FurryCandyHearts wrote: »

the point again, is to not be popular

popular or not you will always have a few players that can't compete in the other campaigns that will hang out hoping to get some cheap kills to stroke their damaged ego. They will take all their frustrations of dying over and over in the other campaigns out on the new players in the unpopular zone.
These are the types that will hide near a fishing node hoping for an easy kill so of course they would lurk in the unpopular zone for cheap kills.

YandereGirlfriend wrote: »

Stamicka wrote: »

Maybe not crafted and overland set only, but definitely pure stat based sets only. Pure stat based sets are the best way to keep build diversity and player choice while maintaining balance. I could make a much more detailed write up about how this idea can be expanded on, but I will make a separate post for that.

So everyone will try to say that Ravenwatch was unpopular and it died once No Proc was implemented, but that’s missing a lot of context.

A lot of people seem to forget that CP 2.0 and the first tests for No Proc happened around the same time. ZOS ended up putting more power into our characters themselves rather than the new CP system. Health pools changed, raw stats changed, and there was a significant shift in time to kill.

There was actually a period of time before ZOS added more defensive CP to CP 2.0 where the time to kill felt lower in CP than in no CP. So Ravenwatch being a No CP campaign faced a lot of change. The difference between CP and no CP in the CP 1.0 system was not at all the same as the difference between CP and no CP in CP 2.0.

On top of that Cyrodiil populations have been in decline for a long time anyway. Ravenwatch is still dead and on most servers Blackreach is too. No Proc isn’t even a factor anymore, there’s just not enough people for multiple campaigns.

It’s time to stop blaming no proc for the death of Ravenwatch though.

No-Proc absolutely killed PC-NA Ravenwatch. Saying otherwise is revisionist history.

The ruleset completely gutted the offensive power of individual players and small groups and simultaneously hyper-empowered zerging and faction-stacking.

Without decent damage sets and anti-zerg tools like Vicious Death, it devolved into a pure numbers game (very reminiscent of Vengeance, cough cough). A certain AD guild then played an immensely destructive role in driving away the remaining population by round-the-clock gate-camping and like 60v1'ing anything that moved. Players got fed-up and voted with their feet to play elsewhere, leaving said AD guild the king of an empty campaign, like some figure from Dark Souls lore.

TLDR: No-Proc removed all tools necessary to combat population imbalance and then rapacious faction-stacking killed the campaign.

I strongly disagree with the part that implies that individual players and small groups lost all of their offensive power and zergs got hyper-empowered. On RW PC EU, the last months of no-proc campaign were dominated by a handful of players, who were either playing solo or grouped. They were like six people, definitely less than ten.

Yes, faction stacking was very much a thing, but zergs lost some power too. I participated in some fights where the emp group was present, and they would sometimes win by simply wearing down the zerg by being quite hard to kill but efficient at farming zerglings, mostly because they probly have (tens of?) thousands of hours of pvp only. Zerglings would just give up after a while and stop respawning in the outpost/keep they were defending.

I watched some solo/duo players who were very strong, and able to kill several zerglings time and time again while outnumbered (watching with admiration an enemy DK shrug off my faction zerglings till he or she got bored and let themselves be killed).

Individual players / small groups were still powerful in the no-proc setup. They could be so strong in fact, that they managed to drive away some players from the winning faction by controlling the entire map day and night, 7/7, for several months. We could say "A certain DC group of friends then played an immensely destructive role in driving away the remaining population by round-the-clock gate-camping and like 1to5v1'ing anything that moved."

Disastrous implementation is what killed no-proc imho.

YandereGirlfriend wrote: »

aetherix8 wrote: »

YandereGirlfriend wrote: »

Stamicka wrote: »

Maybe not crafted and overland set only, but definitely pure stat based sets only. Pure stat based sets are the best way to keep build diversity and player choice while maintaining balance. I could make a much more detailed write up about how this idea can be expanded on, but I will make a separate post for that.

So everyone will try to say that Ravenwatch was unpopular and it died once No Proc was implemented, but that’s missing a lot of context.

A lot of people seem to forget that CP 2.0 and the first tests for No Proc happened around the same time. ZOS ended up putting more power into our characters themselves rather than the new CP system. Health pools changed, raw stats changed, and there was a significant shift in time to kill.

There was actually a period of time before ZOS added more defensive CP to CP 2.0 where the time to kill felt lower in CP than in no CP. So Ravenwatch being a No CP campaign faced a lot of change. The difference between CP and no CP in the CP 1.0 system was not at all the same as the difference between CP and no CP in CP 2.0.

On top of that Cyrodiil populations have been in decline for a long time anyway. Ravenwatch is still dead and on most servers Blackreach is too. No Proc isn’t even a factor anymore, there’s just not enough people for multiple campaigns.

It’s time to stop blaming no proc for the death of Ravenwatch though.

No-Proc absolutely killed PC-NA Ravenwatch. Saying otherwise is revisionist history.

The ruleset completely gutted the offensive power of individual players and small groups and simultaneously hyper-empowered zerging and faction-stacking.

Without decent damage sets and anti-zerg tools like Vicious Death, it devolved into a pure numbers game (very reminiscent of Vengeance, cough cough). A certain AD guild then played an immensely destructive role in driving away the remaining population by round-the-clock gate-camping and like 60v1'ing anything that moved. Players got fed-up and voted with their feet to play elsewhere, leaving said AD guild the king of an empty campaign, like some figure from Dark Souls lore.

TLDR: No-Proc removed all tools necessary to combat population imbalance and then rapacious faction-stacking killed the campaign.

I strongly disagree with the part that implies that individual players and small groups lost all of their offensive power and zergs got hyper-empowered. On RW PC EU, the last months of no-proc campaign were dominated by a handful of players, who were either playing solo or grouped. They were like six people, definitely less than ten.

Yes, faction stacking was very much a thing, but zergs lost some power too. I participated in some fights where the emp group was present, and they would sometimes win by simply wearing down the zerg by being quite hard to kill but efficient at farming zerglings, mostly because they probly have (tens of?) thousands of hours of pvp only. Zerglings would just give up after a while and stop respawning in the outpost/keep they were defending.

I watched some solo/duo players who were very strong, and able to kill several zerglings time and time again while outnumbered (watching with admiration an enemy DK shrug off my faction zerglings till he or she got bored and let themselves be killed).

Individual players / small groups were still powerful in the no-proc setup. They could be so strong in fact, that they managed to drive away some players from the winning faction by controlling the entire map day and night, 7/7, for several months. We could say "A certain DC group of friends then played an immensely destructive role in driving away the remaining population by round-the-clock gate-camping and like 1to5v1'ing anything that moved."

Disastrous implementation is what killed no-proc imho.

Well, agree to disagree.

Though it does sound as though PC-NA had a singularly rapacious faction-stacking guild the like of which was not present on EU.

Unlike EU, they had 24/7 gate-camping for an entire calendar year and would call in the swarm to literally 60v1 you if you tried to re-take a home keep resource. They were all tanked-up in like Pariah (which somehow was not classified as a proc set despite very obviously being a proc set) and Swift and you simply could not kill them quickly enough to outpace their rezzing.

Apart from that, they would just squat in keeps and 60-man siege you if you even attempted to re-take a home keep.

Eventually, the other factions were like, "You know what... I don't need this in my life..." and left.

To be clear, that guild existed and faction-stacked before No-Proc but was kept in check by skilled solo bombers, 1vXers, and ballgroups. But after tilting the rules so far in favor of defense, their numbers became insurmountable.

More fundamentally, nobody who actually mained Ravenwatch asked for or wanted No-Proc. It was simply served up as sacrifice to please a small number of loud voices of primarily Grey Host players who claimed to want it.

It seems to me that there is no guild with such capacities on PC-EU.

Every faction was guilty of stacking on PC EU RW, especially to dethrone, take or retake scrolls. But that was mostly done by coordinating different guilds’ groups or calling for a stack in zone (ALL TO..!!!), and mostly during prime time. Red are by far the most efficient at it especially to dethrone, yellow also stacked big time, especially for scrolls, and blue have this fetish to stack at chalman and arrius.

If I remember correctly, nobody asked for RW to be no-proc, players wanted a separate campaign for that, but I guess it made more sense for ZOS to add another ‘no’ to RW.

Still, it’s maybe missing the point to blame the ruleset for everything that went wrong. Both on EU and NA, players’ toxic attitudes had a big impact too.

Gabriel_H wrote: »

YandereGirlfriend wrote: »

Without decent damage sets and anti-zerg tools like Vicious Death, it devolved into a pure numbers game

So ... PvP then, not PvGear?! Just a thought.

YandereGirlfriend wrote: »

TLDR: No-Proc removed all tools necessary to combat population imbalance and then rapacious faction-stacking killed the campaign.

All tools? Maybe all currently available tools but there are many avenues ZOS can explore to correct this. Population caps based on lowest number in an Alliance, Offensive/Defensive buffs to counter the power imbalance, altered scaling depending on players in each faction in combat range of a capturable node (just off the top of my head).

Many things have contributed to the decline of Cyrodiil, and one of those things is that ZOS' current mindset to solving the problems is more gear. The very thing you are lauding is what killed it for a lot of players.

New thinking is needed, not doubling down on a failed strategy.

Last I checked, building your character was a core component of the game's PvP. We aren't out here playing Counterstrike or Guilty Gear.

You definitely do identify, though, that there exists a cohort that believes that numbers should decide fights and that zerging and faction-stacking are the highest forms of PvP. It is my observation that those are generally the voices banging the drum the loudest for Vengeance. Which is understandable as that is a far more casual way to play. And that would be fine to exist as a separate campaign from Grey Host for those that prefer it.

I can also agree with you that wise steps would be to eliminate the "rich get richer, poor get poorer" dynamics that are at work in Cyrodiil, where the more that you win the easier that each subsequent win becomes due to constantly accruing bonuses. That should be inverted. In that sense, what they are trying to do in BGs with the underdog bonus is a step in the right direction. That should be applied at a grand scale in Cyro so that an underpopulated faction facing a pop-locked faction isn't automatically condemned to being gate-camped.

YandereGirlfriend wrote: »

Stamicka wrote: »

Maybe not crafted and overland set only, but definitely pure stat based sets only. Pure stat based sets are the best way to keep build diversity and player choice while maintaining balance. I could make a much more detailed write up about how this idea can be expanded on, but I will make a separate post for that.

So everyone will try to say that Ravenwatch was unpopular and it died once No Proc was implemented, but that’s missing a lot of context.

A lot of people seem to forget that CP 2.0 and the first tests for No Proc happened around the same time. ZOS ended up putting more power into our characters themselves rather than the new CP system. Health pools changed, raw stats changed, and there was a significant shift in time to kill.

There was actually a period of time before ZOS added more defensive CP to CP 2.0 where the time to kill felt lower in CP than in no CP. So Ravenwatch being a No CP campaign faced a lot of change. The difference between CP and no CP in the CP 1.0 system was not at all the same as the difference between CP and no CP in CP 2.0.

On top of that Cyrodiil populations have been in decline for a long time anyway. Ravenwatch is still dead and on most servers Blackreach is too. No Proc isn’t even a factor anymore, there’s just not enough people for multiple campaigns.

It’s time to stop blaming no proc for the death of Ravenwatch though.

No-Proc absolutely killed PC-NA Ravenwatch. Saying otherwise is revisionist history.

The ruleset completely gutted the offensive power of individual players and small groups and simultaneously hyper-empowered zerging and faction-stacking.

Without decent damage sets and anti-zerg tools like Vicious Death, it devolved into a pure numbers game (very reminiscent of Vengeance, cough cough). A certain AD guild then played an immensely destructive role in driving away the remaining population by round-the-clock gate-camping and like 60v1'ing anything that moved. Players got fed-up and voted with their feet to play elsewhere, leaving said AD guild the king of an empty campaign, like some figure from Dark Souls lore.

TLDR: No-Proc removed all tools necessary to combat population imbalance and then rapacious faction-stacking killed the campaign.

The problem AD had was that u50 folded and you had 3 u50 guilds move up and join ravenwatch at that same time. Like with the PCNA Aussie guild that only plays at night unopposed. This is the age old problem of catering to guild group combat instead of solo players. If you try to mold the game away from solo players to prevent 1vX what you are really doing is making it impossible for casual solo players to play the game.......Then 1vX players figure it out anyways. So u50 dissolved into only guilds >>> Then ravenwatch dissolved into only guilds >>>>> Now we have GH dissolving into mainly only guilds. We hardly get to see those old days where you had hundreds of solo pugs fighting on the allessia bridge

Also IMO even in noproc you could still 1vX fine if you were mechanically good at the game much like in vengeance you can despite people not knowing any better and thinking its a numbers game. Even in vengeance I could pull groups of 8 into terrain and towers all day. Can more casual players do the same, probably not, for them it will seem more like a 1:1 numbers game without random effects aligning the stars for them giving a false sense of superiority.

EDIT: just to add that zos could have executed a noproc learning campaign 10x better if they did any sort of work to introduce players into it. For instance having the gear vendor at the transitus shrine or an introduction quest and so on.

YandereGirlfriend wrote: »

Last I checked, building your character was a core component of the game's PvP. We aren't out here playing Counterstrike or Guilty Gear.

"New thinking is needed, not doubling down on a failed strategy."

You could still build your character but without the continued addition of meme sets that then more meme sets are put in to counter. It is an endless spiral downwards.

As a side: You need to build your character for PvE too, but at a certain point you either have the skill to compete or you don't - against players that would be called PvP.

YandereGirlfriend wrote: »

You definitely do identify, though, that there exists a cohort that believes that numbers should decide fights and that zerging and faction-stacking are the highest forms of PvP. It is my observation that those are generally the voices banging the drum the loudest for Vengeance. Which is understandable as that is a far more casual way to play. And that would be fine to exist as a separate campaign from Grey Host for those that prefer it.

Numbers AND player skill should be what decide fights. Cyro not being casual is what is killing it. It will keep dwindling until all that is left is organised guild runs, min/maxed, on comms, split over multiple groups. You'll have players from half a dozen guilds and barely any players.

The nature of Cyrodiil is one that MUST cater to the casual because of the design of the zone - 95% of the land mass is PvE. The zone either needs PvE removing, or the hardcore "l33ts" are going to have to bend and rely on their ability more than sets.

I voted "No" in this poll because I do not believe removing sets in their entirety is the answer - again it's a PvE zone with some spattering of PvP - but the constant spiral of set/counter-set is not working. ZOS need to look at other methods such as I named above. What players are going to have to accept is some modification to existing sets, because as I said, those sets are contributing to the decline.

There has to be a balance between sets, population, zone buffs, PvE requirements, and player ability. At the moment all the focus is on the former to the point it can take 20 players and 6 siege engines to kill one person who is just stood there. That's not balance, and it is not sustainable.