PVP Low Pop

DaisyRay

So, while this may be the wrong place for this, I was curious what everyone thought of low pop.  In comparison to many others, I am still new to ESO and even newer to PVP. So that's probably why I don't understand the reason for low pop's existence. To me, it just seems like another way to screw over pvpers who work hard to earn faction points. I can't express how irritated I get when I see my faction working their rears off to get points and then another faction wins the camp due to low pop. Why do we reward teams for achieving the bare minimum? I'm not sure; perhaps someone can explain it to me.

xDeusEJRx

DaisyRay wrote: »

So, while this may be the wrong place for this, I was curious what everyone thought of low pop.  In comparison to many others, I am still new to ESO and even newer to PVP. So that's probably why I don't understand the reason for low pop's existence. To me, it just seems like another way to screw over pvpers who work hard to earn faction points. I can't express how irritated I get when I see my faction working their rears off to get points and then another faction wins the camp due to low pop. Why do we reward teams for achieving the bare minimum? I'm not sure; perhaps someone can explain it to me.

I think the point of low pop is so no faction can blow every other faction away. Let's say one faction has high population all the time, every day, and every other faction can get 1 bar maximum. Chances are they won't be able to make those points themselves because higher number player counts is better than skill (in most scenarios that is). Despite how skilled those people may be, they probably will not be pushing on the map or earning many points at all, which in that case people will feel "Well I can't play any pvp because there's too many of this faction, i'll log off or play somewhere else".

Low pop is supposedly meant to help those struggling factions who can't realistically prop themselves up due to a massive disadvantage numberwise. At least supposedly that's how it's meant to work, sometimes I question whether the system is completely broken/janky at times. The point is to encourage people to PVP, because if I know I have no chance to win, why should I play in your unfair game? Essentially what that is. I've seen people in my factions zone chat express this same mentality, they won't even attempt to fight a 35 vs 5 situation because it's almost always gonna be won by the team with more people.

DaisyRay

Okay, I admit that makes sense in some ways. I've also logged out of pvp when there weren't enough people to reclaim things. However, I've seen factions with 20+ players online and still getting low pop. Today, for example, I was in pvp and a yellow zerg destroyed us (it was still fun), but they were also getting low pop. It appears that ESO hasn't set a specific number, so it ends up just being whoever has less. Even if that is like five less than the other factions. This is why I think it should either be fixed or removed. Right now it just gives factions an unfair advantage.

darvaria

Instead of a bonus, just cap populations. Make players wait in a que if they are stacking a highly populated faction. Right now, AD just waits to night cap. The best you can do for your faction is go do something else, let them take the keeps and scrolls. No one to fight, but they seem to come for the PVDoor. Just let them cap, give them no fights and try when it's at least 2 bars of EP and DC to 3 bars of AD.

It's broken when the best thing you can do for your faction is to leave so they get the low pop bonus.

OR they could buff players stats, percentage wise to population. Wow did that with what they called tenacity in Wintergrasp.

geonsocal

the low pop bonus thing isn't tied to the current pop, it's based off of the previous pops from a time span of 3 hours or so i think...

honestly, no one knows what's really going on under the hood when it comes to cyrodiil, other than we've all been stuck in combat for years and years now...

the low pop bonus is like watching the hammer spawn to the alliance leading the campaign, eval period, has most of the map gated, all the scrolls, emperor - it just doesn't matter...bad logic to the rulesets, coupled with poor game performance...

LarsS

Six year ago, we were a group of people (both solo, small scale and raid, from many guilds, both NA and EU) who were in contact with ZOS and asked them to change the campaign point system among other things. Unfortunately the only thing that came out of that was that the time for underpop bonus to kick in, was reduced from 24 hours to 1 hour. Possibly one can say that the hammer also was a result of that meeting.

Our main request though was to weight the campaign points recived with the number of people online. That is if a server is at 10% of max pop you get only 10% of the campaign points. This could have been combined with other measures to balance the game when a faction is underpopulated. Unfortunately they did not listen to us.

RDMyers65b14_ESO

Supposedly, it's fixed in the chapter drop according to the pts patch notes.

geonsocal

that would be awesome to see this make it "live":
General
Fixed an issue that caused the Cyrodiil campaign low population bonus to be unreliable, which also affected the populations displayed in the Campaign selection menu and caused them to all display as low.

jerj6925

Scrap low population bonus and implement floating population cap for all 3 based on the faction with lowest population.