For full disclosure, I was never a fan of forward camps as I felt they enabled players to pvp sloppily and have almost zero consequences since they could just rez up 15 feet from the fight and join the battle seconds after dying. But, this isn't a debate about the merits of forward camps. ZOS removed them for a reason, and while all I can do is guess, I'd say it's an educated guess that they were removed because forward camps tended to favor players with larger numbers and whoever was in a better position to have people peel off from the fight to make sure a fresh forward camp was put down.
Death had little penalty.
With 2.1, sets were tweaked, and I think players are starting to finalize what the 2.1 meta will look like. In my experience so far, 2.1 is feeling very,
very similar to the 1.1-1.4 meta when forward camps allowed the entire group that you wiped to respawn and bomb your backline 5 seconds later. The groups I've run with in pvp have had a quick rezzer that wore the set, but since 2.1 makes kag's hope the absolute best crafted set for spell damage, it seems like everyone and their mother runs this now.
The reduced time to kill tends to make group fights favor numbers more heavily now, as bad reaction time/calls can be compensated for by the extra heals/ultimates that having more numbers enables. By itself, this would be manageable - players are harder to kill, and it's harder to kill a larger group, but you can still accomplish it. However, when you combine this with how many people seem to be in kag's hope (whether people have just caught on that in 2.1's reduced TTK it's incredibly powerful to be able to rez quickly, or whether people are just running the set because it's the best crafted magicka dps set), the capacity to take on larger numbers begins to dwindle. It almost seems exponentially related to numbers - as soon as you reach a sweet spot of outnumbering the other side, it becomes very easy to have players peel off for literally 1 second and rez. Prior to 2.1, after wiping a group you needed to pay attention to anyone still left alive because if they weren't monitored they could rez up the entire group. In 2.1, I almost want to say preventing rezzes feels like it doesn't matter because it's a near impossible task when you're outnumbered and rezzes can literally be completed in 1 second. How many people can you be in melee range for and bashing at once while still doing sufficient dmg/heals to fight those that were still alive? Against larger numbers now, I find myself literally wondering, "do we camp the two groups that we just wiped so they don't get rezzed by the randoms running around with kag's hope, or do we push the objective and finish taking the keep/whatever" - realizing that doing so we will mean we have near-unbeatable numbers pouring in behind us in 10 seconds when everyone is rezzed up.
I know our group is still testing strategies and trying to figure out a way to combat the meta, and it certainly doesn't help that the majority of my faction seems to still be in IC on pop-locked campaigns when EP (and sometimes AD) are in regular Cyrodiil in almost full numbers, but I'd suggest to
@ZOS_BrianWheeler to at least keep an eye on it in the event that this snowballs further and we're left with pseudo-forward camps running around in a crafted set. I'd certainly like to see what the fights are like with close to even numbers (maybe this is no longer a problem at that point?), but as things stand right now, I'd love for better tools to combat significantly larger numbers since prox det isn't sufficient for that purpose (and yes, I know everyone asks for this, and I'm not providing any suggestions, but I'd still like for more tools to be available). Our group discussed the addition of a rez sickness where your stats are temporarily diminished upon being rezzed, and that may end up being an interesting change that helps balance the scale and reward skilled play over numbers.
Again, I'd like to see what the fights look like when we have more even numbers across the board and everyone is out of IC - as kag's hope may not even matter at that point, but as it stands now, after regularly fighting 2-3 times our number in Trueflame NA PC (and seeing similar fights on Azura's), it's quickly getting old to see the name of someone you've already killed 5 times in a single engagement show up on your death recap
It's starting to feel like
death has little penalty again.