Hey Everyone,

If you don’t know me- I’m Grim. Most people probably know me as a solo/ small group stamblade. I make youtube videos sometimes. A few relevant background notes about myself. I’ve never cared much for the faction war itself, and I also haven’t cared for which campaign I am in. I only care about one thing: good fights. As a secondary thing, I am mildly motivated by nice AP ticks, and I’ll drop by keeps that are already being captured to syphon the ticks.

For those of you who do care about the faction war, I have a few suggestions that I want to run by you, as I think these changes will benefit both the serious faction campaigners and the small group and farming communities.

THE ISSUES IN THE STATUS QUO


1. The Risk of being locked into faction stacking.

For people who value the campaign, I understand that you want faction locks. I personally think they are a bad idea, especially after we have spent all this time being able to play with our friends on any faction. I personally hope they re-reverse the faction lock, but since faction lock is here for now, we need to give players reasons to choose the losing faction from the last campaign, without incentivizing losing, for the purpose of creating a numerically balanced playfield.

Solution: Make Low-Pop Bonuses Scale, that way you get low pop sooner, but the effect is less dramatic and scales higher and higher the lower the population descends. This guarantees that players will flock to campaigns where they are outnumbered, balancing the faction distribution. The pop lock remains focused solely on population, but now there is a reason to pick the faction who has a lower population. Don’t make low-pop bonuses dependent on being outnumbered, make them scale directly off of how populous the server is.

Example:

(This applies per-faction, not for the server as a whole).

Server Pop-Locked (no AP bonus)
Server 75% full (12.5% AP Bonus)
Server 50% full (25% AP bonus)
Server 25% full (37.5% AP bonus)
Server empty (50% AP bonus)

I realize that this system gives certain timezones advantages when it comes to becoming the emperor. But currently primetime is unplayable, and off-hours are dead quiet. I feel like the sacrifice is more than worthwhile. This will incentivize people to play in both the emptiest factions, as well as in the emptiest campaigns. Speaking of…

2. Nobody plays the secondary campaigns.

Self-explanatory. It may be nice for people to add why they don’t play those campaigns, but I have a feeling it comes down to incentives. Campaigners have no reason to campaign there, 1vXers have nobody to fight, and farmers don’t make enough AP per hour.

Solution: Incentivize other servers. I have two ideas on how to do this (besides the scaling low-pop bonus, which will draw farmers and small group to 7-day).

a. Possibility One: Dispose of the idea of home campaigns- you can earn campaign rewards in every campaign you participate in. The easier change, but likely mildly less effective for career campaigners.

b. Possibility Two: Combine the scoreboards of the CP campaigns, so that there is effectively one campaign leaderboard with two servers (and two Emps). I think this would be the more effective idea, since it will force guilds to track two different battlefields and give them reasons to play across several servers, reducing the lag coming from 90% of the PvP population crowding into one server. However, it comes at the cost of the 7-day campaign that nobody plays (in other words, the only realistic way to get Emperor if you only have a week to play, etc).



My big question is; why can’t PvP guilds participate in two separate campaigns?

What would incentives PvP guilds to invest time into several campaigns equally?