Campaign system revision

LarsS

Present status.
1. An alliance gets buffs for owning keeps and the emperor.
2. Volendrung spawns more often to the underdogs in the campaign.
3. Campaign points are the same regardless of population except for the underpopulation bonus that kicks in if an alliance have less people for a while compared to one of the other alliances.
This system is unable to create balanced campaigns, in fact it increases the imbalances.

Problems.
The core problem is that the campaigns have low populations for parts of the time perhaps, especially on the EU servers. Thus, when the instances are nearly empty it’s easy for a small group (less than 10) to cap the map and get all the scrolls. There are groups who have done this consistently for years. When, people in the other alliances come online they have a clear disadvantage since the alliance that caped the map has all the battle buffs. Thus, the battle buffs create severe imbalances, it would be more natural to buff the weaker alliances. Volendrung has a similar effect it tends to land in the hands of the alliance with the highest population. I addition an alliance that have caped the map during low pop get a huge amount of campaign points. The low population bonus is unable to balance this while all alliances at these times are on low population, so it does not activate. One can also observe that the campaign points received by the alliances when the population increases is balanced over time so the caping at low population mostly decides who wins the campaign. I think most of us feels it’s an unfair system.

Thus, I suggest introducing a more balanced system.
1. Remove all battle buffs and replace them with ap bonuses.
2. Weight the campaign points by the population. The low population bonus is no longer needed and should be removed.
Both these changes will reduce the effect of map caping when the instances are on low pop and create a better balance. I addition one could test to lock the scrolls in the home temples if the population on the server is below a certain level. One could also lock out the alliance, which is leading a campaign from using Volendrung, to improve balance.

biminirwb17_ESO

I agree that the faction that has the most "real estate" gets the most buffs is wrong.

To balance this each asset you take off an opponent makes it harder for you not easier, think of it like lengthening supply lines it gets more difficult the longer they are.

Plus the less you have the harder it should be to take it, if you own everything but the last keep on the map the defenders of that keep get huge buffs.

The reward for taking keeps should be ap, the more you have the more ap you earn but it gets more difficult each subsequent keep.

If your faction loses a scroll you get the buff not the faction that took it.

The rewards for taking stuff is still there and the increased challenge in taking assets is surely better than taking the next empty keep.

As for the hammer - bin it.

Kristophskee

1. Remove all battle buffs and replace them with ap bonuses.

Agreed with this.

Would also state that at the start of a campaign everyone is booted and cant play for around 30mins or however long it takes for the map to wipe keep ownership...

Replace the keeps as white and add "ai". Then at start everyone has to capture keeps before they can engage each other, starting the campaign on even grounds.

To balance this each asset you take off an opponent makes it harder for you not easier, think of it like lengthening supply lines it gets more difficult the longer they are.

I dont think it would be to hard to add a logistics aspect, we already have resource that dont actually do anything. So having a supply requirement would be interesting... just not sure how this would work since you cant limit siege purchase since you can buy these elsewhere and might help one faction snowball.



Adding another thought of my own here, could we perhaps change scoring / value of a keep

e.g. Keep Value (Location based) + (Number of enemy players/2) - Enemy siege strength + (Number of friendly players/2) + Friendly siege strength

50 + (40/2) - 20 + 20 + (20/2) = 80

The idea being here that
Location has its own value
More enemy's the more you score
The more they siege the less you score (i.e. encourage defence and not to give up as you give more points)
More friendly you have the more organised you are
More siege you deploy the better

That way each siege has a value. Im sure this could be improved massively however.

Kristophskee

I feel like each fight should have a value to that fights stats. The more engagement the more reward... in counter however does this then punish small scalers?

Izanagi.Xiiib16_ESO

Kristophskee wrote: »

I feel like each fight should have a value to that fights stats. The more engagement the more reward... in counter however does this then punish small scalers?

No because smallscalers should be killing enemies just as well as zergs / large groups. The only difference is the level of objectives, resources/ distraction more smallscale based. Keeps/Outposts more largescale based. There's ofc some crossover.

Pauwer

I agree that the scoring system is unfair. I think the scroring should only include ap earned from pvp fights somehow. Like if one alliance nitecaps, taking only empty keeps, this would not count toward the score. Of course there is a problem with this too, because i guess it could be exploited. Like if prime time all of dc decides to log out lol, or something like that. You could block the other alliances earning score that way. But just like the general scoring system could use some work. Basically pve now wins pvp campaings, because of nitecap.

Grimlok_S

I've always thought it was a little backwards, with the scrolls in particular.

They should give an AP bonus for the faction that holds them, but come at a cost.

Maybe you lose X% WD/SD, or resists, or something, maybe the faction those scrolls belong to get enraged and gain X% of Y stat. Idk.

Kristophskee

I think rewarding AP is a really good idea.

Maybe you lose X% WD/SD, or resists, or something, maybe the faction those scrolls belong to get enraged and gain X% of Y stat. Idk.

My only concern with this, is that there would be pretty much no benefit to capturing scrolls so no one would do it. Scroll runs are fun

KashyyyK240

I did post a few months ago about Cyrodiil scoring being potato, but the thread died quickly without much input.
I will repost here what I wrote back then, hoping to support and rekindle this argument, because I see you're also concerned that the current scoring scheme creates unfair advantages.

Re-post:
Make score value less and less depending on campaign population.

EMPTY CAMPAIGN
Blue 1bar / Red 1bar / Yellow 1bar = During this scenario scoring is hourly at 1/4 scale of current live value (this stops capping and leaving campaign while holding a full map for hours and hours while most of the server sleeps)

POP LOCKED VS EMPTY CAMPAIGN
Blue 2-3bars / Red 1bar / Yellow 1bar = During this scenario scoring is hourly at 1/3 scale of current live value (being the only one online and playing shouldn't grant you extra points)

PVP GOING ON BUT WITH LOW POPULATION
Blue 2-3bars / Red 2-3bars / Yellow 1bar = During this scenario scoring is hourly at 1/2 scale of current live value, as only 2 teams are actively participating in capping (so the 3rd's territory is up for the taking, making scoring easier for both alliances that are active while still negating a decisive upper hand)

EVEN CAMPAIGN POPULATION
Blue 2bars / Red 2bars / Yellow 2bars & Blue 3bars / Red 3bars / Yellow 3bars = Whenever the population bars are even for all 3 alliances, the scoring during this scenario is hourly scaled at default x1, just as the current scale live

POPULATION LOCKED
Blue 3bar / Red LOCKED / Yellow 3bar = During this scenario scoring is hourly and scaling becomes 1.1x of current live value, whenever one or more alliances get population locked (only active when all the other alliances are at a minimum of 3bars population)

And of course, NO LOW POPULATION BONUS. Erase that bad idea from our game.

mullins07

I think that removing the low pop bonus, and weighting the scoring depending on the number of players online are both good suggestions.

Easily testable I would imagine also.

Kristophskee

To add to that i think the PvP community have proven to be happy about testing things that ultimately aim to improve the experience.

DrSlaughtr

My personal opinion is that emp stat bonuses and hammer are both cancer. Otherwise I'm okay with the system. The issue with going full ap know for scoring is that boosters will destroy the system more than they already do.

Emp stat bonus should buff the emp only. For the rest of the alliance buff app.

Hammer needs to go. It usually just ends up in the hands of the most popular alliance and they use it to further their hold on the campaign.

Or if you want to keep hammer, only let one person hold it and decrease the AP burn, letting them hold it longer. Once it's dropped, it goes bye bye. No more sending spies to steal it just to have it over to the dominant alliance.

Lordthousand

Morningcapping and nightcapping is killing the cyrodiil PVP game.

Even if you keep the bonusses at least reduce the campaign points in proportion of the population, its not fun that a small group wins the campaign when noone is around.

Greasytengu

Wonder if its possible for them to split the campaign somehow. Like have it broken up into 12 hour blocks and basically have 2 different scores on the one campaign, when the 12 hours for the campaign segment scoring is up the next one begins.

Dominion_Nightblade

You could always just enjoy the fights when you play and not really care about what faction wins. I understand wanting to play the game for what it is and it is nice to win. But in this mostly broken game where if there are good fights there usually is lag, or no lag but barely any fights, or just the population balance is screwy. It's just not worth it to worry about healthy game mechanics. Just live in the moment in eso and enjoy what you can when you play. It does not really matter who wins the campaign in the end lol.

Sincerely,
A faction loyalists.

Sanctum74

Dominion_Nightblade wrote: »

You could always just enjoy the fights when you play and not really care about what faction wins. I understand wanting to play the game for what it is and it is nice to win. But in this mostly broken game where if there are good fights there usually is lag, or no lag but barely any fights, or just the population balance is screwy. It's just not worth it to worry about healthy game mechanics. Just live in the moment in eso and enjoy what you can when you play. It does not really matter who wins the campaign in the end lol.

Sincerely,
A faction loyalists.

Problem is even if you don’t care about the score it’s getting harder and harder to find good fights. On GH, DC just zergs the server so if you dare even try to take a resource you will get zerged by 20+ players.

On the flip side I can go to BR where AD(my faction) is winning, but there is only 0-1 bars of the other factions so it’s basically just pve taking empty keeps. People are just going out of their way to avoid pvp in cyrodill and I think performance is the big reason why.

I don’t think op’s idea of restricting points will work, but maybe restricting ap would. Such as an undefended keep only giving 500 ap and have it increase to it’s current value based on how many defenders. Force people to pvp in a pvp zone sounds crazy, but it just might work since performance fixes are never going to happen.

techyeshic

I don't know if the suggestion if the OP would help but I'm all for doing pretty much anything other than encouraging 1 side to run over an empty map. Not against pvdoor as I see that as a necessary tactic to pull the larger faction back that doesn't want to split; but when the entire map is empty and the one faction with players decide the campaign, that's rough.

Tommy_The_Gun

Main issue with campaigns imho are score boards manipulations.

Mostly those are caused by night / morning capping. If one faction does that, it is devastating towards campaign balance in the long run.

What happens is that faction exploits how scoring system works to their advantage and they "paint" the map, either late at night or/and early in the morning. Of course, they meet no resistance and they effectively do PvE that later gives them huge advantage and decides who wins a PvP campaign.

Also, in the long run, if they keep doing it for 2 or 3 campaigns, players from other faction usually flock to the winning faction as it gives them benefits (scroll buffs, emp, map control so they can do quests and if they stay late - 100% chance to get skyshards that are behind gates).

I do believe that scoring (to clarify: potential points and NOT AP) should be dependent on population (attackers vs defenders). So you would get less points per objective if your faction has higher population vs underdog faction objective of which you are capturing. This could work in a very simple way. Depending on the population difference, in a most drastic scenario, when attacking faction is locked and defending faction is empty, attackers would get 10x less potential points per objective. So to have 1 point - they will have to capture 10 enemy objectives. The closer population difference is, the less the penalty is. For example 10x, 5x, 3x, 2x, 1x etc. The way to reset this penalty would be to lose an objective & re-take it later, when populations are more or less equall. This would not affect your native objectives and it would not affect AP gain. Also, it would require re-scaling 3 bar pop into 5 or 10 bar pop indicator.

As for the low population point bonus... I guess it should be changed to only apply to the loosing alliance (3rd place) or removed entirely. To many times I have seen factions exploiting it and ending up on 2nd or even 1st place. AFK = Win / not lose feels wrong imho. Either way, it should have more restrictions (for example it would be gone if it would mean faction has "hopped" 1 place up in the score boards).

LarsS

It's sad that zos did not thake their chance to rework campaign system more throughly, when they now did a few campaign changes. Players have been asking for changes in the campaign scoring and buffs for years.

Feaky

Low population needs to be suspended until ZOS can figure out how to implement correctly. It is abused more often than helpful. Just tonight in GH, 2 factions with 2-3 bars fought each others for hours while the 3rd with 1 bar sat idle with a few home keeps and their scrolls. The 2 actually taking and defending keeps averaged 100-150 campaign points and the low pop faction about 305 for essentially doing nothing except making sure people didn't log in.

Last campaign, some players in my guild from an opposing faction said their faction, who was well behind, were told to intentionally log out a few min before eval and wait 5 min than come back in. They repeated this through the night. This was wildly discussed in our zone chat the next day as a 1600 point margin was made up despite no scrolls or map domination.

I doubt that any one faction is more guilty than another, but the fact that campaign points are this easy to exploit is ridiculous.

Most don't really care about campaign scores, quite frankly, rewards are really bad so its just faction pride. But if you are not going to fix low pop bonus, please just remove it.

alberichtano

Lordthousand wrote: »

Morningcapping and nightcapping is killing the cyrodiil PVP game.

Even if you keep the bonusses at least reduce the campaign points in proportion of the population, its not fun that a small group wins the campaign when noone is around.

You really can't do anything about that. Some people can only play certain times of the day, and punishing them for it is a sure way to empty Cyro even more.

Ranger209

Feaky wrote: »

Low population needs to be suspended until ZOS can figure out how to implement correctly. It is abused more often than helpful. Just tonight in GH, 2 factions with 2-3 bars fought each others for hours while the 3rd with 1 bar sat idle with a few home keeps and their scrolls. The 2 actually taking and defending keeps averaged 100-150 campaign points and the low pop faction about 305 for essentially doing nothing except making sure people didn't log in.

Last campaign, some players in my guild from an opposing faction said their faction, who was well behind, were told to intentionally log out a few min before eval and wait 5 min than come back in. They repeated this through the night. This was wildly discussed in our zone chat the next day as a 1600 point margin was made up despite no scrolls or map domination.

I doubt that any one faction is more guilty than another, but the fact that campaign points are this easy to exploit is ridiculous.

Most don't really care about campaign scores, quite frankly, rewards are really bad so its just faction pride. But if you are not going to fix low pop bonus, please just remove it.

I'm not sure it works that way but let's assume it does. A very simple fix to stop that particular abuse would be for the server to do population checks every 2 to 5 minutes rather than once an hour when determining low pop bonus. I would think it would already work this way, but if not that fixes it, unless a faction wants to do nothing but continuously log in and out all night and nothing else.

biminirwb17_ESO

With the rewards for winning a campaign next to useless maybe its time to get rid of the campaign score. Just have individual leaderboards.

Ends low pop capping, gets rid of underdog and low pop bonuses, maybe even stops a few screaming zone generals.

rbfrgsp

Many, many good suggestions here.

1) Low pop bonus doesn't do what you thought it would do, so ditch it.

2) Same, the hammer. It concentrates server population and benefits the leading faction. Ditch it.

3) Scrolls confer an effective +10% combat advantage to every player on the side that is already strongest. Awful game design.

Reverse what scrolls do: they give a BIG boost to personal Ap gain, so that it is faster to lvl up your PvP rank and skills while possessing them, but individual combat gives you -5% bonuses for each scroll type. This is lore-friendly: the scrolls represent dangerous knowledge and there is a terrible risk to learn their rewards. The prophet lost his eyes. PvP players should be weakened by the burden of knowledge.