Tell me your Thoughts on Faction LOCK

Kamchuk · September 5

I prefer Faction lock. I’m one of those few players that play for the score. I have all the rewards, all the money and all the XP I need or want. I play for the “W”. To me faction lock promotes Alliance Warfare with everything war gaming provides such as strategy, resource prioritization, and target prioritization, all to maximize field advantage and War gaming results.

It also eliminates players jumping to another faction in the middle of a contest/campaign. To me, players doing that is similar to Soccer/Football players on the losing team just changing sides in the middle of the game to the winning team.

Turtle_Bot · September 5

Major_Toughness wrote: »

Faction lock sucks.

In the past few months I've made friends with several players on DC and done some small scale / group content with 3 different sets of friends. As well as some long-standing friends.

Now one set has gone to EP, one to AD, and one stayed on DC.

I understand why because DC on PC EU GH was dominating and had a dozen organised groups, sometimes 2 of my sets of friends would be on at the same time, and it sucked for finding fights.

I stuck with the DC set because even though the least active they are longer standing friends, more than a few months, and want to play with them when I can.

EP group play most days and I would love to jump on with them some times but I can't because of Faction Lock. Which also sucks because EP isn't even locking pop on GH. They all play BR.

They need to change Faction Lock to like a 24 hour cool down or something. 12 hours idk. Like I get not wanting people to just shift around depending where the tide goes but on a monthly basis really really sucks.

I'd like to see a cooldown or something similar at least tested:
Basically whenever you leave cyro, it asks if you wish to remain on that faction when you next enter cyro.
- If you select yes, there's no cooldown and you enter the campaign next time as normal
- If you select no, it gives you a lockout from cyro for a duration, but then after that you can log into cyro on any faction.

TL//DR, you can organize with friends to play the next day, or organize ahead of time if they are on regularly.

TBH, there should be some sort of cooldown period for switching factions since there was a lot of trolling happening on GH before the lock, and a lot of just rotating the map colour, but being locked for the entire 30 day campaign is just far too long.

Artim_X · September 5

Faction Lock is a very subjective thing. Some will hate it and others will love it. Of course, there are valid reasons mentioned by others for not having it (play with friends, fill up faction that is empty, looking for decent fights, etc.).

I only play AD and in the past I have seen players in zone who jump onto AD just to troll and then pop back to their actual faction. It has been a hot minute (years), since I've seen this type of behavior, but that's my experience.

IMHO, all current Cyrodiil servers should be sunsetted. When the new fresh servers pop back up, they should have the open campaign on top while the faction lock campaign is placed on the bottom. Many players on here have expressed that having the faction lock campaign at the very top biases player choice and creates a false narrative that the majority of the playerbase wants faction lock. ZOS should put this premise to the test and if the majority of the playerbase still chooses the faction lock campaign, then it'll be up to the players to build up the open campaign's population.

reazea · September 5

I prefer faction lock. There are too many trolls that swap factions or coordinate with their friends on other factions without faction lock.

xDeusEJRx · September 5

Not a fan of faction lock, I don't personally care about the campaign score.I just want to PVP, so I don't care who's winning or losing.
I usually play the losing faction because there's more opportunities to pvp and any mechanic that reduces my ability and options to PVP (like faction lock) is not desirable. It's not fun if you guess wrong and queue into the faction that's winning most of the time

Kappachi · September 5

CameraBeardThePirate wrote: »

Diebesgut wrote: »

I bought the Any Race, Any Alliance Bundle so i don't have any faction lock and everything is fine.😎

My Khajiit family never goes to Cyrodil, the trading opportunities there are very poor...

That's not what they mean by faction lock.

Faction lock means if you play Grey Host on a blue, you can no longer play Grey Host on a yellow.

It's dumb because it basically means you aren't allowed to play in the only campaign with real action if you have multiple friend groups in different factions.

It's not dumb, it's a smart system. You should commit to helping your allies and not bail to help another color just because things go south once for your team. If you have friends you can make characters to play together, simple as that.

CameraBeardThePirate · September 5

Kappachi wrote: »

CameraBeardThePirate wrote: »

Diebesgut wrote: »

I bought the Any Race, Any Alliance Bundle so i don't have any faction lock and everything is fine.😎

My Khajiit family never goes to Cyrodil, the trading opportunities there are very poor...

That's not what they mean by faction lock.

Faction lock means if you play Grey Host on a blue, you can no longer play Grey Host on a yellow.

It's dumb because it basically means you aren't allowed to play in the only campaign with real action if you have multiple friend groups in different factions.

It's not dumb, it's a smart system. You should commit to helping your allies and not bail to help another color just because things go south once for your team. If you have friends you can make characters to play together, simple as that.

Yes, I should expect every single friend group I have to all make characters on a single alliance. That makes perfect sense, you solved the problem!

Kappachi · September 5

CameraBeardThePirate wrote: »

Kappachi wrote: »

CameraBeardThePirate wrote: »

Diebesgut wrote: »

I bought the Any Race, Any Alliance Bundle so i don't have any faction lock and everything is fine.😎

My Khajiit family never goes to Cyrodil, the trading opportunities there are very poor...

That's not what they mean by faction lock.

Faction lock means if you play Grey Host on a blue, you can no longer play Grey Host on a yellow.

It's dumb because it basically means you aren't allowed to play in the only campaign with real action if you have multiple friend groups in different factions.

It's not dumb, it's a smart system. You should commit to helping your allies and not bail to help another color just because things go south once for your team. If you have friends you can make characters to play together, simple as that.

Yes, I should expect every single friend group I have to all make characters on a single alliance. That makes perfect sense, you solved the problem!

Exactly. Not sure why it's so complicated for OP and others.

Casul · September 5

Just let people assign their alliance at the beginning of each campaign. Given the new tutorial it doesn’t even make sense to have alliance brought up on character creation anymore.

CameraBeardThePirate · September 5

Kappachi wrote: »

CameraBeardThePirate wrote: »

Kappachi wrote: »

CameraBeardThePirate wrote: »

Diebesgut wrote: »

I bought the Any Race, Any Alliance Bundle so i don't have any faction lock and everything is fine.😎

My Khajiit family never goes to Cyrodil, the trading opportunities there are very poor...

That's not what they mean by faction lock.

Faction lock means if you play Grey Host on a blue, you can no longer play Grey Host on a yellow.

It's dumb because it basically means you aren't allowed to play in the only campaign with real action if you have multiple friend groups in different factions.

It's not dumb, it's a smart system. You should commit to helping your allies and not bail to help another color just because things go south once for your team. If you have friends you can make characters to play together, simple as that.

Yes, I should expect every single friend group I have to all make characters on a single alliance. That makes perfect sense, you solved the problem!

Exactly. Not sure why it's so complicated for OP and others.

Think you're missing the sarcasm bud.

If you honestly think that's an easy solution then you have no respect for people's time. Not everyone has the time to roll up a fresh character, level all of their passives, gather enough skyshards for a build, get all of their scribe scripts they need, and hunt for things like lorebooks and psijic portals just to play with their friends. Not to mention there's no good way logistically for multiple friend groups with no communication between them except for 1 player to agree "yah let's all play on this faction".

Plus, that literally only encourages even more unbalanced faction sizes. Without alliance lock, many people that go to Cyrodiil for actual fights would much rather play on the least populated faction anyways.

It's an MMO. There's no reason why you should be discouraging people from playing with one another.

SkaraMinoc · September 5

React wrote: »

I'm positive faction lock being added had very little to do with zenimax caring about "competitive integrity" in regards to campaign scoring, and everything to do with their intentions to squeeze more money out of pvp players through the later-added alliance swap tokens.

Alliance change tokens are way too expensive. I've landed on DC permanently because I refuse to buy another one.

DrSlaughtr · September 9

Faction lock does nothing to curb trollism. People still steal hammer and scrolls and give them away. Today someone was using frozen gate to glitch their friends on another alliance into Farre on xbox. What it does do is lead to staleness for 30 days because of the way populations shift. For example, I know people who switched to AD this campaign to get away from the red zerg. Guess what faction is zerging most of the time now? You guessed it. AD. Because a bunch of people had the same idea. Now those people are annoyed because they are in the same situation and can't do anything about it until the camp is up, and they roll the dice again.

I used to play in BR for this very reason and somehow all the bogeymen "troll" fears didn't happen there anymore than they do in GH. The only difference is BR is mostly dead on Xbox since GH works quite better these days than it did a year+ ago. BR only has populations at certain peak hours, and even then it's usually much less exciting.

I wish they would try it for at least one campaign and let people see how it goes. They made us sit through no proc tests that caused people to spend massive amounts of gold. This wouldn't change anything other than people can switch around.

Some people take who wins/loses campaigns and who is on what color way too seriously.

ADawg · September 10

JonnytheKing wrote: »

Im doing a video on the topic and would like to hear your thoughts
DO YOU LIKE IT?
DO YOU THINK ITS DUMB?

Faction lock is amazing. Keep it. Pick a team, help your team, stop swapping. FIGHT FOR YOUR TEAM!

edward_frigidhands · September 10

There is a campaign with faction lock and another without it.

The people who want faction lock play Gray Host and the ones that don't play Blackreach.

Asking faction lock to be removed would be taking the option away from people who actually want it and actively play with it which makes no sense.

Why would you want that? Just play the option you want with your friends.

xDeusEJRx · September 10

edward_frigidhands wrote: »

There is a campaign with faction lock and another without it.

The people who want faction lock play Gray Host and the ones that don't play Blackreach.

Asking faction lock to be removed would be taking the option away from people who actually want it and actively play with it which makes no sense.

Why would you want that? Just play the option you want with your friends.

I don't think you understand OP's intention with this thread. He's looking for opinions on faction look for data, this is not a "remove faction lock" thread

DrSlaughtr · September 10

edward_frigidhands wrote: »

There is a campaign with faction lock and another without it.

The people who want faction lock play Gray Host and the ones that don't play Blackreach.

Asking faction lock to be removed would be taking the option away from people who actually want it and actively play with it which makes no sense.

Why would you want that? Just play the option you want with your friends.

People play GH even during the worst lag because that is where the other players are and they want action. I see just as much cross-alliance trolling in GH than I ever have in BR. People get bored and do stupid things. It's always going to happen.

RaidingTraiding · September 16

I'm really not a fan of faction lock for a few reasons.

First I play in a group in BR. When BR is dead there's really not much we can do since we have members who play in other groups across all 3 factions. We would like to hop in GH to get more fights, but can't because of this.

Second, when the faction I'm locked to on GH is zerging the map I would like to have the option to swap to the other factions to get better fights in. This is especially true in off hours when fights can be more one sided.

Also a common argument for faction lock is SpAiS. There are a lot of people who have alt accounts, so if you were really intent on spying, you could just use your alt account, or get a friend to spy for you. To be honest I really find the spy argument ridiculous, and the whole notion of accusing people of spying.

Muizer · September 16

Population imbalances have been a fatal design flaw in Cyrodiil from the start. Players should be encouraged to change side to the weaker factions and players should be discouraged, or even prevented from joining the dominant faction.
So yeah, that would mean getting rid of faction lock. But not just that, it also means getting rid of faction based campaign scoring.

ZeroAxis · September 17

You can argue it either way, tbh.

Plus side, you are forced to play for the faction you chose and helps mitigate some of the trolling that goes on.

On the other hand, we all have pals we’ve met throughout our time in eso. Not all are on the same faction, so the no lock option is how they get to play together.

Personally, the only thing I can’t stand about unlocked factions is players logging in to swipe a scroll or the hammer to hand over to the other faction. Then they swap back over.

Is it super common? No. Is it annoying? Yes

Ultimately, I think a full revamp of Cyrodiil forts and outposts would be awesome, along with the defeat of one of the factions to make it a 2 way fight. But that’s just me and it will definitely never happen.