How about reducing the cooldown of the Gray Host faction lock down to 4 hours, instead of 1 month?

Erickson9610

BXR_Lonestar wrote: »

Like it or not, an alliance-locked server cuts down on a LOT of shenanigans that you otherwise have to deal with in the unlocked campaign. It's not perfect, there are still problems to deal with, but the number of problems you have to deal with on any given night are far less in the locked campaign vs. the locked campaign.

I'd argue that a 4 hour faction lock would do the same thing that the current faction lock does, but with fewer penalties.

For instance, a person wouldn't be able to swap teams after they hand over Volendrung. The hammer would already be gone by the time the 4 hour faction lock is over.

In general, a lot will happen over the course of 4 hours. Whatever advantage a person may try to get on an enemy faction will disappear by the time their sentence is up. That's a stark contrast to Blackreach, which allows them to immediately swap back.


The faction lock does the same thing if it was reduced in duration. The benefit is that a player can play in Gray Host with different groups on different days, rather than wait weeks to do so again.

katanagirl1

Alliance Change Tokens have ruined Cyrodiil in my opinion. Even switching at the end of campaign causes problems. If a bunch of the ball group leads on the leaderboard go to the same campaign it’s a complete steamroll for all but the first few days. Any time frame shorter than that would cause even more problems, like your proposed four hour cooldown. As mentioned there are other campaigns if you aren’t faction loyal or there are Battlegrounds.

Lumsdenml

No. They need to keep faction lock the way it is. In fact, they need to bring it to all campaigns.

SeaGtGruff

xylena_lazarow wrote: »

AlnilamE wrote: »

People are voting with their feet, and you can too.

Pretty sure the vote was to quit PvP instead of wasting time on a dead campaign.

The circular reasoning of this playerbase constantly amazes me.

Hey, everybody, here's a great idea!

We think the most populated campaign is dead because there simply aren't enough players to support it! So let's all vote by quitting PvP! Yeah, that makes great sense, let's all do that!

/eyeroll

I'm reminded of a PvP ESO stream I tuned into during the recent Whitestrake's Mayhem when someone voice-chatting with the streamer suggested organizing a DDoS attack against the ESO servers as a way to get ZOS to admit that they have problems with their server performance. Yeah, that makes great sense, let's all DDoS the servers to help irove server performance!

In my humble opinion, certain portions of this playerbase are insane.

Major_Toughness

katanagirl1 wrote: »

Alliance Change Tokens have ruined Cyrodiil in my opinion. Even switching at the end of campaign causes problems. If a bunch of the ball group leads on the leaderboard go to the same campaign it’s a complete steamroll for all but the first few days. Any time frame shorter than that would cause even more problems, like your proposed four hour cooldown. As mentioned there are other campaigns if you aren’t faction loyal or there are Battlegrounds.

I don't understand this. Doesn't this reinforce that the problem is you are locked into one alliance for the entire campaign? and you can't move to another alliance to even the playing field? Which you would be able to do if there was no lock, or a much shorter lock.

As long as the long is long enough to deter boosting and intentional griefing, i.e relogging to pick up Hammer in AD spawn on AD character and deliver it to your friends on DC, then it will do it's job.

James-Wayne

Nah keep one server locked.

Or maybe if you want to swap at any point in the 30 days you get a deserter penalty against your account that reduces your stats while in that 30 day campaign.

DLC due next week plenty of deserters coming soon 😂

katanagirl1

Major_Toughness wrote: »

katanagirl1 wrote: »

Alliance Change Tokens have ruined Cyrodiil in my opinion. Even switching at the end of campaign causes problems. If a bunch of the ball group leads on the leaderboard go to the same campaign it’s a complete steamroll for all but the first few days. Any time frame shorter than that would cause even more problems, like your proposed four hour cooldown. As mentioned there are other campaigns if you aren’t faction loyal or there are Battlegrounds.

I don't understand this. Doesn't this reinforce that the problem is you are locked into one alliance for the entire campaign? and you can't move to another alliance to even the playing field? Which you would be able to do if there was no lock, or a much shorter lock.

As long as the long is long enough to deter boosting and intentional griefing, i.e relogging to pick up Hammer in AD spawn on AD character and deliver it to your friends on DC, then it will do it's job.

I guess there are PvPers who think that way, but those of us who fight together as a team and want to win the campaign stick together whether we are winning or losing. If you switch to the winning team all the time and take the easy road out you don’t seem like a serious PvPer.

BXR_Lonestar

Erickson9610 wrote: »

BXR_Lonestar wrote: »

Like it or not, an alliance-locked server cuts down on a LOT of shenanigans that you otherwise have to deal with in the unlocked campaign. It's not perfect, there are still problems to deal with, but the number of problems you have to deal with on any given night are far less in the locked campaign vs. the locked campaign.

I'd argue that a 4 hour faction lock would do the same thing that the current faction lock does, but with fewer penalties.

For instance, a person wouldn't be able to swap teams after they hand over Volendrung. The hammer would already be gone by the time the 4 hour faction lock is over.

In general, a lot will happen over the course of 4 hours. Whatever advantage a person may try to get on an enemy faction will disappear by the time their sentence is up. That's a stark contrast to Blackreach, which allows them to immediately swap back.


The faction lock does the same thing if it was reduced in duration. The benefit is that a player can play in Gray Host with different groups on different days, rather than wait weeks to do so again.

I get it. We have players that have other guilds and like to play on other colors, and when we play in greyhost, it sucks for those players to not be able to play with us too. But I don't know that it changes the analysis any. Greyhost is more heavily populated precisely because people don't want to deal with all the crap that comes with an unlocked campaign, and people who choose to play in a locked campaign to minimize all the shenanigans aren't going to be willing to open the door to the possibility that some of that stuff could leak into the locked campaign.

I'm also not sure that a 4 hour lock would be a sufficient deterrent. I don't know if you've noticed, but there are some players who seem to not know there is another world outside of gaming, and they're literally playing in Cyrodil for stretches of 8 hours or more a day, so a 4 hour wait is not that big of a deal.

And beyond the hammer stealing, scroll shenanigans, and spying, I think the worst and most toxic behavior you see in the unlocked campaigns is players coming over from other alliances into your zone chat with zero intention of playing - they're literally there to sow discontent, taunt or bully players, and just be a toxic presence. I remember one night in blackreach we had several players from yellow who came over to blue, and they were fighting between themselves (not even with blue players!) in our zonechat! Yeah, you can silence them, but the fact that they come over like that just to be a disruptive presence and not to play the game was probably the worst thing they could do IMO. I'd personally rather these people not even get the chance to show up in our zonechat and be that kind of presence.

BXR_Lonestar

xylena_lazarow wrote: »

SeaGtGruff wrote: »

Regardless of how many Cyrodiil PvP players there are in ESO, they choose which campaign they want to play in. If there are a lot of players who dislike faction locking, they have a non-locked campaign for that.

Again. Not enough players for more than one campaign. The unlocked campaign is dead. We split, now there's two dead campaigns. If I didn't want open world, and only wanted to fight my friends, I have dueling or BGs for that.

Exclusive clubs are only exclusive if there's a line of people desperate to get in. There is no line to get into Cyrodiil anymore. Excluding players who prefer friends over factions? Now you're just shooting yourself in the foot.

I think you should ask yourself why the unlocked campaign is dead compared to the lock campaign that regularly has more players.

Players have a choice between locked and unlocked campaigns, and the largest portion of the player base is choosing locked campaign for a reason.

Major_Mangle

Except faction lock has never been the main deciding factor to why a campaign is more popular than another. For some people it may be a reason to play a campaign but historically it never mattered if the 30 day CP campaign was locked or not, it was always the most populated campaign.

xylena_lazarow

SeaGtGruff wrote: »

certain portions of this playerbase are insane.

Can you please explain to me where all these extra players to support two camps are coming from?

BXR_Lonestar wrote: »

I think you should ask yourself why the unlocked campaign is dead

Because the locked campaign is also dead.

You've got maybe 100 regulars between 3 factions and that's not enough. Not sure how we're supposed to make two functional campaigns out of these 100 regulars when we can't even make a functional Gray Host.

CameraBeardThePirate

BXR_Lonestar wrote: »

There is a reason Grey Host is the most populated server: People WANT the alliance lock for the duration of the campaign. Having played in both campaigns (alliance locked and non-alliance locked), there is far less shenanigans in the alliance locked campaigns vs. the unlocked campaigns. Are there ways around it? Sure! But it takes exceedingly more effort than it does when you are playing the non-alliance locked campaign, and as a result, there are far less shenanigans to deal with. There is still some, but you can't expect to be able to eliminate all of the problems (sometimes it's just a player/human issue and not a game design issue), but it is a relief to go into the campaign and have to deal with less nonsense, like fighting right next to someone at one fight, only to run to the next keep and be fighting against that same person on a different color, players spying on/monitoring the opponent's chats and callouts, hammer and scroll shenanigans, etc.

I happen to like the idea that players who play the campaign have to make a commitment to their chosen alliance for the month. Having seen how toxic it can get in the unlocked campaigns, I'm actually surprised they even have an unlocked campaign option. I would prefer to see just one alliance locked campaign for the duration, and make people commit to one alliance or another for the duration. Stop playing both sides!

People constantly spout this argument but it's false.

The most popular campaign is and has always been the first one on the list, regardless of ruleset.

Belegnole

Sounds like some people want very much to troll and grief on GH.

Erickson9610

Belegnole wrote: »

Sounds like some people want very much to troll and grief on GH.

As I've stated in the original post, this can very easily be done even when on an enemy faction. Why wouldn't someone try to ruin the experience for others if they couldn't swap to the alliance they actually want to play on for a whole month?

If anything, allowing an alliance swap once every 4 hours (or 1 day, or so on) would give people less reason to troll and grief others. They can switch to the team they want to play on (they won't have a reason to stick around on the team they're on and grief them) and they can't instantly swap after passing the hammer to their desired faction. It's the best of both worlds.