NA Auriels Bow, campaign hopping, and PvP for the future

Rylana

Hello friends. After a couple weeks checking out the various campaigns I have come to a few conclusions as well as a found more than a few problems which I am sure some already know of.

For starters, there is some sort of mentality here in ESO PvP that Cyrodiil is only meant to be used to gain bonuses and so forth for one overpopulated faction that controls the entire map. Campaigns have been set aside for this purpose where say AD controls the whole thing (Auriels Bow, Dawnbreaker before about a week ago, etc) with only token resistance.

The core issue here is the fast campaign switching. it only costs 15,000 AP to switch home campaign, which is a drop in the bucket, that can be gained in 20 minutes of solid fighting or just taking a couple of keeps.

Due to this, AB has become swamped with easily a 5-1 odds situation in which EP or DC have effectively zero chance of making any headway into anything on the server. I have watched them try, I have watched them fail. Some are good players I have grown to respect on other campaigns as well.

But there is more, due to the fact the AB emperor left the campaign, AB is stuck in a situation where it is impossible to crown another emperor. EP or DC would have to take all six imperial keeps first and crown their own before AD could put another back up. Because EP/DC are crushed at their spawns or gate keeps immediately, the chances of this ever happening are slim to none. The "need" to keep crit bonuses and e-peen bragging for 100 percenting the entire map is superceding the good of the whole faction homed on this campaign. There are even guest yellows joining AB on a daily basis just to troll our own faction and prevent EP/DC from making any headway.

There are three major issues that need addressed here, and I will propose three solutions to address them directly.

1. It is too likely for one faction to overcrowd a campaign and severely outnumber the other two. Solution - cap the number of players allowed into a campaign at no more than 1.5x the combined number of the other two factions present at any one time. This means there could never be more than 150 AD players in AB if there are less than 100 EP/DC players on. This would also help spread people around to the other campaigns that are one sided, homogenizing the playerbase a bit and shutting down the "all of one faction on each campaign" mentality taking place.

2. If an emperor leaves the campaign and abdicates, the emperorship is then locked until another faction claims all imperial keeps. On campaigns that suffer overpopulation problems, this makes emperorship effectively unobtainable by virtue of its own dominant faction. Solution: After 6 hours if no one has been crowned emperor, but all six keeps are held, the next in line should automatically move into emperor position.

3. Currently you can change campaign as often as you can acquire 15000 AP and wait 24 hours before switching. This is far too soon, there should be a 1 week timer installed on home campaign switching as well as a quadrupling of the AP requirement. 7 days, 60,000 AP to switch home campaign and also add a limit of ONE home switch every 90 days. Guest campaigns would be unaffected.


See you in game.

Lord_Draevan

ZOS has said that the 15k AP cost to switch will be restored to what is was in Beta, 200k AP, though they haven't said when. I think there was also a 7 day timer for home campaigns in Beta, but I'm not sure.
Honestly, I didn't expect the first 90-day round of campaigns to be very good. The game is still full of bugs, glitches, exploits/exploiters and such. Hopefully next round will be better and ZOS will find a way to balance the PvP.
The 1.5 campaign balance suggestion you put forth would indeed help things greatly.

Mends_from_Shadows

Pretty hilarious you AD in Auriel's Bow get stuck w/ no Emperor. Hope it stays that way forever.

thelg

200k is a good starting point, every next switch should be double that. Also just disable guesting it give all AP gained 50%debuff

Mends_from_Shadows

Last two big guilds in AB Ebonheart are switching campaign. Have fun playing by yourselves AD.

MaximillianDiE

We're AD and have been guesting on other servers for the past week. Its not much fun from our side either... Shame to see you go Mends_from_Shadows you and your group are good players and a fun fight

Rylana

Pretty sure I heard the name mends from shadows called in TS more than a few times tonight when we were rolling the emperor group while retaking the whole map.

Why leave? PvP tonight was actually pretty epic once EP took the keeps and the vets jumped back in.

Mends_from_Shadows

I haven't left. Although I'm seriously considering switching to Wabbajack with basically the top 3 Ebonheart players on the leaderboard.

I was mostly referring to Elite Guard and Guild of Shadows leaving, since they were two of the biggest EP guilds.

Tonight was fun, but we were only able to get that done due to the planning by Zazeer, the GM of GoS. He was the one who organized guilds from other campaigns to come help us take Emperor. Shortly after we lost emperor they transferred to Scourge (same place Elite Guard went).

(and yeah for once in my life in Auriel's Bow I was actually getting focused as I heal. so gj)

xxslam48xxb14_ESO

Well good news auriels bow it looks like all the ad left to go ruin wabbajack! Guess they werent happy just having one campaign to ruin, now they have two! Hurray for campaign switching right?

mjspnrb18_ESO

Hey everyone I would just like to say that its a shame that both EG and my guild (GoS) were forced to withdraw from Auriels Bow as we were the last standing guilds, I had hoped that by pushing and throning our Emperor we would draw some of our players back to Auriels and make it a fun campaign to play for each side once again, however we had barely gotten emperor before AD guilds were brought in from other campaigns to wipe us and as such we did not even have time to notify EP players elsewhere, Guild Of Shadows & Elite Guard both loved fighting the regular AD guilds and I'm sure you guys enjoyed the challenge of combat we provided however in the end the fight at Auriels was futile and having crowned our emperor our job had been done so we have now moved elsewhere and already freed another campaign from being all yellow to completely red, and most likely we will pull back to our half of the map to keep this campaign a fair fighting ground. - Zazeer

galiumb16_ESO

There are a few pretty obvious solutions in my opinion:

1) get rid of half the campaigns, your options for an active campaign are pretty limited because we have to many people spread out over empty campaigns which creates the view that PvP is dying and its empty. Everyone on those campaigns can set their home to a new server.

2) after a couple weeks letting this settle out, reset the Home campaign costs to what they were in beta, this is planned I assume at some point anyways.

3) Change guesting so that as a guest, or someone that traveled to player, you are not able to join a campaign when your alliance has some amount more people than the other alliances in that campaign, at that point in time. Home folks log in normally, guest folks cannot.

4) Increasing rewards for underdog. This is coming, so it should help with some of the server stacking issues.

As a player I guest far more than I am on my home campaign, but we go where the fight is, our alliance is losing and we have a target rich environment. The only reason we guest is because our home campaign after careful selection got flooded by folks from our alliance, making it boring to play most of the time. I would hate to lose that opportunity because of so many other folks that are just campaign stacking for easy dominating.

To me the focus should be on getting this stuff worked out now, with this campaign series. It is a mess anyways, rather see them try a bunch of stuff now, see what works and doesn't work, so that the next 90 day round is well positioned.

Mends_from_Shadows

Not bad suggestions but at this point I'm pretty much expecting Zenimax to do nothing. They may as well release in every patch notes that they don't give a *** about PvPers.

Nooblet

xxslam48xxb14_ESO wrote: »

Well good news auriels bow it looks like all the ad left to go ruin wabbajack! Guess they werent happy just having one campaign to ruin, now they have two! Hurray for campaign switching right?

How is switching from a super overpopulated alliance on one campaign to a lesser population on another a bad thing?

Please explain your logic.... I swapped for a more balanced atmosphere.

Mends_from_Shadows

Maybe if you guys switched earlier it would have mattered. But now all the AD abandoning ship elsewhere is probably just going to ruin that server too. Pretty much expecting you guys to go ruin whatever campaign you decide to go in just like AB.

Lord_Draevan

Nooblet wrote: »

Please explain your logic.... I swapped for a more balanced atmosphere.

I think he's concerned that what happened on Auriel's Bow, i.e the AD being at High or Full pop 24/7 causing every non-AD to abandon it, is going to happen on Wabbajack.

jamesmw_ESO

Easiest way to solve the problem is to drop down to three campaigns. This would probably be bad press so they won't do it.

Infraction

As long as they don't lock AD 24/7 on Wabbajack that campaign will be fine. All the off hous non US primetime players need to get on a server so they aren't PvDooring the campaigns to low pop.

Rylana

The irony of all of this is I just joined AB three/four days ago. Good thing im guested to Wabba, i guess? PvP needs to stop moving around and stay in one spot >=/

Avidus

The idea of campaign swapping is entirely so you can play with friends, however we suffer from people who feel that they are supposed to swap campaigns and win all of them.

Guilds need to find a server, and stick to it.
If another guild is losing on another server? Why jump across and do everything for them, all this does is starts the campaign swinging game.
At the moment Zazeer is one of very few people with enough influence to attempt to halt this madness, but he cannot influence AD and DC. So while EP are currently fighting to create a more balanced campaign, AD are fighting for a monopoly of all of the campaigns.

So really guys, take a step back, by allowing equal competition, we all get what we want, we all get more AP, we all have more fun.
Lets stop this one sided madness, let things even out, then wreck each other as we are supposed to.

xxslam48xxb14_ESO

Wabbajack was pretty good earlier today even with the massive influx of auriel's bow players. Ep and ad were both at 2 bars pop and we still kicked the auriels back to their server. I know they left too because when we took most of their keeps their pop went down to one bar and then auriels bow went back up to three, its was an awesome sight to behold!

In other words what im trying to say is my last post was a bit too hasty. The ad people from auriels bow are not a big threat due to the fact they are coming to a real pvp server after living the good life playing pvwall. Yeah thats some smack talk, come at us ab!

"I think he's concerned that what happened on Auriel's Bow, i.e the AD being at High or Full pop 24/7 causing every non-AD to abandon it, is going to happen on Wabbajack."

Yeah I was for a bit because I logged on today and ad had almost the whole map when I commented on here. Im on early too when we normally have most of the map, so I knew something was not right!

vanzan

Well it started yesterday in my timezone. AD zerg with all the new AB x-fers just rolled the map. Within 1 hour of this both DC and EP just logged dropping to 1 bar vs AD 3 bars for the first time. Every small marker on the map had a huge AD zerg turn up.

How long before this campaign turns into a PvD zone?

jeradlub17_ESO

Mends_from_Shadows wrote: »

Last two big guilds in AB Ebonheart are switching campaign. Have fun playing by yourselves AD.

I've been very disappointed with the guilds tucking tail and running from AB. Makes me lose all respect for them. It just makes the problem worse for the EP trying to stay and tough it out. Not a nice thing to do to your friends. A better solution would have been to recruit guilds from other servers to come join us on AB and even the fight out or simply be patient and see what ESO finally does to even it up. I would like to see people toughen up, have some spine, and stick it out on AB. Call in other guilds from other servers and show AD we aren't going to lay down or run away.

If ESO had simply used my idea of capping server entry rates at 10% over the lowest population so the servers fill at approximately the same rate evenly for each side instead of only having a total population cap it wouldn't be an issue. Drop to 3 servers with the entry rate limits and remove the home/guest restrictions they would fill smoothly without issue. But they needed to do this weeks ago instead of sitting on their hands. That and stop the scroll swap cheaters that we reported. The latter seemed to be the real nail in the coffin that made a lot want to leave cause after we did good and got it back they cheated to retake them and nothing was done. Thanks ESO.

Lord_Draevan

jeradlub17_ESO wrote: »

Mends_from_Shadows wrote: »

Last two big guilds in AB Ebonheart are switching campaign. Have fun playing by yourselves AD.

I've been very disappointed with the guilds tucking tail and running from AB. Makes me lose all respect for them. It just makes the problem worse for the EP trying to stay and tough it out. Not a nice thing to do to your friends. A better solution would have been to recruit guilds from other servers to come join us on AB and even the fight out or simply be patient and see what ESO finally does to even it up. I would like to see people toughen up, have some spine, and stick it out on AB. Call in other guilds from other servers and show AD we aren't going to lay down or run away.

I can't speak for other EP guilds, but mine and its sister-guild tried recruiting for Auriel's since early April and we barely got anyone. Sticking it out through rough patches is one thing, but after over a month of constant AD domination and off-hour map zerging, sorry, we had enough. We left AB and are having a blast on Scourge and Wabbajack.
The simple fact the AD doesn't zerg the map with overwhelming numbers every night on those servers like they do on Auriel's makes it sssoooo much better.
Luckily Auriel's is starting to even itself out. For the past few days the AD hasn't gone above Medium population. Hope it's not just a ruse to lure EP and DC back...

jeradlub17_ESO

Lord_Draevan wrote: »

I can't speak for other EP guilds, but mine and its sister-guild tried recruiting for Auriel's since early April and we barely got anyone. Sticking it out through rough patches is one thing, but after over a month of constant AD domination and off-hour map zerging, sorry, we had enough. We left AB and are having a blast on Scourge and Wabbajack.
The simple fact the AD doesn't zerg the map with overwhelming numbers every night on those servers like they do on Auriel's makes it sssoooo much better.
Luckily Auriel's is starting to even itself out. For the past few days the AD hasn't gone above Medium population. Hope it's not just a ruse to lure EP and DC back...

Yeah don't get me wrong cause I fully understand the frustration as I feel it myself. Being that we don't have server boards, I'm not 100% certain what the best recruitment tactic would be outside of maybe guesting and talking in channel. The AD have been leaving AB and following where others are going it seems so their population on AB has reduced but now we are badly outnumbered still because despite their population drop we also lost folks. Had they stayed we might be about even now.

Soven

Feel free to call me wrong, I don’t PVP much in US prime time but when I did it was a story of AD getting their butts kicks. So during prime time you had a ton of area to take back isn’t that fun? Being on the AD I know its not fun having it all. All I can do is sit there and hope someone comes out of the staging area, or go to wabbajack where everyone went to.

Which really brings me to the point; we were 110k+ points behind to now being 78k behind. Meaning we’re catching up. It won’t happen in prime time, but when you go to bed and the AD players on wonder where the fun is at, they’ll hop on down to Wabbajack and create the exact same problem. You’re halting it, but if we actually come out with a point lead that’ll be really funny in a very sad way.

But moving on from the “you’re going to see it happen again because the player base hasn’t moved faction.” There are way too many servers; I don’t have a problem with one server for each faction and one where the PVP is, but there is a saturation that should be addressed.
Also when has forcing the population of a PVP server ever been a good idea? Think of a 10v10 battleground, but only 2 players from the other side showed up, or rather 10v10v10. So because there aren’t 8 other players at that moment or maybe that team is just unpopular you want everyone to play a 2v2v2 match? Sounds horrible.
Have fun in some PvP!

Kevaliji

From now on i refer to wabbajack as laggajack. The lag in that campaign gets so bad that it turns into light and heavy attack fights. Abilities? Who needs em.

Bergs

xxslam48xxb14_ESO wrote: »

Well good news auriels bow it looks like all the ad left to go ruin wabbajack! Guess they werent happy just having one campaign to ruin, now they have two! Hurray for campaign switching right?

AD can try and ruin Wabbajack, but it won't be easy for them. We take pride in our ganking and oil pouring!

vstadenerwb17_ESO

THIS:

1. It is too likely for one faction to overcrowd a campaign and severely outnumber the other two. Solution - cap the number of players allowed into a campaign at no more than 1.5x the combined number of the other two factions present at any one time. This means there could never be more than 150 AD players in AB if there are less than 100 EP/DC players on. This would also help spread people around to the other campaigns that are one sided, homogenizing the playerbase a bit and shutting down the "all of one faction on each campaign" mentality taking place.

Great idea.

MatosQc

Just Reduce the servers to 2-3 maximum, i would say 2, and everyone won t have choice ... and everyone will be happy to have lots of people in Cyrodil.

Soven

vstadenerwb17_ESO wrote: »

THIS:

1. It is too likely for one faction to overcrowd a campaign and severely outnumber the other two. Solution - cap the number of players allowed into a campaign at no more than 1.5x the combined number of the other two factions present at any one time. This means there could never be more than 150 AD players in AB if there are less than 100 EP/DC players on. This would also help spread people around to the other campaigns that are one sided, homogenizing the playerbase a bit and shutting down the "all of one faction on each campaign" mentality taking place.

Great idea.

But that's locking most of a single faction out of PvP. Daggerfall Covenant can lock 2 campaigns. What you're saying to them is "Well because the other factions just don't have as many people, you can only play on one realm." Is that right? Limiting the amount of campaigns is a way to address this.

dba.2000_ESO

Nooblet wrote: »

xxslam48xxb14_ESO wrote: »

Well good news auriels bow it looks like all the ad left to go ruin wabbajack! Guess they werent happy just having one campaign to ruin, now they have two! Hurray for campaign switching right?

How is switching from a super overpopulated alliance on one campaign to a lesser population on another a bad thing?

Please explain your logic.... I swapped for a more balanced atmosphere.

Are you AD? So you didn't mind the weeks of exploiting and base camping, until now, after everyone is fed up with the AD pvp crowd? And it's created so much bad blood between factions, that some of us have no desire at all to be anywhere near a map that has even 1 AD player on it.

I'll be straight with you, after what I've seen AD do on AB and now on Wabbajack, I'm probably done with the whole Elder's scroll PvP thing until Zos makes some real changes. Also, If I never see another AD player during my travel's thru ESO, I'll consider it a good thing.

And I won't be listening to any nonsense how about it 'was only a few AD Players', because that will be total bs.

Just sit back, AD, and admire your handywork.