Low Population Bonus Issues

Thudunblundur

May as well go and find out...

Dalglish

If thats the case, then you are just as bad as the guys doing this, if they are actually doing that.

Elder Scroll Exploits Online haha!

cazlonb16_ESO

Thudunblundur wrote: »

May as well go and find out...

Nah, not interested.

Haxnschwammer

Having more chars in the same campaign is forbidden, don't know about
guesting (but I think that is possible). Also for a cross faction guild it's no
problem to send some not related chars to a campaign for a few special
gifts...

Dalglish

You can travel to friends/guild members in the same campaign even if you have another alliance char homed to that campaign.

cazlonb16_ESO

That was my guess as well, but didn't wanna spell it out.

Sacadon

ZOS_TristanK wrote: »

Thank you for staying patient, all. We have looked into the population bonus and everything seems to be working as designed. To give you a bit more insight into the mechanic, the population bonus is applied and dissolved over time and not immediately. Because of the gradual application, there isn't really a way for players to log in and out to raise or lower the bonus in a consistent way.

We can say after looking at the campaigns from the back end that the battles are often pretty close! That said, we will continue monitoring the campaigns to see if the population bonus needs to be tweaked.

@ZOS_TristanK, @ZOS_BrianWheeler,

Then clearly the design needs to change. We all make mistakes, it's what you do afterwards that matters. So to avoid a repeat, at a minimum I recommend you involve the community more actively in discussing the options. Then let us know what you decided to do, why and approx wehen, even if it's different than what we chose.

Lava_Croft

AbraXuSeXile wrote: »

I suggest EP and DC just attack AD to there homebase everytime they get the low pop bonus.

I was toying with promoting this idea, but I feel bad about possibly 'punishing' AD players for a mechanic they (supposedly) cannot help.

Haxnschwammer

Punishing a whole faction for a handfull exploiters... Seems unfair to me.
Yes, it would prevent huge low pop boni... If done over 3 weeks and all would have to take part... Hard to manage that. And the exploiter would just change campaign. And what about all the players? They would be punished instead of exploiters. No, that's wrong.

Gorthax

it would be way easy to fix.....disable travel to player when said player you are traveling to is in cyrodill....but WAIT! thats too hard for them to do!

Reverb

Gorthax wrote: »

it would be way easy to fix.....disable travel to player when said player you are traveling to is in cyrodill....but WAIT! thats too hard for them to do!

It's not too hard, it's just not a direction they want to go in. Zos has explicitly said that the ability to move to friends and guildmates in campaigns is intended and desired.

It also doesn't circumvent the pop cap. If you try to travel to a friend in a locked campaign the travel will fail and you will get an error in the upper right corner. I speak from experience, both frequent and recent.

Izanagi.Xiiib16_ESO

AbraXuSeXile wrote: »

Low pop bonus usually procs when it's a unholy hour, Which is easy for a raid to manipulate as they probably have 75% of the population on.

Well you know I was leading that raid the first night with the 1480 pop, so I assume your asking if I asked everyone to do this as it was my group, answer is no. You can even see this yourself on your friendlist

I wasn't online last night though so anything could have happened.

Thudunblundur

Reverb wrote: »

Gorthax wrote: »

it would be way easy to fix.....disable travel to player when said player you are traveling to is in cyrodill....but WAIT! thats too hard for them to do!

It's not too hard, it's just not a direction they want to go in. Zos has explicitly said that the ability to move to friends and guildmates in campaigns is intended and desired.

It also doesn't circumvent the pop cap. If you try to travel to a friend in a locked campaign the travel will fail and you will get an error in the upper right corner. I speak from experience, both frequent and recent.

It may not allow travel to a locked campaign, but it would allow travel to low population campaigns by the sound of it. If so, they would then count towards the population of the faction they were joining, wouldn't they? Which would be useful if you were looking to abuse the low population bonus.

Thanks for saving me from having to try all this out!

Lava_Croft

A good start would be to not allow people to travel to friends in a campaign their are not Homed or Guested to. I don't see the need for a Home or Guest campaign when you can just travel to player and bypass this mechanic entirely.

Hermod

Back in off night shift again, just to see the yellows with a Low Population Bonus again, could set the clocks by it now.

Spangla

Lava_Croft wrote: »

AbraXuSeXile wrote: »

I suggest EP and DC just attack AD to there homebase everytime they get the low pop bonus.

I was toying with promoting this idea, but I feel bad about possibly 'punishing' AD players for a mechanic they (supposedly) cannot help.

This is a great idea - however even if ep only had 1 keep and ad has the rest of the map. Every1 would still attack ep

daemonios

Lava_Croft wrote: »

A good start would be to not allow people to travel to friends in a campaign their are not Homed or Guested to. I don't see the need for a Home or Guest campaign when you can just travel to player and bypass this mechanic entirely.

ZOS supposedly wants to incentivate PvE'rs to do PvP. Hence the PvP buffs in PvE and the ability to port to friends in Cyrodiil, etc. But in the end the result is buff servers and possibly abuse of campaign populations. I'd separate PvP from PvE completely, but I don't think ZOS is willing to do that.

Turelus

daemonios wrote: »

Lava_Croft wrote: »

A good start would be to not allow people to travel to friends in a campaign their are not Homed or Guested to. I don't see the need for a Home or Guest campaign when you can just travel to player and bypass this mechanic entirely.

ZOS supposedly wants to incentivate PvE'rs to do PvP. Hence the PvP buffs in PvE and the ability to port to friends in Cyrodiil, etc. But in the end the result is buff servers and possibly abuse of campaign populations. I'd separate PvP from PvE completely, but I don't think ZOS is willing to do that.

Or just fix the game so it's possible to have only one Cyrodiil, then it's one focused location where no trading or buff campaign can happen due to it having a large population.

However ZOS want smaller campaigns not larger ones.

Also back to the low population bonus, do we get a reply yet?

What about now?

What about now?

What about now?

What about now?

What about now?

What about now?

What about now?

What about now?

(Baldur's Gate fans will get it)

Turelus

23 days since the last reply from ZOS.
Below I will try to sum up all the information since @ZOS_LenaicR last made a post.
In that time the issue has persisted and even got worse in some cases.

AD won EU Thornblade season 4 after a lack of participation from a significant portion of the faction throughout the month.

Many members of the AD faction are now facing venomous and offensive comments from the community as they're being blamed for this and seen as abusing it.

The bonus still seems to mostly be seen for AD on EU Thornblade, if others have information of its happening and values on other campaigns or the NA servers please post it would be nice to see what's happening.

The bonus seems to always kick in around the same times each morning, this time seems to be between 01:00 to 08:00 when it does there are occasionally times where AD will have a full raid online capturing the map as well.


Image taken from http://esostats.com/35-30_Day_small_Thornblade_small

The above image shows the scores for EU Thornblade, we can see that since the 1400 points bonus on December 6th it's taken four days for the other two factions to close the gap. At the largest point the gap was close to 4,000 points.

The update from ZOS for lower population caps on campaigns has not done anything to alleviate this issue (though that was not the changes intent).

@Haxnschwammer created a post with a breakdown of player perceived mechanics and their potentials for abuse which can be found here.

To date and my knowledge ZOS have yet to comment on the workings of this mechanic in a way to give the playerbase acceptable proof that it can't be manipulated or how it works.
Google searches bring up some information including a post on Tamriel Foundry quoting an AMA posted on Reddit where the following can be found.

We are adding a population underdog bonus in the first patch that will give the lesser populated alliances in a campaign triple the points for owning objectives in Cyrodiil as well as 10% more Alliance points.

That's all I can think of for now.
I would like to once again invite members of the ZOS PVP Development team to open a dialog with their player base regarding this issue. We as the PVP community would like to sit down and talk this through and maybe some friendly debating about if this mechanic is good for the future health of ESO PVP.


On a personal point I would like to go back to making posts on the forums which are not snarky jabs at ZOS and have some of my faith in them restored.
I love this game and I want to play and support it, I want to see it grow and continue to be the place I spend my gaming time, sadly over the last two months I have felt insulted, ignored and patronised by ZOS for many issues with this being at the forefront of them.

Please come speak with us, help us create that fantastic community you want rather than staying behind these close doors and using community manager proxies to deliver messages to then be ignored once again.

I again ask that members of the ZOS teams especially @ZOS_MattFiror to take a look over at the EVE Online forums, or read the #tweetfleet hashtag on twitter to see how close a company and its player base can be.

daemonios

Thank you Turelus for your posts. They must be hard work to put together.

suycyco

On azura star EU, DC has sometimes the low pop bonus since few days, I think it's has something to see with the recent migration of somes Thornblade guilds (AD and EP mostly) to Azura.
Can't say why and how we have it , we are the less populated on the map but it appeared on prime time sunday for exemple when the map was quite balanced (3 bars AD, 3 bars DC, EP locked).

The things wich is quite strange is that te population repartition didn't change, only we are a few more on azura due to the problems of lagblade but we passed to a 2 bars AD; 2 bars DC, 3 bars EP to that situation (only in prime, the rest of the day and night it's a full red map and week ends AD has a strong population reinforcement).

Dunno if it'll help to understanding this strange buff.

Thudunblundur

(Baldur's Gate fans will get it)

Butt kicking for Goodness!

Dalglish

In terms of Thornblade EU; It seems that DC and EP want to faceroll the campaign with superior numbers and not get penalised for being really bad at taking advantage.

If you have multiple 15+ man raid bomb groups just wanting to run around killing pugs at gates or at outposts for AP farming, then you are wasting your time while you have a higher population.

I've actually played more often this last week and even in the late night raids (I was around for 2 night fights) where keeps were taken by AD there were still more players (in number) defending those keeps.

Izanagi.Xiiib16_ESO

Low pop bonus actually seems to be doing a decent job of balancing out the scores this campaign depending on its purpose this could be seen as working as intended.
But I'd still prefer not to have it.

themdogesbite

Last 2 - 3 days AD have been at a considerably lower pop then the other factions at times. The ammount of points the bonus brings is still to high though.

Please save your conspiracy theories. AD is NOT manipulating this at will. This lowpop bonus have made a lot of players not wanting to pvp anymore on our side too.

Thudunblundur

johan.danielsson1994b16_ESO wrote: »

Last 2 - 3 days AD have been at a considerably lower pop then the other factions at times. The ammount of points the bonus brings is still to high though.

Please save your conspiracy theories. AD is NOT manipulating this at will. This lowpop bonus have made a lot of players not wanting to pvp anymore on our side too.

I afraid that the timings of the bonus last campaign and the fact that until recently AD weren't the lowest population faction on Thornblade EU as far as anyone could see makes your protestations look a bit flimsy. Which is part of the problem: We simply can't tell whether you personally, you as a faction, a guild within your faction or no-one has been playing silly buggers.

The effect is that we simply can't trust anything an AD player says on this matter.

If they are going to have a bonus, all players should know how it works OR have faith in the developers.

Turelus

Right now 00:31 GMT DC & AD medium, EP low. Thornblade EU

Edit* Updated for campaign.

themdogesbite

Thudunblundur wrote: »

johan.danielsson1994b16_ESO wrote: »

Last 2 - 3 days AD have been at a considerably lower pop then the other factions at times. The ammount of points the bonus brings is still to high though.

Please save your conspiracy theories. AD is NOT manipulating this at will. This lowpop bonus have made a lot of players not wanting to pvp anymore on our side too.

I afraid that the timings of the bonus last campaign and the fact that until recently AD weren't the lowest population faction on Thornblade EU as far as anyone could see makes your protestations look a bit flimsy. Which is part of the problem: We simply can't tell whether you personally, you as a faction, a guild within your faction or no-one has been playing silly buggers.

The effect is that we simply can't trust anything an AD player says on this matter.

If they are going to have a bonus, all players should know how it works OR have faith in the developers.

Dont forget that this is a game we are playing, it must get tedious to think the worst of everything all the time.

Turelus wrote: »

Right now 00:31 GMT DC & AD medium, EP low. Thornblade EU

Edit* Updated for campaign.

This is after EP have been population locked whilst AD and DC have been on medium. AD was on medium the longest today even.

Thudunblundur

johan.danielsson1994b16_ESO wrote: »

Thudunblundur wrote: »

johan.danielsson1994b16_ESO wrote: »

Last 2 - 3 days AD have been at a considerably lower pop then the other factions at times. The ammount of points the bonus brings is still to high though.

Please save your conspiracy theories. AD is NOT manipulating this at will. This lowpop bonus have made a lot of players not wanting to pvp anymore on our side too.

I afraid that the timings of the bonus last campaign and the fact that until recently AD weren't the lowest population faction on Thornblade EU as far as anyone could see makes your protestations look a bit flimsy. Which is part of the problem: We simply can't tell whether you personally, you as a faction, a guild within your faction or no-one has been playing silly buggers.

The effect is that we simply can't trust anything an AD player says on this matter.

If they are going to have a bonus, all players should know how it works OR have faith in the developers.

Dont forget that this is a game we are playing, it must get tedious to think the worst of everything all the time.

Turelus wrote: »

Right now 00:31 GMT DC & AD medium, EP low. Thornblade EU

Edit* Updated for campaign.

This is after EP have been population locked whilst AD and DC have been on medium. AD was on medium the longest today even.

It's not a case of thinking the worst. It's just suspicion. If an AD player insists there's nothing going on, a little part of my mind notes they are AD and regards the protest with suspicion. After all, how can you know? And cheating is cheating, in a game or in life.

Dalglish

Thudunblundur wrote: »

johan.danielsson1994b16_ESO wrote: »

Thudunblundur wrote: »

johan.danielsson1994b16_ESO wrote: »

Last 2 - 3 days AD have been at a considerably lower pop then the other factions at times. The ammount of points the bonus brings is still to high though.

Please save your conspiracy theories. AD is NOT manipulating this at will. This lowpop bonus have made a lot of players not wanting to pvp anymore on our side too.

I afraid that the timings of the bonus last campaign and the fact that until recently AD weren't the lowest population faction on Thornblade EU as far as anyone could see makes your protestations look a bit flimsy. Which is part of the problem: We simply can't tell whether you personally, you as a faction, a guild within your faction or no-one has been playing silly buggers.

The effect is that we simply can't trust anything an AD player says on this matter.

If they are going to have a bonus, all players should know how it works OR have faith in the developers.

Dont forget that this is a game we are playing, it must get tedious to think the worst of everything all the time.

Turelus wrote: »

Right now 00:31 GMT DC & AD medium, EP low. Thornblade EU

Edit* Updated for campaign.

This is after EP have been population locked whilst AD and DC have been on medium. AD was on medium the longest today even.

It's not a case of thinking the worst. It's just suspicion. If an AD player insists there's nothing going on, a little part of my mind notes they are AD and regards the protest with suspicion. After all, how can you know? And cheating is cheating, in a game or in life.

If a black (insert any race, colour or creed) person is accused of committing a crime irl, are you immediately suspicious of all black people?

If what your blabbing on about holds true, its the same principle.