Faction recognition by locked campaigns

josh.lackey_ESO · June 2019

bulbousb16_ESO wrote: »

They're not going to just start fighting for a different side arbitrarily and capriciously.

This is literally the main questline. Have you ever played this game?

The most arbitrary and capricious NPC in the game -- Cadwell -- makes you faction swap.

It's not just some hypothetical, it's the basis of 2/3rds of the game! In the PvE story you play more as a faction swapper than you do as your home faction! Twice as much, in fact.

Story-wise, it makes perfect sense that your character would fight for either faction in the alliance war. You are not even a real person that was born and grew up in one of the factions. You are a "paragon soul shriven" of Nirn generated by the Heart of Lorkhan as kind of self-defense mechanism to defend Mundus against the Planemeld. That is why you cannot be killed and why you can teleport through the wayshrines and use the star map travel. You are not a mortal, but rather an Anuic being made by the same essence of the Divines essence that created the Mundus in the first place. When you are "killed" you are merely discorporeated, and your soul simply recorporeates at a wayshrine, unless you use a soul gem to recorporeate in-place, just like a daedra recorporeates in their home plane of Oblivion when they are discorporeated (they are not actually killed.) Here is an excellent thread explaining more about the nature of the Vestige.

That is how you are able to do all the unique and miraculous things you do throughout the game (like collect skyshards, wayshrine travel, be resurrected, use mundus stones, soul magic), and how Cadwell is able to send you to experience the other factions in an alternative form. As a character in the story, you absolutely would not need have loyalty to a single faction, because your loyalty is to all of Tamriel and even all of Nirn -- in fact all of Mundus. I am not one to tell you how to roleplay, but I don't think you understand the game's story.

The changes in One Tamriel actually made the game mechanics of factions much truer to the storyline. A further improvement would be to have no character faction at all, and you just pick which of your faction forms you want to manifest each time you queue into Cyrodiil. Maybe require unlocking Cadwell's Silver and Gold respectively to play the other factions.

Faction hoppers are actually as true to the storyline as the mechanics will let you be: you roleplay that your different characters are, in fact, the different faction manifestations of your vestige. Truer now than ever with the addition of account-wide skyshards. Faction lock is not only horrible for the health of the game, but it's contrary to the entire story.

Beardimus · June 2019

Joy_Division wrote: »

Ranger209 wrote: »

People have been suggesting that it would be nice that when they home a locked campaign that all of their characters regardless of their actual respective factions could all fight for the faction that they home for. It has been said that doing this would be a potential programming nightmare due to main story lines and other issues. However, I believe this is more of an issue regarding permanent faction changing. I believe there are already ways programmed into the game for battlegrounds that allow people to team up together regardless of faction and fight against people that may or may not be of the same faction as them.

I propose that they do something similar with locked campaigns whereby only that campaign when homed will see all of the characters on the same account as fighting for that faction. Doing so in this way would not involve a permanent faction change, but rather only an override mechanism that causes a homed, locked campaign to view all characters on an account as loyal to the faction chosen when locking that account to a particular faction. Outside of that locked campaign the rest of the game would view each character as the proper faction that it is, but inside that campaign it would view that character as the faction that was chosen when homed. So a character could have a faction=EP but also have a factionvivec=AD when AD is homed in a locked campaign. In this way the game would see this character as EP everywhere in game except in Vivec, or insert new campaign name.

I have 13/13 DC characters so am really not affected by this, but people that are spread among factions with their characters are being denied use of their off faction characters unless they take them to another campaign. I see this as a possible solution to that dilemma.

Since I wear the Alliance War outfit, I might be able to share some light here.

Joining a Battleground does not remove your alliance. It merely puts all the members on your team into one of the three alliances. What I mean is I'm wearing the EP shirt, be put onto the Stormlords, and then be wearing the DC shirt. It only teams players up by putting them onto one of the alliances in an separate instance. It doesn't seem to me a step toward a general "overide" as you put it into a non-instanced open-world Cyrodiil.

Also, even if ZOS could do such a thing, If I understand what you are proposing, it doesn't address the main complain that people who dislike the faction-locks have: being forced to play on an overpopulated alliance.

Agreed on the alliance costume, i wear the same, asked support and its not a bug (well not one they intend to fix). You see the alliance colours underneath

Hashtag_ · June 2019

DisgracefulMind wrote: »

Haashhtaag wrote: »

idk wrote: »

The solution is clear. Zos encouraged us to play in various faction when they removed faction lock and other changes with 1T. Now that that are bringing back faction locks Matt and Rich need to man up and do the work needed to bring us faction changes for a limited time.

They need to own their decisions and be responsible. Something that is heavily lacking with these decisions.

I’d be okay with said scenario ONLY if the alliance change is FREE. If they add that and don’t allow you to change ALL your toons alliance for FREE I would not be on board with it. As it would just be another ZOS cash grab

What do you think the probable ultimate goal is? Make us pay for faction swaps once they figure out how to ungarble their code. xd

Tbh I wouldn’t put it past them to make “alliance swap tokens” for 3k crowns.

Ranger209 · June 2019

Alliance swap tokens would change a character's faction on a permanent basis. I'm not 100% against it, but I think this is a better solution. It allows people to change all of their characters to a chosen faction for the 30 day duration. It allows more flexibility for people with characters in multiple factions, while still allowing them to use all of their characters all the time. It also allows for guilds to balance campaigns by swapping to an underdog/underpopulated faction for increments of 30 days rather than a permanent solution that will set the faction balance in stone, or not allow people access to all of their characters in Cyrodiil all of the time.

tonemd · June 2019

Anything short of decoupling characters from alliances and automatically slotting people into the under populated alliance in PVP (just like BGs) is destined to get us in the same place we have been in forever with unbalanced populations.

I assume this would be a massive rework of cyro but all these other half measures (including locks, which I am for) depend on people not being selfish.

But I'm sure they will continue to try and fail instead, desperately clinging to the original concept and code.

Agrippa_Invisus · June 2019

tonemd wrote: »

Anything short of decoupling characters from alliances and automatically slotting people into the under populated alliance in PVP (just like BGs) is destined to get us in the same place we have been in forever with unbalanced populations.

I assume this would be a massive rework of cyro but all these other half measures (including locks, which I am for) depend on people not being selfish.

But I'm sure they will continue to try and fail instead, desperately clinging to the original concept and code.

I doubt they even understand the original code at this point. The original dev team has been gone so long, the current live team only tells stories about them when talking about the before times in the way way back.