Hm, one good thing about deserted PVP Servers is, you could do all the PVE content on this server without annoying the PVP players.

DirkRavenclaw wrote: »

Hm, one good thing about deserted PVP Servers is, you could do all the PVE content on this server without annoying the PVP players.

It's not a PvE zone, we have dozens of those already. Empty campaigns that PvE'ers flock to is basically a gift to scrub gankers that hang out at quest hubs just to kill PvE'ers.

If the devs want a PvE Cyrodiil, they should make one. Not dilute the PvP population further.

With how cyrodiil is currently working there should probably be a primary cp and a secondary cp for overflow. When the lag and queues on the primary get too bad, people have the option to play in cyrodiil on the secondary still. Having only one campaign (as proven when vivec launched) is a miserable experience.

But at this point I think they need to make some major changes to imperial city, in the way of separating it from cyrodiil campaigns entirely. Add a portal in the coldharbour zone and let the sewer entrances in cyrodiil continue to act as a way to get into imperial sewers, by way of leaving the campaign.

It would have made sense for imperial city to be a part of the campaign, if they had followed through on the original design philosophy of imperial city and how it'd work (darkness falls etc).

Imperial city has been especially dead since the morrowind patch, for a few reasons probably. You used to be able to log out and come back the next day still in ic, even on busy campaigns. Only having one cp campaign made it especially difficult to get into ic during prime-time, double ap drew large crowds to cyrodiil, and the nerf to ap gained from flag flipping made getting ap in ic worse.

2 cp campaigns

2 no cp campaigns

1 sub lvl 50 campaign

Imperial city should be separated from cyrodiil at this point and redesigned in a way that draws crowds of pvpers for pvp, and not just grinders. I appreciate people grinding pve for stones, because they make it possible to get large stone ganks. Perhaps remove the alliance restriction from ic and make it a free for all, the only allies would be whoever is in your group. To prevent large groups of friendlies limit group size to 8 or less.

Stuff like that would make imperial city more interesting.

I very much assume there's going to be an IC anniversary event and the campaigns were left open for that.

Right now all campaigns are quite empty, even Vivec at most times of the day (PC EU). Must be fatigue after the event. For my part, I have always liked playing solo in an empty of half-empty campaign. I have no objectives, I just like getting into fights in IC. It's a bit schizophrenic:

When the IC event was on, last year, it was great. Large population, including lots of solo players on the far sides of the flags. I loved this.

Outside of the event, when a campaign is busy, people tend to zerg up, in IC. This is not why I'm there. I don't like it. It ends up that I have to join larger groups myself. I am not really strong enough to 1vX or 2vX most of the time.

When a campaign is empty or half-empty, it tends to be better for solo players. You are more likely to run into other solo players or maybe duos that haven't yet "clumped up" into a zerg.

As someone who likes and spends most of their time in IC, this is also my main source of income. More campaigns means better Tel Var farming opportunities, e.g. turning all the districts, and farming bosses. In fact, the loss of campaigns, prior to the PvP event, had a noticeable effect on the market, I thought, with Hakeijo and flowers / potions rising in price. As someone who constantly quaffs Immovability pots, I rather value having more campaigns, so that farmers can keep the prices down.

Shore was trying to build a medium to small scale group server... on that server we were 2- bars straight across at prime time .. great action!
Then the event came and ended and we are left with 2 empty servers which has further diluted the playerbase...Shore is struggling now ...
They added a no CP campaign which was not really high pop to start with... Not sure what they are doing ...Ihope there is a plan...

rmerlb16_ESO wrote: »

Durham wrote: »

Shore was trying to build a medium to small scale group server... on that server we were 2- bars straight across at prime time .. great action!
Then the event came and ended and we are left with 2 empty servers which has further diluted the playerbase...Shore is struggling now ...
They added a no CP campaign which was not really high pop to start with... Not sure what they are doing ...Ihope there is a plan...

A lot of people have probably left PvP to farm the new dungeons (myself I haven't been much on PvP this week). I'd expect the PvP pop to increase this weekend or sometime next week.

I'm also a bit confused as to ZOS's vision for the available campaigns. I would expect something more like this:

CP 7-days
CP 30-days
non-CP 7 days
Maybe a non-CP 30-days
Below 50

I say "maybe" for the non-CP 30 days because I'm starting to find 30 days to be somewhat long (after 3 years of playing in one). It's too easy for one faction to get a huge lead during the first 2 weeks, causing people to quit, or switch to the winning faction, meaning the last two weeks of the campaign are pretty much just a farm run.

My personal favorite would be 14-days: long enough to have a contest, but not long enough for people to give up and eitehr quit or stack up on the same faction. So my personal preferences:

CP 7 days
CP 14 days
non-CP 7 days
non-CP 14 days
Below 50

30 days require more faction participation than 7 day. 14 day switch would make it only slightly longer than the 7 day but still have the same "I don't care for score, I'll go fight somewhere" mentality.

What makes the 30 day sexy, is that if one week is a holiday with low pop, the next might be a Snow day where everyone in on trying to PvP. There's more time to get more players in to impact the scoreboard than the 7 day, which is over before you can coordinate a strategy.

Minno wrote: »

30 days require more faction participation than 7 day. 14 day switch would make it only slightly longer than the 7 day but still have the same "I don't care for score, I'll go fight somewhere" mentality.

What makes the 30 day sexy, is that if one week is a holiday with low pop, the next might be a Snow day where everyone in on trying to PvP. There's more time to get more players in to impact the scoreboard than the 7 day, which is over before you can coordinate a strategy.

I totally agree that 7 days is too short to have any kind of strategic play. 7 days is great for casual PvPers and skirmishers. I just find 30 days to be too long for more dedicated PvPers. I suggested 14 days because it has been used before, but 21 days might possibly be a better compromise (I just thought it might be an odd number).

Having mostly played in 30-days camps for three years (with just a few stings in 14-days ones), I'd say the majority of the campaigns were over after two weeks. I've only seen very few of them where things were still undecided during the last week. I particularly remember two amazing camps we've had this spring, two of them where there was less than 100 points between all three factions during the very last weekend (one of them had the winner decided during like the last 2 evaluation). These however were highly unusual. In general, look at the ranking after three weeks, and unless it's unusually close, this will be the same ranking when it closes. (might be interesting having actual data to confirm that, in case my memory might be wrong).

The campaign length isn't just an issue with the faction ranking, it also is with the Emp ranking. You quickly get 1-2 persons ahead by a ridiculous advance. It's not usual to see a 1M AP gap between the 1st and 3rd rank by the end of the 30-days camp. Thankfully, people are often being nice, and once they get Emp once, they will often unhome the camp so the next time their faction crowns a new Emp, it will be someone else.