Alliances are unbalanced

Unit117

The alliances need to be rebalanced. The populations should be fairly close between the three in cyrodil, but there’s way to much Ebon heart and then never any daggerfall on. Between how unfair the battles are and crashes in cyrodil. Y’all may need to rework your entire campaign system to something that works and balances better.

mikecrci

Daggerfall Forever. I don't care if I'm the only player. It is the best alliance.

Unit117

@mikecrci same but still. I’m tired logging on to see we have nothing because the populations are so unbalanced

Turelus

The alliances will never be balanced unless you create a system like Battle Grounds where you queue in and get placed on a team in need of players rather than who you want to fight for.

The reason there are three alliances is to balance out if one becomes too strong/populated. There are also a number of underdog bonuses which help lower population alliances.

Most of the time however the reason alliances don't see good populations is simply because they lack leadership and organisation from guilds or PUG's.

dtsharples

Faction locking campaigns for their duration would help somewhat.
Half of the people who zerg the empty map in the AM, swap to a different faction later to take it back and get double the AP they ordinarily would.
Making them stick to one faction would mean they would have to choose between playing PVDoor, or playing PVP.

If faction locking just can't be implemented, then I'd suggest some kind of dynamic population lock.
Where one faction can never be more than 1 full bar ahead of another.
At this point, essentially the population-lock kicks in and a queue starts.

Ofc people could just wait in the queue, but I think at least some people would prefer to jump right into playing, so would then have to temporarily use a different campaign. Hopefully spreading out the factions across the campaigns a little more equally, and helping to prevent the faction-stacks that plague the map during the daytime.
Hopefully this could help fill up the emptier campaigns too, and give a bit more quality of play for everyone.

Mr_Nobody

I mean does it really matter when you got 40 DC defending a keep and 37 of them are light attacking from up top?

ellahellabella

Mr_Nobody wrote: »

I mean does it really matter when you got 40 DC defending a keep and 37 of them are light attacking from up top?

Gotta get them sload proccs brah!

Beardimus

Sorry @Unit117 first of all you offer no context. Region / Platform (generally if none is listed its NA assuming we all play there and PC) Not trolling you, but context helps.

Secondly, and linked, we have no idea of your timezone. If you expect a matched pop on each alliance 24/7 how could that possibly work in your opinion?

So say its NA primetime people are all on, then folks start to leave, but a few big AD guilds are on. Suddenly DC and EP are outnumbered. Would people get kicked? Then an hour later after AD lot are kicked a big Australian DC guild get on, and AD are outnumbered - then what? AD get invited back, or half the DC guild cant get on?

I understand your point. I do. But being realistic what can ZOS do about it.

As as for Context, its AD swarming when I play. All the time. And cheating. But that may not relate to your experience.

Joy_Division

Mr_Nobody wrote: »

I mean does it really matter when you got 40 DC defending a keep and 37 of them are light attacking from up top?

That's actually AD's specialty. From stealth.

frozywozy

Unit117 wrote: »

The alliances need to be rebalanced. The populations should be fairly close between the three in cyrodil, but there’s way to much Ebon heart and then never any daggerfall on. Between how unfair the battles are and crashes in cyrodil. Y’all may need to rework your entire campaign system to something that works and balances better.

I will give you that. EP has biggest amount of stable and active players.

This being said, all 3 factions have shown in the past that they can bring a ridiculous amount of players to compete easily with EP at random times of the day and night. Not even during a double APs week.

Why aren't they as stable as EP is? This is hard to answer. But every faction has the potential and the numbers to compete.

Turelus wrote: »

The alliances will never be balanced unless you create a system like Battle Grounds where you queue in and get placed on a team in need of players rather than who you want to fight for.

The reason there are three alliances is to balance out if one becomes too strong/populated. There are also a number of underdog bonuses which help lower population alliances.

Most of the time however the reason alliances don't see good populations is simply because they lack leadership and organisation from guilds or PUG's.

I believe that the easiest/hardest way to balance populations is to have more players. The more active campaigns opened, the easier it gets for players to switch from one campaign to another if their faction could use help during their timezone.

Mr_Nobody wrote: »

I mean does it really matter when you got 40 DC defending a keep and 37 of them are light attacking from up top?

Agreed 100%. I wish that DC players would follow the instructions of some of their leaders. Slot dawnbreaker, use proximity detonation and bomb people on ressource flags always go a long way.

zyk

frozywozy wrote: »

Why aren't they as stable as EP is? This is hard to answer. But every faction has the potential and the numbers to compete.

It's not that difficult to figure out on PC/NA. Generally speaking, many players in all games want to play for the most successful team. For the last 18 months or so, that's been EP. I'm not talking about campaign wins, I'm talking about at a pure combat level.

Why? RNG mostly. It's the way the game evolved culturally -- who started where, who quit, who stayed, etc..

It would be less of an issue in a growing game with multiple active servers and a steady influx of new players. But ESO AvA is a game with what appears to be a declining population. As it stands, EP is attractive to players of all types from surfers, to small group players to large group players.

It's the same thing that happens in all games. It's why pro sports have salary caps and luxury taxes. It's why first person shooters often have auto-team balancing on public servers. Most people choose the team that gives them the greatest opportunity for success.

There are solutions. Players can always choose to play for the side that needs help and developers can implement balancing mechanisms to encourage players to do that. For example, if there was a set number of extremely compelling rewards that decent players were more likely to win on a less competitive faction; but there are many ways to accomplish it if ZOS had the will to make the effort.

Unfortunately both ZOS and too many players are content with the status quo -- which sucks for all of us because the game suffers as a result.

WaltherCarraway

Nerf EP lol

usmcjdking

It's blatantly obvious why EP has a gigantic population over everyone else:

Skyrim.

1/3rd of the EP population is a Nord DK with some Viking inspired name.

gp1680

I’m not sure what platform and server you’re on, but right now two things are contributing to low pops on Xbox Vivec NA. EP is running away with the campaign, so motivation for other alliances are low. On top of that, Cyrodiil is broken af right now and even if you wanted to play, you freeze every ten minutes. Makes for miserable PVP right now.

Unit117

gp1680 wrote: »

I’m not sure what platform and server you’re on, but right now two things are contributing to low pops on Xbox Vivec NA. EP is running away with the campaign, so motivation for other alliances are low. On top of that, Cyrodiil is broken af right now and even if you wanted to play, you freeze every ten minutes. Makes for miserable PVP right now.

I play that server and it’s not just this campaign. It’s been bad like this for months

Kartalin

Maybe the solution is to boost the occurrence of the low score bonus. Not only does it increase scoring for the faction it boosts AP gains like low pop does.

BrokenGameMechanics

Who knows what causes the cycle of population shifts?

My personal theory is its driven by what's the current meta. The current Meta combo (say Rune/Crystal/Haunting) and meta DLC build (Sloads) drives the Class everyone wants to be on because it is the best. X-Y-B they dead.

The Class will bias the Race as one Race has the mind share as Best Race for that Class, which in turn drives the Zerg biased to one Alliance or another.

Since my tin hat is on, I have a corollary for that theory. PVP Alliance balance directly reflects Combat Class balance achieved. If Combat is well balance, Alliance population will be as well. Based on that theory the Combat balance changes in Summerset shifted and exasperated combat imbalance and did not improve combat balance. Alliance population imbalance today is as heavily skewed as I've ever seen it.

Dreyloch

Turelus wrote: »

The alliances will never be balanced unless you create a system like Battle Grounds where you queue in and get placed on a team in need of players rather than who you want to fight for.

The reason there are three alliances is to balance out if one becomes too strong/populated. There are also a number of underdog bonuses which help lower population alliances.

Most of the time however the reason alliances don't see good populations is simply because they lack leadership and organisation from guilds or PUG's.

That's all true except the bolded part. Because the 2 factions with more organization tend to just farm the lesser one. The third place team.When that third place team starts to take things back on one side of the map, the 1st or 2nd place team will attack the flank of that 3rd place team.This makes the 3rd place team have to fight even harder on TWO FRONTS, and they can't get out of the hole. Logically, the 2nd and 3rd should be teaming up on the 1st place team. This does NOT happen. Or, it simply does not happen enough.

Edit: That pop bonus stuff has never happened on Vivec NA. Ever

davey1107

I actually like fighting as an underdog...I get more AP that way, and it’s not like being 4,000 points behind when the campaign ends means much.

I’ve played PvP for 3+ years, and there’s always a cycle with the campaigns. Usually an imbalance is caused by someone getting inspired to form a PvP guild and run 20+ people in a campaign every night. That’s pretty much all it takes to terrorize the other factions, lol.

Right now I’m on PS4 NA Vivec. Reds are on fire. They get their guilds online by 5 pm pacific, and they’re online all night with organized teams that are utterly dedicated to defending a specific territory. Notably, they watch Drake like hawks, which is good strategy since it’s hard for EP to win if they don’t spend most of their time holding it.

And right now golds are scrubs. I feel like I’m fighting a war with Mr. Kowaski’s 3rd grade P.E. Dodgeball team. I’m not the greatest PvP player or anything, but there are so many fights where I swear that it’s 5 golds vs 1 red and I’m having to do 80%+ of the damage to take them down. Lol.

But that’s ok. I defend keeps and lose most battles, but get 10+ kills per defense. Then last night we got our rears kicks all night, but I got one 45k defense tick and two 25k ticks. So it doesn’t bother me, except that there are too many broken things right now to make things reliable...and getting killed because my sneak is malfunctioning is annoying. But the red domination doesn’t bother me.

idk

If you are in a low population campaign expect it to have a disparity between the alliances. It really has to be.

Even with a floating cap it requires allowing an imbalance of players. Otherwise it woujd stay extremely low making the campaign worthless.

Such is life when you want to play in a low pop campaign.

vamp_emily

I think they need to hire Elon Musk to find a solution for balance. Apparently it does take a Rocket Scientist to fix it.

Thunderknuckles

Don't know if someone has already mentioned this, but another partial issue is that a looot of players see who's in the lead and then hop on a toon of that faction. They don't want to be on the losing team. Not the whole issue, but it definitely contributes.

CatchMeTrolling

The majority of the pvp community likes to zerg and they like to win, so even if you try to lock someone into a campaign it then going to work unless you make it account bound. Albeit that would just ruin things even more , Cyrodiil is already in a sorry stale state, I’d imagine not being able to group with friends would backfire.

Unit117

@idk I’m talking about Xbox vivec

Gprime31

EP for life, why would I play on an alliance with a blue cat or a yellow chicken on its flag?

Minnesinger

PC/ NA here. I read comments and looks like some EP think they are just so good and everyone else need to get good or just have more people. That is ridiculous. We all know who zergs the most if the campaign scores look unbalanced. The same with AD and DC earlier. EP are the dirty zerglings currently who play the easy campaign win.

idk

Unit117 wrote: »

@idk I’m talking about Xbox vivec

That is all well and good but the statement still holds. It would be a poor mechanism to reduce the total population in Cyrodiil because one alliance is doing poorly or just has fewer interested in that campaign.

Joy_Division

usmcjdking wrote: »

It's blatantly obvious why EP has a gigantic population over everyone else:

Skyrim.

1/3rd of the EP population is a Nord DK with some Viking inspired name.

Well, yes, but that just means the EP population lock is full of bandwagon hopping PUGs who trend the type that stands under oil at Alessia front door rather than think for themselves and actually be good at the game.

White wabbit

idk wrote: »

Unit117 wrote: »

@idk I’m talking about Xbox vivec

That is all well and good but the statement still holds. It would be a poor mechanism to reduce the total population in Cyrodiil because one alliance is doing poorly or just has fewer interested in that campaign.

Come play on that server and see how bad it is , something needs addressing I know someone will say join one of the other factions but that's just going to make the unbalance even worse, personally I think it's time to merge the servers but can't see that happening

VaranisArano

Joy_Division wrote: »

usmcjdking wrote: »

It's blatantly obvious why EP has a gigantic population over everyone else:

Skyrim.

1/3rd of the EP population is a Nord DK with some Viking inspired name.

Well, yes, but that just means the EP population lock is full of bandwagon hopping PUGs who trend the type that stands under oil at Alessia front door rather than think for themselves and actually be good at the game.

Alessia's front door is Tamriel's one-stop shop for fried-in-siege-oil/baked-in-coldfire potatoes.

Mmm, tasty.

The_Lex

VaranisArano wrote: »

Joy_Division wrote: »

usmcjdking wrote: »

It's blatantly obvious why EP has a gigantic population over everyone else:

Skyrim.

1/3rd of the EP population is a Nord DK with some Viking inspired name.

Well, yes, but that just means the EP population lock is full of bandwagon hopping PUGs who trend the type that stands under oil at Alessia front door rather than think for themselves and actually be good at the game.

Alessia's front door is Tamriel's one-stop shop for fried-in-siege-oil/baked-in-coldfire potatoes.

Mmm, tasty.

What is it with Alessia that PuGs always try to front door the place? Doesn't matter what alliance, either.