PVP Update, June 2015

Estelee

I am so excited and thankful, a lot of this looks so well thought out and pvp buffs not working outside pvp is a smart move, a sad one, but smart. Thank you so much for listening to all the feedback! This looks great so far.

Garion

Actually the more I think about it I really dislike the battle levelling idea also. Will post about that when I get home though

timidobserver

ThatNeonZebraAgain wrote: »

timidobserver wrote: »

Good stuff though I expect to see fewer people's in PvP now that pvers have no reason to participate. Pvers defending their buffs accounts for at least 50% of the activity on some servers.

The Alliance War skill line abilities are still very useful in PvE though.

Yes, but no one needs to defend their alliance war skills and it has already been announced that the requirements for those are being nerfed. I expect servers like azura star to die without pvers scrambling to defend their buffs.

Vynn

[*] Emperor Buffs/Skill Line: The "Former Emperor" buffs are being removed from the game. With this new system, you will only get Emperor buffs while your character is actively Emperor. Also, you will be granted the Emperor skill line and abilities upon earning Emperorship, without the need to spend ability points. All players that have spent points in the Emperor skill line will be refunded those skill points.



Want feedback, my two cents;

I agree with a good portion of the changes listed here. But I think removing former employee passive buffs is a spit in the face of people who earned it. I used vacation time to take off during a server reset, spent 14 hours straight grinding AP to get ahead of the competition and push for the Emp keeps. No one handed it to me, people don't care if you are pushing for it, your whole faction doesn't try to help you(some did, others were verbally abusive about opposing my pushing for it). Emp trading is definitely a problem, but spitting in the face of your player base is not how you go about fixing it. These passives are not ruining pvp. The only people that whine about them are people who don't take the time and put in the effort to get them. I have continued supporting ESO through my subscription because I see the room for improvement on a fun game. But taking away things that have been earned will only confirm for me that Zenimax doesn't care about loyal fans, and my subscription will end as I will not support my time and effort being dismissed.

Teiji

ZOS_BrianWheeler wrote: »

When we fire up the campaign changes, we will wipe your current home\guest assignments.

Mr Wheeler is the man.

I've been playing the game since early-access, I have 8 character slots and having to log multiple character to "fix" my home/guest assignments was very unexciting.

Imperial City update will be great.

Xiphyla

Time to bail from the game if this changes goes through for the travel to player thingy. GG.

driosketch

Ley wrote: »

Bfish22090 wrote: »

This is all great stuff


...but when?

Soon.™

That's not soon enough.

Seriously though, I like the direction of these changes.

Rook_Master

Great Changes!

Good to see some attention being paid to Cyrodiil.

LazyLewis

Also @ZOS_BrianWheeler another issue that has to be addressed is the use of zerg Proximity Detonation in Cyrodiil. One of the issue's is that so many groups try and use so much burst damage like this at once (24 man groups proxying and use some other burst skill + their ultimate will cause lag). I guarantee this causes lag and also us a huge in balance to the game. I remember Eric Wrobel saying that Proxy/Inevitable Det will be used to help split up zergs but now the zergs are using them. Not only are they using them their entire group mechanic revolves around them and especially high sorc groups who just x10 Proxy, streak in and streak out and then rinse and repeat. Please can some sort of Diminishing return self/AEO damage to stop large groups using this be added? When we get bombed by a 24 man poxy group at Peak PvP times we just lag out and no one takes damage for 10 minutes.

Agrippa_Invisus

Vynn wrote: »

ZOS_BrianWheeler wrote: »

Here’s a general update on what we are doing to alleviate some of the pain points in Cyrodiil. This includes systems/mechanics that promote poor sportsmanship, and undesirable reliances, and Cyrodiil-related performance problems that many of you are seeing, especially in Veteran campaigns. Please note that this summarizes our current thinking, but we may change this plan as events warrant.

As I’m sure many of you have noticed, there are far fewer performance problems in non-Veteran campaigns. We have been investigating why non-Veteran campaigns perform better than their Veteran counterparts, and are starting to make some changes based on what we have found. As some of you already know, what we’re seeing is this: there is a point where if too many players are too close together and perform too many AoE and other instant-cast types of spells that server performance starts to degrade. As lower level characters don’t have many of these types of spells, non-Veteran campaigns generally don’t run into this trouble.

As such, the combat team is currently making adjustments to line-of-sight checks for area-of-effect abilities that have been causing the majority of server congestion in Cyrodiil. This has resulted in us taking a close look at higher level abilities/items to root out line-of-sight checks and other potential client-to-server message overflow issues.

There are also many other issues that will be addressed in the near future, some of which are related to players exploiting PvP buffs, social systems, and the Emperor system. Many of these issues came to use via direct feedback from players – thank you so much for your help, everyone who has taken the time to give us well documented feedback. It makes our jobs far easier.

With all this in mind, a multi-pronged change is coming to campaigns, the Emperor system, and campaign assignment that will be a major adjustment. The goal of this change is to address population imbalance issues, the reliance on “buff servers,” and Emperor farming. Read below for an explanation of the changes you can expect to see coming to Cyrodiil in our next major update.

• Jump-to-Friend: Social jumping into Cyrodiil or any PVP space is being disabled. This has long been the way to get around the Guest/Home campaign assignment. With this change, we’re closing that loophole as it's detrimental to the overall PVP experience and integrity of the campaign system.
• PVP Bonuses: Keep, Elder Scroll, and the Emperorship bonuses (passive buffs) will apply only in PVP spaces. This change will effectively do away with the concept of “buff servers.” Originally, we wanted these bonuses to provide a game-wide benefit, but we’ve seen this design become detrimental to the PVP experience due to alliances having "buff servers."
• Emperor Buffs/Skill Line: The "Former Emperor" buffs are being removed from the game. With this new system, you will only get Emperor buffs while your character is actively Emperor. Also, you will be granted the Emperor skill line and abilities upon earning Emperorship, without the need to spend ability points. All players that have spent points in the Emperor skill line will be refunded those skill points.
• Low Population Campaigns/Underscoring Alliances: Players participating in a low-population campaign or as part of an underscoring alliance will now gain 20% more AP within the campaign they're earning that bonus for, instead of 10%. Population polling has also been sped up to apply the underdog/low-population bonuses more often; however, this also means they have the opportunity to expire faster.
• Guest Campaign Reassignment: The cooldown on Guest Campaign reassignment will be increased to 4 days from 3.
• Home Campaign Reassignment: The cooldown on Home Campaign reassignment has been changed to 12 hours from 3 days, but the cost to switch will be 150,000 AP instead of 15,000. Also, switching home campaigns at the end of a campaign period will now cost 100 AP instead of 5,000 AP.
• Battle Leveling: The Battle Leveling system has been updated to include Veteran Ranks. Players that opt into Battle Leveling will be roughly equivalent in power to a VR14 player in moderate-quality gear.
• Elder Scrolls & Gates: A fix is in the works that will prevent enemy player characters from getting through the Elder Scroll Gates while the gates are closed. (Gate jumpers beware. Your days are numbered.) Also, a new protective barrier will now surround the Elder Scrolls while in their temples, if the Elder Scroll Gates are closed. This barrier will drop if the gate opens.

That’s not all—the combat team has been hard at work tweaking numbers on abilities and items, too. Expect to see more details about those changes in future patch notes…considering these aren’t patch notes.

Last but certainly not least, we have some changes coming for each of the campaigns. We will be making some scoring adjustments to the campaigns in order to provide 4 different campaign styles, each with with different scoring parameters. In all cases the keep transit system, keep bonuses, scroll bonuses, emperorship crowning/deposing, and leaderboards will remain the same except for the scoring and duration changes noted below:

• Azura: Ownership of keeps, resources, Elder Scrolls, and outposts will generate 1 point each per scoring cycle and last 30 days.
• Blackwater Blade: Ownership of keeps, resources, Elder Scrolls, and outposts will generate 1 point each per scoring cycle and last 5 days. (Non-Veterans only.)
• Chillrend: Keeps, outposts, and resources will generate zero points. Ownership of Elder Scrolls will generate 1 point per scoring cycle and last 7 days.
• Haderus: Keeps, outposts, and Elder Scrolls will generate zero points. Ownership of resources will generate 1 point per scoring cycle and last 7 days.
• Thornblade: Resources, outposts, and Elder Scrolls will generate zero points. Ownership of keeps will generate 1 point per scoring cycle and last 7 days.
• Versidue-Shae (Console Only): Ownership of keeps, resources, Elder Scrolls, and outposts will generate 1 point each per scoring cycle and last 5 days. (Non-Veterans only.)

All campaigns noted above will be ended when the patch with these changes is live, and start at a score of 0. We have not yet determined if we will reset all objectives to their starting alliances. We will communicate this in the associated patch notes.

As always, these changes are subject to change based on feedback and testing, but this is the direction we’re going with PVP and Cyrodiil. Hopefully this post shows we are dedicated to delivering a solid PVP experience, and we thank you again for your loyalty to the war in Cyrodiil and your feedback!

We’ll see you on the battlefield!

Want feedback, my two cents;

I agree with a good portion of the changes listed here. But I think removing former employee passive buffs is a spit in the face of people who earned it. I used vacation time to take off during a server reset, spent 14 hours straight grinding AP to get ahead of the competition and push for the Emp keeps. No one handed it to me, people don't care if you are pushing for it, your whole faction doesn't try to help you(some did, others were verbally abusive about opposing my pushing for it). Emp trading is definitely a problem, but spitting in the face of your player base is not how you go about fixing it. These passives are not ruining pvp. The only people that whine about them are people who don't take the time and put in the effort to get them. I have continued supporting ESO through my subscription because I see the room for improvement on a fun game. But taking away things that have been earned will only confirm for me that Zenimax doesn't care about loyal fans, and my subscription will end as I will not support my time and effort being dismissed.

As a former Emperor, I think all those PVDoor specialists that farmed Emperor going back to Celarus and other campaigns deserve to have everything they've "earned" thrown in a pit and buried, as it's a "spit in the face" of the people who earned it for realsies.

I'll let that passive skill tree be deleted if it means they lose what they shamefully gained.

Those people are the very definition of 'This is why we can't have nice things'.

manny254

The only change that I dislike is the former emp passive. The farming of this was done months ago. The cost to change campaigns is more then enough to stop this in the future imo. It really is a slap in the face to those that worked hard to get it in a highly populated campaign.

c0rp

I really looking forward to the campaign where the only scores that matter are elder scrolls....I see this being pretty interesting.

Erwen

"There are also many other issues that will be addressed in the near future, some of which are related to players exploiting PvP buffs, social systems, and the Emperor system. Many of these issues came to use via direct feedback from players – thank you so much for your help, everyone who has taken the time to give us well documented feedback. It makes our jobs far easier."

so, if some PVE crying baby cant play pvp like a good player, he crys with "documented feedback" and you decide to take the buffs out because this make your job easier. if you guys EVER listen to the pvp players you would know that we have many ideas to change pvp without make the game easier to crying babies!

c0rp

AllPlayAndNoWork wrote: »

Scoring system is a bit off as you could end up with everyone going to the same server if they don't like a certain set of rules.
It would be more beneficial to change the map style / layout to suit the rule-set of that particular server.

If servers have no points for keeps / outposts and resources then each faction will only go for the keeps needed to open the scroll gates. So whats the point of the rest of the map ?






Everything else is spot on though....

Mobility and protection.

BigTone

I really like the 150k AP cost to switch campaigns.
I like removing former emp buffs.
I LOVE the scoring changes

Really excited for this.

The only thing I would recommend is shortening the duration of the longer campaigns, especially for the beginning. All campaigns should be the same duration, say 14 days.

Torquebow

As I’m sure many of you have noticed, there are far fewer performance problems in non-Veteran campaigns. We have been investigating why non-Veteran campaigns perform better than their Veteran counterparts, and are starting to make some changes based on what we have found. As some of you already know, what we’re seeing is this: there is a point where if too many players are too close together and perform too many AoE and other instant-cast types of spells that server performance starts to degrade.

We have been saying this for months... and I'm sure you guys have known about it for months. A simple, "That is most likely an issue, we are looking into as we speak." would be fine.

@ZOS_BrianWheeler

I don't understand why a lead developer for PvP has had such poor communication with it's player base for so long know. And then when you do post it comes across very negative and condescending. I'm sure you have a ton of things on your plate, but please try and keep at least some sort of open communication with the people who play your game everyday. I've all but stopped playing this game, because I feel like it's in a dead state with absolutely no info coming about anything for months now.

Having said that, I really like these changes and look forward to patch notes. Thank you for participating in the conversation and please keep us in the loop as we are the people who keep the lights on.

Also I didn't see anything about a simple option to deselect a current campaign, maybe I just missed it. But this causes some problems with people who have old alts they don't play, or someone who has switched factions to join another guild. It's just a quality of life thing, but it was annoying and I had to end up deleting one of my VR5 alts, just to join a campaign with my current guild.

Also someone in my guild brought up a good point as well, if your going to make campaign hopping impossible, then you should make the rewards worth while for actually staying and winning a campaign. How you balance this to make sure it doesn't become another type of buff server, where factions camp certain campaigns in order to insure winning them is a delicate matter I guess.

Ghostbane

Agrippa_Invisus wrote: »

As a former Emperor, I think all those PVDoor specialists that farmed Emperor going back to Celarus and other campaigns deserve to have everything they've "earned" thrown in a pit and buried, as it's a "spit in the face" of the people who earned it for realsies.

I'll let that passive skill tree be deleted if it means they lose what they shamefully gained.

Those people are the very definition of 'This is why we can't have nice things'.

Well typed.

Zyle

Akrasjel

Will see

Rook_Master

All the people that farmed Celarus are real mad about losing their former buffs.

DisgracefulMind

I honestly don't like the idea of removing the former emperor passives to players who have gotten it in the past year. Perhaps disable it from happening for future players, but why punish ALL players for a system that others abused. It doesn't seem right or fair to take them away when there are plenty of players who actually and legitimately worked hard to obtain their Emperor status, which ultimately led to the passives of former emperor. I agree that emperor farming has been a problem in the past, but I'm tired of honest players being punished because of dishonest and abusive players. There is no way to sift through who or who wasn't farmed emperor, but because of that, I don't think anyone who obtained it should be punished for the lack of response from ZoS on the issue.

Like I said, restrict it for the future, do not punish the rest of us.

xMovingTarget

Benawaw89 wrote: »

my former emperor buff is gone i worked so hard to get that emperor. now only RED emperor color left

imo emperor buff isnt a game changing, its a reward for hardwork becoming empeor. imo it should be just there.

You and me, we used to be together
Every day together, always
I really feel that I'm losing my best friend
I can't believe this could be the end

It looks as though you're letting go
And if it's real, well I don't want to know

Don't cry
I know just what you're saying
So please stop explaining
Don't tell me 'cause it hurts

Sotha_Sil

This is really nice to hear but we have been requesting Zos to disable the jump-to-friend options since launch and it's only coming now ? let's not forget that and please keep listening to the community more closely and act faster !!. Let's hope more changes are coming in terms of gameplay & skills and also in terms of activities in Cyrodiil (hopefully IC will help).

tinythinker

Draxys wrote: »

I'm actually worried that when people can't find action on a campaign and they can't jump to another one, we will have another mass exodus from the game.

Well, the campaigns are mostly short so picking poorly shouldn't be too much of a burden, but, ZOS could keep campaign hopping open/free for a day for people who haven't been back to Cyro since the changes were made. In other words, let's say these changes start July 1st. I have been out of the game or out of PvP and I am heading in on July 5th. If I could have a day at least to free-hop from campaign to campaign before being locked in, I could make a better choice for home and guest. This could apply to all new people coming into PvP as well in the future. A day pass, if you will, to find your starter home campaign.

Gilliamtherogue

EgoRush wrote: »

Gilliamtherogue wrote: »

Please tell me you plan on wiping the PvE leaderboards if this is the case. All of the top scores at the moment have only been obtained with the full advantages that PvP buffs provide between massive crit chance amps, base damage amps, and former emp buffs. If you do not wipe the leaderboards, many of those scores will remain unbeatable until players have an absurd amount of champion points to outscale the differences.

Not all of them. All the EU EP scores at the minute for 12-man trials are with zero buffs. Though the scores are not exactly top place haha. Arena scores of >11.8K were being obtained with zero buffs now though.

Which is why I mentioned the CP gains. Most top EU players have a disturbingly large advantage of CP over NA players. All of NA's top time(s) is/are done with full, or close to full pvp buffs.

JTorus

DisgracefulMind wrote: »

I honestly don't like the idea of removing the former emperor passives to players who have gotten it in the past year. Perhaps disable it from happening for future players, but why punish ALL players for a system that others abused. It doesn't seem right or fair to take them away when there are plenty of players who actually and legitimately worked hard to obtain their Emperor status, which ultimately led to the passives of former emperor. I agree that emperor farming has been a problem in the past, but I'm tired of honest players being punished because of dishonest and abusive players. There is no way to sift through who or who wasn't farmed emperor, but because of that, I don't think anyone who obtained it should be punished for the lack of response from ZoS on the issue.

Like I said, restrict it for the future, do not punish the rest of us.

I agree with you, in that I don't think its fair for someone to lose what they legitimately earned. But I also agree with removing incentive for farming, and I don't like that those who farmed in the past would retain the benefits. I think a middle ground solution would be an option. Like a former emperor only ability/ultimate. One that is strictly conducive to group play mechanics and not self-serving at all. One would think that a former emperor would still inspire the troops to go to battle, it isn't unreasonable to take that approach in a game environment.

k1llorbek1lled

Vynn wrote: »

I agree with a good portion of the changes listed here. But I think removing former employee passive buffs is a spit in the face of people who earned it. I used vacation time to take off during a server reset, spent 14 hours straight grinding AP to get ahead of the competition and push for the Emp keeps. No one handed it to me, people don't care if you are pushing for it, your whole faction doesn't try to help you(some did, others were verbally abusive about opposing my pushing for it). Emp trading is definitely a problem, but spitting in the face of your player base is not how you go about fixing it. These passives are not ruining pvp. The only people that whine about them are people who don't take the time and put in the effort to get them. I have continued supporting ESO through my subscription because I see the room for improvement on a fun game. But taking away things that have been earned will only confirm for me that Zenimax doesn't care about loyal fans, and my subscription will end as I will not support my time and effort being dismissed.

Well said... read this Brian Wheeler, because it's how I feel toooo.....

FENGRUSH

ZOS_BrianWheeler wrote: »

As I’m sure many of you have noticed, there are far fewer performance problems in non-Veteran campaigns. We have been investigating why non-Veteran campaigns perform better than their Veteran counterparts, and are starting to make some changes based on what we have found. As some of you already know, what we’re seeing is this: there is a point where if too many players are too close together and perform too many AoE and other instant-cast types of spells that server performance starts to degrade. As lower level characters don’t have many of these types of spells, non-Veteran campaigns generally don’t run into this trouble.

As such, the combat team is currently making adjustments to line-of-sight checks for area-of-effect abilities that have been causing the majority of server congestion in Cyrodiil. This has resulted in us taking a close look at higher level abilities/items to root out line-of-sight checks and other potential client-to-server message overflow issues.

So you guys are looking to make changes to make the code smarter here - that is good. Youve asked players to "spread out" in the past to alleviate stress. What is the chances that youre actually looking to change the 'blobing' mentality in cyro? Many players are being forced to jump inside these large groups to spam heals in an effort to fight against those doing the same thing during lag. Heals go through during lag, damage, not so much.

This is really your *biggest* issue impacting performance in the game. You cant force players to not play in this style - but currently youre offering no incentives not to play like this. The big question is why? You added detonation to deter this type of stuff. Instead, youve given these groups a new tool to use together.

Simple solution to fix many of your problems: change detonation to scale off players hit. Deter players from grouping up. Siege is not enough, especially with purge functioning the way it is currently. Players spam purge and make the lag that much worse.

The answers are in this post, and all over the forums. The question is, are you actually going to push for a solution anytime in the near future on this? Otherwise, were just waiting for you guys to make the most effecient netcode on your side, and then youre tackling the complaints that cyrodiil has nothing but 24+ raid groups, which leads to 2 24+ raid groups to fight better single 24ppl groups. Ultimately, youre not offering the smaller player base much of an option.

Its clear youve tried to make changes to deter these issues (aoe caps being partially removed) - but partial is a complete miss. Siege hits a group like no player skill can ever dream of. This is because of the built in 50/75% mitigation youve allowed. If youre not going to fix caps properly, you need to add skills that counter large groups in one location. Because siege alone isnt always enough.


Really hope this gets a thorough response. The other changes are pretty good as well. Dont know how smart it is to lump multiple changes together to try to get a 'feel' for it. One at a time (the same as balance should be done) - rather than lump patches.

Garion

Sotha_Sil wrote: »

This is really nice to hear but we have been requesting Zos to disable the jump-to-friend options since launch and it's only coming now ? let's not forget that and please keep listening to the community more closely and act faster !!. Let's hope more changes are coming in terms of gameplay & skills and also in terms of activities in Cyrodiil (hopefully IC will help).

Really nice? This is the worst change discussed in this thread.

AhPook_Is_Here

@ZOS_BrianWheeler

It's all fine but why not remove guesting completely? If you did that you could blow-up at least one vet server. Now that buff campaigns are dead do we really need 4 empty servers with one decent pop one at prime-time and one lower-pop but active with 2 still empty? I'd much rather have 2 less vet servers than we have now, at least one less. Guesting is just a mess anyway because of the way the marker prevents you from moving characters around to campaigns you want to be present it. Since the home server reset I haven't picked a home server on any character just to avoid *** up the guest markers. At least give an option to clear them if you are going to leave them in the game.