Faction lock

The7thLettter

can we please have a healthy discussion on whether or not faction lock should still be a thing. i forget when exactly, but you used to be able to play any faction in any campaign. with the decline in the pvp population and the start of the developers listening to the player base, i think we should reconsider the faction lock on grey host.

allow person to select 1 "main faction" to receive rewards and then remove that ability on the other 2 factions. please share your thoughts, thank you

MincMincMinc

Why not break the QOL issue preventing people from playing with friends and make it so you can sign up for whatever faction you want at the start of a campaign on any character. No real reason to still have characters locked to a specific faction anymore. Monetarily zos probably loses more money to people canceling subs and leaving the game for months on end because of their friends being on different factions......versus how much money they make on alliance change tokens.

I also see benefits to changing the campaign time constraints too. Instead of monthly doing a weekly or biweekly campaign makes more sense. The beginning of the campaigns always brought in way more participation. Not to mention with the above alliance choice system you would make it far easier to change alliances to play with friends. Waiting a week is much more appealing than hoping your friends are online in a month from now to play.

This also keeps the faction diehards happy because it prevents quick swapping of guilds during a campaign.

CameraBeardThePirate

MincMincMinc wrote: »

Why not break the QOL issue preventing people from playing with friends and make it so you can sign up for whatever faction you want at the start of a campaign on any character. No real reason to still have characters locked to a specific faction anymore. Monetarily zos probably loses more money to people canceling subs and leaving the game for months on end because of their friends being on different factions......versus how much money they make on alliance change tokens.

I also see benefits to changing the campaign time constraints too. Instead of monthly doing a weekly or biweekly campaign makes more sense. The beginning of the campaigns always brought in way more participation. Not to mention with the above alliance choice system you would make it far easier to change alliances to play with friends. Waiting a week is much more appealing than hoping your friends are online in a month from now to play.

This also keeps the faction diehards happy because it prevents quick swapping of guilds during a campaign.

Without changing how Faction Lock works, this would still prevent people from playing with friends of different guilds/groups.

Say I have a friend that wants to play on Blue and another on Yellow. Even if we were able to change factions at the start of a campaign for free, I'm still having to pick between those two friends at the start of the campaign.

SirTraski

Think faction locking a pvp server - especially, since we're only gonna be getting two servers, greyhost and vengeance - probably should be taken a look at. Even if I don't necessarily pvp that often anymore, I still have friends and guildmates on all alliances. It's a shame that 'cos of faction lock, I sometimes can't join.

I understand the developers initial design being to incentivize sticking to a faction - but that could be solved easily by just marking the alliance you want the rewards, and until the campaign ends - you're stuck to that choice. But pls, get rid off the inability to actually join pvp!

The7thLettter

SirTraski wrote: »

Think faction locking a pvp server - especially, since we're only gonna be getting two servers, greyhost and vengeance - probably should be taken a look at. Even if I don't necessarily pvp that often anymore, I still have friends and guildmates on all alliances. It's a shame that 'cos of faction lock, I sometimes can't join.

I understand the developers initial design being to incentivize sticking to a faction - but that could be solved easily by just marking the alliance you want the rewards, and until the campaign ends - you're stuck to that choice. But pls, get rid off the inability to actually join pvp!

Yeah I forgot about there only going to be 2 campaigns. I, myself, have 12 different characters on all 3 factions and since we will only have 2 camps I don’t think I should be punished by not being allowed to play any of them in the main campaign. Great point

allochthons

Has Vengeance been alliance-locked in the past? I only went into the tests once or twice (console) and honestly can't remember.

(I really hope there is at least one campaign that is not alliance locked.)

Attorneyatlawl

MincMincMinc wrote: »

Why not break the QOL issue preventing people from playing with friends and make it so you can sign up for whatever faction you want at the start of a campaign on any character. No real reason to still have characters locked to a specific faction anymore. Monetarily zos probably loses more money to people canceling subs and leaving the game for months on end because of their friends being on different factions......versus how much money they make on alliance change tokens.

I also see benefits to changing the campaign time constraints too. Instead of monthly doing a weekly or biweekly campaign makes more sense. The beginning of the campaigns always brought in way more participation. Not to mention with the above alliance choice system you would make it far easier to change alliances to play with friends. Waiting a week is much more appealing than hoping your friends are online in a month from now to play.

This also keeps the faction diehards happy because it prevents quick swapping of guilds during a campaign.

I like this idea. A lot.

aetherix8

allochthons wrote: »

Has Vengeance been alliance-locked in the past? I only went into the tests once or twice (console) and honestly can't remember.

(I really hope there is at least one campaign that is not alliance locked.)

As far as I remember, no Vengeance iteration had a faction lock.

Ostonoha

It would be amazing if they removed the faction lock from GH. They could put a short lock timer. 2hrs. 10hrs or 24hrs and Or make it so if you play more than one faction in a campaign you get zero end of camp rewards. But allows you to at least play.

The7thLettter

Ostonoha wrote: »

It would be amazing if they removed the faction lock from GH. They could put a short lock timer. 2hrs. 10hrs or 24hrs and Or make it so if you play more than one faction in a campaign you get zero end of camp rewards. But allows you to at least play.

This would make the most sense imo. Also I don’t mind the idea of potentially shortening the main camp. It is true that the beginning of campaign the population rises due to people trying to push for emp. So if you were to maybe shorten it to 2 weeks or even a week to bring more engagement, I’d be ok with it.

Think about it from a logical solution, from the 10 years I’ve been PvPing on Xbox and PC, you tend to seem one front runner able to acquire insane amount of AP keeping them in first place for entire campaigns (which is great for them, no hate) but to shake things up and bring more population at shorter bursts, lowering campaign timers could help.

Just spit balling some ideas here.

imPDA

CameraBeardThePirate wrote: »

Say I have a friend that wants to play on Blue and another on Yellow. Even if we were able to change factions at the start of a campaign for free, I'm still having to pick between those two friends at the start of the campaign.

Sorry, but you are not friends if all 3 of you want to play together and still can't pick up one faction. Factions don't matter, pick one losing previous campaign to have a challenge or stick to one all of you have characters for, or level up new characters to play together, it takes like 2 days in current economy.

imPDA

Without faction lock, you will see how players of losing faction join other factions within minutes after complete defeat, so one faction will always be completely wiped at the end of a day. Only queue or faction lock can prevent it. With faction lock they would simply leave Cyro but not help other faction, it would be somewhat fair.

Problem of Cyro not the lock but players with weak soul unable to fight and not to surrender :P

Only some new system which would spread players evenly could fix the issue, but it is not going to happen. You can remove faction lock, but half of you will return on forum to whine about players changing factions as soon as they start to lose, and other half will be players who change campaign as soon as they start to lose, and 1% of players who want to play with friends with different factions (they are not visiting this forum tho, they just level up characters of different factions and doesn't care, they can pick up faction to play and change in a month, or some of them have alt accounts to play all factions).

LadyGP

The7thLettter wrote: »

can we please have a healthy discussion on whether or not faction lock should still be a thing. i forget when exactly, but you used to be able to play any faction in any campaign. with the decline in the pvp population and the start of the developers listening to the player base, i think we should reconsider the faction lock on grey host.

allow person to select 1 "main faction" to receive rewards and then remove that ability on the other 2 factions. please share your thoughts, thank you

I mean... there are enough people running multibox with alt accounts in various factions anyways so...

To be honest.. would be very inlightening if ZoS decided to run an audit and check hardware, IPs, etc, against player accounts/factions. I'm sure A LOT of trolls would be banned.

The7thLettter

imPDA wrote: »

Without faction lock, you will see how players of losing faction join other factions within minutes after complete defeat, so one faction will always be completely wiped at the end of a day. Only queue or faction lock can prevent it. With faction lock they would simply leave Cyro but not help other faction, it would be somewhat fair.

Problem of Cyro not the lock but players with weak soul unable to fight and not to surrender :P

Only some new system which would spread players evenly could fix the issue, but it is not going to happen. You can remove faction lock, but half of you will return on forum to whine about players changing factions as soon as they start to lose, and other half will be players who change campaign as soon as they start to lose, and 1% of players who want to play with friends with different factions (they are not visiting this forum tho, they just level up characters of different factions and doesn't care, they can pick up faction to play and change in a month, or some of them have alt accounts to play all factions).

I base my gameplay and which faction I play on whatever faction is low pop because I simply get more fights. I don’t care about end of campaign scores, I just want PvP.

And if you think having 12 characters fully geared for PvP and sorted around all 3 factions is having a weak soul, your logic is flawed.

LadyGP wrote: »

The7thLettter wrote: »

can we please have a healthy discussion on whether or not faction lock should still be a thing. i forget when exactly, but you used to be able to play any faction in any campaign. with the decline in the pvp population and the start of the developers listening to the player base, i think we should reconsider the faction lock on grey host.

allow person to select 1 "main faction" to receive rewards and then remove that ability on the other 2 factions. please share your thoughts, thank you

I mean... there are enough people running multibox with alt accounts in various factions anyways so...

To be honest.. would be very inlightening if ZoS decided to run an audit and check hardware, IPs, etc, against player accounts/factions. I'm sure A LOT of trolls would be banned.

I’d love to see some sort of audit, because I don’t think there are as many as you think there are. Think about having to multi-box in a game where you have to actively move and press buttons. Explain to me how that benefits people and what they’re actually able to achieve by doing this?

BetweenMidgets

I personally haven't enjoyed vengeance in any of its iterations. The various PVP friend groups I have also do not like Vengeance and I think I was the only one that even went into the last Vengeance campaign.

For a myriad of reasons I think faction lock in GH should be removed, but if the only two campaign choices are GH and Vengeance, if GH is to remain alliance locked there are many of my pvp friends I will no longer be able to play with.

Ostonoha

The7thLettter wrote: »

Ostonoha wrote: »

It would be amazing if they removed the faction lock from GH. They could put a short lock timer. 2hrs. 10hrs or 24hrs and Or make it so if you play more than one faction in a campaign you get zero end of camp rewards. But allows you to at least play.

This would make the most sense imo. Also I don’t mind the idea of potentially shortening the main camp. It is true that the beginning of campaign the population rises due to people trying to push for emp. So if you were to maybe shorten it to 2 weeks or even a week to bring more engagement, I’d be ok with it.

Think about it from a logical solution, from the 10 years I’ve been PvPing on Xbox and PC, you tend to seem one front runner able to acquire insane amount of AP keeping them in first place for entire campaigns (which is great for them, no hate) but to shake things up and bring more population at shorter bursts, lowering campaign timers could help.

Just spit balling some ideas here.

When they discussed adding stuff like azuras bow, and the hammer they had some whole thing regarding AP tracking, shrines ext. Either way they mentioned that once you reached emperor or got the deadric item you went to the bottom of the que. Something like that for emperor would be nice. But i doubt they could implement it. Id hate to log in find out i was crowned emp in the night and never got to use it. Not that I think emperor is as scary as it used to be before the major nerfs to it.

But shorter campaigns would be fun. Ideally 1 week imo.

MincMincMinc

CameraBeardThePirate wrote: »

MincMincMinc wrote: »

Why not break the QOL issue preventing people from playing with friends and make it so you can sign up for whatever faction you want at the start of a campaign on any character. No real reason to still have characters locked to a specific faction anymore. Monetarily zos probably loses more money to people canceling subs and leaving the game for months on end because of their friends being on different factions......versus how much money they make on alliance change tokens.

I also see benefits to changing the campaign time constraints too. Instead of monthly doing a weekly or biweekly campaign makes more sense. The beginning of the campaigns always brought in way more participation. Not to mention with the above alliance choice system you would make it far easier to change alliances to play with friends. Waiting a week is much more appealing than hoping your friends are online in a month from now to play.

This also keeps the faction diehards happy because it prevents quick swapping of guilds during a campaign.

Without changing how Faction Lock works, this would still prevent people from playing with friends of different guilds/groups.

Say I have a friend that wants to play on Blue and another on Yellow. Even if we were able to change factions at the start of a campaign for free, I'm still having to pick between those two friends at the start of the campaign.

Well thats where you could make it so if you do so, you forfeit all rewards for the rest of the campaign.

Lagzee

I despise faction lock. Especially with how pvp is currently. Black reach is just not an option most of the time, so if you want to play with friends from other factions, in a populated cyrodiil, you're out of luck. I think they second they added faction lock they should have stopped selling faction changes, and just had you sign up at the start of a campaign.

But i wish they didnt add it at all. Whats the point? How many people were actually willing to spend 30 bucks to swap from a losing faction to a winning one? And how often? Well IMO, not many and not very often at all. That is completely unreasonable to most people, and most people do not do that. Other than that i cant thing of any reasons why they would have added it.

I think zos listened to a few people that complained about losing and they made a very bad choice because of it. So ya, i think faction lock needs to go. Or at least, as the op suggested, make it tied to someone's main campaign and the rewards the receive.

ADawg

Faction lock is awesome. Pick a team, fight for that team!

The7thLettter

ADawg wrote: »

Faction lock is awesome. Pick a team, fight for that team!

Very insightful, thank you for your in depth contribution to this matter.

Bokfink

When I started to PvP in Icereach (which was not faction locked) it was just constant AP trains. Fighing with players who when they couldn't push or do more, they would swap team and retake the same keeps.
I don't care so much for the rewards for Cyro or the leaderboard but would not enjoy if players would could just relog to another alliance at a whim.
I have also seen group of players relog to another alliance just to get to another players and write to/about them via the zonechat of that alliance then swap back.
I enjoy playing for my alliance and I feel like when I play then I play with the hand i'm delt. Sometimes we do good sometimes we do not so good

Not against a short term lock, or make Gray Host a 7 or 14 day campaign so people who wish can swap around more frequently.

I thought we are getting a medium Cyrodiil too in addtion Vengence? Maybe this should be open or they should consider keeping Blackreach as is.

MincMincMinc

Bokfink wrote: »

Not against a short term lock, or make Gray Host a 7 or 14 day campaign so people who wish can swap around more frequently.

I thought we are getting a medium Cyrodiil too in addtion Vengence? Maybe this should be open or they should consider keeping Blackreach as is.

The goofy situation is we have the lock, but players can just multibox factions. Which was popular before alliance change tokens.

A shorter term campaign might help drive players joining in for the reset hype and rewards. If timed right it can boost player numbers with weekend warriors.

We are getting a mini campaign with a single keep on it. So I would guess at 60 player factions instead of the current live 100 per faction. If I was to guess at some point they would shut down GH pvp as you know it in favor of this new gamemode. Then leave cyrodil for vengeance.

The scary reality is that as the pop caps get smaller and smaller it becomes FAR easier for coordinated groups to ruin the fun for casual groups. This dynamic like we see in current cyrodil and especially in BGs makes the casuals simply quit and stop playing. Inevitably the coordinated group gets bored and disbands or quits leaving the match/campaign void of everyone. Its no different than kids on a playground. If you have 100 kids, even if there is a bully, kids can avoid and work around them. Reduce the playground to 5-10 kids and suddenly you would be more prone to just leave the playground making the bully get bored and leave too. >> dead campaign. This affect played out already for the lowbie and nocp servers PCNA where AD(my faction) bullied the maps to the point DC and EP quit playing and all the guilds disbanded or moved to greyhost.....now more recently the final AD guilds have moved to greyhost because they were bored with an all yellow map.

melvin10

Absolutely no reason to have faction locks on a game that promotes teamwork and playing with multiple people anymore than it did years ago. We all want to play with friends.

I would also vouch for a temporary lock...even just 24 hours or something. That way you can play with other friends without having to wait multiple days.

xylena

Yes there should be a lock system to prevent abuse, no it should not be 30 days, that just makes people drop out and quit. Shorten the lockout to something like 7 days but demand a bigger sacrifice of game resources, gold, rewards, etc.

The7thLettter

I’d consider using Alliance Points to transfer. If you PvP a lot, chances are you have a bunch of AP hoarded and the only real thing you can buy now are tripots and some gear sets.

Maybe have different tiers.

5 day wait to transfer: 100k AP
3 day wait to transfer: 500k AP
1 day wait to transfer: 1m AP

Similar to switching your home campaign.