Are we all dumb for sitting in greyhost que?

MincMincMinc · August 21

The thought popped up in my head this morning. Pretty much every day people get home and hop on to que into greyhost. Some nights I see a 40 person que, some nights up to 80 people. We all know we are just going to wait for an hour to get in, then half the server is a guild zerging and the other half are ballgroups. Rarely we see pug groups or what used to be normal player zergs back in the day.

Guys the factions only have population caps of like 72 players. Which means most nights we could literally fill a second campaign. Its funny if you think about it, GH is a bandwagon that is broken down, but there are just as many people waiting to get into the bandwagon as there are riding it.

Lag wise one theory is that player dilution could split up the guild groups and ball groups between two different servers. Much like older MyM events would do by filling up the servers with questers or new players that just light attack instead of only ball groups pumping every aoe stacking over time effect in the game.

Are there ways zos can layout the servers to incentivize players to play in the other campaigns?
Reward ideas for off campaigns? AP, Monster keys, golden gear, arena weapons, mythic leads, golden mats?
Que lock mechanics that prevent 2x the population of greyhost from just sitting afk and push them towards the secondary campaign.
Other ideas?

loosej · August 21

I'm guessing there are two reasons people prefer GH:

The Home Campaign: No progress if you have GH as home campaign and join a different one, and the risk of committing to an empty campaign when changing it.
No faction lock for the other campaigns: I personally never saw it as a problem, but I know at least some of the players don't like that there's the option to join with a char that belongs to the currently winning faction.

MincMincMinc · August 21

loosej wrote: »

I'm guessing there are two reasons people prefer GH:
The Home Campaign: No progress if you have GH as home campaign and join a different one, and the risk of committing to an empty campaign when changing it.

No faction lock for the other campaigns: I personally never saw it as a problem, but I know at least some of the players don't like that there's the option to join with a char that belongs to the currently winning faction.

Originally I think the home campaign system was to try and get people away from the main campaign. However the collapse of the other campaigns seems to have pushed everyone to only wait for greyhost. They could probably remove that entirely and just let people progress in all campaign leaderboards. If anything letting people farm rewards for all campaigns might help get people to spread back out.

Faction lock is pointless now. It made sense back in 2014 when people were legitimately spying on other guilds, but even then you could just make an alt to do it while playing your main. In today's age it just becomes a huge QoL problem that makes people not play ESO from months at a time. If you changed to 7 day campaigns you could at least keep faction lock for the RPers and then people could swap more regularly to play with friends.

Restructuring the available campaigns and their ruleset could do a lot of good.

Change to have two 7 day main cp campaigns and then one 7 day nocp campaign. Players under 500cp would be forced to only play the nocp campaign. The nocp campaign would be first on the list and then the other two campaigns would be listed after.

The other benefit with 7 days is that you can line up campaign resets to boost population. People hopping on to try at emp or get on for rewards created mini pvp events each week.

7 day campaigns can have reward structures like transmutes to bring in more new players.

Honestly I would probably get rid of rewards for the worthy and just make the campaign rewards grant ap to use on vendors instead. No point in having the mail system firing off unnecessarily.

AngryPenguin · August 21

MincMincMinc wrote: »

loosej wrote: »

I'm guessing there are two reasons people prefer GH:
The Home Campaign: No progress if you have GH as home campaign and join a different one, and the risk of committing to an empty campaign when changing it.

No faction lock for the other campaigns: I personally never saw it as a problem, but I know at least some of the players don't like that there's the option to join with a char that belongs to the currently winning faction.

Originally I think the home campaign system was to try and get people away from the main campaign. However the collapse of the other campaigns seems to have pushed everyone to only wait for greyhost. They could probably remove that entirely and just let people progress in all campaign leaderboards. If anything letting people farm rewards for all campaigns might help get people to spread back out.

Faction lock is pointless now. It made sense back in 2014 when people were legitimately spying on other guilds, but even then you could just make an alt to do it while playing your main. In today's age it just becomes a huge QoL problem that makes people not play ESO from months at a time. If you changed to 7 day campaigns you could at least keep faction lock for the RPers and then people could swap more regularly to play with friends.

Restructuring the available campaigns and their ruleset could do a lot of good.

Change to have two 7 day main cp campaigns and then one 7 day nocp campaign. Players under 500cp would be forced to only play the nocp campaign. The nocp campaign would be first on the list and then the other two campaigns would be listed after.

The other benefit with 7 days is that you can line up campaign resets to boost population. People hopping on to try at emp or get on for rewards created mini pvp events each week.

7 day campaigns can have reward structures like transmutes to bring in more new players.

Honestly I would probably get rid of rewards for the worthy and just make the campaign rewards grant ap to use on vendors instead. No point in having the mail system firing off unnecessarily.

You seem to be advocating for every imaginable change possible to Cyrodiil except the change that matters most. ZOS could bring back high levels of performance if they just made the investments necessary. They could just fix the game they already created.

MincMincMinc · August 21

AngryPenguin wrote: »

MincMincMinc wrote: »

loosej wrote: »

I'm guessing there are two reasons people prefer GH:
The Home Campaign: No progress if you have GH as home campaign and join a different one, and the risk of committing to an empty campaign when changing it.

No faction lock for the other campaigns: I personally never saw it as a problem, but I know at least some of the players don't like that there's the option to join with a char that belongs to the currently winning faction.

Originally I think the home campaign system was to try and get people away from the main campaign. However the collapse of the other campaigns seems to have pushed everyone to only wait for greyhost. They could probably remove that entirely and just let people progress in all campaign leaderboards. If anything letting people farm rewards for all campaigns might help get people to spread back out.

Faction lock is pointless now. It made sense back in 2014 when people were legitimately spying on other guilds, but even then you could just make an alt to do it while playing your main. In today's age it just becomes a huge QoL problem that makes people not play ESO from months at a time. If you changed to 7 day campaigns you could at least keep faction lock for the RPers and then people could swap more regularly to play with friends.

Restructuring the available campaigns and their ruleset could do a lot of good.

Change to have two 7 day main cp campaigns and then one 7 day nocp campaign. Players under 500cp would be forced to only play the nocp campaign. The nocp campaign would be first on the list and then the other two campaigns would be listed after.

The other benefit with 7 days is that you can line up campaign resets to boost population. People hopping on to try at emp or get on for rewards created mini pvp events each week.

7 day campaigns can have reward structures like transmutes to bring in more new players.

Honestly I would probably get rid of rewards for the worthy and just make the campaign rewards grant ap to use on vendors instead. No point in having the mail system firing off unnecessarily.

You seem to be advocating for every imaginable change possible to Cyrodiil except the change that matters most. ZOS could bring back high levels of performance if they just made the investments necessary. They could just fix the game they already created.

I don't think reordering the campaign and adjusting the rules is much of an ask. They already have versions of the campaigns done and ready. Really its just getting rid of the u50 campaign that is dead and pushing new players into the nocp campaign instead of being GH cannon fodder.

Sluggy · August 21

Queue? What platform? What faction? I've barely seen a queue this year. Even during MyM it was mere minutes to get in most of the time.

aetherix8 · August 22

Don’t be too harsh on yourself, you’re just hooked.

Speaking more seriously, I think everyone is queuing for GH because rn it’s the most populated campaign and therefore there’s some action. Whether this action is indeed worth doing the queue is another story.

But even if personally I can’t imagine myself playing nowadays Cyro, I’m happy there are still people who do queue, play and complain. If everybody quits then what would be the point of trying to fix the performance, and maybe some other things along the way.

So kudos to all of you who still PvP regularly, it does seem like madness, but without you devs would delete Cyro long time ago.

Necrotech_Master · August 22

i personally find it bizarre people will wait 1+ hours in a queue when there are other open camps

if you really want to be in GH that badly then can queue GH then queue into blackreach or one of the other camps and do stuff there until your queue pops

i wont even try to get into a campaign if it has more than a 20 person queue

since they significantly buffed the transmutes from rewards of the worthy, i dont even bother setting a home campaign most of the time because the 50 stones per month is just useless when you can get guaranteed 25 PER DAY from a single rewards of the worthy

i try to play in a campaign that has a decent population level thats also not unbalanced, 1 bar camps are certainly easier to do like town quests or pvdoor with a small group

the problem comes when the population is unbalanced, like if all factions are 1 bar thats fine, but if 1 faction is 2 or 3 bar while the others are 1 bar, you cant do anything because an entire faction will descend on you the moment you take a resource

MincMincMinc · August 22

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

the problem comes when the population is unbalanced, like if all factions are 1 bar thats fine, but if 1 faction is 2 or 3 bar while the others are 1 bar, you cant do anything because an entire faction will descend on you the moment you take a resource

Yeah cyro and campaign rules were established with the notion that cyro would always be like 200v200v200 players. For instance the tri faction balance concept starts to fall apart once we are down to caps of 72v72v72. If one guild takes up 24-36 players on the server, then all it takes to get out of balance is them logging out or logging in. It doesn't help that stat bonuses are given to the winner. Which is fine when one faction takes the map, then the other two team up. However if the populations aren't full what happens is that people log out after losing the map and then instead of the two teams fighting back together the singular faction not only gets to defend, but they get to defend with superior numbers and with boosted stats.

Early on I ran a under lvl50 guild to teach new players and then played solo/small man in vet with some other 1vXers. The lowbie campaign PCNA died because when the guilds became unbalanced you'd have one guild flip the whole map one color. The enemy factions essentially all logged out for the night every time. My guys would have to level characters on all factions so you could swap around and balance out the map's population to keep players from logging out for the night.

Nocp followed a similar decline where the campaign was balanced with major guilds on all factions. However day after day players tended to only play when their guild played. Inevitably once a large guild disbanded, that faction would just be gated night after night. Eventually pugs stop playing or logging in to a losing team.

Will Greyhost follow this trend? IDK the only saving grace is that it is the final stand. When lowbie died, the remaining guilds jumped ship to Nocp. Then when Nocp died, they jumped to greyhost.

Necrotech_Master · August 22

MincMincMinc wrote: »

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

the problem comes when the population is unbalanced, like if all factions are 1 bar thats fine, but if 1 faction is 2 or 3 bar while the others are 1 bar, you cant do anything because an entire faction will descend on you the moment you take a resource

Yeah cyro and campaign rules were established with the notion that cyro would always be like 200v200v200 players. For instance the tri faction balance concept starts to fall apart once we are down to caps of 72v72v72. If one guild takes up 24-36 players on the server, then all it takes to get out of balance is them logging out or logging in. It doesn't help that stat bonuses are given to the winner. Which is fine when one faction takes the map, then the other two team up. However if the populations aren't full what happens is that people log out after losing the map and then instead of the two teams fighting back together the singular faction not only gets to defend, but they get to defend with superior numbers and with boosted stats.

Early on I ran a under lvl50 guild to teach new players and then played solo/small man in vet with some other 1vXers. The lowbie campaign PCNA died because when the guilds became unbalanced you'd have one guild flip the whole map one color. The enemy factions essentially all logged out for the night every time. My guys would have to level characters on all factions so you could swap around and balance out the map's population to keep players from logging out for the night.

Nocp followed a similar decline where the campaign was balanced with major guilds on all factions. However day after day players tended to only play when their guild played. Inevitably once a large guild disbanded, that faction would just be gated night after night. Eventually pugs stop playing or logging in to a losing team.

Will Greyhost follow this trend? IDK the only saving grace is that it is the final stand. When lowbie died, the remaining guilds jumped ship to Nocp. Then when Nocp died, they jumped to greyhost.

personally what i saw that killed nocp was when it got changed to also noproc too

i enjoyed the nocp back in the day when procs were allowed but almost never went there once it also went noproc too for several years

right now even blackreach has a hard time getting above 1 bar pops outside of primetime, so i think the real issue is just lower pvp population as a whole

(my reference points are also outside of the whitestrakes event and from PCNA)

MincMincMinc · August 22

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

MincMincMinc wrote: »

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

the problem comes when the population is unbalanced, like if all factions are 1 bar thats fine, but if 1 faction is 2 or 3 bar while the others are 1 bar, you cant do anything because an entire faction will descend on you the moment you take a resource

Yeah cyro and campaign rules were established with the notion that cyro would always be like 200v200v200 players. For instance the tri faction balance concept starts to fall apart once we are down to caps of 72v72v72. If one guild takes up 24-36 players on the server, then all it takes to get out of balance is them logging out or logging in. It doesn't help that stat bonuses are given to the winner. Which is fine when one faction takes the map, then the other two team up. However if the populations aren't full what happens is that people log out after losing the map and then instead of the two teams fighting back together the singular faction not only gets to defend, but they get to defend with superior numbers and with boosted stats.

Early on I ran a under lvl50 guild to teach new players and then played solo/small man in vet with some other 1vXers. The lowbie campaign PCNA died because when the guilds became unbalanced you'd have one guild flip the whole map one color. The enemy factions essentially all logged out for the night every time. My guys would have to level characters on all factions so you could swap around and balance out the map's population to keep players from logging out for the night.

Nocp followed a similar decline where the campaign was balanced with major guilds on all factions. However day after day players tended to only play when their guild played. Inevitably once a large guild disbanded, that faction would just be gated night after night. Eventually pugs stop playing or logging in to a losing team.

Will Greyhost follow this trend? IDK the only saving grace is that it is the final stand. When lowbie died, the remaining guilds jumped ship to Nocp. Then when Nocp died, they jumped to greyhost.

personally what i saw that killed nocp was when it got changed to also noproc too

i enjoyed the nocp back in the day when procs were allowed but almost never went there once it also went noproc too for several years

right now even blackreach has a hard time getting above 1 bar pops outside of primetime, so i think the real issue is just lower pvp population as a whole

(my reference points are also outside of the whitestrakes event and from PCNA)

Yeah noproc implementation was a big kicker, but for the most part the big guilds PCNA kept playing in it fine. Once u50 died the problem became that there was never any influx of new players.....the server only became those guilds. Once one left that was it. The noproc probably didnt help the random players joining nocp for a new experience, because there was no "hey run these sets" Zos could have made noproc pvp vendors or crafting stations available. Or do literally anything to help players know how it worked.

With only Greyhost the worry is that there is no newb friendly u50 campaign.....then for pve players, there is no nocp less hardcore campaign to dip your toes into. So the Greyhost population probably will just die out since the pvper birthrate is 0, but the deathrate is still climbing. Just wait till a guild leader gets fed up and quits also leading to half their guild quiting. Rinse and repeat until that faction eats up their que and inevitably gets gated day after day.

katorga · August 22

Pvp is dead. Barely 1000 players out of the total player base would be my guess. So 1-2%? My opinion is that vengeance is intended to kill it off and go BG only.

Dunno how ZOS ruined it. PVP was amazing for the first few years.

MincMincMinc · August 22

katorga wrote: »

Pvp is dead. Barely 1000 players out of the total player base would be my guess. So 1-2%? My opinion is that vengeance is intended to kill it off and go BG only.

Dunno how ZOS ruined it. PVP was amazing for the first few years.

Steamcharts has like 10k average daily

Pvp has a server size of about 72*3 or 216 players. You could assume with a que time of about an hour and 40 person ques thats another 40 per hour for about 5 hours a night. so 216+40*5 = 416 for PCNA add another 416 for EU and cyro is around 832 players. Maybe round up to about 900 to account for off primetime players. Which is already almost 10% of the ESO daily population.

BG players are much harder to guess a number, but I would assume they actually match cyrodil population wise or surpass it. They are far easier for new players to engage with. They require no commitment. Endgame PCNA has a bg guild of about 400 players with about 100 active at any given point. So its probably safe to assume another 10% of the ESO daily population.

Now for the other 80% how many are Endgame pve players? How many are people just loggging in for daily chores like writs? How many are bot accounts? How many are new players only logging in for a month?

Crazy to think it cost zos almost nothing over the years and cyrodil kept their daily playerbase so stable. Cyrodil was literally content that wrote itself.

aetherix8 · August 22

katorga wrote: »

Pvp is dead. Barely 1000 players out of the total player base would be my guess. So 1-2%? My opinion is that vengeance is intended to kill it off and go BG only.

Dunno how ZOS ruined it. PVP was amazing for the first few years.

Devs must be really afraid of PvPers rage at shutting down Cyrodiil, going to great lengthts with Vengeance, pretending they trying to fix things while actually plotting to delete PvP.
Frankly, they can just turn it off, they survived adding subclassing, it would be even easier with deleting PvP.

acastanza_ESO · August 22

MincMincMinc wrote: »

Guys the factions only have population caps of like 72 players.

Just a small correction here, as the current maintainer of PvpAlerts - the addon that tracks these counts - the per faction pop cap is closer to 100, and can absolutely confirm it's >90.

AngryPenguin · August 22

MincMincMinc wrote: »

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

the problem comes when the population is unbalanced, like if all factions are 1 bar thats fine, but if 1 faction is 2 or 3 bar while the others are 1 bar, you cant do anything because an entire faction will descend on you the moment you take a resource

Yeah cyro and campaign rules were established with the notion that cyro would always be like 200v200v200 players. For instance the tri faction balance concept starts to fall apart once we are down to caps of 72v72v72. If one guild takes up 24-36 players on the server, then all it takes to get out of balance is them logging out or logging in. It doesn't help that stat bonuses are given to the winner. Which is fine when one faction takes the map, then the other two team up. However if the populations aren't full what happens is that people log out after losing the map and then instead of the two teams fighting back together the singular faction not only gets to defend, but they get to defend with superior numbers and with boosted stats.

Early on I ran a under lvl50 guild to teach new players and then played solo/small man in vet with some other 1vXers. The lowbie campaign PCNA died because when the guilds became unbalanced you'd have one guild flip the whole map one color. The enemy factions essentially all logged out for the night every time. My guys would have to level characters on all factions so you could swap around and balance out the map's population to keep players from logging out for the night.

Nocp followed a similar decline where the campaign was balanced with major guilds on all factions. However day after day players tended to only play when their guild played. Inevitably once a large guild disbanded, that faction would just be gated night after night. Eventually pugs stop playing or logging in to a losing team.

Will Greyhost follow this trend? IDK the only saving grace is that it is the final stand. When lowbie died, the remaining guilds jumped ship to Nocp. Then when Nocp died, they jumped to greyhost.

Original Cyrodiil was 600 players/faction. Not 200.

MincMincMinc · August 22

acastanza_ESO wrote: »

MincMincMinc wrote: »

Guys the factions only have population caps of like 72 players.

Just a small correction here, as the current maintainer of PvpAlerts - the addon that tracks these counts - the per faction pop cap is closer to 100, and can absolutely confirm it's >90.

Can you give insight in how the addon keeps track? Is this by unique UserIDs on a keep fight tick range? How does the addon make its list? Someone was saying there are some other addons that keep track too, but nobody seems sure about the accuracy of those numbers. Someone said during vengeance they were getting up to 2500 players counted on the server.

If its around 100 maybe its 8*12player groups for 96 players. Or zos just makes it 100 players. Even so atleast the que numbers are somewhat better by comparison. Granted its still a depressing figure compared to 600 players.

AngryPenguin wrote: »

MincMincMinc wrote: »

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

the problem comes when the population is unbalanced, like if all factions are 1 bar thats fine, but if 1 faction is 2 or 3 bar while the others are 1 bar, you cant do anything because an entire faction will descend on you the moment you take a resource

Yeah cyro and campaign rules were established with the notion that cyro would always be like 200v200v200 players. For instance the tri faction balance concept starts to fall apart once we are down to caps of 72v72v72. If one guild takes up 24-36 players on the server, then all it takes to get out of balance is them logging out or logging in. It doesn't help that stat bonuses are given to the winner. Which is fine when one faction takes the map, then the other two team up. However if the populations aren't full what happens is that people log out after losing the map and then instead of the two teams fighting back together the singular faction not only gets to defend, but they get to defend with superior numbers and with boosted stats.

Early on I ran a under lvl50 guild to teach new players and then played solo/small man in vet with some other 1vXers. The lowbie campaign PCNA died because when the guilds became unbalanced you'd have one guild flip the whole map one color. The enemy factions essentially all logged out for the night every time. My guys would have to level characters on all factions so you could swap around and balance out the map's population to keep players from logging out for the night.

Nocp followed a similar decline where the campaign was balanced with major guilds on all factions. However day after day players tended to only play when their guild played. Inevitably once a large guild disbanded, that faction would just be gated night after night. Eventually pugs stop playing or logging in to a losing team.

Will Greyhost follow this trend? IDK the only saving grace is that it is the final stand. When lowbie died, the remaining guilds jumped ship to Nocp. Then when Nocp died, they jumped to greyhost.

Original Cyrodiil was 600 players/faction. Not 200.

I had just put 200 as an example for how one guild of 24-36 players isn't going to drastically throw off the power dynamic. Vs if player caps are 60 or 72 than it'd be a much larger % of the faction.

Joy_Division · August 22

I mean, it's been 11 years of consistent behavior. I dont think it's a big mystery. The way Cyrodiil is desinged and played out - a huge map in which the only thing to do is take strategic objectives- means there is little to do except the sort of large scale fights ZOS had originally intended. When these arent happening, the map and game can get dull, even boring. As it is now, that's pretty much GH now because the pop caps are so low. I dont doubt the actaul number is cloaer to 100 than 60. But it is unsustainable that there are 100 people actually fighting and participating in PvP because of how poorly the map is designed and ZOS's blunder of not giving people anything to do except strategic objectives.

I mean, the reason I logged into Vengeance regularly was no much so much the ruleset, which I have quite a few objections to, but because there were people and actual fights, which too often does not happen in ESO's pvp.

MincMincMinc · August 22

Joy_Division wrote: »

I mean, the reason I logged into Vengeance regularly was no much so much the ruleset, which I have quite a few objections to, but because there were people and actual fights, which too often does not happen in ESO's pvp.

Same, even with the slower mount speed and stamina Vengeance never felt like a mount simulator. I had a group of my guildies from 2014-2017 come back to play for vengeance and we literally spent a whole night just playing around drakelow pulling pug groups to resources or holding harlun.

Ive probably only ever taken harlun a handful of times in live because nobody(pug groups) ever goes there.

Darethran · August 23

You can tell how thirsty I am about Vengeance as I'm checking every day then responding on these threads

MincMincMinc wrote: »

Same, even with the slower mount speed and stamina Vengeance never felt like a mount simulator. I had a group of my guildies from 2014-2017 come back to play for vengeance and we literally spent a whole night just playing around drakelow pulling pug groups to resources or holding harlun.

Ive probably only ever taken harlun a handful of times in live because nobody(pug groups) ever goes there.

Yeah these fights were big! If there was more time for people to get used to PvP, we'd probably have those hours long slogs that were just amazing. My favourite memory is from 2016-ish and there was a massive siege at Chalman that went on for a couple hours. Both sides kept making wins and losses, and trying all sorts of different tactics to get around each other.

Maybe with the added skill lines we'll be able to get more of that, since as great as Vengeance was there wasn't enough diversity in skills (snares, aoes, buffs/debuffs, etc) to make things spicy. But then again, it's literally a performance test!

MincMincMinc · August 23

Darethran wrote: »

You can tell how thirsty I am about Vengeance as I'm checking every day then responding on these threads

MincMincMinc wrote: »

Same, even with the slower mount speed and stamina Vengeance never felt like a mount simulator. I had a group of my guildies from 2014-2017 come back to play for vengeance and we literally spent a whole night just playing around drakelow pulling pug groups to resources or holding harlun.

Ive probably only ever taken harlun a handful of times in live because nobody(pug groups) ever goes there.

Yeah these fights were big! If there was more time for people to get used to PvP, we'd probably have those hours long slogs that were just amazing. My favourite memory is from 2016-ish and there was a massive siege at Chalman that went on for a couple hours. Both sides kept making wins and losses, and trying all sorts of different tactics to get around each other.

Maybe with the added skill lines we'll be able to get more of that, since as great as Vengeance was there wasn't enough diversity in skills (snares, aoes, buffs/debuffs, etc) to make things spicy. But then again, it's literally a performance test!

They also have access to much newer assets, wouldn't be crazy to say its time to update the map a little. Maybe bring different elements to keeps to make fights more interesting.

For example look at aleswell, outfront is a mini town that always draws fights. Why not put the farm in the town and place more buildings in the area. You could have a sort of Elven Garden's type fighting that people loved from IC. This also makes the RAM seiging more interesting with the lumbermill bonus. With more cover and different avenues it could make sense to leave the keep during a seige and attack the resource for instance. Maybe keeps like chalman and ash could be closer to or built into the mountain with a goatpath backdoor going through the mine. Maybe Alessia could be on the river instead with a goatpath going across aswell.

People don't even think of how more interesting cyrodil could be. It probably took all of a week for the original team to do cyrodil. For vengeance it is probably the best environment to test out a new map design and concepts like this.

acastanza_ESO · August 24

MincMincMinc wrote: »

acastanza_ESO wrote: »

MincMincMinc wrote: »

Guys the factions only have population caps of like 72 players.

Just a small correction here, as the current maintainer of PvpAlerts - the addon that tracks these counts - the per faction pop cap is closer to 100, and can absolutely confirm it's >90.

Can you give insight in how the addon keeps track? Is this by unique UserIDs on a keep fight tick range? How does the addon make its list? Someone was saying there are some other addons that keep track too, but nobody seems sure about the accuracy of those numbers. Someone said during vengeance they were getting up to 2500 players counted on the server.

Its a bit complicated. There is a semi-stable "unitId" that is assigned by the game to each unit (players and npcs, npc ids are ignored) for the "session". The addon keeps track of all the unitIds that are seen in combat events, and "effect" events. For allied players in the game's event range, you get information on basically everything they cast. For enemy players the game only sends event information from abilities that break stealth, and only detailed information when they're relatively close to you.
This makes the detection of allied players way more reliable than the detection of enemy players.
In addition to the list of players that is built from the list of combat/events it also constructs a list by reading information from your reticle. The displayed player counts are a consensus of the information from the events and the reticle. These lists are monitored on a loop and purged of stale ID/names to keep the counts current, but there is some lag time between when the last events were detected and the name is purged from the list to account for enemies that might have been active and try to hide, unless their death events were seen then they're flagged for cleanup on the next pass. That's a lot of simplification of some pretty complex processes that were not originally written by me, but it's the jist.

ArchMikem · August 24

Please switch to Blackreach.

Please.

Do I have to pay you?