Night Capping ... lets talk

Springt-Über-Zwerge

Slick_007 wrote: »

Springt-Über-Zwerge wrote: »

So on Pc EU the Aldmeri Dominion is winning Vivec for months now by far because they take the whole map every night while having near 0 resistance.
ZOS something has to be done because besides the lag this is one of the main reasons pvp is so frustrating atm.

well excuse me if not everyone plays in the same timezone as you do, or works the same hours as you do so they sleep at different times.
Night capping IS NOT A THING. its just a bunch of rude people like yourself who demand that anyone who doesnt play at the same time they do be penalized.

You know where you can go right?

I'm sorry where have I been rude? I just think that it's a problem. Why do those people living in different time zones all play on one alliance? Wouldn't it be more fun to actually play pvp and not capture empty keeps?
I did not want to penalize people living in a different location just the behavior AD is showing every night

Sandman929

It's pretty amazing how obtuse people can be about the fact that not everyone lives in their timezone or shares their schedule. If "nightcapping" is so troubling you should just start playing when these evil PvDoor losers are exploiting the empty map and stealing your factions hard earned victory during the real primetime.

Not so easy to just completely change your life around to put a stop to it, right? Well it's not so easy for them to change theirs either to accommodate your sense of fair play.

umagon

The only way to correct for alliance war scoring across different time zones is to change the way system functions. Instead of having a campaign based scoring system for the factions zos would need to switch to a global scoring system. One that scores points per faction every 15 mins across all campaigns globally. At the end of the week the winning faction is declared. Switching from hourly scoring to 15mins would allow smaller groups players who are outnumbered on their local campaign to have a better chance at scoring points for their faction. The player alliance point leader boards would not have to be changed they could still be local campaign only.

Enslaved

Sandman929 wrote: »

It's pretty amazing how obtuse people can be about the fact that not everyone lives in their timezone or shares their schedule. If "nightcapping" is so troubling you should just start playing when these evil PvDoor losers are exploiting the empty map and stealing your factions hard earned victory during the real primetime.

Not so easy to just completely change your life around to put a stop to it, right? Well it's not so easy for them to change theirs either to accommodate your sense of fair play.

Why their "effort" when they face no challenge is rewarded so much more than effort of ppl actually PvPing? What we have here is bad design, that promotes stupid bs like this to win campaign.

This is EU PC server. It should be made for EU PC ppl, or at least ppl that share same/similar timezones with majority of EU PC. To be frank, idgaf about how "unfair" would it be for these poor lil PvDoor players to earn less campaign related points by fighting walls and doors. Why is 5% of these players more important than 95% of players that play in primetime?

I say, nerf the points gained from 3 am till 11 am.

Sandman929

Enslaved wrote: »

Sandman929 wrote: »

It's pretty amazing how obtuse people can be about the fact that not everyone lives in their timezone or shares their schedule. If "nightcapping" is so troubling you should just start playing when these evil PvDoor losers are exploiting the empty map and stealing your factions hard earned victory during the real primetime.

Not so easy to just completely change your life around to put a stop to it, right? Well it's not so easy for them to change theirs either to accommodate your sense of fair play.

Why their "effort" when they face no challenge is rewarded so much more than effort of ppl actually PvPing? What we have here is bad design, that promotes stupid bs like this to win campaign.

This is EU PC server. It should be made for EU PC ppl, or at least ppl that share same/similar timezones with majority of EU PC. To be frank, idgaf about how "unfair" would it be for these poor lil PvDoor players to earn less campaign related points by fighting walls and doors. Why is 5% of these players more important than 95% of players that play in primetime?

I say, nerf the points gained from 3 am till 11 am.

So there's EU and NA...how many time zones should be allowed to play EU? 2-3 away from CET? Same for NA, 2-3 away from CST? The rest of the world and people who work hours that aren't around 9am-5pm in those locations are just out of luck? Again, you're talking about your 3 am till 11 am?

Enslaved

Sandman929 wrote: »

Enslaved wrote: »

Sandman929 wrote: »

It's pretty amazing how obtuse people can be about the fact that not everyone lives in their timezone or shares their schedule. If "nightcapping" is so troubling you should just start playing when these evil PvDoor losers are exploiting the empty map and stealing your factions hard earned victory during the real primetime.

Not so easy to just completely change your life around to put a stop to it, right? Well it's not so easy for them to change theirs either to accommodate your sense of fair play.

Why their "effort" when they face no challenge is rewarded so much more than effort of ppl actually PvPing? What we have here is bad design, that promotes stupid bs like this to win campaign.

This is EU PC server. It should be made for EU PC ppl, or at least ppl that share same/similar timezones with majority of EU PC. To be frank, idgaf about how "unfair" would it be for these poor lil PvDoor players to earn less campaign related points by fighting walls and doors. Why is 5% of these players more important than 95% of players that play in primetime?

I say, nerf the points gained from 3 am till 11 am.

So there's EU and NA...how many time zones should be allowed to play EU? 2-3 away from CET? Same for NA, 2-3 away from CST? The rest of the world and people who work hours that around around 9am-5pm in those locations are just out of luck? Again, you're talking about your 3 am till 11 am?

You can play whenever you want, but points you would earn that count toward campaign would be valued less in 4 am than points won at 5pm. And I am talking CEST, for european server. Even BST would be ok. Anything related to EU timezones.

Biro123

Sandman929 wrote: »

It's pretty amazing how obtuse people can be about the fact that not everyone lives in their timezone or shares their schedule. If "nightcapping" is so troubling you should just start playing when these evil PvDoor losers are exploiting the empty map and stealing your factions hard earned victory during the real primetime.

Not so easy to just completely change your life around to put a stop to it, right? Well it's not so easy for them to change theirs either to accommodate your sense of fair play.

Its not that at all..

Look, we all know that there are people who can only play at certain times. The problem isn't that off-peak players exist, the problem is that they all stack one faction - this seems to be true no matter what server.

This is made worse by them deciding to cap everything.. which is made worse by the scoring system working in such a way that these guys decide the campaign every single time.. Not sure where it is in terms of chicken and egg - but a decent scoring system that made off-peak scoring much much less impactful than peak-scoring would firstly make people less upset about it, and secondly may even convince some of these off-peak faction-stackers to maybe, play other factions to actually have a bit of combat (ie fun)

Obviously most others think they are complete *** for doing this - because another solution would be for the community to sort itself out and for a number of them to switch factions to even up the numbers... But call after call for 2 years has fallen on deaf ears, making it pretty obvious that these guys would rather destroy the game then lose a campaign.

Turelus

Nermy wrote: »

Enslaved wrote: »

Nermy wrote: »

I really think there is no solution to this and to be honest, it really can all be laid at AD's feet. They have systematically destroyed Vivec EU. They don't care and you know what, neither do most others. The campaign as a AvAvA is dead. Has been for ages.

Don't blame ZoS, they have tried to balance the campaign, some ideas worked, some (the new scroll points) have failed.

One thing that does need to happen is to lock accounts into one alliance for the campaign duration, other than that it's done. PvP is slowly dying and I am already looking for the next PvP game on the horizon...

Don't blame the Zos, he said.
Well zos is managing the campaign and the game, lol.
They make rules and changes and everything.

They do manage the campaign but they don't go around fighting the NPCs in empty keeps and taking all the scrolls while there is no-one to defend them.

AD do.

AD killed the campaign, not ZoS.

Replace AD with EP and this was us two/three years ago.

We've all done it and we will all continue to do it of the game allows us to because it's how you win, like it or not.
They need to do something to change the mechanics which make it possible, however as I've said whatever they do they're going to lock some people out of having meaningful reasons to fight in Cyrodiil.

I get what you're saying Nermy but we can hardly point fingers and say "this is x factions fault" especially with the history of Wabbajack and War Council.

DaveMoeDee

Springt-Über-Zwerge wrote: »

...
- Cap the population for each alliance at one bar higher than the lowest alliance. This would prevent people from joining just one alliance and overrun the others.
...

What behavior are you trying to elicit with this? Do you want to push people to campaigns that aren't their home, or do you want to encourage them to jump alliances daily (or hourly)?

You could end up with no servers where 2 active alliances can enter because of a single inactive alliance. You will end up with a lot of people locked out of their home campaign due to a weak alliance. You will also end up with once alliance at full bars because they were full pop before another alliance logged off. Imagine EP is a full bars and then everyone logs off from DC and AD. Now a ton of DC are trying to go to the campaign but can't because AD is capping them. So EP runs around with no one to fight.

frozywozy

Turelus wrote: »

Honestly the only way they're going to truly fix it in a fair way is to have a global cyrodiil where all timezones are logged in, however people will hate the latency (it has to be hosted somewhere which won't work for everyone) and it already suffers from a lot of performance issues.

This is definitely not the way to fix the problem with night capping and population imbalances.

The right approach is very easy and affordable to Zenimax Online Studio. They simply have people up there "Cough Matt Fire Cough" and others who don't want to invest into creating a better environment for Cyrodiil. I am pretty sure that their marketing dept. is intelligent enough to understand the revenues this would bring long term.

I believe that they are happy with the income they get from the crown store right now and don't care about their game growing and bringing more players interested into PvPing. Maybe they have a goal of a certain amount of money to reach before investing more into fixing Cyrodiil. So keep sending over your thousand of dollars to get a specific mount from the crown store and maybe someday we will be able to play without server lag, without infinite loading screens, without sprint bug, combat bug, ressources loss, proc sets *Kappa*.

Back to the main point, how to fix population imbalances? Most people disagree with my solution but I believe that with the current state of the game and the amount of people interested into pvp left, it would be better if Zenimax focuses on small instances of PvP (Arena / Battleground / Dueling events) and also on advertisement.

Whenever they consider that we brought the community back high enough and that we fixed performance issues happening in large scale environment (Cyrodiil), then the problem of population imbalances should fix itself simply because having more people playing = more competitive campaigns opened. Then, it makes it much easier for players of different timezones to switch from one campaign to another and bring support to the faction who needs it the most at certain times of the day.

Sandman929

Biro123 wrote: »

Sandman929 wrote: »

It's pretty amazing how obtuse people can be about the fact that not everyone lives in their timezone or shares their schedule. If "nightcapping" is so troubling you should just start playing when these evil PvDoor losers are exploiting the empty map and stealing your factions hard earned victory during the real primetime.

Not so easy to just completely change your life around to put a stop to it, right? Well it's not so easy for them to change theirs either to accommodate your sense of fair play.

Its not that at all..

Look, we all know that there are people who can only play at certain times. The problem isn't that off-peak players exist, the problem is that they all stack one faction - this seems to be true no matter what server.

This is made worse by them deciding to cap everything.. which is made worse by the scoring system working in such a way that these guys decide the campaign every single time.. Not sure where it is in terms of chicken and egg - but a decent scoring system that made off-peak scoring much much less impactful than peak-scoring would firstly make people less upset about it, and secondly may even convince some of these off-peak faction-stackers to maybe, play other factions to actually have a bit of combat (ie fun)

Obviously most others think they are complete *** for doing this - because another solution would be for the community to sort itself out and for a number of them to switch factions to even up the numbers... But call after call for 2 years has fallen on deaf ears, making it pretty obvious that these guys would rather destroy the game then lose a campaign.

Campaign scoring can use some work based on current population, no argument there, and that has nothing to do with timezones or "primetimes" or anything, just based on rewards increasing based on opposing forces present (online, at least). People just get so stuck in their own echo chambers of convincing themselves that there's a right way to play the game, and that there's a right time, and a right way to have fun; and all of those things are, coincidentally, exact how they personally do it.

Nermy

Sorry Tarvy (@Turelus) , but we had opposition when we night capped, it wasn't an empty map. AD do this when their is no-one on the map and have been doing it for 2+ years. Relentlessly.

I remember Torsten would never take everything because he wanted the enemy to have some keeps so they would fight back.

AD on Vivec have no such qualms.

Springt-Über-Zwerge

DaveMoeDee wrote: »

Springt-Über-Zwerge wrote: »

...
- Cap the population for each alliance at one bar higher than the lowest alliance. This would prevent people from joining just one alliance and overrun the others.
...

What behavior are you trying to elicit with this? Do you want to push people to campaigns that aren't their home, or do you want to encourage them to jump alliances daily (or hourly)?

You could end up with no servers where 2 active alliances can enter because of a single inactive alliance. You will end up with a lot of people locked out of their home campaign due to a weak alliance. You will also end up with once alliance at full bars because they were full pop before another alliance logged off. Imagine EP is a full bars and then everyone logs off from DC and AD. Now a ton of DC are trying to go to the campaign but can't because AD is capping them. So EP runs around with no one to fight.

Well this was just an idea that could lead to a more complex and hopefully better system.
The Problem with an alliance running over an empty map could be fixed by not lowering the cap if one alliance still has the numbers online. That's just the problem I want to see fixed.
But it would force people to spread between the alliances or campaigns at low pop times so they can't stack all on one alliance.

BohnT

Nermy wrote: »

Sorry Tarvy (@Turelus) , but we had opposition when we night capped, it wasn't an empty map. AD do this when their is no-one on the map and have been doing it for 2+ years. Relentlessly.

I remember Torsten would never take everything because he wanted the enemy to have some keeps so they would fight back.

AD on Vivec have no such qualms.

I'm sorry but everyone even EP agreed that they destroyed Sotha for the time they morning capped.
There is no excuse for actively ruining the fun for the majority of players

Juhasow

Nermy wrote: »

Enslaved wrote: »

Nermy wrote: »

I really think there is no solution to this and to be honest, it really can all be laid at AD's feet. They have systematically destroyed Vivec EU. They don't care and you know what, neither do most others. The campaign as a AvAvA is dead. Has been for ages.

Don't blame ZoS, they have tried to balance the campaign, some ideas worked, some (the new scroll points) have failed.

One thing that does need to happen is to lock accounts into one alliance for the campaign duration, other than that it's done. PvP is slowly dying and I am already looking for the next PvP game on the horizon...

Don't blame the Zos, he said.
Well zos is managing the campaign and the game, lol.
They make rules and changes and everything.

They do manage the campaign but they don't go around fighting the NPCs in empty keeps and taking all the scrolls while there is no-one to defend them.

AD do.

AD killed the campaign, not ZoS.

People will always want to take adventage of unfair mechanics if it benefits them. It's developer job to prevent that from happening.

Master_Kas

Nermy wrote: »

Sorry Tarvy (@Turelus) , but we had opposition when we night capped, it wasn't an empty map. AD do this when their is no-one on the map and have been doing it for 2+ years. Relentlessly.

I remember Torsten would never take everything because he wanted the enemy to have some keeps so they would fight back.

AD on Vivec have no such qualms.

It's only bad if you're yellow

Aragorn79

I actually play at night (PC EU). And I know many ppl that due to work etc have a different rhythm. So OP is proposing blocking us and other on diff time zones from playing.
Why not leave things as they are and try to deal with it in a different way. Instead of asking for the game to be changed to accommodate your needs why not look for solutions among the players. Like you could try to recruit ppl to defend your positions during the night, or create a guild for it where ppl could sign up for it, or something else.
Seriously guys, this forums is turning into a "how to change the game to meet my needs" thing, try first looking at yourself and at what you can do to solve YOUR perceived problem.

And also just food for thought, would u complain if u were on the winning faction? Because things can change and we need to consider all the options before trying to mold the game in our favor.

Biro123

Aragorn79 wrote: »

I actually play at night (PC EU). And I know many ppl that due to work etc have a different rhythm. So OP is proposing blocking us and other on diff time zones from playing.
Why not leave things as they are and try to deal with it in a different way. Instead of asking for the game to be changed to accommodate your needs why not look for solutions among the players. Like you could try to recruit ppl to defend your positions during the night, or create a guild for it where ppl could sign up for it, or something else.
Seriously guys, this forums is turning into a "how to change the game to meet my needs" thing, try first looking at yourself and at what you can do to solve YOUR perceived problem.

And also just food for thought, would u complain if u were on the winning faction? Because things can change and we need to consider all the options before trying to mold the game in our favor.

All sound nice, but the fact is that people can only play when they can play.This means that the only place to find these ppl are from among those already playing at that time.
Guess what? That means convincing the existing nightcappers to switch sides - which is exactly what these threads tried to do for years, and eventually gave up and instead started looking for suggestions to change the game/scoring to discourage it.

SirDopey

I find it so funny that on EU the other fractions are complaining about AD night capping while on NA everyone is complaining about EP being over populated compared to the other fractions.

So as the EP NA fraction are telling AD, if you want to stop it then change your fraction's culture and have more people online to defend

jaime1982

Dreyloch wrote: »

Im sorry, but ya lost me at PC EU.. =(

lol

IZZEFlameLash

This again. There's nothing you can do about it unless you want to alienate people from huge time zone difference. Your midnight could be someone's morning/afternoon/evening and factor in those who work in different shifts. Sucks but it is very unlikely ZOS wants to do anything about it risking alienating their player base unless they have servers for every timezone. Also, if you care this much about campaign, then you probably would also be dedicated enough to play during these "nightcap" hours. Just sayin'.

Sharee

IZZEFlameLash wrote: »

This again. There's nothing you can do about it unless you want to alienate people from huge time zone difference. Your midnight could be someone's morning/afternoon/evening and factor in those who work in different shifts. Sucks but it is very unlikely ZOS wants to do anything about it risking alienating their player base unless they have servers for every timezone. Also, if you care this much about campaign, then you probably would also be dedicated enough to play during these "nightcap" hours. Just sayin'.

The problem isn't really people playing at odd hours. The problem is all of them piling up on the same side.

Cyrodiil should be 24/7 battle, i agree. But is should never be a 30 vs 2 battle, or a 60 vs 15 battle, all the way until balance is finally reached at primetime thanks to the overpopulated side hitting their population cap.

ZOS needs to ensure that no matter the time of day, all sides of the conflict are always at least roughly balanced number-wise for the scoring system to have any meaning other than "which side did the rabble decide to pile on this time".

Nermy

BohnT wrote: »

Nermy wrote: »

Sorry Tarvy (@Turelus) , but we had opposition when we night capped, it wasn't an empty map. AD do this when their is no-one on the map and have been doing it for 2+ years. Relentlessly.

I remember Torsten would never take everything because he wanted the enemy to have some keeps so they would fight back.

AD on Vivec have no such qualms.

I'm sorry but everyone even EP agreed that they destroyed Sotha for the time they morning capped.
There is no excuse for actively ruining the fun for the majority of players

Nah, this is waaaaay back before Sotha. First 6-12 months of release. Never played on Sotha.

ShenaniganSquad

OMG another thread with people in it who think the world revolves around their time zone... you need to go back to 1st grade and revisit your lesson on how the world is a globe, and how on one side of the world its day time, and the other its night time. I seriously am starting to think that half of eso is made up of narcissists.

We have had this same idiotic discussion on the kyne NA thread. News flash. People play when they can play, the game is 24/7.. Im in australia and our guild has about 50% aussies, we play from 8pm - midnight nearly every night of the week. It is not our fault there are not many other people on. The fact that there are some players out there who think that we dont have the right to play as we see fit, that our subscription somehow does not match theirs in value and that we should be penalized for the time zone we live in, only serves to prove to me that there are a lot of people in this game who havent left their basement in a very long time.

For heavens sake grow up and think of someone other than yourself for a change, when its night time for you its day time for someone else, and vice versa, you cant penalize players for where they live in the world.

Enslaved

ShenaniganSquad wrote: »

OMG another thread with people in it who think the world revolves around their time zone... you need to go back to 1st grade and revisit your lesson on how the world is a globe, and how on one side of the world its day time, and the other its night time. I seriously am starting to think that half of eso is made up of narcissists.

We have had this same idiotic discussion on the kyne NA thread. News flash. People play when they can play, the game is 24/7.. Im in australia and our guild has about 50% aussies, we play from 8pm - midnight nearly every night of the week. It is not our fault there are not many other people on. The fact that there are some players out there who think that we dont have the right to play as we see fit, that our subscription somehow does not match theirs in value and that we should be penalized for the time zone we live in, only serves to prove to me that there are a lot of people in this game who havent left their basement in a very long time.

For heavens sake grow up and think of someone other than yourself for a change, when its night time for you its day time for someone else, and vice versa, you cant penalize players for where they live in the world.

All you wrote, right back at you. Why should your PvDoor action be valued more than PvP that 95% of ppl participate in? You fight empty keeps and call it PvP? Noone want to take away APs you gain by your PvDoor actions. If that is what you enjoy, be my guest. Issue is that such actions ruin the campaign for vast majority of ppl that play on that campaign. All we ask for is a balance for points that count for campaign. Or are you so entitled that you believe your PvDoor should be valued more than actual PvP that most ppl playing campaign participate in?

dtsharples

This isn't about where you live in the world.
It's about how much weight your actions have on the other 90% of the player base. And this is also about the choices that you make as part of that 10%.

You could choose to seek out actual PVP, against actual players, in any campaign. But instead, you choose to fight NPCs, take keeps with zero resistance, and completely ruin the map - EVERY DAY.

If you can't understand how this is affecting the enjoyment of 90% of the EU server population, then yes, someone is being very selfish......and I think we all know who it is.

The actions of (10?) people in your guild, should not determine the outcome of a 30 day long campaign, where the majority of the action for other people takes place at, you guessed it - EU PRIMETIME.

heng14rwb17_ESO

GO AD OR GO CRY !

Etaniel

Aragorn79 wrote: »

And also just food for thought, would u complain if u were on the winning faction? Because things can change and we need to consider all the options before trying to mold the game in our favor.

Ofc I would complain. If I logged in and saw the entire map painted my colour, there would be nothing for me to do . Especially since such a map has a tendency to discourage other factions from starting the slow process of capping their part back. Meaning no enemies, or at least not enough to challenge my over populated faction.

Bergzorn

About half of the comments here read like

'Eeerrmagawd l2timezone!'

I would agree in general, but this is about the persistent state of Vivec PC/EU, which is NOT due to different time zones.

The players causing the problem are not interested in healthy PvP. Over time, they have driven away any opposition.

I'm just curious about one thing. If ZOS would offer a 'PvE' Cyrodiil, where players still can PvD and get full AP for it, and NPCs flip keeps back now and then, would the players under question move to this campaign, or do they just enjoy *** stuff up for other players?

Kram8ion

Springt-Über-Zwerge wrote: »

So on Pc EU the Aldmeri Dominion is winning Vivec for months now by far because they take the whole map every night while having near 0 resistance.
ZOS something has to be done because besides the lag this is one of the main reasons pvp is so frustrating atm.

A few ideas came to my mind how to solve this problem:

- Cap the population for each alliance at one bar higher than the lowest alliance. This would prevent people from joining just one alliance and overrun the others.

- Reset the whole map at 8am. Night capping could still be a thing but it wouldn't be as frustrating to log in every day.

- Empower the guards at low pop alliances.

- Remove the buffs from scrolls & EMP buffs for the whole alliance. Give other rewards for taking the Scrolls

Reset the map at 8am? Who's 8am just yours I'm guessing
What about the rest of the world and please stop night capping my campaign