campaign populations are unbalanced

many see the solution as being 'combine campaigns', start over with just 3 campaigns and do that 'tomorrow' etc - i'm in agreement with the principle behind these because i too find campaign populations unbalanced - but you'd never hear the end of it from people complaining about their campaign being reset/merged/deleted etc

there might be a way to implement some form of balance for the 46 days days remaining:

this is the current picture for campaign populations as i write this



i don't know the exact numbers of players that each bar represents but for arguments sake let's call it 200

The 'rules' for campaigns that is the same for each campaign right now hints that they have some sort of mechanism (hopefully already in place) to create different rules for different servers

ESO/ZOS would need to look at the numbers on the past week or so but based upon the picture my suggestion is this

adjust the max pop allowed in each campaign for each alliance

busy campaign like Wabbajack (for example) would be locked when the pop reaches current max levels allowed (ie 600 total players per alliance, or whatever the actual current total for 3 bars is)

medium pop campaigns like Auriel's Bow and Bloodthorn would go into 'lock' status when they reached the pop needed to fill 2 bars, and just before it went to three bars (ie 400 total players per alliance, or whatever the actual current total for 2 bars is)

low pop campaigns like Chysamere, Dawnbreaker, Goldbrand, Hopesfire, Scourge, Skull Crusher and Voldenrung would be 'locked' when the population was enough to completely fill one bar and just before it flips to two bars (ie 200 players total per alliance, or whatever the actual current total for 1 bar is)


i might be simplistic here, but it might be as 'easy' as changing the values in the code for each campaign as to when to trip it into 'locked' status

this way nobody gets to lose their home campaign and what they worked hard for (personally i favor a total reset of ALL campaigns and cut them back to 3 to start and only add more when those are full), and it might encourage folks to start guesting into the campaigns that aren't locked, thus starting to create a bit more of a population balance

it's not perfect or ideal - but it might help some of the current problems and be something both ZOS and the player base can learn from without creating a lot of pain and inconvenience for either ZOS or the player base?

D.

EDIT: could be that you make the cap on locking the heavy campaign 2 bars, medium campaigns 1 bar, and the low pop campaigns half a bar - i'll let the mathematicians take care of that