Please address: How can a faction be pop locked and have low pop bonus??

Milaedy · September 2021

The below happened during JP primetime. DC received low population bonus (doubling their potential score) despite matching our EP in numbers in the field. What's more, the queue showed that AD had less active people than either of our factions, yet had not received the low pop buff.

I'm not generally one to complain but I'm concerned about this. The campaign is exceedingly close and only has a few days left, doubled points based on a faulty low pop bonus would be a bit of a slap in the face to the other two factions.

I'm looking for an official response here. What are the rules for applying low pop bonus? Why did this happen? To my players out there, have you noticed anything weird with your pvp queues in cyro and IC lately?

Help me, I need an adult

Jameson18 · September 2021

I posted this comment in another thread based on a theory I have:

***
We've spent a few "exploratory" runs looking at this as well.

Pop for your faction is locked. You wait 28 minutes to get in. None of your faction even exists.

Purposely go all over the map. Look everywhere. Ask in zone chat etc. Nothing.

Meanwhile, 2 opposing teams have not 1, but 2 zergs in different locations.

Noticed the same with IC this week.

I believe it's something wrong with the mechanic in which it determines / tallies what faction a player is.

If your guild, other toons, etc. etc. are DC, and you are currently on an EP toon for the campaign, it likely still shows you as a DC.

A similar defect holds true in; Make a toon. Do crafting writs on that toon. You can by default do your race's style.

Change the toons race. You can do the original race style, but not the new race style. It doesn't swap it.
****

At the time of investigating this ourselves, we didn't even consider the low pop bonuses being involved. The more I see/hear and poke around, I feel like there is something to my theory.

Lady_Galadhiel · September 2021

Something I did notice the last 2 days,I tried to get into Gray Host in primetime on EU,one day I was placed at 50th position in queue had to wait over 30 mins while we had pop locked.
Yesterday I tried around the same time,had an instant ready check even my faction had again pop locked.While I was in Cyrodiil te other 2 factions had most part of the map while my faction only defended what was left of ours,and one enemy faction actually only had 2 bar population,aparently.

Pauwer · September 2021

Same on console too, dc has low pop bonus, when other alliances have less bars. Low pop bonus never appears on ad or ep, even if they have 0 bars. Please investigate and permaban for any accounts found abusing an in-game bug. Please treat the issue same as abusing bugs in vet trials.

Tiphis · September 2021

Yeah us AD need our low pop bonus too!

Thoragaal · September 2021

Milaedy wrote: »

The below happened during JP primetime. DC received low population bonus (doubling their potential score) despite matching our EP in numbers in the field. What's more, the queue showed that AD had less active people than either of our factions, yet had not received the low pop buff.

I'm not generally one to complain but I'm concerned about this. The campaign is exceedingly close and only has a few days left, doubled points based on a faulty low pop bonus would be a bit of a slap in the face to the other two factions.

I'm looking for an official response here. What are the rules for applying low pop bonus? Why did this happen? To my players out there, have you noticed anything weird with your pvp queues in cyro and IC lately?

Help me, I need an adult

Although it's not an official response, I believe I can help you.
The bonuses is a way for factions to catch up, in case factions become too unbalanced.
What the system does is look at the average player amount, per faction, across the past four hours (iirc) and then give a bonus to said faction for another four hours, if the right conditions have been met; if the factions aren't balanced enough the added bonus evens the odds.
However, as you've noticed, players can abuse this system by leaving a faction unpopulated, wait for the bonus to happen and then log in.

Milaedy · September 2021

Thoragaal wrote: »

Milaedy wrote: »

The below happened during JP primetime. DC received low population bonus (doubling their potential score) despite matching our EP in numbers in the field. What's more, the queue showed that AD had less active people than either of our factions, yet had not received the low pop buff.

I'm not generally one to complain but I'm concerned about this. The campaign is exceedingly close and only has a few days left, doubled points based on a faulty low pop bonus would be a bit of a slap in the face to the other two factions.

I'm looking for an official response here. What are the rules for applying low pop bonus? Why did this happen? To my players out there, have you noticed anything weird with your pvp queues in cyro and IC lately?

Help me, I need an adult

Although it's not an official response, I believe I can help you.
The bonuses is a way for factions to catch up, in case factions become too unbalanced.
What the system does is look at the average player amount, per faction, across the past four hours (iirc) and then give a bonus to said faction for another four hours, if the right conditions have been met; if the factions aren't balanced enough the added bonus evens the odds.
However, as you've noticed, players can abuse this system by leaving a faction unpopulated, wait for the bonus to happen and then log in.

Appreciate the insight! I'll be interested to see what they say. I'm all for a low pop catchup system, but I definitely think it needs to be a dynamic thing that shifts as people log in and the bars go up. A flat 4 hour buff seems... wrong, particularly when the servers surge with pop the same time every day

Kartalin · September 2021

The game supposedly keeps regular tracking of population information, so if it's consistently low for x minutes, a faction receives the low pop bonus. It then keeps this bonus until it's consistently higher than whatever the threshold is for y minutes.

So I'm guessing low pop was unlocked just before prime time and the faction had a massive population influx prior to the bonus being lost? It's the only thing that makes sense. Surely there has never been anything off with ZOS' code...

Tiphis wrote: »

Yeah us AD need our low pop bonus too!

First place teams cannot receive the bonus, and I think having emp precludes getting the bonus as well.

Milaedy · September 2021

Kartalin wrote: »

The game supposedly keeps regular tracking of population information, so if it's consistently low for x minutes, a faction receives the low pop bonus. It then keeps this bonus until it's consistently higher than whatever the threshold is for y minutes.

So I'm guessing low pop was unlocked just before prime time and the faction had a massive population influx prior to the bonus being lost? It's the only thing that makes sense. Surely there has never been anything off with ZOS' code...

Tiphis wrote: »

Yeah us AD need our low pop bonus too!

First place teams cannot receive the bonus, and I think having emp precludes getting the bonus as well.

Thank you also for your insight, but now I'm just more confused, lol.

(I'd really like some clarification from the team, hi if you're reading)

rauyran · September 2021

I suspect that the population graphs count players who have logged out while still in Cyrodil. Zos might do that to guarantee that there is space for the player in the instance when they log in again.

Indigogo · September 2021

I think the record we've noticed was dc had low pop for 3 hours with minimum 1 bar over that time.
It's broken.

Kinda amusing that the common factor seems to be DC!

VaranisArano · September 2021

The UESP says this about "Underdog Bonuses"

"At certain times, one of the alliances may qualify for an "underdog bonus" during a particular campaign. These are applied when an alliance has a consistently low population of players entering that campaign, or if an alliance has a significantly lower score than the others. Underdog bonuses are re-evaluated every 30 minutes, and grant a 100% increase to Alliance Point gain for the duration. The population and scoring bonus takes all the samples its collected over a period of time, and then on each evaluation period, measures the current score against the average of the prior samples, then applies bonuses as needed. An alliance that is currently benefiting from an underdog bonus will display one of the following icons on the scoreboard:

Population Underdog — Scoring bonus ×4, AP bonus 100%
Underdog — Scoring bonus ×3, AP bonus 100%"
https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Online:Campaigns

As far as I'm aware, the last time this was adjusted to the current values was in 2015 with the Imperial City DLC. Patch Notes: https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Online:Patch/2.1.4

You can read Brian Wheeler talk about some of the rationale for dealing with population imbalance and the existence of "buff servers" in the above Update here: https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/180480/pvp-update-june-2015/p1

trackdemon5512 · September 2021

VaranisArano wrote: »

The UESP says this about "Underdog Bonuses"

"At certain times, one of the alliances may qualify for an "underdog bonus" during a particular campaign. These are applied when an alliance has a consistently low population of players entering that campaign, or if an alliance has a significantly lower score than the others. Underdog bonuses are re-evaluated every 30 minutes, and grant a 100% increase to Alliance Point gain for the duration. The population and scoring bonus takes all the samples its collected over a period of time, and then on each evaluation period, measures the current score against the average of the prior samples, then applies bonuses as needed. An alliance that is currently benefiting from an underdog bonus will display one of the following icons on the scoreboard:

Population Underdog — Scoring bonus ×4, AP bonus 100%
Underdog — Scoring bonus ×3, AP bonus 100%"
https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Online:Campaigns

As far as I'm aware, the last time this was adjusted to the current values was in 2015 with the Imperial City DLC. Patch Notes: https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Online:Patch/2.1.4

You can read Brian Wheeler talk about some of the rationale for dealing with population imbalance and the existence of "buff servers" in the above Update here: https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/180480/pvp-update-june-2015/p1

On PS4 NA I’ve noticed consistently over the last several months DC getting low pop bonuses constantly in Cyrodiil main campaign despite full bars or even one bar lower. Meanwhile AD and EP never seem to have low pop bonuses.

Something is definitely off with how the system is accounting for populations and applying bonuses. It wouldn’t surprise me if an unaccounted factor like when faction changes was implemented it left some sort of residual identity component or if the system is straight up broken.

This is problematic because if a faction is consistently getting such a bonus it encourages high lvl PVPers to switch teams to take advantage. I’ve watched several groups do this already to DC and the lower player counts don’t lead to Pop Bonuses for the other factions.

Furthermore, I NEVER see the score multiplier active and there have been some seriously skewed final scores in campaigns going on.

If these bonuses are being fairly applied it becomes clear they can have an affect on players continuing on with a campaign when they have no motivation to do so. The 30 day campaigns best exemplify this.

Olen_Mikko · September 2021

That's because poplock is only a smallscale By DC standards

Reverb · September 2021

They changed it some time ago so that the low pop bonus factors in population over a rolling period of several hours, not “in the moment pop”.

Just as having people log off right before eval won’t give a low pop bonus (yes, it’s been done), having a lot of people on a prime time doesn’t negate being one bar against 2 locked factions for 6 consecutive hours. Not saying that’s what happened here, just explaining how the bonus works.

TheMountain427 · September 2021

@Milaedy
I believe I can give some insight about this case specifically, as I was on Grayhost when leading up to DC getting the low pop bonus. What ended up happening was that EP took an AD scroll that DC was holding while AD took one of DC's scrolls from their temple. DC ended up with only warden left. Around that time DC went to 1 bar while EP and AD remained at 3 bars or locked for several evaluations. This was prior to JP primetime. DC pop was definitely low at that time as they were not making many moves.
What seems to have happened is that after the 3 or 4 evaluations that DC was at least 2 bars below the other factions, they received the low pop bonus. I logged out a couple hours before JP primetime and DC was still low pop according to the bars. They must have had players log in for JP prime time while they still had the low pop bonus and it takes some time for it to run out.

Jaraal · September 2021

Something is definitely amiss with the population count / queue recently.

Tonight, I queued for Gray Host, was 26th. So I entered Blackreach to play while waiting. After a few minutes, I checked the queue again, and I was 15th. So I played in Blackreach for an entire hour..... and the queue never went under 15. So I ended up just logging out when my allotted play time was up.

You can't tell me with a straight face that nobodly logged or crashed from a poplocked server for an entire hour. Never in my years playing has the queue not steadily gone down over time. Something is definitely wrong, and it's only started with a recent patch.