Ranger209 wrote: »

VaranisArano wrote: »

Players have a greater impact on the score during low population times because they have less opposition. Players have less of an impact on the score during high population times because they have more opposition. This is not surprising. In fact, I dare say, its obvious.

Here you say it is obvious that players have a greater impact on the score during low population times

I still have yet to see a solution that doesn't penalize players for playing during low population times (for many that's the time they can play, their "primetime" as it were) with having their efforts count for less simply because players who play during the most populated server times feel like their efforts for a couple of hours should carry more weight.

Here you say doing something to equalize that is penalizing them.

It's not. Our efforts should carry equal weight toward influencing the score and they don't, not even close. The efforts of people who play unopposed during off hours carry much more weight, they shouldn't. You said as much above, and you said it was obvious, and it is. Then you turn around and say that if you aren't allowed to have greater impact because you have less opposition that you are being penalized. Why should anyone have greater impact on the score than anyone else? Aren't the people who have a lesser impact already being penalized?

In any war, which is what this is albeit in a high fantasy environment, the number of casualties normally dictates the impact on the campaign. Having a scoring system weighted on the number of people engaged at any given time is a way to normalize the peaks and valleys in population over the course of the campaign. I play plenty of times when the server is not pop locked. I have no issue with only having the score accumulate at an adjusted rate which is lower at those times based on how populated the server is at any of those given times.

If the assumption is that low pop campaigns have negligible opposition to no opposition, that assumption would be incorrect if looked at as an absolute. You could have a low pop campaign where 10 people are trying to seize a keep, and 10 people are there defending it. That type of fight is a fair one and deserves full points.

During a high pop campaign you have an increased number of cross faction spys, cross faction agreements, people going back and forth on their different faction alts (on the same day) playing in a non-sportsmanship - like manner (not technically cheating, but coming very close to crossing the line). Just because a faction is pop locked doesn't mean that the number of people 'triggering the pop lock' are actually there playing for the faction they supposedly represent (easy to do with cross-faction alts people have), and let's not forget that the Cyrodiil pop-lock cap population includes people in IC. Then you have the 60+ person zergs that mow down everything in front of them ... most of us have been on the receiving end of that experience. No, pop locked campaigns do NOT equal a fair campaign, pop locked campaigns do not mean the players in that campaign are there to fight for the alliance they supposedly represent, and it doesn't mean the people in these pop locked campaigns are playing the objectives. There have been plenty of times during pop locked campaigns that a small handful of players have taken unmanned keeps ... easy to do especially when you have several people laying down multiple siege weapons at once (and who are experienced players).

And, while I'm at it ... I have seen plenty of campaigns cycles in Vivec where the color of the map often leaned to one color or another during an 8 hour "night time" period, but did not remain that way during the other 16 hours. This so called 'night capping' as it were might give a faction the lead very early on in the campaign, but as the campaign goes on, that faction often finds itself in last place, or going back and forth between 3rd place and 2nd. Sometimes they work their way up to 1st, but they don't seem to be able to hold onto it for long.

What I haven't seen are numbers. Hard facts. Give me numbers for Vivec, since that is the campaign most people are really talking about.

During the past year, how many times has each faction ranked 1st, 2nd, and 3rd at the end of the campaign cycle .... NOT ONLY THAT ... but what was the point disparity ... I mean are we talking a difference between 1st and 2nd by 100 points or less? Or was the difference between 1st and 2nd place won by a landslide?