Tiphis wrote: »

Making it be purely points and AP is pointless at best and actually harmful at worst. The point is to encourage the low pop faction to stay fighting and not to encourage the high pop factions to zerg harder. Give the low pop faction a health bonus, maybe more keep guards, higher keep guard health/damage, higher keep wall/door health, higher scroll bonuses or just about anything.

And of course the bug where ad gets it incorrectly a lot of the time needs to be fixed for fairness, but that's been around for awhile with no response about a fix.

IMO stat bonus should be not awarded by scrolls, etc... the exception to the rule is for the emperor as that should still provide some nice stat bonus.

I agree low population bonus is horrible. I agree it should encourage the low population to continue to fight. I think stat bonuses should be awarded by the % difference in population.

Using PS NA server as an example; in GH and BR EP tends to run both maps with larger 100+ zerg groups making it hard for DC or AD to really counter. Most days they have emp bonus and all the scrolls making EP players hard to kill. Than add to it that there is a big difference in population makes it hard for any AD or DC players to face EP alliance/players. If there bonus to stat was based on population it would provide AD & DC an advantage that is needed to fight back against EP on PS NA server.

I would make the scrolls and keeps capture increase AP gains instead of what it does now.

MEBengalsFan2001 wrote: »

Tiphis wrote: »

Making it be purely points and AP is pointless at best and actually harmful at worst. The point is to encourage the low pop faction to stay fighting and not to encourage the high pop factions to zerg harder. Give the low pop faction a health bonus, maybe more keep guards, higher keep guard health/damage, higher keep wall/door health, higher scroll bonuses or just about anything.

And of course the bug where ad gets it incorrectly a lot of the time needs to be fixed for fairness, but that's been around for awhile with no response about a fix.

IMO stat bonus should be not awarded by scrolls, etc... the exception to the rule is for the emperor as that should still provide some nice stat bonus.

I agree low population bonus is horrible. I agree it should encourage the low population to continue to fight. I think stat bonuses should be awarded by the % difference in population.

Using PS NA server as an example; in GH and BR EP tends to run both maps with larger 100+ zerg groups making it hard for DC or AD to really counter. Most days they have emp bonus and all the scrolls making EP players hard to kill. Than add to it that there is a big difference in population makes it hard for any AD or DC players to face EP alliance/players. If there bonus to stat was based on population it would provide AD & DC an advantage that is needed to fight back against EP on PS NA server.

I would make the scrolls and keeps capture increase AP gains instead of what it does now.

Well the idea for the scrolls would be so that you'd be more likely to be able to hold scrolls. It would most likely be in conjunction with something else, obviously I'm just throwing out ideas, the actual details would have to be worked out.

Right now I guess there are way more important things for ZOS to deal with (performance & lag in Cyro). But, if one day, maybe we will have a lag-free experience (or at least something close to lag-free) then - there are definitely other issues in Cyrodiil that ZOS will have to look into.

I play this game since 2014, and I can tell you this: Originally Cyrodiil was basically a huge & long "capture the flag" game. This is how it was designed - and it worked. It lasted for the whole duration of the campaign. There was no "night" or "morning" capping as there was no "night" & "day" for Cyrodiil. It was populated 24/7. Sure, there were times when there was less people, but there was always some one there to defend & attack. All factions had PvP guilds that were there and there wasn't a lot of population & allaiance strength imbalance.

Since the game was playable, people back then actually cared about winning Campaign & playing for objectives. Nowadays... it is different. Way different...

Lag, dying to something because you could not drink potion, or roll dodge, or because you had de-sync... or proc sets that hits you for 60K because one of your allies died to a random siege that hit him after he died... or sets that do not respect CC immunity...

It all went too far. No wonder why people don't care about factions or balance or anything. Winning/losing has become arbitrary or irrelevant. Cyrodiil, from the lack of better term had become a PvP "sandbox" - where balance is irrelevant & your skill does not matter.

Now that I got that you of the way, you will know the context & what is my approach. I try to look at wider picture and not from "my" or "my allaiance is winning, therefore it is good" perspective.

Low pop bonus was an attempt to motivate players to login to "under dog" faction (hey, double AP for you !). But it kinda faild as there are numerous problems with it. Players don't feel motivated to play for objectives so what usually happens is that one guild will try to simply farm as much AP as they can, by going to random keep or something.

The potential points bonus was there to give lower number of players a chance, as ZOS still wants us to play for objectives. But what ended up happening is that players started to kinda um... "abuse" that. After all, it is a reward for "not playing" which should imho raise a red warning flag. I have seen countless times factions moving from 3rd to 2nd place... by not participating in the game lol. The winning faction (usually night capping one) has huge point advantage so they also can kinda um "take advatage" from one faction having low pop bonus as they only need to focus on the other faction that does not have low pop bonus.

What is also very weird is that very often only one faction gets low pop bonus, despite the fact that 2 have 1 bar or something like that.

Anyway - like I have said - there are numerous issues & critical design flaws in Cyrodiil (low pop bonus being one of them), but it is all irrelevant as long as Cyrodiil is not playable due to lag & server issues. Right now it is an arbitrary PvP sandbox that has nothing to do with fair & competitive PvP gameplay - and it will stay that way for as long as we have lag & server issues.

MEBengalsFan2001 wrote: »

Tommy_The_Gun wrote: »

Right now I guess there are way more important things for ZOS to deal with (performance & lag in Cyro). But, if one day, maybe we will have a lag-free experience (or at least something close to lag-free) then - there are definitely other issues in Cyrodiil that ZOS will have to look into.

I play this game since 2014, and I can tell you this: Originally Cyrodiil was basically a huge & long "capture the flag" game. This is how it was designed - and it worked. It lasted for the whole duration of the campaign. There was no "night" or "morning" capping as there was no "night" & "day" for Cyrodiil. It was populated 24/7. Sure, there were times when there was less people, but there was always some one there to defend & attack. All factions had PvP guilds that were there and there wasn't a lot of population & allaiance strength imbalance.

Since the game was playable, people back then actually cared about winning Campaign & playing for objectives. Nowadays... it is different. Way different...

Lag, dying to something because you could not drink potion, or roll dodge, or because you had de-sync... or proc sets that hits you for 60K because one of your allies died to a random siege that hit him after he died... or sets that do not respect CC immunity...

It all went too far. No wonder why people don't care about factions or balance or anything. Winning/losing has become arbitrary or irrelevant. Cyrodiil, from the lack of better term had become a PvP "sandbox" - where balance is irrelevant & your skill does not matter.

Now that I got that you of the way, you will know the context & what is my approach. I try to look at wider picture and not from "my" or "my allaiance is winning, therefore it is good" perspective.

Low pop bonus was an attempt to motivate players to login to "under dog" faction (hey, double AP for you !). But it kinda faild as there are numerous problems with it. Players don't feel motivated to play for objectives so what usually happens is that one guild will try to simply farm as much AP as they can, by going to random keep or something.

The potential points bonus was there to give lower number of players a chance, as ZOS still wants us to play for objectives. But what ended up happening is that players started to kinda um... "abuse" that. After all, it is a reward for "not playing" which should imho raise a red warning flag. I have seen countless times factions moving from 3rd to 2nd place... by not participating in the game lol. The winning faction (usually night capping one) has huge point advantage so they also can kinda um "take advatage" from one faction having low pop bonus as they only need to focus on the other faction that does not have low pop bonus.

What is also very weird is that very often only one faction gets low pop bonus, despite the fact that 2 have 1 bar or something like that.

Anyway - like I have said - there are numerous issues & critical design flaws in Cyrodiil (low pop bonus being one of them), but it is all irrelevant as long as Cyrodiil is not playable due to lag & server issues. Right now it is an arbitrary PvP sandbox that has nothing to do with fair & competitive PvP gameplay - and it will stay that way for as long as we have lag & server issues.

The issue with low population is we really don't know how many players are on for each faction. Instead we get bars that don't really tell us anything. I've gone into the campaign where there was an 1+ hour timer and when I finally got into the zone the alliance was dead, no one was doing anything and we were gated on top of all of that yet I waited an hour just to get into the zone. But there were hundreds of the other factions fighting near the alliance I was on front door.

The alliance that appeared to have the highest population at that time was getting the low population bonus.

I want the population bar to become a population number. This way when you log on you can see how populated the zone is. You can see how many players are in the zone and if your alliance will simply be face stomped or have a chance at regaining some of the lost keeps or taking keeps over, well at least you hope that is what happens based on the population.

providing the exact numbers for a faction is kind of a bad thing because then it would severely discourage people from joining if they had less population

it might make sense though to have some kind of % pop, so instead of showing locks for each faction, show how much % that faction is out of the entire pop in the zone, but i dont think this would help your issue, your faction could still be 2/3 of the max population in the zone, and still be gated potentially depending on the skill of players available

i think its been noted before but max pop per faction being only like 75 doesnt really lend itself well for large scale cyro stuff, your faction could be locked at 75 people, but 40 of those could be just there for buying stuff from the merchants at home base, doing pve related activities (town quests, harvesting, delves, skyshards, treasure maps, etc) which dont contribute to actual pvp, buying items from merchants at a ally-controlled town and then leaving, or even just those people that port into cyro to get out of IC only to port back to IC (since the pop counters dont seem to change that dynamically)

For me, low pop bonus should just double AP/exp/gold gain.

MEBengalsFan2001 wrote: »

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

MEBengalsFan2001 wrote: »

Tommy_The_Gun wrote: »

Right now I guess there are way more important things for ZOS to deal with (performance & lag in Cyro). But, if one day, maybe we will have a lag-free experience (or at least something close to lag-free) then - there are definitely other issues in Cyrodiil that ZOS will have to look into.

I play this game since 2014, and I can tell you this: Originally Cyrodiil was basically a huge & long "capture the flag" game. This is how it was designed - and it worked. It lasted for the whole duration of the campaign. There was no "night" or "morning" capping as there was no "night" & "day" for Cyrodiil. It was populated 24/7. Sure, there were times when there was less people, but there was always some one there to defend & attack. All factions had PvP guilds that were there and there wasn't a lot of population & allaiance strength imbalance.

Since the game was playable, people back then actually cared about winning Campaign & playing for objectives. Nowadays... it is different. Way different...

Lag, dying to something because you could not drink potion, or roll dodge, or because you had de-sync... or proc sets that hits you for 60K because one of your allies died to a random siege that hit him after he died... or sets that do not respect CC immunity...

It all went too far. No wonder why people don't care about factions or balance or anything. Winning/losing has become arbitrary or irrelevant. Cyrodiil, from the lack of better term had become a PvP "sandbox" - where balance is irrelevant & your skill does not matter.

Now that I got that you of the way, you will know the context & what is my approach. I try to look at wider picture and not from "my" or "my allaiance is winning, therefore it is good" perspective.

Low pop bonus was an attempt to motivate players to login to "under dog" faction (hey, double AP for you !). But it kinda faild as there are numerous problems with it. Players don't feel motivated to play for objectives so what usually happens is that one guild will try to simply farm as much AP as they can, by going to random keep or something.

The potential points bonus was there to give lower number of players a chance, as ZOS still wants us to play for objectives. But what ended up happening is that players started to kinda um... "abuse" that. After all, it is a reward for "not playing" which should imho raise a red warning flag. I have seen countless times factions moving from 3rd to 2nd place... by not participating in the game lol. The winning faction (usually night capping one) has huge point advantage so they also can kinda um "take advatage" from one faction having low pop bonus as they only need to focus on the other faction that does not have low pop bonus.

What is also very weird is that very often only one faction gets low pop bonus, despite the fact that 2 have 1 bar or something like that.

Anyway - like I have said - there are numerous issues & critical design flaws in Cyrodiil (low pop bonus being one of them), but it is all irrelevant as long as Cyrodiil is not playable due to lag & server issues. Right now it is an arbitrary PvP sandbox that has nothing to do with fair & competitive PvP gameplay - and it will stay that way for as long as we have lag & server issues.

The issue with low population is we really don't know how many players are on for each faction. Instead we get bars that don't really tell us anything. I've gone into the campaign where there was an 1+ hour timer and when I finally got into the zone the alliance was dead, no one was doing anything and we were gated on top of all of that yet I waited an hour just to get into the zone. But there were hundreds of the other factions fighting near the alliance I was on front door.

The alliance that appeared to have the highest population at that time was getting the low population bonus.

I want the population bar to become a population number. This way when you log on you can see how populated the zone is. You can see how many players are in the zone and if your alliance will simply be face stomped or have a chance at regaining some of the lost keeps or taking keeps over, well at least you hope that is what happens based on the population.

providing the exact numbers for a faction is kind of a bad thing because then it would severely discourage people from joining if they had less population

it might make sense though to have some kind of % pop, so instead of showing locks for each faction, show how much % that faction is out of the entire pop in the zone, but i dont think this would help your issue, your faction could still be 2/3 of the max population in the zone, and still be gated potentially depending on the skill of players available

i think its been noted before but max pop per faction being only like 75 doesnt really lend itself well for large scale cyro stuff, your faction could be locked at 75 people, but 40 of those could be just there for buying stuff from the merchants at home base, doing pve related activities (town quests, harvesting, delves, skyshards, treasure maps, etc) which dont contribute to actual pvp, buying items from merchants at a ally-controlled town and then leaving, or even just those people that port into cyro to get out of IC only to port back to IC (since the pop counters dont seem to change that dynamically)

How about it tells you how many players are in the zone for your alliance only with a the other only showing a % toward their maximum allotted players allowed. So instead of a bar we would get the following.

AD 52% Over 100 players
DC 45% Under 100 players
EP 35% 75 players

I've played other games where the developers were a bit more transparent with PVP zones. This game needs that to improve the PVP experience for players. Maybe not full transparency but a bit more than a bar that doesn't really make much sense because I've seen 150+ players in another alliance and they had only one bar where as the alliance I was on had three bars and a 1+ hour wait time and every area I went to the zone was empty.

planetside 2 has a pretty good population measure, for the active map it has basically a pie chart with each slice representing the faction population, and that one almost consistently has fairly even populatons (usually between 20-40%)

they also still have individual faction queues for when a faction reaches max population on a map

MEBengalsFan2001 wrote: »

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

MEBengalsFan2001 wrote: »

Tommy_The_Gun wrote: »

Right now I guess there are way more important things for ZOS to deal with (performance & lag in Cyro). But, if one day, maybe we will have a lag-free experience (or at least something close to lag-free) then - there are definitely other issues in Cyrodiil that ZOS will have to look into.

I play this game since 2014, and I can tell you this: Originally Cyrodiil was basically a huge & long "capture the flag" game. This is how it was designed - and it worked. It lasted for the whole duration of the campaign. There was no "night" or "morning" capping as there was no "night" & "day" for Cyrodiil. It was populated 24/7. Sure, there were times when there was less people, but there was always some one there to defend & attack. All factions had PvP guilds that were there and there wasn't a lot of population & allaiance strength imbalance.

Since the game was playable, people back then actually cared about winning Campaign & playing for objectives. Nowadays... it is different. Way different...

Lag, dying to something because you could not drink potion, or roll dodge, or because you had de-sync... or proc sets that hits you for 60K because one of your allies died to a random siege that hit him after he died... or sets that do not respect CC immunity...

It all went too far. No wonder why people don't care about factions or balance or anything. Winning/losing has become arbitrary or irrelevant. Cyrodiil, from the lack of better term had become a PvP "sandbox" - where balance is irrelevant & your skill does not matter.

Now that I got that you of the way, you will know the context & what is my approach. I try to look at wider picture and not from "my" or "my allaiance is winning, therefore it is good" perspective.

Low pop bonus was an attempt to motivate players to login to "under dog" faction (hey, double AP for you !). But it kinda faild as there are numerous problems with it. Players don't feel motivated to play for objectives so what usually happens is that one guild will try to simply farm as much AP as they can, by going to random keep or something.

The potential points bonus was there to give lower number of players a chance, as ZOS still wants us to play for objectives. But what ended up happening is that players started to kinda um... "abuse" that. After all, it is a reward for "not playing" which should imho raise a red warning flag. I have seen countless times factions moving from 3rd to 2nd place... by not participating in the game lol. The winning faction (usually night capping one) has huge point advantage so they also can kinda um "take advatage" from one faction having low pop bonus as they only need to focus on the other faction that does not have low pop bonus.

What is also very weird is that very often only one faction gets low pop bonus, despite the fact that 2 have 1 bar or something like that.

Anyway - like I have said - there are numerous issues & critical design flaws in Cyrodiil (low pop bonus being one of them), but it is all irrelevant as long as Cyrodiil is not playable due to lag & server issues. Right now it is an arbitrary PvP sandbox that has nothing to do with fair & competitive PvP gameplay - and it will stay that way for as long as we have lag & server issues.

The issue with low population is we really don't know how many players are on for each faction. Instead we get bars that don't really tell us anything. I've gone into the campaign where there was an 1+ hour timer and when I finally got into the zone the alliance was dead, no one was doing anything and we were gated on top of all of that yet I waited an hour just to get into the zone. But there were hundreds of the other factions fighting near the alliance I was on front door.

The alliance that appeared to have the highest population at that time was getting the low population bonus.

I want the population bar to become a population number. This way when you log on you can see how populated the zone is. You can see how many players are in the zone and if your alliance will simply be face stomped or have a chance at regaining some of the lost keeps or taking keeps over, well at least you hope that is what happens based on the population.

providing the exact numbers for a faction is kind of a bad thing because then it would severely discourage people from joining if they had less population

it might make sense though to have some kind of % pop, so instead of showing locks for each faction, show how much % that faction is out of the entire pop in the zone, but i dont think this would help your issue, your faction could still be 2/3 of the max population in the zone, and still be gated potentially depending on the skill of players available

i think its been noted before but max pop per faction being only like 75 doesnt really lend itself well for large scale cyro stuff, your faction could be locked at 75 people, but 40 of those could be just there for buying stuff from the merchants at home base, doing pve related activities (town quests, harvesting, delves, skyshards, treasure maps, etc) which dont contribute to actual pvp, buying items from merchants at a ally-controlled town and then leaving, or even just those people that port into cyro to get out of IC only to port back to IC (since the pop counters dont seem to change that dynamically)

How about it tells you how many players are in the zone for your alliance only with a the other only showing a % toward their maximum allotted players allowed. So instead of a bar we would get the following.

AD 52% Over 100 players
DC 45% Under 100 players
EP 35% 75 players

I've played other games where the developers were a bit more transparent with PVP zones. This game needs that to improve the PVP experience for players. Maybe not full transparency but a bit more than a bar that doesn't really make much sense because I've seen 150+ players in another alliance and they had only one bar where as the alliance I was on had three bars and a 1+ hour wait time and every area I went to the zone was empty.

Well the pop cap seems to be under 75 players now, possibly as low as 50 per faction... Which is probably why the low pop bonus is so messed up.