[Suggestion] A fresh idea on how to fix campaign balancing NOW

Dleatherus

campaign populations are unbalanced

many see the solution as being 'combine campaigns', start over with just 3 campaigns and do that 'tomorrow' etc - i'm in agreement with the principle behind these because i too find campaign populations unbalanced - but you'd never hear the end of it from people complaining about their campaign being reset/merged/deleted etc

there might be a way to implement some form of balance for the 46 days days remaining:

this is the current picture for campaign populations as i write this



i don't know the exact numbers of players that each bar represents but for arguments sake let's call it 200

The 'rules' for campaigns that is the same for each campaign right now hints that they have some sort of mechanism (hopefully already in place) to create different rules for different servers

ESO/ZOS would need to look at the numbers on the past week or so but based upon the picture my suggestion is this

adjust the max pop allowed in each campaign for each alliance

busy campaign like Wabbajack (for example) would be locked when the pop reaches current max levels allowed (ie 600 total players per alliance, or whatever the actual current total for 3 bars is)

medium pop campaigns like Auriel's Bow and Bloodthorn would go into 'lock' status when they reached the pop needed to fill 2 bars, and just before it went to three bars (ie 400 total players per alliance, or whatever the actual current total for 2 bars is)

low pop campaigns like Chysamere, Dawnbreaker, Goldbrand, Hopesfire, Scourge, Skull Crusher and Voldenrung would be 'locked' when the population was enough to completely fill one bar and just before it flips to two bars (ie 200 players total per alliance, or whatever the actual current total for 1 bar is)


i might be simplistic here, but it might be as 'easy' as changing the values in the code for each campaign as to when to trip it into 'locked' status

this way nobody gets to lose their home campaign and what they worked hard for (personally i favor a total reset of ALL campaigns and cut them back to 3 to start and only add more when those are full), and it might encourage folks to start guesting into the campaigns that aren't locked, thus starting to create a bit more of a population balance

it's not perfect or ideal - but it might help some of the current problems and be something both ZOS and the player base can learn from without creating a lot of pain and inconvenience for either ZOS or the player base?

D.

EDIT: could be that you make the cap on locking the heavy campaign 2 bars, medium campaigns 1 bar, and the low pop campaigns half a bar - i'll let the mathematicians take care of that

Cheapshot

problem is Skullcrusher DC and EP can't even get more then 10 people now at peek. I say debuff winning alliance and add a cross faction talking between the losing sides

ralonasan

This this this this a million times this!

PS it's ~ 333 per bar since 1000 players lock out a faction.

So essentially a server will have 1 bar until they spill over to let's say 334 people.

Edit: it's 200 sorry.

Dleatherus

Cheapshot wrote: »

problem is Skullcrusher DC and EP can't even get more then 10 people now at peek. I say debuff winning alliance and add a cross faction talking between the losing sides

the whole point is to steer folks that are looking at guesting in a campaign into the less populated ones like Skull Crusher, and to do it NOW

debuffing a winning alliance totally goes against the whole base mechanics, philosophy and point of taking scrolls and holding onto keeps, not to mention the work that might have to be put into it - trying to find a way to balance numbers NOW, not recode cyrodiil (i agree that the mechanics and philosophy are now borked on the underpopulated campaigns)

cross faction talk already exists, it's called teamspeak, ventrillo, mumble and gamevox

D.

Lord_Draevan

I think ZOS should close the 4 least populated servers for a month, see how that works out. I'm sure they can determine which of the 10 are the least populated.
Also, Full population=600 players, max 1800 on a server.

From ZOS Matt Firror:

"We will have two megaservers – one for North American players, and one for European players, although you will be able to create characters on both if you wish. The game's PvP area (Cyrodiil) has a population limit of about 1800 players per campaign, but we'll have many campaigns running simultaneously."

Source: http://www.examiner.com/article/elder-scrolls-online-pvp-player-limit-checks-at-1800-for-cryodiil-campaign