How to achieve emperor (and get the pretty costume, title, and awesome red dye)

Crown

Most of you are probably aware of most of the content in this one.

I wrote it up with the intent of posting it in the General area for PvE players and for those new to PvP (the target audience of most of what I've written on https://darkelves.com) to understand more about how PvP (and in this case the Emperor system) works.

https://darkelves.com/achieving-emperor/

I would normally copy paste the content in here, but this is a very long one with rather challenging formatting, so I'm going to be lazy and just leave the link.

I'd appreciate comments/thoughts/suggestions from you PvP folks before inviting the PvE world to read it.

Nestor

Crown wrote: »

before inviting the PvE world to read it.

Too Late

Thank you for this, becoming Emperor is a complicated process and this will help.

Storymaster

SirAndy

Crown wrote: »

How to achieve emperor

Simple, save a nice sum of gold and pay the well known hustlers to make you emp.

Everyone else does it and so can you!

Beardimus

Nice work @crown ive read your content before and it really helped me out

Crown

SirAndy wrote: »

Simple, save a nice sum of gold and pay the well known hustlers to make you emp.

@SirAndy Is that still going on? We've never heard of this on PC - is it only a console thing?

Rickter

Hey Crown, I've read your stuff before and I appreciate the guides youve posted particularly the explanation on AP gains however, it troubles me greatly that you've detailed behaviors that are significantly frowned upon such as, AP feeding.

The

Note that this technique can be considered “feeding” or “cheating”, though it is not technically against the Terms Of Service and nobody has ever been officially punished for it (that I’m aware of). We’ve seen this done in the past few months (Q4/2017) by large groups taking resources at the start of the campaign and leaving all but one player there. Normally I wouldn’t explain things like this so as not to promote the practice, but it is actively being done so I feel that it’s important for everyone to understand why.

disclaimer doesnt sit well with me. Just because others are doing it doesnt mean you should still explain it in the great detail and depth that you did.

In any case, I guess with the publicizing of this information, we can all expect 500k AP leads within hours of a server restart. Disappointing.

Crown

@Rickter A few of us debated adding that part, and we finally decided to do so as it has very blatantly been done on Vivec (PC/NA) the past three resets. Like obvious having ten people die on a resource, kill the guards, rez the friendlies, and everyone except for one person moves off. If it's being done publicly, then it should be explained publicly. Last reset there was a 150k (ish?) lead 10 minutes into the campaign. There were a lot of people upset about that, but as usual no official response.

In a best case scenario, ZOS would respond with the following:

1. Change kill-AP so that if you've killed someone, you can not get any AP from killing them again until they've been killed by someone else or more than 30 minutes has past.
2. Change the way that D-ticks and O-ticks work so that they are based on contribution rather than simply being there.
3. Come out officially with a statement that feeding violates the TOS with a valid explanation why (not some bullpoop about how someone made an arbitrary decision like the whole gap closing fiasco).

Unless there's an official response, people will do it, and others will suffer for it. I'm happy to be part of the old timers who don't care about AP or emp anymore, but many people do, and this ruins it for too many others.

At least knowing about it, others can go and disrupt the practice.

SirAndy

Crown wrote: »

SirAndy wrote: »

Simple, save a nice sum of gold and pay the well known hustlers to make you emp.

@SirAndy Is that still going on? We've never heard of this on PC - is it only a console thing?

PC/NA as recent as 3 weeks ago. That campaign does not exist anymore but i'm sure the usual suspects will pop up on the remaining campaigns soon and offer their services.

Publius_Scipio

This is futile. Frozn is too powerful and has amassed an immense amount of power and influence in Cyrodiil. Rivaling and most likely surpassing the power of the elf king Crown in his prime. In addition to Pact soldiers, he has with open arms welcomed all sorts of miscreants, deviants, practitioners of dark magic, demon worshippers, and students with a GPA of below 3.0 into his ranks. And that’s only naming a few.

He won’t stop until all of Tamriel is covered in a sheet of ice. His personal ice skating rink. When Jules chose Kodi over him it lit the fuse. We must stop him. And no conventional tactics or army will do the trick. We need Kodi to prick Jules’ finger with a dagger and allow a drop of her blood to touch the blade. But not just any blade. A dagger forged by a blacksmith with a broken heart. This dagger must be driven into Frozn’s popsicle heart sending him unceremoniously to oblivion for good.

Rickter

I'm genuinely confused. At first, it appeared that you were interested in what people "of the pvp mindset" (I'm assuming pvpers in the 1% and the 9% according to your skill/understanding pyramid ) thought about your article. I gleaned this assumption via your following statement:

Crown wrote: »

I'd appreciate comments/thoughts/suggestions from you PvP folks before inviting the PvE world to read it.

But when I provided my feedback, one of the few people who provided feedback might i add, I'm countered with the response of:

Crown wrote: »

@Rickter A few of us debated adding that part, and we finally decided to do so as it has very blatantly been done on Vivec (PC/NA) the past three resets.

Which leads me to believe that this thread is pointless other than to showboat your new guide (which looks very nice and clean btw) because the collective "we" had already made decisions on what content should be included and thus the comments, thoughts, suggestions of others does not matter.

So idk, I guess I'll move along and stop bumping this thread.

sdtlc

Got it back in the pre massive-capture-ap days, my knees and back are still sore from all the brick laying ...

Prince_of_all_Pugs

emp is a no life contest i won 7 times.................THE SHAME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

UppGRAYxDD

Prince_of_all_Pugs wrote: »

emp is a no life contest i won 7 times.................THE SHAME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This basically, play alot and if that doesnt work it will at least save you some gold when you only have to pay off the top 1-2 who are boosting to the top...Its the sad truth...

Nihilos

Crown wrote: »

SirAndy wrote: »

Simple, save a nice sum of gold and pay the well known hustlers to make you emp.

@SirAndy Is that still going on? We've never heard of this on PC - is it only a console thing?

Crown, I myself have personally been paid to help get a PvEr emp. I’m pretty sure I mentioned this to you in a previous thread— yes it is something that has actively and continues to actively go on. I do not believe it is a widespread epidemic but it DOES happen.

Crown

Rickter wrote: »

Which leads me to believe that this thread is pointless other than to showboat your new guide (which looks very nice and clean btw) because the collective "we" had already made decisions on what content should be included and thus the comments, thoughts, suggestions of others does not matter.

@Rickter I appreciate everyone's (genuine) thoughts and suggestions (and @Storymaster 's meme is awesome). The decision on whether to include info on feeding was discussed in TS by the first round proofreaders (2 friends that I tend to play often with) and with my wife. I then posted it to two Discords, one pvp oriented and one pve oriented to get a first round of comments (the only one was the same as yours, and we discussed it at length before agreeing that it should be included). Finally I posted it here to hopefully get more, and the only genuine issue or suggestion so far has been yours - which as I explained had already been discussed. Considering how much people seem to love finding fault with things that I say or do, I'll take the fact that nobody has poked holes or made content change suggestions to mean that the content is good as-is.

If you have any more pros/cons/arguments regarding explaining feeding, then please do let me know - here, in Discord, or you're welcome to hop into our TS and chat. Like most such issues, it's unlikely to ever get an in-game response from ZOS, but the more open discussion is had, the more we can increase the player base's understanding - and hopefully future games will learn from the mistakes made in this game. I have no issue removing the section if I can be convinced that it is in the best interest of the community.

On that topic, the "against explaining it" side's PoV:

• If more people understand how feeding works, more people will do it and ruin the leader board for others.
• The community (majority) feel that this is cheating, so it should not be explained to people who don't understand it.

On that topic, the "for explaining it" side's PoV:

• It is being done, and is rather obvious in some campaigns. Players deserve to know and understand why and how.
• Most players already know how it works, and make the choice not to do so for various reasons.
• It is not against the TOS, the only time that we're aware of a ZOS representative has spoken out about it they said something along the lines of, "players can choose to play however they want. If that includes standing in one place and role playing, then that's their choice". If anyone can link to the origin of that I'd appreciate it.
• Anything that can balance the playing field and bring issues like this to light such that there is a chance for ZOS to address them is a good thing.

On that topic, the "we don't really care" side's PoV:

• It doesn't affect play for more than two players on the leaderboard - the player who would otherwise be top, and the player who is pushed out of the list of recipients for gold rewards.
• It's going to be very rare that someone puts the effort in to stay top of the board for the whole campaign by feeding. Most of it tends to be done by PvE groups who come into Cyrodiil to get caltrops and vigor for their new characters.

Qbiken

@Crown

Best way to deal with people "rigging" campaigns and flipping/swapping Emp all the time? I´ll take an example so you understand what I mean:

Place: PC/EU Shor 7day-campaign
Faction: EP
What happened: Monday, logged on my EP character and get to Cyrodil. Realise I´m only 25k behind the top EP player. EP has almost all inner keeps (Think we were missing 2 of the DC keeps). Call some people I know play EP that are willing to help me. Manage to slowly get more AP and from what I can see I made during those hours more AP than the player being #1 (He/she still makes AP but I can see I make more/hour). DC manage to hold their keeps and take one of ours (AD is more or less absent so atm this is a fight between DC and EP). When EP finally manage to start pushing DC back (and when I start to realise I´m making a lot of AP), I suddenly see that those #1-7 EP players that were on EP, has swapped to DC to prevent anyone from getting Emp on DC. It all ends with EP starts to lose more keeps as AD also starts joining the fun, pushing EP keeps to prevent EP from getting emp (Now I #8-9 but when these ppl swapped faction, but I´m quite confident that I could´ve made enough AP to pass them in the leaderboard).....

Any tips on handling this kind of behaviour......??

Crown

Nihilos wrote: »

Crown, I myself have personally been paid to help get a PvEr emp. I’m pretty sure I mentioned this to you in a previous thread— yes it is something that has actively and continues to actively go on. I do not believe it is a widespread epidemic but it DOES happen.

@Nihilos You did, though I thought that was a case where you were a good businessman and took advantage of players who didn't know what they were doing and couldn't flip the emp keeps themselves (guards OP)!

I've helped PvE players get emp in the past - though mostly because they're part of our circle of friends and it was trivial to do on reset day if you had a few hours. I wonder how much gold I've not-made by helping for free ;-)

Nihilos

Crown wrote: »

Nihilos wrote: »

Crown, I myself have personally been paid to help get a PvEr emp. I’m pretty sure I mentioned this to you in a previous thread— yes it is something that has actively and continues to actively go on. I do not believe it is a widespread epidemic but it DOES happen.

@Nihilos You did, though I thought that was a case where you were a good businessman and took advantage of players who didn't know what they were doing and couldn't flip the emp keeps themselves (guards OP)!

LOL yeah. Almalexia was so dead on arrival that whatever semi-competent group went there could run the map. My guild ran it into the ground in our off time for a month to use as our personal Tel Var farm spot, and I was approached by more than one person to help get them emp. I only agreed to help one person, though, because he was willing to pay a lot and everybody else just wanted it to be a favor or free carry. After we left, Vurian and his guild started selling it for some lump some of gold as well.

And that’s the story of how one guild got an entire campaign closed ecks dee

UppGRAYxDD

On Xbox NA it happens in almost every campaign as soon as they reset. If not then, its being done in the wee hours of the morning. I have recorded boosting players and reported them many times with video proof to no avail...I just get a message probably auto generated saying "thanks for making tamerial a safer place" or some other nonsense. Then Ill see that same person in pvp that same day...utterly useless to get ZOS to actually do anything about it. That being said, you still can get emp legit but it takes alot of time and usually you will get passed by the AP exploiters.

Crown

Qbiken wrote: »

Best way to deal with people "rigging" campaigns and flipping/swapping Emp all the time?

I´ll take an example so you understand what I mean:

Place: PC/EU Shor 7day-campaign
Faction: EP
What happened: Monday, logged on my EP character and get to Cyrodil. Realise I´m only 25k behind the top EP player. EP has almost all inner keeps (Think we were missing 2 of the DC keeps). Call some people I know play EP that are willing to help me. Manage to slowly get more AP and from what I can see I made during those hours more AP than the player being #1 (He/she still makes AP but I can see I make more/hour). DC manage to hold their keeps and take one of ours (AD is more or less absent so atm this is a fight between DC and EP). When EP finally manage to start pushing DC back (and when I start to realise I´m making a lot of AP), I suddenly see that those #1-7 EP players that were on EP, has swapped to DC to prevent anyone from getting Emp on DC. It all ends with EP starts to lose more keeps as AD also starts joining the fun, pushing EP keeps to prevent EP from getting emp (Now I #8-9 but when these ppl swapped faction, but I´m quite confident that I could´ve made enough AP to pass them in the leaderboard).....

Any tips on handling this kind of behaviour......??

@Qbiken There are only a few things I can reasonably say here, and this goes back to one of the basic principles of campaign leaderboards:

1. The player who plays the most gets to be top of the board (with some exceptions). You know that you could out-farm them on AP, so your decision is pretty much: Do you keep farming and get ahead of them far enough that they can't catch up so that when EP does emp you'll be the one to get it?
2. The player with the most allies wins. If they were only running a small group (7 ish players), you would be able to beat them if you got enough help. If you could call in the same number of players with similar skill, or a dozen competent PvP players of mixed skill, you'd be able to beat those guys in a reasonable fight. Then it's a matter of flipping the ring at whatever hour you can.
3. Perhaps you could get your own opposite faction friendlies.. Find someone on DC who wants to go for emp that reset, and while you won't necessarily cooperate with that person, ensure that the offending 7 players have competition on both sides.

None of those options are really good suggestions, but with the state of the game and the way things work, there's no easy answer.

Crown

UppGRAYxDD wrote: »

On Xbox NA it happens in almost every campaign as soon as they reset. If not then, its being done in the wee hours of the morning. I have recorded boosting players and reported them many times with video proof to no avail...I just get a message probably auto generated saying "thanks for making tamerial a safer place" or some other nonsense. Then Ill see that same person in pvp that same day...utterly useless to get ZOS to actually do anything about it. That being said, you still can get emp legit but it takes alot of time and usually you will get passed by the AP exploiters.

@UppGRAYxDD Has anyone tried to disrupt the farm? It's one issue if they're using a map exploit to get behind the mountains or under a keep/resource (where you can sit and steal ticks), though if they're out in the open then get a few small groups to make their farm impossible. Find the swords on the map, and kill them all!

Rickter

Crown wrote: »

Considering how much people seem to love finding fault with things that I say or do, I'll take the fact that nobody has poked holes or made content change suggestions to mean that the content is good as-is

Hey Crown, i'm not sure if this is your perception of me but my perception of you is quite the contrary. I know of you but i do not know you and the opinion that ive formulated is that you are meticulous, dedicated, detail oriented, thorough, knowledgeable, and have commanded/accomplished what anyone could wish, want or dream in PvP, which should always be respected regardless of personality flaws/disagreements.

So with that being said, my feedback was indeed genuine concern for the topic and if you knew me a little better, you'd understand that without reservation.

Crown

@Rickter I'm sorry if you misinterpreted what I wrote... My meaning was that yours was the only genuine response to date! It wasn't meant as insulting/putting you down!

EDIT: Regarding personality flaws, I do have a few, though I tend to think I'm hilarious. Other peoples' opinions on that matter are irrelevant ;-)

EDIT #2: Just reread what I wrote above:

Crown wrote: »

Finally I posted it here to hopefully get more, and the only genuine issue or suggestion so far has been yours

Wanted to be sure I wasn't being a d-ck without intending to (if you've seen me in zone, and you think I'm being one, 99% I intend to ;-)

Regarding people finding fault, look up a few of my old posts if you're bored and you'll see what I mean. I tend to bring out polarising responses in here!

Goshua

Motivating the plebs to chase your personal agenda in the name of faction pride is the key skill.
This normally involves a lot of ars kissing and collective shield beating

People are quick to forget those top players are also the top defenders but do you think they will come down to save the rest of the map until its convenient for them?. Not normally, they will let them all be humiliated by the opposing farming groups until they sit at the place they need to be on the LB.

Having enough guild mates of your own and allied or dare I say enemy guilds also helps.

IxSTALKERxI

Just wanted to make a comment on the whole cheating/bribing discussion. To the best of my knowledge, there has never been any foul play on AD leaderboards on Vivec or Trueflame. The type of behaviour generally happens on the less populated campaigns, most emperors and top leaderboard players are legit.

The best way to counter players who are cheating the system is to defeat them in battle. If they switch sides etc to try and stop you just kill them all. If they are getting fed AP, find them and kill them all. Etc. Just kill all the things. The only reason they get away with it is they have no competition.

Rickter

Crown wrote: »

EDIT #2: Just reread what I wrote above:

Crown wrote: »

Finally I posted it here to hopefully get more, and the only genuine issue or suggestion so far has been yours

Wanted to be sure I wasn't being a d-ck without intending to (if you've seen me in zone, and you think I'm being one, 99% I intend to ;-)

Regarding people finding fault, look up a few of my old posts if you're bored and you'll see what I mean. I tend to bring out polarising responses in here!

Oh no problem, thank you for clarifying! I read the pros and cons of posting the information and i see both sides of the argument. Ultimately, its like, knowing how this works is half the battle then as @IxSTALKERxI said: just kill all the things to stop it.