How to fix Imperial City's biggest lame exploit - server population

davey1107

I love the idea behind IC, but it took all of two weeks for the community to make IC and the rest of Cyrodiil completely un-fun. If you look at the vet campaigns, the three factions have divided entirely into their own maps in order to play IC and Cyrodiil with little to no competition. My AD campaign (moon cursed) has had us with 100% of the keeps and scrolls all week. Meanwhile, 99% of the players in IC are yellow. As a vet 2, my character was able to go around totally unmolested - not what was intended for IC.

This is largely due to lame gamers who want an easy time over a true challenge, but it's totally ruined Cyrodiil and IC. I want reds and blues to fight - it's why I go into a PVP campaign. So how can ZOS fix this? Ideas?

MrGrimey

That's why we need arenas and battlegrounds

Makkir

MrGrimey wrote: »

That's why we need arenas and battlegrounds

leading to even more empty campaigns....

Zavus

They need to remove buff servers, and only allow 1 open access campaign with the rest being gated. Cyro is just a dead wasteland atm, with people constantly having to campaign hop to find fights.

OmniDevil

I completely agree.

Last week, my guild was making a huge push to try and crown an EP Emperor on Skull of Corruption. However, in order to do so, we needed a lot more numbers on EP side as DC is grossly dominating that campaign right now. It took a forum post and some reaching out to other EP guilds to switch campaigns and help out. We were successful and two of my guilds members were crowned.

Taking a break from heavy PvP this week and its back to being a DC buff server.

We definitely miss the Pre-IC Cyrodiil campaigns and would love to have them back.

SeptimusDova

This was predicted in the Moon Sugar Atlas, Page 42 under the heading of PTS will not remove the Campaign/buff servers. They were just re-purposed to IC Servers.. No way to fix its too late. The gated campaign is the "Axe of Blabafat" one Was just on it and its mostly banana land. People are bored on it. Now going to find some delves and group places to solo. A cat has to do what a cat has to Do!!!

Itoq

OmniDevil wrote: »

huge push... we needed a lot more numbers... other EP guilds to switch campaigns and help out.

Thank goodness you were able to out zerg them. For a bit their during your story I was afraid that getting emperor for your guild members was going to be difficult. At least you didn't partake in the

davey1107 wrote: »

biggest lame exploit - server population

and were not one of those

davey1107 wrote: »

lame gamers who want an easy time over a true challenge,

Whew.

But really, these behaviors are hardly surprising and are up to the game designer to anticipate and limit.

UltimaJoe777

Hoh hum, another IC complaint thread... I'll just sort this over here with the rest of them and move on.

DaveMoeDee

Zavus wrote: »

They need to remove buff servers, and only allow 1 open access campaign with the rest being gated. Cyro is just a dead wasteland atm, with people constantly having to campaign hop to find fights.

I don't get it.

If you make IC gated, doesn't that further encourage buff servers? There would be far more motivation to keep a campaign one color if it means no competition whatsoever in IC.

Any time the state of Cyrodiil impacts other aspects of the game, you increase the chances that people who don't really care about active PVP will try to discourage competition.

Sausage

Campaigns needs to be filled one by one, and also add somekind of Mercenary thing to encourage to join low pop alliance. Oor they could just open free trial and give unlimited Cyrodil for them, maybe free trialist could be the Mercenaries, that sounds like fun, that is it, lets use trialist to fill up the low pop alliances.

TBois

DaveMoeDee wrote: »

Zavus wrote: »

They need to remove buff servers, and only allow 1 open access campaign with the rest being gated. Cyro is just a dead wasteland atm, with people constantly having to campaign hop to find fights.

I don't get it.

If you make IC gated, doesn't that further encourage buff servers? There would be far more motivation to keep a campaign one color if it means no competition whatsoever in IC.

Any time the state of Cyrodiil impacts other aspects of the game, you increase the chances that people who don't really care about active PVP will try to discourage competition.

Theoretically the dominant faction would move into IC to get gear and the other two factions would be able to take some keeps. I'm in the it's too late for these fixes camp. My main guild folded so I'm disheartened though.

sagitter

MrGrimey wrote: »

That's why we need arenas and battlegrounds

I don't need it.

Personofsecrets

Makkir wrote: »

MrGrimey wrote: »

That's why we need arenas and battlegrounds

leading to even more empty campaigns....

Save the dying man or ensure the child lives a healthy life

Winterpsy

So long as vet 16 gear requires 150 mats/piece, and/or 10.000 TVstones/piece, players will do anything to be able to farm those out uncontested.

If the mats/equipment become more available, gatherable from nodes, etc, there would be no more reason keep up a farming campaign.

Brrrofski

IC has become boring already.

Unless you go to arena district, there is no pvp. It's just people farming tel Var stones from npcs. As soon as you kill someone, they move to a new zone.

Only reason I keep going there is to get mats for 16 gear. I have the jewellery I need on both toons. Have the mats for one toon already.

Although this is "close quarters" if you don't go to the arena you'll see less enemies than if you took one keep.

Pretty sure other's feel the same. If not yet, they will.

People will be back in normal Cyrodiil soon. As soon as I get another 100,000 tel Var stones for mats, I will be.

I'll probably give up on the mats a long time before that.....

Nivzruo_ESO

MrGrimey wrote: »

That's why we need arenas and battlegrounds

So true. Do away with this 30v5 rubbish and give us fair instanced fighting.

sagitter

Gated keep acces is the key to the revive Cyrodiil , because if u want to farm you must partecipate to the war, you can like it or no but it is sure would create more ava/rvr/pvp.

Personofsecrets

sagitter wrote: »

Gated keep acces is the key to the revive Cyrodiil , because if u want to farm you must partecipate to the war, you can like it or no but it is sure would create more ava/rvr/pvp.

why are you so sure people would participate if they really didn't want to?

Sausage

Just give Cyrodil client for free, thats gonna be one hell of a PR-stunt too.

Sharee

What would help is removing the choice of players as to what campaign they want to join, and instead when they queue for PvP dropping them in a campaign where they are needed the most. This would ensure that all campaigns are (more or less) evenly populated by all three factions, and the concept of buff servers would be gone. It would also be hated to hell and back. Oh well

Sausage

Even better if they just sell the Cyrodil client for 10 bucks or so, upgrade to full game cost 50 bucks, and give them chance to grow in power like the rest of us, if they PVP enough and they are the mercenaries who are sent to low pop alliances, make it like real independent game. Cyrodil itself is like 30+ hour content thing. Anyway, Ive spoken.

Elloa

MrGrimey wrote: »

That's why we need arenas and battlegrounds

*Facepalm* That's not a solution. That's an escape. To have Arena and Battleground will not FIX the problem. It will just destroy completely Cyrodiil and Imperial City.

@Davey1107 The solution can not be bring by the Devellopers but by the community. Together, we can fix this problem by convincing your guild to go in a different campaign for example. To have teh guts to go in a campaign dominated by another faction and challenge them on their own territory.
But this take time, and the collaboration of others. You can not do it alone. But you can initiate it.

Legedric

MrGrimey wrote: »

That's why we need arenas and battlegrounds

No we don't.

This would even draw many more PvP players away from Cyrodiil and IC and won't solve a single thing regarding pop imbalance.

Just make all Campaigns free for all (just need to select a home campaignf or ranking) and let them fill up dynamically.
So for example, if 100 DC players join campaign A it gets close for DC until the number of AD and EP players on that campaign raise to a certain level (let's say 100 in total). If those limites are reached DC is opened up again.

This won't prevent imbalance entirely but it will keep the gap smaller and if your desired DC campaign is full for now you need to go to another campaign until the campaign evens out or others leave.

The above mentioned numbers are of course only examples, so don't take them for real.

DaveTheMinion

Leave Cyrodill alone, I just bought a property there! it's now a nice place to live and raise a family

Yaewinn

sagitter wrote: »

Gated keep acces is the key to the revive Cyrodiil , because if u want to farm you must partecipate to the war, you can like it or no but it is sure would create more ava/rvr/pvp.

That will only work if you get kicked out of IC if you die via pvp while your alliance has no IC-access.
Loosing IC access and still endless farming makes no sense.

willymchilybily

Zavus wrote: »

They need to remove buff servers, and only allow 1 open access campaign with the rest being gated. Cyro is just a dead wasteland atm, with people constantly having to campaign hop to find fights.

sagitter wrote: »

Gated keep acces is the key to the revive Cyrodiil , because if u want to farm you must partecipate to the war, you can like it or no but it is sure would create more ava/rvr/pvp.

this wont help at all. You will end up people setting their home campaign to the open campaign for the pvp and it will be too full to join, and guesting in the campaign their faction dominates and instead of a bit of competition and pvp in IC you wont see a single soul of the enemy faction. because now they dont have IC access people will leave that campaign so It will be uncontested control of cyrodil. And you just end up with campaigns becoming IC faction farms.

TL;DR you're not fixing a problem you are exacerbating it.

Rosveen

Gated access is worthless if ZOS keeps the insane rule allowing people to respawn inside the city even after they lost access.

player_klaus

i would pay a 3 month-sub for a 100% pve IC. just going there for mats, runes, costumes, vWGT & vICP
(btw. i suck at pvp)

i say:
remove ic from the pvp-land, cut campaigns back to a number of 3, open one ic-uber-gated-pvp campaign and gg.
the whining from all sides will come to an end.

player_klaus

edit.

lets be serious. 95% of the so called "pvpers" are just ganking/farming noobs & stones in ic.
this.is.not.pvp.
maybe im not open minded enough... but i dont see the point in doing this. (make ic a ghetto for the sociopaths so the rest of tamriel stays clean?)

davey1107

So after like 30 comments, the feedback seems to compile as:

1. There's general agreement the populations are off, causing issues where the game isn't being played as intended.
2. Most suggestions revolve around a new way of populating campaigns. I think this has the most promise - as an example, only allow in ten yellows, then require ten blues and reds before you allow in more yellows.
3. Maybe offer rewards for undertaking more difficult challenges. If rare drop chances were doubled, I can say I'd be in a highly populated red zone facing those risks.
4. Some seem to like playing IC without the PVP challenges. Maybe offering these players a zone that does this would discourage this campaign zerging. However, PVP is a major feature of the IC rewards, so a PVE only IC would likely need to offer less rewards. Otherwise players would grind the PVE IC for gear they'd then use to tank and gank in PVP.
5. On a side note, as always about a third of commenters have nothing constructive to say...they just wanted to pick on other commenters. Thanks, guys, sooooo helpful.

OGLezard

player_klaus wrote: »

i would pay a 3 month-sub for a 100% pve IC. just going there for mats, runes, costumes, vWGT & vICP
(btw. i suck at pvp)

i say:
remove ic from the pvp-land, cut campaigns back to a number of 3, open one ic-uber-gated-pvp campaign and gg.
the whining from all sides will come to an end.

@player_klaus you do know that you dont have to enter IC to go to the new dungeons.....

.....also, people like to gank those who suck at pvp because it is fun. Hence why it is player vs player.... kill all you see. Regardless of skill. Then when you find someone better you fight them for a challenge. The weaklings are just to keep you up to snuff and free AP/TV