It hasn't even been a full week yet...

Outside of Mayhem, when was the last time a non-GH campaign was poplocked?

tomofhyrule wrote: »

The question isn’t “was BR ever poplocked?” (Which it did get to on weekends on PC)

The question is “are the people in long 80+ person GH queues more likely to go to Vengeance since there’s no queue, or quit the game since they aren’t able to get into their preferred mode?”

GH has a max of 360 players, or 120 per alliance. If the queues in GH are approaching 100, that means that there is sufficient demand for another standard-rules Cyrodiil mode to ipen another Campaign - even though those 100 people could go into Vengeance, there must be something about Vengeance that they dislike enough to choose to sit in multi-hour queues (or uninstall ESO).

I haven’t seen Blackreach with a single bar in quite a long time honestly. I voted no, but I suppose it wouldn’t hurt anything to add it alongside Vengeance and Grey Host. It could just sit there and be dead all day. Why not I guess.

Can you enter delves, grab skyshards, or do town quests in Vengeance yet?

Gabriel_H wrote: »

JustLovely wrote: »

ZOS, you are already losing customers by not supporting the PvP you've told us for a decade you were working on supporting. Now ZOS appears to be going out of it's way to not support normal live Cyrodiil.

Cyrodiil does not work on a fundamental level. ZOS offered a solution. You just don't like it. That's them supporting the PvP, you just don't agree with how they are doing it.

No. You couldn't have possibly presented a more dishonest interpretation of what's going on or what I do and don't like.

ZOS told us for more than a decade they were working on improving normal live Cyrodiil. So where are we at with that effort? Based on the evidence, ZOS never even tried to fix normal live GH. They still haven't even tried limiting heal and shield stacking. What have they done to improve normal live Cyrodiil like they said they were doing for over a decade?

The fumes are clearly too thick where your keeping your head for you to be able to think straight. ZOS ain't hiring now and they don't take applications via the forum even when they are hiring.

CatalinaWineMixer2 wrote: »

People are tired of what is and has been going on in GH for a long time. Only Zos really knows what the true numbers are and it's not for us to know that. Nor should it be. Combat is totally out of control in GH. They are taking a basically ground up approach with Vengeance and it is good. They will eventually add proc sets and other things over time with small very calculated changes. This is the correct approach. So it doesn't get out of control as it is in GH. They've already stated they cant fix it so Im not sure why this comes as a surprise. Bringing back Blackreach wont change the fact that it is so.

The correct approach would have been and remains to this day that ZOS does what they've told us they were doing for over a decade. Accepting anything less is horrible for the game and the studio. There is no credibility on any level until ZOS does what they've told us they were doing for over a decade.

Tallon_IV wrote: »

Don't see the point. I never saw the bars above 1 on Blackreach. I would go in there during prime time Friday/Saturday nights when Gray Host had 1-2 hour queues, and it would be dead. The only people I could find were AFK. People would rather AFK for 1-2 hours to wait for Gray Host than play Blackreach.

You seem to have Blackreach confused with Vengeance.

JustLovely wrote: »

Gabriel_H wrote: »

JustLovely wrote: »

ZOS, you are already losing customers by not supporting the PvP you've told us for a decade you were working on supporting. Now ZOS appears to be going out of it's way to not support normal live Cyrodiil.

Cyrodiil does not work on a fundamental level. ZOS offered a solution. You just don't like it. That's them supporting the PvP, you just don't agree with how they are doing it.

No. You couldn't have possibly presented a more dishonest interpretation of what's going on or what I do and don't like.

ZOS told us for more than a decade they were working on improving normal live Cyrodiil. So where are we at with that effort? Based on the evidence, ZOS never even tried to fix normal live GH. They still haven't even tried limiting heal and shield stacking. What have they done to improve normal live Cyrodiil like they said they were doing for over a decade?

The fumes are clearly too thick where your keeping your head for you to be able to think straight. ZOS ain't hiring now and they don't take applications via the forum even when they are hiring.

I don't know, I have 20-60 ping in primetime, worst was 80 @ Gray Host. I've had that little bit of lag and good performance since ~3 years ago. So something did improve, it just didn't improve for everyone and they probably do not feel like looking into it.

But it's strange because people complain about the game lagging outside of Cyrodiil too. I seriously doubt it's only the server that's the issue, which is probably why they have trouble replicating it and finding a solution.

But it doesn't matter because the path they will take is the path they will take. The game has come a long way from freezing up all the time and people needing to relog over and over. At least for me, it rarely ever lags.

the alliance lock also poses an issue now. I'm fully in favor of keeping GH locked, but now that it's the only normal Cyrodiil campaign, you basically can't play Cyrodiil at all anymore with some of your characters if you already went there with a character of another faction that month. having non alliance locked campaigns available gave you an alternative and now it's gone.

Stamicka wrote: »

tomofhyrule wrote: »

The question isn’t “was BR ever poplocked?” (Which it did get to on weekends on PC)

The question is “are the people in long 80+ person GH queues more likely to go to Vengeance since there’s no queue, or quit the game since they aren’t able to get into their preferred mode?”

GH has a max of 360 players, or 120 per alliance. If the queues in GH are approaching 100, that means that there is sufficient demand for another standard-rules Cyrodiil mode to ipen another Campaign - even though those 100 people could go into Vengeance, there must be something about Vengeance that they dislike enough to choose to sit in multi-hour queues (or uninstall ESO).

I haven’t seen Blackreach with a single bar in quite a long time honestly. I voted no, but I suppose it wouldn’t hurt anything to add it alongside Vengeance and Grey Host. It could just sit there and be dead all day. Why not I guess.

This was PCNA Blackreach on Friday, April 17th, 2026 at 10:51pm.


This was PCNA Grayhost at the same time.

There was no event or golden pursuit happening. This was just the standard friday night for PCNA cyrodiil. As you can see, there was an hour wait to get in GH, and BR had 3 bars with EP pop locking. I don't know why people want to pretend that BR always had 0 bars, that's just plain ignorance. It was always the overflow campaign for GH and it always saw activity when GH had long queues. Obviously it's a necessary campaign to keep around.

Also I had provided this data during the PTS for u50 and it was ignored. I don't know what "data" ZOS needs by waiting 3 months to see if there is any need for an overflow campaign. Forcing players into vengeance when it's still in it's beta stage is only going to cause friction and player loss, unless that is the plan. There needs to be action, not reaction. Waiting for obvious data and then acting on it was the philosophy of ZOS prior to the new management change. Fumbling back to that behavior is leaving me concerned.

On PCEU, I seem to remember Blackreach being *more* popular than Gray Host. It was always the one to cap out first.

I'm guessing ZOS will give it a few weeks to see if the GH queue stays a problem, but I'd really love to see Blackreach back again. Clearly GH can't accommodate everyone who wants to be in that type of Cyrodiil.

We lost the under 50 Cyro, no CP and Blackreach I believe? But there's no extra capacity in GH for those players. Individually Blackreach etc might not have been pop capped all the time, but when you make them all suddenly homeless (Cyro-less?) there's a significant bottleneck with the GH queue. Apparently those Cyros did have more than 10 players at a time! I think if their populations were accommodated in Blackreach, they'd combine to make a good population.

I do really like Vengeance, but it's no use for me in a warm up for GH, or for testing some GH builds/practicing because the ruleset and restrictions are too different and don't work for that. If I play Vengeance it's usually so I can have a casual PvP sesh with a PvE character without having to make her a build. I wouldn't bother PvPing properly with my arcanist, but in Vengeance she's quite fun.

Maitsukas wrote: »

It hasn't even been a full week yet...

Outside of Mayhem, when was the last time a non-GH campaign was poplocked?

As a daily cyro player (PC/EU) I remember waiting in the queue to enter BR before subclassing. Especially during the weekends. Also before dk pvp meta you could see alliances on 3 bars or poplocked at least a few times per week, I have screenshots/clips from february 2026 somewhere. It died because people got really bored of just one superior dk meta. No other class was able to compete without at least 1 subclassed dk line. And that was just extremely boring you played the same build for months and encountered people playing the same or similar build as you for months. Now after U50 and pure class buff I can see many people coming back to the game and cyrodiil since they are finally able to enjoy the game on their main classes and people's builds have much more variety. So yeah giving BR a second chance now would be a good idea.

The fact that Blackreach was taken down shows that this was not thought through for the many people who don't like Vengeance. Or, they're trying to force us into Vengeance. Likely in the hopes they can remove normal Cyro down the line, but that is just my speculation with ZoS' track record.

There two big issues for me are:

1. I cannot play with friends who play on different factions. Previously, we could just play in Blackreach. And while I personally thing GH should not be faction locked, at least there WAS an alternative to be able to play with friends. Some people may argue that you can still do that, just in Vengeance! I'm sorry, Vengeance is not enjoyable as far as I'm concerned.
2. The GreyHost queue. I am not alone in disliking Vengeance. Of my entire smallman group, the core of which have played together for about 8 years now, exactly ZERO of us have any interest in Vengeance. So come Friday night, when it is time to PVP, we are going to log on at our normal time (because some of us have to work), and if the queue is over 80, we aren't going to PVP. None of us are interested in sitting in a giant queue, waiting ages for a queue to pop. As far as I am concerned, 80 is too much for me, but I don't want to let me group down.

While not something I wanted to mention as a BIG issue, the queue bug is also a concern to me, and it is something that ZoS has never commented on but all of us have experienced. You're in queue with your friends, and your queue stops moving entirely. Your friend's queue keeps dropping, and you're stuck at some number, and its probably under 20. In the end, you end up having to restart the queue and sit through all that again. It has never been acknowledged or addressed, so waiting through giant GH queues without any alternative is pretty unreasonable.

I have a hard time believing the outcome ZoS wants is for long time subscribers will leave the game. Maybe the expectation for ZoS is that without BR and no CP, they could raise the caps on GH. But if that is something they are hoping and analyzing, why not just communicate that to us. "The removal of these campaigns is temporary while we do these tests" as they've said countless times during the initial testing some 5 or 6 years ago, and when they were testing Vengeance previously.

In my opinion, removing the Grey Host overflow was quite short sighted.

I stopped playing eso at nights because GH is always full and i have to w8 more than 30-40mins...and there is no second option for me. bad..

This feels like and looks like ZOS taking away Blackreach to artificially increase the appearance of vengeance popularity. ZOS seems to be thinking people who can't get into Grey Host due to crazy three digit queues will go ahead and play vengeance since it's never over one bar population.

Hate to break it to you ZOS, but most of us will never touch vengeance again just out of basic principle. We don't like being lied to. Vengeance was never just a test and it looks and sounds very much like ZOS was lying about ever trying to improve performance in Grey Host now given how vengeance was rolled out and the only time performance improved in Grey Host was when new servers were installed.

It's fix Grey Host or we find a different game ZOS. Catch a clue why don't ya. It's what you always said you were doing, so do it.

@ZOS_Kevin