Campaign duration and faction locks

MincMincMinc

My main point of discussion is whether we think reducing the campaign duration would have a net benefit. Is the 30day(4+ week) campaign too long? I bring this up because we see zos reducing the game to two 30days with GH and Veng. Why 30 days? Why not 7 days? or 14 day campaigns? Can we boost populations in pvp all around if we coordinate wipe reset days? Shorter campaigns also ease the burden of faction locks too, where now you can swap up to 4x as fast. In my earlier years running a 7day campaign training guild we noticed this effect all the time where wipe days drastically boost player numbers and involvement especially in new players. You can see this effect in other games too like Rust where wipe days boost player numbers.

For veteran PvPers as we have pointed out with GH, faction locks are a nuisance that simply prevents people from playing with their friends for a month at a time. (sometimes long enough for people stop playing the game entirely before you get the chance to play together) For the most part older veteran PvPers even guilds don't even care about campaign rewards now after 12 years of getting them. However as we saw with the last veng test without faction locks, the casual players tend to just swap and flock to whatever faction is winning on day 1 because rewards are new to them and enticing. Which would point towards the need for keeping faction locks.

• Say if the campaign was a 7 day, you could strategically time the reset to happen on friday nights an hour after primetime to create a weekend warrior type event.
• 14 day campaigns would also be an option so you could have intermittent wipe weekends and then a followup rebuttable weekend.
• Weekend warrior campaigns are another concept, where you would have a short friday7pm-Sunday12pm campaign for weekend warriors. Then have a weekday Mon-Fri campaign which could offer bonus incentives for participating consistently.

As a 12year pvp player honestly I have no care for the campaign rewards by now as they offer me nothing, however I see that zos may be able to use campaign duration to drive more newer player interaction and gameplay. Does anyone have any good input as to why 30days are better? The only people I think might rather 30days are maybe a couple of guilds that still like to pvdoor keeps daily? Wouldn't it be more fulfilling if you were actually fighting for keeps with more people involved in the campaign score instead of racing to see who nightcaps better for score? I always wondered why zos had individual player leaderboards and not collective guild leaderboards to see who contributed the most to the campaign. But those are discussions for another time. Maybe a newer player focused campaign like veng should be 7 day with strategic resets, then the GH campaign with more established guilds would be a 14 day to be some cross between lower faction lock times, while still having the campaign score "race"

xylena

MincMincMinc wrote: »

Does anyone have any good input as to why 30days are better?

If I show up Day 10 out of 14 then the campaign is already pretty much over and I wasn't even a part of it. But if there are still 20 days left out of 30, I'm inclined to become part of it. So a longer campaign opens the time window for more players to engage with it, though if too long, players don't care either because they don't plan that far ahead (like the old 90 day).

Other than that, month long campaigns are intuitive to keep track of, and the longer format gives many players a subjective sense of "epic" battle.

Jsmalls

I actually have a very strong opinion about this.

30 Day campaigns absolutely need to come to an end. For a couple reasons.

1. Scores become extremely one sided to the point of no return in longer campaigns. Catch up mechanics are good and bad for reasons, but they aren't suitable for gaps created in 30 days.
2. When the campaign resets you see an influx of players because chasing that #1 on the leaderboard has real value and is obtainable. Having this occur more often is a good thing.
3. It gives more value to your "playtime". You mean me and my small group can try to hold these "3 resources" for a couple hours and it actually has a feasible X% score for the entire Campaign? Sure I want to participate that way. Versus oh you held those 3 resources for 3 hours out of a potential 720 hours, you did virtually nothing for the overall score.
4. Let's you change your alliance more frequently if you have varying friend groups.

Then I would go as far as to say 3 day and 7 day campaigns could be really cool.

With 3 days, every hour would have extreme meaning on the score (maybe a multiplier would have to be applied based on active population to help deal with "night capping". I completely recognize everyone has different play times, but I think we can all agree the score should calculate differently if there are 20 people active versus 360 active).

Another change that would be rather "interesting" for shorter campaigns. As someone who has gotten Emperor quite a few times, it's still such an awesome feeling. And an experience that 99% of the PvP playerbase never gets. What if in these shorter campaigns you could only get Emperor once? Then you can maintain your status, but you get disqualified to be crowned again. The next person in line would get it, the next time that alliance captures the 6 inner keeps.

Another idea is you can only get Emperor if you're online. Maybe a less popular idea, but if your alliance captured the 6 inner keeps while you weren't active in the server maybe the highest rank that's actively in Cyrodiil capturing keeps should get the honor.

Cyrodiil is such an amazing experience, and the best iteration of MMORPG PvP that I've personally experienced (I've played just about every popular PvP MMO there is). But it's popularity has declined over the years and some of these changes require very little technical changes and could excite a lot of players to participate.

Lord_Hev

14 day I think is a very fair compromise. 30 days gets excessive, and by the 2nd week 7 times out of 10 the campaign victor is essentially already decided.

MincMincMinc

xylena wrote: »

MincMincMinc wrote: »

Does anyone have any good input as to why 30days are better?

If I show up Day 10 out of 14 then the campaign is already pretty much over and I wasn't even a part of it. But if there are still 20 days left out of 30, I'm inclined to become part of it. So a longer campaign opens the time window for more players to engage with it, though if too long, players don't care either because they don't plan that far ahead (like the old 90 day).

Other than that, month long campaigns are intuitive to keep track of, and the longer format gives many players a subjective sense of "epic" battle.

At the same time though, it may just seem like you are casting into a void so to speak. Especially if you are not a part of a night cap guild or something. Your slice of the pie is so much smaller you don't even taste it.

I would be interested to see the player falloff from the start to end of a campaign. I would guess that the first week has a lot of involvement even just for the transmute farmers coming to get their tiers. Kinda why I wonder if the 2 week campaign could be better because maybe they only stick around the first week for transmutes, but if the end of campaign rewards offered more you could get these players invested more to stick around.

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I have also been thinking more about the reset days. Like say just for the 2 week campaign for instance. If we reset on monday or sunday night, this may boost pvp pop early in the week. Then transmute rewards would help the rest of the week. Then weekend warriors would fill the weekends. The second week would probably still just taper off. Then the campaign might have a finale boost if the campaign was close.

xylena

MincMincMinc wrote: »

Especially if you are not a part of a night cap guild or something

Nightcapping wouldn't be a problem if the game had enough players for a critical mass of engagement 24/7. The first I saw the system fall apart was way back in 2015 when the two main servers cannibalized each other, 30 day Thornblade vs 14 day Chillrend, with the 30 day model eventually "winning" the favor of the devs.

ItsNotLiving

Why do people even want faction locks? I don’t remember them being in the game until people stopped caring about winning campaigns.

MincMincMinc

xylena wrote: »

MincMincMinc wrote: »

Especially if you are not a part of a night cap guild or something

Nightcapping wouldn't be a problem if the game had enough players for a critical mass of engagement 24/7. The first I saw the system fall apart was way back in 2015 when the two main servers cannibalized each other, 30 day Thornblade vs 14 day Chillrend, with the 30 day model eventually "winning" the favor of the devs.

Naturally I think GH staves it off, but yeah maintaining pop is crucial. As we saw with the PCNA sub50 and nocp campaigns, they literally imploded over a month or two once the core pug guilds left from the other factions and the only people in the campaigns were the night cappers.....until they got bored and moved on.

ItsNotLiving wrote: »

Why do people even want faction locks? I don’t remember them being in the game until people stopped caring about winning campaigns.

For GH it probably doesn't need faction lock at all, because people have been on a faction for up to even more than a decade with a guild....or simply dont care to pvdoor anymore since the rewards offer nothing. However the more casuals and weekly farmers you have, the more you need locks because these people are only in it for the grind and have no attachments to any guild. As we saw with the recent Veng without lock, players quickly flipped to their EP instead for rewards.

There is also the notion that players will always flock to the most populated campaign. When we have a situation where the pug/casual guilds will always choose the faction lock campaign it leads to that simply becoming the most populated by default.