Remove the low population bonus from pvp RIGHT NOW

FluffWit

Prime time Saturday night. AD has been pop locked for 6 hours. They have a queue. There is no reason whatsoever for them to be getting this.

We have been complaining about this for what? A year? 2 years?

Until you are capable of fixing it low pop bonus has to go.

These are supposed to be competitive month long campaigns. You are ruining it- and sucking the fun out of the game, by continuing to allow this.

Note that I'm not mad at Aldmeri players in my server and I'm not accusing them of cheating. I'm mad at Zenimax for doing NOTHING to fix this and allowing our campaigns to be ruined for years.

EF321

Low pop should be for player AP gain, not free alliance score.

IronWooshu

I just made a post about this, glad you showed some proof.. AD does this all the time.

Arunei

IronWooshu wrote: »

I just made a post about this, glad you showed some proof.. AD does this all the time.

Except you're outright accusing people, which the screenshot does nothing to prove. It only shows a busted mechanic. I have a really hard time believing that enough AD players coordinate en masse to go into delves to try and manipulate the low pop bonus. And if it's really so easy I also have a hard time believing the other Alliances aren't doing it as well.

N00BxV1

FluffWit wrote: »

(...) pop locked for 6 hours. (...)

Pop, Lock & Drop It

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEYMaSoXQUM

Sorry, had to be done... carry on.

Edit:
FWIW I was in Cyro the other day on PC/NA and some people were talking about this in zone chat. It being PVP people gonna find ways to get an advantage.

Kwoung

Arunei wrote: »

IronWooshu wrote: »

I just made a post about this, glad you showed some proof.. AD does this all the time.

Except you're outright accusing people, which the screenshot does nothing to prove. It only shows a busted mechanic. I have a really hard time believing that enough AD players coordinate en masse to go into delves to try and manipulate the low pop bonus. And if it's really so easy I also have a hard time believing the other Alliances aren't doing it as well.

Why is it hard to believe? To get a low pop bonus, your faction has to have low pop at "just the right time". It is literally impossible to be pop locked for 6 hours and still have the bonus unless you didn't have the population in Cyrodiil when the evaluation was calculated. Which would be incredibly unlikely to happen randomly when your faction is pop locked, unless there was manipulation happening.

FYI, with the new lower populations, it doesn't take that many people coordinating to make this happen. Back when there was 500 players per faction it was impossible, now that there is only 100 or less players per faction allowed, entirely possible and can probably be accomplished by a single guild.

FluffWit

I really don't want this to derail into argue about who's doing what on the player side. It just gets into a big argument, mud gets slung and they have an excuse to shut the topic and do nothing.

I want to focus on who's responsible- Zenimax, and force them to actually do something.

And when I say "Do something" I don't mean thank us for our patience and tell us they'll look into. We've been patient, it's been years, nothing has been done.

I mean remove this entire largely unnecessary mechanic from the game until it can be implemented in a fair way.

IronWooshu

Arunei wrote: »

IronWooshu wrote: »

I just made a post about this, glad you showed some proof.. AD does this all the time.

Except you're outright accusing people, which the screenshot does nothing to prove. It only shows a busted mechanic. I have a really hard time believing that enough AD players coordinate en masse to go into delves to try and manipulate the low pop bonus. And if it's really so easy I also have a hard time believing the other Alliances aren't doing it as well.

They are doing it, AD has been doing it every campaign but this campaign they are egregiously doing it.

Whatever for a win I guess..

Pink_E_808

IronWooshu wrote: »

Arunei wrote: »

IronWooshu wrote: »

I just made a post about this, glad you showed some proof.. AD does this all the time.

Except you're outright accusing people, which the screenshot does nothing to prove. It only shows a busted mechanic. I have a really hard time believing that enough AD players coordinate en masse to go into delves to try and manipulate the low pop bonus. And if it's really so easy I also have a hard time believing the other Alliances aren't doing it as well.

They are doing it, AD has been doing it every campaign but this campaign they are egregiously doing it.

Whatever for a win I guess..

AD player here who practically lives in GH and was in Cyrodiil most of the day. If Fluff posted this soon after taking the screenshot, well, we had a 50+ que. No one is leaving on purpose to get low pop bonus, especially at the risk of an hour or longer wait to get back in. We have wondered ourselves in zc how we have it in pop locked campaigns. We also questioned it some months ago when it seemed like DC was always getting it. Something isn't right and hasn't been for quite a while now.

IronWooshu

Pink_E_808 wrote: »

IronWooshu wrote: »

Arunei wrote: »

IronWooshu wrote: »

I just made a post about this, glad you showed some proof.. AD does this all the time.

Except you're outright accusing people, which the screenshot does nothing to prove. It only shows a busted mechanic. I have a really hard time believing that enough AD players coordinate en masse to go into delves to try and manipulate the low pop bonus. And if it's really so easy I also have a hard time believing the other Alliances aren't doing it as well.

They are doing it, AD has been doing it every campaign but this campaign they are egregiously doing it.

Whatever for a win I guess..

AD player here who practically lives in GH and was in Cyrodiil most of the day. If Fluff posted this soon after taking the screenshot, well, we had a 50+ que. No one is leaving on purpose to get low pop bonus, especially at the risk of an hour or longer wait to get back in. We have wondered ourselves in zc how we have it in pop locked campaigns. We also questioned it some months ago when it seemed like DC was always getting it. Something isn't right and hasn't been for quite a while now.

When in a delve you don't got towards the Cyrodiil player count.

Call_of_Red_Mountain

I can confirm. Something wrong with this system. I think people learned how to cheat it. And recently I noticed that even with 1 or 2 bars AD with low pop bonus. When DC with 0 bars sometimes, no bonus.
EP always 2-3 bars, no bonus.

xclassgaming

"RIGHT NOW!"

Pink_E_808

IronWooshu wrote: »

When in a delve you don't got towards the Cyrodiil player count.

I am aware of that, but thank you for explaining in case someone else isn't. While I don't think delve exploiting happens as often as you seem to think it does, I can't say for sure that it doesn't, but that's not the point of OP's post. I also digressed somewhat in my other comment, so let's move on, shall we? After seeing some chatter about the buggy bonus in one of my guilds chats back in September, I took screenshots of DC with the low pop bonus. They had two bars and AD had one and the exact same accusations were being cast at DC. 40 minutes later, bars are the same, but DC and AD BOTH had the bonus. All three alliances accuse the others of cheating/exploiting/working together, but this seems like a bug, does it not? In my 6 years of PvP, that's the only time I've seen two alliances with the bonus.

Arunei

@Kwoung @IronWooshu
Okay but you guys are just making accusations with no proof, again. You're taking what someone provided as proof only that there's a problem with the mechanic and using it for your narrative. And have we ever actually been told what the population numbers are? All I've ever known is that we've been told they were lowered.

How about instead of "they're doing it just trust me I know 100%" you provide some actual proof of it. And no, a single screenshot like OP's isn't proof of manipulation, it again only shows that there's a problem with the low pop bonus mechanic. And instead of accusing other players of cheating or manipulation, you can just do what OP has, which is tell ZOS (again) that it needs to be addressed.

Perhaps with the rework of base code that supposed to start this year, this is something that will get fixed. Blame the game, not the players, especially if you have no evidence of what you're blaming them for.

TiberX

Played a bit pvp today on pc eu alliance locked campaign. 1 lign pact poplocked dc and no low pop bonus. It works bad, its strange and should be removed.

FluffWit

Didnt expect a response to this on the weekend but it's now Monday.

Kevin? Gina? Anyone?

This kinda matters.

SeaGtGruff

Kwoung wrote: »

Arunei wrote: »

IronWooshu wrote: »

I just made a post about this, glad you showed some proof.. AD does this all the time.

Except you're outright accusing people, which the screenshot does nothing to prove. It only shows a busted mechanic. I have a really hard time believing that enough AD players coordinate en masse to go into delves to try and manipulate the low pop bonus. And if it's really so easy I also have a hard time believing the other Alliances aren't doing it as well.

Why is it hard to believe? To get a low pop bonus, your faction has to have low pop at "just the right time". It is literally impossible to be pop locked for 6 hours and still have the bonus unless you didn't have the population in Cyrodiil when the evaluation was calculated. Which would be incredibly unlikely to happen randomly when your faction is pop locked, unless there was manipulation happening.

FYI, with the new lower populations, it doesn't take that many people coordinating to make this happen. Back when there was 500 players per faction it was impossible, now that there is only 100 or less players per faction allowed, entirely possible and can probably be accomplished by a single guild.

I don't think there'd even need to be any Grand Coordination of Everyone in the Alliance, just enough players who have learned to pay attention to when the calculation is about to be made so they can go into a delve on their own. The arguments about why would anyone do that if it meant they'd have to wait in a long queue to get back out of the delve sound reasonable, but for most of the players there should be no trouble getting back into Cyrodiil proper because the campaign wouldn't be pop-locked for their alliance anymore-- it would just be a certain number of stragglers who got stuck in a queue because they didn't make it back out before their alliance got pop-locked again.

However, I don't think it's an AD thing, because it seems to me that each alliance accuses the other two of doing it. I've never been to Cyrodiil on any of my AD characters, and have only been there once or twice on one of my EP characters-- and that was a few years ago-- so I don't know what AD and EP are saying in Cyrodiil zone chat, but I see DC complain about both AD and EP in zone chat, and see AD or EP players complain about DC in the forum (and maybe sometimes in guild chat), so it's the sort of thing that each side apparently believes the other two sides are doing.

Aside from removing the low-pop bonus entirely (which I'm ambivalent about, since I rarely PvP), I'm not sure what ZOS could do about it. I certainly hope they wouldn't institute some kind of temporary ban against players who enter a delve just before the low-pop calculation and exit just after, because whenever I do go to Cyrodiil it's usually to do daily PvE town quests, some of which involve going into a delve, and I'd be pretty upset if I got temp-banned because I just happened to enter and exit a delve at "the wrong times."

Vevvev

I made this on 10/16/2021 as a meme on my guild's discord server. Went through and cut out the curse words and names, but yeah... this has been a thing for a while now.

Psilent

DC and EP must be capping AD castles when they are at low population.

If a faction is at 1 bar and your at 3 bars or locked. Don’t attack them, attack the other faction or you’ll give them a low pop bonus when they log in.

Pretty simple rule. It’s to discourage “Night capping”.

MEBengalsFan2001

FluffWit wrote: »

Prime time Saturday night. AD has been pop locked for 6 hours. They have a queue. There is no reason whatsoever for them to be getting this.

We have been complaining about this for what? A year? 2 years?

Until you are capable of fixing it low pop bonus has to go.

These are supposed to be competitive month long campaigns. You are ruining it- and sucking the fun out of the game, by continuing to allow this.

Note that I'm not mad at Aldmeri players in my server and I'm not accusing them of cheating. I'm mad at Zenimax for doing NOTHING to fix this and allowing our campaigns to be ruined for years.

That bonus only applies during evaluation and I have not seen the low population bonus be applied during evaluation. Even in your photo there is 25 minutes until evaluation.

SkaraMinoc

I just don't care about the score at all tbh. Hopefully ZOS improves the rewards at some point. Same applies to battlegrounds.

biminirwb17_ESO

Given that population is calculated on the number of people entering Cyrodiil going to a delve or log offs at eval would actually increase that factions pop count not lower it.

Feaky

Its so broken and most likely being exploited. Played tonight on GH for 3-4 hours and all 3 factions were pop locked. AD had low pop bonus nearly the entire time. At one point 70 of them were running around the map with the hammer. What a joke!!

Kill low pop bonus please.

katanagirl1

biminirwb17_ESO wrote: »

Given that population is calculated on the number of people entering Cyrodiil going to a delve or log offs at eval would actually increase that factions pop count not lower it.

No, going into a delve removes the player from the bar count in Cyrodiil. That is a separate instance outside of Cyrodiil. How would logging off increase the player count?

blxdes

Proof of issue with low-pop bonus

maxjapank

FluffWit wrote: »

These are supposed to be competitive month long campaigns. You are ruining it- and sucking the fun out of the game, by continuing to allow this.

Lol. This says it perfectly. Especially when EP has continuously crowned Emp and taken every scroll during off-peak hours while both AD and DC are one bar.

To be fair, it’s not EPs fault. It’s one group that has been repeatedly changing factions each campaign. They did it when they were on AD. They did it when they were on DC. They are doing it now on EP. You all know who they are. Listened to a streamer talk about it the other day, too. No one likes it.

jwarren68

Yep. Everyone in AD is in voice comms with each other

Minnesinger

Kwoung wrote: »

Arunei wrote: »

IronWooshu wrote: »

I just made a post about this, glad you showed some proof.. AD does this all the time.

Except you're outright accusing people, which the screenshot does nothing to prove. It only shows a busted mechanic. I have a really hard time believing that enough AD players coordinate en masse to go into delves to try and manipulate the low pop bonus. And if it's really so easy I also have a hard time believing the other Alliances aren't doing it as well.

Why is it hard to believe? To get a low pop bonus, your faction has to have low pop at "just the right time". It is literally impossible to be pop locked for 6 hours and still have the bonus unless you didn't have the population in Cyrodiil when the evaluation was calculated. Which would be incredibly unlikely to happen randomly when your faction is pop locked, unless there was manipulation happening.

FYI, with the new lower populations, it doesn't take that many people coordinating to make this happen. Back when there was 500 players per faction it was impossible, now that there is only 100 or less players per faction allowed, entirely possible and can probably be accomplished by a single guild.

Chill dude! You just throw accusations but can show no proof which backs your claims. Take a breath and remember you are playing an online game.

Jaraal

FluffWit wrote: »

Prime time Saturday night. AD has been pop locked for 6 hours. They have a queue. There is no reason whatsoever for them to be getting this.

Does console have different campaign timers than PC? Ours is almost over, you have 23 days left.

SimonThesis

Its been bugged for years, last night two poplocked faction had low pop. In the past EP would often get low pop while pop locked and everyone blamed their puglord A*** for zerging people into delves. In reality its just another thing thats broken.

Kwoung

Minnesinger wrote: »

Kwoung wrote: »

Arunei wrote: »

IronWooshu wrote: »

I just made a post about this, glad you showed some proof.. AD does this all the time.

Except you're outright accusing people, which the screenshot does nothing to prove. It only shows a busted mechanic. I have a really hard time believing that enough AD players coordinate en masse to go into delves to try and manipulate the low pop bonus. And if it's really so easy I also have a hard time believing the other Alliances aren't doing it as well.

Why is it hard to believe? To get a low pop bonus, your faction has to have low pop at "just the right time". It is literally impossible to be pop locked for 6 hours and still have the bonus unless you didn't have the population in Cyrodiil when the evaluation was calculated. Which would be incredibly unlikely to happen randomly when your faction is pop locked, unless there was manipulation happening.

FYI, with the new lower populations, it doesn't take that many people coordinating to make this happen. Back when there was 500 players per faction it was impossible, now that there is only 100 or less players per faction allowed, entirely possible and can probably be accomplished by a single guild.

Chill dude! You just throw accusations but can show no proof which backs your claims. Take a breath and remember you are playing an online game.

I am more than chill, did I even sound excited? There has also been plenty of "proof" posted by others. Anyways, AD was doing it all day yesterday while all 3 factions were pop-locked all day long from 9am-1am, EP being the only one that dropped to 3 bars around 11pm last night (and never got the bonus).. It's was cool though, since AD used their bonus to close a decent lead, DC got fed up of their cheating and banded together to show them how we felt about it... this was the result when I logged out at 1am last night, both AD & DC still being pop-locked. AD went from being 9 points behind to 400 behind, so it kinda backfired on them: