Any idea on how to fix nightcapping without ruining the experience for others?

DaisyRay

GooGa592 wrote: »

DaisyRay wrote: »

Oblivion_Protocol wrote: »

I’ve definitely seen AD fighting hard to push the map against both DC and EP. But I’ve also seen them collapse, lose multiple keeps, and get pushed down to like four keeps; yet they maintain their position thanks to low pop bonus.

To get to where we are in points and stay we would need consecutive low pops, which is not the case. I agree, we do get low pop sometimes but so does DC because it usually comes in the morning when the map is all red. However, it is not reliable because it often leaves right before the eval. There are also times when DC gets it and AD does not and sometimes the other way. Low pop overall needs to be revamped, but that will likely never happen. I just think it's funny people are downplaying all the work AD has been putting in by saying they are only beating DC because of low pop. I like all the factions personally, and I think they are all doing great. DC just doesn't have the overwhelming numbers that they used to have unless a ball group gets on.

Oblivion_Protocol wrote: »

As to the main point of this thread, there’s really no way to resolve “night capping” because it’s not night for everyone all at once. What’s 2:00 in the morning for someone on the West Coast could be 8:00 for someone on the East Coast. Any solution I could think of would be subject to manipulation and exploit, which would lead to even more problems.

I agree, I can't see any way to fix what we call nightcapping and they call primetime. I did like the idea of an Asian server, but as someone mentioned not everyone would move over and it might not be enough people to sustain pvp. It's not a real problem though, I was just curious on what other people thought.

Today is the first day in months that AD did not get low pop bonus during the Japan hours of 22:00-24:00. Probably because one of the Japanese guilds did not log on today.

If it's on japan hours, which would be AM, then they get low pop because they are low pop. I don't know what DC is looking like at that hour, but I assume they are also getting low pop. I can't say for sure, I don't play the game at that time of the day usually. I can only speak for what I see personally, so perhaps AD does have low pop at 3am in the morning.

Holycannoli

Oblivion_Protocol wrote: »

As to the main point of this thread, there’s really no way to resolve “night capping” because it’s not night for everyone all at once. What’s 2:00 in the morning for someone on the West Coast could be 8:00 for someone on the East Coast. Any solution I could think of would be subject to manipulation and exploit, which would lead to even more problems.

If it's 2 AM west coast it's 5 AM east coast. Not enough of a time difference in NA to make a difference in population.

I still stand by halving points earned toward score halved when an alliance has a population advantage. It too is exploitable (what isn't?) but it's better than doing nothing. Victory is determined by which alliance has the nightcapping group and that should not be.

Udrath

Good solution would to make tri-keeps spawn insanely tough NPC’s that can one shot, lots of health, heal nearby players and make it almost impossible to steal scrolls. They only despawn when a faction have 3 bars or locked. And the scrolls can’t be stolen until they’re cleared. A least then it would be a time sink and give them challenge to PVEdoor off hours.

LunaFlora

"primetime" is different for people anywhere.
and not everyone who plays eso lives in europe or the americas so you can't base "primetime" on the daytime of those areas.

but "primetime" is different even in the same timezone as people have different schedules.


you can't fix "night capping".

MidniteOwl1913

Your "night capping" is my "this is the time I have to play".

Different time zones, different life schedules.

VadimAleks

AP and CP coefficients, depending on the number of people online. If the Pact sleeping (because they have to work in the morning) and there are 3 people online, then the schoolchildren from AD receive only 3% for their “heroic” captures of empty castles.

MISTFORMBZZZ

DaisyRay wrote: »

Hih!

I understand there's already a discussion regarding PC NA Greyhost, where the Ebonheart Pact (EP) seems to have a massive point advantage over the other two factions. This appears to be due to the timing of when larger groups and guilds from EP are active, which is unfortunately the same time when most players on Greyhost have logged off. Initially, I thought this was done intentionally, but after chatting with others it seems to be a result of time zone differences. Many of these EP zergs are from Japan, creating a huge imbalance in pop.

So, is there a way to fix this issue without negatively impacting those who play in the Japan time zone? One idea I considered was to make it so that both DC and AD automatically receive low pop during this time. However, if they don't have any keeps or scrolls, this probably will not fix the problem.

I'm not really mad at it, because every faction zergs and takes everything when they can. It's just unfortunate for us that when EP does it, the majority of AD and DC aren't on to put up much of a defense. This isn't an attack on EP either, most of the players there are actually really nice and they are only doing what they should do. AD and DC would do the same if in their position.

I personally don't care about winning because we don't really get any prizes from it, but it often makes people leave pvp because try as they might, there is no defense against that. Some people even end up leaving the faction for an easy win, which makes the numbers per faction even more imbalanced.

So I'm just curious if anyone has ideas on how to fix this without messing up for one side or all sides.

merge the servers, so there is no nightcapping cuz the server is always full.

Required bigger population cap and stable servers.

So both out of hands of us players and on the hand of zos.

RebornV3x

Take Plantside 2
1.Factions that are underpop get bonuses for playing as the underdog faction for ESO this would include extra AP by 5 to 10% more rewards of the worthy, gold gain etc
2. Dynamic pop queues so there wouldn't be any imbalances in pop for example if DC has 15 Players and AD has 15 players EP could have no more than 20 players on at one time until more people queued for the other factions tho I don't know how this would really work with 3 factions

finehair

RebornV3x wrote: »

Take Plantside 2
1.Factions that are underpop get bonuses for playing as the underdog faction for ESO this would include extra AP by 5 to 10% more rewards of the worthy, gold gain etc
2. Dynamic pop queues so there wouldn't be any imbalances in pop for example if DC has 15 Players and AD has 15 players EP could have no more than 20 players on at one time until more people queued for the other factions tho I don't know how this would really work with 3 factions

They need to fix the underpop bonus as well for that to happen also. Currently it's not clear which alliance is getting low population bonus. Because while both having 1 bars, DC had bonus almost full day while EP being stomped by 3 bars ad to gates yesterday. And as far as I saw when playing, there weren't a big difference of players on both sides physically as well.

reazea

finehair wrote: »

RebornV3x wrote: »

Take Plantside 2
1.Factions that are underpop get bonuses for playing as the underdog faction for ESO this would include extra AP by 5 to 10% more rewards of the worthy, gold gain etc
2. Dynamic pop queues so there wouldn't be any imbalances in pop for example if DC has 15 Players and AD has 15 players EP could have no more than 20 players on at one time until more people queued for the other factions tho I don't know how this would really work with 3 factions

They need to fix the underpop bonus as well for that to happen also. Currently it's not clear which alliance is getting low population bonus. Because while both having 1 bars, DC had bonus almost full day while EP being stomped by 3 bars ad to gates yesterday. And as far as I saw when playing, there weren't a big difference of players on both sides physically as well.

To me it seems like they did finally adjust the low pop algorithm. It's been a while since one of the factions moved up in the rankings based mostly on the low pop bonus alone.

So on this front I think ZOS did finally do something to fix the problem.

jerj6925

Implement a floating population cap to match the lowest populated factions. When the lowest population starts to develop a que the cap will be raised for the other two factions.

DizzyMac

its amazing that this only becomes an issue when the ranking is NOT -

1.DC
2.AD
3.EP

9 campaigns in a single year finished that way and nothing was said.
all of a sudden EP gets their act together and wins a few, then all hell breaks loose.

i dont see why people who play outside of a certain timezone should be punished.
it would be no different to pushing a controlled ping against north american players so that they match everyone else.

Karivaa

It is a part of the game and a useful strategy.

JerBearESO

Maybe just make flags flip based on population of the owned alliance, so that if they have no one logged in it takes like serious time to take their flag....

Or make guards power up based on missing population for their alliance, so that when no one is on an alliance the guards can defend decently. Maybe make boss guards show up at some point

Freilauftomate

Performance issues, bugs and negligence drove players away. Without finally fixing the game to a degree where it's considered "playable" and "competitive", this trend will continue until an empty map is not called "nightcapping" anymore, but the "normal state" of Cyrodiil.

Xbox EU and PS EU players have been struggling to find action in Cyrodiil for a while now, even at primetime. It's empty and boring. The server hardware refresh improved performance but it was many years too late. Most players already left for good. And it's not like anyone is going to fix all the bugs and exploits that are still in the game. On the contrary, every update we get new ones. Last year a maintenance broke and killed the main campaign on PS EU for 6 months. Xbox EU was the last platform to get the server hardware refresh. A lot of EU players started over on NA servers (or PC) to have some action. This might keep the NA servers a little busier for a while, but it's not going to help anyone in the long run. Same with merging servers. It's just going to delay the inevitable.

Nightcapping is not helping either. Winning or losing a campaign in this game might be completely irrelevant. But most players don't like to be zerged every time they want to take a ressource. So they leave. And might never come back. Especially new players. Without ever experiencing the awesome feeling of big glorious battles. Well organized groups like ballgroups (usually made of veteran players) might have fun taking back the map and farming enemy homekeeps with enemy scrolls in their hands, but only if an enemy alliance is zerging the map. If it's their own alliance, then they will die of boredom too.

Fighting nightcapping by breaking the game even more with some halfbaked ideas is not going to help. It's just going to end up a complete mess, like the low pop bonus.

The only solution i see would be to finally fix the bugs, fix performance, increase the max population again, increase the max group size again, give us better rewards for playing the game, and make us believe that PvP is not going to be completely dropped by the devs and investors again. Then (and only then) you can start thinking about implementing changes and new stuff.

GooGa592

The fix is to bring back population caps of, at a very minimum, to 125 players/faction. That would be a 1/3rd increase in the caps we have today, and still be a massive drop from the original player cap of 600/faction. But alas, ZOS would also have to invest in the server resources to do it.

DizzyMac

Seems DC and AD players have found 1 solution.
I have seen screenshots , in the last few days, of highly aggressive whispers from AD and DC players to EP players.

these whispers contain mostly personal attacks that are simply immature, but also say things like "this is an NA server. either play to our timeslots or get out of ESO cos we dont want you here" and "none of you are American, so GTFO of our server".

so it seems anyone who doesnt fit the server locations are now enemy #1 and should leave eso - according to some US players

Amottica

Holycannoli wrote: »

Oblivion_Protocol wrote: »

As to the main point of this thread, there’s really no way to resolve “night capping” because it’s not night for everyone all at once. What’s 2:00 in the morning for someone on the West Coast could be 8:00 for someone on the East Coast. Any solution I could think of would be subject to manipulation and exploit, which would lead to even more problems.

If it's 2 AM west coast it's 5 AM east coast. Not enough of a time difference in NA to make a difference in population.

I still stand by halving points earned toward score halved when an alliance has a population advantage. It too is exploitable (what isn't?) but it's better than doing nothing. Victory is determined by which alliance has the nightcapping group and that should not be.

Most of the campaigns live with a population imbalance all the time. It happens because Cyrodiil is not designed to be a truly competitive PvP where the score is truly meaningful.

GooGa592

Amottica wrote: »

Holycannoli wrote: »

Oblivion_Protocol wrote: »

As to the main point of this thread, there’s really no way to resolve “night capping” because it’s not night for everyone all at once. What’s 2:00 in the morning for someone on the West Coast could be 8:00 for someone on the East Coast. Any solution I could think of would be subject to manipulation and exploit, which would lead to even more problems.

If it's 2 AM west coast it's 5 AM east coast. Not enough of a time difference in NA to make a difference in population.

I still stand by halving points earned toward score halved when an alliance has a population advantage. It too is exploitable (what isn't?) but it's better than doing nothing. Victory is determined by which alliance has the nightcapping group and that should not be.

Most of the campaigns live with a population imbalance all the time. It happens because Cyrodiil is not designed to be a truly competitive PvP where the score is truly meaningful.

Except Cyrodiil is designed to be competitive and the score determines which faction wins and loses.

dcrush

DizzyMac wrote: »

Seems DC and AD players have found 1 solution.
I have seen screenshots , in the last few days, of highly aggressive whispers from AD and DC players to EP players.

these whispers contain mostly personal attacks that are simply immature, but also say things like "this is an NA server. either play to our timeslots or get out of ESO cos we dont want you here" and "none of you are American, so GTFO of our server".

so it seems anyone who doesnt fit the server locations are now enemy #1 and should leave eso - according to some US players

I find it very ironic to read this from an EP player. I’ve played all three factions and in my experience, more than any other faction, EP players on PC NA are prolific teabaggers and hate whisperers. The server’s most notorious hate whisperers (especially those who keep sending/spamming messages) are all EP.

That being said, I don’t condone the kind of messages you’re quoting here.

On the other hand, anyone contributing to situations like this is part of the problem imho:



And it works both ways - with a map like this there’s nothing left to pvp for EP either.
It’s one thing to dominate the map, it’s another to take everything and then zerg down anyone taking a resource.

JerBearESO

Implementing systems to make the game feel fair for people playing on a lower population alliance would go a looooong way. Right now, if there are less of you than them, you ARE losing everything typically. This means the average player is EXTREMELY motivated to leave when on the lower pop side, which is self perpetuated population loss.

Fix that first.... Make guards power up the less keeps you own. That makes sense. The more keeps you have the more your army is thinned out, so having less should result in your guard power being more.

Make flags take longer to flip based on low population so that the low pop alliance has more time to defend, duh.

And we likely need to solve the resurrection problem too. No one even talks about this, but if a team of 3 kill off half of a team of 20, it should not mean NOTHING simply because they all got resurrected while the 3 pulled back for a bit, just for example. There should be a time until resurrection available. What you manage to pull off in hopeless situations should be impactful, not meaningless

CrazyKitty

dcrush wrote: »

DizzyMac wrote: »

Seems DC and AD players have found 1 solution.
I have seen screenshots , in the last few days, of highly aggressive whispers from AD and DC players to EP players.

these whispers contain mostly personal attacks that are simply immature, but also say things like "this is an NA server. either play to our timeslots or get out of ESO cos we dont want you here" and "none of you are American, so GTFO of our server".

so it seems anyone who doesnt fit the server locations are now enemy #1 and should leave eso - according to some US players

I find it very ironic to read this from an EP player. I’ve played all three factions and in my experience, more than any other faction, EP players on PC NA are prolific teabaggers and hate whisperers. The server’s most notorious hate whisperers (especially those who keep sending/spamming messages) are all EP.

That being said, I don’t condone the kind of messages you’re quoting here.

On the other hand, anyone contributing to situations like this is part of the problem imho:



And it works both ways - with a map like this there’s nothing left to pvp for EP either.
It’s one thing to dominate the map, it’s another to take everything and then zerg down anyone taking a resource.

Don't worry. The DC factions are back and we can expect the exact same situation you're complaining about except the whole map will be blue instead of red....but nobody complained about this situation when DC kept the whole map blue and won nearly every campaign for 18 months straight.

merevie

Last night, an Ep player who leads the zone logged into his alternative DC account and took the hammer out to the EP faction. He then boasted about it in zone chat, which was of course immed screenshotted and landed in the Discords of most of the pvp community.

This person used to turn oils around and sabotage DC, before eventually losing their account and immed making another. When reported, that was ignored, and now he has yet another to continue the harassment.

The point is, because we've told the game owners and nothing was done already, is not to bring that person attention, but to point out that the EP faction have these types of players who will do anything to win.

The game play of everyone else, if wrecked, makes them happy, rather than look for solutions, like you'd like. There are countless Discord screenshots of EP current leaders (plural) boasting of making others 'angry' and 5 mins on any stream -it is most of their content. It makes them feel successful to do so.

EP guilds mass queue out to IC for tactical advantage -another example of the attitude in that faction -and there is the core of streamers that switched to AD to ensure EP won during the day, and are regularly watching as their old team mates/themselves take turns sieging DC keeps.

A couple of things would help balance the map at night -stop watching the EP streamers -stop paying them for emperor -and if the game owners could actually follow through with keeping these players themselves banned, instead of just the account they were on that infringed.

GooGa592

merevie wrote: »

Last night, an Ep player who leads the zone logged into his alternative DC account and took the hammer out to the EP faction. He then boasted about it in zone chat, which was of course immed screenshotted and landed in the Discords of most of the pvp community.

This person used to turn oils around and sabotage DC, before eventually losing their account and immed making another. When reported, that was ignored, and now he has yet another to continue the harassment.

The point is, because we've told the game owners and nothing was done already, is not to bring that person attention, but to point out that the EP faction have these types of players who will do anything to win.

The game play of everyone else, if wrecked, makes them happy, rather than look for solutions, like you'd like. There are countless Discord screenshots of EP current leaders (plural) boasting of making others 'angry' and 5 mins on any stream -it is most of their content. It makes them feel successful to do so.

EP guilds mass queue out to IC for tactical advantage -another example of the attitude in that faction -and there is the core of streamers that switched to AD to ensure EP won during the day, and are regularly watching as their old team mates/themselves take turns sieging DC keeps.

A couple of things would help balance the map at night -stop watching the EP streamers -stop paying them for emperor -and if the game owners could actually follow through with keeping these players themselves banned, instead of just the account they were on that infringed.

Your post reads more like you hate EP and have concocted some "theories" as to all the things that make EP bad. There is at least one person on every faction who has "theories" like these about one or both of the opposing factions, but they're rarely accurate.

DaisyRay

It's been a while since I commented and I admit I haven't fully kept up with it since the new camp started. However....

Every faction does hate whispers. I do get them the most from EP, but I know they come on every faction. I have a lot of EP and DC tell me that AD gives a lot of hate whispers and I believe it. Just because my group does not do that, there are a lot of adult babies in this game. No one faction is bad, they all have their rotten apples and their shiny ones.

Also for those saying DC does the same thing as EP, maybe in the past, but I rarely see DC taking the whole map. They do have a bigger pop in the morning, but AD has been doing a great job of getting more people and groups on to fight back. Unfortunately for EP, since they usually have all the keeps and scrolls in the morning they get grouped up on. That's just what happens when you have everything, AD and DC is going to group up on you to try and get the scrolls first.

DizzyMac

DaisyRay wrote: »

It's been a while since I commented and I admit I haven't fully kept up with it since the new camp started. However....

Every faction does hate whispers. I do get them the most from EP, but I know they come on every faction. I have a lot of EP and DC tell me that AD gives a lot of hate whispers and I believe it. Just because my group does not do that, there are a lot of adult babies in this game. No one faction is bad, they all have their rotten apples and their shiny ones.

Also for those saying DC does the same thing as EP, maybe in the past, but I rarely see DC taking the whole map. They do have a bigger pop in the morning, but AD has been doing a great job of getting more people and groups on to fight back. Unfortunately for EP, since they usually have all the keeps and scrolls in the morning they get grouped up on. That's just what happens when you have everything, AD and DC is going to group up on you to try and get the scrolls first.

The last few days have certainly been interesting. EP has been gated for the better part of 8 hours, with DC camped on their north gate and AD camped on their south gate. No one seems to be fighting except against EP tho.

dcrush

DizzyMac wrote: »

DaisyRay wrote: »

It's been a while since I commented and I admit I haven't fully kept up with it since the new camp started. However....

Every faction does hate whispers. I do get them the most from EP, but I know they come on every faction. I have a lot of EP and DC tell me that AD gives a lot of hate whispers and I believe it. Just because my group does not do that, there are a lot of adult babies in this game. No one faction is bad, they all have their rotten apples and their shiny ones.

Also for those saying DC does the same thing as EP, maybe in the past, but I rarely see DC taking the whole map. They do have a bigger pop in the morning, but AD has been doing a great job of getting more people and groups on to fight back. Unfortunately for EP, since they usually have all the keeps and scrolls in the morning they get grouped up on. That's just what happens when you have everything, AD and DC is going to group up on you to try and get the scrolls first.

The last few days have certainly been interesting. EP has been gated for the better part of 8 hours, with DC camped on their north gate and AD camped on their south gate. No one seems to be fighting except against EP tho.

Last week, I logged in and the entire map was red, save for one or two resources. I tried to get one back by myself and I am not exaggerating when I say that I got zerged down by twenty EP players. You reap what you sow, and that cycle goes on and on. One faction takes the map, then they get gated as revenge, rinse and repeat.

Soraka

DaisyRay wrote: »

It's been a while since I commented and I admit I haven't fully kept up with it since the new camp started. However....

Every faction does hate whispers. I do get them the most from EP, but I know they come on every faction. I have a lot of EP and DC tell me that AD gives a lot of hate whispers and I believe it. Just because my group does not do that, there are a lot of adult babies in this game. No one faction is bad, they all have their rotten apples and their shiny ones.

Also for those saying DC does the same thing as EP, maybe in the past, but I rarely see DC taking the whole map. They do have a bigger pop in the morning, but AD has been doing a great job of getting more people and groups on to fight back. Unfortunately for EP, since they usually have all the keeps and scrolls in the morning they get grouped up on. That's just what happens when you have everything, AD and DC is going to group up on you to try and get the scrolls first.

Yes, I agree. It's easy if you play on one faction exclusively to think that your faction is not doing x things. I could go into different players from different factions who did the same things mentioned above. I suspect I know what EP player you're talking about, and it's disappointing. However negative behaviors are not isolated to any one faction.

I tend to log on in the morning for a little bit and hit the end of the "night capping". Previous posters are right. It's boring when you log on and the entire map is already owned. It feels bad to defend with a zerg against a few players. The players who are playing at that time can't control when their available time is, though.

Then they log out and I'm now at the stage where DC and AD are mad and gate us for hours. That's also not fun and I usually leave after awhile.

I don't know what a solution to night capping would be. There have been some decent sounding suggestions. I don't know about the limiting the # of people who can queue in based on how many are there, though, 'cuz what if a bunch of people on the opposing faction log out at once. Do the remaining people on the other faction get kicked? I'm team server merge for now.

Kordai

Unfortunately night-capping tends to just concentrate players even more to that faction. For whatever reason EP has been the predominate nightcapper for years when I started out in no-cp and then came to cp. Not sure why EP specifically but when they had that initial lead people from other factions joined ep to both play with more people (as EP had more than the others) and to win. And so the lopsidedness got worse over time. Heck in GH a bit ago EP was pop-locked vs 1-2 bars ad and dc.

SaffronCitrusflower

DaisyRay wrote: »

Hih!

I understand there's already a discussion regarding PC NA Greyhost, where the Ebonheart Pact (EP) seems to have a massive point advantage over the other two factions. This appears to be due to the timing of when larger groups and guilds from EP are active, which is unfortunately the same time when most players on Greyhost have logged off. Initially, I thought this was done intentionally, but after chatting with others it seems to be a result of time zone differences. Many of these EP zergs are from Japan, creating a huge imbalance in pop.

So, is there a way to fix this issue without negatively impacting those who play in the Japan time zone? One idea I considered was to make it so that both DC and AD automatically receive low pop during this time. However, if they don't have any keeps or scrolls, this probably will not fix the problem.

I'm not really mad at it, because every faction zergs and takes everything when they can. It's just unfortunate for us that when EP does it, the majority of AD and DC aren't on to put up much of a defense. This isn't an attack on EP either, most of the players there are actually really nice and they are only doing what they should do. AD and DC would do the same if in their position.

I personally don't care about winning because we don't really get any prizes from it, but it often makes people leave pvp because try as they might, there is no defense against that. Some people even end up leaving the faction for an easy win, which makes the numbers per faction even more imbalanced.

So I'm just curious if anyone has ideas on how to fix this without messing up for one side or all sides.

I've seen you gate camping yourself many days lately, so your post is more of a "do as I say, not as I do" kind of assertion.

Gate camping EP, which is in last place by 3k points right now too by the way.