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Let's talk about campaign resets!

RivenEsq
RivenEsq
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Can anyone enlighten me why a new campaign does not reset ownership of all keeps, outposts, and scrolls? You could even make it so that the central keeps and outposts begin neutral with Imperial guards and must be broken down and taken to be claimed for your faction.

Each "new campaign" resets the total score and the leaderboard, but not who actually owns anything on the map. This creates a two-fold problem. First, the campaign resets at zero dark thirty. Whichever server has the players that play later gets an innate advantage in that they get to capture everything (or continue to own everything, in some cases) and hold it for the entire night. Now, this is not an argument against what is commonly referred to as "nightcapping", but having one faction in a campaign have an immediate, sometimes insurmountable advantage at the very moment the campaign begins seems quite disingenuous given the campaign supposedly "resetting". Second, why should the server that won the previous campaign and -typically- has an advantage already going into the new campaign (especially if their opposing factions have already given up since the game is well in hand) get to keep all the territory in a supposedly new campaign? They can already line up their advantage before they are even competing in the next campaign and I do not think that is right.

I have some solutions to these issues and I'd like to see if anyone feels the same.

1. When a campaign resets, EVERYTHING should reset. This includes scrolls, keeps, outposts, resources, etc. If ZOS wants to make the emperor keeps neutral that have to be taken once the campaign starts, that would be fine too. In addition to this reset, the campaign should be closed and all players should be kicked to PvE for a couple minutes while it rolls over. This ensures that everyone starts at the same time and from the same location (their starting gates). They could even have a countdown of a minute or two before you were able to leave your scroll gates into Cyrodiil so that everyone gets a chance to rejoin the match.

2. Make the campaigns reset at a time where people are actually online to play in them. Have them reset at 7pm Eastern time on a Friday night, which is likely the peak population for all servers. This would accomplish several things in that it ensures one server isn't up by several thousand points before the others even field some opposition and it would also build hype for matchups. It would emphasize the importance of early strategy rather than feeling a truly minimal impact on the campaign because you were down 6,000 points before you even had the opportunity to log in for the first time. Changing the reset time is a golden opportunity to build hype for the start of a new campaign as well as maintaining competitive integrity within these campaigns. You do get rewards based on where you finish so I think resetting the campaigns at a time where one faction is clearly advantaged seems a bit unfair. For those concerned about queues, this seems like the optimum time that a ESO plus member priority queue could be put in place for PvP.


So, what does everyone think? I believe this would go a long way to addressing how some campaigns are perpetually controlled by a single faction (buff campaigns) by giving opposing factions an opportunity to get a foothold or even crown an emperor of their own without having to fight through being camped at their own spawns from the very beginning of a campaign. It is also the only real way to have any level of true competition maintained in PvP. Once again, I understand that this is very much a population game and that it is always daytime for someone. I'm not arguing in opposition to players in other timezones who play at night, simply addressing a very controllable competitive balance concern with regard to campaign resets.

@ZOS_BrianWheeler
@ZOS_JessicaFolsom

Do you two have thoughts on this? I think the majority of players in PvP would greatly appreciate this change.
Cheers,
Ryan "RivenEsq" Reynolds
CEO & Founder of [KG] Knight Gaming
@RivenEsq
  • Oughash
    Oughash
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    Agreed completely. I don't have much else to add.

    Campaign resets should definitely be during primetime, and should definitely reset all of the things.
  • Keron
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    I remember quite some discussion on this topic from around a couple months after release, must be close to a year ago. The usual argument against this was either "realm consistency", meaning that a certain consistency in realm state would encourage players to stay on board and make an effort to actually win a campaign. Or it was "realm pride", which is basically the same argument just worded differently and referring to the fact that winners should be proud to stay on board by retaining their edge over the other factions bonus-wise.

    Both of these arguments are kind of only taking the winning side into account and are totally counterproductive in regards to the buff campaigns.

    Maybe a distinction is in order, make the realm state persistent if the factions finished the campaign with all scores within 10% of winner's score and reset it as soon as one faction is more than 10% away. That would kind of punish the buff campaigns and give the other factions a possibility to snatch away the campaign from the buff faction.

    I don't know, I kind of see both sides of the coin and can't really favour one way or the other. The above is just an idea thrown into the discussion.
  • Jauriel
    Jauriel
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    100000000% agree and frankly I would love to know which game maker felt the current system made any sense. It is ridiculous. When the campaign ends-FULL RESET.

    Can we at least get an answer from ZOS about THIS?
  • Weberda
    Weberda
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    Jauriel wrote: »
    100000000% agree and frankly I would love to know which game maker felt the current system made any sense. It is ridiculous. When the campaign ends-FULL RESET.

    Can we at least get an answer from ZOS about THIS?

    So if you and your group are down at.. say.....Bloodmayne fighting to open the gate and make a scroll run when the campaign ends and resets. All of a sudden you're all booted to PvE. I can just imagine the rage in T.S....

    Fernwood, EP Haderus NA
    Lo Behold, AD Thornblade NA (formerly Haderus, inactive)
  • Jauriel
    Jauriel
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    Weberda wrote: »
    Jauriel wrote: »
    100000000% agree and frankly I would love to know which game maker felt the current system made any sense. It is ridiculous. When the campaign ends-FULL RESET.

    Can we at least get an answer from ZOS about THIS?

    So if you and your group are down at.. say.....Bloodmayne fighting to open the gate and make a scroll run when the campaign ends and resets. All of a sudden you're all booted to PvE. I can just imagine the rage in T.S....

    LOL I would never have my group doing a scroll run at the moment campaign resets. I mean- DUH. And anyone who *would* doesn't need to be pvp'ing anyway.
    Edited by Jauriel on April 28, 2015 1:14PM
  • Forestd16b14_ESO
    Forestd16b14_ESO
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    They use to reset after the campaign ended shortly after launched I don't know why they stopped but this has to come back so it can cut back on "owning" servers and gate camping. No faction is entitled to there own server period no matter how much the guilds cry no faction no one is entitled to there own pvp server. Why? Cause it ruins the game for every one else including your own faction.
  • Weberda
    Weberda
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    Jauriel wrote: »
    Weberda wrote: »
    Jauriel wrote: »
    100000000% agree and frankly I would love to know which game maker felt the current system made any sense. It is ridiculous. When the campaign ends-FULL RESET.

    Can we at least get an answer from ZOS about THIS?

    So if you and your group are down at.. say.....Bloodmayne fighting to open the gate and make a scroll run when the campaign ends and resets. All of a sudden you're all booted to PvE. I can just imagine the rage in T.S....

    LOL I would never have my group doing a scroll run at the moment campaign resets. I mean- DUH. And anyone who *would* doesn't need to be pvp'ing anyway.

    Well see that's the thing. A lot of activity would cease an hour or two before reset since players would say "what's the point?". I think Cyrodiil needs to be a dynamic 24/7 activity. It's already gotten to be somewhat boring for a lot of players. What's really needed is a redesign of the area. After a whole year the whole thing has gotten stale. It's the same locations with the same basic tactics with the same basic outcomes.

    Fernwood, EP Haderus NA
    Lo Behold, AD Thornblade NA (formerly Haderus, inactive)
  • AhPook_Is_Here
    AhPook_Is_Here
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    I think it is fine the way it is. The actual time of the reset varies based on when it started. Many campaigns end during the day in the United States of Awesome. The last few Thornblade resets were all mid-day EDT.

    The way the reset works now on active servers; the competition there becomes exceptionally fierce as the campaign ends as factions position themselves for the new campaign. On buff servers nothing happens, because nobody is there competing. Making the map reset will just make people stop playing some hours before campaign end, and promote emperor flipping at the reset, assuming the author wants emp to reset as well.

    What makes more sense is just to remove empty buff servers like Thornblade and Azuras and give all Cyrodiil buffs to every faction in PVE so PVE players can stay out of Cyrodiil past their achievements, or give all factions no buffs in PVE if that is the default progression balance the game makers are shooting for.

    This will also give AD and DC a chance to get on to some trials leader-boards and hopefully provide some competition for the best PVE guild in the America's and the Pacific Rim, Potato Syndicate. Trials competition has been exceptionally thin lately, and having their buffs back might motivate them to take a shot at the content.
    Edited by AhPook_Is_Here on April 28, 2015 1:56PM
    “Whatever.”
    -Unknown American
  • Jauriel
    Jauriel
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    Weberda wrote: »
    Jauriel wrote: »
    Weberda wrote: »
    Jauriel wrote: »
    100000000% agree and frankly I would love to know which game maker felt the current system made any sense. It is ridiculous. When the campaign ends-FULL RESET.

    Can we at least get an answer from ZOS about THIS?

    So if you and your group are down at.. say.....Bloodmayne fighting to open the gate and make a scroll run when the campaign ends and resets. All of a sudden you're all booted to PvE. I can just imagine the rage in T.S....

    LOL I would never have my group doing a scroll run at the moment campaign resets. I mean- DUH. And anyone who *would* doesn't need to be pvp'ing anyway.

    Well see that's the thing. A lot of activity would cease an hour or two before reset since players would say "what's the point?". I think Cyrodiil needs to be a dynamic 24/7 activity. It's already gotten to be somewhat boring for a lot of players. What's really needed is a redesign of the area. After a whole year the whole thing has gotten stale. It's the same locations with the same basic tactics with the same basic outcomes.

    Loooooots to do other than scroll capping. And no campaign is decided in the last 24 hours-they're all pretty much decided in the first 24 the way it is now, IMO.
  • Enodoc
    Enodoc
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    The "reason" is to keep the world persistent and therefore to encourage players into PvP at all times. If the keeps and resources reset, you may have a situation where people would say "oh, the campaign is resetting tomorrow, so I can't be bothered to PvP because everything we gain will be for nothing". For constantly-changing campaigns, is makes complete sense to keep faction state consistent, as they wouldn't want to lose their hard-earned keeps. (Example - Thornblade EU, normally)
    For "buff campaigns" on the other hand, this is complete nonsense, as it discourages people from other alliances to ever go into them at all, knowing that they have so much work to do to even make a dent in it. (Example - Thornblade NA, normally)

    The best solution I think would be to take each campaign reset individually. If, at the end of the campaign, the scores are close, then that one just gets the scores reset. However, if it's functioning as a buff campaign, then one alliance will own almost all of the keeps and will have a score that's - for example - more than double the others. This campaign would also likely have the losing alliances with the Score Underdog bonus, which could be the defining indicator. This one should have a full reset.
    Edited by Enodoc on April 28, 2015 2:21PM
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  • Sypher
    Sypher
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    Weberda wrote: »
    Jauriel wrote: »
    Weberda wrote: »
    Jauriel wrote: »
    100000000% agree and frankly I would love to know which game maker felt the current system made any sense. It is ridiculous. When the campaign ends-FULL RESET.

    Can we at least get an answer from ZOS about THIS?

    So if you and your group are down at.. say.....Bloodmayne fighting to open the gate and make a scroll run when the campaign ends and resets. All of a sudden you're all booted to PvE. I can just imagine the rage in T.S....

    LOL I would never have my group doing a scroll run at the moment campaign resets. I mean- DUH. And anyone who *would* doesn't need to be pvp'ing anyway.

    Well see that's the thing. A lot of activity would cease an hour or two before reset since players would say "what's the point?". I think Cyrodiil needs to be a dynamic 24/7 activity. It's already gotten to be somewhat boring for a lot of players. What's really needed is a redesign of the area. After a whole year the whole thing has gotten stale. It's the same locations with the same basic tactics with the same basic outcomes.

    To be honest I'd rather have inactivity in the last 2-3 hours of the campaign instead of having a campaign dead on arrival within 2-3 hours of the reset. Example: Thornblade.
    DC Dragonknight 'Sypher - AD Nightblade Sypher Ali - AD Sorcerer Sypher Sensei - EP Sorcerer Sypharian - DC Templar Ali Sypher

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    Twitch: www.twitch.tv/SypherPK
  • Jauriel
    Jauriel
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    Enodoc, you do indeed make good points. I wouldn't want to see people give up and stop pvp'ing until the beginning of a campaign.
  • RivenEsq
    RivenEsq
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    The only reason people would stop playing is if the campaign was out of reach. And, even then, they probably would not. AD in NA Chillrend was down 6k points to DC all of yesterday. We played pretty actively until about 2 hours prior to reset (it reset at 3am, so I can imagine most people went to sleep, not quit the campaign "early"). That 6k lead that DC had was built the first night when the campaign reset at 2-3am and they held that exact lead for the entirety of the campaign. It seems to me that the benefit would favor resetting all campaigns at a reasonable time. At some point, every campaign is going to be over and players will be discouraged to join a campaign if it is constantly dominated before the new one starts.

    Additionally, keeping the world persistent does not line up with the concept of having a new campaign start after X amount of time. If the Alliance War is 30 days, you join that campaign and so on. Since you know the length of the campaign from the beginning, that length should matter for something other than a scoreboard. After the campaign ends, it really just needs to reset otherwise campaigns are effectively longer than they are listed for and "resetting" them is just an empty gesture.

    The only situation where resetting is not optimal is when the campaign is fairly even, but when a campaign is fairly even, needing a reset isn't crucial. So many campaigns are imbalanced by the end that they need a reset if ZOS expects players to go there and give it a shot. I'm not down to get farmed at a gate from minute 1 on any campaign and I imagine others aren't either. Dethrone emperors, reset ownership of everything on the map, and actually encourage people to take a shot in a campaign when it starts instead of having to face a daunting number or whatever color is dominating at your scroll gates...
    Cheers,
    Ryan "RivenEsq" Reynolds
    CEO & Founder of [KG] Knight Gaming
    @RivenEsq
  • QuebraRegra
    QuebraRegra
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    It occurred to me this morn with the end of the campaign getting near, and AD zerging around with TWO scrolls in hand (for at last an hour they just ran around with one zerg killing anyone who came) and almost all keeps in their possession... WHY NOT RESET the FARGING CAMPAIGN AT THE END? Shut it down, send the rewards, and start fresh... no piggy backing from campaigns long gone by?
  • Pirhana7_ESO
    Pirhana7_ESO
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    RivenVII wrote: »
    Can anyone enlighten me why a new campaign does not reset ownership of all keeps, outposts, and scrolls? You could even make it so that the central keeps and outposts begin neutral with Imperial guards and must be broken down and taken to be claimed for your faction.

    Each "new campaign" resets the total score and the leaderboard, but not who actually owns anything on the map. This creates a two-fold problem. First, the campaign resets at zero dark thirty. Whichever server has the players that play later gets an innate advantage in that they get to capture everything (or continue to own everything, in some cases) and hold it for the entire night. Now, this is not an argument against what is commonly referred to as "nightcapping", but having one faction in a campaign have an immediate, sometimes insurmountable advantage at the very moment the campaign begins seems quite disingenuous given the campaign supposedly "resetting". Second, why should the server that won the previous campaign and -typically- has an advantage already going into the new campaign (especially if their opposing factions have already given up since the game is well in hand) get to keep all the territory in a supposedly new campaign? They can already line up their advantage before they are even competing in the next campaign and I do not think that is right.

    I have some solutions to these issues and I'd like to see if anyone feels the same.

    1. When a campaign resets, EVERYTHING should reset. This includes scrolls, keeps, outposts, resources, etc. If ZOS wants to make the emperor keeps neutral that have to be taken once the campaign starts, that would be fine too. In addition to this reset, the campaign should be closed and all players should be kicked to PvE for a couple minutes while it rolls over. This ensures that everyone starts at the same time and from the same location (their starting gates). They could even have a countdown of a minute or two before you were able to leave your scroll gates into Cyrodiil so that everyone gets a chance to rejoin the match.

    2. Make the campaigns reset at a time where people are actually online to play in them. Have them reset at 7pm Eastern time on a Friday night, which is likely the peak population for all servers. This would accomplish several things in that it ensures one server isn't up by several thousand points before the others even field some opposition and it would also build hype for matchups. It would emphasize the importance of early strategy rather than feeling a truly minimal impact on the campaign because you were down 6,000 points before you even had the opportunity to log in for the first time. Changing the reset time is a golden opportunity to build hype for the start of a new campaign as well as maintaining competitive integrity within these campaigns. You do get rewards based on where you finish so I think resetting the campaigns at a time where one faction is clearly advantaged seems a bit unfair. For those concerned about queues, this seems like the optimum time that a ESO plus member priority queue could be put in place for PvP.


    So, what does everyone think? I believe this would go a long way to addressing how some campaigns are perpetually controlled by a single faction (buff campaigns) by giving opposing factions an opportunity to get a foothold or even crown an emperor of their own without having to fight through being camped at their own spawns from the very beginning of a campaign. It is also the only real way to have any level of true competition maintained in PvP. Once again, I understand that this is very much a population game and that it is always daytime for someone. I'm not arguing in opposition to players in other timezones who play at night, simply addressing a very controllable competitive balance concern with regard to campaign resets.

    @ZOS_BrianWheeler
    @ZOS_JessicaFolsom

    Do you two have thoughts on this? I think the majority of players in PvP would greatly appreciate this change.

    Actually the majority do NOT want this. There are already alot of games that do that with matches and map resets. If you want this you should be playing GW2 world vs world where they completely reset everything with new matches.
    The reason ESO does NOT reset the map is because it is suppose to be a persistant world where your actions stand until your enemy takes actions to change it. This is not a match system. Its basically a never ending war. The only reason the leader boards reset is so the same person isn't perminately emperor, if not for that there would be nothing that reset. This is the same system that games like Darkage of Camelot and Planet Side used. Think of the campaign more like a battle within a war. You take castles and lands and hold them to better your position in the war.

    Map resets are worse thing to you can do to a seige warfare game. they destroy any feel of accomplishment on the map as well as cause people to give up and wait for resets. But when thing dont reset you have to actually go and do soemthing.
    Edited by Pirhana7_ESO on September 14, 2015 7:18PM
  • Pirhana7_ESO
    Pirhana7_ESO
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    RivenVII wrote: »

    Additionally, keeping the world persistent does not line up with the concept of having a new campaign start after X amount of time. If the Alliance War is 30 days, you join that campaign and so on. Since you know the length of the campaign from the beginning, that length should matter for something other than a scoreboard. After the campaign ends, it really just needs to reset otherwise campaigns are effectively longer than they are listed for and "resetting" them is just an empty gesture.
    Right there is the problem, you are looking at the Campaigns like their only purpose is a match to win. Think of a campaign more like a PVP server from others games. Servers that don't even have scores, or timers to win or ever end. This is the main theme of a Cyrodiil Campaign, Controlling the map for current bonuses is the reward along with having the Emperor. Actually winning the campaign score is a very small after thought and small bonus reward. The campaign timers and scores were just added in as small durations to see how alliances were doing at that time in a persisitant world map.
    Edited by Pirhana7_ESO on September 14, 2015 7:27PM
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