Relegation campaign

Neoauspex

How about we keep the 2 extra CP campaigns and make one of them a relegation campaign. That is, if the campaign is full when you die in it, you don't get to spawn again and run right back to the fight. You spawn at your alliance base in the other non-relegation campaign and you can queue for the top tier campaign immediately. Maybe this would promote a more competitive atmosphere in terms of the actual alliance war instead of ubiquitous AP farming and zerging?

wolfwraith37

I think this would just create more chaos and zerging since this would only negatively effect small man groups if everytime a member died, they got kicked out of the campaign. A zerg just picks up another player and carries on with no negative effects.

Neoauspex

Possibly, but a pick-up-zerg might struggle to keep it's members organized while a small group could place a premium on survival by picking their battles. I prefer small group play for that reason anyway in Cyro. It might give small groups a better chance of defeating a zerg because stragglers that are separated from the herd don't just show up in the herd again 60 seconds later.

Biro123

I would perhaps adjust the idea slightly and have a kind of back-up campaign so that when you queue for your usual (or guest) and its full - it automatically puts you into the backup campaign - but leaves you queued for your first choice.

When it pops it then asks if you want to switch into your chosen campaign.

This would mean that when one is full, rather than people waiting in PVE just because there is no well-populated campaign, it will kind of create a populated campaign from all those people in the queue. Also you wouldn't have to select it as a 'home' or 'guest' with all the switching restrictions that come with that too - it just puts you there.

SugaComa

Biro123 wrote: »

I would perhaps adjust the idea slightly and have a kind of back-up campaign so that when you queue for your usual (or guest) and its full - it automatically puts you into the backup campaign - but leaves you queued for your first choice.

When it pops it then asks if you want to switch into your chosen campaign.

This would mean that when one is full, rather than people waiting in PVE just because there is no well-populated campaign, it will kind of create a populated campaign from all those people in the queue. Also you wouldn't have to select it as a 'home' or 'guest' with all the switching restrictions that come with that too - it just puts you there.

Why don't you just queue a quieter one and when you enter queue for the main campaign

It's basically the same thing only you have to do it ... I do it now

Biro123

SugaComa wrote: »

Biro123 wrote: »

I would perhaps adjust the idea slightly and have a kind of back-up campaign so that when you queue for your usual (or guest) and its full - it automatically puts you into the backup campaign - but leaves you queued for your first choice.

When it pops it then asks if you want to switch into your chosen campaign.

This would mean that when one is full, rather than people waiting in PVE just because there is no well-populated campaign, it will kind of create a populated campaign from all those people in the queue. Also you wouldn't have to select it as a 'home' or 'guest' with all the switching restrictions that come with that too - it just puts you there.

Why don't you just queue a quieter one and when you enter queue for the main campaign

It's basically the same thing only you have to do it ... I do it now

I do, but there are a number of reasons why this would be better.

Its human nature to follow the crowds. Its why you sometimes see a full restaurant next to an empty one, which makes people think (rightly or wrongly) that the empty one is bad and leads to them waiting for a table in the full one. In reality, they may be identical.

Its why we stubbornly see queues for a full server while the others are empty. People follow the crowds for the action.
Now if you forced them all into another server, the crowds(and action) would be there.

The other is that you may have your guest set to something else, it may also be full, or may be so empty that you don't expect to find any action before getting bin to your first choice.

dotme

Neoauspex wrote: »

How about we keep the 2 extra CP campaigns and make one of them a relegation campaign. That is, if the campaign is full when you die in it, you don't get to spawn again and run right back to the fight. You spawn at your alliance base in the other non-relegation campaign and you can queue for the top tier campaign immediately. Maybe this would promote a more competitive atmosphere in terms of the actual alliance war instead of ubiquitous AP farming and zerging?

So you're saying that after waiting for 30-45 minutes in a queue to play with my friends, if I die to a zerg I would have to re-queue and wait another 30-45 minutes to continue playing with them?

No thank you.

Neoauspex

dotme wrote: »

Neoauspex wrote: »

How about we keep the 2 extra CP campaigns and make one of them a relegation campaign. That is, if the campaign is full when you die in it, you don't get to spawn again and run right back to the fight. You spawn at your alliance base in the other non-relegation campaign and you can queue for the top tier campaign immediately. Maybe this would promote a more competitive atmosphere in terms of the actual alliance war instead of ubiquitous AP farming and zerging?

So you're saying that after waiting for 30-45 minutes in a queue to play with my friends, if I die to a zerg I would have to re-queue and wait another 30-45 minutes to continue playing with them?

No thank you.

If you die to a zerg and they don't, then they can rez you. If you all die to a zerg, then you all still get to play together you'd just have to wait to get into the premier league campaign if you want back in. But if you wipe the zerg, and leave no survivors, they won't just run back to the same place and zerg repeatedly. They will actually have been defeated. And vice versa.

dotme

Neoauspex wrote: »

If you die to a zerg and they don't, then they can rez you. If you all die to a zerg, then you all still get to play together you'd just have to wait to get into the premier league campaign if you want back in. But if you wipe the zerg, and leave no survivors, they won't just run back to the same place and zerg repeatedly. They will actually have been defeated. And vice versa.

That's how it was before forward camps. So why not just remove the camps again? When I first started playing, if your group was wiped you had a long ride to get back to the battle, and that 2-3 minute cool-down period was sufficient. Personally I don't think forward camps have improved the game very much.

I think your idea is well-intentioned, but I don't believe many PvP players would be in favor of being thrown back into a long queue to play in their home campaign again just because they died. Just my opinion of course.

Neoauspex

Thanks for your feedback @dotme . My premise is that riding from Sejanus to Alessia bridge after dying there (for example) isn't that significant of a punishment, and, more importantly, it isn't very rewarding to win a battle when the people you killed might just come right back or, worse, just go somewhere else and take a keep that's not defended. It actually makes winning a battle less efficient than just flipping an undefended keep. I find that it's rarely worthwhile to defend a keep; it's usually more effective to go take another keep and come back when nobody's there. Some of this is probably on purpose, to avoid poor server performance.

I also think it might be healthy for PvP to promote the importance of survival, because right now suicide destro bombing is so much more rewarding than a brief horse ride is punitive. I know that I, for one, wouldn't just charge solo at the front door of keeps if I was going to get relegated to the B team campaign... It's worth it to ballista flag a keep suicide style just to reroute a zerg right now. Not saying everybody should fully tank up, I'll still just ignore them and walk away. Just saying it'd be nice to see some planning and strategy in the alliance war be more advantageous as opposed to shear numbers.

I'm not sure how I'd treat camps in this tiered campaign structure. Also, keep in mind that I'm not advocating for all campaigns to be this way... Just the extraneous ones that were added for Midyear Mayhem (which are dead on Xbox now so I assume that they'll be removed in an upcoming patch). Players who don't like the increased stakes could just not join the tiered campaign, they can stay in Vivic/Shor.

mvffins

Neoauspex wrote: »

You spawn at your alliance base in the other non-relegation campaign and you can queue for the top tier campaign immediately. Maybe this would promote a more competitive atmosphere in terms of the actual alliance war instead of ubiquitous AP farming and zerging?

From experience after playing in the most heavily populated campaigns and the lowest populated campaigns, the reason why people queue for the heavily populated campaigns is to get AP easily. Don't kid yourself the primary reason is not to show off your skills by playing with the best or being able to use your CP or being able to experience good PvP the primary reason to join the heavily populated campaign is that it rewards AP more readily. The other reasons might come in your mind, but they are actually secondary factors as the most heavily populated campaign doesn't necessarily always reward skill, bring good fights, or even bring the most AP, but it almost always has a more consistent rate of AP gain due to their always being a zerge available to join.

Also the competitive atmosphere you play in primarily depends on the competitiveness you as a player possess. By becoming a skilled and good player members of the other faction are going to start to take notice of you, and when they do so they will start to get more serious when they see your name tag come across screen. Good players of one faction are always on the lookout for good players of an opposing faction, by paying attention to names dropped in zone chat or listening in group chat to who just killed a teammate. The point that I'm getting at is that you can bash the lackluster PvP all you want, but you as an individual can actually change the atmosphere around your player a lot more than you think.

Neoauspex

mvffins wrote: »

The point that I'm getting at is that you can bash the lackluster PvP all you want, but you as an individual can actually change the atmosphere around your player a lot more than you think.

I wholly agree with your post, although I'm not sure how relevant it is. My intent was never to "bash lackluster PvP", I have a great time running small groups and doing "useful" AvA things in Vivec, and I totally understand why other people just zerg Allesia bridge over and over for AP. Some players just want to get Vigor and go back to PvE as fast as possible, I do not advocate shutting down or altering Vivec/Shor and taking that opportunity away.