PC NA Greyhost (Faction Stacking) will see the death of PvP this year if nothing is done

Blackrim

Currently, the map is owned by the Ebonheart Pact faction with a lead of 10,000 points. Among prominent communities, there is talk of Cyrodiil going very south because of this. There must be some new artifact or benefit to prevent faction stacking. Many talented players all decided to stack up on the Ebonheart Pact side and it is very obvious the campaign lacks any form of competition. Zenimax, I fully believe you should fix Cyrodiil's balance or create new campaign rules to preserve the health of your game.

geonsocal

we've been fortunate on playstation NA/EU to have competitive alliance scores most of the time last year or so in gray host...

it would be nice though to see game mechanics introduced which encourage more alliance balance...

Izanagi.Xiiib16_ESO

Blackrim wrote: »

Currently, the map is owned by the Ebonheart Pact faction with a lead of 10,000 points. Among prominent communities, there is talk of Cyrodiil going very south because of this. There must be some new artifact or benefit to prevent faction stacking. Many talented players all decided to stack up on the Ebonheart Pact side and it is very obvious the campaign lacks any form of competition. Zenimax, I fully believe you should fix Cyrodiil's balance or create new campaign rules to preserve the health of your game.

Welcome to the state of gameplay for EU for the past 6 years lol

Twohothardware

geonsocal wrote: »

we've been fortunate on playstation NA/EU to have competitive alliance scores most of the time last year or so in gray host...

it would be nice though to see game mechanics introduced which encourage more alliance balance...

It's midnight CST on PlayStation NA and even though it's the start of a new campaign EP has 3 bars and 100% of the map. I think everyone on AD and DC has just logged off for the night.

Alliance lock clearly doesn't do anything to help balance player population in Cyrodiil and should just be removed so you're not prevented from playing on your other characters if one side has too many players.

fluffybunny

I mean yeah but that’s what DC did for several campaigns. Do you just not remember that? I remember because I was DC lol. We would zerg the entire map blue until there were no fights left. One of the main dude’s coordinating this had his little melt down and switched over to EP after a ton of DC left to join EP because he kept zerging everything in sight. But remember that a lot of people switched to DC years ago from EP and AD too. There was a massive shift and that’s why this happened. Imho DC got way too used to depending on zerging and not pvping and you can’t win a campaign by only zerging all the time. So ZOS can’t really do anything about it, if they put a cap on how many people could be in x camp, then we would see even more people leaving ESO. As dead as pvp is right now, I literally cannot imagine the catastrophic effect limiting who can be in what camp would have.

Theignson

Blackrim wrote: »

Currently, the map is owned by the Ebonheart Pact faction with a lead of 10,000 points. Among prominent communities, there is talk of Cyrodiil going very south because of this. There must be some new artifact or benefit to prevent faction stacking. Many talented players all decided to stack up on the Ebonheart Pact side and it is very obvious the campaign lacks any form of competition. Zenimax, I fully believe you should fix Cyrodiil's balance or create new campaign rules to preserve the health of your game.

EP has won something like 2 campaigns in the last 2 years. Before this month, most of the time in the last 2 years it has been DC zerging and winning by 5 figures.
Still, if you put aside which faction is zerging and which faction is getting zerged, the basic issue is true: the campaigns tend to be lopsided, and there are no penalties for zerging the map. The trifaction structure guarantees that most of the time, someone is being double teamed. If you log on, and your faction has 1 bar and is being double teamed by the other 2 poplocked factions, again there is little you can do.
It is hard to propose any basic fix: eg, you could imagine trying to make it so each faction always has the same number of players, but it is easier to say than to do. No one has ever figured out how to make Cyrodil equitable. So, it remains a free for all.

Udrath

They should add 3 more factions lol
But really all of cyrodiil needs a rework that’s never coming

chessalavakia_ESO

Theignson wrote: »

Blackrim wrote: »

Currently, the map is owned by the Ebonheart Pact faction with a lead of 10,000 points. Among prominent communities, there is talk of Cyrodiil going very south because of this. There must be some new artifact or benefit to prevent faction stacking. Many talented players all decided to stack up on the Ebonheart Pact side and it is very obvious the campaign lacks any form of competition. Zenimax, I fully believe you should fix Cyrodiil's balance or create new campaign rules to preserve the health of your game.

EP has won something like 2 campaigns in the last 2 years. Before this month, most of the time in the last 2 years it has been DC zerging and winning by 5 figures.
Still, if you put aside which faction is zerging and which faction is getting zerged, the basic issue is true: the campaigns tend to be lopsided, and there are no penalties for zerging the map. The trifaction structure guarantees that most of the time, someone is being double teamed. If you log on, and your faction has 1 bar and is being double teamed by the other 2 poplocked factions, again there is little you can do.
It is hard to propose any basic fix: eg, you could imagine trying to make it so each faction always has the same number of players, but it is easier to say than to do. No one has ever figured out how to make Cyrodil equitable. So, it remains a free for all.

My impression is that it's working as designed.

Having more scrolls is designed to increase your resistance and damage.

Having more keeps is designed to increase experience, alliance points, gold, and critical chance.

Having an Emperor is design to increases your health.

The AP rewards for actions generally go to players the successfully do things and not to those that fail.

The daily quests again have their objectives designed to be far easier to do if your faction is in an advantageous position.

If your primary goal changes towards having more even engagements, you would likely want to shift the incentives in the design.

Brakkish

There's no real incentive for ZOS to balance it while faction changing remains a paid option within the Crown Store.
Not that I'm against it; these sorts of "conveniences" are the things that pay their bills and keep the lights on. Just stating a fact of the matter.

SimonThesis

It would be nice if they rethought low pop bonus to better help the underdogs and to encourage more on their faction at the time to log on.

Oblivion_Protocol

Meh. PvP will be fine. There have been naysayers predicting its death for years now. Besides, EP rolling one campaign isn’t going to kill an entire game mode, especially when DC and AD will attempt the same thing.

Ostonoha

It will never happen but I wish they would allow players that want to play the low pop faction the ability to do so without having to wait 30 days and spending crowns/cash on each character. A mercenary faction if you would. Can put in all the safeguards you want like no picking up of scrolls as one of them. Have to be actively earning AP so they are not clogging up the que.

acastanza_ESO

chessalavakia_ESO wrote: »

Theignson wrote: »

Blackrim wrote: »

Currently, the map is owned by the Ebonheart Pact faction with a lead of 10,000 points. Among prominent communities, there is talk of Cyrodiil going very south because of this. There must be some new artifact or benefit to prevent faction stacking. Many talented players all decided to stack up on the Ebonheart Pact side and it is very obvious the campaign lacks any form of competition. Zenimax, I fully believe you should fix Cyrodiil's balance or create new campaign rules to preserve the health of your game.

EP has won something like 2 campaigns in the last 2 years. Before this month, most of the time in the last 2 years it has been DC zerging and winning by 5 figures.
Still, if you put aside which faction is zerging and which faction is getting zerged, the basic issue is true: the campaigns tend to be lopsided, and there are no penalties for zerging the map. The trifaction structure guarantees that most of the time, someone is being double teamed. If you log on, and your faction has 1 bar and is being double teamed by the other 2 poplocked factions, again there is little you can do.
It is hard to propose any basic fix: eg, you could imagine trying to make it so each faction always has the same number of players, but it is easier to say than to do. No one has ever figured out how to make Cyrodil equitable. So, it remains a free for all.

My impression is that it's working as designed.

Having more scrolls is designed to increase your resistance and damage.

Having more keeps is designed to increase experience, alliance points, gold, and critical chance.

Having an Emperor is design to increases your health.

The AP rewards for actions generally go to players the successfully do things and not to those that fail.

The daily quests again have their objectives designed to be far easier to do if your faction is in an advantageous position.

If your primary goal changes towards having more even engagements, you would likely want to shift the incentives in the design.

Honestly this is one of the biggest problems with the design of Cyrodiil. Scoring and power are perfectly positively correlated. This is the exact opposite of how it should have been designed.
One major positive change would be with the scrolls. Owning an enemy faction's Elder Scrolls should be a debuff not a buff if they're going to be a massive increase to the score.

And instead of a health buff for the faction that has emp, turn it into a "Resistance" bonus for factions that don't (either health or actual resistances).

You shouldn't be at your strongest when you're holding all the emp keeps either, at that point it would make logical sense that your faction is overextended, that should have some detriment, like, scaling down the benefit of resource upgrades with the more keeps you own.

Literally anything to make it slightly easier for the non-dominant factions to push back.

DizzyMac

Blackrim wrote: »

Currently, the map is owned by the Ebonheart Pact faction with a lead of 10,000 points. Among prominent communities, there is talk of Cyrodiil going very south because of this. There must be some new artifact or benefit to prevent faction stacking. Many talented players all decided to stack up on the Ebonheart Pact side and it is very obvious the campaign lacks any form of competition. Zenimax, I fully believe you should fix Cyrodiil's balance or create new campaign rules to preserve the health of your game.

So DC not winning by 5 figures every month means the end of cyrodiil?