Campaign Dominance and Dead Campaigns

Jar_Ek

Campaign Dominance

A number of the PvP campaigns are dynamic, active and effective. The keeps and Emperors change factions regularly and there is a significant level of PvP. Some are not – they are permanently dominated by one faction and are essentially dead because of it. Now you could argue that this is fine because that faction obviously got organised and took over the campaign – and to an extent that is true. They put the work in, they get the rewards… however it is not a good state of affairs for the game as a whole.

A campaign that is dominated by one factions tends to cycle through this:

• Players from other factions within that campaign try to retake keeps / organise resistance, but get wiped by the dominant faction as they have no mobility (no keeps = no mobility) and are fewer in number.
• Greater numbers + no mobility means that zergs will tend to race to the only source of combat and wipe out the fledging resistance.

• Players of other factions move away from the campaign because it is locked out by the dominant faction and there appears to be no way to fight back.

• More players of the dominant faction join the campaign because they are dominant and hence have domination buffs, can also farm IC / Cryodiil in relative peace, and have the best chance of survival / winning. This reinforces the dominance and continues a cycle of player movement (dominant faction players arriving; other factions leaving).

• The remaining players of other factions become fewer and fewer and cannot effectively make a difference – even against nearly empty keeps (need more than one person generally).

• The players in the dominant faction stop PvPing there as there are no opponents, leaving the campaign dead.

Potential solutions:
Any potential solution must not penalise the dominant faction (who have put the effort in to dominate), but must encourage players to take the fight to the dominant faction and break the dominance. Thus the following solutions are proposed:

• Change the AP mechanics such the fewer keeps and resources you have, the greater the AP gain you make when you take one, until it is normalised when you have the same number as all your home keeps / resources. Keep track of resources and keeps separately for this calculation.

• Rather than providing a bonus when you have all your home keeps, provide an underdog bonus based on how many keeps / resources your faction holds (fewer keeps = bigger effect). So if you have zero keeps, you have enough of a bonus to compete against those who hold all the map.

• Alternatively remove the keep bonus system entirely.

• Provide a bonus to AP for people to assign to specific campaigns based on the current population and keep dominance in that campaign (e.g. +50% AP gain when your faction has no keeps; +15% AP gain per level of population difference)

Rune_Relic

The created a low population balance to encourage weaker forces to participate.
So a certain faction decided to... stay away & get the bonus.....wipe map....stay away and get bonus...wipe map....
I think people pretty much lost faith in any scoring system after that.
Everyone just AP farms and emp swaps now.

ZOS has a habit of rewarding the best factions and best players making them even more powerful.
In the process making the weaker force even weaker.
You cant compete in a game when the odds are stacked against you like that.

The more you dominate a map the more thinly you should be spread and the less dominant you should be.
The status quo should be home keeps...not total domination.

IxSTALKERxI

Campaign dominance and dead campaigns is just caused by population imbalance.

The vet pvp servers for PC NA look something like this:

Azura's star - locked pop - competitive
Haderus - locked pop - competitive
Trueflame - Low pop, population imbalance
Axe - Low pop, population imbalance

People choose to play on servers where they can find fights easily and therefore are drawn to the high pop campaigns. No one wants to fight on a dead server with no opponents. So the dead servers stay dead and the high pop campaigns stay laggy.

When there is low population on a campaign it is very easy for it to be unbalanced, one faction could have 5 dudes another could have 20, the third could have none at all.

Imo, I think the solution would be lowering the max population cap for campaigns by 20%. Which would force people to spread out onto the other campaigns and help alleviate some of the lag on the locked pop campaigns.

NBrookus

IxSTALKERxI wrote: »

Imo, I think the solution would be lowering the max population cap for campaigns by 20%. Which would force people to spread out onto the other campaigns and help alleviate some of the lag on the locked pop campaigns.

This sounds plausible.

Another concept would be to have pop caps be relative to each factions' population balance, for example, no more than a 30% variance over the median. This has potential issues - no one wants to be locked out of the home campaign, or worse, ALSO locked out of their guest campaign.

Perhaps a simpler idea is to increase AP gain on low pop servers... more carrot than stick.

I agree with the OP though. 3 things will make me quit for the day.
1: Awful lag (goodbye Azura's)
2: We took everything and there's nothing left to do (only happened once)
3: Getting 10v100'd five or six times in a row

Fun, evenly matched fights where you aren't sure who is going to win should be the norm, instead of being rare.