Solution to Population Imbalance

Kuro1n

ZOS_BrianWheeler wrote: »

We've had discussions about raising the XP gains in Cyrodiil across the board but I'll also get the QA gang to double check the XP/AP boost.

Kinda needs a huge boost too... even if raised by 5x or 10x grinding is more effective (not that it shouldn't), just saying it would be nice to be able to do what you enjoy for EXP instead of having to do your 'daily grind' in order to then go have fun in cyro.

Saint_JiubB14_ESO

Talcyndl wrote: »

Goldie wrote: »

Talcyndl wrote: »

Come 1.6 it will be all about Champion Point accumulation. If people get the inspiration (or whatever it's called) bonus (where you get Champion Points MUCH faster) for fighting in the underdog alliances, that alone will do a lot to create population balance.

Im pretty sure what is meant by the 10% inspiration, is that a player will gain more knowledge from deconstructing items. ie. deconstructing swords for heavy armor skills gives inspiration.

Sorry, the proper term is Enlightenment.

From the Update 6 Guide:

ENLIGHTENMENT

To help you earn Champion Points, we’ve introduced a new mechanic called Enlightenment to the game. Over time, your account will accrue Enlightenment. You do not have to be logged in to accrue Enlightenment.

As you participate in activities that grant experience to your Veteran Rank character, Enlightenment provides you with a bonus to Champion Point progression, helping you earn points faster. Eventually, you may run out of Enlightenment, but don’t worry—more Enlightenment is added to your account every 24 hours.

Activities that grant experience include questing, killing enemies, fighting in Cyrodiil, exploring dungeons and delves, and facing Trials and the Dragonstar Arena.

Enlightenment should accrue faster (become automatic?) when fighting for an underdog alliance.

Enlightenment doesn't work that way since it is a fixed pool. All you could do is increase the multiplier but you would still finish off the exp pool and be done with it, so no real incentive at the end of the day.

http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/discussion/150109/enlightment

ZOS_JasonLeavey wrote: »

Hey all. Here's some specifics about how Enlightenment works:

You'll receive a pool of XP that you'll gain at an accelerated rate. That amount is 400,000 XP during every 24-hour period. You are able to gain XP at the accelerated rate for up to 3 days worth of time, equaling 1.2 million in XP. This pool of XP can be spent on any of your veteran rank characters.

There should be no way to lose Enlightenment other than earning your allotted XP during that period of time. If you're noticing a loss of Enlightenment after zoning, entering a dungeon, or randomly during your time in-game, and you have not reached that max number of XP, that is not working as designed. We've submitted the reports in this thread to our team, but be sure to continue submitting /bug reports if it continues.

Hopefully this helps to clear up some of your questions.

Talcyndl

Easy enough to make that "pool" of XP which you "gain at an accelerated rate" unlimited as long as you are in an outnumbered faction.

Or, as you mentioned, the rate of "acceleration" could be bumped up in such a case.

However they want to do it, getting people faster Champion Points would go a long way to encouraging balanced faction populations.

Turelus

ZOS_BrianWheeler wrote: »

Currently there is a 10% XP and AP bonus to the underpopulated alliances and another 10% for underdog (underscoring) alliances in campaigns. We don't have the capability currently of scaling those based on 2nd and 3rd underpopulated/underscored at this time however.

Maybe you could just close enough campaigns to consolidate the populations rather than giving out the "everyone is a winner" buffs.
There seems to be a focus with ESO on making playing a underpopulated/losing faction more encouraging, we have seen on the EU servers that each side has enough of a population to be on even footing, the issue is everyone wants to guard their buff campaigns and farm gold/gold items on dead campaigns rather than play on Thornblade or Azura where they're needed.

I have posted this before that the real way this can be fixed (though now proved impossible by ZOS) would be one single campaign, the issues in population are player choices to not play where they're needed.

Underscored bonus should just be removed, stop helping people who are losing win because they're too bad to organise, this isn't (as said) school where we should be teaching kids "everyone in life can win!" no if you suck, you shouldn't get help to win, you should learn to get better.

Maybe this is just my grumpy EVE Online side coming out, just tired of buffs and boosts which have caused so much drama the last months.

Turelus

SoulScream wrote: »

I would love to see pvp exp increased. Cyro also needs help in other areas like selecting a scroll quest. It makes me rage when I get offered the same incorrect one over and over. Why not auto offer cap keep or rss when you're close to it and it bursts.

All Cyrodiil quests are offered in twos, get two players to go to a board or your scroll quest giver and both accept "Capture X" at this point the board/NPC will change to the next quest. If you don't want X both abandon the quest and speak to the NPC again, the quest will have now moved over to the next one, repeat until quest required is given.

The only time this is not possible is if you're missing you own factions scrolls, you can't get a capture enemy scroll quest from the NPC while your own scrolls are missing, this can be got around by moving to a campaign where you have them or someone having taken the scroll quest you want before yours were lost.

Turelus

Also one more chime in, I am against any options which lower populations of campaigns more, including lowering it to the lowest faction.

We already suffer that most of my guild has over an hours wait to play with their friends because of ZOS lowering population caps over and over, I really don't want Cyrodiil to become a "oh, because your enemy are all defending their buff campaign tonight, you can't play with your friends on your home campaign."

As I said previous, ZOS should focus on less campaigns with higher population caps. Imagine if we had only vet and non-vet Cyrodiils with no queue or lag.

Instantly solved lack of population for any side and buff servers, however I realise this is a dream as ZOS haven't made any progress in the right direction in regards to lag or population caps.

Xsorus

ZOS_BrianWheeler wrote: »

We've had discussions about raising the XP gains in Cyrodiil across the board but I'll also get the QA gang to double check the XP/AP boost.

One of the things I enjoyed about warhammer online was the ability to level in RvR. The xp for kills should be increased.

lumithelock

@zos_BrianWheeler I think it would be a good idea just in general to Double the AP/XP gain cause one thing i know will happen is what happened with the undaunted patch. people will leave pvp to get the pve stuff cause it gives better xp which means more champions points and people will come back to pvp later cause it will not be cost effect for getting points compared to pve

Theegoliath

tinythinker wrote: »

Nothing is stopping them from using their play-experience, build knowledge, and practiced AP farming techniques for rapidly ranking up again.

As a casual player in the top 1% DC guild on thorn blade, it has taken me from beta to get to my current rank. I would not prefer to repeat due to my game time being limited by real life. IE family, wife, kids, work, house.

Being acount wide makes great sence if wanting to roll an alt. There is no way to quickly get to pvp rank 10 for the good skills/passives.

technohic

1 Account wide Ranks encourage people to level a new alt on an opposing faction. The more they do that, the more they are available to join the fight in the different factions, giving players a chance to balance out ourselves. Campaign selection would then also have to be locked to account to where you can only enter for one alliance during a set time

2. more reactive bonus to underdog buffs. Make them change by the hour at least if you can't have them adjusted real time. They need to be noticeable enough to be worth wanting yet at the same time, you don;t want people just playing dead servers so you would look at eliminating if needed, and I would have the bonus increase or decrease based on the size of the population gap. 1 bar less equals 15%, 2 bars less = 30% (just arbitrary example) Basically just looking to incentive people to actually fight for the underdog alliance rather than just join a buff campaign.

3. Alliance Defection quests. Make them take a while to where someone commits to it and gate it to only once a month. This is another method with the same purpose of number 1, but number 1 leaves you with a character you can just jump back over to while this options, while requiring more of a commitment and gate, you get to continue to develop a single main character rather than an alt.

4. Increase XP all around by a very hefty amount so leveling in Cyrodiil is possible and make sure the buff for non-VR14 players adequately gets them somewhere close enough in power to still be noticeably weaker but not getting 1v5ed with equal skill. If done right, I would get rid of the non-vet campaign. The idea is to have filled and balance campaigns so the larger the player pool to do so, the better.

TLDR: Provide incentives to fight for the underdog and enable players in as many ways as possible to then do so. Let people who want Cyrodiil be their main play-style participate immediately rather than go grind elsewhere until some point the feel they need to get to to be "ready."

Perichor

Sile wrote: »

Top level PvPers in RvR generally prefer fighting on the Underdog, but on ESO rerolling is a big step, particularly due to PvP ranks.

Maybe something to alleviate this, such as making them account wide?

that would be amazing

Gooey

Sile wrote: »

Top level PvPers in RvR generally prefer fighting on the Underdog, but on ESO rerolling is a big step, particularly due to PvP ranks.

Maybe something to alleviate this, such as making them account wide?

Completely true... still if your anyone besides Crystalized i don't see the point in not rerolling.

Hughezy

Sile wrote: »

Top level PvPers in RvR generally prefer fighting on the Underdog, but on ESO rerolling is a big step, particularly due to PvP ranks.

Maybe something to alleviate this, such as making them account wide?

I think the support and assault levels should be account wide, but not the ranks as it would be silly for a level 10 to be a legate.

jcneto

Remove one guard from each Keep/Resource for each 10 players logged in whenever you have a difference of population.

You can zerg with 100 players, let see how you defend without any guards.

Xiphyla

Hughezy wrote: »

Sile wrote: »

Top level PvPers in RvR generally prefer fighting on the Underdog, but on ESO rerolling is a big step, particularly due to PvP ranks.

Maybe something to alleviate this, such as making them account wide?

I think the support and assault levels should be account wide, but not the ranks as it would be silly for a level 10 to be a legate.

Agreed on this ^

dylanjaygrobbelaarb16_ESO

WraithAzraiel wrote: »

Or just get rid of all the frivolous extra campaigns. Along with buffs counting outside of Cyrodiil.


Boom, 2 campaigns.

1 Vet
1 NonVet

Both 30 days. GIANT SERVERS, MASSIVE PIECES OF HARDWARE RUNNING THEM.

No more campaign hopping, no more faction hopping, no more buff servers, no more whining about buff server "liberation", no more long queue's (because beefy hardware and software or daisy-chained old servers) no more population imbalances. Because it'll likely be near pop-locked across all factions at any point of the day. All day. Every day.

Just action - pure, beautiful, simple and never-ending.

if you have ever actually played pvp on full pop you would understand they can not do this. Also they would need at least two vet even after improving lag issues for the sake of primetime play.
and if your saying completely change their infrastructure, well wishes are good to have I suppose.

ghengis_dhan

There are some really interesting ideas presented here about balancing Cyrodiil, though I can't agree with all of them.

I'd like to see random Imperial uprisings against the dominant faction. I don't care if they are ZOS employees, bots, or super-intelligent NPCs. At random times, Imperials will ambush players, take resources, or siege keeps way behind the front lines of the dominant faction.

This will add an interesting dynamic to Cyrodiil as well as keep the dominant faction on its toes. It will force them to pull players away from front-line battles or risk losing transit lines to the insurrection.

Lionxoft

DC is currently at 3 bars on Thorn and pop locked on Chillrend. EP is 3 bars on chillrend and locked on Thorn.

WraithAzraiel

1 PvP Campaign to Rule them ALL!

Do away with these frivolous subcampaigns!

technohic

2 campaigns caps locked or close to it for 2 alliances on a Tuesday and pretty sure the 3rd alliance was capped for a while on at least one of those as well. I don't think a single campaign would work.

I do find it weird though, when I see pop locks and you only see swords popping up in about 2 places. Where the hell is everyone?

Lionxoft

technohic wrote: »

2 campaigns caps locked or close to it for 2 alliances on a Tuesday and pretty sure the 3rd alliance was capped for a while on at least one of those as well. I don't think a single campaign would work.

I do find it weird though, when I see pop locks and you only see swords popping up in about 2 places. Where the hell is everyone?

Everyone in this game zergs. It's part of the culture ZOS adopted when they implemented aoe caps.

ghengis_dhan

technohic wrote: »

2 campaigns caps locked or close to it for 2 alliances on a Tuesday and pretty sure the 3rd alliance was capped for a while on at least one of those as well. I don't think a single campaign would work.

I do find it weird though, when I see pop locks and you only see swords popping up in about 2 places. Where the hell is everyone?

I noticed that too sometimes. One time, the Dominion completely disappeared. I was playing my Covenant character, and they were pushing us really hard, when suddenly they were gone for about an hour. We took back our keeps, and I saw the Pact doing the same thing. I kept checking, and the Alliance page showed all faction populations locked.

It was about 7 PM on the East Coast, so someone over TeamSpeak said that Dominion parents wouldn't let them play until they finished their dinner.

GorraShatan

ZOS_BrianWheeler wrote: »

We've had discussions about raising the XP gains in Cyrodiil across the board but I'll also get the QA gang to double check the XP/AP boost.

Bumping up this low pop/score XP/AP boost would be create. The boost to score for low pop campaigns is pretty problematic still, and I think most people would value a higher AP/XP boost more anyways.

Ticare

ghengis_dhan wrote: »

technohic wrote: »

2 campaigns caps locked or close to it for 2 alliances on a Tuesday and pretty sure the 3rd alliance was capped for a while on at least one of those as well. I don't think a single campaign would work.

I do find it weird though, when I see pop locks and you only see swords popping up in about 2 places. Where the hell is everyone?

I noticed that too sometimes. One time, the Dominion completely disappeared. I was playing my Covenant character, and they were pushing us really hard, when suddenly they were gone for about an hour. We took back our keeps, and I saw the Pact doing the same thing. I kept checking, and the Alliance page showed all faction populations locked.

It was about 7 PM on the East Coast, so someone over TeamSpeak said that Dominion parents wouldn't let them play until they finished their dinner.

Noticed this in BWB EU too a couple of nights ago. Red was 3 bars, yellow and blue were 2 bars. Yellow and blue were fighting it out at roebeck / nikel area for 1-2 hours and red was literally nowhere. No swords or anything anywhere with red in it. The pop indicator probably isn't working correctly at the moment.

Cody

Just give all the members of the underdog faction(3rd place) 3600 CPs.

they will catch up quick, trust me.

Vizier

Just fix the racial passives for DC and populations will even out IMO.

Rune_Relic

Goldie wrote: »

@ZOS_BrianWheeler An easy solution to appease the masses would be to add AP bonuses to outnumbered factions based upon the differences in population. If one certain faction has full or maximum population, and the other has only low population, add a x3 bonus to the underdog factions AP gains.

Let me break it down to illustrate my idea.
In this scenario we are in a Cyrodiil campaign and;

Say EP has Maximum Population (Pop Locked).

1. If AD or DC has low population add a x3 multiplier to AP gains.
2. If AD or DC has medium population add a x2 multiplier to AP gains.
3. When populations equal out, reduce said factions multiplier bonus back to x1 (or normal AP gains)

These bonuses could be scaled down, as I am using x1, x2, and x3 as examples.

I think that this conciliatory solution would appease those who feel that population imbalances in any given campaign are "ruining" PvP play, and placate most issues concerning PvP population.

“An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.”
― Winston S. Churchill

Alas I thought this approach would be best too at one time.....but it is an epic fail.

The problem is to take and defend keeps requires numbers in a group.
Taking 30 bodies to a 10 man defense normally steam rolls the 10 man group.

eg.
EP on azuras EU was pop locked.
DC on same server was 3 bar.
There was a consistant 30-40 man group defending keeps for DC.
Yet there was only a 15-20 mam group to try and take back all the keeps turned blue.
Even though we was pop locked

See the problem ? pop locked.......but only 15-20 EP to take back a whole map.
No other keeps or resources were turning red or under attack when our group was fighting.
So where were all the other players that pop locked the server ?
Buggered if I know.
1. PVE quests ?
2. Ganking gates ?
3. Multifaction pop lock exploits ?
Even the lfgs on chat was maybe 1 every 30 minutes.

As you can see...its not really the total population that is important for PVP balance. Its the size of the groups you fight with or come up against. We all really need to sit down and think about it from this angle instead. IMHO