Well you should at least be accurate in your comparison. Vengeance pop lock is 4x the population. So vengeance at 1-2 bar is going to be pop lock on greyhost. If anything there is the same amount of people playing, however it should be noted that a good portion of pvp players are boycotting the test because they are worried zos is going to replace live pvp with vengeance as it is. So even if the population was about even with live pvp most of the people playing are probably newer players who normally wouldn't have played cyrodil. (kind of a good thing knowing there is an untapped market of new pvp players waiting for pvp to be playable)

Who knows if zos planned this or not. They didnt add much this test, so maybe they are using the undaunted event as a way to gauge how much of the vengeance population was PVE specific players.

Test 4 is going to have a week of overlap too where greyhost is available. So then they would be able to gauge how much of the population would be pvp specific players. During that test we would see how many people solely like vengeance on its own.

---

It would be better to just replace u50 and nocp with a permanent vengeance campaign. Its good to combine the dead servers so new players have a more populated campaign to learn in. At the same time zos could keep adding to vengeance and do simple one or two day incentivized test events instead of full weeks.

ibeprofun wrote: »

No one plays it!

How did you not learn your lesson the first time the server was up?

How is this a good business decision?

To further compound the annoyance, you disable all other cyrodiil instances!!!

Who is making decisions down there?!

who is empowering the person who makes decisions down there?! (who hired the decision maker)

greyhost, you have a server that consistently nears the population limit during regular service hours. then, you implement the vengeance campaign and the servers go empty. the population went from NEAR FULL TO NEAR EMPTY. WHY DID YOU BRING THAT DEAD THING BACK TO LIFE?

Im beyond amazed. not just that you made the vengeance campaign, but that you didn't learn your lesson the first time.

the fact no one plays it defeats the fundamental reason you made it. you cant test performance limits on an empty server no one plays!!!!!

I have no idea what server you are on (or the regular day-to-day PvP routines of said server), but any objective person who is on PC/NA who isn;t a dyed in the wool Vengeance hater would be able to asnwer all of your questions.

How did you not learn your lesson the first time the server was up?

The first time Vengeance was up PC/NA had ques of consistently over 200 people during primetime through the entire test (with a much higher pop cap). I know this because ESO constantly crashes on my machine, boots my out of Cyrodill, and forces me to log back in. It was faction dependent, with DC having a smaller que of around 40-50ish. Anyone with any business acumen would have concluded that further development was worth trying.

(I will say the second test after the first few days did not have these high ques, with DC often at 3 bars. But you asked about the first campaign and I would attribute the drop to Vengeance II not being as enjoyable because of the questionable mechanics that were introduced: ZoS so does love prioritizes healing/defense over damage))

How is this a good business decision?

Because the current Live PvP is the definition of a sunken cost. Given the results from Vengeance I and that established Vengeance would not require constant balance (which would get in the way of PvE) and would potentially attract a larger audience, it was an obvious direction to go in with the few resources that ZOS allots to combat/PvP development.

To further compound the annoyance, you disable all other cyrodiil instances!!!

I would agree that is a legit complaint. Though, ZOS's reasoning isn't far fetched. The whole point is to test how many calculations Vengeance could handle. I don't agree with the decision, but it is something I can understand. I also think it was dumb to schedule the test that required a high population with an event. So with this question, I do agree with you.

Who is making decisions down there?!

Well, you have a company that had basically given up on PvP in around 2015 or so when it concluded its original vision for PvP was unobtainable because of performance and it wasn't worth investing in solutions to make a high population Cyrodiil functionable. This was a decision made by the first leadership team under Sage and continued by the second leadership team under Lambert and given what I read on the Reddit AuA will be the same for the next leadership team. You have one person incharge of teams for both combat (currently in a poor state) and PvP (ditto), which proves just how low of a priority PvP (and combat balance in general) is for ESO, and has been going almost on a decade now.

who is empowering the person who makes decisions down there?! (who hired the decision maker)

The same for every AAA coperate gaming studio. Suits who have business degrees from a university whose only credentials are taking classes rather than actually building a successful business.

greyhost, you have a server that consistently nears the population limit during regular service hours. then, you implement the vengeance campaign and the servers go empty. the population went from NEAR FULL TO NEAR EMPTY. WHY DID YOU BRING THAT DEAD THING BACK TO LIFE?

GH has a tiny population cap, so saying it (only) nears it during a few hours a day is an indictment of Live PvP and why Vengeance was thought of and developed in the first place. You are also making a false comparison with the tiny caps of GH with the much larger caps of Vengeance. My machine kicked me out of ESO last night again, but for the short time I was on PC/NA, there were absolutely more people on Vengeance than any given night on Live. And this was with an event and with much of the regular PvP players not participating. To insinuate that GH is somehow alive and not a "dead thing" is to ignore the mass exodus of players who have long since quit ESO. If GH was as vibrant and popular as you are insinuating, then Vengeance wouldn't exist.

***

It's really not hard to understand why ZOS has went through with Vengeance.

Now, what I will say is that I do not think they have gone in the right direction with Vengeance. For me, the first Vengeance campaign was by far the best. ZOSs problem has always been its balance and combat philosophy: they do not understand high level gameplay and for over a decade they have pandered to defense/healing over offense. So when they introduced more skills (i.e., more defense and healing) for Vengeance II, doing so actually made the gameplay worse. Compounding this was the critique from Vengeance I that everyone agreed with (even supporters), wins and losses came down to a numbers game. That wasn't addressed in Vengeance II, still isn't addressed in Vengeance III, and nothing is being done in Vengeance IV. By ignoring the crucial defect, ZOS has basically lost whatever chance veteran PvPers would ever have in even giving Vengeance a try. It also has tested the patience of potential supporters such as myself who are interested in PvP with big battles, no broken builds, and sans OP ball groups, but have no patience with returning to the same tank/defense/healing oriented gameplay that was responsible for the mass exodus of PvPers from ESO in the first place. I also highly dislike the whole numbers game aspect, and ZOS's failure to even address that concern in these tests is off-putting to say the least.

Aylish wrote: »

ibeprofun wrote: »

you cant test performance limits on an empty server no one plays!!!!!

Since the U48 preview stream, it became pretty obvious that it was never about testing performance.
This Vengeance stuff is just a long step by step tutorial of what the future Cyrodiil will be. The effort that was put into the upcoming passive buff UI for Vengeance 4 made that clear.
We were just fooled about „This is just a test to learn where performance issues come from to make Cyrodiil lag-free again“.

Couldn't agree more. And a mandated vengeance mode like we have now will be the death of cyrodiil. Fewer and fewer PvP mains return after every test. And there's no way that PvE players will repopulate a vengeance PvP mode. Everyone who enjoys PvP is already playing on Grey Host.

SaffronCitrusflower wrote: »

MincMincMinc wrote: »

Well you should at least be accurate in your comparison. Vengeance pop lock is 4x the population. So vengeance at 1-2 bar is going to be pop lock on greyhost. If anything there is the same amount of people playing, however it should be noted that a good portion of pvp players are boycotting the test because they are worried zos is going to replace live pvp with vengeance as it is. So even if the population was about even with live pvp most of the people playing are probably newer players who normally wouldn't have played cyrodil. (kind of a good thing knowing there is an untapped market of new pvp players waiting for pvp to be playable)

Who knows if zos planned this or not. They didnt add much this test, so maybe they are using the undaunted event as a way to gauge how much of the vengeance population was PVE specific players.

Test 4 is going to have a week of overlap too where greyhost is available. So then they would be able to gauge how much of the population would be pvp specific players. During that test we would see how many people solely like vengeance on its own.

---

It would be better to just replace u50 and nocp with a permanent vengeance campaign. Its good to combine the dead servers so new players have a more populated campaign to learn in. At the same time zos could keep adding to vengeance and do simple one or two day incentivized test events instead of full weeks.

If you were being accurate you'd admit you don't have any more of an idea of what the pop cap is for vengeance than anyone else does. You're assuming the pop cap is higher for vengeance. It doesn't seem any higher than normal to me. In fact it seems like fewer players than normal live cyrodiil by a long shot during raid today. EP on PC NA has everything because one 12 man raid group took literally the entire map and all scrolls in 90 minutes today.

I am going off the data available to us. On one hand the devs told us vengeance test 1 was stable at around 4x the live playercap. This stable point was their baseline test done day 1-2 of vengeance 1.

From pvp tracking addons like miats, cyr hud, and score viewer we can track the number of unique players in a campaign and its roughly 100 players per faction. One of the addon developers was even in one of the previous discussion to clarify this. The same addon tracked about 1200 players in vengeance on the first vengeance or about 400 players per faction. Which appears to align with Zos's statement and the player experience during the big chalman fight PCNA.

Again taking the population during the morning midweek while there is an undaunted event going on is a nobrainer and pointing out the obvious. Planning this vengeance test during the undaunted event is just a way for zos to gauge the potential future vengeance playerbase. Next vengeance 4 they are going to do the same test where they have a second week run in parallel with Greyhost to see where the pvp player crowd would prefer to be.

TheAwesomeChimpanzee wrote: »

MincMincMinc wrote: »

Well you should at least be accurate in your comparison. Vengeance pop lock is 4x the population. So vengeance at 1-2 bar is going to be pop lock on greyhost. If anything there is the same amount of people playing, however it should be noted that a good portion of pvp players are boycotting the test because they are worried zos is going to replace live pvp with vengeance as it is. So even if the population was about even with live pvp most of the people playing are probably newer players who normally wouldn't have played cyrodil. (kind of a good thing knowing there is an untapped market of new pvp players waiting for pvp to be playable)

Who knows if zos planned this or not. They didnt add much this test, so maybe they are using the undaunted event as a way to gauge how much of the vengeance population was PVE specific players.

Test 4 is going to have a week of overlap too where greyhost is available. So then they would be able to gauge how much of the population would be pvp specific players. During that test we would see how many people solely like vengeance on its own.

---

It would be better to just replace u50 and nocp with a permanent vengeance campaign. Its good to combine the dead servers so new players have a more populated campaign to learn in. At the same time zos could keep adding to vengeance and do simple one or two day incentivized test events instead of full weeks.

It’s not that PvP players are “boycotting” Vengeance. We’re simply not playing it because we don’t enjoy it. The whole design feels like a separate mode being built from the ground up rather than a testbed to improve Cyrodiil.

And that’s where the concern comes from: since the very first test people have asked whether ZOS intends to use Vengeance to replace live PvP, not just experiment with mechanics for Greyhost. The fact that ZOS hasn’t doubled down on saying “these tests are to make current Cyrodiil better” leaves the community with a lot of uncertainty, and that uncertainty, combined with a mode many of us find terrible, is why you see the backlash. If the goal really were to test improvements for current PvP, most of the community would happily participate to help ZOS improve Greyhost. But that doesn’t seem to be the case.

It’s also very clear after the day one populations that the PvP playerbase does not like Vengeance. There simply aren’t enough PvP players overall, and even fewer who want to play this watered-down version to sustain the kind of populations it was supposedly designed to attract. Even when it’s enforced as the only option, the numbers just aren’t there. A permanent implementation of this campaign will never work.

I mean that's what boycotting is, but whatever you want to call it is fine by me.

The question is what would even make you trust zos saying these are just tests? Obviously them saying it repeatedly every livestream gets ignored. PvP players including me have said since day one that they need build elements and stat choices back or else people wont be happy. They made a generic toggle menu to choose basic stats to satisfy that demand and people are using that as a further reason to not like it. All i'm pointing out is the inconsistencies on the player side, being devil's advocate here. One of the bigger holes in the worry of replacing greyhost is where does the money come from? If zos is spending a year of dev time on this how do they recoup their money? If vengeance is the only gamemode. They would lose what 20-30% of their overall subscriber base? Then those players would never purchase a $50 DLC mythic again? Everytime this is brought up nobody has an answer to this hole in zos's money making strategy. Do we really think the PvE players will subscribe and buy PVE dlc more because they now have a cyrodil campaign?

Zos has PLENTY of inconsistencies we can point out. Don't misconstrued me as a zos fanboy. Ive been waiting nearly 10 years for cyrodil to get fixes

• Why is the test a full week even though from their data it only looks like you need a day or two?
• If they are coding from scratch why not rewrite the stats with hybridization in mind. Why still have weapon and spell crit? Unless they plan on combining old systems like gear sets or potions back into vengeance without reworking them. Why is physical and spell penetration back on the veng character sheet.....I thought it was supposed to be "offensive pen" Or was that just a cover up years ago?
• Why are they not talking about more rule changes. The main benefit to splitting pve and pvp is to change how the game handles aoe caps, over time effects, crosshealing, etc.
• Why do we have parts of the team discovering that the game cant handle the bloated effects......then on live they keep releasing bloated effects?
• If ballgroups and groups clustering up why are we incentivizing groups to ball up? Why keep pushing group combat sets instead of solo playstyles?
• If aoes are a problem why keep releasing sets that incentivize you to spam aoes to meet proc conditions? It gets even worse for aoe dots and hots being incentivized.

We could go on for days here.

TheAwesomeChimpanzee wrote: »

MincMincMinc wrote: »

TheAwesomeChimpanzee wrote: »

MincMincMinc wrote: »

Well you should at least be accurate in your comparison. Vengeance pop lock is 4x the population. So vengeance at 1-2 bar is going to be pop lock on greyhost. If anything there is the same amount of people playing, however it should be noted that a good portion of pvp players are boycotting the test because they are worried zos is going to replace live pvp with vengeance as it is. So even if the population was about even with live pvp most of the people playing are probably newer players who normally wouldn't have played cyrodil. (kind of a good thing knowing there is an untapped market of new pvp players waiting for pvp to be playable)

Who knows if zos planned this or not. They didnt add much this test, so maybe they are using the undaunted event as a way to gauge how much of the vengeance population was PVE specific players.

Test 4 is going to have a week of overlap too where greyhost is available. So then they would be able to gauge how much of the population would be pvp specific players. During that test we would see how many people solely like vengeance on its own.

---

It would be better to just replace u50 and nocp with a permanent vengeance campaign. Its good to combine the dead servers so new players have a more populated campaign to learn in. At the same time zos could keep adding to vengeance and do simple one or two day incentivized test events instead of full weeks.

It’s not that PvP players are “boycotting” Vengeance. We’re simply not playing it because we don’t enjoy it. The whole design feels like a separate mode being built from the ground up rather than a testbed to improve Cyrodiil.

And that’s where the concern comes from: since the very first test people have asked whether ZOS intends to use Vengeance to replace live PvP, not just experiment with mechanics for Greyhost. The fact that ZOS hasn’t doubled down on saying “these tests are to make current Cyrodiil better” leaves the community with a lot of uncertainty, and that uncertainty, combined with a mode many of us find terrible, is why you see the backlash. If the goal really were to test improvements for current PvP, most of the community would happily participate to help ZOS improve Greyhost. But that doesn’t seem to be the case.

It’s also very clear after the day one populations that the PvP playerbase does not like Vengeance. There simply aren’t enough PvP players overall, and even fewer who want to play this watered-down version to sustain the kind of populations it was supposedly designed to attract. Even when it’s enforced as the only option, the numbers just aren’t there. A permanent implementation of this campaign will never work.

I mean that's what boycotting is, but whatever you want to call it is fine by me.

The question is what would even make you trust zos saying these are just tests? Obviously them saying it repeatedly every livestream gets ignored. PvP players including me have said since day one that they need build elements and stat choices back or else people wont be happy. They made a generic toggle menu to choose basic stats to satisfy that demand and people are using that as a further reason to not like it. All i'm pointing out is the inconsistencies on the player side, being devil's advocate here. One of the bigger holes in the worry of replacing greyhost is where does the money come from? If zos is spending a year of dev time on this how do they recoup their money? If vengeance is the only gamemode. They would lose what 20-30% of their overall subscriber base? Then those players would never purchase a $50 DLC mythic again? Everytime this is brought up nobody has an answer to this hole in zos's money making strategy. Do we really think the PvE players will subscribe and buy PVE dlc more because they now have a cyrodil campaign?

Zos has PLENTY of inconsistencies we can point out. Don't misconstrued me as a zos fanboy. Ive been waiting nearly 10 years for cyrodil to get fixes

• Why is the test a full week even though from their data it only looks like you need a day or two?
• If they are coding from scratch why not rewrite the stats with hybridization in mind. Why still have weapon and spell crit? Unless they plan on combining old systems like gear sets or potions back into vengeance without reworking them. Why is physical and spell penetration back on the veng character sheet.....I thought it was supposed to be "offensive pen" Or was that just a cover up years ago?
• Why are they not talking about more rule changes. The main benefit to splitting pve and pvp is to change how the game handles aoe caps, over time effects, crosshealing, etc.
• Why do we have parts of the team discovering that the game cant handle the bloated effects......then on live they keep releasing bloated effects?
• If ballgroups and groups clustering up why are we incentivizing groups to ball up? Why keep pushing group combat sets instead of solo playstyles?
• If aoes are a problem why keep releasing sets that incentivize you to spam aoes to meet proc conditions? It gets even worse for aoe dots and hots being incentivized.

We could go on for days here.

And to your point about ZOS’ messaging: yes, they keep calling these “tests” in livestreams, but they’ve never once addressed the real elephant in the room — whether Vengeance is being built as a permanent replacement for live Cyrodiil. That lingering uncertainty is exactly why players are worried. If these were genuinely about improving Greyhost, people would show up in droves to help test changes that matter to the current game. But this doesn’t feel like that.

I actually agree with your money angle — it doesn’t make sense for ZOS to risk losing a big chunk of their long-term PvP subs who also buy PvE content. But even if they do decide to implement Vengeance permanently alongside Greyhost, the outcome is obvious from the second and third test populations: no one will play it. Or worse, it’ll limp along for a short time and then slowly die.

At the end of the day the answer isn’t another parallel “mode.” Just fix Greyhost. That’s all the PvP community has been asking for, for years.

The problem with them answering that is you need to finalize the testing and the data and probably go through several different tiers of management to make that call. Its not a singular level design team. This is why we wont get a concrete answer. The management hardly knows their options yet other than Live or current vengeance 4. Stopping testing forces them to choose one or the other instead of continuing to build vengeance closer and closer to live pvp.

You are bound to land somewhere between live and vengeance 4 atleast as far as we know. Ideally there is a medium in between where we can cut out bloat and implement game rule changes on pvp to reduce unnecessary load on the server while keeping as many layers and effects as live. As I and many others on here already suggested for crosshealing, group sets, aoe cap standards, skill designs, hot stacking, dot stacking, effect stacking, hot overheal cuts, Over time tick reduction, status effect simplification, etc.

I just see current vengeance and how they are designing it in a way where it can still plug and play with live's systems for testing. From an engineer viewpoint to me there are a lot of things that make sense of why you would make the choices I am seeing. Like how I pointed out the hybridization aspect. If vengeance was supposed to be dumbed down and released as is why keep stats at all? They could have fully hybridized or hid stats from the user completely. The only reason to keep them as is would be to be able to plug in systems for testing

On the other hand why they wouldn't just have the engineering team say why they are doing vengeance in certain ways is beyond me. As a company they pay community managers to do this instead to filter out any IP they dont want people to know about yet, even though alot of the times they are in over their head talking about subjects. We could have a 30min discussion with Wheeler saying how this is just a test and then Gina or someone unrelated to combat could throw a curveball like "Oh who knows what might come of it" and then you have people start questioning whats going to happen next patch.

SeaGtGruff wrote: »

GimpyPorcupine wrote: »

Oh, the hyperbole and histrionics.

Entered Cyro, 5 minutes to set up skills, checked the map, found a fight, went there, and found maybe 20 other blues.

The population was certainly lower than the previous Vengeance campaign, but a lot of that is because there's no Golden Pursuit to drive people there, and it's running concurrently with the Undaunted event which has a lot of people farming boxes.

I'd really like to see Vengeance replace U50 and no-CP, which would allow newer players to hop right into Cyrodiil and not get immediately auto-deleted.

Yeah, I think the Undaunted event is definitely putting a dent in the levels of participation. Just go to any Undaunted enclave and look at how busy and overrun it is. But this is just day 2 of the Vengeance test, and by now a lot of players should have earned, or be very close to earning, the Golden Pursuits apex reward, so hopefully there will be more players joining in the test before it ends next week.

I spent most of yesterday soloing dungeons, and when I finally queued for Vengeance on PCEU it was late night USA Eastern Time and Cyrodiil appeared to be mostly dead. As far as I could tell, I was the only DC player on, and 2 EP players were trying to slowly PvDoor the map. I don't know what it had been like earlier in the day, so maybe all the red keeps and resources and outposts and towns had been captured earlier when more players were on?

In any case, I tried to solo-capture a resource but could not stay alive against the guards, so I gave up and logged out to play on PCNA for the rest of the night.

After doing endeavors and Undaunted on PCNA, I queued for Vengeance and the populations were much better than on PCEU, which is frankly to be expected at that time of night. I still couldn't solo-capture a resource, but I did find a PvP fight or two to get into before I had to log out and go to bed.

Last night while doing Undaunted pledges on PCNA I watched one PvP streamer who was in Vengeance (evidently on PCNA), figuring out which skills were best at keeping him alive and helping him win 1v1 duels with other players. And this afternoon I was watching another PvP streamer who I assume was on PCNA. So there are definitely some PvP players participating in the Vengeance test, despite other PvP players being very vocal about boycotting the test.

TheAwesomeChimpanzee wrote: »

MincMincMinc wrote: »

TheAwesomeChimpanzee wrote: »

MincMincMinc wrote: »

Well you should at least be accurate in your comparison. Vengeance pop lock is 4x the population. So vengeance at 1-2 bar is going to be pop lock on greyhost. If anything there is the same amount of people playing, however it should be noted that a good portion of pvp players are boycotting the test because they are worried zos is going to replace live pvp with vengeance as it is. So even if the population was about even with live pvp most of the people playing are probably newer players who normally wouldn't have played cyrodil. (kind of a good thing knowing there is an untapped market of new pvp players waiting for pvp to be playable)

Who knows if zos planned this or not. They didnt add much this test, so maybe they are using the undaunted event as a way to gauge how much of the vengeance population was PVE specific players.

Test 4 is going to have a week of overlap too where greyhost is available. So then they would be able to gauge how much of the population would be pvp specific players. During that test we would see how many people solely like vengeance on its own.

---

It would be better to just replace u50 and nocp with a permanent vengeance campaign. Its good to combine the dead servers so new players have a more populated campaign to learn in. At the same time zos could keep adding to vengeance and do simple one or two day incentivized test events instead of full weeks.

It’s not that PvP players are “boycotting” Vengeance. We’re simply not playing it because we don’t enjoy it. The whole design feels like a separate mode being built from the ground up rather than a testbed to improve Cyrodiil.

And that’s where the concern comes from: since the very first test people have asked whether ZOS intends to use Vengeance to replace live PvP, not just experiment with mechanics for Greyhost. The fact that ZOS hasn’t doubled down on saying “these tests are to make current Cyrodiil better” leaves the community with a lot of uncertainty, and that uncertainty, combined with a mode many of us find terrible, is why you see the backlash. If the goal really were to test improvements for current PvP, most of the community would happily participate to help ZOS improve Greyhost. But that doesn’t seem to be the case.

It’s also very clear after the day one populations that the PvP playerbase does not like Vengeance. There simply aren’t enough PvP players overall, and even fewer who want to play this watered-down version to sustain the kind of populations it was supposedly designed to attract. Even when it’s enforced as the only option, the numbers just aren’t there. A permanent implementation of this campaign will never work.

I mean that's what boycotting is, but whatever you want to call it is fine by me.

The question is what would even make you trust zos saying these are just tests? Obviously them saying it repeatedly every livestream gets ignored. PvP players including me have said since day one that they need build elements and stat choices back or else people wont be happy. They made a generic toggle menu to choose basic stats to satisfy that demand and people are using that as a further reason to not like it. All i'm pointing out is the inconsistencies on the player side, being devil's advocate here. One of the bigger holes in the worry of replacing greyhost is where does the money come from? If zos is spending a year of dev time on this how do they recoup their money? If vengeance is the only gamemode. They would lose what 20-30% of their overall subscriber base? Then those players would never purchase a $50 DLC mythic again? Everytime this is brought up nobody has an answer to this hole in zos's money making strategy. Do we really think the PvE players will subscribe and buy PVE dlc more because they now have a cyrodil campaign?

Zos has PLENTY of inconsistencies we can point out. Don't misconstrued me as a zos fanboy. Ive been waiting nearly 10 years for cyrodil to get fixes

• Why is the test a full week even though from their data it only looks like you need a day or two?
• If they are coding from scratch why not rewrite the stats with hybridization in mind. Why still have weapon and spell crit? Unless they plan on combining old systems like gear sets or potions back into vengeance without reworking them. Why is physical and spell penetration back on the veng character sheet.....I thought it was supposed to be "offensive pen" Or was that just a cover up years ago?
• Why are they not talking about more rule changes. The main benefit to splitting pve and pvp is to change how the game handles aoe caps, over time effects, crosshealing, etc.
• Why do we have parts of the team discovering that the game cant handle the bloated effects......then on live they keep releasing bloated effects?
• If ballgroups and groups clustering up why are we incentivizing groups to ball up? Why keep pushing group combat sets instead of solo playstyles?
• If aoes are a problem why keep releasing sets that incentivize you to spam aoes to meet proc conditions? It gets even worse for aoe dots and hots being incentivized.

We could go on for days here.

It’s not a boycott. A boycott implies people are deliberately refusing to play even though they might otherwise want to. What’s happening here is much simpler: PvP players just don’t like Vengeance, so they don’t log in for it. That’s not a boycott — that’s a rejection of a design that doesn’t appeal to the PvP community.

And to your point about ZOS’ messaging: yes, they keep calling these “tests” in livestreams, but they’ve never once addressed the real elephant in the room — whether Vengeance is being built as a permanent replacement for live Cyrodiil. That lingering uncertainty is exactly why players are worried. If these were genuinely about improving Greyhost, people would show up in droves to help test changes that matter to the current game. But this doesn’t feel like that.

I actually agree with your money angle — it doesn’t make sense for ZOS to risk losing a big chunk of their long-term PvP subs who also buy PvE content. But even if they do decide to implement Vengeance permanently alongside Greyhost, the outcome is obvious from the second and third test populations: no one will play it. Or worse, it’ll limp along for a short time and then slowly die.

At the end of the day the answer isn’t another parallel “mode.” Just fix Greyhost. That’s all the PvP community has been asking for, for years.

First of all, your explanation of why some (not all) PvP players are not participating in the Vengeance test seems to fit your definition of what a boycott is, so I don't think you're being honest with yourself. I mean, if you want to boycott the test then fine, boycott it. What's the big deal about not wanting to admit to yourself that you're boycotting it?

As for fixing Gray Host, you say the PvP community wants Gray Host to get fixed, but it seems to me like a lot of the PvP community is content to be part of the problem and doesn't want to help be part of finding a solution. If the only way that Gray Host can be "fixed" is to make some unpopular decisions such as (speaking hypothetically) further reducing the maximum size of groups, limiting the range on AOE damage and healing skills, nerfing popular proc sets which form the core of some players' builds and play strategies, or balancing classes and skills that you personally like to use because they're META, is that something you'd be okay with, or not? Are you willing to be part of a potential solution by gracefully giving up skills and sets or whatevers that are problematic, or do you prefer to be part of the problem while loudly demanding that ZOS "Fix it!" even though your actions are seeming to say that you don't really want Cyrodiil to be changed at all?

I didnt continue the boycott discussion since it wont go anywhere or progress in any meaningful way. I say it is boycotting because they enjoy PvP and are refusing to play it because of the proposed changes. The argument they have is they do not see vengeance as PvP or enjoyable PvP so refusing is not boycotting since they do not even associate with it. Really not worth arguing over the definition or manfighting over the topic. The next step in the argument would have been for me to claim that vengeance or testing in general leads to a future pvp where they might find enjoyment, which still meets their definition of boycotting......then their counterargument will be that zos never follows through. Which at this point we are not even talking about boycotting and are just ranting about a company none of us work at or have any impact in their work ethic/drive.

Just to save pages of forum being wasted off topic

MincMincMinc wrote: »

SeaGtGruff wrote: »

GimpyPorcupine wrote: »

Oh, the hyperbole and histrionics.

Entered Cyro, 5 minutes to set up skills, checked the map, found a fight, went there, and found maybe 20 other blues.

The population was certainly lower than the previous Vengeance campaign, but a lot of that is because there's no Golden Pursuit to drive people there, and it's running concurrently with the Undaunted event which has a lot of people farming boxes.

I'd really like to see Vengeance replace U50 and no-CP, which would allow newer players to hop right into Cyrodiil and not get immediately auto-deleted.

Yeah, I think the Undaunted event is definitely putting a dent in the levels of participation. Just go to any Undaunted enclave and look at how busy and overrun it is. But this is just day 2 of the Vengeance test, and by now a lot of players should have earned, or be very close to earning, the Golden Pursuits apex reward, so hopefully there will be more players joining in the test before it ends next week.

I spent most of yesterday soloing dungeons, and when I finally queued for Vengeance on PCEU it was late night USA Eastern Time and Cyrodiil appeared to be mostly dead. As far as I could tell, I was the only DC player on, and 2 EP players were trying to slowly PvDoor the map. I don't know what it had been like earlier in the day, so maybe all the red keeps and resources and outposts and towns had been captured earlier when more players were on?

In any case, I tried to solo-capture a resource but could not stay alive against the guards, so I gave up and logged out to play on PCNA for the rest of the night.

After doing endeavors and Undaunted on PCNA, I queued for Vengeance and the populations were much better than on PCEU, which is frankly to be expected at that time of night. I still couldn't solo-capture a resource, but I did find a PvP fight or two to get into before I had to log out and go to bed.

Last night while doing Undaunted pledges on PCNA I watched one PvP streamer who was in Vengeance (evidently on PCNA), figuring out which skills were best at keeping him alive and helping him win 1v1 duels with other players. And this afternoon I was watching another PvP streamer who I assume was on PCNA. So there are definitely some PvP players participating in the Vengeance test, despite other PvP players being very vocal about boycotting the test.

TheAwesomeChimpanzee wrote: »

MincMincMinc wrote: »

TheAwesomeChimpanzee wrote: »

MincMincMinc wrote: »

Well you should at least be accurate in your comparison. Vengeance pop lock is 4x the population. So vengeance at 1-2 bar is going to be pop lock on greyhost. If anything there is the same amount of people playing, however it should be noted that a good portion of pvp players are boycotting the test because they are worried zos is going to replace live pvp with vengeance as it is. So even if the population was about even with live pvp most of the people playing are probably newer players who normally wouldn't have played cyrodil. (kind of a good thing knowing there is an untapped market of new pvp players waiting for pvp to be playable)

Who knows if zos planned this or not. They didnt add much this test, so maybe they are using the undaunted event as a way to gauge how much of the vengeance population was PVE specific players.

Test 4 is going to have a week of overlap too where greyhost is available. So then they would be able to gauge how much of the population would be pvp specific players. During that test we would see how many people solely like vengeance on its own.

---

It would be better to just replace u50 and nocp with a permanent vengeance campaign. Its good to combine the dead servers so new players have a more populated campaign to learn in. At the same time zos could keep adding to vengeance and do simple one or two day incentivized test events instead of full weeks.

It’s not that PvP players are “boycotting” Vengeance. We’re simply not playing it because we don’t enjoy it. The whole design feels like a separate mode being built from the ground up rather than a testbed to improve Cyrodiil.

And that’s where the concern comes from: since the very first test people have asked whether ZOS intends to use Vengeance to replace live PvP, not just experiment with mechanics for Greyhost. The fact that ZOS hasn’t doubled down on saying “these tests are to make current Cyrodiil better” leaves the community with a lot of uncertainty, and that uncertainty, combined with a mode many of us find terrible, is why you see the backlash. If the goal really were to test improvements for current PvP, most of the community would happily participate to help ZOS improve Greyhost. But that doesn’t seem to be the case.

It’s also very clear after the day one populations that the PvP playerbase does not like Vengeance. There simply aren’t enough PvP players overall, and even fewer who want to play this watered-down version to sustain the kind of populations it was supposedly designed to attract. Even when it’s enforced as the only option, the numbers just aren’t there. A permanent implementation of this campaign will never work.

I mean that's what boycotting is, but whatever you want to call it is fine by me.

The question is what would even make you trust zos saying these are just tests? Obviously them saying it repeatedly every livestream gets ignored. PvP players including me have said since day one that they need build elements and stat choices back or else people wont be happy. They made a generic toggle menu to choose basic stats to satisfy that demand and people are using that as a further reason to not like it. All i'm pointing out is the inconsistencies on the player side, being devil's advocate here. One of the bigger holes in the worry of replacing greyhost is where does the money come from? If zos is spending a year of dev time on this how do they recoup their money? If vengeance is the only gamemode. They would lose what 20-30% of their overall subscriber base? Then those players would never purchase a $50 DLC mythic again? Everytime this is brought up nobody has an answer to this hole in zos's money making strategy. Do we really think the PvE players will subscribe and buy PVE dlc more because they now have a cyrodil campaign?

Zos has PLENTY of inconsistencies we can point out. Don't misconstrued me as a zos fanboy. Ive been waiting nearly 10 years for cyrodil to get fixes

• Why is the test a full week even though from their data it only looks like you need a day or two?
• If they are coding from scratch why not rewrite the stats with hybridization in mind. Why still have weapon and spell crit? Unless they plan on combining old systems like gear sets or potions back into vengeance without reworking them. Why is physical and spell penetration back on the veng character sheet.....I thought it was supposed to be "offensive pen" Or was that just a cover up years ago?
• Why are they not talking about more rule changes. The main benefit to splitting pve and pvp is to change how the game handles aoe caps, over time effects, crosshealing, etc.
• Why do we have parts of the team discovering that the game cant handle the bloated effects......then on live they keep releasing bloated effects?
• If ballgroups and groups clustering up why are we incentivizing groups to ball up? Why keep pushing group combat sets instead of solo playstyles?
• If aoes are a problem why keep releasing sets that incentivize you to spam aoes to meet proc conditions? It gets even worse for aoe dots and hots being incentivized.

We could go on for days here.

It’s not a boycott. A boycott implies people are deliberately refusing to play even though they might otherwise want to. What’s happening here is much simpler: PvP players just don’t like Vengeance, so they don’t log in for it. That’s not a boycott — that’s a rejection of a design that doesn’t appeal to the PvP community.

And to your point about ZOS’ messaging: yes, they keep calling these “tests” in livestreams, but they’ve never once addressed the real elephant in the room — whether Vengeance is being built as a permanent replacement for live Cyrodiil. That lingering uncertainty is exactly why players are worried. If these were genuinely about improving Greyhost, people would show up in droves to help test changes that matter to the current game. But this doesn’t feel like that.

I actually agree with your money angle — it doesn’t make sense for ZOS to risk losing a big chunk of their long-term PvP subs who also buy PvE content. But even if they do decide to implement Vengeance permanently alongside Greyhost, the outcome is obvious from the second and third test populations: no one will play it. Or worse, it’ll limp along for a short time and then slowly die.

At the end of the day the answer isn’t another parallel “mode.” Just fix Greyhost. That’s all the PvP community has been asking for, for years.

First of all, your explanation of why some (not all) PvP players are not participating in the Vengeance test seems to fit your definition of what a boycott is, so I don't think you're being honest with yourself. I mean, if you want to boycott the test then fine, boycott it. What's the big deal about not wanting to admit to yourself that you're boycotting it?

As for fixing Gray Host, you say the PvP community wants Gray Host to get fixed, but it seems to me like a lot of the PvP community is content to be part of the problem and doesn't want to help be part of finding a solution. If the only way that Gray Host can be "fixed" is to make some unpopular decisions such as (speaking hypothetically) further reducing the maximum size of groups, limiting the range on AOE damage and healing skills, nerfing popular proc sets which form the core of some players' builds and play strategies, or balancing classes and skills that you personally like to use because they're META, is that something you'd be okay with, or not? Are you willing to be part of a potential solution by gracefully giving up skills and sets or whatevers that are problematic, or do you prefer to be part of the problem while loudly demanding that ZOS "Fix it!" even though your actions are seeming to say that you don't really want Cyrodiil to be changed at all?

I didnt continue the boycott discussion since it wont go anywhere or progress in any meaningful way. I say it is boycotting because they enjoy PvP and are refusing to play it because of the proposed changes. The argument they have is they do not see vengeance as PvP or enjoyable PvP so refusing is not boycotting since they do not even associate with it. Really not worth arguing over the definition or manfighting over the topic. The next step in the argument would have been for me to claim that vengeance or testing in general leads to a future pvp where they might find enjoyment, which still meets their definition of boycotting......then their counterargument will be that zos never follows through. Which at this point we are not even talking about boycotting and are just ranting about a company none of us work at or have any impact in their work ethic/drive.

Just to save pages of forum being wasted off topic

For a few weeks now every anti vengeance post has been responded to by you, usually in less than an hour.

What's going on?

There isn't any boycott. People just play something else because vengeance is boring.

MincMincMinc wrote: »

ToddIngram wrote: »

MincMincMinc wrote: »

SeaGtGruff wrote: »

GimpyPorcupine wrote: »

Oh, the hyperbole and histrionics.

Entered Cyro, 5 minutes to set up skills, checked the map, found a fight, went there, and found maybe 20 other blues.

The population was certainly lower than the previous Vengeance campaign, but a lot of that is because there's no Golden Pursuit to drive people there, and it's running concurrently with the Undaunted event which has a lot of people farming boxes.

I'd really like to see Vengeance replace U50 and no-CP, which would allow newer players to hop right into Cyrodiil and not get immediately auto-deleted.

Yeah, I think the Undaunted event is definitely putting a dent in the levels of participation. Just go to any Undaunted enclave and look at how busy and overrun it is. But this is just day 2 of the Vengeance test, and by now a lot of players should have earned, or be very close to earning, the Golden Pursuits apex reward, so hopefully there will be more players joining in the test before it ends next week.

I spent most of yesterday soloing dungeons, and when I finally queued for Vengeance on PCEU it was late night USA Eastern Time and Cyrodiil appeared to be mostly dead. As far as I could tell, I was the only DC player on, and 2 EP players were trying to slowly PvDoor the map. I don't know what it had been like earlier in the day, so maybe all the red keeps and resources and outposts and towns had been captured earlier when more players were on?

In any case, I tried to solo-capture a resource but could not stay alive against the guards, so I gave up and logged out to play on PCNA for the rest of the night.

After doing endeavors and Undaunted on PCNA, I queued for Vengeance and the populations were much better than on PCEU, which is frankly to be expected at that time of night. I still couldn't solo-capture a resource, but I did find a PvP fight or two to get into before I had to log out and go to bed.

Last night while doing Undaunted pledges on PCNA I watched one PvP streamer who was in Vengeance (evidently on PCNA), figuring out which skills were best at keeping him alive and helping him win 1v1 duels with other players. And this afternoon I was watching another PvP streamer who I assume was on PCNA. So there are definitely some PvP players participating in the Vengeance test, despite other PvP players being very vocal about boycotting the test.

TheAwesomeChimpanzee wrote: »

MincMincMinc wrote: »

TheAwesomeChimpanzee wrote: »

MincMincMinc wrote: »

Well you should at least be accurate in your comparison. Vengeance pop lock is 4x the population. So vengeance at 1-2 bar is going to be pop lock on greyhost. If anything there is the same amount of people playing, however it should be noted that a good portion of pvp players are boycotting the test because they are worried zos is going to replace live pvp with vengeance as it is. So even if the population was about even with live pvp most of the people playing are probably newer players who normally wouldn't have played cyrodil. (kind of a good thing knowing there is an untapped market of new pvp players waiting for pvp to be playable)

Who knows if zos planned this or not. They didnt add much this test, so maybe they are using the undaunted event as a way to gauge how much of the vengeance population was PVE specific players.

Test 4 is going to have a week of overlap too where greyhost is available. So then they would be able to gauge how much of the population would be pvp specific players. During that test we would see how many people solely like vengeance on its own.

---

It would be better to just replace u50 and nocp with a permanent vengeance campaign. Its good to combine the dead servers so new players have a more populated campaign to learn in. At the same time zos could keep adding to vengeance and do simple one or two day incentivized test events instead of full weeks.

It’s not that PvP players are “boycotting” Vengeance. We’re simply not playing it because we don’t enjoy it. The whole design feels like a separate mode being built from the ground up rather than a testbed to improve Cyrodiil.

And that’s where the concern comes from: since the very first test people have asked whether ZOS intends to use Vengeance to replace live PvP, not just experiment with mechanics for Greyhost. The fact that ZOS hasn’t doubled down on saying “these tests are to make current Cyrodiil better” leaves the community with a lot of uncertainty, and that uncertainty, combined with a mode many of us find terrible, is why you see the backlash. If the goal really were to test improvements for current PvP, most of the community would happily participate to help ZOS improve Greyhost. But that doesn’t seem to be the case.

It’s also very clear after the day one populations that the PvP playerbase does not like Vengeance. There simply aren’t enough PvP players overall, and even fewer who want to play this watered-down version to sustain the kind of populations it was supposedly designed to attract. Even when it’s enforced as the only option, the numbers just aren’t there. A permanent implementation of this campaign will never work.

I mean that's what boycotting is, but whatever you want to call it is fine by me.

The question is what would even make you trust zos saying these are just tests? Obviously them saying it repeatedly every livestream gets ignored. PvP players including me have said since day one that they need build elements and stat choices back or else people wont be happy. They made a generic toggle menu to choose basic stats to satisfy that demand and people are using that as a further reason to not like it. All i'm pointing out is the inconsistencies on the player side, being devil's advocate here. One of the bigger holes in the worry of replacing greyhost is where does the money come from? If zos is spending a year of dev time on this how do they recoup their money? If vengeance is the only gamemode. They would lose what 20-30% of their overall subscriber base? Then those players would never purchase a $50 DLC mythic again? Everytime this is brought up nobody has an answer to this hole in zos's money making strategy. Do we really think the PvE players will subscribe and buy PVE dlc more because they now have a cyrodil campaign?

Zos has PLENTY of inconsistencies we can point out. Don't misconstrued me as a zos fanboy. Ive been waiting nearly 10 years for cyrodil to get fixes

• Why is the test a full week even though from their data it only looks like you need a day or two?
• If they are coding from scratch why not rewrite the stats with hybridization in mind. Why still have weapon and spell crit? Unless they plan on combining old systems like gear sets or potions back into vengeance without reworking them. Why is physical and spell penetration back on the veng character sheet.....I thought it was supposed to be "offensive pen" Or was that just a cover up years ago?
• Why are they not talking about more rule changes. The main benefit to splitting pve and pvp is to change how the game handles aoe caps, over time effects, crosshealing, etc.
• Why do we have parts of the team discovering that the game cant handle the bloated effects......then on live they keep releasing bloated effects?
• If ballgroups and groups clustering up why are we incentivizing groups to ball up? Why keep pushing group combat sets instead of solo playstyles?
• If aoes are a problem why keep releasing sets that incentivize you to spam aoes to meet proc conditions? It gets even worse for aoe dots and hots being incentivized.

We could go on for days here.

It’s not a boycott. A boycott implies people are deliberately refusing to play even though they might otherwise want to. What’s happening here is much simpler: PvP players just don’t like Vengeance, so they don’t log in for it. That’s not a boycott — that’s a rejection of a design that doesn’t appeal to the PvP community.

And to your point about ZOS’ messaging: yes, they keep calling these “tests” in livestreams, but they’ve never once addressed the real elephant in the room — whether Vengeance is being built as a permanent replacement for live Cyrodiil. That lingering uncertainty is exactly why players are worried. If these were genuinely about improving Greyhost, people would show up in droves to help test changes that matter to the current game. But this doesn’t feel like that.

I actually agree with your money angle — it doesn’t make sense for ZOS to risk losing a big chunk of their long-term PvP subs who also buy PvE content. But even if they do decide to implement Vengeance permanently alongside Greyhost, the outcome is obvious from the second and third test populations: no one will play it. Or worse, it’ll limp along for a short time and then slowly die.

At the end of the day the answer isn’t another parallel “mode.” Just fix Greyhost. That’s all the PvP community has been asking for, for years.

First of all, your explanation of why some (not all) PvP players are not participating in the Vengeance test seems to fit your definition of what a boycott is, so I don't think you're being honest with yourself. I mean, if you want to boycott the test then fine, boycott it. What's the big deal about not wanting to admit to yourself that you're boycotting it?

As for fixing Gray Host, you say the PvP community wants Gray Host to get fixed, but it seems to me like a lot of the PvP community is content to be part of the problem and doesn't want to help be part of finding a solution. If the only way that Gray Host can be "fixed" is to make some unpopular decisions such as (speaking hypothetically) further reducing the maximum size of groups, limiting the range on AOE damage and healing skills, nerfing popular proc sets which form the core of some players' builds and play strategies, or balancing classes and skills that you personally like to use because they're META, is that something you'd be okay with, or not? Are you willing to be part of a potential solution by gracefully giving up skills and sets or whatevers that are problematic, or do you prefer to be part of the problem while loudly demanding that ZOS "Fix it!" even though your actions are seeming to say that you don't really want Cyrodiil to be changed at all?

I didnt continue the boycott discussion since it wont go anywhere or progress in any meaningful way. I say it is boycotting because they enjoy PvP and are refusing to play it because of the proposed changes. The argument they have is they do not see vengeance as PvP or enjoyable PvP so refusing is not boycotting since they do not even associate with it. Really not worth arguing over the definition or manfighting over the topic. The next step in the argument would have been for me to claim that vengeance or testing in general leads to a future pvp where they might find enjoyment, which still meets their definition of boycotting......then their counterargument will be that zos never follows through. Which at this point we are not even talking about boycotting and are just ranting about a company none of us work at or have any impact in their work ethic/drive.

Just to save pages of forum being wasted off topic

For a few weeks now every anti vengeance post has been responded to by you, usually in less than an hour.

What's going on?

Im bored at work, there's like 10 people on the forums these days. Feel free to contribute with actual discussion and make points. Ive been waiting 10 years for zos to do literally anything for pvp, either you are in the boat of we need to stop the test at all costs and continue with the dying greyhost campaign. Or your other option is to sit here and keep suggesting they need to add back in systems and set bonuses, etc to vengeance and also suggest rule changes like no crosshealing, hot stacking, dot stacking, selective aoe caps, more single target heals, etc.

I just see making constructive suggestions with good reasoning getting us farther towards a better game than giving up and going back to ballgroup only cyrodil.

the problem is most of what you're posting about vengeance mode isn't especially accurate and isn't reflective of what most PvP mains think in any way what so ever.

What's the problem with expecting ZOS to actually fix the game mode we log on to play? They haven't even tried limiting heal and shield stacking yet on live to see how much that alone improves performance.

But the other posters question stands. Why are you so emotionally invested in promoting vengeance? And on a side note, what job do you have that you can get away with being on the dedicated ESO forums all day if you're not a ZOS employee?

Joy_Division wrote: »

CatoUnchained wrote: »

MincMincMinc wrote: »

ToddIngram wrote: »

MincMincMinc wrote: »

SeaGtGruff wrote: »

GimpyPorcupine wrote: »

Oh, the hyperbole and histrionics.

Entered Cyro, 5 minutes to set up skills, checked the map, found a fight, went there, and found maybe 20 other blues.

The population was certainly lower than the previous Vengeance campaign, but a lot of that is because there's no Golden Pursuit to drive people there, and it's running concurrently with the Undaunted event which has a lot of people farming boxes.

I'd really like to see Vengeance replace U50 and no-CP, which would allow newer players to hop right into Cyrodiil and not get immediately auto-deleted.

Yeah, I think the Undaunted event is definitely putting a dent in the levels of participation. Just go to any Undaunted enclave and look at how busy and overrun it is. But this is just day 2 of the Vengeance test, and by now a lot of players should have earned, or be very close to earning, the Golden Pursuits apex reward, so hopefully there will be more players joining in the test before it ends next week.

I spent most of yesterday soloing dungeons, and when I finally queued for Vengeance on PCEU it was late night USA Eastern Time and Cyrodiil appeared to be mostly dead. As far as I could tell, I was the only DC player on, and 2 EP players were trying to slowly PvDoor the map. I don't know what it had been like earlier in the day, so maybe all the red keeps and resources and outposts and towns had been captured earlier when more players were on?

In any case, I tried to solo-capture a resource but could not stay alive against the guards, so I gave up and logged out to play on PCNA for the rest of the night.

After doing endeavors and Undaunted on PCNA, I queued for Vengeance and the populations were much better than on PCEU, which is frankly to be expected at that time of night. I still couldn't solo-capture a resource, but I did find a PvP fight or two to get into before I had to log out and go to bed.

Last night while doing Undaunted pledges on PCNA I watched one PvP streamer who was in Vengeance (evidently on PCNA), figuring out which skills were best at keeping him alive and helping him win 1v1 duels with other players. And this afternoon I was watching another PvP streamer who I assume was on PCNA. So there are definitely some PvP players participating in the Vengeance test, despite other PvP players being very vocal about boycotting the test.

TheAwesomeChimpanzee wrote: »

MincMincMinc wrote: »

TheAwesomeChimpanzee wrote: »

MincMincMinc wrote: »

Well you should at least be accurate in your comparison. Vengeance pop lock is 4x the population. So vengeance at 1-2 bar is going to be pop lock on greyhost. If anything there is the same amount of people playing, however it should be noted that a good portion of pvp players are boycotting the test because they are worried zos is going to replace live pvp with vengeance as it is. So even if the population was about even with live pvp most of the people playing are probably newer players who normally wouldn't have played cyrodil. (kind of a good thing knowing there is an untapped market of new pvp players waiting for pvp to be playable)

Who knows if zos planned this or not. They didnt add much this test, so maybe they are using the undaunted event as a way to gauge how much of the vengeance population was PVE specific players.

Test 4 is going to have a week of overlap too where greyhost is available. So then they would be able to gauge how much of the population would be pvp specific players. During that test we would see how many people solely like vengeance on its own.

---

It would be better to just replace u50 and nocp with a permanent vengeance campaign. Its good to combine the dead servers so new players have a more populated campaign to learn in. At the same time zos could keep adding to vengeance and do simple one or two day incentivized test events instead of full weeks.

It’s not that PvP players are “boycotting” Vengeance. We’re simply not playing it because we don’t enjoy it. The whole design feels like a separate mode being built from the ground up rather than a testbed to improve Cyrodiil.

And that’s where the concern comes from: since the very first test people have asked whether ZOS intends to use Vengeance to replace live PvP, not just experiment with mechanics for Greyhost. The fact that ZOS hasn’t doubled down on saying “these tests are to make current Cyrodiil better” leaves the community with a lot of uncertainty, and that uncertainty, combined with a mode many of us find terrible, is why you see the backlash. If the goal really were to test improvements for current PvP, most of the community would happily participate to help ZOS improve Greyhost. But that doesn’t seem to be the case.

It’s also very clear after the day one populations that the PvP playerbase does not like Vengeance. There simply aren’t enough PvP players overall, and even fewer who want to play this watered-down version to sustain the kind of populations it was supposedly designed to attract. Even when it’s enforced as the only option, the numbers just aren’t there. A permanent implementation of this campaign will never work.

I mean that's what boycotting is, but whatever you want to call it is fine by me.

The question is what would even make you trust zos saying these are just tests? Obviously them saying it repeatedly every livestream gets ignored. PvP players including me have said since day one that they need build elements and stat choices back or else people wont be happy. They made a generic toggle menu to choose basic stats to satisfy that demand and people are using that as a further reason to not like it. All i'm pointing out is the inconsistencies on the player side, being devil's advocate here. One of the bigger holes in the worry of replacing greyhost is where does the money come from? If zos is spending a year of dev time on this how do they recoup their money? If vengeance is the only gamemode. They would lose what 20-30% of their overall subscriber base? Then those players would never purchase a $50 DLC mythic again? Everytime this is brought up nobody has an answer to this hole in zos's money making strategy. Do we really think the PvE players will subscribe and buy PVE dlc more because they now have a cyrodil campaign?

Zos has PLENTY of inconsistencies we can point out. Don't misconstrued me as a zos fanboy. Ive been waiting nearly 10 years for cyrodil to get fixes

• Why is the test a full week even though from their data it only looks like you need a day or two?
• If they are coding from scratch why not rewrite the stats with hybridization in mind. Why still have weapon and spell crit? Unless they plan on combining old systems like gear sets or potions back into vengeance without reworking them. Why is physical and spell penetration back on the veng character sheet.....I thought it was supposed to be "offensive pen" Or was that just a cover up years ago?
• Why are they not talking about more rule changes. The main benefit to splitting pve and pvp is to change how the game handles aoe caps, over time effects, crosshealing, etc.
• Why do we have parts of the team discovering that the game cant handle the bloated effects......then on live they keep releasing bloated effects?
• If ballgroups and groups clustering up why are we incentivizing groups to ball up? Why keep pushing group combat sets instead of solo playstyles?
• If aoes are a problem why keep releasing sets that incentivize you to spam aoes to meet proc conditions? It gets even worse for aoe dots and hots being incentivized.

We could go on for days here.

It’s not a boycott. A boycott implies people are deliberately refusing to play even though they might otherwise want to. What’s happening here is much simpler: PvP players just don’t like Vengeance, so they don’t log in for it. That’s not a boycott — that’s a rejection of a design that doesn’t appeal to the PvP community.

And to your point about ZOS’ messaging: yes, they keep calling these “tests” in livestreams, but they’ve never once addressed the real elephant in the room — whether Vengeance is being built as a permanent replacement for live Cyrodiil. That lingering uncertainty is exactly why players are worried. If these were genuinely about improving Greyhost, people would show up in droves to help test changes that matter to the current game. But this doesn’t feel like that.

I actually agree with your money angle — it doesn’t make sense for ZOS to risk losing a big chunk of their long-term PvP subs who also buy PvE content. But even if they do decide to implement Vengeance permanently alongside Greyhost, the outcome is obvious from the second and third test populations: no one will play it. Or worse, it’ll limp along for a short time and then slowly die.

At the end of the day the answer isn’t another parallel “mode.” Just fix Greyhost. That’s all the PvP community has been asking for, for years.

First of all, your explanation of why some (not all) PvP players are not participating in the Vengeance test seems to fit your definition of what a boycott is, so I don't think you're being honest with yourself. I mean, if you want to boycott the test then fine, boycott it. What's the big deal about not wanting to admit to yourself that you're boycotting it?

As for fixing Gray Host, you say the PvP community wants Gray Host to get fixed, but it seems to me like a lot of the PvP community is content to be part of the problem and doesn't want to help be part of finding a solution. If the only way that Gray Host can be "fixed" is to make some unpopular decisions such as (speaking hypothetically) further reducing the maximum size of groups, limiting the range on AOE damage and healing skills, nerfing popular proc sets which form the core of some players' builds and play strategies, or balancing classes and skills that you personally like to use because they're META, is that something you'd be okay with, or not? Are you willing to be part of a potential solution by gracefully giving up skills and sets or whatevers that are problematic, or do you prefer to be part of the problem while loudly demanding that ZOS "Fix it!" even though your actions are seeming to say that you don't really want Cyrodiil to be changed at all?

I didnt continue the boycott discussion since it wont go anywhere or progress in any meaningful way. I say it is boycotting because they enjoy PvP and are refusing to play it because of the proposed changes. The argument they have is they do not see vengeance as PvP or enjoyable PvP so refusing is not boycotting since they do not even associate with it. Really not worth arguing over the definition or manfighting over the topic. The next step in the argument would have been for me to claim that vengeance or testing in general leads to a future pvp where they might find enjoyment, which still meets their definition of boycotting......then their counterargument will be that zos never follows through. Which at this point we are not even talking about boycotting and are just ranting about a company none of us work at or have any impact in their work ethic/drive.

Just to save pages of forum being wasted off topic

For a few weeks now every anti vengeance post has been responded to by you, usually in less than an hour.

What's going on?

Im bored at work, there's like 10 people on the forums these days. Feel free to contribute with actual discussion and make points. Ive been waiting 10 years for zos to do literally anything for pvp, either you are in the boat of we need to stop the test at all costs and continue with the dying greyhost campaign. Or your other option is to sit here and keep suggesting they need to add back in systems and set bonuses, etc to vengeance and also suggest rule changes like no crosshealing, hot stacking, dot stacking, selective aoe caps, more single target heals, etc.

I just see making constructive suggestions with good reasoning getting us farther towards a better game than giving up and going back to ballgroup only cyrodil.

the problem is most of what you're posting about vengeance mode isn't especially accurate and isn't reflective of what most PvP mains think in any way what so ever.

What's the problem with expecting ZOS to actually fix the game mode we log on to play? They haven't even tried limiting heal and shield stacking yet on live to see how much that alone improves performance.

But the other posters question stands. Why are you so emotionally invested in promoting vengeance? And on a side note, what job do you have that you can get away with being on the dedicated ESO forums all day if you're not a ZOS employee?

What's this fascination with other peoples' posting history and occupation? Let's not pretend the same 4 or 5 names constantly and consistently make the same anti-Vengeance rants are also not highly emotionally invested in the future of ESO and PvP. That's what these forums are for. To express opinions. They aren't places for other forum users to publicly question the psychological state and motivation of other customers. It doesn't matter what job they have. That's none of your business. It doesn't matter why they post in favor of a ESO development. What matters if they are respectful and follow the guidelines.

Ok, you don;t agree with their perspective about Vengeance. Say why. No need for an inquisition.

Literally this

CatoUnchained wrote: »

MincMincMinc wrote: »

ToddIngram wrote: »

MincMincMinc wrote: »

SeaGtGruff wrote: »

GimpyPorcupine wrote: »

Oh, the hyperbole and histrionics.

Entered Cyro, 5 minutes to set up skills, checked the map, found a fight, went there, and found maybe 20 other blues.

The population was certainly lower than the previous Vengeance campaign, but a lot of that is because there's no Golden Pursuit to drive people there, and it's running concurrently with the Undaunted event which has a lot of people farming boxes.

I'd really like to see Vengeance replace U50 and no-CP, which would allow newer players to hop right into Cyrodiil and not get immediately auto-deleted.

Yeah, I think the Undaunted event is definitely putting a dent in the levels of participation. Just go to any Undaunted enclave and look at how busy and overrun it is. But this is just day 2 of the Vengeance test, and by now a lot of players should have earned, or be very close to earning, the Golden Pursuits apex reward, so hopefully there will be more players joining in the test before it ends next week.

I spent most of yesterday soloing dungeons, and when I finally queued for Vengeance on PCEU it was late night USA Eastern Time and Cyrodiil appeared to be mostly dead. As far as I could tell, I was the only DC player on, and 2 EP players were trying to slowly PvDoor the map. I don't know what it had been like earlier in the day, so maybe all the red keeps and resources and outposts and towns had been captured earlier when more players were on?

In any case, I tried to solo-capture a resource but could not stay alive against the guards, so I gave up and logged out to play on PCNA for the rest of the night.

After doing endeavors and Undaunted on PCNA, I queued for Vengeance and the populations were much better than on PCEU, which is frankly to be expected at that time of night. I still couldn't solo-capture a resource, but I did find a PvP fight or two to get into before I had to log out and go to bed.

Last night while doing Undaunted pledges on PCNA I watched one PvP streamer who was in Vengeance (evidently on PCNA), figuring out which skills were best at keeping him alive and helping him win 1v1 duels with other players. And this afternoon I was watching another PvP streamer who I assume was on PCNA. So there are definitely some PvP players participating in the Vengeance test, despite other PvP players being very vocal about boycotting the test.

TheAwesomeChimpanzee wrote: »

MincMincMinc wrote: »

TheAwesomeChimpanzee wrote: »

MincMincMinc wrote: »

Well you should at least be accurate in your comparison. Vengeance pop lock is 4x the population. So vengeance at 1-2 bar is going to be pop lock on greyhost. If anything there is the same amount of people playing, however it should be noted that a good portion of pvp players are boycotting the test because they are worried zos is going to replace live pvp with vengeance as it is. So even if the population was about even with live pvp most of the people playing are probably newer players who normally wouldn't have played cyrodil. (kind of a good thing knowing there is an untapped market of new pvp players waiting for pvp to be playable)

Who knows if zos planned this or not. They didnt add much this test, so maybe they are using the undaunted event as a way to gauge how much of the vengeance population was PVE specific players.

Test 4 is going to have a week of overlap too where greyhost is available. So then they would be able to gauge how much of the population would be pvp specific players. During that test we would see how many people solely like vengeance on its own.

---

It would be better to just replace u50 and nocp with a permanent vengeance campaign. Its good to combine the dead servers so new players have a more populated campaign to learn in. At the same time zos could keep adding to vengeance and do simple one or two day incentivized test events instead of full weeks.

It’s not that PvP players are “boycotting” Vengeance. We’re simply not playing it because we don’t enjoy it. The whole design feels like a separate mode being built from the ground up rather than a testbed to improve Cyrodiil.

And that’s where the concern comes from: since the very first test people have asked whether ZOS intends to use Vengeance to replace live PvP, not just experiment with mechanics for Greyhost. The fact that ZOS hasn’t doubled down on saying “these tests are to make current Cyrodiil better” leaves the community with a lot of uncertainty, and that uncertainty, combined with a mode many of us find terrible, is why you see the backlash. If the goal really were to test improvements for current PvP, most of the community would happily participate to help ZOS improve Greyhost. But that doesn’t seem to be the case.

It’s also very clear after the day one populations that the PvP playerbase does not like Vengeance. There simply aren’t enough PvP players overall, and even fewer who want to play this watered-down version to sustain the kind of populations it was supposedly designed to attract. Even when it’s enforced as the only option, the numbers just aren’t there. A permanent implementation of this campaign will never work.

I mean that's what boycotting is, but whatever you want to call it is fine by me.

The question is what would even make you trust zos saying these are just tests? Obviously them saying it repeatedly every livestream gets ignored. PvP players including me have said since day one that they need build elements and stat choices back or else people wont be happy. They made a generic toggle menu to choose basic stats to satisfy that demand and people are using that as a further reason to not like it. All i'm pointing out is the inconsistencies on the player side, being devil's advocate here. One of the bigger holes in the worry of replacing greyhost is where does the money come from? If zos is spending a year of dev time on this how do they recoup their money? If vengeance is the only gamemode. They would lose what 20-30% of their overall subscriber base? Then those players would never purchase a $50 DLC mythic again? Everytime this is brought up nobody has an answer to this hole in zos's money making strategy. Do we really think the PvE players will subscribe and buy PVE dlc more because they now have a cyrodil campaign?

Zos has PLENTY of inconsistencies we can point out. Don't misconstrued me as a zos fanboy. Ive been waiting nearly 10 years for cyrodil to get fixes

• Why is the test a full week even though from their data it only looks like you need a day or two?
• If they are coding from scratch why not rewrite the stats with hybridization in mind. Why still have weapon and spell crit? Unless they plan on combining old systems like gear sets or potions back into vengeance without reworking them. Why is physical and spell penetration back on the veng character sheet.....I thought it was supposed to be "offensive pen" Or was that just a cover up years ago?
• Why are they not talking about more rule changes. The main benefit to splitting pve and pvp is to change how the game handles aoe caps, over time effects, crosshealing, etc.
• Why do we have parts of the team discovering that the game cant handle the bloated effects......then on live they keep releasing bloated effects?
• If ballgroups and groups clustering up why are we incentivizing groups to ball up? Why keep pushing group combat sets instead of solo playstyles?
• If aoes are a problem why keep releasing sets that incentivize you to spam aoes to meet proc conditions? It gets even worse for aoe dots and hots being incentivized.

We could go on for days here.

It’s not a boycott. A boycott implies people are deliberately refusing to play even though they might otherwise want to. What’s happening here is much simpler: PvP players just don’t like Vengeance, so they don’t log in for it. That’s not a boycott — that’s a rejection of a design that doesn’t appeal to the PvP community.

And to your point about ZOS’ messaging: yes, they keep calling these “tests” in livestreams, but they’ve never once addressed the real elephant in the room — whether Vengeance is being built as a permanent replacement for live Cyrodiil. That lingering uncertainty is exactly why players are worried. If these were genuinely about improving Greyhost, people would show up in droves to help test changes that matter to the current game. But this doesn’t feel like that.

I actually agree with your money angle — it doesn’t make sense for ZOS to risk losing a big chunk of their long-term PvP subs who also buy PvE content. But even if they do decide to implement Vengeance permanently alongside Greyhost, the outcome is obvious from the second and third test populations: no one will play it. Or worse, it’ll limp along for a short time and then slowly die.

At the end of the day the answer isn’t another parallel “mode.” Just fix Greyhost. That’s all the PvP community has been asking for, for years.

First of all, your explanation of why some (not all) PvP players are not participating in the Vengeance test seems to fit your definition of what a boycott is, so I don't think you're being honest with yourself. I mean, if you want to boycott the test then fine, boycott it. What's the big deal about not wanting to admit to yourself that you're boycotting it?

As for fixing Gray Host, you say the PvP community wants Gray Host to get fixed, but it seems to me like a lot of the PvP community is content to be part of the problem and doesn't want to help be part of finding a solution. If the only way that Gray Host can be "fixed" is to make some unpopular decisions such as (speaking hypothetically) further reducing the maximum size of groups, limiting the range on AOE damage and healing skills, nerfing popular proc sets which form the core of some players' builds and play strategies, or balancing classes and skills that you personally like to use because they're META, is that something you'd be okay with, or not? Are you willing to be part of a potential solution by gracefully giving up skills and sets or whatevers that are problematic, or do you prefer to be part of the problem while loudly demanding that ZOS "Fix it!" even though your actions are seeming to say that you don't really want Cyrodiil to be changed at all?

I didnt continue the boycott discussion since it wont go anywhere or progress in any meaningful way. I say it is boycotting because they enjoy PvP and are refusing to play it because of the proposed changes. The argument they have is they do not see vengeance as PvP or enjoyable PvP so refusing is not boycotting since they do not even associate with it. Really not worth arguing over the definition or manfighting over the topic. The next step in the argument would have been for me to claim that vengeance or testing in general leads to a future pvp where they might find enjoyment, which still meets their definition of boycotting......then their counterargument will be that zos never follows through. Which at this point we are not even talking about boycotting and are just ranting about a company none of us work at or have any impact in their work ethic/drive.

Just to save pages of forum being wasted off topic

For a few weeks now every anti vengeance post has been responded to by you, usually in less than an hour.

What's going on?

Im bored at work, there's like 10 people on the forums these days. Feel free to contribute with actual discussion and make points. Ive been waiting 10 years for zos to do literally anything for pvp, either you are in the boat of we need to stop the test at all costs and continue with the dying greyhost campaign. Or your other option is to sit here and keep suggesting they need to add back in systems and set bonuses, etc to vengeance and also suggest rule changes like no crosshealing, hot stacking, dot stacking, selective aoe caps, more single target heals, etc.

I just see making constructive suggestions with good reasoning getting us farther towards a better game than giving up and going back to ballgroup only cyrodil.

the problem is most of what you're posting about vengeance mode isn't especially accurate and isn't reflective of what most PvP mains think in any way what so ever.

What's the problem with expecting ZOS to actually fix the game mode we log on to play? They haven't even tried limiting heal and shield stacking yet on live to see how much that alone improves performance.

But the other posters question stands. Why are you so emotionally invested in promoting vengeance? And on a side note, what job do you have that you can get away with being on the dedicated ESO forums all day if you're not a ZOS employee?

Enlighten me on what "isn't especially accurate" or point out where I am misrepresenting most pvp mains. Like Joy pointed out a large majority of the anti vengeance posts are people doing exactly this and attempting to represent all of pvp in their generalized comment.

Whats funny is you bring up limiting heal and shield stacking......a point I have brought up hundreds of times already. Actually plenty of my vengeance posts bring up that zos should be using the PvE and PvP split system to now implement gamerules on the pvp skills for things like crosshealing, hot stacking, dot stacking, Hot overheals purging themselves, aoe caps on selective skills, Less smart heals and more aimed heals.

I'm sorry you see forum posts in this polarizing way. "If you are not against vengeance you must be diehard for it." By no means do I think current vengeance is the answer, its a good testbed system and should be used as such. At best I could see it implemented as a noob friendly replacement for u50 and nocp cyrodil. I would rather use the test for what it is and provide feedback and test ideas than get hysterical over a "what if" conspiracy that zos might implement something you have no control over.

The way I see it if vengeance is a 0 on the bloat/lag scale and Live is a 10/10 on the scale. It makes no difference to me whether we see 0+5 or if we see 10-5. I have given plenty of suggestions in the past before vengeance was even thought up on what tests to do and how to reduce calculation load and why zos's previous aoe and crosshealing tests saw little to no change.

EDIT: fairly certain giving out personal details is against ToS. Me giving you this information serves no purpose unless you just want it for personal attacks when instead you should be focusing on good faith arguments about the subject instead. We've already seen plenty of these vengeance threads turn into "vengeance is bad.....Why......cuz it is and you are a noob if you think otherwise"