Campaign scoring logic allows players to get massive gains during regional off hours

SkaraMinoc

Problem: Players log into a regional mega server during off hours (e.g. 1am-6am) and take the entire Cyrodiil map. They get thousands of points with almost no resistance. The low pop bonus doesn't activate when this happens and if it did, there's no resources for 2x AP since one faction has the entire map.

The best example is PC NA has out-of-region players that log in every night and PvDoor the entire map for 4-6 hours and run up the score. All of the hard work that regional players invested is not only gone but there's no chance of catching up.

To be clear, this is a campaign scoring logic issue. Anyone can play when they want from where they want.

Solutions

• Catch up mechanic so scores stay within 3000 of each other to prevent runaway factions from killing the campaign
• Penalty where less campaign score is rewarded if a faction controls more than 2/3 of the map and that faction has significantly more players currently online in Cyrodiil
• Improved low pop bonus with 2x AP rewarded so players are still incentivized to play Cyrodiil

SkaraMinoc

Less than 10 DC online while 40+ AUS/JPN EP zerg the entire map at 5am PDT. No low pop bonus given.





and the next day at 430am

SkaraMinoc

They broke 100k campaign score "for fun" in September 2023. I took a screenshot because of how ridiculous this was.

SkaraMinoc

Another reminder that this is a campaign scoring logic issue. Anyone can play when they want from where they want.

xylena_lazarow

They're also making the game unplayable for the lower populations of AD/DC who want to be able to log in during those time zones, so it's not just NA players affected. The game needs to stop rewarding this behavior.

derkaiserliche

but whats your solution? Locking cyrodiil for the hours when you sleep?

Poss

Every server is the same. EU gets the Aussies and a lot of the Asian population there’s nothing you can do

Major_Mangle

derkaiserliche wrote: »

but whats your solution? Locking cyrodiil for the hours when you sleep?

Or just have a dynamic score system based on the amount of people who´re present in said campaign. Doing objectives during primetime (and primetime is the time when the campaigns population is at its peak. No such thing as a "personal" or "timezone" specific primetime. Hours when campaign is locked/most population = primetime) should come with the highest rewards/outcome if successful. The current system essentially diminish the efforts off the people who play during primetime when it´s the most difficult to take and defend objectives.

I personally couldn´t give less about scores and outcome off campaigns, but I can 100% understand why people find it frustrating when their efforts have 0 impact. The entire "effort/reward" ration when it comes to campaigns and score heavily favours those who takes the path of least resistance, which shouldn´t be the case. I´m not saying those playing during off-hours/non-primetime shouldn´t have an impact on the campaign. But their impact shouldn´t be as equal or even more impactful (as it currently is) to those who play during primetime.

Vaqual

Seems EP got the most efficient crowd around the clock and deserves the win, as often as those players decide to run for EP.

reazea

ESO is made in the USA, but it's for sale worldwide.

The irony here is that Japan and Aussie players play with 300-400ms lag most of the time. So they must really want to be in game.

darvaria

Here are the maps from the other 2 campaigns at the time you speak of. Have you considered players in your faction prefer to PV Door the map at these times. These were both taken about 3 a.m. EST. If you are so intent on winning, why not join one of these other campaigns. I can not believe you single out Japanese and Australian players in such a way. As if you think the entire world revolves around "your" time zone.

Telel

The first thing ZOS needs to do is revamp the AP reward system. That alone incentivizes so much of the scrubbery you see in the game.

Not just nightcapping and PVdooring either. The 'looking for good fights' types who ignore their own team's plight so they can go farm easy kills on whomever has the lowest pop and or least organized players. On Gray Host there's a LOT of DC who might as well be EP at this point just based on who benefits from their 'skill'.

We also need a better way of knowing where the rest of the team is. Especially when the population bars tell us we're locked with a 60+ queue, and yet you can't get more than four people to defend a keep from yet another zerg that is dozens strong.

Finally of course is the issue with all the AFkers, chat relay bots, and worse taking up server space. Especially now that the population limits have been cut to a fraction of what they should be. Yet ZOS seems unwilling to do anything about the fact they're keeping paying customers from playing the game when they're online.

Telel keeps suggesting going to a more dynamic AP reward system. Once that factors in population, number of allies in area, and if you're pushing the team that's in first place or not. A system that rewards those who push objectives, helps their team score points, and does so without running off to whichever side gives the largest zergs.

E.G: Each keep has a pool of 30,000 AP at the start. This pool is then divided amongst ALL the people taking the keep. But each player is capped at a max of 6,000 AP. There'd also preferably be a system that rewards those who healed, sieged, and then repaired. Thus punishing those who 'leech' and or just run off to flip resources instead of helping.

The system would also need to have a degrading return on points based on location. THis would help discourage tower farmers who just keep running to the same annoying spot to farm randoms that still don't know what a heal is. If WOW can do that with XP farming it'd be easy to implement for AP gained via kills.

So as some facetious examples....

Wanna get on at 3 am with 40 people to take an empty map? Enjoy your 5 AP per person per keep. Meanwhile the 1 bar teams are getting way more per player as they flip resources behind you.

Took out one level 10 after you and your 12 man bot train ulti dumped on them? Here, have two AP for your 'effort'

Do you like sitting in stealth as others siege only to run off to do resources while 'the chumps' fix the walls and doors? Great, you get 1/10th of the O tick given to the people who stopped to repair. Possibly even zero if you never even helped fight any defenders.

Get on the 1 bar team that's in third place so you can tower farm the guys in first place who're pop locked. Get a HUGE bonus per kill. Provided you move every few minutes to a different spot.

Oh, you like maxing your K/D while ignoring your team's request to help recover the scroll that's costing your team points? Again, enjoy less and less AP as a result of your decisions

Meanwhile the people trying to play the game mode will easily pass you on the leader boards. Don't like it? Then go to imperial city or battle grounds where your play style is more useful to those game modes. Or just stop play the game mode you chose to be in.

Then comes the population thing. if ZOS refuses to give us live service whose job would be to find the AFKers, and other bots taking up space then we need some kind of heat map overlay for the map itself. SOmething a player can look at that'd tell them where the population for their team is.

For example if I get onto a server and it says it's pop locked I just have to open up my map and begin mousing over different regions. Each region would then have a little 'heat bloom' that'd indicate there were ally players there. Something like purple would indicate no players while a bright bright blue would indicate a good portion of the team is in that region.

That alone would make it easy to tell if your team is mostly AFK in delves/base or if they're just busy somewhere and can't/won't communicate in zone.

React

Telel wrote: »

Not just nightcapping and PVdooring either. The 'looking for good fights' types who ignore their own team's plight so they can go farm easy kills on whomever has the lowest pop and or least organized players. On Gray Host there's a LOT of DC who might as well be EP at this point just based on who benefits from their 'skill'.

How dare people enter the PVP zone looking for PVP! Shame on them.

darvaria

Just leave the game the way it has been for the last 10 years. It will even out.

Theignson

This has been posted 10,000 times and about equally by EP, AD, DC players over the last 10 years.

Everyone thinks only their faction is oppressed by it.

ZOS will never do anything to fix it because it is in fact unfixable.

Every time zone has a right to play. I moved to CA some years back and for a period of almost 2 years my faction was getting completely outnumbered in the time that I can play. I suffered through it, then the wheel turns, then my faction dominates...it goes on and on

SkaraMinoc

derkaiserliche wrote: »

but whats your solution? Locking cyrodiil for the hours when you sleep?

No. Cyrodiil should be open 24/7. Also, it's entirely possible that the low pop bonus can be exploited. So that's probably why it doesn't activate unless under very specific conditions.

SkaraMinoc

xylena_lazarow wrote: »

They're also making the game unplayable for the lower populations of AD/DC who want to be able to log in during those time zones, so it's not just NA players affected. The game needs to stop rewarding this behavior.

They'll send 20+ players after you for taking a mine, lumbermill, etc.

Kappachi

Jsmalls wrote: »

Kappachi wrote: »

Jsmalls wrote: »

There is a core issue here.

Clearly PvP isn't "Fun" or "Rewarding" for most players.

If a group of players would rather PvDoor than split their group up into different alliances and actually PvP (even against each others, it's fun!!) then that shows significant failure in the core of Cyrodiil.

The scoreboard and rewards from it are not significant enough to care about winning.

But this all boils down to... They abandoned Cryodiil. They left it out in the rain to rot.

It's their most Active PvP system and they could literally care less. Honestly this isn't saying much because at prime time this consists of likely ~600 players (across all campaigns) with probably another 150 in que, that's like 1% of their playerbase. But we still have a stuck in combat bug after a DECADE...

No new content for longer than I can remember. And no new significant content since release (Volendrung is cool for the ~2 hours / 24 it's up).

Cryodiil is the way it is because it's the neglected step child living under the stairs. There are people from the US and EU playing at ALL hours of the day. Not everyone is a 9-5 worker/student with a set schedule. The fact that 20-30 people can run a map during any time of the day is because Cyrodiil is virtually DEAD.

Don't ask for complex rulesets, ask them to put even a small amount of effort into a "core" part of the game that was advertised as end game at launch. This problem would fix itself with more players having fun in PvP.

U44 is going to be PvP focused, I'd say wait until then to make any serious PvP complaints as they probably already know the direction they wanna go with that.

You mean a couple of battleground maps and a new game mode for battlegrounds?

There is a reason you can't find a que for Battle grounds the majority of the day. It's virtually dead PvP content.

Why they are choosing to make focus on an aspect of the game that has a lower player count than a struggling Cyrodiil is mine boggling (the reason is they've reduced the population caps over and over and it's still not having the performance they want so they seem to want to abandon it entirely).

Every time I queue for BG it's pretty fast, dunno what you're talking about. PC NA Battlegrounds always seem to be very populated, probably more playing in it seriously than cyrodiil since that never has a queue anymore.

Jsmalls

Kappachi wrote: »

Jsmalls wrote: »

Kappachi wrote: »

Jsmalls wrote: »

There is a core issue here.

Clearly PvP isn't "Fun" or "Rewarding" for most players.

If a group of players would rather PvDoor than split their group up into different alliances and actually PvP (even against each others, it's fun!!) then that shows significant failure in the core of Cyrodiil.

The scoreboard and rewards from it are not significant enough to care about winning.

But this all boils down to... They abandoned Cryodiil. They left it out in the rain to rot.

It's their most Active PvP system and they could literally care less. Honestly this isn't saying much because at prime time this consists of likely ~600 players (across all campaigns) with probably another 150 in que, that's like 1% of their playerbase. But we still have a stuck in combat bug after a DECADE...

No new content for longer than I can remember. And no new significant content since release (Volendrung is cool for the ~2 hours / 24 it's up).

Cryodiil is the way it is because it's the neglected step child living under the stairs. There are people from the US and EU playing at ALL hours of the day. Not everyone is a 9-5 worker/student with a set schedule. The fact that 20-30 people can run a map during any time of the day is because Cyrodiil is virtually DEAD.

Don't ask for complex rulesets, ask them to put even a small amount of effort into a "core" part of the game that was advertised as end game at launch. This problem would fix itself with more players having fun in PvP.

U44 is going to be PvP focused, I'd say wait until then to make any serious PvP complaints as they probably already know the direction they wanna go with that.

You mean a couple of battleground maps and a new game mode for battlegrounds?

There is a reason you can't find a que for Battle grounds the majority of the day. It's virtually dead PvP content.

Why they are choosing to make focus on an aspect of the game that has a lower player count than a struggling Cyrodiil is mine boggling (the reason is they've reduced the population caps over and over and it's still not having the performance they want so they seem to want to abandon it entirely).

Every time I queue for BG it's pretty fast, dunno what you're talking about. PC NA Battlegrounds always seem to be very populated, probably more playing in it seriously than cyrodiil since that never has a queue anymore.

Solo BGs or Group BGs?

MMR is definitely a factor as well. Solo BGs while not "fast" definitely gets pops, because it seems to mostly ignore MMR from my experience (some games I'll go 40-0, others I'll have 2 million damage and 4 kills). Group BGs.... If you're high MMR good luck.

SkaraMinoc

Theignson wrote: »

Everyone thinks only their faction is oppressed by it.

Not everyone thinks that. DC was the night capping faction 2-3 years ago on PC NA Gray Host. Now it's EP.

Theignson wrote: »

ZOS will never do anything to fix it because it is in fact unfixable.

ZOS doesn't want to rock the boat too much with Cyrodiil. They're kind of locked in at this point.

Delphinia

SkaraMinoc wrote: »

Less than 10 DC online while 40 AUS/JPN EP run the entire map at 5am PDT. No low pop bonus given.

Honestly, they need a better method for “rewarding” the lower population faction.

With all due respect, the faction that benefits from it the most, makes more points off of it than when they’re actually playing and more than any faction should.

Low pop bonus has and is being abused. It has moved the faction into the next rank above numerous times.

Being N.A., I understand that people may be logging off during the late evening/early morning. However, this just helps give them more incentive to log off earlier.

Low pop bonus just encourages people not to play.

darvaria

Theignson wrote: »

I moved to CA some years back and for a period of almost 2 years my faction was getting completely outnumbered in the time that I can play. I suffered through it, then the wheel turns, then my faction dominates...it goes on and on

Yes, I was one of the 10 EP that was playing right there with you. And not once did we complain on the forums.

SkaraMinoc

Players keep asking for solutions so I updated the thread with some ideas.

SkaraMinoc wrote: »

Solutions

• Catch up mechanic so scores stay within 3000 of each other to prevent runaway factions from killing the campaign
• Penalty where less campaign score is rewarded if a faction controls more than 2/3 of the map and that faction has significantly more players currently online in Cyrodiil
• Improved low pop bonus with 2x AP rewarded so players are still incentivized to play Cyrodiil

darvaria

Any solution is biased against countries you specifically named. You just can't stand not winning. But you can NOT implement mechanisms that show global bias.

What about the other 2 campaigns? Are you going to change them too? Players are making a conscious choice to NOT play on GH. Are you going to limit the other 2 campaigns as well?

And not EVERY player keeps asking for changes. Look back and it's the same players that ask over and over for a change.

Pelanora

Problem: Players living outside North America log into PC NA Cyrodiil campaigns ...and take the entire map. They get thousands of points.... the result is one faction (EP on PC NA Gray Host) is nearly poplocked 24/7.

The other two factions drop to 1 bar. One faction gets full control of Cyrodiil for 4-6 hours. The low pop bonus doesn't activate when this happens and even if it did, there's no resources for 2x AP since one faction has the entire map.



There I fixed it for you. This is now not bizarrely about where the server happens to be located in a global game.

Seems to me clearly now about the point system and the pop lock

and not the fact the planet spins on an axis and the lack of a second sun and Americans not coping with not being the only country in the world.

SkaraMinoc

Pelanora wrote: »

Seems to me clearly now about the point system and the pop lock

and not the fact the planet spins on an axis and the lack of a second sun and Americans not coping with not being the only country in the world.

PC NA is a regional server that is geolocated closest to where most players live. Anyone from around the world can play on it but don't expect most players to continue playing during off hours for that region. This is common sense. Not sure why you're turning this into an America vs Rest of the World take. That's actually pretty rude. There are 23 countries in North America.

Pelanora

SkaraMinoc wrote: »

Pelanora wrote: »

Seems to me clearly now about the point system and the pop lock

and not the fact the planet spins on an axis and the lack of a second sun and Americans not coping with not being the only country in the world.

PC NA is a regional server that is geolocated closest to where most players live. Anyone from around the world can play on it but don't expect most players to continue playing during off hours for that region. This is common sense. Not sure why you're turning this into an America vs Rest of the World take. That's actually pretty rude. There are 23 countries in North America.

There are two servers for a global game any one can join. The na server is not "North America's." Is just located there. That's how servers work.

If zos hasn't designed a global game adequately, that's a fair cop. If zos hasn't designed a game to cope with changing players over a 24 hour cycle, that's a fair cop. They should fix that. But it's not about players ruining a game "when you're asleep".

The whole thread is a nth america vs anywhere else in the world that's got inconvenient- for-us playtimes take. I haven't done anything.

MidniteOwl1913

Players play when it is convenient for them, not you.

A worldwide player base means that different people will be on at different times.

MidniteOwl1913

Pelanora wrote: »

SkaraMinoc wrote: »

Pelanora wrote: »

Seems to me clearly now about the point system and the pop lock

and not the fact the planet spins on an axis and the lack of a second sun and Americans not coping with not being the only country in the world.

PC NA is a regional server that is geolocated closest to where most players live. Anyone from around the world can play on it but don't expect most players to continue playing during off hours for that region. This is common sense. Not sure why you're turning this into an America vs Rest of the World take. That's actually pretty rude. There are 23 countries in North America.

There are two servers for a global game any one can join. The na server is not "North America's." Is just located there. That's how servers work.

If zos hasn't designed a global game adequately, that's a fair cop. If zos hasn't designed a game to cope with changing players over a 24 hour cycle, that's a fair cop. They should fix that. But it's not about players ruining a game "when you're asleep".

The whole thread is a nth america vs anywhere else in the world that's got inconvenient- for-us playtimes take. I haven't done anything.

I for one am really happy when the Europeans and Aussies start showing up. I play late PDT time and it can be pretty deserted before that. Wait times for random dungeons go from 15-20 minutes to 5, I like that.

SkaraMinoc

Pelanora wrote: »

SkaraMinoc wrote: »

Pelanora wrote: »

Seems to me clearly now about the point system and the pop lock

and not the fact the planet spins on an axis and the lack of a second sun and Americans not coping with not being the only country in the world.

PC NA is a regional server that is geolocated closest to where most players live. Anyone from around the world can play on it but don't expect most players to continue playing during off hours for that region. This is common sense. Not sure why you're turning this into an America vs Rest of the World take. That's actually pretty rude. There are 23 countries in North America.

There are two servers for a global game any one can join. The na server is not "North America's." Is just located there. That's how servers work.

I already described how PC NA is a geolocated regional (mega) server that anyone can play on. You don't need to do it again.

Pelanora wrote: »

But it's not about players ruining a game "when you're asleep".

This entire thread is about a small number of out-of-region players taking advantage of campaign scoring during downtime that regional players have during the night. Those regional players work very hard to win the campaign, often spending 6-8 hours/day or more in Cyrodiil fighting for what is often very small gains in campaign score. Each faction can be within a few hundred points of each other after intense fighting all day. This is fun and it keeps Cyrodiil competitive.

Then out-of-region players log in during off hours and carry their faction with almost no resistance, undoing all of the hard work that regional players have done. Yeah I'd say it ruins the game especially when those out-of-region players tip the scale so badly in favor of their faction that they end up 10-20k points ahead halfway through the campaign.

To be clear, the issue is the campaign scoring logic and not that out-of-region players are playing during regional off hours.

SkaraMinoc

BahometZ wrote: »

[snip]

[snip]

Players are allowed and encouraged to play whenever they want. The problem is the campaign scoring logic.

[edited for baiting & to remove quote]