Like the title, I am thinking about this, i hope ZOS can get something useful out of my idea.

Let's get straight to the point. We know that with the design of cyrodiil, there's only 1 thing to do: capturing/defending keeps. It encourages people to form a large group (or many large groups lol) and just zerg keeps, the more people you have the easier and quicker to take keeps. The only way to deal with that is forming a larger ball of zergs and zerg back, there's no other way to counter-play, it's just a game of which side has a larger ball of zergs, and the result is, you know, laggggggggggg.

My proposal is, we can use a similar mechanic to the game mode Conquest in Battlefield series: making small towns, villages and other destinations (where you can do quests that no one does) capture-able, and capturing/defending them also generates APs and points. Well I am not talking about 3 towns, and I am talking about 50 towns or more. Now let's call those small towns "small flags" and the keeps "big flags". As we can see in Battlefield, people will eventually be attracted to small flags, and when people see a flag is flipping, other people will come to take it back. Make sure to promote small/medium group play, by making them yielding less APs if too many people are on site, and more APs if you are in a 4-8-man group. It solves three things: firstly, it promotes small and medium group PvP, and as we know it offers an awesome and fun PvPing experience. Secondly, if there's a zergball coming to your keep, you can counter-play them, by splitting your forces to capture all the small flags, so the zergball has a choice to either continue zerging and lose all the small flags, thus losing the campaign and getting less APs, or split the forces to deal with the small flags and the problem of zerging is dealt with. So it's no longer a game of "who has a bigger zergball", tactics will probably be viable enough and hopefully we will (hopefully) probably see coordinated guilds war with a tactician calling strats. Just make sure capturing/defending small flags gains enough APs, and people will do it. Lastly, there will be PvP in every corner of Cyrodiil, it utilizes the beautifully crafted map that has been created, it's such a waste when everyone is just centering around a couple of keeps.

A few other things to note:
1) The enemy NPCs (bandits, skeletons...) can be used to guard small flags, or remove the unnecessary ones and diverge the resources to create NPC soldiers, whichever way you feel more immersive.
2) Make big flags large group (16-man group, 16v16), or maximum 2 large groups (32 men, 32v32) battlegrounds, by capping the total amount of AP you can gain there for a 16-man group (or 32), meaning, if there are more than 16 (or 32) people each side, AP is shared so you will get less APs. I prefer 32 for keeps, and 16 for nikel/sej.
3) Quest NPCs can be moved to inside houses, you know, it's warzone, people stay ... inside. That way players can still do quests if they want to.

Hope it helps.

If you guys like my idea or think certain things won't work, well, let's discuss about it