just pointing some things out. . .

but, here are a few of the larger pain points of Cyro, as a result of how it plays (by design)



-PvDoor: flagging and flipping keeps before anyone has a chance to fight, the map does not even update fast enough with amount of siege and if you don't have people with eyes on screaming in chat by the time you get to a transitus its 50% and flagged, by the time you ride to it its flipped.

-Siege: on the flip side the amount of resources required to actually fight and take a keep require overwhelming advantage in some fashion, be it numbers or group skill, as with the ability to instantly respawn defenders can just throw bodies at the situation without fear of repercussion from death, where as attackers only have 1 life then a 5 min cooldown on camps or a long ride back. I feel this is somewhat one of the reasons we get pvdoor, its just more efficient to burst a keep without defenders, obviously.

-outer keep defense is *usually* the only one that actually offers a chance at defense, as once the enemy is able to siege inner they can turn the outer against the inner and siege the defenders with more siege then the defenders can even place. If this is as intended that's fine, but it would be nice to know that. it would be nice for ZOS to take a look at how sieges play out and make sure everything is working out, just pointing out the initial outer keep fight has the most room for strategy and emergent gameplay in how things can play out compared to inner. heck some new keep designs would be cool, what if the gate keeps were 3 layer instead of 2, bigger, and had more flags? orsinium and alinor had some gorgeous verticality in the layout that would be amazing to see implemented in keeps.

-de emp should occur at one keep remaining, what I mean is that the emp faction should need to hold TWO ring keeps, and when they drop to one they lose emp. by current design de emping goes against various ideas of spreading out, avoiding lag, not all stacking in one place, and heavily favors the emp faction. requiring the holding of two keeps would just be more healthy for the game from both a gameplay perspective and a server perspective.

-scrolls: the concept and gameplay needs to be looked at and perhaps re tuned. from how the buffs work to stealing and securing them. the buffs seem a little counter intuitive from a gameplay perspective, so a faction is strong enough to steal a scroll and what does it do? it weakens the faction they beat and makes them stronger. . .wait what? so a situation where the weaker faction gets punished even more? scrolls are a little overbearing in points / buffs, but they also don't offer any unique gameplay, we are already sieging keeps, now we just have to siege them, again. what if there were specific locations to deposit scrolls for the factions, so that when scrolls did get stolen and secured they offered unique gameplay experiences at interesting locations. yeah, just re examine this whole system.

-loss of keep resources should not prevent transitus to that keep, in reality it does nothing because players can still keep recall and blood port to a keep if needed, it should continue to effect keep health, points, and be a target for smaller groups that want to help with the war effort. as well as being a place to fight over and fall back to. more often then not its used by vet small man groups to troll and feed on noobs. we want to ignore them, but cannot let the keep get cut, so they force you to come play there game until a zerg has to come roll them over. . .then one melts away to put up a camp and do it again.

-cyro terrain / fighting locations. at this point I would not mind some areas of cyro just being impassible as a result of terrain to create more interesting fighting locations and bottleneck areas of the zone a bit. as stated previously with zones like elsweyr, alinor, orsinium, etc. the team has gotten a lot better at world building and interesting terrain / lcations. not to the point of mile gates and bridges, but enough to move people into areas with other people. the further you get away from the ring keeps the more barren and open and boring it gets. having more just single flag resource like locations spread throughout the map, that dont provide spawn points but have maybe 1-2 faction guards and possibly provide a score point would be really fun at the various lone towers, shacks, villages, etc. and provide another option even smaller then capping keep resources, and without the threat of an enemy keep right next to you waiting to zerg down any lone player silly enough to wander up and try and cap a resource.

anyway, I know pvp is not really a thing really worked on or cared about to much, and that's a shame as when its lag free eso pvp is really amazing. and it would be nice to see it get some attention rather then neglected T_T


EDIT (these edits are based on either things I forgot or suggestions in the thread)

-Siege part 2: normal vs coldfire. this needs to go away if we are going to get any balance in siege damage. as it stands if coldfire is balanced and doing decent damage then normal siege is crap and does nothing. on the flip side if normal siege is balanced and doing decent damage then coldfire becomes OP and is overperforming. coldfire either needs different bonuses that don't effect gameplay in such an overt way (like improved durability or something) or needs to just be removed altogether so that the siege we do have can be perfectly balanced and performing at exactly the level that the developers intend.

-NPC mobs: remove any and all npc mobs not related to the alliance war or the dolmens, that includes various wolves, and NPC's around delves and skyshards. this should further improve performance (the great deer purge did as much)

-Offensive ticks: reduce the base amount of AP gained from offensive ticks to further incentivize fighting people and not reward capture of empty resources. if it cannot be dealt with at least stop rewarding it.

-Scale NPC guards: even if local scaling was too difficult to work out a global scaling based on bar population OR something like current eval points (so high point factions would have weak guards and low point factions would have strong guards this would dynamically scale every eval tick to help balance the alliance war.

-Scroll gates: I already posted that the scroll system needs an overhaul, but at least something to the effect of not allowing the gates to open if a faction is only 1 bar would also do some good, only allow gates to open a 2 bar or higher at least.

-Milegates / bridges: the bridges are still horrid gate options for AD compared to the milegates afforded to the other factions, they do not offer the distinct advantage in AD's favor compared to the way milegates are set up and the directions they face AND (worst of all) now that they are destructible they are even WORSE. DC and EP can cross their destroyed gates to the opposing faction while denying that faction the ability to do the same, this is a very large strategic and gameplay advantage, the bridges offer NO SUCH BENIFIT. when they are destroyed neither AD or EP can cross. these bridges have been perfectly even in the offensive and defensive capabilities afforded to the bordering factions for too long compared to the one sided nature of milegates afforded to the other factions, that balance has now been exaggerated now that there destructible, its simply NOT FAIR. flatten and widen the bridges and slap milegates on top of them, done.

-Low Population: this was somewhat touched on in a few other points, but giving low pop a point bonus does not help the problem, the problem is the *gameplay* the results from low population, you cannot push, you cannot defend, you end up losing the map, possibly your scrolls, when you lose your scrolls you lose combat effectiveness (that the high pop faction now has) I have already touched on that the scrolls need to just be re looked at, and a couple other ideas for population. but adding in some tangible gameplay bonuses for being low pop would also go a long way, the NPC boost was a suggestion, but others include things like increasing siege damage, this would DIRECTLY help to counter low pop, as it helps you hold and push keeps. where as things like stat buffs to the players would still result in low pop small man groups ignoring the map and trolling locations with now buffed stats. but SIEGE DAMAGE would directly help with the problem of taking and defending keeps while being legitimately outnumbered, as losing the map has always been the core problem of low pop.

@ZOS_BrianWheeler