The population has been reduced several times in the past, and I believe for the best. As they add new content and new game mechanics, they forget to optimize it for pvp and the servers take a dumb everytime. Reducing the population cap helps maintaining a certain "quality of life" even thought I wish they would reduce it even more.

My personal sweet spot is when all populations are at 3bars. Still alot of opportunities to find fights and large organized groups / zergs don't impact the performances as much as when all pops are maxed.

I have been having alot of fun the past few days on PC NA in Vivec playing EP. We are getting double teamed extremely hard and it makes it easier to find fights without riding too much.

usmguy1234 wrote: »

Tzayad wrote: »

Doomsayers gonna doomsay.

The population is fine, a new patch just came out, and there is an event going on. So either you're new to this, or just haven't noticed that this happens everytime a new patch comes out (more pronounced with an event going on at the same time).

It will pick back up like it always does in a week or two.

What's the fetish with coffin building and doomsayers? Can we at least get an original metaphor next time? At least then I'm not reading the same dumb *** every time this gets posted.

I guess reading comprehension is not your strong suit as I preferenced in the first sentence "over the past year." Also, I've been playing this game for damn near 5 years and I know what it's like to have a couple hundred people on both sides of a keep fight and now I know what it's like to have 50 people attacking and a dozen defending. Are you being disingenuous or are you the new one?

No new patch, but the event is going on, correct? Also probably the biggest game in recent memory was just released on console, Red Dead Redemption 2.

I'll admit that I'm on PC, but I have seen a downtick in population across campaigns, Vivec is actually in a playable state for me most of the time now due to the population decrease. But this is nothing I haven't seen before, and I've been playing since beta. On weekday nights, Vivec still gets poplocked with a 50+ queue sometimes. But again, I've seen this all before, and it always picks back up.

I can almost guarantee this is just normal fluctuation that happens all the time. The CONSTANT posts about the game dying are getting *** old. And there is no point to them! Just stop. If you see a problem with the game, send in a ticket, or create an actually helpful post, instead of a dumb one like this.

Also, I don't think "preferenced" means what you think it means.

killahsin wrote: »

I have always felt there was some hidden variable population cap fluctuation limit myself. Thats my ultimate conspiracy theory. haha

frozywozy wrote: »

I have been having alot of fun the past few days on PC NA in Vivec playing EP. We are getting double teamed extremely hard and it makes it easier to find fights without riding too much.

I have been having a lot of fun on vivec this past week or so tbh. Servers exploded a few times but not to much.

How would you say things are compared to 6 months even a year ago. Even just 6 months ago all alliances had about 20 people in queue. It's been instantly in for the past couple of months even on the dominant alliance for me.

leeux wrote: »

One thing that would help at first, is to remove IC from the shared pool of players... give IC its own queue and separated instance and let players interested in IC port directly to it without the need of going through Cyrodiil first.

That would help first clarify how many people are left for oper world PvP on the surface, and then you can go making adjustments from there.

IMO ofc, the IC is like a limbo that could be holding half of the campaign population for a given alliance and even if they look that they'd be locked, there's nobody around to defend/fight... that kind of unknown makes hard to judge actual levels of activities on a given day... again IMO.

That's a great point that I've never really thought about much. Thank you.

*Logs in*

*See's bridge is destroyed*

*Logs out*

Honestly for me it’s all based on performance. I was Xbox NA and I did nothing but PvP for about 2-1/2 years until the disconnects and bugs started making me lose interest. I’ve taken really long breaks from ESO and every time I want to come back I quickly learn that performance still hasn’t improved. And of course performance always sucked even worse right after a DLC.

Also, I posted about dynamic population caps in 2015, it’s always been a problem but the ZOS folk are likely zergers which it would hardly affect.

thankyourat wrote: »

So after this week I'm not so sure the population is actually dying. both EP and AD have had decent size ques in Vivec as well as being pop locked most of the afternoon into the night. DC had 3 bars in both Vivec and shor for a period of time yesterday.

I'm starting to think the problem is something else. If you like big Zerg alliance vs alliance battles than there is plenty of action, but if you are trying to find smaller fights the map is a ghost town it's either you are in the 100 v 100 fight or you don't fight anyone at all. So if you are a solo player or even a smaller group player and you are looking for fun winnable fights you are going to have a bad time. So the PvP population is alive and well it's just more congested than ever before.

You know I think you bring up a fantastic point and I have noticed it as well. I think the biggest problem is with dc itself. They only attack but don't protect. So when I'm solo protecting with 10 randoms against 30-50 ep/ad it's rough. Ep/ad do protect their keeps so when dc tries to attack, they show up in huge numbers. So, it looks like we're completely outnumbered no matter what we do... but it's because dc is an one dimensional alliance.

That being said I've been playing mostly in shor now. If I'm going to get ran down by a dozen people at least I can experience it without lag.

I think it's a combination problem. A 60+ zerg by itself is not the end of the world because zergers are usually pretty awful and can be taken down by a good medium sized group. The lag by itself is not a total deal breaker (although still completely unacceptable, given the amount of cash this game is netting someone), as you know that everyone is lagging equally and you can adjust your play-style to accommodate it. The zerg and the lag together is game breaking though because you can't fight through load screens and disconnects, and no one wants to put time, effort, and sometimes money on the table when the only thing determining a "winner" boils down to whoever the rng decides to Dashboard first. Even trying to play on the outskirts of the map by myself or with a couple of friends feels futile, because at some point, either one of the zerg-blobs or a load screen is going to get you.

Personally, as much as I love this game and the PvP format, I just don't have the drive to play through that as much as I used to. It's frustrating and ultimately boring. I haven't lost interest in the game, but I have lost interest in making excuses for and developing workarounds for a problem that should be handled by the company we're all paying to handle it.

On the plus side, I have started saving a lot more money by not spending it on crowns anymore.

p00tx wrote: »

I think it's a combination problem. A 60+ zerg by itself is not the end of the world because zergers are usually pretty awful and can be taken down by a good medium sized group. The lag by itself is not a total deal breaker (although still completely unacceptable, given the amount of cash this game is netting someone), as you know that everyone is lagging equally and you can adjust your play-style to accommodate it. The zerg and the lag together is game breaking though because you can't fight through load screens and disconnects, and no one wants to put time, effort, and sometimes money on the table when the only thing determining a "winner" boils down to whoever the rng decides to Dashboard first. Even trying to play on the outskirts of the map by myself or with a couple of friends feels futile, because at some point, either one of the zerg-blobs or a load screen is going to get you.

Personally, as much as I love this game and the PvP format, I just don't have the drive to play through that as much as I used to. It's frustrating and ultimately boring. I haven't lost interest in the game, but I have lost interest in making excuses for and developing workarounds for a problem that should be handled by the company we're all paying to handle it.

On the plus side, I have started saving a lot more money by not spending it on crowns anymore.

Agreed. This game has become more zergy than it's ever been imo. I hardly see other solo players much anymore.

Rohamad_Ali wrote: »

For a moment thought this was a necro .

It is. I'm just going with it.