maboleth wrote: »

@ZOS_GinaBruno

I'm glad you guys touched Cyrodiil with the latest patch, but it was mostly cosmetic issues with a bit of QoL regarding AP and daily quests.

What Cyrodiil actually needs is a true gameplay update. The last thing you did something with it was inclusion of camps and villages as spawn points. You have a PVP guy in your house, so what is he actually doing, besides battlegrounds?

It's been years, Cyrodiil feels staled. The overall army vs army is a great idea with lore and a background, but you should consider all the shortcomings that accumulated over the years. You have the stats, you know how players behave, where they go and where they don't, what they are abusing and what is left there to rot. It also needs a bit of faster gameplay, faster horses, different ways for keeps to be taken or defend. Anything that could add fun and make everything more challenging.

Or are you afraid for Cyrodiil to grow in numbers, considering your servers cannot handle it, so you leave it as is for your hardcore pvp fans only?

I'm not here to bash, you guys did a great job with new quests, lore and chapters, but it is time for Cyrodiil update, besides lag. Really.

no

I'm not a huge PvPer as I am not very good at it, but I do enjoy it. I went into Cyrodiil this weekend for the first time since the jubilee event and holy crap it was bad. First 30 minutes was great, until I got to a keep my alliance was in the process of taking, there were a lot of players there and the lag started getting worse.

once we took the keep and players started going elsewhere, the lag died down slightly, i guess you could say. But not much.

Went to take another keep, the lag was worse than before. My screen kept freezing every minute or so fro only about a second or two. After a few minutes, we break into the inner keep wall and my screen froze for about a minute. Game never came back. I closed the game and couldn't get ESO to start back up again. I did a hard reset and loaded up the game, worked just fine. Loaded back into Cyrodiil to the northern Morrowind gate and everything seemed fine, until I got outside the keep wall to ride to where I was going. each time I hit the sprint button, i would do the animation of starting the sprint, but then continued to run normally on my mount. Actually had to hold down the stick to sprint successfully.

Each time a player was near me, you couldn't even tell they were walking or running on their mount or by foot, there character was just jumping forward about what looked to be every ten feet or so.

I ended up just leaving Cyrodiil and went to Battlegrounds, to where this and the lag continued. After a round or two, I just quit the game for the night.

My two cents:

All towns should be made capturable. This could result in more action in areas where there are usually not many players engaging in combat and this could add more strategic points of attack for capturing keeps/outposts.

Imperial City might get more action if it's added to the base game and is changed to become more relevant to the campaign in some meaningful way.

If Imperial City remains the same it should be kept as a dlc, but it should be separate from the campaign so that it does not affect a campaign's overall population. In this case one can enter it without going into Cyrodiil, but they should also be able to enter it via the gates in Cyrodiil if the population of the city isn't currently full.

I think it would be cool if imperial NPCs attacked keeps/outposts that have not been repaired/occupied for a long period of time. This would encourage players to guard/maintain their back line keeps every now and then. When a campaign resets all keeps/outposts could also be controlled by the imperial NPC faction, which would require players to put in some work to increase their potential score at the start of a new campaign.

Damn, I just posted about this and then immediately saw this thread. But I'll re-post it anyway.

Cyrodiil, on the Map, the land, should be divided up into largish areas, tiles, say as a Hexagonal Tiled Grid. All the land of Cyrodiil will be in some large area (tile).

Initially each castle "owns" all the tiles around it up to 1/2 to the nearest castle.
Points are scored by how many Tiles an Alliance controls.
A tile will change control IF an opposing Alliance builds a Palisade somewhere within the territory of tile.

So I think this is a really great idea for the following reasons:
It is a modest enhancement to current Cyrodiil and so something ZOS might be able to find bandwidth to pull off. It's not a complete make over of PVP requiring large scale changes to PVP/Cyrodiil. It is pure extension to the existing system.

It will take the tactics and strategy of game play up to the next level. It will completely re-energize Cyrodiil.

It will spread out PVP game play throughout all of Cryodiil and should greatly solve the current horrendous lag problems.
Right now Cyrodiil is a lot of empty space you ride through with everyone bunching a few locations.

It opens up whole new vistas of game play. Big groups tackle Castles. Small groups can scrum over Palisades and a general area of tiles. Small groups could do Patrols. Small groups could "man" a Palisade. Single players can "scout" enemy tiled areas to locate where Palisades have been placed etc.

It opens up a whole new Blue Ocean where ZOS can do incremental changes to PVP game play for years to come.

By Palisade: It could be anything. Maybe it's plant a large flag. Could be a special kind of Camp Tent. Could be an actual small, defensible wooden Palisade. Maybe a small stone Tower.

Maybe all of those.

Initially an Alliance controls an area by planting a Flag. IF the Alliance retains control for X number of consecutive scoring cycles, the Flag converts to a Camp which supports Rezs. After Y tics the Camp becomes a Palisade which is defensible and allows for Transiting-To. After Z tics of ownership the Palisade converts to a tried and true Stone Round Tower Keep similar to the ones found by all Farm/Mining/Lumber resources. Maybe a smaller 2-story version. The scoring points increase for each level palisade in that zone/tile.

In summary, it looks like a reasonable development effort extension to the current PVP system. It would be super fun with Alliance strategy and tactics taken to a whole new level. MOST IMPORTANTLY IT WILL SPREAD OUT GAME PLAY AND REDUCE LAG. Did I mention, IT WOULD SPREAD OUT GAME PLAY AND REDUCE LAG?

All of these ideas sound nice in theory (well, sometimes) but, as others have pointed out, Cyro is often barely playable right now. Until they get the performance issues taken care of there's no point in going forward. Seems like some of the near literal $1,000,000,000 they've made from the game could go towards better server performance.