AVA needs more information, party & command/leadership tools

EatsManyPancakes

This is a somewhat rambling post, but I wanted to get all my thoughtsdown as i've played ESO on and off since the beta and PVP has always felt like it was just short of being great. I think I've finally come to terms with why that is: Cyrodiil lacks structure.
It has all the ingredients for a large scale war, but none of the tools to reliably deliver that war, usually descending into zerg-on-zerg lag-fests. I'll avoid talking about performance (for the most part) in this post, too. Though I do have some thoughts on that but they've probably been covered elsewhere by someone else, already.

This will predominantly focus on how the game feels opaque and why that's a problem and what sort of things could be done to make it more acessible to understand what's going on in cyrodiil.
See TLDR at bottom for summary of my main 3 suggestions.

This is what I see when I connect to cyrodiil (in this case it was a 2-bar yellow, 3-bar red, locked blue, No-cp campaign)

There were dozens of people standing around shouting out "LFG +LFG Blue +BLUE" and other variations of that in the DC home castle (and I imagine similar things were happening in the AD and EP home castles). Why is this the case?

It's because there are only 3 sources of information about the world in AVA:

1. High priority "Toast" messages that (occasionally) appear at the top of the screen ("The Elderscroll of X has been dropped" and so on)
2. The chat box (in the above screenshot you can see someone call out ash as it was under attack) - this and any associated context can be easily missed if the chat is scrolling fast, or if you've joined halfway through a conversation or if you locked up in a load-screen and reconnected etc.
3. The map itself - as seen above it will (Silently) attach combat icons when fights of sufficient size - IDK what constitutes sufficient size - or sieges are recorded by the server)

And whilst these info-sources can be used in tandem they are wholly insufficient most of the time, so many people will rely on joining a group to gather more information.
I was able to join a group with someone I knew shortly after connecting, I don't play ESO that often anymore, but they religiously PVP, meaning I have an easily accessible information feed, leading me to the juicy fights) And this gets at why I'm making this post.

It's honestly just bloody annoying - verging upon frustrating - to try and find fights when you aren't in the loop, because the game is so *** awful at providing players with information. This leads to people actively trying to find groups for the wrong reasons rather than trying to find people to play with to perform interesting strategies, or to complement eachother's builds, most people look for groups just so that they can "follow the crown" and get into the action in a reasonable amount of time.

• As a small tangent, this kind of small, "clued-in", group often forms a core of players which snowballs and becomes a zerg - so in a way this topic also touches on the prevalence of zerging in AVA (though there are other factors at play there, beyond information, like respawn times vs having others around to res you etc).

Now, on information again, I can already hear some people saying "B-Bu-But, Just Join A Clan man!" if I want to find clued-in people to play with. And yes - that is a solution, though it is not a convenient one (as it relies on having others online if I want to play, and them being in parties with free slots, and the campaign having enough space to join which isnt always guaranteed) and solves this problem by avoiding the problem. That lack of information - that informational inaccessibility is still right there, affecting many players (and perhaps is even a factor for some ESO players being reluctant to engage in PVP),

• It's also why I'll find players will sometimes aimlessly roam around the map if they cant find a group, or get bored and disconnect,
• i've seen people stand around in the home keep spam LFG for a bit then go back to the transitus and leave after getting bored.

The reason they do this, for the uninitiated, is because many party leaders will run plugins that will auto-add people to their parties when certain phrases are seen in chat.. phrases like "+lfg" (there are also a few combat plugins that help with information in PVP, like minimaps and notification/UI tweaks, but as that's not "vanilla" i'll skip them - though if you need to rely on 3rd party tools to play a game comfortably... its probably not been designed very well IMO)

Parties (up to 24 players in ESO/AVA) serve a triple function

1. Provide information on combat hotspots - usually via a informed group-leader
2. Provide opportunities for organised combat (if you work in a guild etc) or shorten ressurection times via tents or just having friends to rez your violated corpse when a ganker is about.
3. Augment gameplay by impacting mechanics - via group gear synergies (And depending on ZOS optimisation tests, group-locked AOE heals/buffs).

So, I've explained why information is a pain to come accross in AVA, and how it's a barrier to people playing, unless they can get into a party, but what can be done about it?

Well there is a place we could look for inspiration: Planetside 2 - and its own inspiration - the Battlefield franchise.

Attach provinces "Zones" to the cyrodiil map so that anyone, in squads or not, can get a rough Idea of how many troops, of each faction are in that zone

Planetside 2 has a feature on its map, where it'll show you approximately how many players are in each region of the map.

A separate map filter could toggle showing these zones on and off, they'd be shaded Yellow/Red/Blue based on their dominant number of players present (like a heatmap, basically).
Now, obviously, Planetside 2 is a scifi game with orbital sensors that can justify this level of information, but ESO is a high fantasy game, one could justify a feature like this by saying "<faction name> mystics have scryed a buildup of approx X-Y enemies here" (mysticism is the school of magic that "Sense life" sits within, in the mainline TES games).

• The game even has scouting quests, in theory, ZOS could roll those into this feature, normally if there are (e.g.) 100 AD troops in, say, the "Alessian bridge Zone", an EP player might see "75-125 players present here, but if their faction ha'd conducted a scouting mission in that region recently, it might show 90-110, or even the exact value if several scout quests had been done there so the more scout quests done in a region, the more accurate the map's numbers would be.

Making it easier to start, join and leave parties in Cyrodiil

Despite their obvious benefits, very few people like starting a party because of the work that goes into running one. Planetside 2 has an answer to this. Sort of. It uses a platoon structure:

So there are effectively 4 squads ("parties") with 4 independent squad leaders ("Crowns") but one of them (usually the leader of squad 1) ends up being the "boss" and directs everyone, sort of like a commander or a general.

Also, all existing squads/platoons are shown on a squad screen in PS2 - and can be "open" for all, or locked to invite - this is unlike in ESO where parties are by invite only, with no central party screen to join from (even in the past, the old groupfinder in AVA was a peer-to-peer matchmaker that hardly anyone liked, personally I hated it as it was opaque).

Contrast this with PS2 where the platoon screen shows you how many people are in each platoon you could join + where most of their members are located and even features a "cohesion" metric to show you how close it's members are to each other (or if it = "low" it's just full of lone wolves doing their own thing lol).

In ESO terms Cyrodiil could use a "PARTY HUB" screen for AVA, where all existing parties, for your faction, are shown (e.g. a screen with all 24 man parties is shown in a list format, and where their leader is located, based on nearest map POI, and if it is locked/free-to-join)


An elected faction commander?
This Idea actually goes back to Battlefield, the older Battlefield games had a unique position for each side where 1 player would be the commander and give direction to each squad, and could call in support powers like UAVs or cruise missiles, a good commander that squads actually listened to could turn the tide of a game.

Something similar could exist for ESO - lets call it the "WARLORD" position. The Warlord would be able to

• Issue "Contracts" on the global map, visible to all party leaders - "attack here, defend here, siege here, rally here" etc, which could be built up in chains of several (say, 6) actions to form a plan.
• Party leaders (Crowns) then have 2 mins to either vote to accept or reject (or just ignore) those plans, after 2 mins the offer expires.
• Those parties who accept the Warlord orders, will receive time-limited rewards whilst completing them or time-limited discounts after completing them.
• e.g. if your Warlord says "Siege Ash" and you accept, sieging ash in the next 10m will grant you double 50% more AP during the siege. Or recently completing the siege will make all items/repairs from the Ash NPC vendor 50% cheaper.
• Warlords make 10% of whatever their parties make for following those orders. E.g. if 5 EP parties siege Ash, collectively making 1mil AP, the warlord will get 100k from it.
• Warlords are chosen by popular vote (there is no democracy in the military). You'd apply via some ui-button and all players in the campaign in your faction would see your AVA stats on that character (e.g. was emperor 6 times, played for 300 hours whatever) and then click vote on anyone who'd put themselves up for nomination. Most votes wins.
• If the Warlord isnt doing a good job, party leaders can issue a vote of no-confidence via simple majority (50.1%) if it passes, warlord is booted and a new one is picked.
• If you've been voted out of warlord you cannot re-apply for 1 hour.
• Warlords could also issue general warning pings on the map for all players - e.g. those not in parties or lone wolves, like "enemy army here", "gankers reported here".

Now, adding something like this to ESO could be interesting - though would need to be carefully implemented (Even I can see a bunch of problems with how i've described it above, but the idea of an actually invested commander on each of the 3 factions might lead to genuinely interesting wars, and a good commander who is listened to will probably not want all their troops zerging from place to place, they'd want to split them up a bit, too) also it'd probably lead to drama between guilds clamouring to take the commander spot - if you want to go all-out on faction identity imagine replacing the vote of no-confidence with a duel for EP, may the best barbarian win lol.

Group mounts could lead to transporting players by cart/wagons? Could we one day see Battle busses in Cyrodiil?
One last thing i'd like to add - and this bit is my own wild fantasy/conjecture - but ZOS is currently testing Group mounts, for now just for 2 players. But, this could be a "game changer" (as much as I despise that buzzword) for the large open, lifeless, expanse that is Cyrodiil - Imagine having horse-drawn carts (with a HP bar) spawn around the game's keeps. Players could all pile in to them and be driven to their destination - this would make Cyrodiil more accessible (literally) for new players or alts that dont have high mount speed, they could still get into the fight in a group. Gankers could use claptrops to break the wheels (you know, what claptrops are actually used against historically - horse/ox drawn carts and war-beasts (elephants)) to force people out to repair them, or use siege engines to "break" them forcing the occupants out. It's worth noting that War wagons were an actual thing used in history by the Hussites https://youtube.com/watch?v=2ZQwkX3euFg

TLDR

ESO's pvp mode has, since it's inception, relied upon guilds and players managing parties, themselves, to carry the weight of it's information and organisation functionality. I do not feel this is overall beneficial to the experience in cyrodiil and believe ZOS should take steps to bring some more structure to cyrodiil via the below, which would add a lot to making the game more transparent to play and potentially more accessible for more players - particularly those not in a dedicated combat guild or those not in the loop on how grouping up currently works.

Summary of above suggestions:

1. Add zones to the cyrodiil map which indicate approximately how many players are in said zone (e.g. an AD player might see that the Bruma Zone has X+/-Y AD players in it and Z+/-N EP players in it), with the estimations becoming more accurate as more scouting quests are performed (either globally for your faction, or in that zone specifically).
2. Add a global faction party list - you'll see all the parties currently up in the campaign, how many players each party has in it, if it's open or not, where its party leader(s) are presently located [i.e. which "zone" they're in], and can join any of them at the push of a button.
3. Add a commander ("Warlord") position to each alliance, the commander's job would be to give direction to each party, parties that follow the Warlord's orders would gain rewards, the warlord would make a % of AP off what each party following orders makes (e.g. 10%). Bad warlords can get voted out.
4. Battle Wagons When?

EatsManyPancakes

Also, I apologise for the poor formatting, first time i've made such a long post here.