Sweats don't want to miss out on level advantage, casuals go where the group goes, and Cyrodiil doesn't have enough population to force players to play in other campaigns.

valenwood_vegan wrote: »

There just aren't enough people interested in pvp in its current state.

the other campaigns are full or almost full, so, this is not true

Karmen wrote: »

valenwood_vegan wrote: »

There just aren't enough people interested in pvp in its current state.

the other campaigns are full or almost full, so, this is not true

Sorry you don't like the answer, but again, there is not a sufficient day-to-day pvp population at this time to fill the various campaigns. Even Blackreach is at one bar outside of primetime. Maybe it's different on your server, I have no idea. As mentioned above, Ravenwatch is not the campaign of choice for the sweaty regular pvp'ers; in my experience, they go to Grey Host and overflow into Blackreach at busy times. Likely because they want to use their cp. Grey Host also has faction lock, which may be a factor. And people who want to pvp don't want to play in an empty campaign so they will go where the crowd is.

Major_Mangle wrote: »

And also the fact that zos left Ravenwatch as a no proc campaign for too long. Before Ravenwatch became no proc it was as popular, if not more popular than Greyhost (on PCEU). When Ravenwatch became no proc it had some population for maybe 3-4 months but after that it had a rapd decline. One thing led to another and the campaign became a ghost campaign dominated by a small group of players treating it like a 9-5, always having emp and essentially killing the campaign.

ZOS made the mistake by making it no proc, if they'd left the campaign alone from the start I'm quite convinced Ravenwatch wouldn't have died as it did.

Certainly a good point that I overlooked - ZoS didn't help things by messing around with an existing campaign like they did.

I'm low CP (~500) so would prefere play in ravenwatch

I want my CP's for farming and general enjoyment, I don't really care much about the PVP. I use Faction Lock campaigns to do that, when I must. It doesn't usually take very long to hit level 1 for the transmutes.

shadyjane62 wrote: »

When I get on DC has gated everyone always at the time I can play. I have a DC, I tell them what's the point of taking everything and discouraging active pvp.

They just laugh. And nobody joins.

Well those are PvE players. They hop onto deserted servers to face no opposition to do cyrodiil stuff.

Stamicka wrote: »

People blamed No Proc, but the real reason is that no one really PvPs anymore. Blackreach doesn’t always fill either, although it used to in the past.

Maybe players are tired of ballgroups, bombers, and other overpowered builds, they feel bad, find no fun in it and prefer to go do 5-10min BG sessions

Karmen wrote: »

Stamicka wrote: »

People blamed No Proc, but the real reason is that no one really PvPs anymore. Blackreach doesn’t always fill either, although it used to in the past.

Maybe players are tired of ballgroups, bombers, and other overpowered builds, they feel bad, find no fun in it and prefer to go do 5-10min BG sessions

This.

Ravenwatch used to be semi popular for some time but it died when the set restrictions were added and has never recovered.

try to take a castle and after 3 min a blue an red ballgroup comes in
running around the courtyeard
c ant do anything to kill them
have a lot of fun
thanks zos

A history of Ravenwatch on PC/EU, for those who care.

For a long time, Ravenwatch was pretty much on par with Gray Host for being the most popular campaign. TTK was lower and many of the game's most popular PVP guilds played there. It was a healthy, lively campaign with its own culture.

Then the no proc test happened. There is some revisionism regarding this test, so let me recap: during late 2020/early 2021, Cyrodiil had many different tests, where the devs would turn off or change a core ruleset of all campaigns to see how it would impact performance. These included things like no crosshealing, adding cooldown timers to DOTs, and turning off proc sets.

The no proc test lasted for a few weeks (3 in my memory). Some people on the forums were vocal about liking it, in retrospect probably because it simply provided something different, and there hadn't been any new PVP content in years.

When the test was almost over, ZOS said that they barely noticed an impact on performance. But due to the small but vocal group of people who loved the no proc ruleset, they made the decision to keep the no proc ruleset in place on all campaigns for another 6 months. This caused a lot of backlash because a lot of players felt ZOS moved the goalposts and didn't make it clear that such big decisions were at stake. Due to this backlash, the period was shortened to 3 months, ending with the Blackwood patch of June 2021. This is all important to realize, as now you can often read that no proc happened because of server performance issues, when in reality it was 100% a gameplay decision that arose from an unsuccessful performance test. The same thing happened to group sizes, which were halved from 24 to 12. Not because it boosted performance in any significant way, but, to paraphrase ZOS, they preferred the way people played/behaved with smaller groups.

In any case, proc sets returned to all campaigns during Blackwood, but ZOS still wanted to throw the no proc supporters a bone. So for the next patch, the Ravenwatch campaign, which up until then had been no-CP only, was to be turned into the no-proc campaign of choice indefinitely.

In August 2021, Ravenwatch became a no-proc campaign, and it had design issues from the get-go. The number of no-proc sets was increased for this campaign, but other than testing every set for yourself, there was no in-game way of telling which sets worked and which ones didn't. All the information you got was an easily missed and unspecific blurb of text in the campaign window. The devs did provide an official list of working sets on these forums, but first of all you would not have looked for this list if you weren't already "in the know", and second, the list was inaccurate and incomplete. Some sets that were on it didn't work, while other sets that weren't on it did work. And for the following years, new sets that obviously fit within the no proc ruleset (such as Order's Wrath) did not work and it required multiple threads on the forums and months of campaigning for them to be activated. Until the very end of no proc, zone chat would regularly have people asking why their sets didn't work or which sets worked. The onus was on the rapidly declining Ravenwatch community to help people gear up for this campaign. Every Ravenwatch guild I was in even had their own, in-house list of working sets as the official one was never accurate. People in those guilds would regularly run tests to see what worked. Sympathetic, but essentially doing the job of the developers.

The decline of Ravenwatch on PC/EU began pretty much immediately. Many big Ravenwatch guilds moved to Gray Host on patch day as they did not like the ruleset. These included Project Nova, one of EU's oldest and most competent ballgroups. But it also included casual guilds, such as Yoven's Knights on AD and The Daggerfall Authority on DC. This effectively transported dozens of activate players away from Ravenwatch overnight. Gray Host was now undisputedly the biggest campaign on the server and Ravenwatch didn't even come close.

For the following 1.5 years, there was still an active community in Ravenwatch, but not always for 'noble' reasons. Some guilds stayed there out of habit or some sense of loyalty, others because they didn't actually mind the different challenge provided by the no proc ruleset. These included a variety of guilds, ranging from casuals to ballgroups to smallscales. There were also those, however, who stayed on Ravenwatch out of necessity. With so many people on Gray Host now, performance there was worse than ever. People like to say 'literally unplayable' as an overstatement, but for GH, that was the actual reality during that time. However bad you think it gets now, it was 10x worse then.

Since Ravenwatch had fewer guilds and fewer players overall, it meant smaller concentrations of players across the map, and 3 pop-locked alliances for only 1-2 hours a day, a few days per week (usually MON, WED, FRI, SUN). Due to the declining popularity of Ravenwatch, the better performance on no-proc had become sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is also the source of revisionism, that a no-proc campaign was introduced because it boosted performance. Eventually, it simply turned out this way due to declining populations.

So there was a bit of an audience left for Ravenwatch, but this all changed in the spring of 2023, when EU finally got new servers. At least for the time being, server performance on Gray Host was fixed. This proved the final nail in the coffin for the Ravenwatch campaign, since it saw yet another of exodus of many of the remaining guilds, who wanted to experience the new performance in Gray Host. Only a few die-hard no-proc guilds remained, and alliances rarely pop-locked anymore.

No-proc then entered its final era. A dying campaign without any of the traditional organized guilds present proved an excellent playground for communities of players, centered around a few streamers, who could just dominate the entire map 24/7 without much serious resistance or competition. Those who remained in Ravenwatch and weren't part of these groups usually had a miserable time, as these were casual guilds who ended up getting farmed every single run by players with no concern for campaign health, balance or challenge.

In the final months, whenever I checked Ravenwatch, it would be 1 alliance on 3 bars and the remaining ones on 1. There was nothing going on there anymore, and it was during this period that the announcement came that Ravenwatch would return to just being no-CP, and no-proc was to be a thing of the past. After all, no-proc was by now just an extra concern for the devs over something that nobody seemed to want anymore

Sadly, being changed to its original no-CP state didn't allow Ravenwatch to recapture its former glory, and it in fact chased away the last few casual guilds who were playing there, as there now was 0 reason for them to stay in a dead campaign that offered the same ruleset as the others (apart from Champion Points, but that's just a case of slapping on an extra recovery glyph).

So, in the end, it was a combination of factors that necked Ravenwatch. A half-baked ruleset that was never implemented and communicated well and the subsequent years of neglect helped rob this campaign of its guild culture and balance, turning it into a toxic wasteland that's only enjoyed by people who want to be perma-emp of a campaign that nobody plays. Sure, you might also say the PVP population is smaller in general, but one does not have to exclude the other. Getting their home campaign altered beyond recognition and then forgotten about was reason enough for many to abandon PVP in the first place. In one of my old Ravenwatch guilds, I am literally the only person who was part of the core group that still plays the game at all.

The reason I took the time to type all of this out is for my fellow players to think carefully about what kind of feedback they will give regarding the Vengeance campaign, and whether the simple change of pace is enough to warrant drastic changes to the way PVP works in this game, even when that honeymoon phase is over. I also typed it out because I hope the devs read this and remember that the balance of things is pretty fickle in ESO's PVP, and it only takes a few wrong decisions for Gray Host to suffer the same fate as Ravenwatch.

Pretty much everyone who participated in the test (at that time) appreciated how differently PvP played with no proc conditions. People were tired of alot of things, and I've got to be honest in that I genuinely enjoyed the experience. It was nice to have the ESO PvP style but call it fair with no bombers or overly aggressive, unkillable PvP groups... of any kind. It was nice. The tests ended and like they said Ravenwatch became no-proc. So then after a few months people started leaving. Ok so let's pause here.

How do you know that those of us who enjoyed no proc PvP were the ones responsible for killing the population on the server? Let's think about this. It's true the server did empty. But my sources from then and today, have indicated the reason for it emptying was because the Guilds weren't happy. The Guilds that were there... they decided to leave. Once they left, then the population left.

You see, part of the problem on GH and BR is the Guilds, the ball groups, the bomber behavior, is all very comfortable for them. That's why things aren't changing. That's why they left. They don't want a fair game they want to dominate. That said, you're welcome to try and shout me down and argue all you like but a no proc game doesn't do the guilds or ball groups any favors so naturally they're not going to stay. Look at how badly they dominate now... everywhere else. That's why they're not there. When they discovered they could no longer exploit players on Raven they dumped that server like an abandoned mining town in western folklore. And no one questioned it then, they're not going to care now either.

It's a symptom of a bigger problem but no one cares or like a bullet in too deep, perhaps the problem can't be addressed -at this time- without paralyzing the game itself. Maybe that's the real lesson learned from all this.