Faction Lock - Why do people want this?

GreenHere

Thank you everyone for trying to shed some light on this issue for me! I do appreciate all the insights.

For all who advocate implementing a system that locks an entire account into only one alliance for a PvP campaign, I have a couple more questions. Asked in earnest, not being snarky or anything here.

Do you feel that an alliance lock would significantly cut down on players informing on your alliance, misdirecting war efforts via chat, and generally acting as a "spy" for opposing alliances? (All they need to do that is willingness to do it and a guild/private chat, or Discord/TS/etc., no?)

What about our characters in other alliances? MANY people make their characters EP, or AD, or DC for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with PvP. How do you propose they should be handled, if no longer allowed to join the main (read: actually populated) campaigns? Are our other characters simply ineligible for campaign rewards from the same campaign, in your view?

(As an aside -- when I switch to alts of another alliance, I do it for one of three reasons: Some friends want to group up for PvP and I'm on the "wrong" side for that atm, the current character has reached the AP goal I was going for and it's time to move on, or lastly the alliance I'm currently on is dominating the map and I want to be on the team with objectives to actually accomplish. None of that seems particularly harmful to me, yet would be blocked by a faction lock.)

GreenHere

Also, wanted to add, I'm not concerned that alliance locking is (or isn't) coming back to the game. I'm not looking to advocate one way or the other. It's just that the topic comes up fairly often in zone, guilds, etc., and it's very clear that people are quite... passionate about it. But they never explain why in any convincing sense, and I truly wanted to see if I could wrap my little noggin around it. As someone who doesn't see the need or benefit in it, I am curious why others feel so strongly about it.

Zorgon_The_Revenged

As far as I know faction lockout never worked anyway, you could group up with a player who had your locked campaign as their home campaign, and you could just get in that way.

Most of the faction jumpers I see are the small scale/solo players who play for themselves and do nothing for their alliance.

I only play the 30day cp campaign, with AD and EP, simply for a change of scenery. I spend my time at opposite sides of the map fighting DC.

Elsonso

Izanagi.Xiiib16_ESO wrote: »

People think that by locking factions it will instill some form of campaign spirit and loyalty. Unfortunately these people fail to realise that without any incentive all faction locking archives is a limited player base and frustration from those who want to play with friends.

A far better solution (assuming that campaign rewards and incentives were added to make playing for a faction worth while) would be to pledge your account to a faction. This would allow you to earn ap on other factions but not increase the "reward" your account receives. Thus encouraging people to play for a faction but not restricting them.

Rewards need to be 1) daily faction points rewards 2) better token based campaign rewards including possibility to buy high end weapons.(vma etc) 3) increased tier ranking system up to something like 10m ap earned where the rewards have diminishing returned but you can still get rewarded for playing more.

Factions in this game are a joke. For a while, it was only a joke in PVE, but my impression is that they could quietly drop factions from the whole game in some minor patch and it would take people months to notice.

Personally, I would have gone more your route and tried to make it worth while to pick a faction and stick with it.

That does not seem to be a design goal, so my suggestion is to do the opposite. Just drop the character faction from the game and make everyone a freelance merc. When entering Cyrodiil, you get placed in the faction where your friends are, your current group is, or randomly (weighted by current populations).

caeliusstarbreaker

The only time I’ve ever seen emp trading was when we had buff campaigns, former emp passives, and the closest thing to a faction lockout eso ever had which was the one home campaign per character.

(Spelling and typos)

Soul_Demon

GreenHere wrote: »

Thank you everyone for trying to shed some light on this issue for me! I do appreciate all the insights.

For all who advocate implementing a system that locks an entire account into only one alliance for a PvP campaign, I have a couple more questions. Asked in earnest, not being snarky or anything here.

Do you feel that an alliance lock would significantly cut down on players informing on your alliance, misdirecting war efforts via chat, and generally acting as a "spy" for opposing alliances? (All they need to do that is willingness to do it and a guild/private chat, or Discord/TS/etc., no?)

What about our characters in other alliances? MANY people make their characters EP, or AD, or DC for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with PvP. How do you propose they should be handled, if no longer allowed to join the main (read: actually populated) campaigns? Are our other characters simply ineligible for campaign rewards from the same campaign, in your view?

(As an aside -- when I switch to alts of another alliance, I do it for one of three reasons: Some friends want to group up for PvP and I'm on the "wrong" side for that atm, the current character has reached the AP goal I was going for and it's time to move on, or lastly the alliance I'm currently on is dominating the map and I want to be on the team with objectives to actually accomplish. None of that seems particularly harmful to me, yet would be blocked by a faction lock.)

There was NEVER a time where the factions were locked in this game. The time people are talking about there was a restriction on the servers you could 'home' a char on and guest. If you had AD there, (or EP) you would have to home that faction on another server in order to 'home' another char from another alliance on that server. It was never a faction lock, it was one faction on any particular server lock and even that was not accurate as you could change this server to different faction for cost if you wished. You could home only one faction per server, but as many of that faction as you wished. This had a cool down and an AP cost that was reasonable (if you just created the char- it required you play for about a week on it first to earn the AP maybe two if you were not as adept at gaining AP then) and when the AP was much steeper and slower to earn in Cyro as to provide a gate mechanism to the feature.

The combination of the "one alliance per server" and "cost in AP to re-home" did not remove the bad behaviors, but it certainly reduced it to only the very few truly dedicated and only a handful of them. Most players who claim they just want to play with friends were reminded they could and always could- but would dismiss that and change the discussion. What they wanted and always wanted was "no consequence instant faction hops" and that brings us to todays structure. The whole discussion was a farce from the beginning and never was about playing with friends as often pushed- it was always and is now about no consequence faction hops for rewards stacking and trolling new players to make those players feel relevant. Many of them, if you pay attention, are some of the more toxic types and NEED to leave one faction after they have irritated those in that faction to the point they can no longer interact with them.....so they wanted a zero cost instant way to continue the toxic behaviors elsewhere needed to leave the environments when they had sufficiently damaged the community there.

Now they have it under the guise of 'just want to play with friends' and 'just looking for good fights'. It was all a joke before and even more now that they are apparently rewriting the game to support the argument they need no consequence faction hops to facilitate the 'hunt for good fights' because they are so good, so overwhelmingly good at the game that they need to jump at a moments notice free of charge to another alliance. We knew then it was garbage and now with the implementation we see that there is no volume of players seeking the 'underdog' to fight for looking for these good fights- if that were the case we would have perfect faction balance now.....no denying the results at this point. Trollish, exploitative and toxic players will defend this to the death, so even with absolute facts it wont matter they will never allow their 'style' of play to be threatened. Watch the responses to this if you doubt how committed they are to this activity.

MerlinPendragon

No faction lock system, please. This will likely reduce PVP numbers, not increase them.

Amdar_Godkiller

Because there are certain guilds that will play multiple factions and trade emperor back and forth.

Jimmy_The_Fixer

This is an MMO, being allowed to play with your friends is way more important than some silly faction war BS. Emp trading is pointless and hasn't happened in years.

Emp trading is not a thing anymore.

Nobody. Is. Trading. Emperor.

Amdar_Godkiller

Jimmy_The_Fixer wrote: »

This is an MMO, being allowed to play with your friends is way more important than some silly faction war BS. Emp trading is pointless and hasn't happened in years.

Emp trading is not a thing anymore.

Nobody. Is. Trading. Emperor.

You're absolutely wrong. It's been going on for months on XBX NA Shor

fullheartcontainer

MerlinPendragon wrote: »

No faction lock system, please. This will likely reduce PVP numbers, not increase them.

I'm totally fine with reduced pvp numbers if it means fewer multi-faction players or people that only come on at the end of the campaign to get the rewards.

fullheartcontainer

GreenHere wrote: »

As a PvP casual who basically only shows up once a month per character in order to get tier 1 campaign rewards, I honestly don't understand. But I want to. Can someone explain it to me rationally, please?

Do you not see how this is an issue? "I don't pvp but I come on to the campaign at the end of the month to get the winning rewards"

It's like saying "I don't play soccer, but during the last game of the season I always sign onto the winning team so I can get a championship trophy and tshirt and stuff" - This sounds crazy and no team would ever allow it, right? It's the same thing.

GreenHere

fullheartcontainer wrote: »

GreenHere wrote: »

As a PvP casual who basically only shows up once a month per character in order to get tier 1 campaign rewards, I honestly don't understand. But I want to. Can someone explain it to me rationally, please?

Do you not see how this is an issue? "I don't pvp but I come on to the campaign at the end of the month to get the winning rewards"

It's like saying "I don't play soccer, but during the last game of the season I always sign onto the winning team so I can get a championship trophy and tshirt and stuff" - This sounds crazy and no team would ever allow it, right? It's the same thing.

Framed that way, I sorta see the complaint I guess... But that's not exactly what I'm doing, I don't think. I get all my characters (AD, EP, and DC) to tier one rewards so I get the Transmutation Geode, since ZOS decided end of campaign rewards were the only source of 50-crystals-at-a-time rewards. And for what it's worth, it worked; I spend a lot more time in Cyrodiil than I otherwise would. It's the incentive reward for participating in PvP, right? More often than not, the character who ends up with tier 3+ isn't even on the winning alliance; it's just whoever I was having the most fun on during that month. I think I got the purple jewelry container twice (across 15 characters) since Transmutation came out, however many months/campaigns ago that was.

When I'm on a given alliance, I play like I always do; honestly, earnestly, and to have fun with my alliance comrades or group of friends. Given some of the insights shared in this thread, I get that other people are double-agenting for their preferred alliance, and other such shenanigans. That's not cool, and I can see why dedicated players would be miffed about people sabotaging "their" campaign. Part of me thinks "yeah, we should do something to curtail that somehow", and another part thinks "this is war; spies and sabotage are part of that -- get over it!" haha. But I'm in the "Largely Irrelevant" tier of players, so...

Mostly I'm just trying to wrap my head around some of the past conversations I've been privy to in-game and in discords, where people get borderline frothy-mouthed over the issue, but failed to give any solid reasoning. It was clear that they were passionate in their beliefs, but their argument usually amounted to something like, "if you don't have loyalty and can't see the issue, then there's nothing to say that can make you understand!"... Which is more of an emotional response than a reasoned discussion, to me. Besides, in a game like ESO where almost all of us have toons of different alliances, it makes little sense by itself.

Still, I'm open to being convinced otherwise. I really am. So far, though, I have yet to be convinced that how I play is wrong.


EDIT, to add :: Thank you, @fullheartcontainer for taking the time to try and illustrate the feeling of people on your side of the fence. I do appreciate the effort!

GreenHere

Soul_Demon wrote: »

GreenHere wrote: »

Thank you everyone for trying to shed some light on this issue for me! I do appreciate all the insights.

For all who advocate implementing a system that locks an entire account into only one alliance for a PvP campaign, I have a couple more questions. Asked in earnest, not being snarky or anything here.

Do you feel that an alliance lock would significantly cut down on players informing on your alliance, misdirecting war efforts via chat, and generally acting as a "spy" for opposing alliances? (All they need to do that is willingness to do it and a guild/private chat, or Discord/TS/etc., no?)

What about our characters in other alliances? MANY people make their characters EP, or AD, or DC for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with PvP. How do you propose they should be handled, if no longer allowed to join the main (read: actually populated) campaigns? Are our other characters simply ineligible for campaign rewards from the same campaign, in your view?

(As an aside -- when I switch to alts of another alliance, I do it for one of three reasons: Some friends want to group up for PvP and I'm on the "wrong" side for that atm, the current character has reached the AP goal I was going for and it's time to move on, or lastly the alliance I'm currently on is dominating the map and I want to be on the team with objectives to actually accomplish. None of that seems particularly harmful to me, yet would be blocked by a faction lock.)

There was NEVER a time where the factions were locked in this game. The time people are talking about there was a restriction on the servers you could 'home' a char on and guest. If you had AD there, (or EP) you would have to home that faction on another server in order to 'home' another char from another alliance on that server. It was never a faction lock, it was one faction on any particular server lock and even that was not accurate as you could change this server to different faction for cost if you wished. You could home only one faction per server, but as many of that faction as you wished. This had a cool down and an AP cost that was reasonable (if you just created the char- it required you play for about a week on it first to earn the AP maybe two if you were not as adept at gaining AP then) and when the AP was much steeper and slower to earn in Cyro as to provide a gate mechanism to the feature.

The combination of the "one alliance per server" and "cost in AP to re-home" did not remove the bad behaviors, but it certainly reduced it to only the very few truly dedicated and only a handful of them. Most players who claim they just want to play with friends were reminded they could and always could- but would dismiss that and change the discussion. What they wanted and always wanted was "no consequence instant faction hops" and that brings us to todays structure. The whole discussion was a farce from the beginning and never was about playing with friends as often pushed- it was always and is now about no consequence faction hops for rewards stacking and trolling new players to make those players feel relevant. Many of them, if you pay attention, are some of the more toxic types and NEED to leave one faction after they have irritated those in that faction to the point they can no longer interact with them.....so they wanted a zero cost instant way to continue the toxic behaviors elsewhere needed to leave the environments when they had sufficiently damaged the community there.

Now they have it under the guise of 'just want to play with friends' and 'just looking for good fights'. It was all a joke before and even more now that they are apparently rewriting the game to support the argument they need no consequence faction hops to facilitate the 'hunt for good fights' because they are so good, so overwhelmingly good at the game that they need to jump at a moments notice free of charge to another alliance. We knew then it was garbage and now with the implementation we see that there is no volume of players seeking the 'underdog' to fight for looking for these good fights- if that were the case we would have perfect faction balance now.....no denying the results at this point. Trollish, exploitative and toxic players will defend this to the death, so even with absolute facts it wont matter they will never allow their 'style' of play to be threatened. Watch the responses to this if you doubt how committed they are to this activity.

Thank you for the thoughtful response. I can see how people looking to troll hiding behind otherwise legitimate reasons for wanting to switch can be an issue. Seems to me that "I want to play with my friends, not against them" is a pretty good reason, but the potential for abuse is real. Thanks for pointing this out.

danno8

The problem with locking you to a faction comes to the forefront when the populations are unbalanced.

When you have a faction that has consistently more players than the others it can get frustrating or everyone. The high population faction is bored because they can't find any meaningful PvP where they don't outnumber their foes 2:1, and the low population factions get tired of being run over in addition to not being able to accomplish anything.

To me that is a much worse situation that "spais" and people from other factions logging in to trash talk you on your faction.

At least you get to have PvP.

Lieblingsjunge

Because there are still puglings and zone chat lords convinced of the fact that spying, scroll-trading and other knick-knack has a serious impact on PvP. Which it doesn't. Morning/Nightcaps(For eu) has an impact on PvP scoreboard. Nothing else.

Only thing you would achieve by faction locking a campaign, is a lot of the small-scalers and good players leaving. Leaving only the puglings, potatoes and all-around light attack-spamming legolas'es left. Because these kind of players tend to play the faction where they can have the best fight. (Surprisingly enough, that's not the faction with 100 guys zerging keeps).

killahsin

danno8 wrote: »

The problem with locking you to a faction comes to the forefront when the populations are unbalanced.

When you have a faction that has consistently more players than the others it can get frustrating or everyone. The high population faction is bored because they can't find any meaningful PvP where they don't outnumber their foes 2:1, and the low population factions get tired of being run over in addition to not being able to accomplish anything.

To me that is a much worse situation that "spais" and people from other factions logging in to trash talk you on your faction.

At least you get to have PvP.

The problem with unlocking faction comes to the forefront when the populations are unbalanced.

When you have a faction that has consistently more players because people love playing with the winners and zerg surfing than the losers it can get frustrating or everyone. The high population faction is bored because they can't find any meaningful PvP where they don't outnumber their foes 2:1, and the low population factions get tired of being run over in addition to not being able to accomplish anything.

To me that is a much worse situation that "spais" and people from other factions logging in to trash talk you on your faction.

At least you get to have PvP

Xsorus

Faction lock should be in the game; but at that time time Selecting your Faction at the start of the campaign should be in the game as well.

allstarplayergk

Why faction lock you ask? Anyone here in PS4 Na Vivec. The first place blue character keeps logging into the other factions and jumping his guild mates inside of keeps, they just took every scroll in the game In less than 1 hour and crowned themselves. I love the #fakenews cry on scroll trading, and broken rules, here’s your proof.
https://youtu.be/0xCdGndd498

JobooAGS

allstarplayergk wrote: »

Why faction lock you ask? Anyone here in PS4 Na Vivec. The first place blue character keeps logging into the other factions and jumping his guild mates inside of keeps, they just took every scroll in the game In less than 1 hour and crowned themselves. I love the #fakenews cry on scroll trading, and broken rules, here’s your proof.
https://youtu.be/0xCdGndd498

I don't see the harm of opening 1-2 faction locked campaigns. What happened in the video is ridicious

GreenHere

allstarplayergk wrote: »

Why faction lock you ask? Anyone here in PS4 Na Vivec. The first place blue character keeps logging into the other factions and jumping his guild mates inside of keeps, they just took every scroll in the game In less than 1 hour and crowned themselves. I love the #fakenews cry on scroll trading, and broken rules, here’s your proof.
https://youtu.be/0xCdGndd498

While what's going on in the video is BS and needs to be handled, I fail to see how locking the factions in a campaign would prevent it.. The cheaters obviously have friends and/or alt characters in other alliances. Locking wouldn't prevent what they did at all; it would simply require a tiny bit more foresight. As in, all they'd have to do is arrange to have toons on each faction at the beginning of a campaign, then they're still free to do exactly what they're doing. They can still boost their friends AP this way all the same, no?

Is there something I'm missing here?

kylewwefan

In the under 50 campaign....you flip the keeps to get your friend the emperor achievement.

They are gonna stay that way, until you swap to a different toon of a different faction to dethrone and possibly give emp to another friend.

This is how it works. On a relatively empty campaign.

Beardimus

Jimmy_The_Fixer wrote: »

This is an MMO, being allowed to play with your friends is way more important than some silly faction war BS. Emp trading is pointless and hasn't happened in years.

Emp trading is not a thing anymore.

Nobody. Is. Trading. Emperor.

Yeah they are. Of course depending on your definition but for me a guild having characters in two or three alliances leaderboards flipping stuff back and forth to tick off the cheevo, that's emp flipping.

You may well speak for your region / platform and time you only. But you don't speak for all.

Ps. Silly faction war BS is kinda the basis of the entire game, and cyrodiil. Cool if you aren't into that, many are.

Beardimus

allstarplayergk wrote: »

Why faction lock you ask? Anyone here in PS4 Na Vivec. The first place blue character keeps logging into the other factions and jumping his guild mates inside of keeps, they just took every scroll in the game In less than 1 hour and crowned themselves. I love the #fakenews cry on scroll trading, and broken rules, here’s your proof.
https://youtu.be/0xCdGndd498

Spot on, I'm bored with all the folks who care little for alliance loyalty etc justify switching and denounce that bad stuff goes on when we all see it. And it's detrimental to legit players longevity.

If boosters / flippers leave cos alliance lock comes in, oh well.

GreenHere

Beardimus wrote: »

allstarplayergk wrote: »

Why faction lock you ask? Anyone here in PS4 Na Vivec. The first place blue character keeps logging into the other factions and jumping his guild mates inside of keeps, they just took every scroll in the game In less than 1 hour and crowned themselves. I love the #fakenews cry on scroll trading, and broken rules, here’s your proof.
https://youtu.be/0xCdGndd498

Spot on, I'm bored with all the folks who care little for alliance loyalty etc justify switching and denounce that bad stuff goes on when we all see it. And it's detrimental to legit players longevity.

If boosters / flippers leave cos alliance lock comes in, oh well.

I agree with that last point, in a vacuum. But I'd guess the problem that ZOS has to weigh is, how many regular, non-cheating players will leave too? Surely you don't want Cyrodiil empty of all the casuals like me, do you? I imagine that us noobs make up a significant portion of your AP and opposition.

If enough of us are driven away, you're basically just playing the most boring Battlegrounds ever, in a ridiculously oversized map where you hardly ever see another player.

allstarplayergk

@GreenHere I do agree that faction locking does not solve all nefarious acts within pvp, however what happened in the video would be. That is the #1 blue player, who can’t get crowned because he can’t get his alliance to choose Scrolls or crown Emp, so he jumped on to his red, let his friends ambush into every keep to take all 4 Scrolls, got on his blue and crowned himself emperor. Last night we had 1 scroll, and AD had 1 scroll(if DCs) so him and CozmicWhale jumped back and forth between AD,DC, and EP over the course of 1 hour taking Scrolls from different factions keeps without ever laying down 1 pierce of siege or fighting lol

GreenHere

allstarplayergk wrote: »

@GreenHere I do agree that faction locking does not solve all nefarious acts within pvp, however what happened in the video would be. That is the #1 blue player, who can’t get crowned because he can’t get his alliance to choose Scrolls or crown Emp, so he jumped on to his red, let his friends ambush into every keep to take all 4 Scrolls, got on his blue and crowned himself emperor. Last night we had 1 scroll, and AD had 1 scroll(if DCs) so him and CozmicWhale jumped back and forth between AD,DC, and EP over the course of 1 hour taking Scrolls from different factions keeps without ever laying down 1 pierce of siege or fighting lol

Thank you for illuminating this for me, I do appreciate it! Just a friendly reminder, though, careful of the naming and shaming policy. You'll end up getting more of a punishment than the cheaters in question. Personally, I think situations like this should be called out, names and all... but I don't make the rules ;P

I guess we don't want to get an internet lynch mob going, but... No, no... No naming and shaming. There's always someone who takes it too far! lol

allstarplayergk

@GreenHere yeah, I actually just made my first forums post to call this out. I wasn’t aware of the naming and shaming policy(although I have been since posting the video a couple times) but honestly if I get punished but it brings light to the problem and they get banned, fine. If nothing happens to these guys I’m probably gone from the game anyway with a lot of people. The objective of pvp is the Scrolls(finally after them being useless for 2.5 years lol) and if the objective can just be glitched out and hours of work into said objective negated(try taking a scroll 6pm on Friday, not an easy task lol) then there’s literally no point in playing the game, yes a lot of us are still “the *** playing objective”.

GreenHere

allstarplayergk wrote: »

@GreenHere yeah, I actually just made my first forums post to call this out. I wasn’t aware of the naming and shaming policy(although I have been since posting the video a couple times) but honestly if I get punished but it brings light to the problem and they get banned, fine. If nothing happens to these guys I’m probably gone from the game anyway with a lot of people. The objective of pvp is the Scrolls(finally after them being useless for 2.5 years lol) and if the objective can just be glitched out and hours of work into said objective negated(try taking a scroll 6pm on Friday, not an easy task lol) then there’s literally no point in playing the game, yes a lot of us are still “the *** playing objective”.

I commend you for your bravery and documenting the atrocities of war!

Seriously, though, I hope you don't get harsher punishment than the perpetrators in the video.

allstarplayergk

@GreenHere is it common place for a name and shame on the forums to take harsh game punishment like suspension or loss of account? Or will I just lose my forums access? Like I said I’m prepared for whatever, because if this doesn’t get addressed the game is functionally unplayable beyond the lag, the core mechanic is broke.