Fixing One of the Biggest Problems in PvP Today

rfennell_ESO

Vercingetorix wrote: »

One of the primary issues plaguing PvP right now is the ability for two different faction characters to be on the same campaign

It's not quite the issue it's made out to be.

Fixing One of the Biggest Problems in PvP Today


Really, the changes they made to siege is starting to rise to the top. The game is becoming a contest of how many red rings can you count... it's terrible.

geonsocal

to all you campaign faction locking aficionados - you couldn't care less that about my game play and enjoyment - so...


p.s. - good to see so many ps4/na players here in the thread, hopefully we've killed and rezzed one another on a few occasions, it's all good fun

Jurand80

No one gives a crap about campaign score. Get over it or find a new game.

generalmyrick

Vercingetorix wrote: »

One of the primary issues plaguing PvP right now is the ability for two different faction characters to be on the same campaign - a notion that is idiotic at best, yet somehow is allowed in the game. This is blatant abuse and it in turn removes any competitive aspect of the game with cheating and griefing left unchecked. To address this issue, the solution I propose is actually quite simple: Lock accounts to a single faction and introduce a Faction Change Token in the Crown Store (with a 90-day cooldown upon use) to compensate.

So how would this work?

When the patch goes live, ZoS pulls all existing characters out of all campaigns, resetting Home and Guest options as well as resetting all maps and leaderboards. Campaign durations will reset on the day this patch goes live. (7-day and 30-day)

ZoS runs script for all existing accounts and upon your next login, you will be directed to the faction choice option. Your faction choice will be applied to all your current and all future characters on your account. New accounts will simply choose their faction first then be redirected to the character creation menu.

Cadwell's Silver and Gold will be retooled as a set of achievements: Finishing any 2 faction questlines gives the first set of rewards and finishing all 3 faction questlines gives the final reward. This allows all existing players to retain any progress and still be eligible for the rewards, regardless of whatever faction is selected. The quests "Cadwell's Silver" and "Cadwell's Gold" will be retired. The player simply ports to either of the 2 remaining factions and can essentially complete them in any order rather than a predetermined order.

The Faction Change Token can be used on an account once every 90 days. Upon being used, all characters on the account will have their Home and Guest campaign selections reset, forfeiting any current leaderboard progress as a result, but any AP gains will be retained.

@zos = please stop this faction switching nonsense...

p00tx

DenMoria wrote: »

I have the solution!

Let's get rid of PvP completely.

No more whining about PvP. No more performance issues about PvP. No more toxicity of PvPers!

It's win, win!

Of course then we'd have to address the whining of the PvE. The performance issues of the PvE. And the toxicity of the PvE.

Looks like there won't be much of a game left.

But then what would you have to complain about?

geonsocal

despite the fact we've had this conversation ad infinitum on these forums - here's the bottom line:

the cyrodiil map is huge, the pvp player base can not support multiple "healthy/active" campaigns.....

many of us with multiple characters on each alliance don't want to exile some of our characters to some pvp purgatory...

I get it their are jerks out there, and, many of you want to try to limit their impact on your gameplay...or, you want that "raw", intense feeling of alliance rivalry...

great, go recruit about another 10% of the eso player base to participate in cyrodiil, and, then we can faction lock campaigns...

now, if we were discussing faction switching timers - whole other story...I'm totally for some 2 to 12 hour faction switching cooldown period...

generalmyrick

Jurand80 wrote: »

No one gives a crap about campaign score. Get over it or find a new game.

i care about the campaign score...its a game, im trying to win.

VaranisArano

Thogard wrote: »

Everyone I know who faction swaps, myself included, does so to swap to the lowest pop faction for the AP bonuses.

I don’t know any serious PvPer who cares about any of the end of campaign rewards apart from the transmute crystals, which are available to everyone.

Locking factions would lock in the imbalances and it would prevent the talented groups that prefer fighting outnumbered from taking advantage of the many incentives already in the game that promote playing for the less-populated faction.

That's probably true of the more experienced PVPers, who swap to the lower-populated factions for the AP bonus, the "good fights," to "balance the map", help the underdog, etc.

There's another segment of the regular PVP population who faction swaps on a regular basis in order to play with their friends. Maybe their guilds are cross-faction or they regularly run with two or more PVP guilds. Either way, these players aren't basing their faction swapping on what the map looks like, but rather which friends are active that night.

Then there's the other segment, the fair-weather fans, the band-wagoners, whatever you want to call them. They'll log in to whichever alliance is dominant at the moment. Some of them are PVEers getting transmute crystals, so they want to be on the winning team. These are the players that swell the ranks of the winning team with high numbers, even though their individual contributions may not be that much and they probably won't stick around once the dominance in Cyrodiil shifts.


So faction locking has a different impact on each group.
For the PVPer who swaps to the under-dog for whatever reason, faction locking removes the option to support the underdog part-way through a campaign.
For the PVPers who regularly faction swap to play with friends, everyone has to pick sides. Awkward!
For the bandwagoners who follow the dominant faction, faction locking basically "locks in" that swell in population to whichever faction is dominant at the moment, instead of evening out the population. (Like right now on PC/NA Vivec, EP would likely get most of these types of players, rather than spreading out the population.)

The only people not effected by faction locking are the people who only ever play one alliance in PVP, win or lose. I'm in that group, but I have a feeling that's a fairly small club all things said and done, and I'm more of the opinion that die-hard faction loyalty is something that works for me, not necessarily something that should be imposed on everyone.

TequilaFire

Jurand80 wrote: »

No one gives a crap about campaign score. Get over it or find a new game.

Actually it is you that need to get out as that is the point of the campaign.

TequilaFire

geonsocal wrote: »

despite the fact we've had this conversation ad infinitum on these forums - here's the bottom line:

the cyrodiil map is huge, the pvp player base can not support multiple "healthy/active" campaigns.....

many of us with multiple characters on each alliance don't want to exile some of our characters to some pvp purgatory...

I get it their are jerks out there, and, many of you want to try to limit their impact on your gameplay...or, you want that "raw", intense feeling of alliance rivalry...

great, go recruit about another 10% of the eso player base to participate in cyrodiil, and, then we can faction lock campaigns...

now, if we were discussing faction switching timers - whole other story...I'm totally for some 2 to 12 hour faction switching cooldown period...

So instead we have one huge unhealthy campaign.

p00tx

So, since the community is so divided on this issue, why not just add one more 30-day campaign, but with a faction lock? It doesn't seem that complicated, and everyone gets what they want in the end.

DenMoria

p00tx wrote: »

DenMoria wrote: »

I have the solution!

Let's get rid of PvP completely.

No more whining about PvP. No more performance issues about PvP. No more toxicity of PvPers!

It's win, win!

Of course then we'd have to address the whining of the PvE. The performance issues of the PvE. And the toxicity of the PvE.

Looks like there won't be much of a game left.

But then what would you have to complain about?

Good point!

TequilaFire

DenMoria wrote: »

p00tx wrote: »

DenMoria wrote: »

I have the solution!

Let's get rid of PvP completely.

No more whining about PvP. No more performance issues about PvP. No more toxicity of PvPers!

It's win, win!

Of course then we'd have to address the whining of the PvE. The performance issues of the PvE. And the toxicity of the PvE.

Looks like there won't be much of a game left.

But then what would you have to complain about?

Good point!

You will find something I am sure.

Shardaxx

There's no need to force people to play 1 alliance or change their characters, that would be very unpopular.

Instead, when you enter a campaign, you lock it down for the duration of the campaign to the alliance of the character you are going in with. A message on screen would inform you of this. After that, you can't bring in a different alliance character into that campaign until it has ended, but if you have several characters of the same alliance, you can bring those in. Simples.

Minyassa

If they did this I would not be able to play with different groups of friends who are on at different times of day, and playing with friends is the only way I would ever actually get into PvP in Cyrodiil. So no. If my early-evening friends are AD and my late-morning friends are DC I am going to want to play with both of them. Socializing with friends in an MMO is the whole point.

idk

I like how OP opens up his post saying it is idiotic at best that we are not faction locked and merely provides his opinion as to why.

Fortunately we were faction locked when the game launched and Zos finally figured out it was bad so they removed it. I doubt they want to make that mistake again.

TequilaFire

Nothing but ap farmers. They should tie Alliance skill and rank advancemet to objectives in the main campaign score.
Then they wouldn't have to faction lock.

Jameliel

The longer I PvP, the biggest problem I'm seeing is population imbalance. On PC-NA, EP is nearly always pop-locked. Yesterday, as soon as prime time was finished, and mostly all AD logged off, EP was still at full population. AD had around 30-40 players at most. EP then took every possible castle and the scrolls. Zero skill, and zero chance that we could defend. We had nearly every player defending with max siege, but there is no way to defend against such sheer overwhelming numbers. 150+ vs 30-40.... That's ridiculous.

Possible solutions to this problem need to be examined and tested. I've thought of two possible solutions so far.

1. Make castle/keep/fort guards more powerful/weaker according to population. If an alliance has fewer than 50 players online, make the guards extremely powerful with lots of HP. If more than 50, drop the guards power down a tier. Something along these lines.

2. If too few players are on, make scrolls inaccessible. Only allow scroll-exchanges when population numbers are within a certain range of one another. The hard data needs to be examined. It's clear that on PC NA, a certain faction has mostly jobless players. Those of us with jobs can't stay on a constant 12-18 hours a day.

geonsocal

TequilaFire wrote: »

geonsocal wrote: »

despite the fact we've had this conversation ad infinitum on these forums - here's the bottom line:

the cyrodiil map is huge, the pvp player base can not support multiple "healthy/active" campaigns.....

many of us with multiple characters on each alliance don't want to exile some of our characters to some pvp purgatory...

I get it their are jerks out there, and, many of you want to try to limit their impact on your gameplay...or, you want that "raw", intense feeling of alliance rivalry...

great, go recruit about another 10% of the eso player base to participate in cyrodiil, and, then we can faction lock campaigns...

now, if we were discussing faction switching timers - whole other story...I'm totally for some 2 to 12 hour faction switching cooldown period...

So instead we have one huge unhealthy campaign.

i understand - cyrodiil ain't what it once was...i'm not sure though you can place all the ills of pvp (cyrodiil in particular) on faction hopping...

balance, performance, game/scoring rules, human nature - have all helped us get to where we are at...

performance issues aside - i'm having fun...granted, cyrodiil (vivec in particular) - isn't that intimate a social experience for me...i really don't care who i fight against or with...

for myself - it's the joy of open world pvp - at my own pace...

i understand though - guild play has degraded quite a bit over the years; and, faction swapping has definitely contributed to that decline...

AhPook_Is_Here

Like Caesar said at Alesia, he sure had gaul.