Is the population cap in Cyrodiil too low?

EdmondDontes · May 2022

In my opinion having the population cap in cyrodiil at or about 80/faction is just way too low. I think the minimum cap should be 125/faction and in reality it should be 250/faction at least.

Having such low population caps creates all kinds of problems. And now that the server reworking has been partially completed queue times are very high during prime time. As in DC queue times during prime time are 80+ most days and even higher on the weekends now. That means more people want to play and can't because the pop cap is so ridiculously low.

I know these super low pop caps correlate to performance issues and it's an effort to keep performance playable, but hey, why not just invest in more hardware to support the zone? PvP players pay to play just like everyone else and should get a zone that is playable with higher numbers of people. ...you know, closer to how things used to be a few years ago.

HonestLoverr · May 2022

Yes

Yes and No.

Yes, many people would like to play and queues could be fixed by either raising population cap or making a second campaign with same ruleset like GH. Also low population just doesn't fit cyrodiil, it just needs more players to have fights going on all over the place again with such a huge map size.

No, because big fights at the low population cap we got now already cause more than enough crashes, sound to break, stutter, rubberbanding, and so on. Especially when hammer is around things get out of control really fast and crashes so many players at once, it literally wipes out the whole queue time for everyone because of masses of people getting kicked out of the game in that moments. The hardware update was clearly not enough. Crashing, lag, performance, etc. will quickly return to its old broken state, if ZOS decides to raise player cap again without solving hammer crashes and at spots where faction stacks cause crashes too.

PS: remove hammer!

Xarc · May 2022

The first reason of low cap is a technical issue... Zos can't manage too many players with the actual code, that's why they're refunding it and decreased population cap.

TechMaybeHic · May 2022

Yes

Yes but...

Still need some more performance improvements before raising it.

Necrotech_Master · May 2022

Yes

new server hardware helped, but now they need to finish the code rearchitecting to make it you know more optimized, then i could see them raising caps again

Kamchuk · May 2022

Yes

The server performance has led to so many changes to this game over the last eight years. I can understand that they would be hesitant to upgrade the servers due to the return-on-investment questions. Who would have thought that an online game would be this strong after 5 years in development and 8 years in release. To try to solve the performance issues, they eliminated those poor defenseless deer, then reduced pop caps gradually over the years. When the pop caps were reduced to present day levels, (80’ish), that introduced the dominance of ball groups, then they introduced proc sets to counter, then all the balancing nerfs and buffs. All of these changes occurred to put a Band-Aid on the root cause of everything – the 12-15 year old servers, and the software code to match that “ancient” technology.

With the upgrade in servers, the performance improvements were night and day. Veteran players I haven’t seen in months and years are back to play this amazing game. But I would not want to go backwards by increasing the pop caps to fast. ZOS should do this in increments to see where the “sweet spot” is of server technology/capacity vs concurrent users that produces near zero performance degradation.

Raising the pop caps solves so many issues mentioned on these forums - if the servers can handle it. I would suggest that we start with an incremental increase to 150 per faction. That’s approximately double the current numbers. But the bottom line – YES, ZOS should raise the ceiling. As a community. we are able to provide solid feedback on how the game performs. And it appears that ZOS is listening.

xDeusEJRx · May 2022

No

Not in current state of game until I think the servers are stable enough to support it, they should not be changed cause what do we gain by nuking the servers more than they already have been? (outside of PC na, since they supposedly are in a better state)

McTaterskins · May 2022

Yes

Yes it is too low.

Currently? No, it sadly isn't. As the game can't perform when you're all by yourself somewhere, let alone when 20 people are in the vicinity.

Holycannoli · May 2022

Yes

Yes.

Raise the cap and get rid of the hammer while we're at it.

The problem is everyone flocks to the one populated server that allows CP, and the hammer encourages ball zergs.

YandereGirlfriend · May 2022

Yes

With performance on the upswing it is definitely time to increase the population caps again.

Amottica · May 2022

No

The answer to the question is relevant to a number of factors with our desire being merely one of them and not the most important one.

The one thing we can all agree on concerning ESO is that server performance in Cyrodiil has been poor for several years. Clearly the more players in the campaign lead to a greater server load. So increasing the cap significantly without improving server performance to handle it would be an amazingly short-sighted change.

With the hardware changes and the server-side code rework Zenimax will hopefully be able to increase the cap. Until performance is improved on all platforms and servers increasing the cap should not be considered.

EdmondDontes · May 2022

Yes

Amottica wrote: »

The answer to the question is relevant to a number of factors with our desire being merely one of them and not the most important one.

The one thing we can all agree on concerning ESO is that server performance in Cyrodiil has been poor for several years. Clearly the more players in the campaign lead to a greater server load. So increasing the cap significantly without improving server performance to handle it would be an amazingly short-sighted change.

With the hardware changes and the server-side code rework Zenimax will hopefully be able to increase the cap. Until performance is improved on all platforms and servers increasing the cap should not be considered.

I agree. It's totally up to ZOS to fix their game so it's playable just as it was only a couple/few years ago. They get away with providing a degraded product because so many are willing to accept things as they are now instead of demanding we get what we have been paying for all these years.

It's all up to ZOS to get their act together and provide a working product. I agree. It's way past time to fix their game and raise the population caps back to a reasonable level again.

As a paying customer since shortly after Beta I'm not OK with paying the same price for a continually degraded product. I'll never understand how some people are perfectly happy to pay the same price for getting less than the original game had to offer.

It's way past time for ZOS to get it together and raise the population caps back to a reasonable minimum number/faction.

ob1ken0bi · June 2022

While they are at it, alliance lock every campaign.

xDeusEJRx · June 2022

No

ob1ken0bi wrote: »

While they are at it, alliance lock every campaign.

No, gray host exists for that sole reason. Why ruin other's fun when you already have a campaign for that?

ResidentContrarian · June 2022

xDeusEJRx wrote: »

ob1ken0bi wrote: »

While they are at it, alliance lock every campaign.

No, gray host exists for that sole reason. Why ruin other's fun when you already have a campaign for that?

Maybe they want everyone to have the pain of waiting in a boring queue to do anything in-game.

Dungeon? Queue.
BGs? Queue.
Alliance War? Queue.

On patch day there will probably even be a queue to login...

And the sad part is that faction lock has and always mean nothing to players that actually PvP. I know for certain that most players in Cyro on all sides in PC NA don't care to defend anything and just run in a blob on Greyhost. With population cap apparently lowered in Cyro, faction lock is even more out of place and has less benefit than players that support it think.

Kalitas · June 2022

No

No. Not until they can prove that they can keep performance decent while raising the player cap.

Ahk1lleez · June 2022

Yes

Yes, the pop cap can be raised if they get rid of the hammer and implement a mechanic that forces people to spread across the map instead of fighting in huge battles in specific areas causing performance issues regardless of what hardware you're on. I'd personally like to see a nearly invincible Dragon spawn instead of the hammer which levels keep walls and kills those in the courtyards/surrounding grounds on a random basis. Keeps all over the map would be burning and contested as a result. I would suggest implementing the mechanic which spreads the fights across the map first though before raising the population cap so as to judge whether performance does indeed improve.

If the hammer remains, then the pop cap is right where it needs to be. Otherwise raising it will cause worse performance issues as a result when the zergs are fighting each other over it.

fred4 · June 2022

Yes

Where does that 80 per faction number come from? Is this a guess or official from ZOS?

EdmondDontes wrote: »

I know these super low pop caps correlate to performance issues and it's an effort to keep performance playable.

I voted yes, even though at current performance levels I do not think ZOS should raise the cap. Don't know about NA, but on PC EU (Gray Host), no.

but hey, why not just invest in more hardware to support the zone?

If only it was that simple. I genuinely believe that it's not. They have to optimize their server software.

The Elder Scrolls Online

Is the population cap in Cyrodiil too low?

Is the population cap in Cyrodiil too low? 64 votes