more than one event a year in the dlc zones would be outstanding...

specific to imperial city - please make IC it's own campaign to increase occupancy and make it more quickly/easily accessible...

hopefully one day it will become part of the base game package too...

I want some smaller scale pvp fights in IC before battlegrounds release, but IC is empty.

IxSTALKERxI wrote: »

I want some smaller scale pvp fights in IC before battlegrounds release, but IC is empty.

I always find people there in both TF and Haderus...often minizergs of farmers. Look harder.

Sucks when the minizerg is DC though. IC needs objectives that more strongly incentivize contesting those farming groups.

geonsocal wrote: »

NightbladeMechanics wrote: »

geonsocal wrote: »

specific to imperial city - please make IC it's own campaign to increase occupancy and make it more quickly/easily accessible...

Why do people think this is a good idea? Do people actually think this is a good idea? This is not a good idea. lol

real live people here to try to answer this question...

for myself, in regards to PvP - the more the merrier...even on the most populated map on my platform - IC is normally sparsely filled, and, normally very unbalanced...consolidating all the maps seems like a pretty good way of consistently buffing up the player population in IC...

plus, by the time I normally slog/ride my way to the IC gates - my wanna go play in IC vibe starts to die down...would be really nice to just jump to the sewer without the whole mount ride or cyro battles...

admittedly though a more heavily populated map would be tough on on PvE questors, plus it would hose the BwB players and 30 no-cp map players...

so tell me then - why do people think it's a bad idea?

not really laughing out loud from the irony/absurdity of the whole discussion - just wondering...cuz, I'm sure there are several legitimate points or obstacles concerning the implementation of a consolidated IC map...

In my opinion, consolidating IC into a single, separate campaign is a baindaid fix for a larger issue, being a lack of substantial incentives for people to play and fight in IC.

I also believe that having IC objectives tightly tied to the overland campaign would be more fun because it would draw Cyrodiil people to come and go from IC, whereas having one separate IC campaign could create separate "Cyrodiil players" and "IC players" who seldom mix.

If IC is sparsely populated right now, that means most people don't think they have a substantial reason to go there. Consolidate it down to one map, and most people will still have little reason to go there.

Therefore, if you severed IC from the Cyrodiil campaigns and left it otherwise unchanged, it would still not reach its potential.

However, if you severed it from the other campaigns, added some more objectives to fight over, added faction leaderboards, and maybe awarded a mini-emp if a faction killed Molag Bal while owning all the district flags (coming up with random requirements for that), then people would have a reason to play there, and it would become popular, right? That's the idea. People would maybe even become excited to play in IC!

People would be attracted by adding substantial PvP related reasons to go there. But why can't we just add substantial reasons to go to IC without severing it from the Cyrodiil campaigns? Why is making it a separate campaign with one map required to reach a sufficient level of activity in IC?

The usual answer is that IC doesn't have enough interest or population to warrant multiple instances, but this isn't the case. On NA/PC, we have two cp-enabled campaigns. One is pop locked every night, and the second reaches pop locks on the weekends. On each one, IC has at least one farming group and a handful of scattered players skirmishing almost around the clock, with a couple of farming groups and many scattered skirmishers during prime time hours. Activity dips during early morning hours, but there is still someone doing something in each campaign's IC. I know all of this because I have a weird sleeping schedule and spend time PvPing in Cyrodiil and IC at all sorts of odd hours. The IC naysayers seem to ignore this activity...

Now this means two things:

One, that IC is already attractive enough to people on NA/PC to warrant two active instances, at least during prime time. If ZOS adds incentives to fight in IC, like more objectives or a leaderboard, these would draw more people to PvP in IC. Therefore, it would be difficult to justify eliminating a server instance at the same time.

And two, recognizing that NA/PC is smaller than the EU/PC and console servers (pretty sure that data is still accurate), this means that if IC truly is dead on your platform, it is likely because your platform's players are not informed of the reasons for playing in IC, and therefore not considering IC as a place to play at all. Farming bosses is a lucrative way to make money, and small group fights in the unique environments of the districts and sewers can be fun...if there are people to fight.

Does anyone have current server population data? I'm going off of numbers from last year.

Anyway, TLDR: Just add significant reasons to fight there, and people will do so. There is enough interest to fill multiple server instances, and leaving Cyrodiil players to come and go from IC to contribute to the overall campaign will create a more dynamic environment.

Also lore.

@NightbladeMechanics ...right on, reasonable, logical stuff...

because it is a dlc I don't think it should have much if any impact on the overall campaign which houses that particular IC instance - just doesn't seem fair if only a small percent of the campaign population actually have access to IC...

i whole heartedly agree that making it a single instance within a platform's campaign choices would in fact generate an additional PvP subset (cyro, dueling, IC and eventually battlefields)...

I like having more PvP options...true though - this would place some strain on the other campaigns...

my thought to that is - we just lost two maps per platform - maybe it's time to drop another and consolidate IC into it's own campaign...

currently I have all my characters in the "main" map for my platform - scourge...no guest campaigns...turn IC into it's own campaign - well, I'm gonna have to make a choice of where I want to "home"...

geonsocal wrote: »

@NightbladeMechanics ...right on, reasonable, logical stuff...

because it is a dlc I don't think it should have much if any impact on the overall campaign which houses that particular IC instance - just doesn't seem fair if only a small percent of the campaign population actually have access to IC...

I actually don't think it would be unreasonable for them to make IC free/part of the base game after it's been out for 2 years.

t3hdubzy wrote: »

Agree with making it seperate. The fact that population here takes away from cyrodil boggles my mind since it cant help the alliances win the campaign.

Maybe make multiple campaigns for IC to spread out populations, but indeed it should be seperate. Tying it to the campaign makes absolute zero sense. The 2 have no impact on each other.

If its going to remain the same there needs to be impact, but i think itd be hard to do.

Imperial City is the throne of Cyrodiil which each faction is fighting over in Cyrodiil. When you become emperor, you are in fact sitting on the Ruby Throne, located in the middle of IC (or so the lore goes). Tying control of IC to the campaign makes complete sense... It should have been done from the beginning imo. IC was an incomplete DLC.

geonsocal wrote: »

because it is a dlc I don't think it should have much if any impact on the overall campaign which houses that particular IC instance - just doesn't seem fair if only a small percent of the campaign population actually have access to IC...

I'd like to see DLC access data. IC has been absolutely packed full in the past, for months following its release and again during the double tel var anniversary week. I'm petty sure a lot of people are ESO+ subscribers for the crafting bag too.

I could see IC being made part of the base game, if that's legal...or I could see a full rework of it being done to spur additional purchases. Who knows? Regardless, I'm still of the opinion that as long as all three factions have healthy DLC access rates (a subjective threshold for sure), some campaign score contribution from IC, even a minor one, is not only appropriate but necessary.

ZOS could always add a mechanic where IC objectives "unflag" and reset to a neutral or unowned state, like the daedra take them back over, if players do not pass over them for some amount of time. This would make an unoccupied IC have effectively no impact on the campaign.

ZOS could also add way more flags into the sewers and districts, spreading out objectives, and possibly make them flip faster. This would make it next to impossible for a single zerg to paint IC one color and tilt the campaign that way. One or two enemy players could run around distant from the zerg flipping their objectives back.

There are lots of ways IC objectives could be made to work. I just wish ZOS would communicate their apprehensions with us so that we could have an open dialogue...

Could it be another double drop rate for items too? I know several people that hit the center daily for that soul shriven skin only to be denied it by rnjeebus.

As to why IC wont be free, i think it simply comes down to bandwidth. and im not talking about internet. Im talking about remember that ZOS team pic they put out at the Fallout 4 launch? ZOS is a TINY dev team. probably understaffed after the base game launch staff cuts.

so they have had to allocate probably over 90% utilization to development on Morrowind. To make IC free by tying it to the base game, is going back to 2 year old content and doing a massive systems overhaul. Look at what is being asked: incorporating it with the current Emperorship, setting flags to default neutral status, lore-wise we are completely past the molag bal threat. Thats why Craglorn has no dolmens. so how does anyone expect ZOS to revist older content when they are receiving tremendous pressure to push new content? subscribers want new content, new content generates reinvigorated interest and new players, its a business. Even the numbered TES titles arent revisited, the mod community just fixed the game for everyone.

so it would be nice for a rehaul, of everything base game (i mean even down to the mostly ugly and outdated base armor motifs) but it just cant happen. all they can do is patch existing systems.

Rickter wrote: »

As to why IC wont be free, i think it simply comes down to bandwidth. and im not talking about internet. Im talking about remember that ZOS team pic they put out at the Fallout 4 launch? ZOS is a TINY dev team. probably understaffed after the base game launch staff cuts.

so they have had to allocate probably over 90% utilization to development on Morrowind. To make IC free by tying it to the base game, is going back to 2 year old content and doing a massive systems overhaul. Look at what is being asked: incorporating it with the current Emperorship, setting flags to default neutral status, lore-wise we are completely past the molag bal threat. Thats why Craglorn has no dolmens. so how does anyone expect ZOS to revist older content when they are receiving tremendous pressure to push new content? subscribers want new content, new content generates reinvigorated interest and new players, its a business. Even the numbered TES titles arent revisited, the mod community just fixed the game for everyone.

so it would be nice for a rehaul, of everything base game (i mean even down to the mostly ugly and outdated base armor motifs) but it just cant happen. all they can do is patch existing systems.

Must be spaghetti code if switching IC from DLC to base game access would take excessive man hours. Common sense tells me it should be a week's worth of work tops.