Rohamad_Ali wrote: »

A long time ago when a faction locked campaign was suggested by players a lot of people said no one would like it. Overwhelmingly on these forums. It has turned out to be the most popular campaign of all. They should open a second faction locked campaign since this is the most popular play style whether anyone on the forums ever agrees or not.

TheAwesomeChimpanzee wrote: »

I have been PvPing in ESO for a long time, and I have seen many different versions of Cyrodiil over the years. Right now, though, the biggest issue for me, and I assume for many others as well, is the Gray Host queue situation on PCNA.

I have always played Ebonheart Pact, but I want to be honest from the start: while I know many players care deeply about campaign score, map play, and winning the campaign, that has never been the main draw for me personally. I say that respectfully, because I know that side of Cyrodiil matters a lot to a large part of the playerbase. For me, the reason I still log into this 12-year-old game is its combat. That is what keeps me here.

For the last two to three campaigns, Gray Host queues on EP during primetime have become absurd. On weekdays, if you want to start playing around 9:00 PM EST, you often need to queue around an hour and a half earlier. By 7:30 PM EST, the queue can already be sitting at 80 to 100 players. On Fridays and Saturdays, it gets even worse, with waits of two to two and a half hours not being unusual.

At the same time, friends of mine who play DC often tell me their queues are either nonexistent or much smaller during those same hours. I cannot speak for AD, so if any AD players want to share their experience, I think that would be useful.

A lot of people will say, “Just play Blackreach,” but I think that is part of the problem. After a rough 2025 for PvP, a lot of players stepped away (many, including myself attribute it to vengeance "testing"), Blackreach largely died off, and Gray Host became the only campaign that still felt worth playing for many people. Now that more players seem to be returning in 2026, especially with the current patch and recent change of direction from the Dev team, they are all coming back to Gray Host while Blackreach remains mostly empty. The result is that EP players during primetime are stuck with two choices: sit through a miserable queue, or do not get to play Cyrodiil at all during the most active hours.

Raising pop caps is one possible solution, but I understand why that may not be realistic if it would make performance even worse.

Because of that, I want to suggest another option: temporarily lifting alliance lock under certain population or queue conditions. I understand why alliance lock exists, even if I'm personally not a fan of it, but especially for players who care about faction identity, map strategy, and campaign integrity, this feature is important. Those concerns are completely fair. But if one alliance has dramatically higher population or queue numbers than the others, I think the game should temporarily allow players to queue for a different alliance. This could be based on live population, queue size, or both.

That would help even out faction populations, reduce extreme queue times, and make it easier for players who mainly want to PvP to actually get into the campaign. At the same time, if it were only triggered during major population imbalances, it would still respect the concerns of players who care about the map and the campaign itself. At the end of the day, the current Gray Host queue situation on PCNA does not feel sustainable. If Blackreach is no longer a real alternative, and if it is eventually removed for Vengeance, which, let’s be honest, will likely be dead on arrival, then this problem will only get worse. That is why I think it makes sense to at least consider a system like this.