Nightcapping

Westcoast14_ESO

A pernicious form of essentially PvE play called Nightcapping is infesting some of the campaigns currently. This vacuous play style which seems focused on deliberately avoiding PvP in Cyrodill makes defending keeps largely meaningless.

Liquid_Time

Huh?
I have not heard of this term "nightcapping", so please provide a little more information.

darkdruidssb14_ESO

Liquid_Time wrote: »

Huh?
I have not heard of this term "nightcapping", so please provide a little more information.

Night capping is a phrase people use to describe what happens at night in persistent PvP zones. Since they can't be on 24/7 they get upset that people play at different schedules and come in to undo whatever they did while they were online.. like taking all the keeps. These people usually can't grasp the meaning of persistent and how the game doesn't stop when they go to bed.

Natjur

So the other guys cap all your forts while you sleep.... Its valid, just cause they are from other country and play while you sleep does not mean its not PVP.

To them, your Nightcapping as your taking them all back while THEY sleep.

darkdruidssb14_ESO

Natjur wrote: »

So the other guys cap all your forts while you sleep.... Its valid, just cause they are from other country and play while you sleep does not mean its not PVP.

To them, your Nightcapping as your taking them all back while THEY sleep.

Right, that is the other flip side. The only realistic way players can combat this is trying to get more guilds from multiple time zones to play on their server. It's really hard to do, but not impossible. We ran global alliances in Guild Wars 2 to try to prevent the "nightcapping". It worked to a degree as many guilds like to play around the same time as others in their timezone... so you can get a 24/7 presence that way.

ArcanusMagus

darkdruidssb14_ESO wrote: »

Liquid_Time wrote: »

Huh?
I have not heard of this term "nightcapping", so please provide a little more information.

Night capping is a phrase people use to describe what happens at night in persistent PvP zones. Since they can't be on 24/7 they get upset that people play at different schedules and come in to undo whatever they did while they were online.. like taking all the keeps. These people usually can't grasp the meaning of persistent and how the game doesn't stop when they go to bed.

This.

The next thing that happens is the complainer says that nightcappers should switch servers to "make it more fair (read: more favorable to them)." Let's just skip that part by asking, "Why don't you?"

ErykGrimm

After a fabulous date with a beautiful girl, who doesn't love a good ol' fashion night cap. Amirite?

Xsorus

Nightcapping is only a problem when bad Oceanic Players decide to play on one faction because they don't like a challenge.

They should put them on *** no skills server like they use to. Instead they allow them to infest the US servers with their badness.

ArcanusMagus

xsorusb14_ESO wrote: »

Nightcapping is only a problem when bad Oceanic Players decide to play on one faction because they don't like a challenge.

They should put them on *** no skills server like they use to. Instead they allow them to infest the US servers with their badness.

Called it.

Cody

in all honesty, this cant be fixed. our nighttime may be another countries daytime, so "nightcapping" is actually invalid in all honesty:( best you can do is get guilds from different time zones, or find people that play till 5AM to play at our nighttime. its a valid tactic though, many battles in real life have been won by attacking enemies while they are unaware:)

Samadhi

xsorusb14_ESO wrote: »

Nightcapping is only a problem when bad Oceanic Players decide to play on one faction because they don't like a challenge.

They should put them on *** no skills server like they use to. Instead they allow them to infest the US servers with their badness.

Curse those bad, no-skilled players that exclusively inhabit countries outside my timezone and take over keeps while I'm asleep.
I'd certainly show them a thing or two if they weren't sleeping or afk while I was online with my awesome awesomeness.

Lord_Draevan

The extreme of this is what used to be on NA Auriel's Bow.
During NA off hours, AD would stack on there to full pop (600 players) and cap the map while EP and DC were at low pop (less than 100 players). Since we had very few people on during those hours, AD would hold the map for about 2/3s of the day. This quickly got out of hand as people deleted their characters and rolled AD "because they're winning" or switched campaigns. We tried to recruit Oceanic players to go on Auriel's but, understandably, they did want to spend their play time being outnumbered 10 to 1 by AD and either went AD or didn't go on Auriel's. Now it's at the point where the server is rarely above low pop, where it used to be locked full pop all factions most of the day.
So yeah, "get more people" is a solution, but it doesn't always work. However I'm sure this isn't the case here. I'm sure it's a group of 20-30 people max playing during NA off hours, which is fine.

Izatar

I have a solution for this problem. You have 1 server for every 2 hour timezone. The server stays up during that time, then goes down, and the next timezone comes up. This way, there is always population on the active campaign, and no goofy nightcapping. You like?

Westcoast14_ESO

When players/guilds interested in large scale pvp have to go through a lot of added effort in order for large scale pvp to emerge in the games large scale pvp zone (as opposed to some campaigns being dominated by essentially pve-centric objective exchanges), that could indicate something is a little off in the games current implementation of the large scale pvp.

Nijjion

Aussies are on NA servers so of course there's going to be night capping... the problem is AD aussies are on AB, EB aussies seem to be on Wabba and DC are on another.

DC/EB that were on AD seem to gotten tired of AD dominating at offpeaks when AD all went onto 1 server, so they went onto wabba.

Should just delete all servers except AD and Wabba and should even itself out.

Xsorus

Samadhi wrote: »

xsorusb14_ESO wrote: »

Nightcapping is only a problem when bad Oceanic Players decide to play on one faction because they don't like a challenge.

They should put them on *** no skills server like they use to. Instead they allow them to infest the US servers with their badness.

Curse those bad, no-skilled players that exclusively inhabit countries outside my timezone and take over keeps while I'm asleep.
I'd certainly show them a thing or two if they weren't sleeping or afk while I was online with my awesome awesomeness.

Being an Oceanic Player and deciding to play a faction on a NA server doesn't make you bad.

Getting together with all the other Oceanic Players so you can overload on faction and play the NA servers does make you bad...and don't say they don't do it..Because they did it in GW2, and they did it in this game.

Igolbug

Perhaps you should change your schedule to be awake to fight against the nightcappers!!

RedTalon

They could always region lock servers...ok that would be bad, but know someone had to say it.

Forztr

The problem I see with night capping , and it happens in Europe too is that 20-30 people can turn the map one colour in a few hours and it will stay that way for most of the day until populations fill up. This disproportionately rewards the side that night caps.
The next patch is going to up the strength of the NPCs guarding keeps and resources which might help stop small groups taking undefended keeps or at least slow them down.

Nijjion

RedTalon wrote: »

They could always region lock servers...ok that would be bad, but know someone had to say it.

Should they also lock them with works hours also?

We will get work cappers then when people are at work or school people still play as they might have night shifts or unemeployed!

Nidwin

Here we go again. Human paranoid stupidity (HPS) at his best.

Let's see, next step in the HPS is going to be.
EU players starting to whine about the French Canadians rolling on the EU mega- server and night capping. Thar Frogs alliance, and of course they all roll the same alliance, as all the Masters of HPS will want you to believe.
Because it's so unfair because the night capping from the people from Quebec.

Bunch of ***, because that's exactly what you are.

Tintinabula

heres a hint: Its always night time...somewhere ..I know it boggles the mind not to think that "cause its day here..Its day everywhere"...but its not.

Now hold on to your chair tight..Im gonna blow your mind even more.

While you're capping keeps in your day time..someone is asleep in their night time and they're wondering why YOU are taking advantage of them being asleep.. DOH!

I know, I know..crazy as it sounds...the gaming world doesn't revolve around your sleep patterns.

Samadhi

Nidwin wrote: »

Here we go again. Human paranoid stupidity (HPS) at his best.

Let's see, next step in the HPS is going to be.
EU players starting to whine about the French Canadians rolling on the EU mega- server and night capping. Thar Frogs alliance, and of course they all roll the same alliance, as all the Masters of HPS will want you to believe.
Because it's so unfair because the night capping from the people from Quebec.

...

And here I had thought that the only people who complain needlessly about the Québécois were other Canadians.

popatiberiuoneb18_ESO

xsorusb14_ESO wrote: »

Nightcapping is only a problem when bad Oceanic Players decide to play on one faction because they don't like a challenge.

They should put them on *** no skills server like they use to. Instead they allow them to infest the US servers with their badness.

Yes, please give us our nubs back and take yours. The problem is the same on EU and US servers...there is a group of people that preffer on playing on the "wrong" server for a reason or another. There is also a small group of people that like or are forced to play at night and/or didnt know/didnt care about picking the right server.

Afraid not much we can do about this. If i was calling the shots in ZoS i'd probably give EU people a small xp/gold/whatever bonus during a time frame that will more or less corespond to the EU playtimes and do the same for US servers. This way people would choose the side with the bonus if their play times coincide. Ohh, and let everyone take a free server transfer since leveling a new toon is such a painfull experience and 99.99% of the ppl cant be bothered with it

From the hardware side, this would add/shave a bit more stress at prime or odd times from both servers

darkdruidssb14_ESO

As long as they keep persistent pvp campaigns... which is the only way to realistically do RvR style combat.. then there will always be players playing during someones off hours.

People here act like Oceanic players are evil because they clump together on specific servers.... you know because NA players don't do that right??? That is why there are only 3 remotely competitive campaigns right now. Who are you going to blame? The NA players that dislike a challenge so they roll heavy on 1 faction during NA prime time or the Oceanic players that do the same thing during their prime time? Both sides are stupid.

The real problem: Too many servers with too little active PvPers. You have zerg factions on empty servers because no one wants to compete against unrealistic odds. Different times of the day create influxes that sway campaign populations so that there is always a zerg faction on under populated campaigns.

Solution: ZOS needs to consolidate campaigns.. we don't need 10 when only 3 are remotely competitive. Take the other 7 and combine them into 1-2 so we have 4-5 active campaigns instead of 3. That will promote more consistent PvP across all servers.

Eylith

I PvP on Chrisamere and it is frustrating to fight hard to take some keeps every evening and to find every morning the map entierely blue. it's very demotivating.

Maybe keeps should be harder to take ?

Gisgo

Many years ago i moved from an italian daoc server to the us server and i was shocked by this thing that you call "nightcapping"... the map was changing every night
But i learned soon that on an international server there isnt really a primetime and a nighttime.

popatiberiuoneb18_ESO

Gisgo wrote: »

Many years ago i moved from an italian daoc server to the us server and i was shocked by this thing that you call "nightcapping"... the map was changing every night
But i learned soon that on an international server there isnt really a primetime and a nighttime.

Unfortunately there is no international ESO server, its clearly delimited into EU and US and the population logs roughly around same prime hours (except a few oddballs that "ruin" all the daytime work of countless people with only a handfull against no oposition)

Gisgo

EU = international.
The US while one nation are as huge as a continent (and to the US, add Oceania).
So yeah both servers are international.

edit. ooops forgot Canada

jvargas150_ESO

Tintinabula wrote: »

heres a hint: Its always night time...somewhere ..I know it boggles the mind not to think that "cause its day here..Its day everywhere"...but its not.

Now hold on to your chair tight..Im gonna blow your mind even more.

While you're capping keeps in your day time..someone is asleep in their night time and they're wondering why YOU are taking advantage of them being asleep.. DOH!

I know, I know..crazy as it sounds...the gaming world doesn't revolve around your sleep patterns.

Do you know how clueless you sound? I don't mean the sarcasm.. I mean how this issue went totally over your head..

Let me explain it to you so you understand the problem(I really don't consider it a problem, but so you are on the same page as those complaining)..

We are playing on NA time zone servers... So NA players select this server, we all live in the same timezone(give or take 3 hours)... The European server is catered to those who live in Europe (they should be on around the same time)

Now people who shouldn't be on our time zone, are deciding to play in our server so they have an ADVANTAGE... They should be playing in the European server so that their timezone difference is only about 7hrs as oppose to us where its over 10 hours..

darkdruidssb14_ESO

jvargas150_ESO wrote: »

Now people who shouldn't be on our time zone, are deciding to play in our server so they have an ADVANTAGE... They should be playing in the European server so that their timezone difference is only about 7hrs as oppose to us where its over 10 hours..

To be fair you sound just as clueless. Oceanic players don't have Oceanic servers.. they play on NA servers.. most of them at least. So you would have to create Oceanic specific servers.. region lock all servers and pray that people are too stupid to figure out VPNs.

Plus there isn't much advantage to having huge population on 1 faction at night.. besides the initial caps for the keeps you generate very little AP/XP in those dead servers. If you want to actually take advantage of maximizing your AP/XP then you need to play on populated servers where you can generate 40,000 - 100,000 AP an hour.

How many campaigns on these forums have 1 faction that is heavy.. namely AD or DC... asking to get other factions to join their campaign so they can have a competitive campaign?