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Feedback on Cyr: The Domination Cycle; Potential Ways to End It
AkeGamer
✭✭
Summary: Current campaign balance systems fail to address the Domination Cycle and the author suggests some ideas to improve the situation.
As per the last ESO live, the ZOS team wants input and feedback on game play at a higher level to better understand where they can dig in and make improvements. I know that much of what I'm going to say here has been bantered about, but I've never provided my opinion and I hope to add value to the discussion.
Background on me: PvP centric MMO player since Asheron's Call Darktide 1989. I'm not an elite PvPer. I enjoy the PvE and crafting gaming systems as well but I don't play PvE only MMOs as I enjoy the pvp competition. I'm the average PvPer who tries to keep his KD ratio in the black where K is defined as Killing Blows. There are many in the community like me who don't voice their opinions and may have the majority opinion but aren't heard on these forums. I play on Haderus as DC and Trueflame as AD. I don't hop campaigns and choose to be loyal to both the faction and campaign I've pledged to. I'd also rather not guest as a personal preference.
Campaigns where 30-40 alliance members run in a pack decimating any competition and owning the whole map are broken. The term zerg is so overused and yet remains so rarely understood. If you played Blizzard's Starcraft, then you would know that zerglings are weak but are cheaply produced and require little resources to maintain. So you just mass produce them and throw them at the enemy. The groups of 30-40 aren't zergs. They are armies fighting against squads. Of those 30-40 on my two Vet campaigns there will be those with weaker builds and/or fewer CP but they aren't L10s with 0 CP.
What happens when these armies amass and the 2 opposing factions don't have the numbers to respond is simple: the majority (PvErs wanting IC access or PvPrs wanting decent fights) just hop to a different campaign via guesting or by being pulled in group to a campaign they may have an opposing faction character homed to. The minority will tactically retreat and do PvE objectives outside of Cyrodiil, assuming they want to continue playing the game. While that isn't great, it should reduce the available AP to the army and their members will thin out after they paint the map and have no targets to kill. Now, should the other factions return with similar numbers at some later point the army can respond and lock-down the campaign. Thus the natural force which should dissipate the army (lack of AP) isn't strong enough.
So, I see two very necessary changes to make the concept of declaring a Home campaign viable:
1. Eliminate the loophole which allows a player to enter a campaign in which he/she has already Homed an opposing faction character to. This means that a player can't be invited to a group from a player who is homed in that campaign and then auto-port to the leader. Home campaign benefits should also be improved as incentive to be loyal to your campaign as opposed to guesting. The AP penalties for switching before campaign end seem fair.
2a. Minority bonuses need to be determined real time and should directly affect the ability for the underdog to balance the playing field. The AP incentives simply don't work other than to drive campaign hopping. Buffs should be provided alliance wide to any character in an underdog state improving stats and killing capabilities like the battle levelling system. The underdog state definition must take into consideration the percentage of keeps. scrolls and raw player numbers so as not to provide buffs too early in the domination cycle. However, having 6 scrolls and all available keeps is too late as now you have entered a domination cycle in which the force of tactical withdrawal exceeds the incentives to keep up the fight. If the players aren't smart enough to know they need to keep the enemy in the game to have a viable game, then the game systems need to do that.
2b. A second option is to strictly gate the alliance numbers to preserve the concept of a match. That is to say that the numbers of players in each alliance must remain equal. No new alliance member may enter Cyrodiil until the opposing two factions have a player queued up to enter Cyrodiil. Should the numbers match and an alliance lose a member, then that faction should receive a bonus buff until either the opposing two factions lose equal members or the first faction gain a member.
Here's an example of the concept:
AD: 40
DC: 40
EP: 40
120 player match
DC loses 1 member and the remaining 119 players receive a buff equal to 1/120 of the total player capability score where this score is an amalgam of CP, AP, KBs and a Gear Score.
How that buff is applied needs discussion but let's keep it simple and say that it aligns with the battle leveling system. Here, though, instead of a target balance of v16; the target is to improve the underdog players to equal 1/120th of the total player capability score.
Can a domination cycle occur with these changes? If an equal number of players exists across the 3 factions and 1 faction achieves dominance through more highly skilled players and or CP/Gear imbalance then they have won. The other two factions will see their numbers dwindle and then either the minority bonus system (2a) or the match system(2b) kicks in to either balance the weaker factions or drive natural attrition of the dominant faction and thus reduce the match size. In either case, the game system recognizes an imbalance and applies forces to correct the imbalance.
Will this lead to longer queue times? While it's possible, especially on the most populated campaigns (AS currently), it doesn't currently appear that we are short on campaigns. In actuality, there are calls for reductions given the limited participation numbers people are seeing.
TL;DR: Current campaign balance systems fail to address the Domination Cycle and the author suggests some ideas to improve the situation.
As per the last ESO live, the ZOS team wants input and feedback on game play at a higher level to better understand where they can dig in and make improvements. I know that much of what I'm going to say here has been bantered about, but I've never provided my opinion and I hope to add value to the discussion.
Background on me: PvP centric MMO player since Asheron's Call Darktide 1989. I'm not an elite PvPer. I enjoy the PvE and crafting gaming systems as well but I don't play PvE only MMOs as I enjoy the pvp competition. I'm the average PvPer who tries to keep his KD ratio in the black where K is defined as Killing Blows. There are many in the community like me who don't voice their opinions and may have the majority opinion but aren't heard on these forums. I play on Haderus as DC and Trueflame as AD. I don't hop campaigns and choose to be loyal to both the faction and campaign I've pledged to. I'd also rather not guest as a personal preference.
Campaigns where 30-40 alliance members run in a pack decimating any competition and owning the whole map are broken. The term zerg is so overused and yet remains so rarely understood. If you played Blizzard's Starcraft, then you would know that zerglings are weak but are cheaply produced and require little resources to maintain. So you just mass produce them and throw them at the enemy. The groups of 30-40 aren't zergs. They are armies fighting against squads. Of those 30-40 on my two Vet campaigns there will be those with weaker builds and/or fewer CP but they aren't L10s with 0 CP.
What happens when these armies amass and the 2 opposing factions don't have the numbers to respond is simple: the majority (PvErs wanting IC access or PvPrs wanting decent fights) just hop to a different campaign via guesting or by being pulled in group to a campaign they may have an opposing faction character homed to. The minority will tactically retreat and do PvE objectives outside of Cyrodiil, assuming they want to continue playing the game. While that isn't great, it should reduce the available AP to the army and their members will thin out after they paint the map and have no targets to kill. Now, should the other factions return with similar numbers at some later point the army can respond and lock-down the campaign. Thus the natural force which should dissipate the army (lack of AP) isn't strong enough.
So, I see two very necessary changes to make the concept of declaring a Home campaign viable:
1. Eliminate the loophole which allows a player to enter a campaign in which he/she has already Homed an opposing faction character to. This means that a player can't be invited to a group from a player who is homed in that campaign and then auto-port to the leader. Home campaign benefits should also be improved as incentive to be loyal to your campaign as opposed to guesting. The AP penalties for switching before campaign end seem fair.
2a. Minority bonuses need to be determined real time and should directly affect the ability for the underdog to balance the playing field. The AP incentives simply don't work other than to drive campaign hopping. Buffs should be provided alliance wide to any character in an underdog state improving stats and killing capabilities like the battle levelling system. The underdog state definition must take into consideration the percentage of keeps. scrolls and raw player numbers so as not to provide buffs too early in the domination cycle. However, having 6 scrolls and all available keeps is too late as now you have entered a domination cycle in which the force of tactical withdrawal exceeds the incentives to keep up the fight. If the players aren't smart enough to know they need to keep the enemy in the game to have a viable game, then the game systems need to do that.
2b. A second option is to strictly gate the alliance numbers to preserve the concept of a match. That is to say that the numbers of players in each alliance must remain equal. No new alliance member may enter Cyrodiil until the opposing two factions have a player queued up to enter Cyrodiil. Should the numbers match and an alliance lose a member, then that faction should receive a bonus buff until either the opposing two factions lose equal members or the first faction gain a member.
Here's an example of the concept:
AD: 40
DC: 40
EP: 40
120 player match
DC loses 1 member and the remaining 119 players receive a buff equal to 1/120 of the total player capability score where this score is an amalgam of CP, AP, KBs and a Gear Score.
How that buff is applied needs discussion but let's keep it simple and say that it aligns with the battle leveling system. Here, though, instead of a target balance of v16; the target is to improve the underdog players to equal 1/120th of the total player capability score.
Can a domination cycle occur with these changes? If an equal number of players exists across the 3 factions and 1 faction achieves dominance through more highly skilled players and or CP/Gear imbalance then they have won. The other two factions will see their numbers dwindle and then either the minority bonus system (2a) or the match system(2b) kicks in to either balance the weaker factions or drive natural attrition of the dominant faction and thus reduce the match size. In either case, the game system recognizes an imbalance and applies forces to correct the imbalance.
Will this lead to longer queue times? While it's possible, especially on the most populated campaigns (AS currently), it doesn't currently appear that we are short on campaigns. In actuality, there are calls for reductions given the limited participation numbers people are seeing.
TL;DR: Current campaign balance systems fail to address the Domination Cycle and the author suggests some ideas to improve the situation.
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