Abolish permanent factions In cyrodil

Theignson · December 3

Cyrodil is on life support. Most of the old time players have left.

Aside from performance issues the biggest issue I see is it is almost never equal forces. When I log on (I'm on PST) the factions are never equal. There is aways one faction (it doesn't matter which) with a huge zerg. Playing with 1-2 bars against poplock simply is not fun. PvD oor isnt fun.

My solution: abolish permanent factions. When you log in, you are randomly assigned to one of the three factions.

Then the forces will always be equal-- like in BG.

You could be allowed to que in a group but it would have to maintain equal numbers.

One of the things I like about BG is I am playing with people who, for years and years, were always on the other faction. Now we play on the same team sometimes,

So, it would mess up guilds, and ball groups couldn't be guaranteed to run together. But the benefits might outweigh the negatives.

SeaGtGruff · December 3

How would campaign scoring work?

How would emperorship work?

robpr · December 3

SeaGtGruff wrote: »

How would campaign scoring work?

How would emperorship work?

How would playing with friends work?

Urzigurumash · December 3

Replace Factions with Guilds. You can pick one Guild you're in when you first log into GH that month.

Muizer · December 3

SeaGtGruff wrote: »

How would campaign scoring work?

How would emperorship work?

We can do without.

Jaraal · December 3

Nah. I like playing with the regulars. Same folks I've been fighting side by side with for years. And I like killing our common enemies.

If you want to group up with randoms, then battlegrounds is for you. And if you think people who don't like playing the objectives in BGs is bad, imagine the same thing applied to Cyrodiil objectives.

JonesFPS · December 3

What Cyro needs is:

- More server capacity/or other solutions regarding lags/rubberbanding etc.
- increased players per faction ( zone is to big to feel like an epic battlefied)
- big rework of the reward structure
- maybe a visual overhal (atleast for the faction keeps, so they resemble the region they are in)
- seperate cyro's balance vom PVE / through battlespirit or any other way.

and those are just the basics imo.
And when those things are done, there needs to be more dedicated and thought through marketing.

I rember the days when even as a total newbe it was just epic to take part in castle sieges even if i did almost nothing.

MincMincMinc · December 3

SeaGtGruff wrote: »

How would campaign scoring work?

How would emperorship work?

How would it not work? You sign up for whatever faction you want to score on. Just no lock that prevents a character from swapping to another team. Players in general are also more active during campaign flips.

Other considerations

Swap away from the 30 day campaign and only have 7 day campaigns that flip at midnight on saturday. Thus weekend warriors and pugs will be driven to play on the weekend. The shorter campaign would make people consider not swapping and just swapping with their friends on the flip.
Consistent economy driving rewards. Generic rewards for the worthy should be monetary and not gear. The gear should just be on the vendors at spawn. Campaign rewards should be updated to include arena weapons and mythic leads. Nonperfected Trial gear should be available at a spawn vendor, which may help bring in pve players and bridge pvp players into trials.
Get rid of the other servers and focus all resources to a single cyrodil campaign. u50 players can be competitive if crafted gear vendors/stations are available at spawn. (honestly I dont see why gear is even tied to level anymore considering one tamriel should have abolished the gear leveling system.)
Basic map changes....... guys itd take a day for one person to drop in some new assets to make things interesting again. Imagine the town outside of aleswell is larger and we get city street fights.

Taril · December 3

JonesFPS wrote: »

- increased players per faction ( zone is to big to feel like an epic battlefied)

The issue with that is it would simply further exacerbate the issue of imbalanced teams and the power of ballgroups.

Which is always the main problem of Cyro style open world PvP systems.

The fantasy is grand, large scale wars with multiple fronts that have brutal back and forth battles to take or hold objectives with siege weapons and unique buffs to help turn the tides (Such as Volendrung)

The reality is ballgroups. Ballgroups for days. Have everyone group up in a single ball and run around smashing objectives because they overpower literally any defensive force that isn't an equally big ballgroup (But because of the 3 sided nature of many systems, it's usually better to not clash with other ballgroups and instead just go take objectives from someone else)

I suppose one way to try and alleviate this would be to split the map into areas similar to Craglorn and then limit the number of players from each faction that can be in an area at once, forcing the entire population to spread out. (Of course, this would be extremely frustrating for people who can't get the rewards for objectives because they didn't enter the area fast enough and would essentially make Cyro very unfriendly to anyone not part of a main PvP group)

BetweenMidgets · December 3

I agree, faction lock needs to go.

BlueRaven · December 3

Cyrodiil (and PvP in general) is dying because the gap between high end and low end players is tremendous. No one wants to go to cyrodiil to play the roll of canon fodder or ap grind target for apparently unkillable players.

Coordinate with your friends on faction before you create a character.

Jaraal · December 3

BetweenMidgets wrote: »

I agree, faction lock needs to go.

Most Cyrodiil campaigns are not faction locked. No one is required to play on Gray Host. Yet most people choose to do so.... at least on PC/NA.

TX12001rwb17_ESO · December 3

Why would you have it random? If I am on a Human character, why would I want to fight for the Aldmeri Dominion?

Veinblood1965 · December 3

BlueRaven wrote: »

Cyrodiil (and PvP in general) is dying because the gap between high end and low end players is tremendous. No one wants to go to cyrodiil to play the roll of canon fodder or ap grind target for apparently unkillable players.

Coordinate with your friends on faction before you create a character.

It's been getting worse this last month or so. We are seeing almost entire factions with 50k health or so. Last night almost every one I ran into had 45 to 50k health and 15 people beating on them to no avail.

Mathius_Mordred · December 3

Cyrodiil on life support ... right, that must be why it takes 45 minutes to join Gray Host. Are some of you playing a different game to me?

Major_Mangle · December 3

Mathius_Mordred wrote: »

Cyrodiil on life support ... right, that must be why it takes 45 minutes to join Gray Host. Are some of you playing a different game to me?

Reduced population caps is most likely the answer to that

TheAwesomeChimpanzee · December 3

Mathius_Mordred wrote: »

Cyrodiil on life support ... right, that must be why it takes 45 minutes to join Gray Host. Are some of you playing a different game to me?

Cyrodiil has pop 3 hours a day in only one of the 3 end game campaigns. I would not call that anything other than slowly dying. It’s not a good sign when 2 out of 3 camps are dead almost 24/7 and the main one only has population during prime time.

MJallday · December 3

Muizer wrote: »

SeaGtGruff wrote: »

How would campaign scoring work?

How would emperorship work?

We can do without.

i dont think ripping up the entire lore of the game is going to work

or even happen.

MJallday · December 3

Veinblood1965 wrote: »

BlueRaven wrote: »

Cyrodiil (and PvP in general) is dying because the gap between high end and low end players is tremendous. No one wants to go to cyrodiil to play the roll of canon fodder or ap grind target for apparently unkillable players.

Coordinate with your friends on faction before you create a character.

It's been getting worse this last month or so. We are seeing almost entire factions with 50k health or so. Last night almost every one I ran into had 45 to 50k health and 15 people beating on them to no avail.

yeah these stupid builds need to be capped. theres builds (multiple ones) going on where 15 people are DPS parsing on one person and theyre sat there just taking it like nothing is occuring.
takes the fun out of it massively.

Theignson · December 3

The issue I'm addressing is that 22 hours a day the map is completely unbalanced.

There used to be many more players and more equal teams.

The fights over keeps used to be fantastic-- sometimes over an hour-- big D ticks, unique gameplay.

This still happens a couple hours a day.

But the rest of the time it is ridiculous. Huge zergs PvDooring.

Emperor? It is a joke. It is usually obtained when it is poplocked vs 1-2 bars. The map is completely one color. That is a travesty.

Getting Emp when the teams are balanced-- yes, I have seen it, it is tons of fun and very hard to achieve.

8v8 BG showed me something: equal teams are preferable. Yes, you sometimes still crush one side. But it is better than 8v1

Razmirra · December 3

What if giant zergs receive an HP/MP/Stam pool penalty near a keep? 25 people? 5% penalty. 30-35 people? 10% penalty. Over 35 people in one giant cluster? 20-25% penalty. Give the defenders a chance instead of being hopelessly overrun.

Theist_VII · December 3

I’m of the opinion that players should be able to choose what faction they want to play each campaign, rather than having a real-world currency attached to faction changes.

Picking the wrong faction is a huge noob trap, kind of like Vampire/Werewolf curses/cures in the store.

doesurmindglow · December 3

There are better solutions to the imbalance of player populations than this.

Here's one:

Reworking the low pop bonus to eliminate the score buff but increase the AP buff, and then pushing a notification (with the option to turn it off, like leaderboards) to all the players homed in that campaign that their faction is currently earning a low pop AP bonus.

A change like this would probably balance out populations pretty reliably without disrupting people's ability to play on the same team as their friends, roommates, guildies, and significant others.

Vulkunne · December 3

Theignson wrote: »

Cyrodil is on life support. Most of the old time players have left.

Aside from performance issues the biggest issue I see is it is almost never equal forces. When I log on (I'm on PST) the factions are never equal. There is aways one faction (it doesn't matter which) with a huge zerg. Playing with 1-2 bars against poplock simply is not fun. PvD oor isnt fun.

My solution: abolish permanent factions. When you log in, you are randomly assigned to one of the three factions.

Then the forces will always be equal-- like in BG.

You could be allowed to que in a group but it would have to maintain equal numbers.

One of the things I like about BG is I am playing with people who, for years and years, were always on the other faction. Now we play on the same team sometimes,

So, it would mess up guilds, and ball groups couldn't be guaranteed to run together. But the benefits might outweigh the negatives.

Then go to BG then.

Making Cyrodiil function the same as BG will kill the spirit of this type of PvP. BGs are short fights with short-term factions. That's why many of us like them.

Cyrodiil is a bit different and is different for reason(s), namely because each Campaign lasts for a week or longer, 30 days, etc. This requires... *commitment*. And this is something that's a hard thing, it's hard for me too sometimes, especially when you have some people acting like lunatics getting so angry cause I temporarily used their cheap Ballista, shooting at the same target as they were while they was doing other things.

So, I get it. You want to be free to be yourself, be free from associations with others who maybe are not so friendly and so on and so forth. But when you are committed to a goal, like a Crusader kind of, then that goal is what unifies folks regardless. Although there are things that can be done, perhaps should be done to improve Cyrodiil, the commitment part of this thing will not change.

Coming in as a random person/personality, swapping real quick between sides, making the Campaign PvP Guild exclusive, all of these are bad positions to take and will make things worse. Like in New World, for example, 'Companies' are the only ones who can fight to take a zone. I really would hate to see Cyrodiil turn into Guilds fighting over things in similar manner. Then I wouldn't help anyone at all because it has a way of becoming just about them. And to be fair, we already have this problem now.

In ESO, at least you have the luxury to fight for which side best represents you, if that matters to you. And, this will not be popular, and I know Alliances are what they are, but there are patterns and traits that I have noticed, over time, about each of them. You can artificially try to force a change with that too if you want, but then you're left with everything being the same. If players aren't supporting a faction as they should then there might be a reason why, for better or worse.

Cyrodiil is more complicated than it seems and slapping a revolving door over it won't fix anything.

kargen27 · December 3

Taril wrote: »

JonesFPS wrote: »

- increased players per faction ( zone is to big to feel like an epic battlefied)

The issue with that is it would simply further exacerbate the issue of imbalanced teams and the power of ballgroups.

Which is always the main problem of Cyro style open world PvP systems.

The fantasy is grand, large scale wars with multiple fronts that have brutal back and forth battles to take or hold objectives with siege weapons and unique buffs to help turn the tides (Such as Volendrung)

The reality is ballgroups. Ballgroups for days. Have everyone group up in a single ball and run around smashing objectives because they overpower literally any defensive force that isn't an equally big ballgroup (But because of the 3 sided nature of many systems, it's usually better to not clash with other ballgroups and instead just go take objectives from someone else)

I suppose one way to try and alleviate this would be to split the map into areas similar to Craglorn and then limit the number of players from each faction that can be in an area at once, forcing the entire population to spread out. (Of course, this would be extremely frustrating for people who can't get the rewards for objectives because they didn't enter the area fast enough and would essentially make Cyro very unfriendly to anyone not part of a main PvP group)

None of the ideas in this thread would deal with ball groups. Ball groups are organized and can roll over just about anything even when outnumbered significantly.

The only thing that will fix Cyrodiil is improving server performance. Players left because of server issues and until that is fixed enticing players that left to come back any other change will have little to no impact.
Game mechanics to deal with overpowering ball groups can happen after Cyrodiil is fixed.

Jaraal · December 3

doesurmindglow wrote: »

There are better solutions to the imbalance of player populations than this.

Here's one:

Reworking the low pop bonus to eliminate the score buff but increase the AP buff, and then pushing a notification (with the option to turn it off, like leaderboards) to all the players homed in that campaign that their faction is currently earning a low pop AP bonus.

A change like this would probably balance out populations pretty reliably without disrupting people's ability to play on the same team as their friends, roommates, guildies, and significant others.

We were just discussing this today. Somebody should make an addon that alerts you (wherever you are in the game) when your faction in your home campaign has the low pop bonus. Many of us would stop PvEing and hop right into Cyrodiil.

Artim_X · December 3

Absolutely not! Battlegrounds already serves this purpose.

If they're red, make them dead! If they're blue, strike true! And if they're yellow, help that fellow! All within reason.

"Together we stand on Faregyl wall,
Bananas united to the dauntless call,
From east to west, from Rayles to
Kingscrest we carry the banner,
Bananas unite, Bananas to war!"

SerafinaWaterstar · December 3

I appreciate you are attempting to make things ‘better’ but these are awful ideas & would destroy what is left of campaigning pvp.

As pointed out above, chose a different campaign to GH & you are not faction locked.

But if I couldn’t play pvp with my fab guild mates, I just would not play.

(Ball groups are a different topic altogether - and its a good guild group that can co-ordinate and communicate that can break them. You suggestions would ruin that.)

Urzigurumash · December 3

I think Artim_X makes a great point, red and blue are criminal organizations so they should definitely be dissolved anyhow

AngryPenguin · December 3

How are guild raids to form and join the same faction together then?

The solution we know that works is to have a much, much higher population cap with more people playing. So how about we just raise the pop cap back up to 1/3rd of what it was originally? (200 players/faction is 1/3rd of the original cap)

Necrotech_Master · December 4

i dont think that it should be an apply to everything thing

now if you so choose to be placed on any faction which throws you on the lowest pop faction, that should be a possible option i think, if its technically feasible to be implemented