ZOS, will you address population caps?

booksmcread

@ZOS_BrianWheeler‌

Either I'm not sure how the current outnumbered bonus works or it's just not working. Yesterday I was on midday for four hours and we were outnumbered, one bar of DC to pop-locked then three bars of EP. Not at one point during that time did I see any outnumbered bonus. Is it supposed to work like this?

There have been some good suggestions that you and the players have brought up in this thread. Personally, I don't mind being outnumbered, but I do realize that it is very demoralizing to many players. There needs to be a good reason to be out there when massive imbalances happen. Increased Champion Point XP would definitely be an incentive for some people. But I still think that there needs to be a reason not to flip the entire map one color and take all the scrolls and zerg the everliving **** out of everyone. Maybe a high threshold that once you pass it, you start incurring small penalties. As of right now, there is no reason not to flip the map and take all the scrolls. In fact, you get bonuses for doing it.

Roechacca

There's some really good ideas floating around in here . I hope the Devs will take a look back in here now and then to read a few .

Huntler

roechacca wrote: »

There's some really good ideas floating around in here . I hope the Devs will take a look back in here now and then to read a few .

I disagree, I see barely hashed ideas that are basically rip offs of what Brian already stated as ideas (and yet people somehow think they are different and somehow the ZOS ideas are bad). And these barely hashed ideas are based off of suppositions that somehow ZOS haven't already considered these....


Get it through your heads guys, no matter what rules you come up with Dynamic caps will fail. Miserably, it will be awful for the game. You need other ways to drive populations to be even. Give the options to the players to make the decisions to be the underdog and get the benefit of it. The players on the overpopulated side that hate zerging will move to more fertile areas, they won't be stuck on 1 campaign for their rewards where it is all zerging. The same goes for the underpopulated alliance. Given bonuses to the people who fight that fight, it will distribute people/populations more easily and naturally.... instead of this garbage where you somehow think theres a magic combination of rules/numbers that are entirely exploitable, suffocating to PvP numbers, and overall bad.

ZOS_BrianWheeler

The low population bonus doesn't apply on the fly and is set to evaluate every 60 minutes against a rolling population sample of the past 24-72 hours. We have talked about reducing that window to have it apply faster, but the counter would be the bonus fades away quicker.

The low scoring bonus is evaluated on a larger time frame than hourly, and we have discussed shortening that as well, but again, the bonus would last shorter if we shorten that window too.

There have also been talks like mentioned here of editing scoring, or flat out removing it and making the rewards be simply based on your own efforts during campaign durations, and adding another tier or two.

CitraBenzoet_ESO

You know what, screw it. There is nothing ZOS can do, just things we can do. Like getting more people to play pvp.

Winnamine

Sharee wrote: »

Winnamine wrote: »

Sharee wrote: »

ZOS_JessicaFolsom wrote: »

roechacca wrote: »

Also I like your ideas Mr Wheeler . I like the first idea best .

The first idea (Limiting population per alliance to match the lowest or median population of the lowest population) sounds good in practice, but there are some inherent problems with it. Let's say you're in a campaign where the lowest-population alliance has only 11 people on (this actually happens). That means the other two alliances would also be limited to 11 people, and no one is having fun at that point.

How about instead of limiting each side to 11 players, you simply make the underpopulated side's keep NPC's unkillable like the justice system guards.

Meaning, you track the lowest or median population of the lowest faction, but instead of limiting the other factions population to it, you render the lowest populations keeps immune to capture for the duration that the side is heavily underpopulated.

That way you can have a cyrodiil with 100 reds fighting 100 yellows fighting 11 blues, but only reds and yellows can attack and capture each other's keeps.

That would make the exploit that AaronMB described so much worse.
Think about it, one alliance gets all the scrolls and emp. Then they leave.
Now no one can dethrone them or get any scrolls back until they come back... which would probably be never.
Buff servers you don't even have to defend!

That would however require the alliance in question to not play at all during primetime.

I can understand if a guild forces their members to not play in a campaign at certain times, but a whole megaserver? The guy planning this has no control over all the players on his faction. By not logging in at primetime, all he would achieve was his faction being filled by randoms instead of his guild, losing everything pronto.

I doubt it.
We have buff servers now, and one competitive campaign. I think the same would happen in this instance, only the buff servers would be permanent, because the dominant faction would never populate it enough for their keeps to be vulnerable.

Lord_Draevan

ZOS_BrianWheeler wrote: »

There have also been talks like mentioned here of editing scoring, or flat out removing it and making the rewards be simply based on your own efforts during campaign durations, and adding another tier or two.

You could have some campaigns that have overall faction scores, some with none.
That way, people who insist on seeing numbers go up will be satisfied and those who just want to fight will be satisfied.

I also wouldn't mind know what the population bars mean. For example, Locked=300 players, 3 bars 200-299, 2 bars 100-199 and 1 bar < 100.

Minnesinger

McDoogs wrote: »

ZOS_BrianWheeler wrote: »

We have looked at population imbalances throughout the release of the game and have seen it change from campaign to campaign, month to month with Ebonheart, Aldmeri and Daggerfall all taking top population spots. As a snap shot, the past three days show the following:

• Haderus has swapped highest population between all three alliances.
• Azura has a steady stream of Aldmeri and Ebonheart, but not much Daggerfall.
• Blackwater has mainly Ebonheart with the highest with Aldmeri slightly behind and again, Daggerfall the lowest.
• Chillrend has Daggerfall with the highest population and Aldmeri/Ebonheart around the same
• Thornblade has Aldmeri and Ebonheart with roughly the same population with a slight edge towards Ebonheart, and Daggerfall trailing.

There are ongoing discussions about how to address population imbalances in the campaigns. Some of the possible solutions include the following:

• Limiting population per alliance to match the lowest or median population of the lowest population.
• Giving more XP/AP than we currently do
• Giving alternate siege weapons to the underdog\low-population alliance(s) that do more damage while they have the underdog\low pop bonus.
• Altering Cyrodiil's landscape
• Changing/removing scoring and showing that other campaigns have underdog/low-population bonuses on the Campaign Selection UI
• Doing away with Home and Guest campaign options, so Campaign Reward tiers roll with a character instead of being tied to a campaign so you can play in any campaign you want.

All of these have their pros and cons, some of which may not be immediately apparent but we still have to consider. The last one, for example, would result in all the campaigns having the same duration (so people can't earn tier 3 then hop to a short campaign and get a reward when it ends), and scoring and would be better suited as a meta-score across all campaigns. We would also need to remove the limitation on the accounts which don't let players have characters from opposing alliances in the same campaign (and yes I know that "jump to buddy" circumvents this rule already).

I agree there are many solutions we can explore, and that population imbalances are always a challenge for PVP games in which battles are not instanced to launch on demand. Thanks again for your continued patience in this and many other matters that the PVP community and myself care about deeply

Nothing of value was said here.

TL:DR version: "We have no actual plans of doing anything, suck it up or gtfo"

He didn´t say they have made decisions but they take a look at the matters. He came up with some examples not saying these are the only solutions. These discussions will continue here in the Forums and I am glad to see how many players have made an effort to solve the imbalance problems. Thus many recognize the ongoing issues and people are aware of them. Now is a wrong time to give up. I totally disagree with your point. We should make noise of the imbalance, its twisted effects on the scroreboards and the general happines of PvP. As Brian has shown the Forums are read.

Talcyndl

Huntler wrote: »

You need other ways to drive populations to be even. Give the options to the players to make the decisions to be the underdog and get the benefit of it. The players on the overpopulated side that hate zerging will move to more fertile areas, they won't be stuck on 1 campaign for their rewards where it is all zerging. The same goes for the underpopulated alliance. Given bonuses to the people who fight that fight, it will distribute people/populations more easily and naturally.... instead of this garbage where you somehow think theres a magic combination of rules/numbers that are entirely exploitable, suffocating to PvP numbers, and overall bad.

What about my suggestion to give Champion Point bonuses to low population factions?

I think that could be a big incentive for people to move to other campaigns.

And ZOS wouldn't even need to worry (as much) about how to calculate the "low population" since it wouldn't effect the overall campaign score. Individual players could get the Champion Point bonus whenever they are outnumbered.

RWYDRYCKb14_ESO

Mr. Brian Wheeler,

While I don't envy your current position I look forward to any measures you can take to alter the face of PVP. I normally don't post but I would like to comment and make some suggestions.

1. Lets keep the changes simple at the moment....Rome was not built in a day as the saying goes.

a) A possible simple solution to the imbalance may be to simply increase the strength of the guards for the lower populations appropriately. Have this effect takes place hourly as things can flux greatly. This will allow for well coordinated defenses against large zergs who vastly outnumber the other factions. Base it on the population bars you currently use. It will balance things out as the stronger guards will become stronger allies. Making it very difficult to capture low population Keeps as you will have to take into account guards now. In addition taking a low population scroll will be very difficult with the number of guards at Temples. As the numbers become more even so will the strength of the guards again. This will ensure balance on an hourly basis. This will also encourage large population alliances to work harder even if they have a zerg, which will show the expertise of some guilds coordination and not so much for others. Trust me the really great guilds love to show off their talents and will welcome the opportunity to disclaim the "you only win because you zerg".

I realize that changing the Guards strength on the fly will require some real time coding and they can never replace a person actually fighting but it will alleviate some current issues until as a team ZOS can come together on the PVP changes.

I know I don't have all the details covered but I did not see this suggestion, however, I may have missed it.

Thanks for talking to us about the matter Brian as communication is the foundation of trust and understanding. Others at ZOS should follow your lead.

Xsorus

ZOS_BrianWheeler wrote: »

The low population bonus doesn't apply on the fly and is set to evaluate every 60 minutes against a rolling population sample of the past 24-72 hours. We have talked about reducing that window to have it apply faster, but the counter would be the bonus fades away quicker.

The low scoring bonus is evaluated on a larger time frame than hourly, and we have discussed shortening that as well, but again, the bonus would last shorter if we shorten that window too.

There have also been talks like mentioned here of editing scoring, or flat out removing it and making the rewards be simply based on your own efforts during campaign durations, and adding another tier or two.

Simply remove it, as i've stated in the past...the scoring system is a byproduct of Guild Wars 2 and it didn't work there for the same reason it didn't work here.

DAOC would of suffered from similar issues as well, For example Albion on Merlin often held all 6 scrolls for extended periods of times on that server..and our factions morale never suffered despite that simply because there wasn't this big ole "Score" saying Albion was winning.

Scoring system like that should be left to things like Esports or Battlegrounds with even numbers (Even then BG's were often won by premades or population if people left)

The Personal Score you get for campaign duration is perfectly fine though. However you need to remove Guesting system like I said if you ever want it to be used (as Realm buffs outweigh any reward you'd get from Personal Score in campaign mode)

Removing guesting would also eliminate buff servers as well.

tonemd

The scoring towards a campaign victor IS a motivating factor to play PVP. It's also a unifying force. Declaring a victor after 30 days and resetting is a good way to keep people from being discouraged and quitting PVP altogether.

I just think what contributes to that score should be changed. If you change that, then unbalanced populations may not matter so much. If you changed it so that only player combat specific measurements add to the score then even if EP vastly outnumbers everyone else at a given time, if they can't find a fight they can't run up the score.

Domander

ZOS_JessicaFolsom wrote: »

roechacca wrote: »

Also I like your ideas Mr Wheeler . I like the first idea best .

The first idea (Limiting population per alliance to match the lowest or median population of the lowest population) sounds good in practice, but there are some inherent problems with it. Let's say you're in a campaign where the lowest-population alliance has only 11 people on (this actually happens). That means the other two alliances would also be limited to 11 people, and no one is having fun at that point.

Why not limit the population of an alliance to the sum of the other 2? (Up to the max for the campaign)

WebBull

It needs to be a combination of several ideas. Not just one solution will work.

Also, it has been thrown around that limited/modified forward camps may return. Perhaps they return as a tool for the low pop alliance. Limited forward camps can only be deployed by an underdog alliance when the population imbalance between top and bottom exceeds xx%. Fast reinforcements would certainly go a long way to help even the sides.

Xsorus

tonemd wrote: »

The scoring towards a campaign victor IS a motivating factor to play PVP. It's also a unifying force. Declaring a victor after 30 days and resetting is a good way to keep people from being discouraged and quitting PVP altogether.

I just think what contributes to that score should be changed. If you change that, then unbalanced populations may not matter so much. If you changed it so that only player combat specific measurements add to the score then even if EP vastly outnumbers everyone else at a given time, if they can't find a fight they can't run up the score.

No its not...and I have ample proof of that as well.

1. No one has won a campaign in this game yet that hasn't been won by nightcapping when no one is on. Every single match has been won this way. Every time one side thought they were going to win over the night capping faction, They'd wake up and their entire map would be either Yellow or Red.

2. The Entire Guild Wars 2 WvW system, which has a similar scoring system. What happened in that game? People up and jumped ship from servers that weren't winning in scoring (because the lack of night defense) leaving most matches to be nothing more then population contests and nothing more.

3. Auriels Bow, you remember server? The one where AD had population all the time and were vastly outscoring people...Know what happened to it? Everyone jumped ship to Wabbajack because it was seen as more balanced in the scoring system leaving AB to die a slow worthless death.

The scoring system accomplishes nothing..It has one goal, and that's to show who the best faction is..and it fails at that in every way as the best faction is never shown to win..only the one that logs on when everyone is asleep.

Sallington

If we got an XP/AP bonus depending on how much lower our population was than the highest pop faction, I would be so happy.

EP: Highest pop, no bonus
AD: 80% of EP pop, 10-20% bonus to XP/AP
DC: 70% of EP pop, 20-30% bonus to XP/AP

I feel like that would be a great incentive for people to start joining lower pop factions, and everything would start to even out a bit.

nikolaj.lemcheb16_ESO

The last solution wont work as long as personal AP gains means so little for character development and power. If it all comes down to personal AP gains then you need a realm point system similar to what they had in DaoC else there will be no incentive to keep on doing pvp.

Also there is slowly developing server identity and server pride at the moment. It were also there before you cut the server numbers back in July and it has taken months for a new pride to emerge. Right now is not a good time to take away server identity.

You need a dynamic system that simply look at how many APs a certain side has gained in the past hour or so compared to the others and then simply add in modifiers so the side that have gained the least APs will get a bonus to XP and AP gains.
That way a side that have too many players online will simply see their reward dwindle away and they will in the end gain practically nothing in XP and AP reward. The champion system will make this difference hurt and make people go to servers where they don't outnumber the enemy force.

DisgracefulMind

ZOS_BrianWheeler wrote: »

The low population bonus doesn't apply on the fly and is set to evaluate every 60 minutes against a rolling population sample of the past 24-72 hours. We have talked about reducing that window to have it apply faster, but the counter would be the bonus fades away quicker.

The low scoring bonus is evaluated on a larger time frame than hourly, and we have discussed shortening that as well, but again, the bonus would last shorter if we shorten that window too.

There have also been talks like mentioned here of editing scoring, or flat out removing it and making the rewards be simply based on your own efforts during campaign durations, and adding another tier or two.

I think that you should all give it a test with just flat out removing the scoring system. I personally think that more people would hop back into PvP once they didn't feel like it was hopeless and worthless to play the campaign. I know at the end of the last Thornblade there were many comments in zone saying "Who cares about such-and-such keep? Look at how far ahead they are anyways." It just destroys the morale of other alliances when the score is as tipped as it is from the map getting capped when the other factions are low-pop.

Either that, or the scoring needs some significant altering.

Thanks for responding on this thread.

Urai

This is weird treat.

"The main issue with PVP since launch , besides performance , has been really unbalanced numbers in each faction"

And the unbalanced numbers of each faction (in certain campaigns) are there, mainly, because of the performance...

...if performance would have been great at start you would have 10(?) full and balanced campaigns, but so many left and cyrodiil is that big that you're lucky now you can fill up one campaign with a reasonable amount of people to make it worth with the size and objectives.

Whatever fluffy bunny you add in Cyro, the only thing you need to fix this are simply players!

And B2P will bring more players to the game for sure so to start again, performance...

McDoogs

Can't leave it up to players, that's what has been done up until now and look, people re-roll on EP to take advantage of buffs, as every single campaign is an EP buff compaign.

tonemd

xsorusb14_ESO wrote: »

The scoring system accomplishes nothing..It has one goal, and that's to show who the best faction is..and it fails at that in every way as the best faction is never shown to win..only the one that logs on when everyone is asleep.

I'm coming at this from a DC-Thornblade-NA perspective.

Until recently, your examples did not stop people from trying to win. I was in guilds where they would use the score and enemy action as a rallying cry to get pve'rs into the campaign for a couple of hours. It is only now (Past couple of months) that DCs spirit has been broken and the futility of it all has finally set in.

Your last example shows that people DO care about the scores. Whether they want easy victories or not is another thing. I don't think the players on Thornblade would care about nightcapping/daycapping if it didn't put factions ahead by thousands of points. If it maybe gave them a couple hundred point lead after a 8 hours of owning every keep, no one would care because it's not insurmountable.

The fact that the score does not represent the "best" faction is why I would suggest a change in how the score is determined. As it is, it only reflects who has the largest, around-the-clock playerbase.

Bouvin

1 - Remove PvE Buffs. Just give buffs in PvP for the campaign you are currently on.
2 - Remove Home/Guest Servers and track rewards by character
3 - Add lockout timers by faction. Ex., if you're on AD Thornblade, you can't login into Thornblade on EP for 2 hours.

technohic

ZOS_BrianWheeler wrote: »

[*] Giving more XP/AP than we currently do

This part should be done all the way around for all. And by a large margin.

Roechacca

I think if Brian Wheeler logged on NA right now with a DC toon , he'd quit in 30 minutes or less .

frozywozy

DisgracefulMind wrote: »

ZOS_BrianWheeler wrote: »

The low population bonus doesn't apply on the fly and is set to evaluate every 60 minutes against a rolling population sample of the past 24-72 hours. We have talked about reducing that window to have it apply faster, but the counter would be the bonus fades away quicker.

The low scoring bonus is evaluated on a larger time frame than hourly, and we have discussed shortening that as well, but again, the bonus would last shorter if we shorten that window too.

There have also been talks like mentioned here of editing scoring, or flat out removing it and making the rewards be simply based on your own efforts during campaign durations, and adding another tier or two.

I think that you should all give it a test with just flat out removing the scoring system. I personally think that more people would hop back into PvP once they didn't feel like it was hopeless and worthless to play the campaign. I know at the end of the last Thornblade there were many comments in zone saying "Who cares about such-and-such keep? Look at how far ahead they are anyways." It just destroys the morale of other alliances when the score is as tipped as it is from the map getting capped when the other factions are low-pop.

Either that, or the scoring needs some significant altering.

Thanks for responding on this thread.

I don't see the point to play this game without a scoring system.

DisgracefulMind

frozywozy wrote: »

DisgracefulMind wrote: »

ZOS_BrianWheeler wrote: »

The low population bonus doesn't apply on the fly and is set to evaluate every 60 minutes against a rolling population sample of the past 24-72 hours. We have talked about reducing that window to have it apply faster, but the counter would be the bonus fades away quicker.

The low scoring bonus is evaluated on a larger time frame than hourly, and we have discussed shortening that as well, but again, the bonus would last shorter if we shorten that window too.

There have also been talks like mentioned here of editing scoring, or flat out removing it and making the rewards be simply based on your own efforts during campaign durations, and adding another tier or two.

I think that you should all give it a test with just flat out removing the scoring system. I personally think that more people would hop back into PvP once they didn't feel like it was hopeless and worthless to play the campaign. I know at the end of the last Thornblade there were many comments in zone saying "Who cares about such-and-such keep? Look at how far ahead they are anyways." It just destroys the morale of other alliances when the score is as tipped as it is from the map getting capped when the other factions are low-pop.

Either that, or the scoring needs some significant altering.

Thanks for responding on this thread.

I don't see the point to play this game without a scoring system.

Then perhaps the better option would be to implement a scoring system that gathered points in a more effective manner. For example, if an alliance takes a keep, scroll, outpost, etc. from an alliance significantly less populated than them, then they get 1/3rd of the amount of points, or something like that. I don't have this genius system thought out or anything, but something does need to be done.

DisgracefulMind

tonemd wrote: »

xsorusb14_ESO wrote: »

The scoring system accomplishes nothing..It has one goal, and that's to show who the best faction is..and it fails at that in every way as the best faction is never shown to win..only the one that logs on when everyone is asleep.

I'm coming at this from a DC-Thornblade-NA perspective.

Until recently, your examples did not stop people from trying to win. I was in guilds where they would use the score and enemy action as a rallying cry to get pve'rs into the campaign for a couple of hours. It is only now (Past couple of months) that DCs spirit has been broken and the futility of it all has finally set in.

Your last example shows that people DO care about the scores. Whether they want easy victories or not is another thing. I don't think the players on Thornblade would care about nightcapping/daycapping if it didn't put factions ahead by thousands of points. If it maybe gave them a couple hundred point lead after a 8 hours of owning every keep, no one would care because it's not insurmountable.

The fact that the score does not represent the "best" faction is why I would suggest a change in how the score is determined. As it is, it only reflects who has the largest, around-the-clock playerbase.

This and this.

We DO care about the score, which is why the morale falls so steeply and players have been quitting.

I agree with changing how the score is determined, if the devs decide to keep scoring in the game.

While I would be interested to see how it would go without the scoring, I'd also be interested to see how it would go with a new system set in place.

Dreyloch

ZOS_BrianWheeler wrote: »

We have looked at population imbalances throughout the release of the game and have seen it change from campaign to campaign, month to month with Ebonheart, Aldmeri and Daggerfall all taking top population spots. As a snap shot, the past three days show the following:

• Haderus has swapped highest population between all three alliances.
• Azura has a steady stream of Aldmeri and Ebonheart, but not much Daggerfall.
• Blackwater has mainly Ebonheart with the highest with Aldmeri slightly behind and again, Daggerfall the lowest.
• Chillrend has Daggerfall with the highest population and Aldmeri/Ebonheart around the same
• Thornblade has Aldmeri and Ebonheart with roughly the same population with a slight edge towards Ebonheart, and Daggerfall trailing.

There are ongoing discussions about how to address population imbalances in the campaigns. Some of the possible solutions include the following:

• Limiting population per alliance to match the lowest or median population of the lowest population.
• Giving more XP/AP than we currently do
• Giving alternate siege weapons to the underdog\low-population alliance(s) that do more damage while they have the underdog\low pop bonus.
• Altering Cyrodiil's landscape
• Changing/removing scoring and showing that other campaigns have underdog/low-population bonuses on the Campaign Selection UI
• Doing away with Home and Guest campaign options, so Campaign Reward tiers roll with a character instead of being tied to a campaign so you can play in any campaign you want.

All of these have their pros and cons, some of which may not be immediately apparent but we still have to consider. The last one, for example, would result in all the campaigns having the same duration (so people can't earn tier 3 then hop to a short campaign and get a reward when it ends), and scoring and would be better suited as a meta-score across all campaigns. We would also need to remove the limitation on the accounts which don't let players have characters from opposing alliances in the same campaign (and yes I know that "jump to buddy" circumvents this rule already).

I agree there are many solutions we can explore, and that population imbalances are always a challenge for PVP games in which battles are not instanced to launch on demand. Thanks again for your continued patience in this and many other matters that the PVP community and myself care about deeply

Thank you for the response. It goes a long way with all of us. I think you missed one option, or for w/e reason it's just not feasible and did not make your list...

We're allowed to enter Cyrodiil campaigns with any character of any faction currently. This produces spies, and many jumping ship to be with the leading crowd. It's one of the biggest factors in this imbalance. I understand you want people to play with their friends within different factions. That's great for PvE! However, it's very bad for PvP.

Going over your points...

1) Limiting pop.-Could work if there was a way to open and close campaigns dynamically once one reaches it's max.pop. If your friend is in one, and your locked out, they can opt to move over where you are in a freshly opened map. This would have to work with your last point in place as well. We have leader boards for individuals according to class, faction and overall. Taking the average of all these factors together could produce an overall faction win over a "season". A season would be 30 days as the campaigns are today.

2) Altering landscape- This needs to be addressed anyway. Who in any given time period on earth has ever built a castle or keep in a chasm? Giving the opposition free reign with holding the high ground? DC has one, and it's really poor design. I can't think of any other keep having this glaring design flaw.At least not on all sides of said keep. In other words, it's time to revamp the map and maybe make it a touch smaller. With a little better advantage going to the defenders inside.

Those are my thoughts regarding the options your looking at. They all have merit, but what I listed are the most obvious to me.

Xsorus

tonemd wrote: »

xsorusb14_ESO wrote: »

The scoring system accomplishes nothing..It has one goal, and that's to show who the best faction is..and it fails at that in every way as the best faction is never shown to win..only the one that logs on when everyone is asleep.

I'm coming at this from a DC-Thornblade-NA perspective.

Until recently, your examples did not stop people from trying to win. I was in guilds where they would use the score and enemy action as a rallying cry to get pve'rs into the campaign for a couple of hours. It is only now (Past couple of months) that DCs spirit has been broken and the futility of it all has finally set in.

Your last example shows that people DO care about the scores. Whether they want easy victories or not is another thing. I don't think the players on Thornblade would care about nightcapping/daycapping if it didn't put factions ahead by thousands of points. If it maybe gave them a couple hundred point lead after a 8 hours of owning every keep, no one would care because it's not insurmountable.

The fact that the score does not represent the "best" faction is why I would suggest a change in how the score is determined. As it is, it only reflects who has the largest, around-the-clock playerbase.

Please, anyone sane who's played on DC since launch knows the futility of it. both AD and EP have night capped since Launch and its allowed them to win since launch, hence why no one cares about the score...Saying "If we only allow them a couple hundred point lead after 8 hours of owning keeps no one would care" is silly..Because A. it'll never happen because you'll have people who actually play during the day upset they're not valued as much as someone plays during primetime, and B...those points will add up..it'll always come down to who had population during those times.

Trying to push a point system designed around equal populations in a game that will always have unequal populations is downright dumb... It doesn't work, and nothing they can change will make it work. If you want a esport scoring system, play an esport.

tonemd

xsorusb14_ESO wrote: »

tonemd wrote: »

xsorusb14_ESO wrote: »

The scoring system accomplishes nothing..It has one goal, and that's to show who the best faction is..and it fails at that in every way as the best faction is never shown to win..only the one that logs on when everyone is asleep.

I'm coming at this from a DC-Thornblade-NA perspective.

Until recently, your examples did not stop people from trying to win. I was in guilds where they would use the score and enemy action as a rallying cry to get pve'rs into the campaign for a couple of hours. It is only now (Past couple of months) that DCs spirit has been broken and the futility of it all has finally set in.

Your last example shows that people DO care about the scores. Whether they want easy victories or not is another thing. I don't think the players on Thornblade would care about nightcapping/daycapping if it didn't put factions ahead by thousands of points. If it maybe gave them a couple hundred point lead after a 8 hours of owning every keep, no one would care because it's not insurmountable.

The fact that the score does not represent the "best" faction is why I would suggest a change in how the score is determined. As it is, it only reflects who has the largest, around-the-clock playerbase.

Please, anyone sane who's played on DC since launch knows the futility of it. both AD and EP have night capped since Launch and its allowed them to win since launch, hence why no one cares about the score...Saying "If we only allow them a couple hundred point lead after 8 hours of owning keeps no one would care" is silly..Because A. it'll never happen because you'll have people who actually play during the day upset they're not valued as much as someone plays during primetime, and B...those points will add up..it'll always come down to who had population during those times.

Trying to push a point system designed around equal populations in a game that will always have unequal populations is downright dumb... It doesn't work, and nothing they can change will make it work. If you want a esport scoring system, play an esport.

This is why I suggested weighting the scoring (or basing it entirely) on player vs player combat action and not owning keeps or scrolls. If there is no enemy, you don't score any points. You would get it from defensive, offensive ticks, bounty quests turned in, overall faction K/D ratio, things like that.