Cyrodil in the cooldown age: Milk run in a ghost town.

geknighton

Well thanks ZOS....and....No thanks. I pulled a nine hour marathon Wednesday night with my bosmer nightblade and was able to get EVERY SKYSHARD IN CYRODIL in one go. Now I did this in the smaller Blackreach campaign, with lots of gold players so the pact and covenant base gates were open for a long time, so I got those too. Which was the plan.

The problem here is that the plan was even POSSIBLE. The sad fact was that at four am the place was deserted. Zone chat was loud and clear about what was going on. The three second "test" was on and many powers were totally useless. I verified this by jumping a daedric shrine and getting killed. She is a nightblade and without steel tornado's consistent dam, crits, and crit heals, she is a powderpuff against multiple enemies. Fortunately this was only true for overland fights. Some of the delve bosses and their mobs could not be avoided.

Just for speed and safety I was stealthing the entire way. (thanks to nightmother's and ring of the wild hunt) Briarheart was my other gear for the fights, and with the steed and her passives she was moving about 170 while stealthed. Nothing OP used at all. On the occasions when enemy players got close, (twice in delves) I just crouched and got missed. Of course flaming horses charging all over the landscape are hard to miss, so in my rare enemy sightings on the surface no one even got close. But somehow it wasn't as much fun as it should have been. Apart from the deadric shrine fiasco I didn't get killed at all. Is this the Cyrodil you want to see?

The proposed changes in skills and mandated cooldowns will wreck every build they touch. They are going to have to either completely rethink Cyrodil or come up with something else. I have seen this over and over. When developers BREAK something in a game they will lose players. The worse the break, the bigger the exodus. So thanks, but no thanks ZOS. Now that I have all the zone shards, I won't need to play in Cyrodil anymore. Which is good because right now it's BROKEN, and I don't do BROKEN.

geonsocal

wow, that was a really thrilling cyro adventure...thanks for sharing...

Dovakhan

No offense, but that's not even really a ginormous achievement, neither an indicator of anything...I got all the skyshards ages ago with my magblade (speedy build, Darloc Brae + Jailbreaker + Wild Hunt + Swarm Mother 1 piece), minus the 4 Alliance locked ones (and I got the Dominion ones shortly after...still waiting for a bit of luck for the DC ones). If your build, magicka pool and recovery are decent, Shadowy Disguise + very small Stealth detection radius makes it a breeze.

Also, I maybe found about 3 or 4 people in all my run, even in prime time. And I'd swear that half of them were the same couple which was also skyshard hunting.

Dusk_Coven

To conclusively say this is the result of the AOE test, you would have to have a sample size of more than 1 and a control group/scenario against which to compare.

Major_Lag

With all due respect, I seriously doubt that OP's statement proves anything by itself.

Although the platform and server was not stated, it was clearly indicated that this was done in a low population campaign.
Such campaigns are, by definition, almost empty - so it is no surprise that hardly any other players would be encountered in the process.

Even the fact that the entire map was of a single color is hardly anything unusual, as the low pop campaigns in particular tend to suffer from heavy population imbalances because of emperor swapping.

For the record, when I got Cyrodiil completion on my PC-NA account a few months ago, my experience was quite similar to the OP's - and that was at a time when there were no major disruptions to the way Cyrodiil normally functions.

preevious

I don't think Cyrodiil is empty because the cooldown.
It's empty because everyone is in IC. There's some kind of event going on there.

RaddlemanNumber7

Over the years I have run all my characters through all the achievements for Cyrodiil shards/delves/dolmens/town quests. It's always deserted, sometimes I see no other players for several hours at time. That's because all the many PvP players there are always focused on the PvP objectives, very few of which are anywhere near the places I wanted to go. The vast majority of Cyrodiil's land area is always deserted.

If you have Rapids and a full speed horse there's no need to be invisible when travelling overland.

AlnilamE

My guild has been running PvP events in Blackreach 2 out of 3 Fridays and it's a pretty quiet campaign.

Also note that there is an Imperial City event going on and all IC instances have one of more factions locked.

We'll see what it's like next week after the IC event ends.

Also, I have the behind the gates skyshards on all my characters, even if they have no other skyshards in Cyrodiil. It's just a matter of keeping an eye out.

red_emu

Cyro empty at 4am? Wow. How weird 😵😵😵

techyeshic

Yeah 4 am on Blackreach does not require a CD test really. To be fair though; you could have been EP in Gray Host at primetime before last night and been able to do it. But then, things have been getting lopsided population anyway.

Truth is; they just now are taking big, controversial measures to actually address lag but even if they miraculously fix lag, they have already created other deep run issues in order to sell crown store items and have entirely ignored measures to maintain a healthy, incentivised, population balance in an open PVP area.

Maybe they can sell more faction changes by changing low pop bonus to high pop penalty. if you are 1 bar above another faction, AP and points get halved. 2 bars or more; 100% reduction.

markulrich1966

I guess that the IC has a strong impact, as also on servers without this test (xbox) cyrodiil is far less populated than usual.

The test might add up to it, but certainly is not the only reason.

I used cyro to jump out of IC immedeatly last night doing 50 dailies, this would be impossible on other weekends due to queues of more than an hour.

Celephantsylvius_Bornasfinmo

Well Greyhost is a PVE overland at the moment I suppose...Some are probably happy with it and doing all the quests/fishing...etc

Enjoy lol !