Grimick wrote: »

Do you have a proposal to accommodate 1vXers as well as players that play an MMO in order to group with friends?

I like the group size of 12- but I feel like making that the status quo in Cyrodiil would fix a lot of issues as well without losing the appeal of Cyrodiil to solo players.

The way I see it, grouping would work the same way it does now - not like in BGs where you get automatically grouped with your team.
So you would have a total population of a few dozen players per team, and they would be free to form groups as they pleased (or queue as a group, to ensure the whole group ends up on the same team).

Also since it would mostly reuse existing Cyrodiil assets (structures, rocks, trees, etc.) there would be still plenty of room for 1vX and smallscale play.

One thing that would require careful consideration is how to enable organized GvG gameplay (such as 2 competing guilds), since my current proposal fails to address this specific scenario - because of automatic population balancing, you could not choose your preferred team.
At the same time, allowing players to freely switch teams at will is not the answer, either - because that would invariably lead to population stacking and imbalances. Adding a cooldown would also not fix the issue, either.

I still enjoy Cyrodiil, even with the performance issues. I don't find it stale because, while the general strategy of fights is the same, every combat is different and unique. Its more akin to playing the same sport for years. The rules and plays stay very similar, but every match happens in a different way.

So I'm not a fan of replacement gameplay modes.

Also, your suggestion removes or substantially reduces a number of things I enjoy about Cyrodiil:
Large scale combat
Playing with a guild raid any larger than 12 players
Strategy of playing the map
Playing as a team with my whole faction
The huge variety of playstyles
The ability of PUGs to mass up to beat a ball group (Let's be honest, reducing the overall pop to 36 players per team and group size to 12 would be a godsend for ball groups, who'd completely dominate now that they can't be effectively outnumbered)

So I'm struggling to view this as a "constructive approach" when it's actually ruining much of what I enjoy about Cyrodiil. These would be fine suggestions for an alternative gameplay mode to Cyrodiil, assuming ZOS could work out balancing issues with group sizes.

VaranisArano wrote: »

Also, your suggestion removes or substantially reduces a number of things I enjoy about Cyrodiil:

Large scale combat - I think we can agree that while it is awesome, ZOS seems to be unable to make it work properly.
IMO the current scale is just too grandiose for what the game's engine can support, hence my scaled down proposal.

Playing with a guild raid any larger than 12 players - again, see above.
As much as I love the faction stacked fights with 100+ players in one place, it makes both the client and the server die a horrible death.

Strategy of playing the map - still very much present.
Sure, the map is scaled down and there are fewer objectives, but there's still a lot of room for strategic plays.
If anything, strategic plays become more important than ever - because with a roughly balanced population you would be otherwise very hard pressed to capture the enemy relic(s).

Playing as a team with my whole faction - well, here you would be playing as a team with your whole "faction".
If the campaigns were kept short (1-2 days max), it would be very feasible to "faction lock" the campaigns while retaining the population balancing aspect of using "fake BG factions", which are not the same as the AD/DC/EP character factions.
It would also bring more variety, because you wouldn't always be fighting alongside (and against) the same players on each team in every campaign.

And with the campaigns being relatively short, any individual player's contribution would have a significant effect on the overall score - unlike the current Cyrodiil, which is "won" by night/morning/day/evening capping, the outcome effectively decided at times of the largest population imbalances.

The huge variety of playstyles - I fail to see how my proposal would significantly detract from this.
The much smaller player population per campaign would hopefully discourage mindless zerging, and help encourage players to seek to improve their skills.

Currently there is rather little motivation for the lowest tier PvPers to improve, because you can "play" Cyrodiil just fine by zergsurfing - which does very little to improve one's PvP skill set, and does even less to help promote healthy PvP gameplay.

At the mid- and high tier, not much would change in terms of playstyles - most of the good PvPers already play either (truly) solo or in relatively small groups, so they would not be directly affected by this.

The ability of PUGs to mass up to beat a ball group (Let's be honest, reducing the overall pop to 36 players per team and group size to 12 would be a godsend for ball groups, who'd completely dominate now that they can't be effectively outnumbered)
There's a big L2P issue involved in dealing with ballgroups - and at the same time, they are currently rather significantly overperforming due to their reliance on Purge and crosshealing.

A very skilled ballgroup is virtually invincible and can only be defeated with lag (or another ballgroup).
It's not even a matter of the number of PUGs or their individual skill - you just need so many that the whole ballgroup lags out and can't cast their purges and heals, and they are cooked.

Needless to say, the question of "ballgroups" would have to be addressed in such a game mode. There are many ways in which it could be done, with a Battle Spirit adjustment (primarily to reduce cross-healing) being quite likely the simplest option.
I do agree, however, that this is one of the important issues which would need to be carefully evaluated to make such a game mode actually viable.

VaranisArano wrote: »

So I'm struggling to view this as a "constructive approach" when it's actually ruining much of what I enjoy about Cyrodiil. These would be fine suggestions for an alternative gameplay mode to Cyrodiil, assuming ZOS could work out balancing issues with group sizes.

From a purely pragmatic standpoint, Cyrodiil would still have to remain in some form - if only because of the achievements tied to it, as well as the "PvE" (non-PvP) content it contains: skyshards, lorebooks, etc.

However, if performance continues to worsen at the current rate, PvE players will have their much-desired "PvE Cyrodiil" before long - because no serious PvPer will want to play in such an extreme lagfest, so it will be populated with noone but PvEers grinding for geodes or Vigor.

Already it got to the point where balling up and/or zerging are pretty much the only workable strats, since the huge delay on casting abilities is a huge nerf to solo/smallscale and only a minor nerf to LA spamming zergs.
A lot of my friends, some of them very skilled PvPers, have either left Cyrodiil for good or gave up on any pretense of "skilled" gameplay and reverted to zerging and sieging.

I love the unique Cyrodiil gameplay as much as anyone else here, but it's pretty clear that it's going downhill now and there's no stopping that.
Which is why I don't even ask for Cyrodiil to be fixed anymore (since that's just wishful thinking), but instead I ask for a new similar game mode which would hopefully actually work.

Izanagi.Xiiib16_ESO wrote: »

Its not perfect but it would be interesting and a potential way of solving a lot of issue at a high cost - however the cost is diminishing with each passing day of the current gameplay and performance.

The problem is there are a lot of other issues to consider regarding grouping / pop limits / map size / objectives etc... a Global faction scoring could be interesting but theres other issues to that such as matchmaking imbalance (lessened by population size)

Yes, this is pretty much the kingpin of the whole idea: some way of effectively managing the population, to prevent extreme imbalances from arising on a regular basis.

This is where the current Cyrodiil falls flat on its face: it's all awesome, with great fights to be had, if the campaign is triple poplocked - or at least if it has equal pop on all factions, at times of no poplock.
But at most times of the day(night?), this is not the case, and the map is being "painted"/PvDoored by the dominant faction.
Which is boring if you are the on the dominant faction, and equally no fun if you are on the underdog faction - being constantly curbstomped by giant enemy zergs at your own gate keeps.

And as the whole faction lock fiasco has proven, leaving the population balancing up to the players themselves is not a workable solution, while "baking in" population imbalances for weeks on end is just as counterproductive.

Nope

This proposal is just a larger version of Battlegrounds and can not be a "replacement" for Cyrodiil.

Even with the lag, crashes, skill bug, combat bug, slow bug and whatever other bugs there are, large scale Cyrodiil is what attracted people to play it. They wont be happy with replacing it with a large scale BG.

Either they have to find a way to fix Cyrodiil or just admit that they cant and be open and up front about it.