Faction pop lock with only 60-80 players per faction is too low for fair competition

EdmondDontes

It seems that the population cap for factions has been reduced to such a low number that fair competition has been compromised.

If two factions coordinate in the slightest or even just share a common goal it's impossible for the third faction to defend against the numbers. With pop caps this low it becomes impossible for a faction to defend against a tag team effort and it becomes only a matter of a short time (less than an hour) before the third faction is gated.

I understand that fewer players means less lag, but the population caps are just too low as they stand now. Population caps this low are prohibitive to balanced, fair play.

When combined with the new OP sets, Dark Convergence primarily, the overall cyrodiil experience has become decidedly less enjoyable.

NeillMcAttack

Dude, the current pop cap leads to a completely unplayable experience. So unplayable that balance and fair play don't exist as the whole "play" side of the equation is not present.

I have always said, until you have a functioning game, you will not be able to balance large scale combat.

The sets introduced should tell you that even the devs understand that large groups and numbers can not be challenged in the current Cyro situation. When you can't rely on spells, the devs have been so kind as to introduce automatic proc's that can do the job of many skills for you.

DrSlaughtr

Wait, what? They're dropping the pop lock to 80?

Jaraal

TheEndBringer wrote: »

Wait, what? They're dropping the pop lock to 80?

It's been 80 for a while.

Zabagad

Jaraal wrote: »

TheEndBringer wrote: »

Wait, what? They're dropping the pop lock to 80?

It's been 80 for a while.

How do you know?
I have never read any official word on this and so I have often thought about a kind of "census"

Gilvoth

EdmondDontes wrote: »

... I understand that fewer players means less lag ...

i was under the impression this was true,
However, if the cap is now this low, and i / we are still getting massively HIGH ping and horrible lagg then i guess that lower numbers in population is just not fixing the problem.

Zabagad wrote: »

Jaraal wrote: »

TheEndBringer wrote: »

Wait, what? They're dropping the pop lock to 80?

It's been 80 for a while.

How do you know?
I have never read any official word on this and so I have often thought about a kind of "census"

you are right,
what proof do we have of what the Population CAP is right now?

DrSlaughtr

I've not heard of this. While I've never head counted I'm pretty sure I've seen more than 80 of one alliance in a zerg.

Also I routinely q 100+ for GH. If only 80 are let it at a time, it would take forever to cycle through everyone in a queue of even half that.

EdmondDontes

Zabagad wrote: »

Jaraal wrote: »

TheEndBringer wrote: »

Wait, what? They're dropping the pop lock to 80?

It's been 80 for a while.

How do you know?
I have never read any official word on this and so I have often thought about a kind of "census"

I know because I can count to over 100 and I'm in game enough during pop lock that I can make a very accurate estimation. I'm generally in the two groups that make up 18-24 people toward pop lock. There is one other guild that also fields 18-24 at the same time. There aren't more than, at most, 20-30 solo running same time. So the pop lock is right at or about 65 per faction right now. The current per faction population cap is closer to 50 than it is to 100 right now.

We can figure this stuff out without someone telling us what's up.

DrSlaughtr

Just because you don't see more than 80 at a location doesn't mean there aren't more.

I'm confident I've seen more than 80 blue zerg across Blackreach.

EdmondDontes

TheEndBringer wrote: »

Just because you don't see more than 80 at a location doesn't mean there aren't more.

I'm confident I've seen more than 80 blue zerg across Blackreach.

Today's raid lead said he is convinced that the population cap is only 50 based on the players we can account for in the two organized groups running and the nearly complete lack of any solo players at all.

We really can figure this stuff out by doing a basic head count. We for sure can get very close to the actual cap number, and it's lower than 80 and closer to 60. Every day this week all three factions have capped out at 9am EST.

It appears the pop cap is shrinking as the weeks go by as well.

SimonThesis

What's sad is the pop caps keep getting lower and lower and performance keeps getting worse. I wish they would be transparent to everyone what the population caps per faction are.

Karm1cOne

Shouldnt be too hard to estimate the cap. Have enough people run esolog data at the same time, then compare unique user ids.

DrSlaughtr

They tell you on each campaign how many guild members are logged in. I'm only in red pvp guilds. No rainbows. GH right now shows over 200 of my fellow guild members. BR shows over 100.

🤷

Greasytengu

TheEndBringer wrote: »

They tell you on each campaign how many guild members are logged in. I'm only in red pvp guilds. No rainbows. GH right now shows over 200 of my fellow guild members. BR shows over 100.

🤷

that's for guild members homed onto that server, not actually online.

Amerises

Not sure how you don't see solo players, seems like I could spend a 1/2 hour saying LFG picking off people outside of the zerg/keep battles.

maxjapank

You will never get an accurate count of AD players. They are hiding in the bushes. Start to flag an outpost, though, and they will show up out of nowhere. Your best bet is to count the EP moving as one herd when they are poplocked. But even as I saw 50-60 following the hammer during a Oceanic prime time , I’d suddenly see another 10-20 coming late to the party, multiple times. And yet EP were still defending the other side of the map.

Amottica

NeillMcAttack wrote: »

Dude, the current pop cap leads to a completely unplayable experience. So unplayable that balance and fair play don't exist as the whole "play" side of the equation is not present.

I have always said, until you have a functioning game, you will not be able to balance large scale combat.

The sets introduced should tell you that even the devs understand that large groups and numbers can not be challenged in the current Cyro situation. When you can't rely on spells, the devs have been so kind as to introduce automatic proc's that can do the job of many skills for you.

Players that have been around since the game launched have told me the low pop cap is not the reason Cyrodiil becomes unplayable. They say the original pop cap was several times what it is now and played better. That tells me other things have changed and are the cause and lowering the pop cap is not the real solution but a hopeful bandaid.

EdmondDontes

We've been watching the population for a week now. The pop cap in cyrodiil is 50-60 players per faction right now.

Original pop cap was roughly 10x what it is now, and generally, most of the time, performance was notably better.

EdmondDontes

TheEndBringer wrote: »

They tell you on each campaign how many guild members are logged in. I'm only in red pvp guilds. No rainbows. GH right now shows over 200 of my fellow guild members. BR shows over 100.

🤷

Huh? You are looking at total number that have played in the campaign total over the campaign, not how many are logged in at one time.

Jackey

.

YandereGirlfriend

One of the players in the raid that I was in last night had their add-on count 78 unique AD in the faction-stack attacking Ash.

EdmondDontes

YandereGirlfriend wrote: »

One of the players in the raid that I was in last night had their add-on count 78 unique AD in the faction-stack attacking Ash.

Which add-on was used to give this number? Also, you didn't tell us that the game was indicating pop lock at the same time.

MalakithAlamahdi

Amottica wrote: »

NeillMcAttack wrote: »

Dude, the current pop cap leads to a completely unplayable experience. So unplayable that balance and fair play don't exist as the whole "play" side of the equation is not present.

I have always said, until you have a functioning game, you will not be able to balance large scale combat.

The sets introduced should tell you that even the devs understand that large groups and numbers can not be challenged in the current Cyro situation. When you can't rely on spells, the devs have been so kind as to introduce automatic proc's that can do the job of many skills for you.

Players that have been around since the game launched have told me the low pop cap is not the reason Cyrodiil becomes unplayable. They say the original pop cap was several times what it is now and played better. That tells me other things have changed and are the cause and lowering the pop cap is not the real solution but a hopeful bandaid.

Performance got really bad after update 1.2.3 when they introduced the lighting changes & some anticheat to the game. The performance in PvP gotten terrible since then and they never managed to fix it. The lowering of the popcap was a bandaid fix that didn't accomplish anything.

fastolfv_ESO

they lower the caps to make the que look like cyro numbers are healthy still no need for changes lol

EdmondDontes

fastolfv_ESO wrote: »

they lower the caps to make the que look like cyro numbers are healthy still no need for changes lol

And it's a misdirected effort to address lag. The only test they haven't tried and told us about publicly is providing enough server capacity to support the game in it's entirety.

Rhaegar75

I think we just don't know what the cap is..the rest is just a speculation at best

DrSlaughtr

I don't have access to a counter addon but I am confident it isn't as low as 60. I've seen arrius zerged down by DC with more than that.

My guess is it's around 80 to 100, after having thought about this for a bit.

Should it be higher? Yes. IIRC correctly wasn't Cyro originally like 2k per each alliance? I know they dropped it a few years ago but afaik it's never been revealed what it is.

The best thing they could do is force players to spread out across GH and BR. 99% of the time BR works fine even pop locked. Even when players are just there while queuing for GH.

Obviously the pop lock doesn't encourage people to make BR their home.

Let's be honest. If they financially could just throw money to fix the issues they would have.

Amottica

MalakithAlamahdi wrote: »

Amottica wrote: »

NeillMcAttack wrote: »

Dude, the current pop cap leads to a completely unplayable experience. So unplayable that balance and fair play don't exist as the whole "play" side of the equation is not present.

I have always said, until you have a functioning game, you will not be able to balance large scale combat.

The sets introduced should tell you that even the devs understand that large groups and numbers can not be challenged in the current Cyro situation. When you can't rely on spells, the devs have been so kind as to introduce automatic proc's that can do the job of many skills for you.

Players that have been around since the game launched have told me the low pop cap is not the reason Cyrodiil becomes unplayable. They say the original pop cap was several times what it is now and played better. That tells me other things have changed and are the cause and lowering the pop cap is not the real solution but a hopeful bandaid.

Performance got really bad after update 1.2.3 when they introduced the lighting changes & some anticheat to the game. The performance in PvP gotten terrible since then and they never managed to fix it. The lowering of the popcap was a bandaid fix that didn't accomplish anything.

That may be the case but I have also heard performance really crashed when checks were moved from a trusted client model to the server. I understand why they would do this but it does put more load on the server.

EdmondDontes

TheEndBringer wrote: »

I don't have access to a counter addon but I am confident it isn't as low as 60. I've seen arrius zerged down by DC with more than that.

My guess is it's around 80 to 100, after having thought about this for a bit.

...

Let's be honest. If they financially could just throw money to fix the issues they would have.

Throwing money at the problem is the solution they apparently have not tried yet.

The raid group I run with has been counting the numbers online for the faction when we are locked for a few weeks now, off and on. We are using add-ons and actual head counts to make our estimations. Granted, they are estimations, but the estimations have a very low standard deviation. Original cyro pop cap was roughly 500/faction. It's less than 100 today, and probably closer to 50 than to 100.

DrSlaughtr

EdmondDontes wrote: »

TheEndBringer wrote: »

I don't have access to a counter addon but I am confident it isn't as low as 60. I've seen arrius zerged down by DC with more than that.

My guess is it's around 80 to 100, after having thought about this for a bit.

...

Let's be honest. If they financially could just throw money to fix the issues they would have.

Throwing money at the problem is the solution they apparently have not tried yet.

The raid group I run with has been counting the numbers online for the faction when we are locked for a few weeks now, off and on. We are using add-ons and actual head counts to make our estimations. Granted, they are estimations, but the estimations have a very low standard deviation. Original cyro pop cap was roughly 500/faction. It's less than 100 today, and probably closer to 50 than to 100.

Hence why I said financially.

It's a business. They aren't going to lose the profit margin expected by investors to dump money into a physical fix that may or may not actually work.

CrashTest

maxjapank wrote: »

You will never get an accurate count of AD players. They are hiding in the bushes. Start to flag an outpost, though, and they will show up out of nowhere.

Bruh I'm still kinda new to PvP, so I don't know much yet, but I do know this 100% lol