Captain's player suggestion for Cyrodiil 2018

TheDrunkCaptain

I'll be the first to say it, i think Cyrodiil needs its own subscription. Now before you fly to the comments to rage, allow me to explain. I don't mean Cyrodiil itself needs to be locked behind a sub or pay wall. And to be clear Cyrodiil should always be part of the base game. But with lag issues and long loading screens being a problem for years now in cyro it's clear, there needs to be a change. It feels like the developers have no interest in adding more content to Cyrodiil, or they have given up completely. And if you think i am exaggerating just look at Cloud Ruler Temple and the city of Bravil, both unfinished content since the release of the game. And what did overworld get? Player housing. But can the player base blame them? This game did start out with a mandatory subscription after all, that they removed. No we can not blame zos because at the end of the day, ZeniMax Online Studios is a business and they will do what they must to keep that business alive. So when it comes to adding content and incentive to improve Cyrodiil and pvp, we must keep in mind that the developers need funds and incentive as well to apply those improvements. Cyrodiil is one of the largest zones in the game and the amount of content it can handle is truly amazing, leading me to believe it is worthy of it's own subscription to help support and improve it, much like eso plus helps support the pve content in the game.

Now before i go on about what a Cyrodiil sub should look like, i want to point out the flaws of the current subscription: ESO Plus. Everything (kinda), "i quit my subscription" is the most over used sentence on the fourms, and with good reason too. There is nothing that it offers to end game players or pvp players. Angry people trolling on the forums aside, there really is no reason for players like myself to stay subbed to the game. This doesn't mean eso plus is a bad sub! Eso plus is the best kind of sub a game like this can offer... for newcomers and people that are into trade. But for people that have played this game for years, there is a very good chance they 1. Already bought all of the dlcs with the crowns they get with eso plus. 2. Are max cp and master crafters. And 3. Have no need for an unlimited craft bag when needed items are so readily available at guild stores. All of these reasons are why some may have dropped off, but from an end game pvper stand point it feels as if eso plus is no longer contributing towards consistent content for the pvp community. All the more reason to start an additional subscription program before the current one is stretched too thin.

What should a Cyrodiil subscription look like?

• Siege dye and customization

Players should be able to dye their own siege. This would be like the ability to dye costumes in eso plus, players would have another way to show off their personality. Just for a few examples, someone could dye the wood of their ballista birch tree white while having a golden (lion/eagle/dragon) head in the front, and then dye the rope rigging a bright blue. A pvp guild could also use this to show their colors in a siege for a keep. Or maybe a player just wants to remember where they put their siege in a field of abandoned siege engines so, they dyed the whole thing pink. Siege customization would really stand out too, and would be a good opportunity for zos to make some money in the crown store. Notable mentions being the Molag Bal siege in the imperial city, or maybe a Dwarven themed siege with a Centurion head in the front, zos could sell different styles like that in the crown store. These features should be available to the full list of siege items including forward camps, oils, rams, catapults, cold fire and not just limited to trebuchets and ballistas.

• Quick select gear and CP

Give players a feature where they can quick select from three different layouts that consist a set of gear, skills, and cp. Many pc players know with the exception of cp, there are addons that can do this for players. But for most console players this would be a sell because they don't have access to any addons. This would allow players to have their pvp or pve setups ready at a moment's notice. Example: a player could have a melee pvp set up for open world pvp, a pvp bow setup to defend a keep from atop a wall, and a pve dps setup for pledges with friends. All conveniently at the click of a button, no need to waist time setting up bars, gear and having the wrong cp to do the job. So this will be very casual friendly and make use of a lot of unused or forgotten gear. Now this has to have a price of some kind, to lock each layout the player should have to pay a fee of one million AP. This would mean for a player to lock all three layouts they would need a total of three million AP. Players should be restricted from switching layouts while in combat, group dungeons, and trials.

• 10% increase in Tel Var Stones and Alliance Points

• 15% increase of mount speed, stamina, and carrying capacity while in Cyrodiil

No one likes to feel like they're playing horse simulator so this will help. This buff should not stack with mounts that are maxed out, and should end after a perk reaches 45%

• Full access to Imperial City and Battle Grounds

This will tie all of the pvp in Elder Scrolls Online together and is definitely needed. Right now Dragon Bones dlc is about to release and with it two new battle ground maps, which is good battle ground modes are fun but, its not Cyrodiil. And it never will be cyrodiil, BGs will only keep the pvp players happy for so long. And now zos has a problem on their hands because they are releasing new battle ground maps while pve Morrowind players get nothing. Some people will eye roll at this and say "you can't please everyone." But it is far better to deal with the issue now before it becomes a big problem. So if we put this content in a subscription zos can still keep imperial city and battle grounds behind a pay wall, but now on holiday events like Midyear Mayhem or Imperial city event zos can now offer a seven day free trial for the Cyrodiil subscription. This would let players experience Imperial city when it is most active, and try out battle grounds for free which may lead them to purchase the Morrowind chapter and have permanent access to battle grounds. Put all of the pvp content under one subscription.

• Incentive for Cyrodiil

First reduce the flags needed to capture a town to one flag in the center of the town. Stack the one flag with honor guards to keep the difficulty of taking a town the same, but now taking a town would be more small scale/solo player friendly. Add a flag to Cheydinhal and Chorrol to make them towns alliances can capture as well, this will be important for the next part.
Members of the Cyrodiil sub will have exclusive access to purchase contracts from a tel var merchant in the imperial city at their alliance base. These contracts can also have a chance to drop through battle grounds rewards for members as well. The way these contracts work: A player buys/receives an account and alliance locked contract, when the player opens the contract they are given a mission. The contract will tell the player their alliance has accepted a request from a specific town to deliver goods to another specific town. The reward for completing a contract will be half of the delivered goods. Contract value will be higher for towns that are far apart from each other and have better rewards. The contracts will also expire and will only be available to complete for so many days regardless if open by the player, and the tel var merchant will cycle through contracts weekly and have a different list per alliance. Example: A player visits the merchant to view the list of available contracts, then the player pays x amount of tel var for a contract labeled "Bruma to Cropsford 100 Beetle Scuttle" and opens it. The player then must go to Bruma to talk with an npc which will give them the goods to deliver in the form of a backpack with a banner attached to it. This backpack will have the same rules as carrying an elder scroll, meaning a player can not mount with the backpack or fast travel with keeps and so on. The player is also timed and the timer will vary with different contracts and will only start when the player is given the backpack, and will end when receiving npc is talked to, completing the quest. The example player after completing the quest will be rewarded with 50 Beetle Scuttle. But If the backpack is not delivered before the timer is up they will receive nothing.
These new trading backpacks can also be intercepted by enemy players. If an enemy player slays someone with a backpack, the backpack will drop and be available to be picked up by other players. If a non subbed player or player of the same faction picks up the backpack they get a quest to take the pack to their alliance gate and they will only receive half of the rewards. If an enemy player is subbed they will get a quest to take the backpack to a different town and receive the full rewards, or they can take the backpack to their alliance gate and only receive half. High value or rare contracts will cause an ava announcement to appear such as "Flame Atronach crate pack has left bruma!" adding to the level of difficulty. This will be healthy for pvp because the current ava announcements used to feel like a call to arms when the game first released but now act only as signs to say pvp just died for the day. There should also be multipliers for these trading backpacks that players can buy in the crown store or earn in veteran dungeons/daily random rewards, and they're going to need them because the rewards of the trading backpack will be split among the group the player is in or has been in during the trade run. This will strongly influence players to develop effective small scale groups and have rewards for doing so, and discourage the use of huge groups for an unfair advantage. The multipliers should also be account bound to avoid problems like players giving multipliers to large groups for free. And once the multiplier is used on a trade backpack it is consumed by the backpack. Since crowns with a sub should stay exclusive to ESO Plus, offering the rare chance to obtain and possibly earn crown store items would make the Cyrodiil sub sound just as attractive and offer unique opportunities, whlie adding healthy competitive pvp to the game. (The contract/trading backpack feature should be restricted to home campaigns only. This would force people to invest more time into one campaign)

^^^^^ Problems with this idea^^^^^
- Before an idea like the one above is put into the game zos needs to fix some ongoing problems first. Starting with the below 50 campaign, this campaign needs some serious reworking and should be way more beginner friendly. This campaign should act as a tutorial for pvp but it can't while end game players on low level characters, with access to best in slot gear running around stomping on people playing pvp for the first time. With the idea of trade backpacks, end game players would be able to take even more advantage of beginners and steal their trading backpacks with ease and pull in more rewards than they would get from a normal campaign. So to avoid this taking candy from a baby issue zos will have to limit access to that campaign to accounts that have no champion points.
- Battle Ground matches. Zos needs to remove premade groups from the 4v4v4 mode of battle grounds otherwise, that is all there is going to be. Just premade groups trying to farm contracts and it won't be fun for solo queue players. To make up for this, players that are subbed to the cyrodiil sub will have access to chose what game mode they want to queue for in the 4v4v4. Open up a new tab in the battle grounds menu labeled Group vs Group and this is where premade groups of 6v6 can fight. Open up another new tab labeled Solo with Ald Carac, Ularra, and Foyada Quarry as options the player can travel to freely like a zone of its own. When a player visits one of these zones they can see everyone else in that zone with them like a normal zone. Each of these maps have a center that is perfect for dueling so that is what they will be used for. Any cyro subbed players should have the chance to get contracts to drop through dueling at these maps but the drop rates be reduced to avoid spamming.

• Tel Var Merchant

Cyrodiil subbed players get exclusive access to another tel var merchant that sells weapon and armor furnishings. A lot of players want to be able to put weapon furnishings in their houses such as a mounted greatsword on a wall or a sheild above a fireplace and so on. The problem is the list of weapon and armor in this game is huge. Zos should put a telvar merchant in the Imperial city alliance bases that cycles through gear and weapon styles for furnishing on a weekly basis. This would save them a lot of time and open the door for new opportunities for item replicas like a Wuuthrad replica or a Wabbajack replica. These furnishing should also be account bound to avoid clutter and confusion in guild stores.

• Unique Daily Quest for Cyrodiil

• Players with an active Cyrodiil subscription will have access to unique daily quest and weekly quest that reward them with a change in color to their abilities and, have a high reward of alliance points that contribute towards alliance rank but not leaderboard. And to be clear nothing on this list should gained through leaderboards or contribute towards leaderboards, because the way they are set up currently this would incentivize more big groups which is not what cyrodiil needs, we need to spread the fights out. On with the daily quest, starting with rarest drops. A player can pick up two daily quest at their alliance base, one will always have the player go kill a random cyrodiil delve boss. With eighteen dungeons in cyrodiil and each one having a few bosses, this is something that is going to be sending the player somewhere different all the time. The reward for this is 15k alliance points and a very rare chance to randomly drop a color altered weapon skill ability. If a player gets a color altered skill it will be stored in their collectibles under special, the same place wardens can change the skin of their ULT Feral Guardian. Then it is up to the player to equip the color in the collectibles menu. The second daily quest will always tell the player to go kill a random boss in Imperial City/Imperial Sewers, the reward for this is 30k alliance points and a very rare chance to randomly drop a color altered weapon skill.

• Dolmens! Once a week an npc will will give out a daily quest at the alliance base. The quest is to destroy every dolmen in cyrodiil once. When completed the rewards will be 20k alliance points and a rare chance to randomly drop a color altered class skill. This quest can only be picked up on the day the npc is giving it, but the player can turn the quest in at anytime. Meaning if a player wanted to farm this on all of their toons they can by grabbing the quest on the day it is available. This way there is less pressure to be all over the map on one day when everyone else will be farming dolmens too. Zos should also increase the difficulty of the dolmens in cyrodiil, it takes two minutes for a dolmen raid to finish a dolmen in the Alik'r Desert and that is with people leveling up their new toons. Cyrodiil being the center a daedric invasion and having veteran players everywhere should have harder dolmens that take a while to complete.

• A second weekly quest. Once a week an npc will show up at the alliance bases with a quest to defeat a specific boss that is a cyrodiil delve boss or an imperial sewer/imperial city boss and the boss is the same for every faction. The boss that is selected should standout with an aurora around them of some kind and should have increased stats to that of a veteran level dungeon boss. Or in other words it will be mandatory to have a small team of players to defeat it. This quest can only be completed and turned in on the day it is given and is only available in a players home campaign. Each campaign will have different days and different bosses that this will occur in, but the boss for this will always be randomly selected to keep things fair. The reward for completing this quest is 100k alliance points and a chance to drop a color altered class ultimate. If a player's daily cyrodiil boss or daily imperial city boss is the same boss in the weekly quest then their reward is double in alliance points.
  
  These daily and weekly quest are the consistent content a subscription needs, and zos doesn't have to release a full list of colors for skills or come out with all of them at the same time. Instead they could chose a color of the week, and cycle through different colors per week. This would help keep players subscribed and keep them busy all times of the week. Zos should also throw in a Pelinal Whitestrake style motif in with rewards for the daily/weekly quest because Pelinal was a liberator of cyrodiil, and that's what the player would be doing, liberating cyrodiil. And the motif would fit well with the title a player can get in midyear mayhem: Star Made Knight.
  
  All of these ideas line up with the direction is game is going and i have spent a lot of time putting it all together but it's not perfect, so please feel free to add some constructive criticism.

Datthaw

Yeah no one's reading all that

Bajlk

Datthaw wrote: »

Yeah no one's reading all that

I just scrolled down.

geonsocal

bullet points can be your friend...

i'm definitely for a mount speed buff while in cyrodiil...don't wanna spend more money pvping though...

TheDrunkCaptain

geonsocal wrote: »

bullet points can be your friend...

i'm definitely for a mount speed buff while in cyrodiil...don't wanna spend more money pvping though...

Thanks for the helpful advice! I've added some bullet points and highlighted most of the important parts, hopefully that will help for an easier read.

I understand people will be hesitant at the idea at first because it doesn't really sound like a deal, but even eso plus had to start off somewhere. And I really think the developers could hit this off if done right with the ability to change the color/skin of a skill. Players would dive for the chance to make their Dragonknight's Spiked Armor ability look similar to the Dragon Aspect shout in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

Vapirko

Some nice ideas but I doubt it would happen. Two separate subs doesn’t seem like something they would go for.

TheDrunkCaptain

Vapirko wrote: »

Some nice ideas but I doubt it would happen. Two separate subs doesn’t seem like something they would go for.

Perhaps zos feels like two subscriptions might appear greedy. But if something like this is actively supported by the community then there would be a reason to have a pvp and a pve sub. Spamming the forums with posts to fix the lag and add incentive has been ineffective for three years, its about time we give them something to work with.

Katahdin

So people that enjoy pve and pvp pay $25-$30 a month ? No thank you.

There have been countless threads to "fix/upgrade the servers"

Not going to hunt for it, you can find it yourself
ZoS has said it's a bigger issue than just throwing money and more servers at it

TheDrunkCaptain

Katahdin wrote: »

So people that enjoy pve and pvp pay $25-$30 a month ? No thank you.

There have been countless threads to "fix/upgrade the servers"

Not going to hunt for it, you can find it yourself
ZoS has said it's a bigger issue than just throwing money and more servers at it

No one is forcing you to pay for anything, and who's not to say zos might offer a discount for people that are double subbed?

This isn't just about the servers but the lack of any new content and incentive to cyrodiil as well. Something like this would be a lot more healthy than milking crown crates and would send funds directly towards pvp, giving players more consistent content.

QuebraRegra

Katahdin wrote: »

So people that enjoy pve and pvp pay $25-$30 a month ? No thank you.

There have been countless threads to "fix/upgrade the servers"

Not going to hunt for it, you can find it yourself
ZoS has said it's a bigger issue than just throwing money and more servers at it

time to re-write/re-code... that takes a dev team dedicated to the task. Now where would they find the money for that? Crown sore sales maybe?