ZOS, will you address population caps?

tonemd · February 2015

As I said in the "High Unemployment..." thread, I'm for the changing of scoring idea. Would it be possible to put more weight on activities which REQUIRE combat with enemy players, such as the defensive and offensive ticks K/D ratios and bounties completed? You could even remove scoring from owning keeps completely and have that only apply to player buffs and map navigation.

Roechacca · February 2015

You're not going to find too many people from the factions with a healthy population liking a pop cap lowered lol . That's a given . The underdogs need something though . I would hate to see this games PVP go the way of The Secret Worlds AvAvA PVP and just die off all together . Balance is the most important issue when the games working .

Valnas · February 2015

Thank you for communicating w/ the community on these issues.

Population issues are serious and anti-competitive at this point. At night it's all hard fought for every inch and in the day ... it's like we have to try not to take the map on EP.

A cap tied to the lowest pop isn't really addressing the issue and would strangle pvp to a quiet death.

I like the idea of low pop buffs, but do it for players not siege. It contradicts the idea of the map buffs for keep ownership but, there needs to be an incentive for people to login to an outnumbered environment and keep playing. With ulti gain firmly under control I think you can give some substantial survivability buffs (think movement speed/resists/heal %/regen) that wouldn't present TTK balance issues.

Lord_Draevan · February 2015

AaronMB wrote: »

Interesting ideas all around.

"Limiting population per alliance to match the lowest or median population of the lowest population."

^Unless I misunderstand, this one would concern me. Would this leave open the opportunity for a winning--or any--campaign to simply leave Cyrodiil and minimize the opposition's numbers? (e.g. "Alright! We got Emp and the scrolls. Everyone leave town!")

^This. It's way too easy to exploit.

Roechacca · February 2015

Lord_Draevan wrote: »

AaronMB wrote: »

Interesting ideas all around.

"Limiting population per alliance to match the lowest or median population of the lowest population."

^Unless I misunderstand, this one would concern me. Would this leave open the opportunity for a winning--or any--campaign to simply leave Cyrodiil and minimize the opposition's numbers? (e.g. "Alright! We got Emp and the scrolls. Everyone leave town!")

^This. It's way too easy to exploit.

Interesting . Exploiting wasn't my first thought here .

Minnesinger · February 2015

Without knowing the exact numbers I believe when Brian says that AD and EP have roughly the same numbers. I am against limiting the population to the lowest faction. Also I believe any of the 3 factions can bring reasonable numbers to the field.

What comes to the imbalance issues and what needs to reconsidered is that one faction caps all 6 scrolls, the Emp and the map while there is really much less resistance. For example, EP just took control of the Thornblabe NA in this fashion leaving nothing to AD and DC. This, not suprisingly, gave EP the lead. In one day, the whole situation turned upside down. It is quite frustrating to chase EP when they control all 6 scrolls and the Emp giving them a nice overall buff.

I know some say it is war and blah blah. We all seek enjoyment in this game. In my opinion, at worst the imbalance between the factions leads to said exploitation of the game mechanics. It is best to fix imbalance somehow.

Huntler · February 2015

Minnesinger wrote: »

Without knowing the exact numbers I believe when Brian says that AD and EP have roughly the same numbers. I am against limiting the population to the lowest faction. Also I believe any of the 3 factions can bring reasonable numbers to the field.

What comes to the imbalance issues and what needs to reconsidered is that one faction caps all 6 scrolls, the Emp and the map while there is really much less resistance. For example, EP just took control of the Thornblabe NA in this fashion leaving nothing to AD and DC. This, not suprisingly, gave EP the lead. In one day, the whole situation turned upside down. It is quite frustrating to chase EP when they control all 6 scrolls and the Emp giving them a nice overall buff.

I know some say it is war and blah blah. We all seek enjoyment in this game. In my opinion, at worst the imbalance between the factions leads to said exploitation of the game mechanics. It is best to fix imbalance somehow.

I do agree with this that it is insanely frustrating that an entire weekend of fighting/pushing for every gain above EP (which led to thousands of points ahead) was completely undone with 1 day during the week of the early morning cap of everything. That just doesn't make sense.

Lord_Draevan · February 2015

roechacca wrote: »

Lord_Draevan wrote: »

AaronMB wrote: »

Interesting ideas all around.

"Limiting population per alliance to match the lowest or median population of the lowest population."

^Unless I misunderstand, this one would concern me. Would this leave open the opportunity for a winning--or any--campaign to simply leave Cyrodiil and minimize the opposition's numbers? (e.g. "Alright! We got Emp and the scrolls. Everyone leave town!")

^This. It's way too easy to exploit.

Interesting . Exploiting wasn't my first thought here .

Mine either, but when I read AaronMB's comment I realised how devilishly simple it would be to abuse it.

Sharee · February 2015

ZOS_JessicaFolsom wrote: »

roechacca wrote: »

Also I like your ideas Mr Wheeler . I like the first idea best .

The first idea (Limiting population per alliance to match the lowest or median population of the lowest population) sounds good in practice, but there are some inherent problems with it. Let's say you're in a campaign where the lowest-population alliance has only 11 people on (this actually happens). That means the other two alliances would also be limited to 11 people, and no one is having fun at that point.

How about instead of limiting each side to 11 players, you simply make the underpopulated side's keep NPC's unkillable like the justice system guards.

Meaning, you track the lowest or median population of the lowest faction, but instead of limiting the other factions population to it, you render the lowest populations keeps immune to capture for the duration that the side is heavily underpopulated.

That way you can have a cyrodiil with 100 reds fighting 100 yellows fighting 11 blues, but only reds and yellows can attack and capture each other's keeps.

Huntler · February 2015

Lord_Draevan wrote: »

roechacca wrote: »

Lord_Draevan wrote: »

AaronMB wrote: »

Interesting ideas all around.

"Limiting population per alliance to match the lowest or median population of the lowest population."

^Unless I misunderstand, this one would concern me. Would this leave open the opportunity for a winning--or any--campaign to simply leave Cyrodiil and minimize the opposition's numbers? (e.g. "Alright! We got Emp and the scrolls. Everyone leave town!")

^This. It's way too easy to exploit.

Interesting . Exploiting wasn't my first thought here .

Mine either, but when I read AaronMB's comment I realised how devilishly simple it would be to abuse it.

A lot of us have been skeptical of dynamic caps for that exact reason when this suggestion was brought up over the summer around August(?) or so. Its too easy manipulated and can literally lead to the suffocation of PvP. Your best solution as I said before is to create an environment where the players fix it through incentives that are worthwhile. Examples being as some of the ideas Brian presented things such as rewards track across campaigns (universal reward) and giving the "underdog population/alliances" bonus to EXP/AP gains, with 1.6 coming out and exp being important again I would jump at the chance to be the underdog alliance to benefit from these gains.

Should there be concern about bonus AP when it comes to emp, all you have to do is make "bonus AP" not count towards leaderboards. Should be rather trivial if that is a concern at all. In this way you incentivize the players that care about these things which I imagine will be a lot of the organized guilds.

Huntler · February 2015

Sharee wrote: »

ZOS_JessicaFolsom wrote: »

roechacca wrote: »

Also I like your ideas Mr Wheeler . I like the first idea best .

The first idea (Limiting population per alliance to match the lowest or median population of the lowest population) sounds good in practice, but there are some inherent problems with it. Let's say you're in a campaign where the lowest-population alliance has only 11 people on (this actually happens). That means the other two alliances would also be limited to 11 people, and no one is having fun at that point.

How about instead of limiting each side to 11 players, you simply make the underpopulated side's keep NPC's unkillable like the justice system guards.

Meaning, you track the lowest or median population of the lowest faction, but instead of limiting the other factions population to it, you render the lowest populations keeps immune to capture for the duration that the side is heavily underpopulated.

That way you can have a cyrodiil with 100 reds fighting 100 yellows fighting 11 blues, but only reds and yellows can attack and capture each other's keeps.

No.

Just no. Doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize how easily exploitable/manipulable that scenario would be. I would suggest you ponder on that thought for a while before you push for that idea.

CitraBenzoet_ESO · February 2015

Why not just have it set to something like:

If the population of each faction is from 0-24 then no dynamic cap is needed.

If the population of each faction is 24 or greater, then no single faction can have more than 3 times the population of the lowest populated faction starting at 24.
Ex: faction 1 has 24 ppl, faction 2 has 52, then faction 3 cannot exceed 72 people.

That way if people think capping emp then logging out seems like a way to control they would be wrong. As it is possible to take a map pvdoor or pvp with 1 full raid group.

Just an idea...

Roechacca · February 2015

CitraBenzoet_ESO wrote: »

Why not just have it set to something like:

If the population of each faction is from 0-24 then no dynamic cap is needed.

If the population of each faction is 24 or greater, then no single faction can have more than 3 times the population of the lowest populated faction starting at 24.
Ex: faction 1 has 24 ppl, faction 2 has 52, then faction 3 cannot exceed 72 people.

That way if people think capping emp then logging out seems like a way to control they would be wrong. As it is possible to take a map pvdoor or pvp with 1 full raid group.

Just an idea...

Interesting . Floating caps with a minimum sounds less exploitable

Junipus · February 2015

CitraBenzoet_ESO wrote: »

Why not just have it set to something like:

If the population of each faction is from 0-24 then no dynamic cap is needed.

If the population of each faction is 24 or greater, then no single faction can have more than 3 times the population of the lowest populated faction starting at 24.
Ex: faction 1 has 24 ppl, faction 2 has 52, then faction 3 cannot exceed 72 people.

That way if people think capping emp then logging out seems like a way to control they would be wrong. As it is possible to take a map pvdoor or pvp with 1 full raid group.

Just an idea...

An interesting idea, but what happens if a locked faction dominates then logs out at least 2 bars of players while the other factions are high/locked. Would that mean that those "extra" players would be booted purely because one faction logged out?

Dynamic faction caps, or even lower faction caps, are a bad idea for the game. Yes it sucks being outnumbered or feeling that everything you work towards is futile, but there are ways to deal with that within the game already instead of asking ZOS to implement something which they could either fudge up or would be detrimental to PvP through no fault of their own.

SoulScream · February 2015

Go put one of the ideas on the PTS right now and let us see if we like it. Please!

Jahosefat · February 2015

I like the increased xp idea; encourage new people to come PVP without sacrificing leveling time or just an alternative method to level up through veteran ranks. I like this because it seems it would expand the PVP player base as opposed to just shifting the current player base around.

I think it would be great if you could fix imbalance issues by/alongside efforts to expand the pvp community. It is almost all familiar faces at this point

RinaldoGandolphi · February 2015

@ZOS_BrianWheeler‌

Here is my idea.

I understand that no one wants to limit pop caps because who wants to wait in ques, and not being able to play with their friends, etc. So this is what i propose:

Temporary Alliances

Temporary Alliances would work like this:

1. Allows two factions of lower pop to have a time period, of say 1 hour, where all hostilies between these two factions cease.
2. The two factions that get a temporary truce can not attack each others keeps, resources, or players during this time frame.
3. This allows the two factions with lower numbers to team up on the one with dominant numbers.
4. Much like how Scrolls Messages come up on screen, Temporary Alliance messages would be shown in a simlair way.

example DC and AD are at 2 bars and EP is pop locked. if EP has:

Locked population
Controls all the keeps around the IPC
Has x Amount of a score lead over the other two factions.

then an announcement appears on the screen stating that Daggerfall Covenent and Aldmeri Dominion have forged a temporary alliance.

During this 1 hour time frame, AD and DC would team up on EP, putting aside their petty differences to fight a common enemy they are both outnumbered by, "The Enemy of my Enemy is my Friend" All keeps taken by this Alliance will show up as Green on the Map.

When the 1 hour time frame is up, the RNG then splits the taken keeps randomly between AD and DC, if their is an odd number of keeps, then X number of the keeps is given to EP in order to ensure a fair even allotment between the two members of the temporary alliance..

A Temporary Alliance can only happen once every 12 hours. Once the Alliance period is over, everyone resumes hostilities and goes back to killing one another.

This will allow the map to be shaken up, to always be contested ground, and will prevent any one faction from asserting unrivaled Dominance over a campaign, while preventing one from holding Emperor soley on the grounds of superior numbers.

If EP, for example, wants to be the most populous faction, then they should expect to be on the receiving end of being double teamed on a regular basis... this will encourage others to roll toons on the Factions that have less players.

All wars are political, when 2 opposing factions are being steamrolled by one contemporary, it makes political sense for those 2 factions to work together(with their own ulterior motives) to better their own situation in the current landscape, Even if that means working with one they see as an enemy if it helps them against a greater threat.

this is just my 2 cents, i have no idea how difficult it would be to implement something like this, but I think it could work and would put the complaining about pop imbalances to an end, as if things are lopsided that badly, the game would have a system in place to remedy that on fly while still keeping the landscape competitive.

TheBull · February 2015

Fix servers then give more XP and AP.

There a war going on at the heart of Tamriel for christ's sake. Make it important!

@ZOS_BrianWheeler‌ man it's good to have you around!

Winnamine · February 2015

Sharee wrote: »

ZOS_JessicaFolsom wrote: »

roechacca wrote: »

Also I like your ideas Mr Wheeler . I like the first idea best .

The first idea (Limiting population per alliance to match the lowest or median population of the lowest population) sounds good in practice, but there are some inherent problems with it. Let's say you're in a campaign where the lowest-population alliance has only 11 people on (this actually happens). That means the other two alliances would also be limited to 11 people, and no one is having fun at that point.

How about instead of limiting each side to 11 players, you simply make the underpopulated side's keep NPC's unkillable like the justice system guards.

Meaning, you track the lowest or median population of the lowest faction, but instead of limiting the other factions population to it, you render the lowest populations keeps immune to capture for the duration that the side is heavily underpopulated.

That way you can have a cyrodiil with 100 reds fighting 100 yellows fighting 11 blues, but only reds and yellows can attack and capture each other's keeps.

That would make the exploit that AaronMB described so much worse.
Think about it, one alliance gets all the scrolls and emp. Then they leave.
Now no one can dethrone them or get any scrolls back until they come back... which would probably be never.
Buff servers you don't even have to defend!

frozywozy · February 2015

@ZOS_BrianWheeler‌

There is another VERY popular MMO which figured out how to solve this problem before they even released their first instance of large scale open world pvp.

They added a "tenacity" buff to increase the health / damage of the players of the outnumbered faction and the number would work according to certain margins.

The way I see it work would be the following :

- Your faction is at 1 bar : max health & damage
- Your faction is at 2 bar : high health & damage
- Your faction is at 3 bar : average health & damage
- Your faction is max pop : low health & damage

I'll let you figure out the numbers but you see where I'm going with this.

Sharee · February 2015

Winnamine wrote: »

Sharee wrote: »

ZOS_JessicaFolsom wrote: »

roechacca wrote: »

Also I like your ideas Mr Wheeler . I like the first idea best .

The first idea (Limiting population per alliance to match the lowest or median population of the lowest population) sounds good in practice, but there are some inherent problems with it. Let's say you're in a campaign where the lowest-population alliance has only 11 people on (this actually happens). That means the other two alliances would also be limited to 11 people, and no one is having fun at that point.

How about instead of limiting each side to 11 players, you simply make the underpopulated side's keep NPC's unkillable like the justice system guards.

Meaning, you track the lowest or median population of the lowest faction, but instead of limiting the other factions population to it, you render the lowest populations keeps immune to capture for the duration that the side is heavily underpopulated.

That way you can have a cyrodiil with 100 reds fighting 100 yellows fighting 11 blues, but only reds and yellows can attack and capture each other's keeps.

That would make the exploit that AaronMB described so much worse.
Think about it, one alliance gets all the scrolls and emp. Then they leave.
Now no one can dethrone them or get any scrolls back until they come back... which would probably be never.
Buff servers you don't even have to defend!

That would however require the alliance in question to not play at all during primetime.

I can understand if a guild forces their members to not play in a campaign at certain times, but a whole megaserver? The guy planning this has no control over all the players on his faction. By not logging in at primetime, all he would achieve was his faction being filled by randoms instead of his guild, losing everything pronto.

Talcyndl · February 2015

Champion points are incoming in 1.6 and based on PTS, earning them will be MUCH faster when you have the inspiration (name?) bonus.

As a preliminary step to encourage player driven balance, give low population faction(s) the equivalent bonus - even if they otherwise don't qualify for it and perhaps an added bonus on top of any existing inspiration bonus a player might have.

You will then see people roll other faction characters to gain the much desired Champion points.

TheBull · February 2015

frozywozy wrote: »

@ZOS_BrianWheeler‌

There is another VERY popular MMO which figured out how to solve this problem before they even released their first instance of large scale open world pvp.

They added a "tenacity" buff to increase the health / damage of the players of the outnumbered faction and the number would work accordingly to certain margins.

The way I see it work would be the following :

- Your faction is at 1 bar : max health & damage
- Your faction is at 2 bar : high health & damage
- Your faction is at 3 bar : average health & damage
- Your faction is max pop : low health & damage

I'll let you figure out the numbers but you see where I'm going with this.

Man I hated Tenacity. I didn't like how all the sudden one guy took 10 people to kill. On the other side it felt cheap when I was that one guy and killed 7 people.

Roechacca · February 2015

Just a wild out there idea

What about creating a antagonist to the Emperor ? Similar buff line as Emperor but given to the lowest populations highest ranking member the moment a new Emperor is crowned ? Not sure what a good name for it would be but a outlaw leader to the regime .

Darklord_Tiberius · February 2015

Population imbalance is something that will always be here in this game. Phoenix Rising was and for the most part still outnumbered on Haderus. Yea sure it was tough and yea sure AD swept the map, what did we do? We adjusted. Phoenix Rising, EP hit Squad and Immortali are the three guilds that fight for Pact on Haderus. During the past 6 weeks we were still able to crown Emperors and go head to head with the imbalance of everything. Usually we would go to bed controlling our lands and more. When we started our PvP at Prime time, we took everything back despite being outnumbered.

I think Cutting down another PvP server would help and start buffing guards. If a faction only has 15 people on against a faction with 50, all guards for the lowest pop faction should be increased to V14 or at least triple the amount of guards at their keeps. The less easy it is for a stacked faction to take keeps the less we will see of map capping.

Darklord_Tiberius · February 2015

kwisatz wrote: »

I think it would be better give people an incentive to stay in the same campaign for a long time: the more you fight for the same campaign, the more you'll be rewarded. So people would think about it twice before switching campaign.

This is a good idea too. Or at least make it harder to jump around from server to server. Haderus had great balanced PvP. When you get people from another campaigns coming over to farm emp and not really contribute or have goals to stay committed to a campaign it causes inflation and imbalance and people leave, on all sides.

daswahnsinn · February 2015

How many EP are in this zerg?

McDoogs · February 2015

ZOS_BrianWheeler wrote: »

We have looked at population imbalances throughout the release of the game and have seen it change from campaign to campaign, month to month with Ebonheart, Aldmeri and Daggerfall all taking top population spots. As a snap shot, the past three days show the following:
Haderus has swapped highest population between all three alliances.

Azura has a steady stream of Aldmeri and Ebonheart, but not much Daggerfall.

Blackwater has mainly Ebonheart with the highest with Aldmeri slightly behind and again, Daggerfall the lowest.

Chillrend has Daggerfall with the highest population and Aldmeri/Ebonheart around the same

Thornblade has Aldmeri and Ebonheart with roughly the same population with a slight edge towards Ebonheart, and Daggerfall trailing.

There are ongoing discussions about how to address population imbalances in the campaigns. Some of the possible solutions include the following:
Limiting population per alliance to match the lowest or median population of the lowest population.

Giving more XP/AP than we currently do

Giving alternate siege weapons to the underdog\low-population alliance(s) that do more damage while they have the underdog\low pop bonus.

Altering Cyrodiil's landscape

Changing/removing scoring and showing that other campaigns have underdog/low-population bonuses on the Campaign Selection UI

Doing away with Home and Guest campaign options, so Campaign Reward tiers roll with a character instead of being tied to a campaign so you can play in any campaign you want.

All of these have their pros and cons, some of which may not be immediately apparent but we still have to consider. The last one, for example, would result in all the campaigns having the same duration (so people can't earn tier 3 then hop to a short campaign and get a reward when it ends), and scoring and would be better suited as a meta-score across all campaigns. We would also need to remove the limitation on the accounts which don't let players have characters from opposing alliances in the same campaign (and yes I know that "jump to buddy" circumvents this rule already).

I agree there are many solutions we can explore, and that population imbalances are always a challenge for PVP games in which battles are not instanced to launch on demand. Thanks again for your continued patience in this and many other matters that the PVP community and myself care about deeply

Nothing of value was said here.

TL:DR version: "We have no actual plans of doing anything, suck it up or gtfo"

frozywozy · February 2015

daswahnsinn wrote: »

How many EP are in this zerg?

If you took this picture yesterday (february 3rd), at Brk LM, it was 8 of us.

Xsorus · February 2015

ZOS_BrianWheeler wrote: »

We have looked at population imbalances throughout the release of the game and have seen it change from campaign to campaign, month to month with Ebonheart, Aldmeri and Daggerfall all taking top population spots. As a snap shot, the past three days show the following:
Haderus has swapped highest population between all three alliances.

Azura has a steady stream of Aldmeri and Ebonheart, but not much Daggerfall.

Blackwater has mainly Ebonheart with the highest with Aldmeri slightly behind and again, Daggerfall the lowest.

Chillrend has Daggerfall with the highest population and Aldmeri/Ebonheart around the same

Thornblade has Aldmeri and Ebonheart with roughly the same population with a slight edge towards Ebonheart, and Daggerfall trailing.

There are ongoing discussions about how to address population imbalances in the campaigns. Some of the possible solutions include the following:
Limiting population per alliance to match the lowest or median population of the lowest population.

Giving more XP/AP than we currently do

Giving alternate siege weapons to the underdog\low-population alliance(s) that do more damage while they have the underdog\low pop bonus.

Altering Cyrodiil's landscape

Changing/removing scoring and showing that other campaigns have underdog/low-population bonuses on the Campaign Selection UI

Doing away with Home and Guest campaign options, so Campaign Reward tiers roll with a character instead of being tied to a campaign so you can play in any campaign you want.

All of these have their pros and cons, some of which may not be immediately apparent but we still have to consider. The last one, for example, would result in all the campaigns having the same duration (so people can't earn tier 3 then hop to a short campaign and get a reward when it ends), and scoring and would be better suited as a meta-score across all campaigns. We would also need to remove the limitation on the accounts which don't let players have characters from opposing alliances in the same campaign (and yes I know that "jump to buddy" circumvents this rule already).

I agree there are many solutions we can explore, and that population imbalances are always a challenge for PVP games in which battles are not instanced to launch on demand. Thanks again for your continued patience in this and many other matters that the PVP community and myself care about deeply

1. This is a bad idea as it'll be unfun like you said.
2. This is a good idea somewhat, but if you want people to roll other factions to help with population you need to make alliance war rank account bound.
3. Would be interesting.
4. Not needed
5. Removing scoring would be my primary suggestion. It serves no purpose but to lower morale and the score on reflects population imbalance. There is no real way to fix it either because it's trying to shove an esport mechanism into a inheritly unbalanced setting.
6. Guest campaigns need to go. It's why you have buff servers in the first place and why daoc did not despite the same mechanics.