Cyrodiil 2.0

Ranger209 · September 2017

If they were ever to seriously consider doing a 2.0 this is the direction I would like to see it go.

1. Make taking a keep much more difficult. Eliminate the flipping, horse simulator, pvdoor game play and make people dig in and fight for something.
A. Home triangle keeps should take around 1 day to capture.
B. The 6 keeps in the circle around I.C. should take around 3 days to capture.
C. Opposition triangle keeps should take around 5 days to capture.
D. Holds and towns and resource nodes between 1 hour and 1 day to capture.

2. Introduce caravans as people have been talking about.
A. These would leave the faction base camps on a random spawn time of between 1 to 3 hours as to not be able to be timed by opponents.
B. They would travel along the linked keeps and forward camps that a faction has and be able to be attacked and defended.
C. They would consist of horses, supply wagons, and npc's that have a combined overall hp so you must destroy the whole thing not its parts.
D. Each keep and forward camp that they travel through along their journey they would:
I. Heal a certain percentage of the fortress/camp.
II. Buff to the players fighting there.
III. The amount of heal and buff is a direct reflection of their overall remaining hp when they arrive at a destination.
IV. Take resources from around the keep to replenish their stock or cumulative hp and bring to the next keep.
a. If enemies control them they do not accumulate and replenish.
b. If same faction controls them they do accumulate.
V. Their journey ends when they are destroyed, depleted, or reach the next opponent owned keep and can build a new forward camp.

3. Seige equipment and repair equipment are no longer purchased with AP and carried in your man-purse on horseback.
A. They are crafted in keep, outposts, and forward camps either by crafters or npc crafters from the supplies brought by caravan.
B. All weapons must be moved into position like battering rams are now.
C. All repair equipment is removed as repairs are made by a caravans arriving or passing thru.

4. Quests.
A. Redo quests to be of the following types:
i. Attack/defend keeps.
ii. Attack/defend caravans.
iii. Attack/defend resources.
B. Each quest should only allow a certain number of players to obtain it to distribute players to various locations and utilize the entire map.
i. Quests should show current number of and max players allowed in that quest so groups can find unpopulated quests to accommodate them.
ii. Quests are temporary and only valid for that play session. Next time you log back in you need a new quest.
iii. If any quest you participate in is successful you will receive appropriate reward based on your contributions to that quest.
You could receive rewards from many succeeding quests that you have participated in over the course of days.
iv. Quests are timed per section 1 time limits above.
a. If siege is successful before time elapses ownership changes and quest is over.
b. If siege is unsuccessful when time elapses forward camp burns to the ground and quest is over.
v. No AP or awards are rewarded except thru the quest system.
vi.Quests are dynamic and more become available as population dictates.

5. Hourly scoring goes away, the only score that matters is the current score based on the state of the map at the end of campaign cycle.

6. Scrolls weigh heavily into scoring but debuff the team that holds them so you want them, but incur a cost for having them. No not blindness.
But this is Elder Scrolls after all.

7. Emperorship qualifications are total AP per campaign divided by minutes in Cyrodiil with a minimum average of 30 minutes per day to qualify.
This will put an emphasis on quality of your time in Cyrodiil instead of quantity of time.

8. Rework siege to make it more meaningful as long durations in one spot will be common.

The overall idea is to distribute the population all over the map thru dynamic quests and creating a reason to stay there.
This should help with the lag, the zerg, spending as much time running around as fighting, the constant flipping, night capping, etc. etc. etc.
This was a long read, I know, I hope you made it and it was worth it. Hope I didn't forget anything.
Any other suggestions/critiques are welcome.

Robs_NB · September 2017

This for real maybe some of the dumbest s*** I've ever seen

arkansas_ESO · September 2017

The dynamic quest idea is cool, but I don't think anybody wants to spend 3 days fighting over Chal

Derra · September 2017

Not sure if 5 days to capture a keep is trolling or...
Either way it´s (un)intentionally funny.

heystreethawk · September 2017

Imagine the amount of pugs that would show up if a keep was flagged for 5 days

Morgul667 · September 2017

5 days is way too much for me

It means your contribution to the fight is close to none unless you dont have a life

Hard to tell the trolls nowadays

courier · September 2017

Don't forget, lets make each campaign last for 5 years, if its going to take a day for resources and 3 days for a keep

Anrose · September 2017

OP, I have another suggestion...

Just play Cyrodiil how it currently is and wait for Ashes of Creation.

Maikon · September 2017

Robs_NB wrote: »

This for real maybe some of the dumbest s*** I've ever seen

^ This

bikerangelo · September 2017

Pretty sure the actual siege of Jerusalem took less time than these proposed siege changes.

Asgari · September 2017

This game is so geared towards casuals now and most of the hardcore players have left that taking days to capture keeps would just kill what is left of pvp haha

Terrible ideas.

Subversus · September 2017

It takes about 5 minutes to capture the average keep at the moment. A day has 1440 minutes. 3 days have a total of 4320 minutes.

So you are proposing people to stand on the flag, without getting disconnected, for 4315 more minutes than what they already do.

I don't know if you are playing stupid or just simply lack the little amount of intelligence needed in order to see what's wrong here.

My money's on him being a troll, I refuse to believe anyone is this stupid.

Defilted · September 2017

Some of the ideas are interesting. I do not understand why people just call and idea stupid. It is fine to criticize and idea, but try to keep it constructive. Constructive criticism is how a not so good or bad idea becomes a great idea.

Maybe a new campaign type would be better. This way it is a new format to Cyro without disrupting what players are already doing now. This way you could implement this idea without ruining the experience for someone else. Just adding the Caravan reinforcement idea in a new Campaign mode would be very interesting IMO and I would play in it for sure.

The time of taking a keep would have to be much lower. It is not realistic for most players to be logged into the game that long. Coordinating between people to string together that kind of time is also not a realistic idea IMO.

The caravans moving from one keep to the next that could bolster the defenses of a keep are interesting and would add a fun dynamic to the game play. Based on the amount of time it takes a good organized group to take a keep I think it would be hard to get the caravan fast enough to be helpful. Maybe introduce a call for re-enforcement that a player could initiate that would put a 5 or 10 , or... minute timer on the arrival. This would repair walls(%) or add NPC siege or something. This could be helpful in a smaller group defending a keep from a larger group.

The only part about a caravan that I find would be hard to implement would be how effective they are. If they do get to the keep and the enemy faction does not destroy it, what would be the strength of it? Would getting there mean you will definitely hold becasue it adds so much defense to the keep that the attacking group no matter what they did would fail? I think that would be a big change and people would not like it. So if you cannot always win if they arrive, how effective can it be without it being OP? Not enough power and it makes it useless and no one would care about it. I think balancing that would be difficult.

I do not have any issues with the current quests in Cyro. There fine. Not very dynamic, but work fine

Biro123 · September 2017

arkansas_ESO wrote: »

The dynamic quest idea is cool, but I don't think anybody wants to spend 3 days fighting over Chal

Are you sure about that? O_o

Drummerx04 · September 2017

So you want to take a relatively fast paced combat and tie it down with snail slow siege, remove all AP gains except for capturing keeps that take days?

What about your quest system? How do you measure contributions that will allow rewards to be passed out? It seems like the best course of action to maximize reward would be to find the minimum requirements for rewards and then just relog and pick up a new quest to get your fingers in as many pies as possible. What if you've been working on a quest for 5 days and you fail? No rewards for my effort? What is this, real life?

You don't like the horse simulator... but you want to walk siege between keeps? I don't see how a manual labor simulator is more appealing than a horse simulator.

Emperorship qualifications... see my argument about maximizing AP rewards. So your emp would be that guy who just flakes around between quest objectives.

If this got implemented in Cyrodiil, I'd expect to see a mass exodus. Personally, I'd find it a convincing reason to look for another game after all this time.

Ranger209 · September 2017

Anrose wrote: »

OP, I have another suggestion...

Just play Cyrodiil how it currently is and wait for Ashes of Creation.

Yes, that and Crowfall are some of the games I have been reading about that look very interesting to me.
Maybe you are correct and I will enjoy what we have here until those come along, Camelot Unchained as well.

However, I do love this game world and thought a twist on those styles added to Cyrodiil could re-engage some
people that are getting bored with the constant flip-run-flip-run-zerg that this has become. Don't get me wrong
there are still some classic fights to be had which are a blast, but they are less frequent than the above mentioned.
I keep seeing various posts about how to revitalize Cyrodiil so just throwing in my 2 cents.

The original post was a lot of stuff and I was maybe overly concise trying to contain it so let me elaborate some.
I enter Cyrodiil at my base camp and run to the quest board. Here I see some quests that are currently available, along
with the number of people currently in that quest, along with the total allowed in that quest.

Attack Chal 17/30 Defend Glade 12/20 Defend DC Caravan 4/10 Attack EP Caravan 3/6 Defend Warden farm 9/12

Each quest has a limit to the amount of people that it will allow and as quests become full new quests will come to the
quest board. What this does is spread people out all over the map into smaller groups of maybe 6 to 30 incrementally.
The only way to earn AP is by being on one of these quests. So the quest system plays traffic cop to disperse the
masses all over the board.

I choose attack Chal cause I'm DC and that's what we do. I arrive at the forward camp that spawned when the caravan
made it out to Chal, which is what made this quest available to take. I check to see if any newly crafted siege equipment
have spawned that need to be moved into place. This is where as I stated in the OP siege itself would need a rework
since we will be spending a lot of time trying to siege Chal down. I am sure there are plenty of clever people out there
with ideas to make that fun. Now I stated 1 - 3 - 5 days to take keeps. Don't get hung up on that , at one point I edited
it to be 6 - 12 - 24 hours, but that to me didn't seem long enough. Those are just numbers with the overall idea being
that it shouldn't take 2 people running 3 siege each, 5 minutes to take a keep. It should take a lot more people a lot longer.
While I am within a certain radius of Chal I am earning AP for killing EP and for damaging Chal plus whatever other
fun ideas people can think of. I stay for 2 hours then log for the night. The next day I get on and Chal is still active.
I can choose to go back there which I do cause I'm DC and that's what we do, but I can go pick another quest and go to
another location earning AP while participating within the radius of that quest same as I did at Chal if i am so inclined.
I spend 2 hours there earning AP and log for the night. Next day I get back on and Chal quest is done and we have
succeeded in taking over Chal. I am now given whatever reward AP, gear, coin, whatever in relation to how much
damage I myself inflicted on Chal as well as how many poor souls from Ebonheart I have disemboweled. The day
before all of this happened I was on another quest which we failed. Damn Dominion. So I receive no reward for that
quest, but I did get plenty of AP while I was there fighting.

In a nutshell that is how I would see the quest system working. Yes it is a philosophical shift from the constant
running from keep to keep that currently is in place. It may not be everyone's cup of tea.

One thing to understand about the server and the lag is that it is what it is. There will always be a threshold of data
that the server can handle and once that is exceeded there will be issues. They either cannot fix it or do not want to
fix it because it would affect the game outside of Cyrodiil. I am referring to the lighting/cheat snitcher patch that
many blame for the lag, and are probably right in doing so. That stuff is staying at least for today. So the only way
to beat it is to cleverly work around it. It seems its worst when local density issues arise, aka, 50 on 50 battles
all within a 200 meter or so radius. Again just numbers from my behind but you get the point. If they can come up
with a way to distribute the player base all over the map and keep fights to less than 40 or 50 people in a given
area this could do a lot to alleviate that issue. So this is an endeavor to spread people out by incentivizing them
to do so. it is also a way to create small, medium, and large scale battles with 8 participants being small and
50 being large. The quests would be designed to allow 30 attackers and 20 defenders of keeps, or 6 attackers vs
10 defenders of a caravan, or 12 attackers vs 12 defenders of a farm or mine. It is a way to fuse a battleground
atmosphere into an open world setting allowing for cumulative large scale conflict via smaller scale battles.

This is getting too damn long again so I will wrap up. Keep the comments, critiques, challenges coming they
are welcome and I have a thick skin. Bear in mind this is just a rough draft and nothing is beyond debate or discussion.

yodased · September 2017

Ranger209 wrote: »

words[

Except that Cyrodiil is one shard and being anywhere on the map affects everywhere else on the map. Only way to help the server is to make it either stronger or rely on it less.

We used to rely on it signficantly less, had 0 lag and could have a thousand people fighting, but cheat engine and lack of morality makes it impossible.

Unless the can figure a way to reduce the server side checking without trusting the client, or significantly increase the processing power of said server, we will always have the same issues, no matter if there are 20 people in one place and 50 in another, its still 70 people spamming skills.

Ranger209 · September 2017

You're right it's more of the client side stuff this will help with. I guess in my experience that is probably what needs the
help. The game generally only loses playability in situations where mass amounts of people are congested into a small
area. FPS and latency take bigger hits in that situation. Sound gets affected and eventually ceases if it gets too crazy,
and then people stop moving, and here comes the crash.

DeadlyRecluse · September 2017

Ranger209 wrote: »

The original post was a lot of stuff and I was maybe overly concise trying to contain it so let me elaborate some.
I enter Cyrodiil at my base camp and run to the quest board. Here I see some quests that are currently available, along
with the number of people currently in that quest, along with the total allowed in that quest.

Attack Chal 17/30 Defend Glade 12/20 Defend DC Caravan 4/10 Attack EP Caravan 3/6 Defend Warden farm 9/12

Each quest has a limit to the amount of people that it will allow and as quests become full new quests will come to the
quest board. What this does is spread people out all over the map into smaller groups of maybe 6 to 30 incrementally.
The only way to earn AP is by being on one of these quests. So the quest system plays traffic cop to disperse the
masses all over the board.

Slowing down siege isn't a great idea, imo, because it will only encourage stacking a few objectives even more, but I do love this quest idea. Things like it have been suggested before--maybe a timed quest, so 10-20 players from each alliance have a quest to attack/defend a resource for 30 minutes, and whoever holds it at the end of that time has a decent reward? Kind of a mini king-of-the-hill objectives all over the map with total involved population limited by the quest board?

Ranger209 · September 2017

Slowing siege down is definitely a matter of taste and what individuals prefer for gameplay. But it wouldn't
encourage stacking objectives. As the quests became full more quests for more objectives would open up sending
players to other destinations. As a matter of fact it would limit the number of people to any given objective.
Once the quest fills out it would be taken off the board until people dropped from it and then it would open
back up to allow for more to fill it again. So in the above example once Attack Chal had 30/30 players it would
be off the quest board until someone left and brought it back to 29/30 players. Maybe quest is a bad name, mission,
combat orders? But it would work like a dynamic quest board where what is offered changed as things filled up and
new objectives became required.

DeadlyRecluse · September 2017

Ranger209 wrote: »

Slowing siege down is definitely a matter of taste and what individuals prefer for gameplay. But it wouldn't
encourage stacking objectives. As the quests became full more quests for more objectives would open up sending
players to other destinations. As a matter of fact it would limit the number of people to any given objective.
Once the quest fills out it would be taken off the board until people dropped from it and then it would open
back up to allow for more to fill it again. So in the above example once Attack Chal had 30/30 players it would
be off the quest board until someone left and brought it back to 29/30 players. Maybe quest is a bad name, mission,
combat orders? But it would work like a dynamic quest board where what is offered changed as things filled up and
new objectives became required.

So here's the thing I think you might be overlooking: many, many players would probably ignore the missions and just ride to action. Which is fine, and would work just fine with the quest system you've laid out, but if sieges are slow, you'd likely end up in a situation like this:

I log into Cyrodiil. I'm given a mission to attack Warden Keep. It's a long ways away, it'll take 2 hours, minimum, to capture (am I even playing for 2 straight hours tonight?), and not a lot of people seem to be up there at this point. But look! Chalman is flagged already! I don't have the mission for it, but I don't care--I just want to kill people, so I ride there--along with everyone else in my faction. Warden never gets lit, so nobody ever bothers to follow their quest and head out there.

So you have a few "active" conflicts, and because they stay active for so long, everyone looking for a fight gravitates there (besides a few groups who are extremely objective focused).

Obviously there are ways around that issue, but most would require even further redesigns.

Ranger209 · September 2017

Defilted wrote: »

The only part about a caravan that I find would be hard to implement would be how effective they are. If they do get to the keep and the enemy faction does not destroy it, what would be the strength of it? Would getting there mean you will definitely hold becasue it adds so much defense to the keep that the attacking group no matter what they did would fail? I think that would be a big change and people would not like it. So if you cannot always win if they arrive, how effective can it be without it being OP? Not enough power and it makes it useless and no one would care about it. I think balancing that would be difficult.

Great question. Probably the best way would be for the caravan to heal a % of a keeps missing health. The % could be
tweaked with testing and balanced over time. This goes contrary to my initial thoughts on however much health it arrives
with determining how much it heals, but I think would be easier to balance.

Ranger209 · September 2017

DeadlyRecluse wrote: »

Slowing down siege isn't a great idea, imo, because it will only encourage stacking a few objectives even more, but I do love this quest idea. Things like it have been suggested before--maybe a timed quest, so 10-20 players from each alliance have a quest to attack/defend a resource for 30 minutes, and whoever holds it at the end of that time has a decent reward? Kind of a mini king-of-the-hill objectives all over the map with total involved population limited by the quest board?

Yes, that is the aim, to get action happening all over the map with time based objectives or events. Some could be of a
shorter time span like you are suggesting and some longer. This could vary and be more attractive to varying tastes of
what combat should be,and how long someone feels they want to be engaged in the event.

Ranger209 · September 2017

DeadlyRecluse wrote: »

So here's the thing I think you might be overlooking: many, many players would probably ignore the missions and just ride to action. Which is fine, and would work just fine with the quest system you've laid out, but if sieges are slow, you'd likely end up in a situation like this:

I log into Cyrodiil. I'm given a mission to attack Warden Keep. It's a long ways away, it'll take 2 hours, minimum, to capture (am I even playing for 2 straight hours tonight?), and not a lot of people seem to be up there at this point. But look! Chalman is flagged already! I don't have the mission for it, but I don't care--I just want to kill people, so I ride there--along with everyone else in my faction. Warden never gets lit, so nobody ever bothers to follow their quest and head out there.

So you have a few "active" conflicts, and because they stay active for so long, everyone looking for a fight gravitates there (besides a few groups who are extremely objective focused).

Obviously there are ways around that issue, but most would require even further redesigns.

This is true, there is nothing to stop anyone from going rogue and disregarding the quests/events. But if you are not
participating in one then you are not getting AP or rewards. Hopefully, this would be incentive enough for most. You
could still do it if so inclined just for the sheer pleasure and exhilaration of killing that guy that just won't stop
teabagging you and your friends every time he gets the chance to do the happy dance.

You also raise an interesting point that as population fluctuates from prime time to off hours that there would be a lot
of quests/events going that no one is participating in. There would probably need to be a mechanism in place that after
a certain time of inactivity the forward camp would self destruct, and the keep under duress would heal to full, and the
caravan would be suspended from traveiling there. Not sure on this, there could be benefits to leaving them active as well.

Zvorgin · September 2017

I couldn't keep reading when the first line says "get rid of pvdoor" and the second suggests keeps take "1, 3 or 5 days to capture"... that seems a little contradictory.

Ranger209 · October 2017

Zvorgin wrote: »

I couldn't keep reading when the first line says "get rid of pvdoor" and the second suggests keeps take "1, 3 or 5 days to capture"... that seems a little contradictory.

How so? You expect keeps to stay empty for days/hours at a time with quests funneling limited numbers of people to them
throughout the duration?

Rohamad_Ali · October 2017

This is one of those few times I'm grateful Devs are ignoring player feedback .

GreenSoup2HoT · October 2017

Ranger209 wrote: »

If they were ever to seriously consider doing a 2.0 this is the direction I would like to see it go.

1. Make taking a keep much more difficult. Eliminate the flipping, horse simulator, pvdoor game play and make people dig in and fight for something.

This is actually really easy to change. Make it so ram's do no extra damage unless the lumber-mill is acquired instead of the insane damage they do currently. Increase wall/front door health based on number of players in server (example pop locked servers have 3x hitpoints).

7. Emperorship qualifications are total AP per campaign divided by minutes in Cyrodiil with a minimum average of 30 minutes per day to qualify.
This will put an emphasis on quality of your time in Cyrodiil instead of quantity of time.

This is a really good idea but can be exploited potentially. For instance say a zerg bomber gets some really good bombs off over the course of an hour. They could technically log out of cryodill and wait for emperor since they will have the most AP given your formula.

Anything to promote quality or quantity is good though. I think dividing your AP gains based on play-time is a step in the right direction. However only after accumulating a certain amount of play-time should you be eligible... but then what happens to an emperor who remains after a campaign reset or if an emperor is crowned within the first hour? Lots to be thought out but its a good idea none the less.

Zbigb4life · October 2017

Robs_NB wrote: »

This for real maybe some of the dumbest s*** I've ever seen

It sure is...

Ranger209 · October 2017

Understand when looking at this that it is a systemic change. Try not to look at it as how Cyrodiil currently is, but how it could potentially be. You could take a couple ideas here and incorporate them into Cyrodiil as it now is and make improvements. You could also take a couple ideas from here and make Cyrodiil worse than it now is. This is more of a reboot idea than a tweak idea and needs to be looked at totally outside the box. There are certain goals that are to be achieved through this reboot that I will post on specifically as time permits.

The first goal is to spread out the player base through the quest system that has player number limits depending on the quest. The quest system would also be the grouping system for Cyrodiil as whatever quest you are on is also the group you are in.
Friends would have to be a little selective about which quests they choose to group together. Being on a quest and contributing to its objective is the only way to get AP in Cyrodiil. Some quests may include up to 24 players, others may only include up to 4, or some may be for solo work depending on the objective and how may people may be required to complete it. There should be quest givers at every outpost not just the base camps for convenience.

The result of this goal is two-fold. To help with performance issues associated with population density that arises when too many people are fighting in too small of an area. It also is intended to help reduce the zerg tactics that are all too prevalent currently in game. Incentivizing people to spread out is the only way to get them to actually spread out. What is enough incentive? Well that is different for everyone, but this is a place to start. Why go fight somewhere you can get no rewards when you can go fight somewhere else through a quest that will allow you to receive awards? There are reasons, but this is the crux for how this incentive would work.