Meanwhile in Cyrodill ...



For those who doesn't understand my point. This picture was being made 3 days before last reset of 30 days campaign (dec 2019/jan 2020). I am at position 181 with 1,7k AP which means total population on my alliance on this campaign is less then 200 characters. Now we're talking about characters so considering some people will have multiple characters on leaderboard we can assume population for that 1 alliance is like 120-150 accounts for that 1 alliance. On my second account I also signed to that campaign but with different alliance. I was able to monitor population of AD and EP for both CP and no CP locked campaign.

Both alliance on both campaigns 1 day before closing positioned me on 180-200th spot when I had bare minimum of AP collected. We can safely assume that population of DC is similar. Fun fact is that when I got to like 500k+ AP my position on leaderboard barely moved and I advanced to spot ~170-180 which means there is barley anyone that logs casualy on the campaign once in a while. Now considering each alliance have population of ~120-150 accounts actively playing it gives us something like 400-500 people visiting campaign montly.

That means during last 30 days campaigns duration ~1k people visited them. That is definition of dead content. For the comparison I remember the times before faction locks where I was positioned as spot ~1k+ which means 5x more then currently. Even last month before adding faction locks it was way way higher then it is right now.

I am not saying that faction locks are the only reason why Cyrodill died lately but it's hard not to notice it's just another nail to the coffin. personally i barely played in Cyrodill after faction locks were intruduced because I am disgusted with the idea that I need to organise all my alts that are evenly splitted between all 3 alliances. I like to play in CP and sometimes in no CP but faction locks killed it for me and I think many people thinks the same. There is also new players aspect. Very often when I was describing what are faction locks to new players they immidiately lost their interrest with joining Cyrodill and preferred to keep playing BG because faction locks felt super limiting for them and it felt imposed on them.

Faction locks definietly did not help to solve any issue Cyrodill had. ZoS disencouraged many people from participating in Cyrodill just to make few most vocal players happy but now Cyrodill population declined even more because of it.

And for those who'll come here with arguments "but if non faction locked PvP is so great why dont You join non faction locked campaign" , well You clearly dont understand how non zergling mentality works. We want to have freedom of choice. Not because we want to jump to the winning side but to simply play whatever , whenever we want on campaigns with most traffic with and without CP.