Reimagining Cyrodiil

Aurielle

As all of us who regularly PVP know, Cyrodiil is a shadow of its former self. Long-gone are the days of epic keep defenses and assaults. Long gone are the days of finding action anywhere on the map. Given that ZOS just rebuilt BGs entirely, I think it's time to talk seriously now about rebuilding Cyrodiil entirely -- the content the vast majority of the PVP playerbase in this game cares about.

Let's start with the major pain points that keep getting brought up in the forums and elsewhere:

• The map is too big to support the current population cap limits. Cyrodiil feels deserted. Small groups of people sit in uncontested keeps waiting for one fight to occur, then make a beeline for the first set of crossed swords they see on the map. This is a consequence of drastically reducing player population without simultaneously reducing the size of the playable area.
  
• It takes too long to enter popular campaigns during prime time. Who likes hour-long, 100+ player queues? No one.
  
• Large ballgroups and/or large organized guild groups kill all the fun. I'm not talking about a single 12 person group here; I'm talking about multiple guild raid groups stacking in one location, following one crown. 24+ nigh on unkillable players spamming shields and cross-heals, zeroing in on one keep, one cluster of player targets. Hardly anyone wants to play against them, for obvious reasons.
  
• Performance is better than it was in the past, but still terrible during large fights. Despite the reduced population, any big fight is frequently associated with disconnects, audio cutting in and out, frame rates dropping significantly (even on powerful gaming rigs), and so on.
  
• "Night-capping" is unfair, and out of region players shouldn't be able to influence the scoreboard. While I don't personally agree with this, a lot of players think it's unfair that players in Oceania can contribute to campaign outcomes outside of NA/EU prime time.
  
• Faction locks are unfair, because I can't play with my friends for an entire month at a time, so they should be removed. Another thing I don't personally agree with, but something that comes up frequently.

So, how do we deal with these issues?

In an ideal world, population caps would increase again, the performance issues would be fixed properly, PVP populations would naturally become healthier with better performance / shorter or non-existent queues, we'd have fights all over the map again, and there'd be more counters to guild stacking. I think most of us understand a lot of that's not going to happen at this point in time. What could happen, though, is a total reimagining of Cyrodiil designed to address those pain points.

Here's my idea, in a nutshell: reduce the map size significantly while introducing more objectives to capture, significantly reduce campaign length, open up multiple faction-locked instances of Cyrodiil based on queue demands, reduce pop caps in each instance to limit guild stacking but still permit smaller guild groups to have fun, and make better use of Battle Spirit for balancing purposes.

Details and rationale behind the spoiler:

1. Reduced Map Size with More Objectives to Capture.

Cyrodiil is massive with wide areas of empty space between each objective. This made sense at launch when each alliance could support upwards of 600 players, but it makes zero sense now. Either divide Cyrodiil into three separate smaller maps for some variety, or zero in on one specific area of Cyrodiil as the main site of AvAvA conquest. If the latter is done, the now uncontested areas of Cyrodiil could be turned into strictly PVE zones with better stories and quests to satisfy PVEers who want to explore Cyrodiil.

2. Reduced Campaign Length.

There are so many issues associated with the month-long campaign system. Emperorship in 30 day campaigns is often out of reach for all but those who essentially "no-life" the game (to the point where a lot of players end up cheesing Emperorship by getting their guilds to boost them during the 7-day MYM campaigns). Long campaigns allow for ridiculous score disparities that kill motivation for the losing alliance(s). Long campaigns make your efforts feel futile if you only have an hour or two to play per day (as is the case for a lot of people). A better, more competitive alternative would be a significantly shorter campaign. I'm talking REAL short -- like two hours short. That said, a slightly longer campaign of six hours or even twelve hours could work. But I still think two hours will be best, for reasons I'll expand upon with my next points.

3. Reduced Population Caps.

I can hear you saying "huh, reduce the caps EVEN MORE? we have to INCREASE them!" But hear me out. With smaller population caps on a smaller map featuring a shorter campaign length, we can eliminate other problems: namely, performance issues associated with larger fights and guilds that stack 24+ players in one location. I think a good number would be 30 players per alliance, but even 45 per alliance could still work and be fun. Guilds could still host events with those numbers, but they'd be less able to run multiple groups at the same time, as there'd be a limit to the number of available spots in a given instance of Cyrodiil. Limits to guild stacks means less performance-impacting spamming of cross heals and shields, and more fun for everyone else who isn't running in that stacked guild group.

4. Multiple Instances of Cyrodiil Based on Queue Demands.

No one likes sitting in queues for hours, and no one likes playing in empty campaigns. Cyrodiil should be instance-based, and new instances should spawn based on queue demands. Plenty of other games with large scale PVP do this (see, for instance, no pun intended, Battlefield's Conquest game mode). And again, this is assuming a shorter campaign length of around two hours. Imagine if at NA prime time, there were multiple two hour campaigns available for you to join. You could queue with your friends and have the option of joining a number of instances that are either filling up or mostly full. Isn't that better than sitting in queue for AN HOUR? Or joining a dead campaign? It would mean, too, that people in certain parts of the world would be mostly playing with each other, and there'd be no more unnecessary discrimination in these forums, no more complaints about "night-capping" outside of NA prime time and other garbage like that.

5. Faction Locks.

To keep things fair, multi-instance Cyrodiil should be faction-locked for the duration of the campaign, and once you've joined one instance of Cyrodiil, you'd have to endure a fifteen minute deserter penalty before you can join another if you decide to leave. Since the campaign is only two hours long, this shouldn't be an issue for anyone. Furthermore, it should not be possible to see the score before joining an instance. This should hopefully encourage fights that are more competitive, and prevent the AP farm-oriented faction hopping that occurs in campaigns like Blackreach.

6. Better Use of Battle Spirit.

Last but not least... ZOS, we're tired of PVP nerfs that affect PVE, and vice versa. Battle Spirit exists. Use it more! Limit cross-healing and cross-shielding by a certain percentage while grouped when Battle Spirit is active, for instance -- that'll immediately solve a lot of ballgroup-related issues. Balance more sets with Battle Spirit. It's the right thing to do for the PVP community AND the PVE community.

Anyway, that's just an idea I had. It's not perfect, but I think it would be an interesting improvement over what we currently have.

Thoughts? Other ideas?

Edit: Formatting.

Edit 2: Tagging @ZOS_BrianWheeler .

LadyGP

My number one complaint with this and ZoS as a whole is reducing caps to improve performance.

ZoS has been building technical debt for years by not directly addressing the performance issues. Making a move to reduce caps even more to "fix performance" just doubles down on this. In my opinion this line of thinking needs to be avoided at all costs.

Fix the underlying issues - which I believe is that ZoS is restricted by the Hero Engine.

Aurielle

LadyGP wrote: »

My number one complaint with this and ZoS as a whole is reducing caps to improve performance.

ZoS has been building technical debt for years by not directly addressing the performance issues. Making a move to reduce caps even more to "fix performance" just doubles down on this. In my opinion this line of thinking needs to be avoided at all costs.

Fix the underlying issues - which I believe is that ZoS is restricted by the Hero Engine.

Oh I get it, believe me. Like I said, in an ideal world, performance issues would be fixed properly and population caps would be increased. It would be amazing if they could rebuild the engine and fix these problems once and for all — I just don’t think it’s even remotely likely at this point in ESO’s development.

Muizer

Hmm many of the complaints I see today are almost exactly the same as they were many years ago.

Beyond transient issues like build metas, the recurring issues are

1) Performance
2) Population imbalance / Nightcapping
3) Ball groups


Of these population imbalance is the low-hanging fruit, because it's the result of Cyrodiil (campaign*) rules and unrelated to combat rules shared with PvE.

It would be a good place to start, to list the things that result in players joining the faction that is already dominant. Because that should simply not happen to the extent that it kills the game completely.

* parenthesis, because the very existence of campaigns should arguably be questioned.

Credible_Joe

I once suggested evolving Cyrodiil into a Conqueror's Blade-esque real time tactics experience using the Companion System.

Instance Cyrodiil into queues like you suggest, but limit each instance to one 12 slot raid per alliance, 36 players on the map total. Your character would command a platoon of NPCs that would man siege and fight hostile NPCs, both keep / objective defenses and enemy hero platoons.

https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/633459/cyrodiil-pipe-dream

It wasn't well received; I probably went too far suggesting that it completely displaces the current experience. But the core sentiment was the same as yours; the issues with Cyrodiil aren't going away and the only solution is to move to a less resource-intensive experience. The engine just can't handle interfacing this many players together; it probably never could.

Necrotech_Master

i dont think reducing population caps is a good idea unless you disabled grouping entirely

a 12 man ball group in a 30-45 player pop cap would be nigh unkillable, as it can already take 45+ people to kill them sometimes, if you reduced the population cap, it would just empower ball groups and they would be truly unkillable unless they ran into another ball group

the way ive come to estimate it, is unless its a really bad group, you need between 3 and 4x more players than what is actually in the group to kill it, for a 12 person group, this would be 36-48 players minimum needed to kill an avg to above average ball group

if your population cap was 30 players, even with the entire faction stacked they might not be able to kill that ball group and you would be locked into an eternal fight, or it would push more people to leave the campaign

and with a population cap of 30, thats enough room for 2 full ball groups per faction still, it would be nothing but ball groups in cyro at that point

the only way ive seen to really counter ball groups was higher population caps to overwhelm them, like back when they were doing the increased population cap test last year

this isnt good for performance sure, but in a lower population setting ball groups and cheese builds reign supreme because there isnt enough people to counter them, unless they are also running ball groups and cheese builds

Aurielle

Credible_Joe wrote: »

I once suggested evolving Cyrodiil into a Conqueror's Blade-esque real time tactics experience using the Companion System.

Instance Cyrodiil into queues like you suggest, but limit each instance to one 12 slot raid. Your character would command a platoon of NPCs that would man siege and fight hostile NPCs, both keep / objective defenses and enemy hero platoons.

https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/633459/cyrodiil-pipe-dream

It wasn't well received; I probably went too far suggesting that it completely displaces the current experience. But the core sentiment was the same as yours; the issues with Cyrodiil aren't going away and the only solution is to move to a less resource-intensive experience. The engine just can't handle interfacing this many players together; it probably never could.

Interesting idea, but I think you're right that it perhaps strays a little too far from the original vision of Cyrodiil.

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

i dont think reducing population caps is a good idea unless you disabled grouping entirely

a 12 man ball group in a 30-45 player pop cap would be nigh unkillable, as it can already take 45+ people to kill them sometimes, if you reduced the population cap, it would just empower ball groups and they would be truly unkillable unless they ran into another ball group

the way ive come to estimate it, is unless its a really bad group, you need between 3 and 4x more players than what is actually in the group to kill it, for a 12 person group, this would be 36-48 players minimum needed to kill an avg to above average ball group

if your population cap was 30 players, even with the entire faction stacked they might not be able to kill that ball group and you would be locked into an eternal fight, or it would push more people to leave the campaign

and with a population cap of 30, thats enough room for 2 full ball groups per faction still, it would be nothing but ball groups in cyro at that point

the only way ive seen to really counter ball groups was higher population caps to overwhelm them, like back when they were doing the increased population cap test last year

this isnt good for performance sure, but in a lower population setting ball groups and cheese builds reign supreme because there isnt enough people to counter them, unless they are also running ball groups and cheese builds

That's why I also suggested making more use of Battle Spirit to balance the game. You wouldn't need 45+ people to take out a 12 person ballgroup if said ballgroup did not have as much freedom to stack shields and heals. Moreover, you SHOULDN'T need that many players. Ballgroups should have some advantages over unorganized zergs, but never so many advantages that they need more than triple their numbers to take them out. That's completely unhealthy, and not a reason to increase Cyrodiil's population cap at the expense of performance, IMO.

Also, with a cap of thirty players per alliance per instance, it would actually be less likely that multiple ball groups would end up in the same instance on the same alliance; after all, they'd be competing against a much larger number of solo players for a much smaller number of available slots. And even if multiple ballgroups did end up in the same instance on the same alliance, they'd likely end up shooting themselves in the foot if they tried to farm ungrouped or less organized players -- especially if those players had the option of leaving the instance and joining another instance where there AREN'T stacked ballgroups ruining everyone's fun. Right now, we don't have that option -- we either deal with the fun-sapping stacked ballgroups, or we leave Cyrodiil to do something else.

Aurielle

Muizer wrote: »

Hmm many of the complaints I see today are almost exactly the same as they were many years ago.

Beyond transient issues like build metas, the recurring issues are

1) Performance
2) Population imbalance / Nightcapping
3) Ball groups


Of these population imbalance is the low-hanging fruit, because it's the result of Cyrodiil (campaign*) rules and unrelated to combat rules shared with PvE.

It would be a good place to start, to list the things that result in players joining the faction that is already dominant. Because that should simply not happen to the extent that it kills the game completely.

* parenthesis, because the very existence of campaigns should arguably be questioned.

Some reasons why players right now might choose to join the dominant faction with the current rulesets in place:

1. They want the 1st place end of campaign rewards (silly reason, IMO, because the rewards are pretty lackluster).
2. They don't want a challenge and just want to farm AP in peace.
3. If the winning alliance is already leading by a significant margin, they know their efforts would be wasted if they played for one of the losing alliances, as the campaign is way too long and big score gaps only tend to get bigger (the "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" idea).

I don't think these issues go away without drastically changing the way Cyrodiil works. Significantly shorter faction-locked campaigns where you can't even see the scoreboard before you join the instance would probably fix a lot of the population imbalance problems.

Necrotech_Master

Aurielle wrote: »

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

i dont think reducing population caps is a good idea unless you disabled grouping entirely

a 12 man ball group in a 30-45 player pop cap would be nigh unkillable, as it can already take 45+ people to kill them sometimes, if you reduced the population cap, it would just empower ball groups and they would be truly unkillable unless they ran into another ball group

the way ive come to estimate it, is unless its a really bad group, you need between 3 and 4x more players than what is actually in the group to kill it, for a 12 person group, this would be 36-48 players minimum needed to kill an avg to above average ball group

if your population cap was 30 players, even with the entire faction stacked they might not be able to kill that ball group and you would be locked into an eternal fight, or it would push more people to leave the campaign

and with a population cap of 30, thats enough room for 2 full ball groups per faction still, it would be nothing but ball groups in cyro at that point

the only way ive seen to really counter ball groups was higher population caps to overwhelm them, like back when they were doing the increased population cap test last year

this isnt good for performance sure, but in a lower population setting ball groups and cheese builds reign supreme because there isnt enough people to counter them, unless they are also running ball groups and cheese builds

That's why I also suggested making more use of Battle Spirit to balance the game. You wouldn't need 45+ people to take out a 12 person ballgroup if said ballgroup did not have as much freedom to stack shields and heals. Moreover, you SHOULDN'T need that many players. Ballgroups should have some advantages over unorganized zergs, but never so many advantages that they need more than triple their numbers to take them out. That's completely unhealthy, and not a reason to increase Cyrodiil's population cap at the expense of performance, IMO.

Also, with a cap of thirty players per alliance per instance, it would actually be less likely that multiple ball groups would end up in the same instance on the same alliance; after all, they'd be competing against a much larger number of solo players for a much smaller number of available slots. And even if multiple ballgroups did end up in the same instance on the same alliance, they'd likely end up shooting themselves in the foot if they tried to farm ungrouped or less organized players -- especially if those players had the option of leaving the instance and joining another instance where there AREN'T stacked ballgroups ruining everyone's fun. Right now, we don't have that option -- we either deal with the fun-sapping stacked ballgroups, or we leave Cyrodiil to do something else.

oh i completely agree that you shouldnt need that many people to take out a ball group

personally i prefer the larger populations, a 60v60v60 3 way keep fight while a lot of chaos, is what i imagine from pvp, i dont really enjoy "small scaling" which i see is basically what BGs role is, if the pop caps were reduced to 30 and the campaign 2 hours, your basically in 1 really long slightly more populated BG, which i would not see as fun

in order to do that though need higher populations

i do agree with other points you brought up, such as the huge distances between objectives (my main pvp toon is a NB that ive neglected mount training on, so i just run everywhere)

other points such as campaign score i could care less about, and what would you do about campaign rewards for a 2 hour campaign? right now 80% of the reason anyone who doesnt prefer pvp goes to cyro is for the transmute crystals, but theres no way zos would give 50 transmutes for 2 hour camp (they only give like 10 for the 7 day camps during the events for example)

El_Borracho

If they adjusted the respawn to somewhere between right where you died and halfway across the map, it would be a vast improvement. The ride back to the battle really kills the fun of Cyrodiil. I also understand why it can't be a respawn where you died, as it would make taking a keep next to impossible.

Aurielle

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

Aurielle wrote: »

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

i dont think reducing population caps is a good idea unless you disabled grouping entirely

a 12 man ball group in a 30-45 player pop cap would be nigh unkillable, as it can already take 45+ people to kill them sometimes, if you reduced the population cap, it would just empower ball groups and they would be truly unkillable unless they ran into another ball group

the way ive come to estimate it, is unless its a really bad group, you need between 3 and 4x more players than what is actually in the group to kill it, for a 12 person group, this would be 36-48 players minimum needed to kill an avg to above average ball group

if your population cap was 30 players, even with the entire faction stacked they might not be able to kill that ball group and you would be locked into an eternal fight, or it would push more people to leave the campaign

and with a population cap of 30, thats enough room for 2 full ball groups per faction still, it would be nothing but ball groups in cyro at that point

the only way ive seen to really counter ball groups was higher population caps to overwhelm them, like back when they were doing the increased population cap test last year

this isnt good for performance sure, but in a lower population setting ball groups and cheese builds reign supreme because there isnt enough people to counter them, unless they are also running ball groups and cheese builds

That's why I also suggested making more use of Battle Spirit to balance the game. You wouldn't need 45+ people to take out a 12 person ballgroup if said ballgroup did not have as much freedom to stack shields and heals. Moreover, you SHOULDN'T need that many players. Ballgroups should have some advantages over unorganized zergs, but never so many advantages that they need more than triple their numbers to take them out. That's completely unhealthy, and not a reason to increase Cyrodiil's population cap at the expense of performance, IMO.

Also, with a cap of thirty players per alliance per instance, it would actually be less likely that multiple ball groups would end up in the same instance on the same alliance; after all, they'd be competing against a much larger number of solo players for a much smaller number of available slots. And even if multiple ballgroups did end up in the same instance on the same alliance, they'd likely end up shooting themselves in the foot if they tried to farm ungrouped or less organized players -- especially if those players had the option of leaving the instance and joining another instance where there AREN'T stacked ballgroups ruining everyone's fun. Right now, we don't have that option -- we either deal with the fun-sapping stacked ballgroups, or we leave Cyrodiil to do something else.

oh i completely agree that you shouldnt need that many people to take out a ball group

personally i prefer the larger populations, a 60v60v60 3 way keep fight while a lot of chaos, is what i imagine from pvp, i dont really enjoy "small scaling" which i see is basically what BGs role is, if the pop caps were reduced to 30 and the campaign 2 hours, your basically in 1 really long slightly more populated BG, which i would not see as fun

in order to do that though need higher populations

i do agree with other points you brought up, such as the huge distances between objectives (my main pvp toon is a NB that ive neglected mount training on, so i just run everywhere)

other points such as campaign score i could care less about, and what would you do about campaign rewards for a 2 hour campaign? right now 80% of the reason anyone who doesnt prefer pvp goes to cyro is for the transmute crystals, but theres no way zos would give 50 transmutes for 2 hour camp (they only give like 10 for the 7 day camps during the events for example)

I also prefer larger populations, but I think we might have to give up on that idea if we want decent performance. It sucks approaching big keep battles in Cyrodiil right now and disconnecting as soon as you come within range of the action, or hearing combat music cutting in and out like a scratchy radio station because the game simply cannot handle that many players in the same location. 45 vs 45 vs 45 might be the most the servers can handle right now. In an ideal world, they rebuild the engine and get population numbers back to where they used to be, but I simply do not have faith in ZOS doing that anymore.

As for scoring and rewards, I didn't really delve into that, but I obviously don't expect ZOS to reward 50 transmutes for a single two hour campaign. Each campaign instance would have its own individual scoreboard (specific only to that campaign, a la BG scoreboards), but there would be a global leaderboard that tracks total AP gain for the month. The global leaderboard could function exactly like the 30 day campaign leaderboard does right now: 25k AP for tier 1 rewards, 50k AP for tier 2, so on.

Necrotech_Master

Aurielle wrote: »

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

Aurielle wrote: »

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

i dont think reducing population caps is a good idea unless you disabled grouping entirely

a 12 man ball group in a 30-45 player pop cap would be nigh unkillable, as it can already take 45+ people to kill them sometimes, if you reduced the population cap, it would just empower ball groups and they would be truly unkillable unless they ran into another ball group

the way ive come to estimate it, is unless its a really bad group, you need between 3 and 4x more players than what is actually in the group to kill it, for a 12 person group, this would be 36-48 players minimum needed to kill an avg to above average ball group

if your population cap was 30 players, even with the entire faction stacked they might not be able to kill that ball group and you would be locked into an eternal fight, or it would push more people to leave the campaign

and with a population cap of 30, thats enough room for 2 full ball groups per faction still, it would be nothing but ball groups in cyro at that point

the only way ive seen to really counter ball groups was higher population caps to overwhelm them, like back when they were doing the increased population cap test last year

this isnt good for performance sure, but in a lower population setting ball groups and cheese builds reign supreme because there isnt enough people to counter them, unless they are also running ball groups and cheese builds

That's why I also suggested making more use of Battle Spirit to balance the game. You wouldn't need 45+ people to take out a 12 person ballgroup if said ballgroup did not have as much freedom to stack shields and heals. Moreover, you SHOULDN'T need that many players. Ballgroups should have some advantages over unorganized zergs, but never so many advantages that they need more than triple their numbers to take them out. That's completely unhealthy, and not a reason to increase Cyrodiil's population cap at the expense of performance, IMO.

Also, with a cap of thirty players per alliance per instance, it would actually be less likely that multiple ball groups would end up in the same instance on the same alliance; after all, they'd be competing against a much larger number of solo players for a much smaller number of available slots. And even if multiple ballgroups did end up in the same instance on the same alliance, they'd likely end up shooting themselves in the foot if they tried to farm ungrouped or less organized players -- especially if those players had the option of leaving the instance and joining another instance where there AREN'T stacked ballgroups ruining everyone's fun. Right now, we don't have that option -- we either deal with the fun-sapping stacked ballgroups, or we leave Cyrodiil to do something else.

oh i completely agree that you shouldnt need that many people to take out a ball group

personally i prefer the larger populations, a 60v60v60 3 way keep fight while a lot of chaos, is what i imagine from pvp, i dont really enjoy "small scaling" which i see is basically what BGs role is, if the pop caps were reduced to 30 and the campaign 2 hours, your basically in 1 really long slightly more populated BG, which i would not see as fun

in order to do that though need higher populations

i do agree with other points you brought up, such as the huge distances between objectives (my main pvp toon is a NB that ive neglected mount training on, so i just run everywhere)

other points such as campaign score i could care less about, and what would you do about campaign rewards for a 2 hour campaign? right now 80% of the reason anyone who doesnt prefer pvp goes to cyro is for the transmute crystals, but theres no way zos would give 50 transmutes for 2 hour camp (they only give like 10 for the 7 day camps during the events for example)

I also prefer larger populations, but I think we might have to give up on that idea if we want decent performance. It sucks approaching big keep battles in Cyrodiil right now and disconnecting as soon as you come within range of the action, or hearing combat music cutting in and out like a scratchy radio station because the game simply cannot handle that many players in the same location. 45 vs 45 vs 45 might be the most the servers can handle right now. In an ideal world, they rebuild the engine and get population numbers back to where they used to be, but I simply do not have faith in ZOS doing that anymore.

As for scoring and rewards, I didn't really delve into that, but I obviously don't expect ZOS to reward 50 transmutes for a single two hour campaign. Each campaign instance would have its own individual scoreboard (specific only to that campaign, a la BG scoreboards), but there would be a global leaderboard that tracks total AP gain for the month. The global leaderboard could function exactly like the 30 day campaign leaderboard does right now: 25k AP for tier 1 rewards, 50k AP for tier 2, so on.

personally if the populations were any less than they are now, i dont know if i would even really bother actually pvping much lol

if the reward tiers were separate and awarded separately, it would probably make me care even less about the score of the campaign (of which i have no interest in it now lol), at best i think it would just recycle emps faster

other big problems i notice is population balance issues on camps that arent fully locked across all factions, and people unwilling to go to other camps even though grey host is full (the "i cant get into the campaign because its a 50+ person queue" people)

jaws343

I like the idea of reducing the map size. Maybe keep the population as it is now but decrease the map.

Probably keep the Emp ring keeps and outposts, and the single homekeep in each faction that connects the emp ring. Would basically give 9 keeps to funnel players to rather than 18.

You'd end up with:

DC
Glades
Ash
Ales
Bleakers

AD
Alessia
Roe
Faregyl
Nikel

EP
Arrius
Chalman
BRK
Sej

ArchMikem

Aurielle wrote: »

[*]It takes too long to enter popular campaigns during prime time. Who likes hour-long, 100+ player queues? No one.

That point is fixed and made moot by an incredibly simple and obvious solution.

Take your 100 player Queue, and go to an empty Camp.

"But why would I ever want to play in an empty Camp??"

If all of you went to that Camp, then it's suddenly not empty anymore.

Four_Fingers

But all the "cool" people hang out on GH.

Aurielle

ArchMikem wrote: »

Aurielle wrote: »

[*]It takes too long to enter popular campaigns during prime time. Who likes hour-long, 100+ player queues? No one.

That point is fixed and made moot by an incredibly simple and obvious solution.

Take your 100 player Queue, and go to an empty Camp.

"But why would I ever want to play in an empty Camp??"

If all of you went to that Camp, then it's suddenly not empty anymore.

And this is something that does happen in other PVP games with short campaigns that don't last for thirty days. It doesn't happen here, because the score tends to be closer on GH and that's where people feel they'll find the best fights. If a campaign is only two hours long, no one is going to sit in the queue for an hour or longer and then only be able to play for an hour or less before the campaign ends and they get kicked out of the map. They're going to join one of the other dynamically created instances with free slots.

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

Aurielle wrote: »

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

Aurielle wrote: »

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

i dont think reducing population caps is a good idea unless you disabled grouping entirely

a 12 man ball group in a 30-45 player pop cap would be nigh unkillable, as it can already take 45+ people to kill them sometimes, if you reduced the population cap, it would just empower ball groups and they would be truly unkillable unless they ran into another ball group

the way ive come to estimate it, is unless its a really bad group, you need between 3 and 4x more players than what is actually in the group to kill it, for a 12 person group, this would be 36-48 players minimum needed to kill an avg to above average ball group

if your population cap was 30 players, even with the entire faction stacked they might not be able to kill that ball group and you would be locked into an eternal fight, or it would push more people to leave the campaign

and with a population cap of 30, thats enough room for 2 full ball groups per faction still, it would be nothing but ball groups in cyro at that point

the only way ive seen to really counter ball groups was higher population caps to overwhelm them, like back when they were doing the increased population cap test last year

this isnt good for performance sure, but in a lower population setting ball groups and cheese builds reign supreme because there isnt enough people to counter them, unless they are also running ball groups and cheese builds

That's why I also suggested making more use of Battle Spirit to balance the game. You wouldn't need 45+ people to take out a 12 person ballgroup if said ballgroup did not have as much freedom to stack shields and heals. Moreover, you SHOULDN'T need that many players. Ballgroups should have some advantages over unorganized zergs, but never so many advantages that they need more than triple their numbers to take them out. That's completely unhealthy, and not a reason to increase Cyrodiil's population cap at the expense of performance, IMO.

Also, with a cap of thirty players per alliance per instance, it would actually be less likely that multiple ball groups would end up in the same instance on the same alliance; after all, they'd be competing against a much larger number of solo players for a much smaller number of available slots. And even if multiple ballgroups did end up in the same instance on the same alliance, they'd likely end up shooting themselves in the foot if they tried to farm ungrouped or less organized players -- especially if those players had the option of leaving the instance and joining another instance where there AREN'T stacked ballgroups ruining everyone's fun. Right now, we don't have that option -- we either deal with the fun-sapping stacked ballgroups, or we leave Cyrodiil to do something else.

oh i completely agree that you shouldnt need that many people to take out a ball group

personally i prefer the larger populations, a 60v60v60 3 way keep fight while a lot of chaos, is what i imagine from pvp, i dont really enjoy "small scaling" which i see is basically what BGs role is, if the pop caps were reduced to 30 and the campaign 2 hours, your basically in 1 really long slightly more populated BG, which i would not see as fun

in order to do that though need higher populations

i do agree with other points you brought up, such as the huge distances between objectives (my main pvp toon is a NB that ive neglected mount training on, so i just run everywhere)

other points such as campaign score i could care less about, and what would you do about campaign rewards for a 2 hour campaign? right now 80% of the reason anyone who doesnt prefer pvp goes to cyro is for the transmute crystals, but theres no way zos would give 50 transmutes for 2 hour camp (they only give like 10 for the 7 day camps during the events for example)

I also prefer larger populations, but I think we might have to give up on that idea if we want decent performance. It sucks approaching big keep battles in Cyrodiil right now and disconnecting as soon as you come within range of the action, or hearing combat music cutting in and out like a scratchy radio station because the game simply cannot handle that many players in the same location. 45 vs 45 vs 45 might be the most the servers can handle right now. In an ideal world, they rebuild the engine and get population numbers back to where they used to be, but I simply do not have faith in ZOS doing that anymore.

As for scoring and rewards, I didn't really delve into that, but I obviously don't expect ZOS to reward 50 transmutes for a single two hour campaign. Each campaign instance would have its own individual scoreboard (specific only to that campaign, a la BG scoreboards), but there would be a global leaderboard that tracks total AP gain for the month. The global leaderboard could function exactly like the 30 day campaign leaderboard does right now: 25k AP for tier 1 rewards, 50k AP for tier 2, so on.

personally if the populations were any less than they are now, i dont know if i would even really bother actually pvping much lol

if the reward tiers were separate and awarded separately, it would probably make me care even less about the score of the campaign (of which i have no interest in it now lol), at best i think it would just recycle emps faster

other big problems i notice is population balance issues on camps that arent fully locked across all factions, and people unwilling to go to other camps even though grey host is full (the "i cant get into the campaign because its a 50+ person queue" people)

That's fair, I knew a lot of people would hate the idea of reducing caps even further when I suggested it. I do think it would work, though, for those of us who enjoy larger scale siege battles, but want better performance. Having upwards of 90 players converging in the same area is still fun and epic, IMO.

As for people being unwilling to go to other camps, I really do think that would be solved by shorter campaign lengths. The reluctance to move over to other campaigns right now typically boils down to "all my friends play on Gray Host" or "I've invested too much time on Gray Host." Month long campaigns are a little ridiculous when you look at other PVP games...

I played a lot of Battlefield in my FPS days, prior to the travesty that was BF2042. BF players also tend to prefer full or close to full campaigns (or "servers" in that game), but no one's sitting around in the Server Browser waiting to join one particular match for over an hour at a time when there are multiple servers open to join. It's because the campaigns are much shorter in that game (usually around half an hour). What would be the point of sitting in the queue for an hour or longer when the campaign's almost over? People spend an hour in the GH queue because they know they can still spend 2-3+ hours playing once they get in, so long as they don't disconnect. They know that they can keep doing this day after day, and keep contributing to their personal score and their alliance's score in the campaign.

Joy_Division

3. Reduced Population Caps.

I can hear you saying "huh, reduce the caps EVEN MORE? we have to INCREASE them!" But hear me out. With smaller population caps on a smaller map featuring a shorter campaign length, we can eliminate other problems: namely, performance issues associated with larger fights and guilds that stack 24+ players in one location. I think a good number would be 30 players per alliance, but even 45 per alliance could still work and be fun. Guilds could still host events with those numbers, but they'd be less able to run multiple groups at the same time, as there'd be a limit to the number of available spots in a given instance of Cyrodiil. Limits to guild stacks means less performance-impacting spamming of cross heals and shields, and more fun for everyone else who isn't running in that stacked guild group.

Won't work. Or at least, it won't be Cyrodiil.

One of the better organized group would never die Vs. 30 PuGs on a map. 45 PuGs, assuming they are all on the same place, will eventually get them, except many of them would do what I'd do: log out after getting repeatedly Rush of Agonied, Feared, and insta-killed by PBAO.

So, what's the solution, limit group size to 6 or 4? Fine by me, but then, we're just in a larger version of Battlegrounds. Much of the open world and multiple objectives that was the charm of Cyordiil would not be there to begin with, so it is basically an upscale battlegrounds. Which might be fine, but it wouldn't be Cyrodiil.

I've played this game since Launch and what made the early PvP a far more enjoyable experience - despite the bugs and terrible balance - because it was relatively friendly for just about every type of player in the ESO community. There were so many players on the map, even if you were a terrible PvPer, you could zerg somewhere, help kill a few people, take a keep, etc., basically have a feeling of accomplishment (regardless of how hollow that objectively may be). There were expert Guilds like Alacrity who were every bit as oppressive to PuGs as the best guilds today, but because there were so many fights, players could go an hour without ever even seeing them, and when they did, there were so many PuGs and LFG groups that though sheer numbers, the ball group would die (and once again a feeling of accomplishment).

NOTHING ZOS will ever or can ever do will ever rekindle the feeling of accomplishments that below average / inexperienced players can get as long as the population cap is tiny and the same sweaty 100 people log onto to play ever night. They have to have more people in Cyroidill. I think they know that, but also know they can't do that so Cyrodiil is pretty much screwed. I believe ZoS's last attempt to do add some spice to Cyrodiil was the destructible bridges and gates (terrible decision catering to try-hards who are fine with removing the very fights below-average players could actually do something) and the Hammer have done nothing to make Cyrodiil appealing to the general population and garnered a lot of criticism from PvPers. Of course they were going to cut any resource/investment into Cyrodiil after that because they've shown themselves incapable of making it fun and dealing with performance. This is why we are getting a Battleground update because, as much as ZOS cant even figure out a MMR system, at least they will not get complaints about performance.

The other huge problem with the PvP in the game is the power creep has gotten so out of control, I don't think it is even possible to have anything resembling balance. Even a class that isn;t very good like a Templar can easily enough run a build out there there doesn't run out of resources, has 35K health, 5-6K spellpower, be impervious to anything an below-average player can throw at the, while absolutely melting said below average player with a stun-execute combination. Good players will often take 4,5, and even 6 decent players to kill them, or never die in a resource tower because it is so trivial to always be immune to roots/snares and constantly be faster than the original game designers intended. These builds have no weaknesses. It is incredibly boring to play PvP games where players rarely die, and worse, there will never be any sense of accomplishments for below average players because they literally never actually kill anyone. This is not something that shrinking the map will solve, and why I predict the new BGs will quickly turn off players who might otherwise been curious about them.

ZOS did the worst combination possible: cave into our complaints about being snared, running out of resources, playing classes that could not do everything (i.e, the things that cause players to die) while simultaneously stripping away the powerful distinctive abilities on many classes that showed up in their death recaps (i.e, the things that allowed players to kill). So now we're stuck playing a bunch of bland classes with generic abilities that are defined mostly by gear sets, with always an obvious exception where one class actually has something powerful which everybody gravitates to (now sorcerers). Or some ridiculously powerful gear sets, some of which break the game's rules (Rush of Agony). It is absolutely insane to me that a group of players or even individuals can just breeze through a contested breech or charge to the back of a keep and up the stairs. How is any strategy or even tactics possible in such a setting? I don;t see how that can be fixed.

Necrotech_Master

Aurielle wrote: »

ArchMikem wrote: »

Aurielle wrote: »

[*]It takes too long to enter popular campaigns during prime time. Who likes hour-long, 100+ player queues? No one.

That point is fixed and made moot by an incredibly simple and obvious solution.

Take your 100 player Queue, and go to an empty Camp.

"But why would I ever want to play in an empty Camp??"

If all of you went to that Camp, then it's suddenly not empty anymore.

And this is something that does happen in other PVP games with short campaigns that don't last for thirty days. It doesn't happen here, because the score tends to be closer on GH and that's where people feel they'll find the best fights. If a campaign is only two hours long, no one is going to sit in the queue for an hour or longer and then only be able to play for an hour or less before the campaign ends and they get kicked out of the map. They're going to join one of the other dynamically created instances with free slots.

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

Aurielle wrote: »

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

Aurielle wrote: »

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

i dont think reducing population caps is a good idea unless you disabled grouping entirely

a 12 man ball group in a 30-45 player pop cap would be nigh unkillable, as it can already take 45+ people to kill them sometimes, if you reduced the population cap, it would just empower ball groups and they would be truly unkillable unless they ran into another ball group

the way ive come to estimate it, is unless its a really bad group, you need between 3 and 4x more players than what is actually in the group to kill it, for a 12 person group, this would be 36-48 players minimum needed to kill an avg to above average ball group

if your population cap was 30 players, even with the entire faction stacked they might not be able to kill that ball group and you would be locked into an eternal fight, or it would push more people to leave the campaign

and with a population cap of 30, thats enough room for 2 full ball groups per faction still, it would be nothing but ball groups in cyro at that point

the only way ive seen to really counter ball groups was higher population caps to overwhelm them, like back when they were doing the increased population cap test last year

this isnt good for performance sure, but in a lower population setting ball groups and cheese builds reign supreme because there isnt enough people to counter them, unless they are also running ball groups and cheese builds

That's why I also suggested making more use of Battle Spirit to balance the game. You wouldn't need 45+ people to take out a 12 person ballgroup if said ballgroup did not have as much freedom to stack shields and heals. Moreover, you SHOULDN'T need that many players. Ballgroups should have some advantages over unorganized zergs, but never so many advantages that they need more than triple their numbers to take them out. That's completely unhealthy, and not a reason to increase Cyrodiil's population cap at the expense of performance, IMO.

Also, with a cap of thirty players per alliance per instance, it would actually be less likely that multiple ball groups would end up in the same instance on the same alliance; after all, they'd be competing against a much larger number of solo players for a much smaller number of available slots. And even if multiple ballgroups did end up in the same instance on the same alliance, they'd likely end up shooting themselves in the foot if they tried to farm ungrouped or less organized players -- especially if those players had the option of leaving the instance and joining another instance where there AREN'T stacked ballgroups ruining everyone's fun. Right now, we don't have that option -- we either deal with the fun-sapping stacked ballgroups, or we leave Cyrodiil to do something else.

oh i completely agree that you shouldnt need that many people to take out a ball group

personally i prefer the larger populations, a 60v60v60 3 way keep fight while a lot of chaos, is what i imagine from pvp, i dont really enjoy "small scaling" which i see is basically what BGs role is, if the pop caps were reduced to 30 and the campaign 2 hours, your basically in 1 really long slightly more populated BG, which i would not see as fun

in order to do that though need higher populations

i do agree with other points you brought up, such as the huge distances between objectives (my main pvp toon is a NB that ive neglected mount training on, so i just run everywhere)

other points such as campaign score i could care less about, and what would you do about campaign rewards for a 2 hour campaign? right now 80% of the reason anyone who doesnt prefer pvp goes to cyro is for the transmute crystals, but theres no way zos would give 50 transmutes for 2 hour camp (they only give like 10 for the 7 day camps during the events for example)

I also prefer larger populations, but I think we might have to give up on that idea if we want decent performance. It sucks approaching big keep battles in Cyrodiil right now and disconnecting as soon as you come within range of the action, or hearing combat music cutting in and out like a scratchy radio station because the game simply cannot handle that many players in the same location. 45 vs 45 vs 45 might be the most the servers can handle right now. In an ideal world, they rebuild the engine and get population numbers back to where they used to be, but I simply do not have faith in ZOS doing that anymore.

As for scoring and rewards, I didn't really delve into that, but I obviously don't expect ZOS to reward 50 transmutes for a single two hour campaign. Each campaign instance would have its own individual scoreboard (specific only to that campaign, a la BG scoreboards), but there would be a global leaderboard that tracks total AP gain for the month. The global leaderboard could function exactly like the 30 day campaign leaderboard does right now: 25k AP for tier 1 rewards, 50k AP for tier 2, so on.

personally if the populations were any less than they are now, i dont know if i would even really bother actually pvping much lol

if the reward tiers were separate and awarded separately, it would probably make me care even less about the score of the campaign (of which i have no interest in it now lol), at best i think it would just recycle emps faster

other big problems i notice is population balance issues on camps that arent fully locked across all factions, and people unwilling to go to other camps even though grey host is full (the "i cant get into the campaign because its a 50+ person queue" people)

That's fair, I knew a lot of people would hate the idea of reducing caps even further when I suggested it. I do think it would work, though, for those of us who enjoy larger scale siege battles, but want better performance. Having upwards of 90 players converging in the same area is still fun and epic, IMO.

As for people being unwilling to go to other camps, I really do think that would be solved by shorter campaign lengths. The reluctance to move over to other campaigns right now typically boils down to "all my friends play on Gray Host" or "I've invested too much time on Gray Host." Month long campaigns are a little ridiculous when you look at other PVP games...

I played a lot of Battlefield in my FPS days, prior to the travesty that was BF2042. BF players also tend to prefer full or close to full campaigns (or "servers" in that game), but no one's sitting around in the Server Browser waiting to join one particular match for over an hour at a time when there are multiple servers open to join. It's because the campaigns are much shorter in that game (usually around half an hour). What would be the point of sitting in the queue for an hour or longer when the campaign's almost over? People spend an hour in the GH queue because they know they can still spend 2-3+ hours playing once they get in, so long as they don't disconnect. They know that they can keep doing this day after day, and keep contributing to their personal score and their alliance's score in the campaign.

the only other game ive played occasionally for pvp is planetside 2, which oddly enough has a lot of similarities with ESO (it has a 3 faction pvp fight, large map requiring travel on vehicles or takes forever) but it also has things which fix problems that ESO has

the big things that i think it does better:

• faction balance queue - it locks a factions population behind a queue if they are outnumbering the other factions (tries to encourage people to switch factions to get in without a queue)
• when the campaign reaches a certain population threshold, it starts a 90 minute timer before the campaign ends, whichever faction controls the most control points at the end of the timer "wins", but everyone gets rewarded as long as they participated enough before the timer ends (rewards vary depending on 1st, 2nd ,3rd place, but are generally pretty good regardless)
• each "campaign" is actually a fully different map to provide some variety (kind of works like your idea almost of splitting cyro into smaller segments)

Aurielle

Joy_Division wrote: »

3. Reduced Population Caps.

I can hear you saying "huh, reduce the caps EVEN MORE? we have to INCREASE them!" But hear me out. With smaller population caps on a smaller map featuring a shorter campaign length, we can eliminate other problems: namely, performance issues associated with larger fights and guilds that stack 24+ players in one location. I think a good number would be 30 players per alliance, but even 45 per alliance could still work and be fun. Guilds could still host events with those numbers, but they'd be less able to run multiple groups at the same time, as there'd be a limit to the number of available spots in a given instance of Cyrodiil. Limits to guild stacks means less performance-impacting spamming of cross heals and shields, and more fun for everyone else who isn't running in that stacked guild group.

Won't work. Or at least, it won't be Cyrodiil.

Of course it won't be Cyrodiil. Cyrodiil right now isn't Cyrodiil. This is just an idea to try to retain some of the original elements that made Cyrodiil great, while still keeping things playable and eliminating some of the more egregious problems with the current system. We just have to face it as a community: we're never getting 600 vs 600 vs 600 players again; we're not even getting 150 vs 150 vs 150 players again. It's over. It's never coming back. Part of moving on is accepting what you've lost.

Joy_Division wrote: »

One of the better organized group would never die Vs. 30 PuGs on a map. 45 PuGs, assuming they are all on the same place, will eventually get them, except many of them would do what I'd do: log out after getting repeatedly Rush of Agonied, Feared, and insta-killed by PBAO.

So, what's the solution, limit group size to 6 or 4? Fine by me, but then, we're just in a larger version of Battlegrounds. Much of the open world and multiple objectives that was the charm of Cyordiil would not be there to begin with, so it is basically an upscale battlegrounds. Which might be fine, but it wouldn't be Cyrodiil.

No, the solution (as I already suggested) is to make better use of Battle Spirit to balance groups, balance sets, and balance abilities. Fix RoA. Fix heal-stacking and shield-stacking. Don't just throw up your hands in defeat and say "all this imbalance exists, so we can't reduce caps to a point where the game is still playable."

Joy_Division wrote: »

I've played this game since Launch and what made the early PvP a far more enjoyable experience - despite the bugs and terrible balance was the it was relatively friendly for just about every type of player in the ESO community. There were so many players on the map, even if you were a terrible PvPer, you could zerg somewhere, help kill a few people, take a keep, etc., basically [have a feeling of accomplishment (regardless of how hollow that objectively may be). There were expert Guilds like Alacrity who were every bit as oppressive to PuGs as the best guilds today, but because there were so many fights, players could go an hour without ever even seeing them, and when they did, there were so many PuGs and LFG groups that though sheer numbers, the ball group would die (and once again a feeling of accomplishment).

NOTHING ZOS will ever or can ever do will ever rekindle the feeling of accomplishments that below average / inexperienced players can get as long as the population cap is tiny and the same sweaty 100 people log onto to play ever night. They have to have more people in Cyroidill. I think they know that, but also know they can't do that so Cyrodiil is pretty much screwed. I believe ZoS's last attempt to do add some spice to Cyrodiil was the destructible bridges and gates (terrible decision catering to try-hards who are fine with removing the very fights below-average players could actually do something) and the Hammer have done nothing to make Cyrodiil appealing to the general population and garnered a lot of criticism from PvPers. Of course they were going to cut any resource/investment into Cyrodiil after that because they've shown themselves incapable of making it fun and dealing with performance. This is why we are getting a Battleground update because, as much as ZOS cant even figure out a MMR system, at least they will not get complaints about performance.

I agree, and it's incredibly sad, but it's just a reality of the game these days. So rather than continuing to complain about a dying system that's getting worse and worse by the day, I think it's more productive for us as a community to suggest alternatives that could still be fun.

Joy_Division wrote: »

The other huge problem with the PvP in the game is the power creep has gotten so out of control, I don't think it is even possible to have anything resembling balance. Even a class that isn;t very good like a Templar can easily enough run a build out there there doesn't run out of resources, has 35K health, 5-6K spellpower, be impervious to anything an below-average player can throw at the, while absolutely melting said below average player with a stun-execute combination. Good players will often take 4,5, and even 6 decent players to kill them, or never die in a resource tower because it is so trivial to always be immune to roots/snares and constantly be faster than the original game designers intended. These builds have no weaknesses. It is incredibly boring to play PvP games where players rarely die, and worse, there will never be any sense of accomplishments for below average players because they literally never actually kill anyone. This is not something that shrinking the map will solve, and why I predict the new BGs will quickly turn off players who might otherwise been curious about them.

ZOS did the worst combination possible: cave into our complaints about being snared, running out of resources, playing classes that could not do everything (i.e, the things that cause players to die) while simultaneously stripping away the powerful distinctive abilities on many classes that showed up in their death recaps (i.e, the things that allowed players to kill). So now we're stuck playing a bunch of bland classes with generic abilities that are defined mostly by gear sets, with always an obvious exception where one class actually has something powerful which everybody gravitates to (now sorcerers). It is absolutely insane to me that a group of players or even individuals can just breeze through a contested breech or charge to the back of a keep and up the stairs. How is any strategy or even tactics possible in such a setting? That's what happens when lethal tools are taken away and in their stead everyone is given everything to survive. I don;t see how that can be fixed.

I agree with your concerns. Again, ZOS needs to balance PVE and PVP separately, and more aggressively, via tools that already exist like Battle Spirit. All of the problems you cite are indeed terrible for gameplay in Cyrodiil and have contributed to its steady decline over the years, but I have faith that they could be fixed if ZOS well and truly wanted to fix them in a way that wouldn't aggravate PVEers.

SkaraMinoc

Limit HoT stacking and disable snow treaders in large groups.

Home Keeps spawn 3m or 6m health "Keep Lord/Lady" boss when certain conditions are met. DAoC had a mini boss in keeps and it was great. The boss would actually kill players. Surprised ESO doesn't have them.

Reduce Volendrung spawn time and/or add a 2nd weapon.

Add a way to increase siege damage. Siege has not kept up with power creep.

Add campaign score catch up mechanic to prevent any one faction from accumulating runaway scores.

Aurielle

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

Aurielle wrote: »

ArchMikem wrote: »

Aurielle wrote: »

[*]It takes too long to enter popular campaigns during prime time. Who likes hour-long, 100+ player queues? No one.

That point is fixed and made moot by an incredibly simple and obvious solution.

Take your 100 player Queue, and go to an empty Camp.

"But why would I ever want to play in an empty Camp??"

If all of you went to that Camp, then it's suddenly not empty anymore.

And this is something that does happen in other PVP games with short campaigns that don't last for thirty days. It doesn't happen here, because the score tends to be closer on GH and that's where people feel they'll find the best fights. If a campaign is only two hours long, no one is going to sit in the queue for an hour or longer and then only be able to play for an hour or less before the campaign ends and they get kicked out of the map. They're going to join one of the other dynamically created instances with free slots.

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

Aurielle wrote: »

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

Aurielle wrote: »

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

i dont think reducing population caps is a good idea unless you disabled grouping entirely

a 12 man ball group in a 30-45 player pop cap would be nigh unkillable, as it can already take 45+ people to kill them sometimes, if you reduced the population cap, it would just empower ball groups and they would be truly unkillable unless they ran into another ball group

the way ive come to estimate it, is unless its a really bad group, you need between 3 and 4x more players than what is actually in the group to kill it, for a 12 person group, this would be 36-48 players minimum needed to kill an avg to above average ball group

if your population cap was 30 players, even with the entire faction stacked they might not be able to kill that ball group and you would be locked into an eternal fight, or it would push more people to leave the campaign

and with a population cap of 30, thats enough room for 2 full ball groups per faction still, it would be nothing but ball groups in cyro at that point

the only way ive seen to really counter ball groups was higher population caps to overwhelm them, like back when they were doing the increased population cap test last year

this isnt good for performance sure, but in a lower population setting ball groups and cheese builds reign supreme because there isnt enough people to counter them, unless they are also running ball groups and cheese builds

That's why I also suggested making more use of Battle Spirit to balance the game. You wouldn't need 45+ people to take out a 12 person ballgroup if said ballgroup did not have as much freedom to stack shields and heals. Moreover, you SHOULDN'T need that many players. Ballgroups should have some advantages over unorganized zergs, but never so many advantages that they need more than triple their numbers to take them out. That's completely unhealthy, and not a reason to increase Cyrodiil's population cap at the expense of performance, IMO.

Also, with a cap of thirty players per alliance per instance, it would actually be less likely that multiple ball groups would end up in the same instance on the same alliance; after all, they'd be competing against a much larger number of solo players for a much smaller number of available slots. And even if multiple ballgroups did end up in the same instance on the same alliance, they'd likely end up shooting themselves in the foot if they tried to farm ungrouped or less organized players -- especially if those players had the option of leaving the instance and joining another instance where there AREN'T stacked ballgroups ruining everyone's fun. Right now, we don't have that option -- we either deal with the fun-sapping stacked ballgroups, or we leave Cyrodiil to do something else.

oh i completely agree that you shouldnt need that many people to take out a ball group

personally i prefer the larger populations, a 60v60v60 3 way keep fight while a lot of chaos, is what i imagine from pvp, i dont really enjoy "small scaling" which i see is basically what BGs role is, if the pop caps were reduced to 30 and the campaign 2 hours, your basically in 1 really long slightly more populated BG, which i would not see as fun

in order to do that though need higher populations

i do agree with other points you brought up, such as the huge distances between objectives (my main pvp toon is a NB that ive neglected mount training on, so i just run everywhere)

other points such as campaign score i could care less about, and what would you do about campaign rewards for a 2 hour campaign? right now 80% of the reason anyone who doesnt prefer pvp goes to cyro is for the transmute crystals, but theres no way zos would give 50 transmutes for 2 hour camp (they only give like 10 for the 7 day camps during the events for example)

I also prefer larger populations, but I think we might have to give up on that idea if we want decent performance. It sucks approaching big keep battles in Cyrodiil right now and disconnecting as soon as you come within range of the action, or hearing combat music cutting in and out like a scratchy radio station because the game simply cannot handle that many players in the same location. 45 vs 45 vs 45 might be the most the servers can handle right now. In an ideal world, they rebuild the engine and get population numbers back to where they used to be, but I simply do not have faith in ZOS doing that anymore.

As for scoring and rewards, I didn't really delve into that, but I obviously don't expect ZOS to reward 50 transmutes for a single two hour campaign. Each campaign instance would have its own individual scoreboard (specific only to that campaign, a la BG scoreboards), but there would be a global leaderboard that tracks total AP gain for the month. The global leaderboard could function exactly like the 30 day campaign leaderboard does right now: 25k AP for tier 1 rewards, 50k AP for tier 2, so on.

personally if the populations were any less than they are now, i dont know if i would even really bother actually pvping much lol

if the reward tiers were separate and awarded separately, it would probably make me care even less about the score of the campaign (of which i have no interest in it now lol), at best i think it would just recycle emps faster

other big problems i notice is population balance issues on camps that arent fully locked across all factions, and people unwilling to go to other camps even though grey host is full (the "i cant get into the campaign because its a 50+ person queue" people)

That's fair, I knew a lot of people would hate the idea of reducing caps even further when I suggested it. I do think it would work, though, for those of us who enjoy larger scale siege battles, but want better performance. Having upwards of 90 players converging in the same area is still fun and epic, IMO.

As for people being unwilling to go to other camps, I really do think that would be solved by shorter campaign lengths. The reluctance to move over to other campaigns right now typically boils down to "all my friends play on Gray Host" or "I've invested too much time on Gray Host." Month long campaigns are a little ridiculous when you look at other PVP games...

I played a lot of Battlefield in my FPS days, prior to the travesty that was BF2042. BF players also tend to prefer full or close to full campaigns (or "servers" in that game), but no one's sitting around in the Server Browser waiting to join one particular match for over an hour at a time when there are multiple servers open to join. It's because the campaigns are much shorter in that game (usually around half an hour). What would be the point of sitting in the queue for an hour or longer when the campaign's almost over? People spend an hour in the GH queue because they know they can still spend 2-3+ hours playing once they get in, so long as they don't disconnect. They know that they can keep doing this day after day, and keep contributing to their personal score and their alliance's score in the campaign.

the only other game ive played occasionally for pvp is planetside 2, which oddly enough has a lot of similarities with ESO (it has a 3 faction pvp fight, large map requiring travel on vehicles or takes forever) but it also has things which fix problems that ESO has

the big things that i think it does better:

• faction balance queue - it locks a factions population behind a queue if they are outnumbering the other factions (tries to encourage people to switch factions to get in without a queue)
• when the campaign reaches a certain population threshold, it starts a 90 minute timer before the campaign ends, whichever faction controls the most control points at the end of the timer "wins", but everyone gets rewarded as long as they participated enough before the timer ends (rewards vary depending on 1st, 2nd ,3rd place, but are generally pretty good regardless)
• each "campaign" is actually a fully different map to provide some variety (kind of works like your idea almost of splitting cyro into smaller segments)

I've never played Planetside 2, but those ideas definitely sound like they could work, especially in the context of a shorter campaign. That 90 minute timer in particular sounds interesting, and could introduce a fun "scramble to cap and defend as many keeps as you can" element before the time is up. Out of curiosity though, what happens if that population threshold is never met? Is there a set duration for each campaign irrespective of the pop threshold?

TX12001rwb17_ESO

• Completely redesign the Cyrodiil zone by reducing the Map Size to only the Keeps surrounding the Imperial City, this would come with the bonus of allowing ESO expansions to take place in areas such as Cheydninhal and Bruma which quite frankly need a massive redesign, that does not look like Bruma and Cloud Ruler Temple is being completely wasted.

• Restore the ability to destroy Towers and Inner Keeps

• Add more artifacts to act as a means for smaller groups to counter larger groups

Aurielle

SkaraMinoc wrote: »

Limit HoT stacking and disable snow treaders in large groups.

Home Keeps spawn 3m or 6m health "Keep Lord/Lady" boss when certain conditions are met. DAoC had a mini boss in keeps and it was great. The boss would actually kill players. Surprised ESO doesn't have them.

Reduce Volendrung spawn time and/or add a 2nd weapon.

Add a way to increase siege damage. Siege has not kept up with power creep.

Add campaign score catch up mechanic to prevent any one faction from accumulating runaway scores.

Some good ideas there. I was also toying with the idea of a boss spawn when thinking about what a shorter, reimagined Cyrodiil could look like. Just keeping the scoring as is with fifteen minute score evals or something like that would be kind of boring... but an encounter towards the end of the campaign (like a big boss or some other kind of objective) that could reward a large number of points to one alliance could introduce another layer of fun and chaos to keep people interested in the campaign score (rather than, I dunno, running around a resource tower for two hours)...

TX12001rwb17_ESO wrote: »

• Completely redesign the Cyrodiil zone by reducing the Map Size to only the Keeps surrounding the Imperial City, this would come with the bonus of allowing ESO expansions to take place in areas such as Cheydninhal and Bruma which quite frankly need a massive redesign, that does not look like Bruma and Cloud Ruler Temple is being completely wasted.
• Restore the ability to destroy Towers and Inner Keeps

• Add more artifacts to act as a means for smaller groups to counter larger groups

Yeah, that's what I was thinking too. I do like the thought of dividing Cyrodiil up into three smaller maps, but then the problem of the Emp ring (and Emperorship in general) remains... Reducing the map size to include just the Emp ring and some of the surrounding areas could solve that problem. In saying that, though, perhaps Emperorship could be tied to something other than securing the Emp ring.

MISTFORMBZZZ

What we need is Crossplay betwen consoles and crosplays pc - pc.
Bigger population caps. Stable servers.

= Best Cyrodiil ever

Aurielle

MISTFORMBZZZ wrote: »

What we need is Crossplay betwen consoles and crosplays pc - pc.
Bigger population caps. Stable servers.

= Best Cyrodiil ever

Sure, that would be great. Is it realistic at this point in time in the game's development, though?

Necrotech_Master

Aurielle wrote: »

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

Aurielle wrote: »

ArchMikem wrote: »

Aurielle wrote: »

[*]It takes too long to enter popular campaigns during prime time. Who likes hour-long, 100+ player queues? No one.

That point is fixed and made moot by an incredibly simple and obvious solution.

Take your 100 player Queue, and go to an empty Camp.

"But why would I ever want to play in an empty Camp??"

If all of you went to that Camp, then it's suddenly not empty anymore.

And this is something that does happen in other PVP games with short campaigns that don't last for thirty days. It doesn't happen here, because the score tends to be closer on GH and that's where people feel they'll find the best fights. If a campaign is only two hours long, no one is going to sit in the queue for an hour or longer and then only be able to play for an hour or less before the campaign ends and they get kicked out of the map. They're going to join one of the other dynamically created instances with free slots.

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

Aurielle wrote: »

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

Aurielle wrote: »

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

i dont think reducing population caps is a good idea unless you disabled grouping entirely

a 12 man ball group in a 30-45 player pop cap would be nigh unkillable, as it can already take 45+ people to kill them sometimes, if you reduced the population cap, it would just empower ball groups and they would be truly unkillable unless they ran into another ball group

the way ive come to estimate it, is unless its a really bad group, you need between 3 and 4x more players than what is actually in the group to kill it, for a 12 person group, this would be 36-48 players minimum needed to kill an avg to above average ball group

if your population cap was 30 players, even with the entire faction stacked they might not be able to kill that ball group and you would be locked into an eternal fight, or it would push more people to leave the campaign

and with a population cap of 30, thats enough room for 2 full ball groups per faction still, it would be nothing but ball groups in cyro at that point

the only way ive seen to really counter ball groups was higher population caps to overwhelm them, like back when they were doing the increased population cap test last year

this isnt good for performance sure, but in a lower population setting ball groups and cheese builds reign supreme because there isnt enough people to counter them, unless they are also running ball groups and cheese builds

That's why I also suggested making more use of Battle Spirit to balance the game. You wouldn't need 45+ people to take out a 12 person ballgroup if said ballgroup did not have as much freedom to stack shields and heals. Moreover, you SHOULDN'T need that many players. Ballgroups should have some advantages over unorganized zergs, but never so many advantages that they need more than triple their numbers to take them out. That's completely unhealthy, and not a reason to increase Cyrodiil's population cap at the expense of performance, IMO.

Also, with a cap of thirty players per alliance per instance, it would actually be less likely that multiple ball groups would end up in the same instance on the same alliance; after all, they'd be competing against a much larger number of solo players for a much smaller number of available slots. And even if multiple ballgroups did end up in the same instance on the same alliance, they'd likely end up shooting themselves in the foot if they tried to farm ungrouped or less organized players -- especially if those players had the option of leaving the instance and joining another instance where there AREN'T stacked ballgroups ruining everyone's fun. Right now, we don't have that option -- we either deal with the fun-sapping stacked ballgroups, or we leave Cyrodiil to do something else.

oh i completely agree that you shouldnt need that many people to take out a ball group

personally i prefer the larger populations, a 60v60v60 3 way keep fight while a lot of chaos, is what i imagine from pvp, i dont really enjoy "small scaling" which i see is basically what BGs role is, if the pop caps were reduced to 30 and the campaign 2 hours, your basically in 1 really long slightly more populated BG, which i would not see as fun

in order to do that though need higher populations

i do agree with other points you brought up, such as the huge distances between objectives (my main pvp toon is a NB that ive neglected mount training on, so i just run everywhere)

other points such as campaign score i could care less about, and what would you do about campaign rewards for a 2 hour campaign? right now 80% of the reason anyone who doesnt prefer pvp goes to cyro is for the transmute crystals, but theres no way zos would give 50 transmutes for 2 hour camp (they only give like 10 for the 7 day camps during the events for example)

I also prefer larger populations, but I think we might have to give up on that idea if we want decent performance. It sucks approaching big keep battles in Cyrodiil right now and disconnecting as soon as you come within range of the action, or hearing combat music cutting in and out like a scratchy radio station because the game simply cannot handle that many players in the same location. 45 vs 45 vs 45 might be the most the servers can handle right now. In an ideal world, they rebuild the engine and get population numbers back to where they used to be, but I simply do not have faith in ZOS doing that anymore.

As for scoring and rewards, I didn't really delve into that, but I obviously don't expect ZOS to reward 50 transmutes for a single two hour campaign. Each campaign instance would have its own individual scoreboard (specific only to that campaign, a la BG scoreboards), but there would be a global leaderboard that tracks total AP gain for the month. The global leaderboard could function exactly like the 30 day campaign leaderboard does right now: 25k AP for tier 1 rewards, 50k AP for tier 2, so on.

personally if the populations were any less than they are now, i dont know if i would even really bother actually pvping much lol

if the reward tiers were separate and awarded separately, it would probably make me care even less about the score of the campaign (of which i have no interest in it now lol), at best i think it would just recycle emps faster

other big problems i notice is population balance issues on camps that arent fully locked across all factions, and people unwilling to go to other camps even though grey host is full (the "i cant get into the campaign because its a 50+ person queue" people)

That's fair, I knew a lot of people would hate the idea of reducing caps even further when I suggested it. I do think it would work, though, for those of us who enjoy larger scale siege battles, but want better performance. Having upwards of 90 players converging in the same area is still fun and epic, IMO.

As for people being unwilling to go to other camps, I really do think that would be solved by shorter campaign lengths. The reluctance to move over to other campaigns right now typically boils down to "all my friends play on Gray Host" or "I've invested too much time on Gray Host." Month long campaigns are a little ridiculous when you look at other PVP games...

I played a lot of Battlefield in my FPS days, prior to the travesty that was BF2042. BF players also tend to prefer full or close to full campaigns (or "servers" in that game), but no one's sitting around in the Server Browser waiting to join one particular match for over an hour at a time when there are multiple servers open to join. It's because the campaigns are much shorter in that game (usually around half an hour). What would be the point of sitting in the queue for an hour or longer when the campaign's almost over? People spend an hour in the GH queue because they know they can still spend 2-3+ hours playing once they get in, so long as they don't disconnect. They know that they can keep doing this day after day, and keep contributing to their personal score and their alliance's score in the campaign.

the only other game ive played occasionally for pvp is planetside 2, which oddly enough has a lot of similarities with ESO (it has a 3 faction pvp fight, large map requiring travel on vehicles or takes forever) but it also has things which fix problems that ESO has

the big things that i think it does better:

• faction balance queue - it locks a factions population behind a queue if they are outnumbering the other factions (tries to encourage people to switch factions to get in without a queue)
• when the campaign reaches a certain population threshold, it starts a 90 minute timer before the campaign ends, whichever faction controls the most control points at the end of the timer "wins", but everyone gets rewarded as long as they participated enough before the timer ends (rewards vary depending on 1st, 2nd ,3rd place, but are generally pretty good regardless)
• each "campaign" is actually a fully different map to provide some variety (kind of works like your idea almost of splitting cyro into smaller segments)

I've never played Planetside 2, but those ideas definitely sound like they could work, especially in the context of a shorter campaign. That 90 minute timer in particular sounds interesting, and could introduce a fun "scramble to cap and defend as many keeps as you can" element before the time is up. Out of curiosity though, what happens if that population threshold is never met? Is there a set duration for each campaign irrespective of the pop threshold?

i dont know all of the details about what starts the timer, i know i remember it mentioned that population was one trigger

they do have multiple maps (i think 4 maps, or basically 4 different campaigns) and they do dynamically open more/less as they have populations

so if its more off hours, it might only have 1 campaign map open at a time

the way the maps work is that when it first opens, you can only contest a very small amount of the map (each faction is on 1 side of the map equidistant from each other) with basically a line of capture areas to a center area, its random which faction starts with the central area

as more people go into the map, more of the map opens up to become capturable, and then at some point, it will put up the "alert" timer which is for locking the map

i remember playing at times when there were times between the map control alert that they also had "mini alerts" come up too, which were like 30-40 min timer alerts for like "kill X number of enemy MAX units" or "15 min alert where all aircraft vehicles were free to spawn" that would usually give some award to the faction which did the best

honestly planetside 2 is i think of for "ideal" pvp, especially for a 3 faction environment, of which ESO already shares many similarities, but ESO definitely needs to iron things out a bit better

Muizer

Aurielle wrote: »

Some reasons why players right now might choose to join the dominant faction with the current rulesets in place:

1. They want the 1st place end of campaign rewards (silly reason, IMO, because the rewards are pretty lackluster).
2. They don't want a challenge and just want to farm AP in peace.
3. If the winning alliance is already leading by a significant margin, they know their efforts would be wasted if they played for one of the losing alliances, as the campaign is way too long and big score gaps only tend to get bigger (the "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" idea).

I don't think these issues go away without drastically changing the way Cyrodiil works. Significantly shorter faction-locked campaigns where you can't even see the scoreboard before you join the instance would probably fix a lot of the population imbalance problems.

All of these seem related to scoring. So here's the thing I am wondering. Outside of being a reward system plagued by perverse incentives where a monochrome map is the stable end-state, what positive thing does a scored campaign add to the Cyrodiil experience on a day to day basis?

DirtyDeeds765

If you guys like the idea of writing paragraphs upon paragraphs theorycrafting how to make Cyrodiil better, by all means.

But deep down you know the only real fix is... the only real fix.

This game has its foundation in almost 20 year old software.. being bound by 12 year old hardware.

The only way to fix Cyrodiil, and ESO period, is a real ground up remake and the removal of support for last gen consoles.. I mean we are already halfway to the PS6..... Think about that.

A report came out recently saying that ESO brings in 15 million a month. That's almost 200m a year. There's no way their expenses are over 50m a year. Take 100m or so and remake the game. Invest in your product. Alot of people didn't leave the game because they didn't like it - they left the game because it wasn't being maintained and treated properly.

They are obviously (mostly) doing the bare minimum for the game. Hold their feet to the fire. Posts like this just give them an out.

@DirtyDeeds765

Joy_Division

@Aurielle

You are talking to someone has made numerous lengthy, comprehensive, thought out suggestions to ZOS to improve Cyrodiil.

Most recent: https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/659374/why-raising-cyrodiils-population-caps-will-make-pvp-more-attractive-to-the-general-population#latest

Here's one form 2017: https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/357550/101-suggestions-to-make-cyrodiil-pvp-great-again/p1

Here's a 2016 plea even trying to avoid harming PvE: https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/308586/things-that-can-invigorate-pvp-that-do-not-mess-up-pve/p1

I hear what you are saying about not throwing our hands in the air. About trying to make what we have work. I really do.

It's not just about ZOS's apathy toward broken things like RoA and HoT/Shield stacking. Or that they can;t even be bothered to tell us their analysis of the population cap test (which made Cyrodiil enjoyable). The number one problem I see for ZOS's PvP is that it is incredibly unfriendly and intimidating to inexperienced players: it's dominated by builds and groups that are perceived to be unkillable by the general population (and there is some truth to that perception).
.
There have been a number of suggestions to do what you suggest. But with a smaller population and a smaller map, that just exacerbates the problem: the fewer players there are, the less randomness there is, the less opportunity for inexperienced players to do anything useful before being destroyed. This obviously is especially so if there are organized groups (whether ball group or small-scale).

If I had to suggest a trimmed down version of Cyrodiil, then I would just take the best parts of it and make them instanced. Probably the best thing about Cyordiil are the keep sieges/defenses. Just take a keep, redesign it so it actually favors the defenders (as opposed to make them sitting ducks to siege), figure out an ideal number of players, and give the attackers 20 minutes to capture it or they lose. Or just take some terrain such as Alessia gate to the top of the hill past Alessia Bridge: the team that breaks through and reaches the other side wins. Max group size four. Put RoA in a fire to die. These are smaller, but they avoid the biggest problem in Cyrodiil: there isn't anything for inexperienced/casual players to do. Newer players will still get destroyed, but at least in this format it is clear what to do and they might convince themselves that they did something useful since there are a lot of players in a small area means some are bound to die. It's certainly more exciting than sitting in a keep waiting for action, just so they can go to a resource tower and chase pros long enough that their dinner gets cold, only to wind up dying ingloriously.

tomofhyrule

As someone who doesn't PvP much at all, and prefers Cyrodiil when I have to...

I'm so over it. Honestly, I'm at the point that if they just removed PvP from the game, it'd only be an improvement.

ESO PvP has been on a downward spiral for a while, and the main reason is that PvP is only getting sweatier and sweatier, thereby making it less and less accessible to the playerbase who is not that into it in the first place. If a player is going to PvE, there's a whole range of areas that they can go to - overland for the ultra casuals, then delves, public dungeons, group dungeons (basegame and then DLC), and then trials, the latter each with a normal, and vet, and HM. It's very easy to find something within your skillset. But for PvP, the only option is "I want to play against the best players," which is not good for retention at all.

There's also no impetus to balance the campaigns either, which is another factor cutting people off from even going in in the first place. There are countless threads that consoles can't even get full bars at primetime, while PC's got the problem where people will sit for hours in the Grey Host queue instead of going into one of the other campaigns, which means those other campaigns end up horribly unbalanced. There are very few times that those campaigns are not a total sweep of one alliance or the other, and many usually end up as two-way fights with one of the three alliances basically nonexistent. That is also a continual feedback loop, since if the third alliance never has anything to do, then people who main that alliance are basically barred from that campaign and are forced to sit in the queue for another.

Here's an anecdote - my main is EP on PCNA. We had the "repair stuff in Cyro" endeavor earlier this week, so I went into Grey Host early evening that day and just found a wall to repair, and I managed to get in on a resource flip as well. In total, I made about 1.8k AP from the resource and about 2k from repairing a wall, but we were also being pushed back and I wasn't there to stick around, so I left after about 10-15 minutes. A day or two later, I went in again with two of my friends to actually do some PvP. We were being pushed back in Grey Host again and managed a single resource flip before a group of 6-8 actual PvPers came in to wipe us, and EP was getting squashed on two sides so we just went to Ravenwatch, where the entire map was one color and all alliances were on 1 bar. But even as we tried to take the resources right outside of our base, a group of about 3-4 PvPers from the other alliance came up to wipe us and prevent us from even getting a foothold - there was nothing on that map for that alliance to do, and they managed to get to a keep that they can't transitus to before we could even take a single resource, so it means that these people were just sitting at those keeps waiting to pick off players instead of going to look for PvP in a populated campaign. We didn't have a chance there so we went to Blackreach, which was the same story with the other alliance.

So, in 30 minutes of trying to PvP across three campaigns, we made a grand total of 1.8k AP. I made 2k a day or so before by repairing walls. So... what's the best thing for me to do to earn AP then?

It seems like the campaigns need some identity. For all of the "We want PvP, not PvD!" on the forums, there are sure a lot of players who will camp these empty campaigns and just pick off players to disallow them from even gaining a foothold, which means they're not earning AP because there are really no major fights or captures. That also funnels everyone from the underdog alliance into the only campaign where they're not absolutely being crushed, but even then they're only doing mediocre. As a player for plays on that alliance, if my choice is "go into Cyrodiil and die on repeat and not earn AP" or "don't bother PvPing," I know exactly which way I'm going, and it's the same way that most casual players will also take.

What Cyro really needs is a way to encourage people to play other alliances. The scoring bonus system should be dynamic and give AP bonuses to alliances who are lower scores (not only if one is crushing the other two, since mostly you end up with two even and the third with less than half the score) to encourage players to come in on the underdog alliance. Maybe even add an AP penalty if on alliance is untouchable to discourage people from being too loyal to a specific alliance to try to balance the campaigns. A dynamic population cap would also be nice, so if you have 40 players from one alliance and 5 from the other two, it'll stop people from entering on the high alliance but still be open for the others.

The other problem is player-generated. If the only people you meet in PvP are unkillable ball groups or the Warden tank/bursty friend tower-jumper combos, then that's making it almost impossible for more casual PvPers to get into anything. Everyone likes to say that "Oh, you'll die in PvP, but it's so much fun when you start to win!" but when you are at the point when you can never win because you can never take out the others... well, that's never fun and that just drives people away.

I've decided that I'm never touching PvP in this game outside of events again. BG queue times are too long and the MMR is bull since it only looks at how many games you played since back in 2020 (hopefully that'll be addressed in the next update) and it's impossible to play casually with friends, IC is just PvE with the added bonus of being able to get ganked and lose your stuff, and Cyrodiil has now lost all its casual players and is only playable for hardcore players on specific alliances. Even the last PvP event was so much less fun than usual since it was harder and harder to find a campaign where my alliance wasn't being absolutely steamrolled, or even has some presence whatsoever.

It seems like, for all the warnings people have given on the forums that the PvP population is dying, that the hardcore PvP base is still as it always was... but the less-sweaty people who want to just go in to be cannon fodder for those hardcore players is what decided to leave. And I don't blame them. I don't consider it fun to make zero progress and just be someone else's AP farm, when I could earn just as much AP from playing Tales of Tribute (aka zero). I'll stick to PvE until someone wants to try to make Cyrodiil more accessible to players outside the 1% of PvPers.

Aurielle

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

Aurielle wrote: »

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

Aurielle wrote: »

ArchMikem wrote: »

Aurielle wrote: »

[*]It takes too long to enter popular campaigns during prime time. Who likes hour-long, 100+ player queues? No one.

That point is fixed and made moot by an incredibly simple and obvious solution.

Take your 100 player Queue, and go to an empty Camp.

"But why would I ever want to play in an empty Camp??"

If all of you went to that Camp, then it's suddenly not empty anymore.

And this is something that does happen in other PVP games with short campaigns that don't last for thirty days. It doesn't happen here, because the score tends to be closer on GH and that's where people feel they'll find the best fights. If a campaign is only two hours long, no one is going to sit in the queue for an hour or longer and then only be able to play for an hour or less before the campaign ends and they get kicked out of the map. They're going to join one of the other dynamically created instances with free slots.

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

Aurielle wrote: »

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

Aurielle wrote: »

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

i dont think reducing population caps is a good idea unless you disabled grouping entirely

a 12 man ball group in a 30-45 player pop cap would be nigh unkillable, as it can already take 45+ people to kill them sometimes, if you reduced the population cap, it would just empower ball groups and they would be truly unkillable unless they ran into another ball group

the way ive come to estimate it, is unless its a really bad group, you need between 3 and 4x more players than what is actually in the group to kill it, for a 12 person group, this would be 36-48 players minimum needed to kill an avg to above average ball group

if your population cap was 30 players, even with the entire faction stacked they might not be able to kill that ball group and you would be locked into an eternal fight, or it would push more people to leave the campaign

and with a population cap of 30, thats enough room for 2 full ball groups per faction still, it would be nothing but ball groups in cyro at that point

the only way ive seen to really counter ball groups was higher population caps to overwhelm them, like back when they were doing the increased population cap test last year

this isnt good for performance sure, but in a lower population setting ball groups and cheese builds reign supreme because there isnt enough people to counter them, unless they are also running ball groups and cheese builds

That's why I also suggested making more use of Battle Spirit to balance the game. You wouldn't need 45+ people to take out a 12 person ballgroup if said ballgroup did not have as much freedom to stack shields and heals. Moreover, you SHOULDN'T need that many players. Ballgroups should have some advantages over unorganized zergs, but never so many advantages that they need more than triple their numbers to take them out. That's completely unhealthy, and not a reason to increase Cyrodiil's population cap at the expense of performance, IMO.

Also, with a cap of thirty players per alliance per instance, it would actually be less likely that multiple ball groups would end up in the same instance on the same alliance; after all, they'd be competing against a much larger number of solo players for a much smaller number of available slots. And even if multiple ballgroups did end up in the same instance on the same alliance, they'd likely end up shooting themselves in the foot if they tried to farm ungrouped or less organized players -- especially if those players had the option of leaving the instance and joining another instance where there AREN'T stacked ballgroups ruining everyone's fun. Right now, we don't have that option -- we either deal with the fun-sapping stacked ballgroups, or we leave Cyrodiil to do something else.

oh i completely agree that you shouldnt need that many people to take out a ball group

personally i prefer the larger populations, a 60v60v60 3 way keep fight while a lot of chaos, is what i imagine from pvp, i dont really enjoy "small scaling" which i see is basically what BGs role is, if the pop caps were reduced to 30 and the campaign 2 hours, your basically in 1 really long slightly more populated BG, which i would not see as fun

in order to do that though need higher populations

i do agree with other points you brought up, such as the huge distances between objectives (my main pvp toon is a NB that ive neglected mount training on, so i just run everywhere)

other points such as campaign score i could care less about, and what would you do about campaign rewards for a 2 hour campaign? right now 80% of the reason anyone who doesnt prefer pvp goes to cyro is for the transmute crystals, but theres no way zos would give 50 transmutes for 2 hour camp (they only give like 10 for the 7 day camps during the events for example)

I also prefer larger populations, but I think we might have to give up on that idea if we want decent performance. It sucks approaching big keep battles in Cyrodiil right now and disconnecting as soon as you come within range of the action, or hearing combat music cutting in and out like a scratchy radio station because the game simply cannot handle that many players in the same location. 45 vs 45 vs 45 might be the most the servers can handle right now. In an ideal world, they rebuild the engine and get population numbers back to where they used to be, but I simply do not have faith in ZOS doing that anymore.

As for scoring and rewards, I didn't really delve into that, but I obviously don't expect ZOS to reward 50 transmutes for a single two hour campaign. Each campaign instance would have its own individual scoreboard (specific only to that campaign, a la BG scoreboards), but there would be a global leaderboard that tracks total AP gain for the month. The global leaderboard could function exactly like the 30 day campaign leaderboard does right now: 25k AP for tier 1 rewards, 50k AP for tier 2, so on.

personally if the populations were any less than they are now, i dont know if i would even really bother actually pvping much lol

if the reward tiers were separate and awarded separately, it would probably make me care even less about the score of the campaign (of which i have no interest in it now lol), at best i think it would just recycle emps faster

other big problems i notice is population balance issues on camps that arent fully locked across all factions, and people unwilling to go to other camps even though grey host is full (the "i cant get into the campaign because its a 50+ person queue" people)

That's fair, I knew a lot of people would hate the idea of reducing caps even further when I suggested it. I do think it would work, though, for those of us who enjoy larger scale siege battles, but want better performance. Having upwards of 90 players converging in the same area is still fun and epic, IMO.

As for people being unwilling to go to other camps, I really do think that would be solved by shorter campaign lengths. The reluctance to move over to other campaigns right now typically boils down to "all my friends play on Gray Host" or "I've invested too much time on Gray Host." Month long campaigns are a little ridiculous when you look at other PVP games...

I played a lot of Battlefield in my FPS days, prior to the travesty that was BF2042. BF players also tend to prefer full or close to full campaigns (or "servers" in that game), but no one's sitting around in the Server Browser waiting to join one particular match for over an hour at a time when there are multiple servers open to join. It's because the campaigns are much shorter in that game (usually around half an hour). What would be the point of sitting in the queue for an hour or longer when the campaign's almost over? People spend an hour in the GH queue because they know they can still spend 2-3+ hours playing once they get in, so long as they don't disconnect. They know that they can keep doing this day after day, and keep contributing to their personal score and their alliance's score in the campaign.

the only other game ive played occasionally for pvp is planetside 2, which oddly enough has a lot of similarities with ESO (it has a 3 faction pvp fight, large map requiring travel on vehicles or takes forever) but it also has things which fix problems that ESO has

the big things that i think it does better:

• faction balance queue - it locks a factions population behind a queue if they are outnumbering the other factions (tries to encourage people to switch factions to get in without a queue)
• when the campaign reaches a certain population threshold, it starts a 90 minute timer before the campaign ends, whichever faction controls the most control points at the end of the timer "wins", but everyone gets rewarded as long as they participated enough before the timer ends (rewards vary depending on 1st, 2nd ,3rd place, but are generally pretty good regardless)
• each "campaign" is actually a fully different map to provide some variety (kind of works like your idea almost of splitting cyro into smaller segments)

I've never played Planetside 2, but those ideas definitely sound like they could work, especially in the context of a shorter campaign. That 90 minute timer in particular sounds interesting, and could introduce a fun "scramble to cap and defend as many keeps as you can" element before the time is up. Out of curiosity though, what happens if that population threshold is never met? Is there a set duration for each campaign irrespective of the pop threshold?

i dont know all of the details about what starts the timer, i know i remember it mentioned that population was one trigger

they do have multiple maps (i think 4 maps, or basically 4 different campaigns) and they do dynamically open more/less as they have populations

so if its more off hours, it might only have 1 campaign map open at a time

the way the maps work is that when it first opens, you can only contest a very small amount of the map (each faction is on 1 side of the map equidistant from each other) with basically a line of capture areas to a center area, its random which faction starts with the central area

as more people go into the map, more of the map opens up to become capturable, and then at some point, it will put up the "alert" timer which is for locking the map

i remember playing at times when there were times between the map control alert that they also had "mini alerts" come up too, which were like 30-40 min timer alerts for like "kill X number of enemy MAX units" or "15 min alert where all aircraft vehicles were free to spawn" that would usually give some award to the faction which did the best

honestly planetside 2 is i think of for "ideal" pvp, especially for a 3 faction environment, of which ESO already shares many similarities, but ESO definitely needs to iron things out a bit better

That sounds fun. Maybe I should be playing that game instead of this one.

DirtyDeeds765 wrote: »

If you guys like the idea of writing paragraphs upon paragraphs theorycrafting how to make Cyrodiil better, by all means.

But deep down you know the only real fix is... the only real fix.

This game has its foundation in almost 20 year old software.. being bound by 12 year old hardware.

The only way to fix Cyrodiil, and ESO period, is a real ground up remake and the removal of support for last gen consoles.. I mean we are already halfway to the PS6..... Think about that.

A report came out recently saying that ESO brings in 15 million a month. That's almost 200m a year. There's no way their expenses are over 50m a year. Take 100m or so and remake the game. Invest in your product. Alot of people didn't leave the game because they didn't like it - they left the game because it wasn't being maintained and treated properly.

They are obviously (mostly) doing the bare minimum for the game. Hold their feet to the fire. Posts like this just give them an out.

@DirtyDeeds765

How many ten year old games have completely rebuilt their engine? Because that is what's necessary to return Cyrodiil to its former glory. A full rebuild from the ground up. I'm generally an optimist, but I'm sorry, it's not happening. I read that report too, and I agree it's shameful that the game is in this state when it's making that much money. Holding their feet to the fire hasn't achieved anything, however. Cyrodiil right now is the easily the least fun it has ever been. Rather than reminiscing about how good it used to be, rather than waste effort asking for the game engine to be rebuilt, I'd rather suggest realistic changes that could make the experience more enjoyable again.

Joy_Division wrote: »

@Aurielle

You are talking to someone has made numerous lengthy, comprehensive, thought out suggestions to ZOS to improve Cyrodiil.

Most recent: https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/659374/why-raising-cyrodiils-population-caps-will-make-pvp-more-attractive-to-the-general-population#latest

Here's one form 2017: https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/357550/101-suggestions-to-make-cyrodiil-pvp-great-again/p1

Here's a 2016 plea even trying to avoid harming PvE: https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/308586/things-that-can-invigorate-pvp-that-do-not-mess-up-pve/p1

I hear what you are saying about not throwing our hands in the air. About trying to make what we have work. I really do.

It's not just about ZOS's apathy toward broken things like RoA and HoT/Shield stacking. Or that they can;t even be bothered to tell us their analysis of the population cap test (which made Cyrodiil enjoyable). The number one problem I see for ZOS's PvP is that it is incredibly unfriendly and intimidating to inexperienced players: it's dominated by builds and groups that are perceived to be unkillable by the general population (and there is some truth to that perception).
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There have been a number of suggestions to do what you suggest. But with a smaller population and a smaller map, that just exacerbates the problem: the fewer players there are, the less randomness there is, the less opportunity for inexperienced players to do anything useful before being destroyed. This obviously is especially so if there are organized groups (whether ball group or small-scale).

If I had to suggest a trimmed down version of Cyrodiil, then I would just take the best parts of it and make them instanced. Probably the best thing about Cyordiil are the keep sieges/defenses. Just take a keep, redesign it so it actually favors the defenders (as opposed to make them sitting ducks to siege), figure out an ideal number of players, and give the attackers 20 minutes to capture it or they lose. Or just take some terrain such as Alessia gate to the top of the hill past Alessia Bridge: the team that breaks through and reaches the other side wins. Max group size four. Put RoA in a fire to die. These are smaller, but they avoid the biggest problem in Cyrodiil: there isn't anything for inexperienced/casual players to do. Newer players will still get destroyed, but at least in this format it is clear what to do and they might convince themselves that they did something useful since there are a lot of players in a small area means some are bound to die. It's certainly more exciting than sitting in a keep waiting for action, just so they can go to a resource tower and chase pros long enough that their dinner gets cold, only to wind up dying ingloriously.

@Joy_Division , when I encouraged you to avoid defeatism re: pop caps, I wasn't questioning your history of making suggestions to improve Cyrodiil, so I'm not really sure why you brought that all up. I also have a long history of suggestions to improve PVP in this game. In fact, I basically posted more or less this exact same thread four years ago when I still played on console.

But back on topic, I fail to see how a smaller map with smaller population caps would exacerbate existing issues if at the same time there was a concerted effort to rebalance gear sets and group behaviors that are known to be broken in Cyrodiil. You couldn't have one (reduced pop caps) without the other (major rebalancing tied to Battle Spirit). My suggestion of 30 players per alliance was merely to improve performance AND avoid the issue of guilds stacking multiple ball groups or coordinated groups in one location. But if you feel that's too low of a number, then maybe 45 or even 60 players per alliance could work without affecting game performance -- except then you're back to dealing with multiple stacked ballgroups or coordinated guild groups in one location, and relying on pug zergs to take them out. If that's what you guys want, then by all means, suggest those numbers to ZOS instead.

All new and inexperienced players in any PVP game suffer a bit until they learn to play, so I disagree that this is the number one problem for ZOS to address. The number one problem is, and long has been, performance.

https://youtu.be/xZ46xn_6Pfg

The above is not what large scale objective-based capture/defend PVP is supposed to look like.

https://youtu.be/TcQeteMEpaw

The above is. Would people play the above if literally no hits were registering for multiple seconds at a time? If multiple squads were disconnecting? Of course they wouldn't.

The number one reason I've always seen for people rage quitting Cyrodiil in the groups I play in is not unkillable tanks or ballgroups -- it's unplayable performance. People rage quit because they can't barswap due to terrible performance and die. People rage quit because their burst rotation fails to go off, and an enemy player who should have died lives to fight another day. People rage quit because they disconnect while defending a scroll and can't get back into the game. The problem builds don't help, of course, but they can be balanced better if ZOS actually tries to address the concerns we have about particular sets and ridiculous mechanics like HoT and shield stacking.

Respectfully, reducing Cyrodiil to a single keep fight or a bridge fight with a max group size of four would be terrible. I certainly wouldn't play it. We can still have the larger scale sandbox-type battles we have right now without the crippling performance issues that drive people away if we reduce map sizes, slightly reduce population caps, and finally balance the ballgroups and other problem group comps.