I admit I have been doing it myself, but let's be real, this can't continue and it's making the Imperial City a worse experience for everyone.
As we know, the Imperial City is a mixed content zone that combines both PvP and PvE.
PvE is encouraged by offering Telvar stones as a reward. PvP is encouraged by allowing you to take Telvar stones from other players after you kill them.
However I have been playing a bunch of Imperial City and I have noticed that the current system not only encourages ganking (which is fine) but makes it so rewarding for gankers while removing all the risk for them, that ganking has become pretty much the dominant and only valid playstyle there.
Here is the play pattern I have observed gankers follow in Imperial City:
- find a target
- wait for an opportunity to attack
- kill the target
- queue for Cyrodiil and bank all the Telvar stones gained
- queue for IC again
- repeat, with no risk attached
Since you can queue for a Cyrodiil campaign from anywhere in the Imperial City, the Sigil of Imperial Retreat is made obsolete as long as there is one campaign that isn't pop-locked and there usually is one or one with a very small queue. You do not even have to do the whole teleporting animation that makes you visible for its duration and you can even stay on one of the doors between districts while waiting for the queue. There is no risk involved for gankers! You can countergank but nobody does it, because gankers never carry any telvars even if they have been continuously killing other players for hours, so it's just not worth it.
It's completely fine if gankers bank half of their Telvar loot once someone finally killed them, but they do not need to wait for that to happen nor do they have to risk getting ganked on their way to the base - they can bank
all of it at
any time. Thanks to the improved load times, the only noticeable performance improvement that happened so far, this method of saving Telvars has become extremely time efficient - meaning ganking has become more time efficient as well. Meanwhile farming takes time, because most PvP setups aren't that great at melting bosses while PvE setups generally are a free kill and all that time spent fighting you are completely visible and vulnerable to ganks.
I have had multiple instances of me dying to a gank at a quest objective, respawning, predictably heading back to the quest objective immediately, unsurprisingly finding the same ganker there, getting a revenge kill, only for me to get zero telvars for it, despite me losing a ton seconds earlier, because they've been to Cyrodiil and back faster than I could respawn. This is because when you die in a district owned by another faction and you choose "respawn", you are thrown into a district your faction does own, so you get an additional loading screen for entering the sewer base, which means together with the loading screen upon dying and the loading screen for heading back into the right district with your quest and the stupid bug of "you are already queued for that campaign" when trying to use the damn ladders, you had the same number of loading screens as the ganker banking your stones, but likely wasted even more time than them.
People aren't even bothering to farm regular IC district NPCs anymore and only literal ungankable gods-at-the-game or large groups of players dare to take down those district bosses, because anyone else will just get ganked and lose half their Telvar with no hopes of getting even a single one back even upon successfully getting revenge immediately after. When the risks are considered, farming isn't worth it at all while ganking has no downsides, even if you are a terrible ganker.
How to fix this? Well, I do not think a cooldown on queuing like for Battlegrounds and Dungeons should be a thing for Cyrodiil or IC. Often enough you want to check out how things are in different campaigns before you decide where you will stay. But making queuing from IC only possible in the sewer base or perhaps even banning to queue from IC at all... that would be great. The reverse - queueing from Cyrodiil to IC - doesn't affect either mode negatively so that should definitely stay.
I know this would also affect Telvar farmers who kill a boss and then do the same trick to stash the stones immediately, but I honestly feel that is a price worth paying. Gankers have it too easy right now and gankers having it easy automatically makes it worse on people trying to farm. So hopefully if the risk to ganking and the reward for denying a gank or getting revenge on a ganker are reestablished, ganking will become less prevalent and farmers will return until a healthy population balance between gankers and farmers is restored. Hopefully.
Edit: A 50% telvar loss upon queuing to leave would also do the trick, even if that takes Telvars out of circulation and denies people their revenge.
This Bosmer was tortured to death. There is nothing left to be done.