Would you approve of a 4th choice as an "alliance" at char creation?

brylars

If it were possible, would you choose a non-alliance choice, like "mercenary" at character creation. Then when entering a server for the Alliance War or Imperial City, be given a prompt to choose your temporary alliance for that session or maybe continue as a new fourth faction.

What are your thoughts? Explain below please.

Soarora

It'd be nice for roleplay reasons but I'm not sure how well it'd actually work out with the game mechanics and cyrodiil culture.

SpiritKitten

Other games I've played that had factions allowed you to choose Neutral.

VaranisArano

I have qualms about the idea of a fourth Faction in Cyrodiil, so I couldn't support that.

Namely, Cyrodiil is designed with AvAvA in mind. It's a three-way war between three equal alliances all with their home territories. Oftentimes, it plays like Av A+A, but every alliance has times where they are being ganged up on and when they are ganging up on someone else.

A 4-way war changes the dynamic in unintended ways. What home territory will the fourth faction have, and can they interfere with Cyrodiil objectives? How much of extremely limited Cyrodiil's population cap will be alloted to this fourth faction? Will a original alliances be ganged up 1 vs 3, and forced to defend their territory with even less players?

Choosing a temporary alliance in PvP zones like Cyrodiil and Imperial City is a much better option, IMO.

ProudMary

There needs to be an odd number of possible factions to play in my opinion. I think 3 works well. If they add more possible factions then they should add 2 more to make 5 possible factions.

Dojohoda

While it's an interesting idea, it sounds complicated.

For one thing, there is no base for a mercenary. The base provides two important functions- a spawn point and transportation out of pvp areas to overland.

Also, there are no tools for mercenaries. How would you interact with the keeps, the other players. Who would see what you type in zone chat?

I can understand that a mercenary might want to explore Cyrodiil and be untouchable but that seems like using the area in an untended way.

TheImperfect

No, it is perfect as it is.

StaticWave

Dojohoda wrote: »

While it's an interesting idea, it sounds complicated.

For one thing, there is no base for a mercenary. The base provides two important functions- a spawn point and transportation out of pvp areas to overland.

Also, there are no tools for mercenaries. How would you interact with the keeps, the other players. Who would see what you type in zone chat?

I can understand that a mercenary might want to explore Cyrodiil and be untouchable but that seems like using the area in an untended way.

I believe a mercenary would spawn with the faction they decided to work for during that particular session, so no need to create anything new.

Dojohoda

StaticWave wrote: »

Dojohoda wrote: »

While it's an interesting idea, it sounds complicated.

For one thing, there is no base for a mercenary. The base provides two important functions- a spawn point and transportation out of pvp areas to overland.

Also, there are no tools for mercenaries. How would you interact with the keeps, the other players. Who would see what you type in zone chat?

I can understand that a mercenary might want to explore Cyrodiil and be untouchable but that seems like using the area in an untended way.

I believe a mercenary would spawn with the faction they decided to work for during that particular session, so no need to create anything new.

I was responding to this part of the idea: "maybe continue as a new fourth faction."

Amottica

The fourth faction idea has always been a bad idea as the game is not designed for it. There is no need for it and little to no benefit to the game worthy of the effort required to make it happen. That alone means it will not happen let alone it goes against the vision Rich and Matt have had for the game since early on and they hold the keys to such change.

chessalavakia_ESO

Personally, I think that could present some interesting possibilities for the less populated campaigns but, it probably wouldn't be worth the effort.

For Mercenary, instead of allowing the player to pick a faction and a server for the session I would suggest having the server itself pick and toss you in a group with other Mercenaries automatically.

The server could use the Mercenary players to cut into population imbalances.

You could also use an Imperial Legion Faction to do something similar.

Right now, you have Imperial Camps dotting all over Cyrodiil that don't really do much. You could allow players that are Imperial to queue for the Alliance War on the Imperial Side. When you had a sufficient number of players in queue and a campaign with an imbalance and an expected lack of population you could dump the players in to an Imperial Camp in the backfield of the dominant faction. If they lose the camps the Imperials will be wiped out once they die if they haven't captured anything else until the next time the Campaign triggers Imperial Legion activity. This will incentivize beating the Imperial Legion quickly to avoid them becoming a lasting threat.

One could also potentially offer a Daedric variant where you can get a drop in rare circumstances that allows you and your group to align with the Daedra and be sent in via Dark Anchor and you'd get to attempt to take over Cyrodiil for Molag Bal.

Fruity_Ninja

Yes make it a mercenary faction, if you are apart of it it is a free for all. So you are totally solo against everyone out there!

Iriidius

A mercenary faction cant exist because mercenarys are by definition not loyal to a faction but fight for whoever pays them the most money. Characters playing for the „mercenary“ faction wouldnt be mercenarys because they are loyal/bound to that faction. Mercenarys would be hired by the faction of the 3 factions with the most money. And what faction has the most money? Assuming that all 3 factions have the same income,
(from taxes from their own provinces) the faction with the least regular soldiers to pay would have the most money left to hire mercenarys. This way mercenarys would help balance the campaigns.
You could just choose the campaign then queue as mercenary for another faction. Dont know why it would be so problematic if you can already use alts on another faction or change faction of your char.

merpins

Personally, I do not care. But that kind of option undermines the imperial edition, allowing you to choose any race for any alliance would be moot if you could just pick neutral and then do whatever anyway. So even though I personally don't see a problem with it, I don't think ZoS would want it in the game for monetization reasons.

Also, the Alliance Change token would immediately become useless, further cementing that, for monetization reasons, this probably would never happen.

Surragard

From a lore standpoint it would be fun to have a neutral alliance and even a fifth Imperial loyalist alliance but from a gameplay mechanics standpoint I can’t see it making much sense in Cyrodil.