The way I think they should have done it is to have a shared neutral/no man's land starting zone for everyone, where there are quests introducing you to the pros and cons of each Alliance and their attitudes towards each other. Then when you reach level 10 instead of automatically being sent off to fight for 'your' alliance you're given the opportunity to choose one to fight for. If you don't then you can't enter Cyrodiil but you can travel freely between all the PvE maps since you're neutral to all the alliances, like the guilds, merchants and assorted other NPCs who get to choose whether to join an Alliance or not.

Maybe there would be a way later on to change your alliance or declare yourself neutral again too.

But I can't see that happening at this point because it would require changing pretty much everything. It's hard to see how cross-faction parties can make sense for open-world PvE (dungeons it makes sense because we're all doing them as part of the same guild quests and all the guilds are neutral even if some of their members aren't), but if they can make it work lore-wise I'll definitely be in favour.

Enodoc wrote: »

UrQuan wrote: »

Enodoc wrote: »

UrQuan wrote: »

The complication these zones have that the group dungeons don't is that they'd have to account for an increased player population in those zones one way or another.

Not necessarily. Considering there are numerous different "shards" of each zone, say each shard has capacity of 600. Currently that's 600 from one faction, but it could easily be altered so that it was 200+200+200, or even dynamically set so that a+b+c=600 for 1 < a,b,c < 600.

But that's exactly the kind of "accounting for an increased player population" that I'm talking about... They'd have to decide on how they want to have the population balanced across the alliances in each shard, and then create a mechanism to maintain that balance. With a group dungeon where the population is only the 4 people in the group, you don't have to worry about any of that, so you don't have to write any code to take it into account.

Ah sure, fair enough. I thought maybe you meant they would directly triple the capacity, which is possible but less likely.

I would hope they don't just do things that way. Seems like you'd be more likely to run into Cyrodiil-like performance issues with that approach...