Should cyrodiil be scaled down in size due to population cap reductions?

Zodiarkslayer · July 23

Yes

I think PvP is in dire need of a complete rework.

The entire Cyrodiil concept is just not working anymore. Its time to admit failure and start fresh.

Joy_Division · July 23

gariondavey wrote: »

@Joy_Division as said multiple times, I wish they would increase the population cap. I've seen it get reduced to 1/10th the original size. I long for a map full of people to fight.
That isn't happening. So this thread was a conversation starter on what a solution could be to remedy the situation we are now in.

OK Fair enough. Despite what the poll numbers say, I'm pretty sure the vast number of people who play regularly would agree the population cap is too low.

I still think it would be helpful to kick off the starter by ideas in which we might achieve the goal of making a more active map. Ideally these ideas should keep in mind that ZOS does not have a full time PvP developer and the last battleground map they delivered I think was update 21.

I've made my suggestion quite clear here. It seems such an obvious thing to at least try that the only reason I can think that ZOS won;t do this is that they are absolutely terrified of people complaining about the lag. It's quite clear and has been for some time now most common complaints on these forums are (now, not sya 2018) probably in this order: "ball groups," X build/class/set is too strong, low population, exploiting, lack of new content, then maybe lag. ZoS has gone way too far in cutting population. What I dont think they realize is that with fewer people, organized groups become much more oppressive, good players far more common to fight against (and die to leading to complaints of stuff overpowered), staler, etc., basically low population makes everything people complain about worse. That ZOS won't even tell us the results of their pop cap test going on what, 7 months later, is what we are dealing with here.

It didn't help at all the very first night during the population cap test people hysterically screamed at ZOS that the game was unplayable. I don;t play EU, so I cannot say for sure what happened there. Maybe things were really bad the first night. All I know is that during the test here on PC/NA, and I played almost every night because PvP was actually fun, for the most part it was fine. There were a few occasions of lag, but I already get that now, and nothing like the horror stories I came across. But I don't think that feedback ever got through. ZOS might have threw in the towel after the first night and said, "Nah bro. Don't even bother looking through the results. People praised us for fixing the lag a few years ago, nope, not going back to when lag was the most common complaint on the forums."

If asked would I be willing to put up with potentially more lag for more fights on the map, the answer is a resounding yes. The occasions of the lag were not that bad. If I wanted boring with no lag, I could watch paint dry. What stresses my tolerance most about Cyrodiil is playing for 90 minutes and having only 35 kills, Like what did I do for an hour and a half? It's not much more fun or different than watching paint dry. There are times when I have another monitor open and actively working on something else while "PvPing" in Cyrodiil. It's that bad.

I don;t think we need to scale things down. We need to be loud and clear to ZoS that they've gone so far in reducing the population cap that the adjective "boring" comes up too often when playing in Cyrodiil.

LPapirius · July 24

No (please explain why)

Zodiarkslayer wrote: »

I think PvP is in dire need of a complete rework.

The entire Cyrodiil concept is just not working anymore. Its time to admit failure and start fresh.

The biggest failure is that Zos doesn't support the game mode anymore. They've reduced the pop cap to 10% of what it was originally and that just don't work for a zone as big and popular as Cryodiil. The battles used to be epic and fun and in multiple locations on the map at the same time. Now there are only enough players/faction for one major battle on the map at any given time.

There's nothing wrong with Cyrodiil that some respect from ZOS wouldn't fix.

Celas_Dranacea · July 24

No (please explain why)

Hi there 🙋🏻‍♂️ late to the conversation but I have an honest question. When ya’ll reference numbers of people in cyrodil now vs before / say there are x% less people allowed into cyrodil now vs before, what are you basing this on? I would love to know what it’s based on.

Having been back to the game for a month or two now, I’m trying to think about the olden days and what it was like, but hard to put a finger on objectively. Going off of general feelz, personally I’d say maybe there are 25% less people … but probably not 50-75%

CatoUnchained · July 24

No (please explain why)

Celas_Dranacea wrote: »

Hi there 🙋🏻‍♂️ late to the conversation but I have an honest question. When ya’ll reference numbers of people in cyrodil now vs before / say there are x% less people allowed into cyrodil now vs before, what are you basing this on? I would love to know what it’s based on.

Having been back to the game for a month or two now, I’m trying to think about the olden days and what it was like, but hard to put a finger on objectively. Going off of general feelz, personally I’d say maybe there are 25% less people … but probably not 50-75%

The original pop cap was 600 players/faction. Today's cap is 60-80 players/faction. So yep, the pop cap has been reduced 85-90% from what it originally was. There have been many threads since January this year when they reduced the pop cap last time. You can search the forums and read all about it.

Celas_Dranacea · July 24

No (please explain why)

CatoUnchained wrote: »

Celas_Dranacea wrote: »

Hi there 🙋🏻‍♂️ late to the conversation but I have an honest question. When ya’ll reference numbers of people in cyrodil now vs before / say there are x% less people allowed into cyrodil now vs before, what are you basing this on? I would love to know what it’s based on.

Having been back to the game for a month or two now, I’m trying to think about the olden days and what it was like, but hard to put a finger on objectively. Going off of general feelz, personally I’d say maybe there are 25% less people … but probably not 50-75%

The original pop cap was 600 players/faction. Today's cap is 60-80 players/faction. So yep, the pop cap has been reduced 85-90% from what it originally was. There have been many threads since January this year when they reduced the pop cap last time. You can search the forums and read all about it.

Ok, yea well I’ve been away mostly for years and trying to understand. I’ve done some poking around but can’t find any place where it’s been stated conclusively what the population caps used to be and what they are now. I’m assuming what you are sharing here came from devs at some point?

loosej · July 24

Celas_Dranacea wrote: »

CatoUnchained wrote: »

Celas_Dranacea wrote: »

Hi there 🙋🏻‍♂️ late to the conversation but I have an honest question. When ya’ll reference numbers of people in cyrodil now vs before / say there are x% less people allowed into cyrodil now vs before, what are you basing this on? I would love to know what it’s based on.

Having been back to the game for a month or two now, I’m trying to think about the olden days and what it was like, but hard to put a finger on objectively. Going off of general feelz, personally I’d say maybe there are 25% less people … but probably not 50-75%

The original pop cap was 600 players/faction. Today's cap is 60-80 players/faction. So yep, the pop cap has been reduced 85-90% from what it originally was. There have been many threads since January this year when they reduced the pop cap last time. You can search the forums and read all about it.

Ok, yea well I’ve been away mostly for years and trying to understand. I’ve done some poking around but can’t find any place where it’s been stated conclusively what the population caps used to be and what they are now. I’m assuming what you are sharing here came from devs at some point?

Original cap of 600 was originally communicated by zos.

Current number of 60-80 comes from player observation. No way to be accurate, but since there's only one fight happening on the entire map at any given time it's pretty easy to count the players.

Turtle_Bot · July 24

No (please explain why)

Celas_Dranacea wrote: »

CatoUnchained wrote: »

Celas_Dranacea wrote: »

Hi there 🙋🏻‍♂️ late to the conversation but I have an honest question. When ya’ll reference numbers of people in cyrodil now vs before / say there are x% less people allowed into cyrodil now vs before, what are you basing this on? I would love to know what it’s based on.

Having been back to the game for a month or two now, I’m trying to think about the olden days and what it was like, but hard to put a finger on objectively. Going off of general feelz, personally I’d say maybe there are 25% less people … but probably not 50-75%

The original pop cap was 600 players/faction. Today's cap is 60-80 players/faction. So yep, the pop cap has been reduced 85-90% from what it originally was. There have been many threads since January this year when they reduced the pop cap last time. You can search the forums and read all about it.

Ok, yea well I’ve been away mostly for years and trying to understand. I’ve done some poking around but can’t find any place where it’s been stated conclusively what the population caps used to be and what they are now. I’m assuming what you are sharing here came from devs at some point?

Pretty much what @loosej said.

The official figures for pop caps for the first few years after launch (2014 to ~2016/17) was ~600 players per faction.

That number has been significantly reduced over the years since then (easy to see with "full campaigns only really have the same few groups running).

From what most players are observing, there's usually 1 ball group (maybe a second) and roughly 2-3 pugs at most running for each alliance during prime time. That is roughly 40-50 players there.
Then you take about 10-20 solo players (likely less, but lets be generous with this number). There's the 60-70 total players in cyro while the menu shows the population caps as locked (full) with the queue time to get in.

We don't have official numbers from ZOS themselves to confirm/deny this, but it's not super hard to roughly calculate the population caps if you're in the zone and doing things for a few hours.

Simple math 60/600 = 10%, or a 90% reduction in pop caps.

xylena_lazarow · July 24

No (please explain why)

Everyone wanted ZOS to address the lag. They did. There's less lag now. Y'all doing the "no not like that."

Joy_Division · July 24

xylena_lazarow wrote: »

Everyone wanted ZOS to address the lag. They did. There's less lag now. Y'all doing the "no not like that."

Pretty much, yeah

They went way too far and people are right to call them out on that.

Besides, I don;t think they lowered the pop cap one day and then the lag was fixed. I wasn't active in ESO when my Discord blew up with pronouncements of "ZOS finally did it! They fixed the lag." This was late 2021 / early 2022 when ZOS installed some new hardware or something. The pop caps were already low. They made things better by actually investing in the product.

loosej · July 24

xylena_lazarow wrote: »

Everyone wanted ZOS to address the lag. They did. There's less lag now. Y'all doing the "no not like that."

We wanted the product we bought into to perform reasonably well. Instead we were given something that performs reasonably well, but that's basically a different product, which delivers about 10% of what the originally sold product was supposed to be. Not so weird to go "no not like that" I think.

Jsmalls · July 24

No (please explain why)

Player mentality is just as much to blame as the population Cap is.

Realistically I think the Population Cap is roughly 100-120 of each alliance.

300 players on the Map is enough for meaningful PvP. Splitting each faction into 8 "12 player groups" and spreading that across Cryodiil would have plenty of action.

Having more than 30 players taking a Keep is extreme overkill in 90% of the situations. And the game can't handle 100 players in one location. It can barely support 2 "12 Man ball groups" in one location.

But this is what we get instead. An alliance generally all groups up and you have one location in the map with 200 players (2/3 of the Players in that campaign). Then the rest of the map is left with the remaining players. And it feels dead.

Lalothen · July 24

No (please explain why)

Zodiarkslayer wrote: »

I think PvP is in dire need of a complete rework.

The entire Cyrodiil concept is just not working anymore. Its time to admit failure and start fresh.

Cyrodiil - or at least a scaled down version of it - would actually be awesome as a 12-24 man PvE siege warfare instance where a group has to capture and hold objectives against increasingly tough enemy NPC armies until there's a final "mega siege" against a central keep with a boss that gets unlocked after a period of holding all the keeps.

ProudMary · July 24

No (please explain why)

xylena_lazarow wrote: »

Everyone wanted ZOS to address the lag. They did. There's less lag now. Y'all doing the "no not like that."

Yep, ZOS kinda seems like the person you hire to help with a job they don't want to do, so they do that job super poorly so you'll never ask them to help out again.

Zodiarkslayer · July 24

Yes

LPapirius wrote: »

There's nothing wrong with Cyrodiil that some respect from ZOS wouldn't fix.

The problem is how you progress in PvP.
The requirements in gear, player skill, ressources and time are ginormous!
Noone in their right mind is getting into PvP anymore, because it takes too bloody long to see any kind of improvement or even get to the point where it starts to be fun.

This is independent of player caps, map size or server ressources. Its just bad gameplay!

SaffronCitrusflower · July 24

No (please explain why)

Zodiarkslayer wrote: »

LPapirius wrote: »

There's nothing wrong with Cyrodiil that some respect from ZOS wouldn't fix.

The problem is how you progress in PvP.
The requirements in gear, player skill, ressources and time are ginormous!
Noone in their right mind is getting into PvP anymore, because it takes too bloody long to see any kind of improvement or even get to the point where it starts to be fun.

This is independent of player caps, map size or server ressources. Its just bad gameplay!

ESO's Cyrodiil PvP is the best and most fun PvP and combat system ever created. That's why it's so jaw dropping ZOS doesn't support the game mode anymore.

NuarBlack · July 26

Yes

Zodiarkslayer wrote: »

I think PvP is in dire need of a complete rework.

The entire Cyrodiil concept is just not working anymore. Its time to admit failure and start fresh.

I'm not sure cyro needs to be deleted but it was a flawed game mode from the start. It sort of worked when it first started because the game wasn't solved and gear didn't even matter during the very early days. The little fond memories I have from back then I don't think can be recaptured.

Plus, for a lot of players it was just a horse riding simulator that gate kept and deterred new players from ever getting into pvp. Raising the pop. Cap may not do anything if players don't even want to return.

I'd much prefer an entirely new mode that is less sweaty than BGs, but more consistent action than cyro that is conducive to new players being able to get into pvp without all the barriers to entry that both cyro and BGs have. Something like scaled down scenarios. Just 2 factions fighting over a pass with one keep that's set on the peripheral of the war but vital to the logistics of cyro. Or one faction is escorting supplies to cyro while the other tries to stop it on a timer. Make the teams bigger like 12+ so newbies can blend in and not be such a liability like BGs but make sure you can respawn relatively quickly to get back into the action to learn from your mistakes.

Build the pvp population back to relevance so cyro population even matters.

NordSwordnBoard · July 26

No (please explain why)

I agree with the sports field analogy's basic priciples, but I think the map size is good for strategy. It's more about objectives imo. I keep looking at the map posted here and thinking what if they just removed the objective towns? The PvE crowd would probably enjoy not having a reaction to them flipping a town anymore. It's only 3 places so it's easily reversible and not as major as slimming the zone size or other more meaningful objectives.

One less objective to fight for means more encounters with the enemy at the other objectives.

katorga · July 29

No (please explain why)

Performance is bad with current population caps.

Performance was equally as a bad with larger population caps.

So raise the caps.

Sleep724 · July 29

Yes

Scale the map down into more of a V shape, introduce new mechanics for players to fight over, increase pop cap again, and give Cyrodill a more war torn look. Update battle spirit to differentiate pvp more from pve.

Another random idea. Give forward camps the ability to give buffs to the players of its alliance in a larger radius. More armor, weapon damage, no cloak zone for emeries, reduced range for enemies, etc.

Tinkerhorn · July 29

Yes

I am personally of the opinion make it smaller, make the terrain a lot more interesting.
That said it's never going to happen and if they did minimize the map ZoS would just cut the edges off of it so my answer is yes but in reality no.
If done right a smaller Cyrodiil would be a lot better than what Cyrodiil is currently.

Ezhh · July 29

No (please explain why)

All this would do is make it harder to avoid ballgroups, which is a recipe to turn even more people off PvPing in ESO.

Outside that, a huge part of Cryo's appeal is the sheer scale of it. I love that I can wander through the outskirts of things, not constantly under attack and fighting, but knowing that could change at any moment.

Amottica · July 29

No (please explain why)

Joy_Division wrote: »

gariondavey wrote: »

@Joy_Division as said multiple times, I wish they would increase the population cap. I've seen it get reduced to 1/10th the original size. I long for a map full of people to fight.
That isn't happening. So this thread was a conversation starter on what a solution could be to remedy the situation we are now in.

OK Fair enough. Despite what the poll numbers say, I'm pretty sure the vast number of people who play regularly would agree the population cap is too low.

I still think it would be helpful to kick off the starter by ideas in which we might achieve the goal of making a more active map. Ideally these ideas should keep in mind that ZOS does not have a full time PvP developer and the last battleground map they delivered I think was update 21.

I've made my suggestion quite clear here. It seems such an obvious thing to at least try that the only reason I can think that ZOS won;t do this is that they are absolutely terrified of people complaining about the lag. It's quite clear and has been for some time now most common complaints on these forums are (now, not sya 2018) probably in this order: "ball groups," X build/class/set is too strong, low population, exploiting, lack of new content, then maybe lag. ZoS has gone way too far in cutting population. What I dont think they realize is that with fewer people, organized groups become much more oppressive, good players far more common to fight against (and die to leading to complaints of stuff overpowered), staler, etc., basically low population makes everything people complain about worse. That ZOS won't even tell us the results of their pop cap test going on what, 7 months later, is what we are dealing with here.

It didn't help at all the very first night during the population cap test people hysterically screamed at ZOS that the game was unplayable. I don;t play EU, so I cannot say for sure what happened there. Maybe things were really bad the first night. All I know is that during the test here on PC/NA, and I played almost every night because PvP was actually fun, for the most part it was fine. There were a few occasions of lag, but I already get that now, and nothing like the horror stories I came across. But I don't think that feedback ever got through. ZOS might have threw in the towel after the first night and said, "Nah bro. Don't even bother looking through the results. People praised us for fixing the lag a few years ago, nope, not going back to when lag was the most common complaint on the forums."

If asked would I be willing to put up with potentially more lag for more fights on the map, the answer is a resounding yes. The occasions of the lag were not that bad. If I wanted boring with no lag, I could watch paint dry. What stresses my tolerance most about Cyrodiil is playing for 90 minutes and having only 35 kills, Like what did I do for an hour and a half? It's not much more fun or different than watching paint dry. There are times when I have another monitor open and actively working on something else while "PvPing" in Cyrodiil. It's that bad.

I don;t think we need to scale things down. We need to be loud and clear to ZoS that they've gone so far in reducing the population cap that the adjective "boring" comes up too often when playing in Cyrodiil.

Regarding your comments here and the linked thread, I agree that the population does need to increase, and Zenimax needs to figure out how to make it happen instead of decreasing the pop cap because changes to the game have made it worse.

Lag happens in large-scale environments. Even in GW2, which seems to have a better design for open-world PvP with a three-banner style, there is lag sometimes. It's not as often as in ESO, but it still happens. I have been in battles there with over 150 total players (the add-on counts how many were in the battle) without notable lag.

So Zenimax can improve by increasing the population and performance. They just need to figure out how the servers can manage the data or how the data can be changed to make it more manageable.

Celas_Dranacea · July 29

No (please explain why)

This probably has been mentioned before, but it seems pretty obvious: have we discussed how a higher population cap might allow for even higher population unbalances between factions? For example on PC NA Grayhost, EP is always zerging/nightcapping everything.

So with an higher population cap it could potentially be 200 EP bulldozing 30 other players at night, instead of 100 vs 30 (or whatever it is)? That would not be good.

So if they ever raised population caps it would need to be like, a variable population cap that goes up during peak hours and down during off peak, otherwise low pop factions would get zerged even harder. I would sooner leave it the way it is than have even greater population unbalances.

JustLovely · July 30

No (please explain why)

Celas_Dranacea wrote: »

This probably has been mentioned before, but it seems pretty obvious: have we discussed how a higher population cap might allow for even higher population unbalances between factions? For example on PC NA Grayhost, EP is always zerging/nightcapping everything.

So with an higher population cap it could potentially be 200 EP bulldozing 30 other players at night, instead of 100 vs 30 (or whatever it is)? That would not be good.

So if they ever raised population caps it would need to be like, a variable population cap that goes up during peak hours and down during off peak, otherwise low pop factions would get zerged even harder. I would sooner leave it the way it is than have even greater population unbalances.

We managed just fine for years with pop caps in excess of 200/faction and 24 man group sizes.