Instead of a rant, how about a discussion on how we can make faction lock better?

Mayrael · June 2019

Firstmep wrote: »

Mayrael wrote: »

Delsskia wrote: »

EP's 14k point differential in the latest NA 30 day cp win was lovingly brought to you by faction locks. News flash, faction locks didn't work a few years ago and they still don't work.

For almost 2 years AD was winning on Vivec PC EU month after month WITHOUT faction lock. This is much more complicated than locked/unlocked. In general faction that wins a lot drags even more people because everyone want to be on the winning side.

Sandman929 wrote: »

Joy_Division wrote: »

Sandman929 wrote: »

Before there's any real discussion, ZOS needs to clarify what was intended and why it was implemented in the way that it was. Once we all have a real understanding of their direction, then it becomes a discussion of the merits of that direction. Until then, we're just making stuff up about why they did it and claiming that our position is the correct one.

They've already said this multiple times. They want the AvAvA component of cyrodiil to have integrity (primarily having the alliance choice matter) and they want to eliminate the perceived abuses that came about because of people who switched factions.

Everything else people have said is just made up to try to justify why there should or should not be locks.

But that's pretty vague. What is "integrity" for them, and why have integrity-free options? Why have integrity only on the 30 day instance? Why is no-CP determined to need the highest integrity (since no integrity-free option exists)? Which abuses in particular are meant to be resolved by this partial integrity?

Those were mentioned in every thread about faction locks, but are always conveniently ignored buy lock haters.

- Emp trading
- AP farming
- Scrolls abusing
- Intentional toxicity and flaming in chat etc.

You may say that it is still possible, yes it is, but is a lot harder what can be seen in the game quality improvement.

About OP ideas. I'm not against, as long as it won't affect things I mentioned above.

Those have been and still are much more prevalent on the 7 day.
Ad won vivec for that long sorely beacuse of pvdoor, same thing ep did on sotha.
On tbe 7 day both ep and dc are doing it now, rendering the campaign scoring pointless.
Nice thing for me when i play on there is to farm the pvdoor heroes for good ap.
Until they implement things like dynamic scoring, to discourage ppl from ONLY playing vs NPCs and empty keeps, the scoring, faction loyalty and the whole war is utterly pointless.
Then once they alleviate thoss issues, re-evaluate rewards.
Im actually suprised they implemented faction locks before doing any of that.
What will happen now is that ppl who want their campaign rewards will lock themselves to the most likely winner and stick to it for 30days, making population imbalances even worse.
We may not see the effects right now, but once the most dominant faction on each campaign is clear, this is exactly what a lot of ppl will do.
Which is sad beacuse it has nothing to do with faction loyalty, which what everyone here was hoping to enforce with the lock, just playing for the winning side, which what many has done for years.
Bonus points fot locking ppl out of playing their alts(if on different faction) and stopping people to switch to the underdog faction to make tjings more equal.
Clearly what we needed for a healthier pvp experience.

Of course they will but as I mentioned before, they did it even without faction lock, you can't say it's because of lock since all can change their faction every month if they get bored with one sided gaemplay, but somehow 2 years WITHOUT LOCK showed us it's not the case. Campaings are still won during "Off time", nothing changed in that matter. While during prime time gameplay is VERY BALANCED! All factions are being pushed very hard through evening and it changes dynamically, thus there is no need to swap factions to "balance" things unless you talk about swapping and night capping which would have impact on the score.

Off hours capping as a way to winning campaigns is a matter for completely other discussion, it doesn't belong to faction lock.

In general faction lock makes Cyrodiil a lot more pleasant and has less impact on overall score than some people like to claim.

dtsharples · June 2019

*Kinda rattled on a bit here, maybe I'll find a better place to post it

*

Thinking a little more on this, I'd also remove all point scoring from PVDoor.
Keeps and Outposts become just transportation and a means to defend yourself from enemies whilst inside.

Make scoring Points + AP depend almost entirely on actual PVP - Combat with other players.

The idea of this would be to encourage people to spread out on their own, as overwhelming an empty map would offer no AP / Points at all.
This also still relies on the OPs suggestion of locking accounts to factions, not factions to campaigns.
It would also make a smaller-scale playstyle more appealing, as the efforts of these smaller groups would equally affect the campaign score, where they don't really do this at the moment.

Emperor still works similarly to as it does now - but you need to be online to actually get it, otherwise it goes to the 2nd in line, or whoever is online next in the list.

Volendrung needs tweaking. It needs a 'nerf' to make it weaker, but still relevant.
I'd also prefer for another 2 weapons to drop at the same time, this would actually spread people out on the map chasing after 3 different objectives.
Maybe the Volendrung is 'Damage', and we have a 'Tanky' weapon that provides an AOE Shield, and a 'Healy' one that provides an AOE buff to HP regen and healing received.
Any person can pick up a weapon (but no more than 1), but any faction can hold all 3 if they manage to acquire them.
Oh and make them spawn more often.

The scrolls would need to be reworked to offer a small AP boost but no points to the faction that holds them, plus some other benefit as they still need to be relevant. Maybe an increase in Gold from the ROTW whilst you hold a scroll.

Dutchessx · June 2019

If they want faction locks to be all that has been stated on the forums then, they need to make a way that we can drop and rehome like it was at launch. By making it so we can drop and rehome, if we make a mistake and get locked on the wrong faction we can still fix it. This should cost us AP or gold... NEVER real money.

OrdoHermetica · June 2019

Keep the faction lock as is, but reduce the lock-out to 72 hours. If the goal is to prevent people from hopping between alliances to exploit the map, then a three day cooldown will do that handily. If that's not enough on its own, you can have people choose an alliance at the start and treat all other alliance characters they play in that campaign as guesting. I simply see no reason for a full 30 day lock.

Derra · June 2019

OrdoHermetica wrote: »

Keep the faction lock as is, but reduce the lock-out to 72 hours. If the goal is to prevent people from hopping between alliances to exploit the map, then a three day cooldown will do that handily. If that's not enough on its own, you can have people choose an alliance at the start and treat all other alliance characters they play in that campaign as guesting. I simply see no reason for a full 30 day lock.

Agree.

3day cooldown would effectively shut down trolling and instant relogs while also allowing people to still play all their characters.

Ranger209 · June 2019

If you can switch alliances during a campaign it isn't a lock at all. If you can switch teams during a campaign, why have teams. Without the lock it is not AvAvA it is me vs me vs me. The 3 banner war makes absolutely no sense without locks.

OrdoHermetica · June 2019

Ranger209 wrote: »

If you can switch alliances during a campaign it isn't a lock at all. If you can switch teams during a campaign, why have teams. Without the lock it is not AvAvA it is me vs me vs me. The 3 banner war makes absolutely no sense without locks.

My characters are members of Alliances. I am not.

RivenEsq · July 2019

The biggest problem is that they only locked the factions without giving any incentive to care about the locked faction other than negatively in that it stops you from playing your alts on that campaign.

For PC/NA, this means your alts have the option to play on the two remaining campaigns that are perpetually underpopulated outside of small stretches during primetime. While you have the "option" to play any of your characters in AvA since there are three selectable campaigns, only one of the campaigns offers any sort of a sustainable population during "off hours" in North America.

@baronzilch I agree with a lot of your points. As I mentioned above, the big issue here is that it stops players from reasonably playing the characters they want in AvA because the other campaigns are not acceptable alternatives for many players due to population concerns. That is public enemy #1. This system, fundamentally, has to change to something that allows players to play their characters.

Personally, I support either a faction change token system so that you can switch which faction your characters are on This option, I believe would be more likely only because it would be a microtransaction that can make money for Zenimax. If it were implemented, I would imagine every account would get 3-4 free faction change tokens, just like when the race balance changes came with Wrathstone. This still doesn't resolve the issue of players rolling other faction characters to begin with so that they could play with their friends.

The real, best choice, however, is what you mentioned, and what I've told others before I came to this thread. Our characters fight for all three alliances at various points in the base game story. It makes no sense that you would be restricted to the first faction you chose in terms of alliance war allegiance when the story doesn't hold you to that same standard. All characters should have their "faction" removed, and you should be able to lock your account to one faction for the duration of the campaign. Alternatively, a "Mercenary" system where you keep your faction loyalty on each character, but fight for the faction that your account is locked to for that campaign would accomplish the same end.

Either way, there has to be a system in place that allows you to play all of your characters without having to resort to playing them in underpopulated campaigns, whether that is locking your account to a faction for a campaign, or allowing you to make all of your characters onto one faction; the latter of these is much more clunky, and would likely come with its own set of issues.

Additionally, as I touched on above, locking the factions for the sake of "competitive integrity" was only half of the process. Competitive integrity doesn't matter if no one actually cares about the result of the campaign, or the alliance they are fighting for. I believe the entire campaign reward system needs to be revamped:

Firstly, the effort to get "Tier 3" rewards doesn't seem to scale based on campaign length, so a player only needs to play a single afternoon of AvA to get their "maximum" AvA reward for the month, this leads to minimal time investment from many players, making them less inclined to care about map progress, and only about gaining AP the easiest way they can. Players should need to work a bit harder in a longer campaign to receive these rewards, especially since the 30-day rewards are higher than the 7-day. This could also aid population issues if players need to play more to get their transmute crystals. They could also look at expanding the highest reward tier up to 10 levels instead of 3 so that players that invest more time can get rewarded more heavily, since Cyrodiil isn't remotely rewarding in terms of gear or gold compared to PvE or even BGs.
Second, since they are making you choose a faction, they should make winning matter more, and give greatly increased rewards for all 3 placings in the campaign. Building off the idea above of increased reward tier levels, instead of 10k gold for 3rd place, it should give something like 30 or 40k gold based on the reward tier that you reached. They could possibly reward gold PvP set gear for reaching the top reward tier for a campaign.
Leaderboard placing should be more heavily rewarded. There was a time when finishing in the top 20 players would get you premium rewards. I placed 12th one campaign, and I received a Maelstrom Inferno Staff with Precise on it. If they want players to care about the leaderboard, and investing in a campaign and their faction, making the leaderboard give premium rewards like that again would be a nice change. The reward of "good fights" and "fun" from PvP is not enough to make someone care about campaign results or their spot on the leaderboard.

That about sums up my thoughts on this topic. I played Guild Wars 2 for a couple years before ESO released, and I miss the rivalry and competition that came from the World PvP in that game. Coincidentally, you were mostly stuck on the server that you started on without paying to leave to play on a different server. This game doesn't necessarily have to be as strict, but investment in the outcome of a campaign has to be cultivated and rewarded. Simply locking players to a faction, and in doing so, out of their alts, is wholly insufficient for accomplishing what I believe ZOS intends to with this change. There have to be better rewards all around, and for the campaign winners. One last point that @baronzilch raised is that there should be rewards that encourage playing for factions that are losing in a campaign, and I absolutely agree with that, and I agree that there should be a system to discourage faction hopping to the winning side every month. This goes along with encouraging faction loyalty and I am all for that. I trust that the good PvP guilds would make an effort to have competition rather than one sided stomps as well, despite the DC streamer bias that currently exists.

usmcjdking · July 2019

The easiest fix to faction locks is the one that requires the least amount of work.

But the home request before the faction lock request. I don't care about trans stones, ROTWs or AP. I will gladly omit myself from the leaderboards so I can simply PVP on half of my characters.

josh.lackey_ESO · July 2019

VaranisArano wrote: »

I don't think ZOS can unbind Alliance from character.

Actually, they could. It's just a database. It can be done.

J18696 · July 2019

Considering the 7 day is always dead empty and locks are so popular would be in the games best interest to make the 7day locked so it has population >.>

Mr_Walker · July 2019

J18696 wrote: »

Considering the 7 day is always dead empty and locks are so popular would be in the games best interest to make the 7day locked so it has population >.>

Faction lockers don't want this because, despite the constant suggestions everyone who realises faction locks are a miserable failure go there, they know 12-16 hours a day it's a ghost town.

Miriel · July 2019

OrdoHermetica wrote: »

Ranger209 wrote: »

If you can switch alliances during a campaign it isn't a lock at all. If you can switch teams during a campaign, why have teams. Without the lock it is not AvAvA it is me vs me vs me. The 3 banner war makes absolutely no sense without locks.

My characters are members of Alliances. I am not.

yea, and regardless what you want to play as, you dont change sides during a match, thats like the loosing side in a dota final, suddenly all leave their chairs and yoin the winning side, mid game... so all can win, thats just so brilliantly stupid... if you want to change sides, you do that when a match has been concluded...

Luckilly, as far as i know, there is no indication that SoZ is going to change this... and at this point mods should just merge all threads since its just a tiny portion flooding the forum over and over... i think someone said that the biggest poll was like 169 people or sometihing, thats not even a base to make anything viable even with statistiks...

Qbiken · July 2019

Add a Mercenary faction that is considered faction less. How it would work:

* You and a few friends group up outside of Cyrodil (for the mercenary group the group size is capped to 8) regardless of what faction your characters belong to. You then decide which campaign you want to queue to as a mercenary group.

* As a mercenary group you're now considered as "factionless" group, which means you can attack all other three factions, but also be attacked by all other factions (including other mercenary groups)

* As a mercenary group you can't pick up the scrolls (since you don't really have anywhere to place them as a group without a faction) or capture the inner emperor keeps. You can however capture resources, outposts, towns and non-emperor required keeps.

* You can earn AP as usual, but you're kept out of any rewards from the end of the campaign.

* As a mercenary you're not able to read any zone chat messages from any faction (in case some people are paranoid about spies)

This way, people are not locked out of the crowded campaigns and can play with all their characters where the action is, and the ones that want rewards or feel some kind of immersive faction pride, get that option as well.

I see this option as a win-win.

Gariele · July 2019

A few unpopular suggestions I have seen/discussed are-

1. Faction change tokens. I actually like this one as it seems like a win/win for all. It covers the “play with friends” argument. It’s great for the people that are still playing the same character they made before One Tamriel. ZOS can actually monetize it so that’s good for them.

2. Universal AP Rank. Making you AP rank the same on all characters as the AP is tied to account instead of per character. This is a very unpopular opinion but rank isn’t a testament to ones skill as much as it’s time spent playing. Plenty of high rank players leeched their way to the rank they have. This covers the people that are just there for the achievements/dyes/furnishings.

3. Mercenary Faction. I use to support this but all it would cause is a 2-6 man squad at every resource being a major annoyance. But it is a Small Scalers dream

I actually support faction lock and wouldn’t mind if the rules were more strict. But people deserve a way to change a character faction.

msalvia · July 2019

3 words: Alliance Change Tokens

The one-and-only thing I hate about faction lock is not being able to play my all my pvp toons. I'm all about faction loyalty and against side-jumping, dropping faction-lock on people without giving them an option to truly change toons to a different alliance is frustrating.

Put it a different way: they just made a (imo fairly minor) change to racial passives and gave us all 3 tokens to account for the change. Nothing of the sort exists for faction-lock.

Alliance change tokens are the one thing I would open my wallet for in the crown store.

Alliance change tokens / Nerf goliath bash 2020.

Ranger209 · July 2019

The problem with alliance change tokens is that you have friends, and they have other friends who have other friends and so on, and so on. With this web of friends no one would be able to play with all of their friends unless everyone eventually migrated to the same faction. It works fine for people who just have a small circle of friends that always only play with each other, but as soon as it starts branching out it gets messy. The best way would be to lock an account to a faction so that all characters on that account can play for whatever faction that account is bound to. After the campaign completes a person could then switch alliance to play with other friends who are on another alliance or those friends could join them on the alliance they were playing on the previous campaign. I believe something like this should be done so that all characters on an account are playable at all times, but a flat out alliance swap token I feel is too simplistic of a solution for the issue at hand.

PhxOldGamer68 · July 2019

Make the faction lock for the entire account. My 2 AD and 2 DC want to play in Kaal with my 8 EP toons. That's where the action is. That's where my 2 PVP guilds are located.

Dutchessx · July 2019

I have the PERFECT solution doesn’t require tokens or locking accounts. LET THE PLAYERS DECIDE. What happened to choice in this game? Play the game how you want?

I jest but I don’t... this is really the simplest form. If you want to be faction loyal then be so... if you don’t then don’t. For the past 5 years I have mained EP. I have 2 grand overlords plus several other high ranking characters that are EP. I also have AD & DC, I have also swapped factions to help balance out the map or to play with friends. Sometimes I would swap just to get some time to myself to play the game when I was a guild leader. Now since that guild is gone I went to play DC but my friends came back to the game on EP.

Now that most everyone has stopped reading here is a solution, the one I really want to propose.

As prior to One Tamerial... allow us to que in as a guest no AP towards rewards or allow us to drop our home campaign which should include the faction lock. And then choose to rehome whatever character whatever faction we want on that server. It is a way out if we make a mistake. Our campaign rewards are just as forfeited before we dropped, like they always have been if we drop our home prior to the end of the campaign. We get to keep the AP we made there. After we rehome the faction lock clicks back in and we can get back on the leader boards for campaign rewards. Let’s take it a step farther shall we? Reward the people who don’t switch factions during the campaign. At the end of the campaign give them increased faction loyalty rewards make it something people want ie gold 50 transmute stones or a gold reward you can sell. Makes sense if you want to increase faction loyalty do it through positive reinforcements not negative consequences. It is a win win for everyone.

I still say revert faction locks... it makes the most sense if you are faction loyal GREAT if not GREAT... either way have fun it is a game.

ATomiX96 · July 2019

Do you honestly think ZOS can implement something thats more complex than throwing cosmetics into a box of surprise mechanics?

Dutchessx · July 2019

ATomiX96 wrote: »

Do you honestly think ZOS can implement something thats more complex than throwing cosmetics into a box of surprise mechanics?

If we have to have faction locks at least make it like it was prior to One Tamerial where we could drop the campaign and rehome to the desired faction. It Is usually better to reward desired behavior than to demand it through negative consequences. Besides that if end of campaign rewards were better it would provide incentive to pvp more often and reward faction loyalty. I still believe it would be good to place something like master weapons back into the rewards tiers for the top x% above tier 3 rewards would be a good idea.

UnseenCat · July 2019

Gariele wrote: »

3. Mercenary Faction. I use to support this but all it would cause is a 2-6 man squad at every resource being a major annoyance. But it is a Small Scalers dream

I still think a mercenary system is worth investigating. I agree with you that it might choke fights over resources, although ZOS in prior updates wanted to make the resources more pivotal in supporting the keeps, so this isn't entirely a bad thing. What might help would be some way for mercenaries to be goaded into leaving and attacking other places rather than camping on a resource. Diminishing AP returns after taking it and not handing it over to the NPC guards, maybe.

Mr_Walker · July 2019

dtsharples wrote: »

*Kinda rattled on a bit here, maybe I'll find a better place to post it *

Thinking a little more on this, I'd also remove all point scoring from PVDoor.
Keeps and Outposts become just transportation and a means to defend yourself from enemies whilst inside.

Make scoring Points + AP depend almost entirely on actual PVP - Combat with other players.

The idea of this would be to encourage people to spread out on their own, as overwhelming an empty map would offer no AP / Points at all.
This also still relies on the OPs suggestion of locking accounts to factions, not factions to campaigns.
It would also make a smaller-scale playstyle more appealing, as the efforts of these smaller groups would equally affect the campaign score, where they don't really do this at the moment.

Terrible idea, only (further) disincetivises playing when there's a small pop.

dtsharples · July 2019

For those who enjoy PVDoor, possibly yes.

OrdoHermetica · July 2019

Miriel wrote: »

OrdoHermetica wrote: »

Ranger209 wrote: »

If you can switch alliances during a campaign it isn't a lock at all. If you can switch teams during a campaign, why have teams. Without the lock it is not AvAvA it is me vs me vs me. The 3 banner war makes absolutely no sense without locks.

My characters are members of Alliances. I am not.

yea, and regardless what you want to play as, you dont change sides during a match, thats like the loosing side in a dota final, suddenly all leave their chairs and yoin the winning side, mid game... so all can win, thats just so brilliantly stupid... if you want to change sides, you do that when a match has been concluded...

Luckilly, as far as i know, there is no indication that SoZ is going to change this... and at this point mods should just merge all threads since its just a tiny portion flooding the forum over and over... i think someone said that the biggest poll was like 169 people or sometihing, thats not even a base to make anything viable even with statistiks...

When DOTA finals last a full 30 days and are something that literally all players are pretty much forced to participate in, regardless of skill level or interest in competitive play, because the alternative is wandering around empty ghost towns of DOTA matches, that'll be a reasonable point of comparison. Until then, however, that's not even an apples and oranges comparison.

SippingPotions · July 2019

I like suggestions 1 and 2 a lot. IMO the problem isn't faction locks, it's lack of people willing to PVP in this old mess of a game. If I could actually find a fight in the 7 day I'd have no issues but the reality is that off prime hours there's not even enough players online to fill the 30 day CP campaign.