The night-capping in Cyrodiil needs to stop.

merevie · June 2023

The people who currently lose all the time on NA Grey are notoriously the worst faction of pvprs, (multiple groups of pve factions who come into GH) who run away with 30 from a handful of people. That's not a nightcapping issue.

The other faction that is losing likes to play in towers. At any given time, 5 or 6 groups of 10 are in different towers. That is not a nightcapping issue. It is a streaming issue -towers make better streams.

'Winning' is a very boring game of running to keeps all the time. That's not everyone's thing. So the first faction like ap so they go to empty places and resources. The second one likes fights, so they go to the bridge and towers. And the winning one currently has good puglet herders who take that 1/3 of the faction to keeps. (While the rest chase people in towers).

A good number of that currently losing for a long time group play at 'night'. Penalising further an already losing group doesn't seem healthy for pvp. It seems unlikely they will have a good time fighting supercharged guards, for instance.

Rogue_WolfESO · November 2023

Is the OP suggesting the game be unavailable while they are sleeping?

Akasha_Mei · November 2023

Because there's a market of selling titles in Cyrodill... Who doesn't know? New campaign? Mercenaries centered in AD can go to EP or DC.
Ppl now have 3 toons for each flag, to get AP.
Bad reward system of coin in Cyro, ppl follow the wave of mercenaries.

darvaria · July 17

The only way to stop this would be equal population ques. Even that would be limited because it's always ADC. So equal numbers with TWO factions.

Or just give us a large scale PVP event that lasts like 1 or 2 hours. With TWO factions.

xFocused · July 19

You're never going to solve the night/day capping issue unfortunately. Players are always going to find ways to take the entire map and keep it a certain color at the worst times, there's just no viable fix. Even now, AD has been sitting at 3 bars almost 24/7 on the NA GH server this campaign with little to no resistance except for prime time when they finally do get gated and lose scrolls and emp, but daytime it's 3 bars yellow until night time when EP/DC start logging back in.

I'd suggest that if a alliance wants to zerg a empty map then Zos could look at raising the health of keeps and guards to almost boss level health, if whatever alliance wants to night/day cap then they need to work for it instead of steamrolling a empty map

Vaqual · July 20

Thus the thread had been unearthed.

Pelanora · July 20

Shhhh we're sleeping

Holycannoli · July 21

xFocused wrote: »

You're never going to solve the night/day capping issue unfortunately. Players are always going to find ways to take the entire map and keep it a certain color at the worst times, there's just no viable fix. Even now, AD has been sitting at 3 bars almost 24/7 on the NA GH server this campaign with little to no resistance except for prime time when they finally do get gated and lose scrolls and emp, but daytime it's 3 bars yellow until night time when EP/DC start logging back in.

I'd suggest that if a alliance wants to zerg a empty map then Zos could look at raising the health of keeps and guards to almost boss level health, if whatever alliance wants to night/day cap then they need to work for it instead of steamrolling a empty map

I wake up from work NA, EST time zone, and log in once in a while before heading out. Grey Host is always fully red.

People keep saying “well this is a global game, there’s no such thing as nightcapping” but they fail to understand that nighttime is based on the server. NA will have a different nighttime than EU.

Curiously this is the same nonsense on Grey Host that was happening when I last played this game last summer (yes I took nearly a year off of this game and especially Cyrodiil). Last year it was an EP nighttime group running around PvDooring the map.

Hours and hours of uncontestable points gaining every single day. Yeah yeah yeah who cares about points blah blah blah but it’s disheartening to lose a campaign because your time zone - the same time zone as the server - needs to sleep at night.

What can be done? What about greatly reduced points accumulation if the server pop is unbalanced? If one faction is three bars while the other two are one or two bars those points earned are slashed?

Or we can just do nothing and accept it lol.

Amottica · July 21

ESO and Cyrodiil are 24-hour games. They are not available only during prime time in my home area. As such, people will play them at all hours of the day. Since Cyrodiil is not designed or intended to have a balanced population, nor is it intended to be truly competitive (only feel like it is), this should not surprise anyone.

There is a way the scoring can be modified to adjust for populations and population imbalances but this is and should only be a modification. It should never make it so people who play during off hours are left feeling their work is meaningless.

And with that, we should all remember that while Cyrodiil is designed to feel like it is a competitive PvP environment, it is not truly a competitive PvP since imbalances are permitted by design. It is intended to be a fun PvP but the score is not truly meaningful. BG type of PvP is where players go for competitive PvP.

Tiphis · July 26

Well if there is a significant imbalance people usually don't re-balance factions themselves. So if you play EP during oceanic prime time and easily outnumber both AD and DC combined you obviously win most fights and are unlikely to switch to AD/DC and be the underdog. On the flip side if you are AD/DC you might get sick of constantly losing and swap to EP. This further shifts the faction imbalance which furthers the people leaving AD/DC for EP, which furthers the faction imbalance, so on and so forth.

There isn't really any easy answer to this situation. In my opinion there could be a buff to guards and/or make them more numerous the more the pop imbalance. This would make the less numerous defenders have a bit better of a chance while also not making it too difficult as player numbers would still be the most important factor.

As an aside low pop bonus really needs to be looked at.

Tiphis · July 26

Like right now EP is going on its 5th hour of being poplocked with ball groups. They own all scrolls, have emp and own all but 5 keeps. It's been this way at this time for many years and no ep faction swap to re-balance so it stays this way.

It's just human nature to jump on the bandwagon.

RaikaNA · July 28

Rogue_WolfESO wrote: »

Is the OP suggesting the game be unavailable while they are sleeping?

Are you implying that Pvdoor is a good strategy for winning a campaign that is designed for PvP?

This is NA/Ravenwatch... DC is winning not because they're good, but because they PvDoor the map as soon as AD logs off for the night. This kind of strategy should NEVER be encourged.

BlackRaidho · July 28

Yeah people, STOP PLAYING WHEN I'M NOT THERE !

ClowdyAllDay · July 28

im all for night capping. if you cant man the walls around the clock then you lose. period. don't like it? man the walls at night or enjoy your sour grapes.

SeaGtGruff · July 29

RaikaNA wrote: »

Rogue_WolfESO wrote: »

Is the OP suggesting the game be unavailable while they are sleeping?

Are you implying that Pvdoor is a good strategy for winning a campaign that is designed for PvP?

This is NA/Ravenwatch... DC is winning not because they're good, but because they PvDoor the map as soon as AD logs off for the night. This kind of strategy should NEVER be encourged.

What's wrong with that picture? Oh, it's the fact DC has only 4 keeps while EP has 12 and AD has 2. So how are you looking at that picture and concluding that DC is in the lead (at that time) because "they PvDoor the map as soon as AD logs off"?

darvaria · July 31

ZOS need to have even ques, no matter what time of day it is. 30 v 30 v 30. 10 v 10 v 10 ... if that's what it is.

Tommy_The_Gun · July 31

VaranisArano wrote: »

"Nightcapping" or other forms of complaining about the faction score being being dominated at low pop times is essentially complaining "It's harder for me to capture objectives during prime time, so my contributions should count for more even though I did less."

I dont think that players who actually play for objectives during prime time, when all factions are locked are "doing less". I think they are doing more. If you defend your stuff during prime time, it is way harder to capture it, right ? So that is why we have "night capping" or "morning capping" (whatever it is called) in a 1st place. Because it is the most effective way to win a "PvP" Alliance war Campaign. Just wait till enemy is gone & PvD your way to victory.

The paradox is that "PvP" campaigns are won by doing "PvE".

Capturing objectives is a PvE activity, but it is a PvP activity when your replace NPC guards with real players.

The result of current scoring potential point system and players figuring out the way to by-pass PvP aspect of Cyro, pretty much devalued playing for objective almost completely. Nowadays players are more interested in AP Def ticks, rather than not letting enemy to grab a keep or scroll. Because there is no point. Because players know that map will have X colour in like 2 - 3 hours so no point in defending objectives.

There is a really simple way to have a cake & eat a cake (make every one happy):

Make potential point gained for each objective captured to be depended of population difference:
- Re-scale population bar from 3 bars + locked to 9 bars+ locked (10 bars in total).
- Capturing enemy objective during a time when enemy has less population than you, will mean that you will get less potential points for captured objective. If you have 10 bar population and enemy is at 1, then capturing enemy objective will give you 0,1 point (10x less). If the difference is for example 50% in "bar population", then it will give you 2x less, so 0,5 instead of 1. If populations are equal then it will work normally - 1 point for objective and 10 for scroll.
- Game would "remember" what was the population difference when capturing objective, and the way to reset the penalty (if there is any) would be to lose & re-take objective when populations are equal.
- AP gain would be same as it is. No penalty for PvD empty map.
- The potential point calculation based on population, would not affect your native "home" objectives (Scrolls, keeps, outposts, town etc,)
- In the most drastic scenario, in order to get 1 potential point, you will need 10 enemy objectives or 1 Elder Scroll.

System like this would do simply do what ZOS did to AP long time ago. Right now, you are rewarded with more AP for doing "harder content" (capturing keep during huge battle) and less AP for doing "easier content" (capturing empty keep with no defence).

The game gives you better rewards for doing harder content and less rewards for doing easier content. Just like in PvE Arena for example - you get normal weapon for doing normal difficulty and you get perfected weapon for doing veteran difficulty.

"Potential Points" are an anomaly here. You always get the same amount of points, regardless of how hard or easy it was. This needs to change. System like this would simply be a good middle ground as "PvD" or "Night capping" or whatever it is called will still have an effect on a scoreboard, but it would not be this huge as it is now and it would be possible to "catch up" during the active PvP phase that would for the most part decide who wins PvP campaign. Players will again play for objectives, as they would again feel that it actually matters.

Joy_Division · August 1

@Tommy_The_Gun is 100% right.

The obvious solution is to make scoring proportional to population. That this has not even been tried yet is indicative of how much effort/care ZOS has for supporting Cyrodiil

xDeusEJRx · August 2

Joy_Division wrote: »

@Tommy_The_Gun is 100% right.

The obvious solution is to make scoring proportional to population. That this has not even been tried yet is indicative of how much effort/care ZOS has for supporting Cyrodiil

I think the more realistic thing to do is just make the scoring more weighted during prime time versus off-times. For example: whenever prime time is NA, the points are increased, and when NA is during sleeping hours the points gained is reduced. The same goes for each server, more points during EU's prime time, and so on.

That way "nightcapping" is much less lucrative than playing during prime hours and can't completely flip a scoreboard overnight

Pelanora · August 2

There is a southern hemisphere, people.

You are going to have to deal with it.

Izanagi.Xiiib16_ESO · August 3

Pelanora wrote: »

There is a southern hemisphere, people.

You are going to have to deal with it.

believe it or not the southern hemisphere has the same set of timezones as the northern.

The issue isn't the fact that players are playing during hours where the server's aren't as busy but that those players have a disproportionate effect on the campaign outcome and seem reluctant to actually fight each other, preferring instead to stack on the same factions.

As has been stated many times, there just needs to be score weighting to adjust the scales back to balance.
My preference is 'evaluation tick time adjustment' to promote good map play actually but its basically the same thing.

Tommy_The_Gun · August 3

Pelanora wrote: »

There is a southern hemisphere, people.

You are going to have to deal with it.

I mean clearly all players from "different time zone" all mained EP for some reason

I mean if this was true, if other times zone than prime time were playing the game, populations would be more or less equal 24/7, but we both know it is not the case.

Izanagi.Xiiib16_ESO wrote: »

believe it or not the southern hemisphere has the same set of timezones as the northern.

Yep...

Sylosi · August 3

You are playing a game mode that:

- Is a 30 day round the clock match.
- Has casuals vs tryhards.
- New players vs players with thousands of hours.
- 16 year olds vs 60 year olds.
- can easily be manipulated by people with multiple accounts (or even multiple characters outside of Grayhost)
- has different numbers of players on each team.
- easily lets you stack one team or another.
- is packed full of exploits / bugs.
- Is three teams, so two teams can simply choose to focus the other team and there is nothing they can do about it.
- Provides nothing meaningful for "winning".

The result of which is that is you have a "PvP" game mode that is so flawed competitively it essentially doesn't work as a PvP mode and never has. You need to be a roleplayer playing in some state of suspended disbelief to treat Cyrodiil as anything but a joke, "winning" in every aspect from the points to fights is meaningless. No amount of tinkering is going to change that.

Which is a big part of why it and game modes like it are so unsuccessful.

Lumsdenml · August 7

Tommy_The_Gun wrote: »

VaranisArano wrote: »

"Nightcapping" or other forms of complaining about the faction score being being dominated at low pop times is essentially complaining "It's harder for me to capture objectives during prime time, so my contributions should count for more even though I did less."

I dont think that players who actually play for objectives during prime time, when all factions are locked are "doing less". I think they are doing more. If you defend your stuff during prime time, it is way harder to capture it, right ? So that is why we have "night capping" or "morning capping" (whatever it is called) in a 1st place. Because it is the most effective way to win a "PvP" Alliance war Campaign. Just wait till enemy is gone & PvD your way to victory.

The paradox is that "PvP" campaigns are won by doing "PvE".

Capturing objectives is a PvE activity, but it is a PvP activity when your replace NPC guards with real players.

The result of current scoring potential point system and players figuring out the way to by-pass PvP aspect of Cyro, pretty much devalued playing for objective almost completely. Nowadays players are more interested in AP Def ticks, rather than not letting enemy to grab a keep or scroll. Because there is no point. Because players know that map will have X colour in like 2 - 3 hours so no point in defending objectives.

There is a really simple way to have a cake & eat a cake (make every one happy):

Make potential point gained for each objective captured to be depended of population difference:
- Re-scale population bar from 3 bars + locked to 9 bars+ locked (10 bars in total).
- Capturing enemy objective during a time when enemy has less population than you, will mean that you will get less potential points for captured objective. If you have 10 bar population and enemy is at 1, then capturing enemy objective will give you 0,1 point (10x less). If the difference is for example 50% in "bar population", then it will give you 2x less, so 0,5 instead of 1. If populations are equal then it will work normally - 1 point for objective and 10 for scroll.
- Game would "remember" what was the population difference when capturing objective, and the way to reset the penalty (if there is any) would be to lose & re-take objective when populations are equal.
- AP gain would be same as it is. No penalty for PvD empty map.
- The potential point calculation based on population, would not affect your native "home" objectives (Scrolls, keeps, outposts, town etc,)
- In the most drastic scenario, in order to get 1 potential point, you will need 10 enemy objectives or 1 Elder Scroll.

System like this would do simply do what ZOS did to AP long time ago. Right now, you are rewarded with more AP for doing "harder content" (capturing keep during huge battle) and less AP for doing "easier content" (capturing empty keep with no defence).

The game gives you better rewards for doing harder content and less rewards for doing easier content. Just like in PvE Arena for example - you get normal weapon for doing normal difficulty and you get perfected weapon for doing veteran difficulty.

"Potential Points" are an anomaly here. You always get the same amount of points, regardless of how hard or easy it was. This needs to change. System like this would simply be a good middle ground as "PvD" or "Night capping" or whatever it is called will still have an effect on a scoreboard, but it would not be this huge as it is now and it would be possible to "catch up" during the active PvP phase that would for the most part decide who wins PvP campaign. Players will again play for objectives, as they would again feel that it actually matters.

You could also tie the scoring in with number of players actually defending the keep. We know that the game already tracks players within the vicinity of the keep in order to award AP, so why not translate that into the scoring. Capture a keep with 10 defenders, 100 points. Capture a keep with 0 defenders, 1 point.

Lumsdenml · August 7

RaikaNA wrote: »

Rogue_WolfESO wrote: »

Is the OP suggesting the game be unavailable while they are sleeping?

Are you implying that Pvdoor is a good strategy for winning a campaign that is designed for PvP?

This is NA/Ravenwatch... DC is winning not because they're good, but because they PvDoor the map as soon as AD logs off for the night. This kind of strategy should NEVER be encourged.

Though DC did run up the score, it was really nice of them to give us low score bonus during a double AP event....

Holycannoli · August 10

xDeusEJRx wrote: »

Joy_Division wrote: »

@Tommy_The_Gun is 100% right.

The obvious solution is to make scoring proportional to population. That this has not even been tried yet is indicative of how much effort/care ZOS has for supporting Cyrodiil

I think the more realistic thing to do is just make the scoring more weighted during prime time versus off-times. For example: whenever prime time is NA, the points are increased, and when NA is during sleeping hours the points gained is reduced. The same goes for each server, more points during EU's prime time, and so on.

That way "nightcapping" is much less lucrative than playing during prime hours and can't completely flip a scoreboard overnight

They would have to determine what is considered “prime time” though. 6 PM - Midnight? 6 PM - 2 AM?

What I’ve suggested is any alliance with a considerable population advantage gets less score per tick. I don’t have specific numbers but when the overnight PvDoor EP crew logs on NA during NA’s sleeping hours they get less score per tick. Simple as that. It’s an unbalanced map the entire time they’re on. They can still capture all the undefended keeps they want while the server is asleep but they won’t tip the scales every night. In some months (Grey Host) it causes an insurmountable points difference.

It’s no longer just about the lower pop alliance getting a bonus. It now also has to be about the highest pop alliance getting a penalty.

I’d say a three bars to one bar difference should trigger it. Easy thing for an overnight PvDoor faction to trigger.