliance-locked play. Most players care about having a populated, competitive campaign more than anything else. So I will say that if Blackreach had made a stronger early showing by attracting a strong core of multifaction players and guilds when everyone swapped campaigns, it would probably be the main campaign right now.

What do you mean not engaging with what you said. I literally addressed ur point that " where players have had a choice, CP players have chosen locked campaign". You are the one who said that so im not even sure what u are even talking about when u are telling me that im changing the topic and that you never gave credit to faction lock when i literally addressed what you said and that is exactly what u did.

Again, the concept of choice is based on the premise that you can actually make that choice. When the population cant support multiple campaigns to give players the freedom of making a choice then you dont really have a choice. The only choices u have are CP or no CP and populated or dead campaign and those will always be more important than lock or unlock. The CP main was always the most populated regardless of lock, unlock or whatever. Let me give you an example. I always preferred 7 day campaign over 30 day campaigns. And yet i never felt like i had a choice to play what i want because simply there was no population to support both campaigns and i was simply playing in the 30 day campaign too. It doesnt matter what you and ur guild does. Most people are playing casually, they dont go on discord with their guild to choose which campaign to home. They hop on, open the alliance war tab check which one is the most populated and home it. And yes which one is first probably does make a difference. Simply put i couldnt care less for faction lock or not and this is probably true for the majority of players. But if i logged on first after a patch and wanted to home a campaign before anyone else, i would simply home the first campaign in the list. It was always the most populated regardless of lock or unlock and most likely will always be the most populated.

It appears that what I meant as a simple statement of fact "Where players have had a choice, CP players have twice chosen the Alliance Locked campaign - and one of those choices was an equal "everyone is removed, choose your campaign again" unless you think PVPers are too dumb to read the rulesets before they pick a campaign" has been misunderstood as something far different.

Because they did choose the Alliance locked campaign. Most CP players, when they were removed from their campaigns and told to choose a new one to be their home campaign, homed themselves to the Alliance Locked campaigns. That's a fact, easily proven by looking at the relative populations of the campaign.

As to why that was? In my original comment, I made no claim as to why most CP players homed themselves on the alliance locked campaigns. But since you asked...

This might surprise you, but I don't think its because everyone loves faction lock. That would be silly, given that there's a ton of other reasons why players joined Gray Host, including feeling like they had no other choice once Gray Host filled up and became the most populated, competitive campaign. There's plenty of players on Gray Host because they like faction lock, plenty of players on Gray host who don't care, and plenty of players on Gray Host who dislike the faction-locked ruleset and are there anyway perhaps because they feel they now have no other choice unless they are willing to put in a lot of work in Blackreach now that the horse is out of the barn door.

At least this time, everyone got removed from their campaigns and given the choice as to which ruleset they were going to make their home campaign. That's in marked contrast to the last time, when ZOS completely mishandled the campaign reset and left unlocked Laatvulon dead on arrival.

So I'll thank you not to jump to conclusions, since I'm rather far from giving all the credit to the alliance-locked ruleset for why most players homed themselves to Gray Host or Kaal.

1. It's not that people are too dumb to read. It's just that they don't care. They just want to pvp. That's the process of thinking behind the argument "people just click on what's first on the list".

2. Removing everyone from the campaigns doesn't mean that you are given a choice. That's ur problem, that you actually think people have a choice. They don't because the game can't support their choice. It doesn't matter if u want unlock or lock. At the end of the day ur choice is going to be most populated.

3. You said that players chose alliance lock and stated it as a fact and in the very next paragraph said people in gray host migh like or dislike alliance lock or simply don't care. You literally contradicted ur own statement.

4. The only common choice between all those players is the choice of what's most populated. And no, you can't say the first people logging are choosing lock when literally in the same post you say many people in the campaign just don't give a damn. You are just going back and forth with ur arguments. Just like there are some people who choose it first because it's locked the same way some people choose it first because they don't care, because it's first on the list, because they got used to playing in the first on the list because they believe that it's going to be the most populated regardless of what they like.

5. And it's not even about not liking faction lock. People just want to play their characters and quite frankly thats more important than faction pride in a video game. Cause relatively speaking, faction lock doesn't really do anything else other than promoting faction pride.

I didnt jump to conclusions. Your arguments were simply put, all over the place.

Earthewen · March 2020

Believe it or not, players have already "voted" on what campaign they want. You vote every time you click on your favorite campaign. If you only go to the one most populated, then you are only following the crowd. That, in itself, should tell you something. If the most populated server IS the one with faction locks, isn't it more logical to believe that people want that server? In a way, then, the majority of players have already voted for faction locks.

About your point that it isn't about faction locks and people just want to play their characters … It may be more important for some people to just simply play their characters, but for others like me, winning is more important. How does one win? By having a bigger score for my team. Games are not won by the skirmishes. It's won by consistent and constant outplaying of your enemy. Hour after Hour.

I think what this discussion boils down to is the same old problem of people believing that what they want is the only viable way to play. Let me assure you that your way is not the only way of everyone on the map nor the only way that one should play. I don't want anyone to speak for me and the way I like to play. I'll do that myself. There is no viable reason why we all can't exist and play on the same map without disparaging each other's play style. Some people like to play small man, don't care about points, etc. Okay. That's what you like so go for it. However, myself and my guild love the thrill of excellence in gaining the most score, so please do not presume that MOST players like what you like. You can only attest to what you and your friends like. Not me and my friends.

My last point is about "faction lock doesn't really do anything else other than promoting faction pride." What's wrong with that? As far as I can tell, absolutely nothing. You seem to want to downplay something you disagree with, but as I stated earlier, not everyone thinks like you. If someone chooses to be faction loyal, that is their choice to make. You trying to make others choose what you have chosen is seen more as an attempt to manipulate ZOS into believing and doing what you want, rather than look at the "voting" that has already taken place.

Let's agree that both styles of play CAN exist on the same map and coexist in positive ways.

Soul_Demon · March 2020

Earthewen wrote: »

Believe it or not, players have already "voted" on what campaign they want. You vote every time you click on your favorite campaign. If you only go to the one most populated, then you are only following the crowd. That, in itself, should tell you something. If the most populated server IS the one with faction locks, isn't it more logical to believe that people want that server? In a way, then, the majority of players have already voted for faction locks.

About your point that it isn't about faction locks and people just want to play their characters … It may be more important for some people to just simply play their characters, but for others like me, winning is more important. How does one win? By having a bigger score for my team. Games are not won by the skirmishes. It's won by consistent and constant outplaying of your enemy. Hour after Hour.

I think what this discussion boils down to is the same old problem of people believing that what they want is the only viable way to play. Let me assure you that your way is not the only way of everyone on the map nor the only way that one should play. I don't want anyone to speak for me and the way I like to play. I'll do that myself. There is no viable reason why we all can't exist and play on the same map without disparaging each other's play style. Some people like to play small man, don't care about points, etc. Okay. That's what you like so go for it. However, myself and my guild love the thrill of excellence in gaining the most score, so please do not presume that MOST players like what you like. You can only attest to what you and your friends like. Not me and my friends.

My last point is about "faction lock doesn't really do anything else other than promoting faction pride." What's wrong with that? As far as I can tell, absolutely nothing. You seem to want to downplay something you disagree with, but as I stated earlier, no everyone thinks like you. If someone chooses to be faction loyal, that is their choice to make. You trying to make others choose what you have chosen is seen more as an attempt to manipulate ZOS into believing and doing what you want, rather than look at the "voting" that has already taken place.

Let's agree that both styles of play CAN exist on the same map and coexist in positive ways.

I agree.....I think the swappers see the points being made and understand 'following' anyone as a necessity to play means you are not the majority nor do 'most players' want that play-style. If a server opens with locks and a large portion selects that- its showing that is what they want.....all the rest who 'follow' have made their choice just as those who initially moved did. Parasitic play-styles rely on others to get fights and cant populate a server- that is made up largely of swappers....and they know it. Precious resources are being spent 'investigating' what many already knew and its taking time from addressing lag and bugs in game. Time to stop with the excuses as to why the non locked camps bomb immediately. Excuses can keep being rolled out but if you step back and look its clear...the largest part of the player base wants locks and 'all the rest' simply follow those players wherever they go to play. Why keep ZOS from addressing what that same larger base wants right now- lag and bug fixes? Its wasting resources and time for what the players really want.

pieratsos · March 2020

Earthewen wrote: »

Believe it or not, players have already "voted" on what campaign they want. You vote every time you click on your favorite campaign. If you only go to the one most populated, then you are only following the crowd. That, in itself, should tell you something. If the most populated server IS the one with faction locks, isn't it more logical to believe that people want that server? In a way, then, the majority of players have already voted for faction locks.

About your point that it isn't about faction locks and people just want to play their characters … It may be more important for some people to just simply play their characters, but for others like me, winning is more important. How does one win? By having a bigger score for my team. Games are not won by the skirmishes. It's won by consistent and constant outplaying of your enemy. Hour after Hour.

I think what this discussion boils down to is the same old problem of people believing that what they want is the only viable way to play. Let me assure you that your way is not the only way of everyone on the map nor the only way that one should play. I don't want anyone to speak for me and the way I like to play. I'll do that myself. There is no viable reason why we all can't exist and play on the same map without disparaging each other's play style. Some people like to play small man, don't care about points, etc. Okay. That's what you like so go for it. However, myself and my guild love the thrill of excellence in gaining the most score, so please do not presume that MOST players like what you like. You can only attest to what you and your friends like. Not me and my friends.

My last point is about "faction lock doesn't really do anything else other than promoting faction pride." What's wrong with that? As far as I can tell, absolutely nothing. You seem to want to downplay something you disagree with, but as I stated earlier, not everyone thinks like you. If someone chooses to be faction loyal, that is their choice to make. You trying to make others choose what you have chosen is seen more as an attempt to manipulate ZOS into believing and doing what you want, rather than look at the "voting" that has already taken place.

Let's agree that both styles of play CAN exist on the same map and coexist in positive ways.

So you like faction lock. Let's say the most populated campaign was unlocked. You would be forced to play there since the other campaign would be dead. So according to you ur choice would be unlocked. Yeah I don't think that u understand the concept of choice.

Yes I know that some like to play for the win. No one is limiting you to do that in an unlocked campaign.

Nothing wrong with faction pride. I never downplayed it. I'm just saying that this is a video game and whether u like it or not people being able to play their characters is more important than having faction pride.

You are accusing me of downplaying
ur faction pride and trying to enforce my choice on others while u believe that ur faction pride is more important than the freedom of players being able to play their characters. How ironic is that

Soul_Demon · March 2020

pieratsos wrote: »

Earthewen wrote: »

Believe it or not, players have already "voted" on what campaign they want. You vote every time you click on your favorite campaign. If you only go to the one most populated, then you are only following the crowd. That, in itself, should tell you something. If the most populated server IS the one with faction locks, isn't it more logical to believe that people want that server? In a way, then, the majority of players have already voted for faction locks.

About your point that it isn't about faction locks and people just want to play their characters … It may be more important for some people to just simply play their characters, but for others like me, winning is more important. How does one win? By having a bigger score for my team. Games are not won by the skirmishes. It's won by consistent and constant outplaying of your enemy. Hour after Hour.

I think what this discussion boils down to is the same old problem of people believing that what they want is the only viable way to play. Let me assure you that your way is not the only way of everyone on the map nor the only way that one should play. I don't want anyone to speak for me and the way I like to play. I'll do that myself. There is no viable reason why we all can't exist and play on the same map without disparaging each other's play style. Some people like to play small man, don't care about points, etc. Okay. That's what you like so go for it. However, myself and my guild love the thrill of excellence in gaining the most score, so please do not presume that MOST players like what you like. You can only attest to what you and your friends like. Not me and my friends.

My last point is about "faction lock doesn't really do anything else other than promoting faction pride." What's wrong with that? As far as I can tell, absolutely nothing. You seem to want to downplay something you disagree with, but as I stated earlier, not everyone thinks like you. If someone chooses to be faction loyal, that is their choice to make. You trying to make others choose what you have chosen is seen more as an attempt to manipulate ZOS into believing and doing what you want, rather than look at the "voting" that has already taken place.

Let's agree that both styles of play CAN exist on the same map and coexist in positive ways.

So you like faction lock. Let's say the most populated campaign was unlocked. You would be forced to play there since the other campaign would be dead. So according to you ur choice would be unlocked. Yeah I don't think that u understand the concept of choice.

Yes I know that some like to play for the win. No one is limiting you to do that in an unlocked campaign.

Nothing wrong with faction pride. I never downplayed it. I'm just saying that this is a video game and whether u like it or not people being able to play their characters is more important than having faction pride.

You are accusing me of downplaying
ur faction pride and trying to enforce my choice on others while u believe that ur faction pride is more important than the freedom of players being able to play their characters. How ironic is that

But that is not happening...if we were to suppose something lets suppose for a min that what if, what if the swapper players stopped complaining about absolutely everything done for them and that style over the last few years....from battlegrounds to the factions being able to be swapped over in Tam1 and now in some campaigns. Suppose that happened and instead ZOS was focusing effort and manpower on fixing bugs and lag in the game.

Do you think that is something the 'majority' of players would want? Do you or can you not see how the selfish approach of repeatedly complaining about being able to play that style of play could be hurting the dwindling community in PvP?