April 20th Vengeance Only..

Lucasl402 · April 12

xylena wrote: »

moderatelyfatman wrote: »

I'm just curious though: would you prefer Vengeance or a cleaned up version of Gray Host where a lot of the problems you describe actually get addressed (not necessarily gone but much much less of an issue)?

I would prefer radical change to a "cleaned up" GH, but check back with me in 2 years after they've overhauled all 7 classes and (hopefully) adjusted the busted sets/stats. In my perfect world the game would still have the 2014 soft cap system to prevent broken minmaxing.

Cyrodiil is thriving with queues exceeding 150 during prime time even on weekdays. I know this doesn't fit your world view on this issue, but it's the facts. The PvP community is getting along just fine without those who left and refuse to come back and experiencing increased demand for normal live GH as it is now.

SneaK · April 12

aetherix8 wrote: »

SneaK wrote: »

aetherix8 wrote: »

SneaK wrote: »

Hi ZOS,

Stop doing this, the majority of your PvP base does not want this washed game mode. We don’t want to contribute anything to your “testing” because we are against it. Frankly, it’s a waste of time. With all the good that’s being done recently in the studio this is the remaining outlier of a team clinging to one last bad decision. It feels like we’re just being reminded to stay skeptical of the PvP dev team’s vacuum decision making philosophy.

*edit*
Can we test PvE Vengeance on April 20th too?

Basically, your best option is to participate as early as it goes live, and spam dmg aoes en masse.
If all PvPers and their grannies show up and help testing whether the cap of 6 will or will not melt down the servers, we might be done with that test in a couple of days.
Boycotts are pointless now, Vengeance will go live, so if you want to have GH back faster then help test this change.
Not to mention that this test is perhaps the most important - in a megazerg environment such as Vengeance we need bombing more than ever, and a cap of 3 on dmg aoe is ridiculous beyond belief.

Ah yes, that’s right…. Hancho always has a reason or incentive for us to play Vengeance, in this case it’s so we can get GH back faster lol. What a joke. No thanks, hope they limit your AoEs to one person and yall can enjoy those Megabanger battles you mentioned at 61fps.

You can show your bad faith all you want, but the point stands: whining about a one-week test is pathetic when there is a practical solution to shorten its duration.

“Practical Solution” to what *problem?

That’s right, the PROBLEM that they are forcing Vengeance on us yet again, and therein lies the reason for the original post.

xR3ACTORx · April 12

JohnG wrote: »

So who else will be taking a week off from ESO starting April 20th?

Taking a break from ESO since previous vengeance. Never looked back.

xylena · April 12

Lucasl402 wrote: »

I know this doesn't fit your world view on this issue, but it's the facts.

Worldview? What lol.

katanagirl1 · April 13

I like the idea of paring down the bloat for Cyrodiil PvP but the last Vengeance was more laggy than prime time Gray Host is right now! It’s going to be just like the harder overland in that a handful of players get excited for it and then a month later it will be empty. Also, it will be three times more empty than Gray Host because of the higher cap. There is just no way that many players are going to keep a template version of PvP lively and exciting.

I just don’t know why they won’t address the problems we have been stating over the last few years. Every set of gear now has stacks of whatever that stack and then proc, and we wear three full sets of them now and/or a mythic. This is way more computationally intensive than the old sets with constant max stam, max magicka, and penetration.

I hate to be the one to question other player’s performance issues in GH prime time but I am on an original PS5 and I really don’t have any problems except when a ball group rides up and then my skills just go onto slow motion or stop working altogether. I mean this console is getting on up in years now. I see lower frame rates and worse performance riding through Elden Root to the traders. Maybe it’s because DC on my server is mostly solos except for the ball groups so there isn’t much healing and shield stacking and it’s highly localized.

BardokRedSnow · April 13

tomofhyrule wrote: »

Poss wrote: »

Brace yourself for an influx of pvers about to give you their wisdom on why Vengeance is better

Is Greyhost disabled again? Please say it isn’t

It is disabled again, for that week only.

It has also been confirmed that permaVengeance will drop in U50 alongside Grey Host as the two options

an entire week AGAIN is egregious and Im very sick of it, especially when greyhost pvp has been so active and so much fun recently since the refresh. I will play other things until this is over yet again, need to finish resident evil anyway, but this is absolutely infuriating they keep doing this and havent learned from the last time that pvpers dont want this. It was a dead campaign, everyone went to greyhost as soon as it was available besides EP who reluctantly came back when no one else wanted to be zerged by them in ratios of 40 to 1

BardokRedSnow · April 13

xylena wrote: »

LPapirius wrote: »

It's not a viable alternative to the normal live GH the PvP community logs in to play.

Who exactly is logging in for lag, ball groups, proc sets, and one shots? Not me.

I'm hearing they are moving forward with GH and Vengeance as the only two campaigns. I think this is a sound move, we are long overdue to condense the queue.

Greyhost is so populated that by 5 lately its been locked out totally, two hours earlier than it normally has been and even on work days youll find yourself locked out.

This has been the case for a while now but especially after this update. Who is logging in, lol a lot of players, and I no longer can say I never see ten people online at once on my friends list, its near 30 during those hours or more every day

BardokRedSnow · April 13

aetherix8 wrote: »

SneaK wrote: »

Hi ZOS,

Stop doing this, the majority of your PvP base does not want this washed game mode. We don’t want to contribute anything to your “testing” because we are against it. Frankly, it’s a waste of time. With all the good that’s being done recently in the studio this is the remaining outlier of a team clinging to one last bad decision. It feels like we’re just being reminded to stay skeptical of the PvP dev team’s vacuum decision making philosophy.

*edit*
Can we test PvE Vengeance on April 20th too?

Basically, your best option is to participate as early as it goes live, and spam dmg aoes en masse.
If all PvPers and their grannies show up and help testing whether the cap of 6 will or will not melt down the servers, we might be done with that test in a couple of days.
Boycotts are pointless now, Vengeance will go live, so if you want to have GH back faster then help test this change.
Not to mention that this test is perhaps the most important - in a megazerg environment such as Vengeance we need bombing more than ever, and a cap of 3 on dmg aoe is ridiculous beyond belief.

Absolutely not. Zos is responsible for listening to the consumer not the other way around. Forcing content on us that we do not want is remnant of their old mentality and whoever is in charge making the decision needs to end this immediately and listen to their player base.

Or it will directly hurt their resurgence efforts. I am not caving in and playing something I have no interest in. They're not paying me, I'm paying them. And that will cease every time I am forced to use my time in the day to play something I do not want and clearly the PvP community doesn't want either.

And, not even the PvE community wants for that matter.

If a community doesn't like beer, you don't try and make beer for people who hate beer, you just make it how the people that do like it, want it. Its so basic its painful.

licenturion · April 13

If there is one thing all ESO players seem to love, it is rewards and filling up progress bars. Even if they don't love the activity.

Veterancy are exactly these two things combined. So when Vengeance officially launches it will be super popular at least until people have all the rewards they want. Battlegrounds will probably also see an uptake of players grinding it out.

It sympathise with those who prefer the legacy GH experience. They should just run those two together during tests IMO because they will both exist in the future as well. That makes it actually a real test.

L_Nici · April 13

licenturion wrote: »

If there is one thing all ESO players seem to love, it is rewards and filling up progress bars. Even if they don't love the activity.

Veterancy are exactly these two things combined. So when Vengeance officially launches it will be super popular at least until people have all the rewards they want. Battlegrounds will probably also see an uptake of players grinding it out.

It sympathise with those who prefer the legacy GH experience. They should just run those two together during tests IMO because they will both exist in the future as well. That makes it actually a real test.

They did run both the last test. I wonder why they don't this time? Surely not because Vengeance was dead the last time you had an option.

Taarente · April 13

Well the issue really is just the layers upon layers of complexity that have built up over the years in Cyrodiil and Imperial City. It shows in Cyrodiil because that's where it really manifests when you get a number of players. So the answer is to reduce complexity hence why you end up with vengeance. Of course it would have been possible to have had pvp only gear and skill which would have reduced that. Or to have done what they are doing now and start to have skills and sets perform differently depending on which zone you are in. I never understood people who want big battles then complain they lose agency. That's how wars work.

ioResult · April 13

BardokRedSnow wrote: »

If a community doesn't like beer, you don't try and make beer for people who hate beer, you just make it how the people that do like it, want it. Its so basic its painful.

There is a huge silent majority who don't participate in the forums because they either don't know they exist or don't know how to make an account and log in to participate.

In this silent majority are tons of players who queue for Zerg Host because that was literally the first campaign presented to them and they don't even understand the difference between GH, BR & RW. Don't believe me? Go ask tons of them. They queue for GH because that's the only camp they've ever been in.

Beyond that, certain AD guilds just went and ruined BR & RW by night capping everything and then mega-zerg Agony bombing everyone from both other factions, running the map, gating both other factions, and then sweating down anyone who tries to take anything at all on the map, even just a resource.

Two people in big guilds in particular did this on AD in Ravenwatch and ruined that camp for everyone. Then they and their Agony bomb zerg moved to Blackreach and did the same in that camp. Go look at both camps, they're nearly totally yellow all the time and people go in there, see the map all yellow and then just leave. You have a pack of 4-5 DKs doing it right now, sweating down anyone who tries to take anything in Blackreach and Ravenwatch. It's no fun.

What's funny is none of those people will show up in Vengeance because without the meta to hang onto desperately, they get clapped over & over in Vengeance. Same with ball groups. None of them go into Vengeance either because their silly playstyle doesn't work when everyone literally has the same health, the same armor, the same stats and the same type of abilities.

Everyone who cries about Vengeance is nothing but the vocal minority who gets clapped there over & over.

If you don't like Vengeance then don't go into it. Simple. But right now Vengeance is a better queue-waiting alternative to getting sweated down in Blackreach and Ravenwatch by those hugging the DK meta like its their fantasy anime girlfriend.

Maitsukas · April 13

U50 adds 24 new skills for Vengeance (1 Ultimate & 5 Active skills for each of the 4 loadouts), here's a full list for those that may be curious.

QB1 · April 14

Just please don’t disable gray host. Vengeance was boring after the first big battle

tomofhyrule · April 14

L_Nici wrote: »

licenturion wrote: »

If there is one thing all ESO players seem to love, it is rewards and filling up progress bars. Even if they don't love the activity.

Veterancy are exactly these two things combined. So when Vengeance officially launches it will be super popular at least until people have all the rewards they want. Battlegrounds will probably also see an uptake of players grinding it out.

It sympathise with those who prefer the legacy GH experience. They should just run those two together during tests IMO because they will both exist in the future as well. That makes it actually a real test.

They did run both the last test. I wonder why they don't this time? Surely not because Vengeance was dead the last time you had an option.

They straight up said the main goal is to get Vengeance to pop cap because the test this time is that they increased target limits on AoEs and really need Cyrodiil to be maxed.

I am a little nervous about what happens when U50 drops though. They're going to give us Vengeance and Grey Host as the two options, and they have their own pop caps (900 and 360, or 300/120 per alliance). They did say that they'd see if another campaign was needed, but they implied that was if we had something like both Campaigns at cap and a long queue... but I think it'll be a bit more likely that GH could have a long queue while Vengeance is still at two bars. Would they consider another standard campaign if there is demand for more standard campaigns? Especially with this mysterious 'mid-size' Cyro-esque zone they've mentioned will come this year?

Also, GH is faction-locked. That means that for players who have more than one alliance, they will need to choose which alliance they're playing on for that month, and their only Cyrodiil option for other alliances would then be Vengeance. Is "you are not able to play with your friends in Cyrodiil" really a good idea?

MorallyBipolar · April 14

tomofhyrule wrote: »

L_Nici wrote: »

licenturion wrote: »

If there is one thing all ESO players seem to love, it is rewards and filling up progress bars. Even if they don't love the activity.

Veterancy are exactly these two things combined. So when Vengeance officially launches it will be super popular at least until people have all the rewards they want. Battlegrounds will probably also see an uptake of players grinding it out.

It sympathise with those who prefer the legacy GH experience. They should just run those two together during tests IMO because they will both exist in the future as well. That makes it actually a real test.

They did run both the last test. I wonder why they don't this time? Surely not because Vengeance was dead the last time you had an option.

They straight up said the main goal is to get Vengeance to pop cap because the test this time is that they increased target limits on AoEs and really need Cyrodiil to be maxed.

I am a little nervous about what happens when U50 drops though. They're going to give us Vengeance and Grey Host as the two options, and they have their own pop caps (900 and 360, or 300/120 per alliance). They did say that they'd see if another campaign was needed, but they implied that was if we had something like both Campaigns at cap and a long queue... but I think it'll be a bit more likely that GH could have a long queue while Vengeance is still at two bars. Would they consider another standard campaign if there is demand for more standard campaigns? Especially with this mysterious 'mid-size' Cyro-esque zone they've mentioned will come this year?

Also, GH is faction-locked. That means that for players who have more than one alliance, they will need to choose which alliance they're playing on for that month, and their only Cyrodiil option for other alliances would then be Vengeance. Is "you are not able to play with your friends in Cyrodiil" really a good idea?

And what is ZOS offering us in return for doing their "testing" for them?

Ya, their offer is to potentially permanently remove normal live Cyrodiil PvP from the game.

I've never heard of a company offering a worse benefit for helping them out.

So nobody should participate in vengeance, ever, for any reason. Ever. Vengeance is an exercise in self destruction for both players and company.

MorallyBipolar · April 14

Maitsukas wrote: »

U50 adds 24 new skills for Vengeance (1 Ultimate & 5 Active skills for each of the 4 loadouts), here's a full list for those that may be curious.

Vengeance takes away the ability to create our own builds. Vengeance is an extreme and radical reduction in options for Cyrodiil. So it's deceptive to talk like it's an increase in options.

MorallyBipolar · April 14

xylena wrote: »

LPapirius wrote: »

Queue last night was 130.

You are a very small minority of PvP players that like vengeance

You haven't logged into Cyrodiil on live for more than a year.

Whoa 3 digits worth of players, up there with Fortnite and CoD /s

Is the pop cap even 3 digits? Of course Vengeance enjoyers would be a minority of active PvPers, because the target audience for Vengeance is the thousands who quit or who were never able to access PvP to begin with. They're leaving GH up for the 130 that still want it.

I don't log in because forum complaints mean little if you keep playing anyway. When play numbers keep dropping, the devs take notice, like they have in making drastic PvP changes.

There are 3 digits of players in queue during prime time most nights and always on the weekends now days.

SneaK · April 14

Maitsukas wrote: »

U50 adds 24 new skills for Vengeance (1 Ultimate & 5 Active skills for each of the 4 loadouts), here's a full list for those that may be curious.

Biggest missed opportunity for a Rick roll in the last decade

xylena · April 14

MorallyBipolar wrote: »

Vengeance takes away the ability to create our own builds.

MorallyBipolar wrote: »

There are 3 digits of players in queue

GH is a one build meta, with a billion options to handicap yourself by using worse gear.

Vengeance builds are the skills on your bar and the buttons you press. No gear to carry you.

3 digits of players during NA prime time in a billion dollar game is pathetic.

BardokRedSnow · April 14

ioResult wrote: »

BardokRedSnow wrote: »

If a community doesn't like beer, you don't try and make beer for people who hate beer, you just make it how the people that do like it, want it. Its so basic its painful.

There is a huge silent majority who....

Your silent majority also filled greyhost the minute it was available alongside vengeance and made vengeance a ghost town. I don't think more needs to be said on the matter than that.

DocFrost72 · April 14

I'm looking forward to Vengeance. I don't mind the idea of having another campaign open while it runs the test though. Maybe it's to isolate the results of the changes they made? Do cyrodiil campaigns affect one another? Or maybe they really wanna stress test it with maxed pop?

xylena · April 14

BardokRedSnow wrote: »

Your silent majority also filled greyhost the minute it was available

Not hard to fill when the pop cap is 2 digits.

1 bar faction on Vengeance = an entire pop locked faction on GH.

The "silent majority" being mentioned is neither on the forums nor on GH. They were the players once upon a time packing 600+ onto each of multiple different servers during NA prime.

Major_Mangle · April 14

ioResult wrote: »

BardokRedSnow wrote: »

If a community doesn't like beer, you don't try and make beer for people who hate beer, you just make it how the people that do like it, want it. Its so basic its painful.

There is a huge silent majority who don't participate in the forums because they either don't know they exist or don't know how to make an account and log in to participate.

In this silent majority are tons of players who queue for Zerg Host because that was literally the first campaign presented to them and they don't even understand the difference between GH, BR & RW. Don't believe me? Go ask tons of them. They queue for GH because that's the only camp they've ever been in.

Beyond that, certain AD guilds just went and ruined BR & RW by night capping everything and then mega-zerg Agony bombing everyone from both other factions, running the map, gating both other factions, and then sweating down anyone who tries to take anything at all on the map, even just a resource.

Two people in big guilds in particular did this on AD in Ravenwatch and ruined that camp for everyone. Then they and their Agony bomb zerg moved to Blackreach and did the same in that camp. Go look at both camps, they're nearly totally yellow all the time and people go in there, see the map all yellow and then just leave. You have a pack of 4-5 DKs doing it right now, sweating down anyone who tries to take anything in Blackreach and Ravenwatch. It's no fun.

What's funny is none of those people will show up in Vengeance because without the meta to hang onto desperately, they get clapped over & over in Vengeance. Same with ball groups. None of them go into Vengeance either because their silly playstyle doesn't work when everyone literally has the same health, the same armor, the same stats and the same type of abilities.

Everyone who cries about Vengeance is nothing but the vocal minority who gets clapped there over & over.

If you don't like Vengeance then don't go into it. Simple. But right now Vengeance is a better queue-waiting alternative to getting sweated down in Blackreach and Ravenwatch by those hugging the DK meta like its their fantasy anime girlfriend.

Remove offensive AoE caps and I can guarantee you that the ballgroups you claim gets clapped will wreck havoc in Vengeance. Same goes for any organized small-/medium scale comp group as well. It's the single most impactful reason you don't see ballgroups in Vengeance. Vengeance is more a numbers game than any PvP setting out there and the mode has no reliable tool to counter stacking in large numbers. AoE abilities which are supposed to counter it becomes unreliable (or next to useless) when it's a lottery on who it will go to when fighting a stack larger than 3 people.

As much as I dislike the concept of ballgroups, it's a massive cope to claim they fail in Vengeance because of their "skillevel" or competence with the game.

BXR_Lonestar · April 14

CatalinaWineMixer2 wrote: »

The current state of PvP is due to constant nerfs, ruining sets, ruining/nerfing our characters, Subclassing and placing what's left of what was once a fun and vibrant PvP comunity above the rest of the entire Eso population. We all talk about how it used to be. Most of the people who do have quit PvP. Some of the new players look at us like we are telling a fairytale when we speak of it. Its been going on for ten years. We need change. Vengeance is a part of this and there are many looking forward to it.

The very first iteration of Vengeance on Xbox NA was a TON of fun, but every Vengeance after that has been terrible. Why? People figured out Nightblade was meta and you couldn't go anywhere without getting ambushed by 7-8 + nightblades that you can't kill because they have the best speed, best burst damage, and best burst heal of all the classes in vengeance.

Then there is low participation numbers. Vengeance server couldn't even get a bar of each faction online, so no massive battles with 200+ participants. That's what made vengeance fun - the HUGE battles. Its what made it feel like giving up a ton of other fun stuff was worthwhile. But without big battles, you get a boring and frustrating PVP experience where you are going to struggle to kill your opponents - unless you're a nightblade of course.

And people also wised up to the tactics that we had to use to make vengeance fun and worthwhile. We used to lure people into Resource Tower battles to farm them with a combination of stuns and oils. Or lure people into fighting in battles were you could impact the battle using seige. But people have wised up to those tactics and have figured out how to avoid them, and without the ability to have coordinated pulls to kill groups of players, there isn't really any counterplay beyond that. So the game mode is also extremely limited, and overall, not as fun as the first Vengeance experience.

Overall, I don't think Vengeance replacing Blackreach is the change we need. I think you are going to see Greyhost Que's in the 100+ every night and Vengeance will be relatively empty, and they are going to be forced to bring back another non-Vengeance campaign. My hope is that they just bring back another Alliance-locked campaign, because Greyhost's popularity makes it obvious that players WANT to play in an alliance-locked campaign. So just make all campaigns alliance-locked.

I know if we can't get into Greyhost, my PVP group is planning to play more Imp City, maybe do a Battlegrounds night. Either way, Cyrodil won't be our focus unless we can get into Greyhost.

BXR_Lonestar · April 14

katanagirl1 wrote: »

I like the idea of paring down the bloat for Cyrodiil PvP but the last Vengeance was more laggy than prime time Gray Host is right now! It’s going to be just like the harder overland in that a handful of players get excited for it and then a month later it will be empty. Also, it will be three times more empty than Gray Host because of the higher cap. There is just no way that many players are going to keep a template version of PvP lively and exciting.

I just don’t know why they won’t address the problems we have been stating over the last few years. Every set of gear now has stacks of whatever that stack and then proc, and we wear three full sets of them now and/or a mythic. This is way more computationally intensive than the old sets with constant max stam, max magicka, and penetration.

I hate to be the one to question other player’s performance issues in GH prime time but I am on an original PS5 and I really don’t have any problems except when a ball group rides up and then my skills just go onto slow motion or stop working altogether. I mean this console is getting on up in years now. I see lower frame rates and worse performance riding through Elden Root to the traders. Maybe it’s because DC on my server is mostly solos except for the ball groups so there isn’t much healing and shield stacking and it’s highly localized.

Eliminating Cyro campaigns for vengeance. Making overland content harder. Making pure-class builds OP because they refuse to admit that Subclassing in its current state was a huge mistake. These Dev's simply want to keep giving us stuff without addressing the elephants in the room.

IMO, the performance issues stem from too many simultaneous inputs that the server has to calculate in a short instance (i.e., when a large ballgroup goes to pull and you have 12-18 players converging for the burst damage window). Like it or not, I think animation cancelling plays a roll in bogging down the server too. You have all the constant ability timers and buffs/debuffs being reset, and then you get the pull/fear/cc all going off at once with the damage - you can't tell me that this doesn't contribute to server lag, frame freeze, and other issues we experience. And yet, there isn't any effort to try to slow combat down so that it doesn't bog down the server (or any upgrades to server so that existing combat mechanics don't cause the server to bog down).

While I feel like the devs are doing some good things by impementing QoL changes we've all been requesting, in many ways, I think they're also doing things that a smart Dev team wouldn't do. You can't SOLVE a problem by fixing everything AROUND the problem to make it seem less bad.

These are the reasons I'm playing a lot less ESO these days and am focusing my time on single-player games.

MincMincMinc · April 14

Still think vengeance could have been better if they simply just brought basic gear back and consumables. More performative streamlined skills and gear could have gotten us back to the oldschool pvp before we had 3-4 proc sets on builds where skills do 5 different paragraphs of effects.

It would have been a good datapoint to see what happens when all the normal game build systems are brought back with those performative skills.

Using the split pvp and pve design could have made the inventory easier too so more pve players wouldnt have that hurdle of gear management to even try pvp.

BardokRedSnow · April 14

xylena wrote: »

BardokRedSnow wrote: »

Your silent majority also filled greyhost the minute it was available

Not hard to fill when the pop cap is 2 digits.

1 bar faction on Vengeance = an entire pop locked faction on GH.

The "silent majority" being mentioned is neither on the forums nor on GH. They were the players once upon a time packing 600+ onto each of multiple different servers during NA prime.

The pop cap total is what matters, 120 per faction, since we're locked out and it also doesnt show the queue of people waiting over an hour to get in despite vengeance being open.

If you did go in there, the entire map was red and no one else is playing, which is why ep came back to greyhost and vengeance dropped even further. I even have pictures of people's comments about this stating they came back because all the "cool kids" are in greyhost etc.

Yall are in denial man, Vengeance hasnt popped off the way it did from the start ever since, its gonna be the new campaign collective for blackreach and ravenwatch people and thats all its gonna be. Which, Im fine with tbh, everyone will get what they want. Competitive pvp in GH, and siege/zerg simulation in Vengeance.

Everyone wins.

Except on april 20th where we're forced to go play another game again because of these tests.

ceruulean · April 14

Greyhost is popular because of the Network Effect. Because it's popular, people would rather wait 1+ hr in queue than go into Blackreach for quicker drop in. People pick the campaign their friends are playing in. ZOS could easily make Vengeance the dominant mode by offering more social opportunities, titles, alliance-lock and balancing, announcing intent to actively develop Vengeance, and incentives that are only achieved through Vengeance, and just ignore Greyhost and let people run however they want, letting it go the wayside. Once enough people convert to Vengeance, people will follow along like the social creatures they are.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect

BardokRedSnow · April 14

ceruulean wrote: »

Greyhost is popular because of the Network Effect. Because it's popular, people would rather wait 1+ hr in queue than go into Blackreach for quicker drop in. People pick the campaign their friends are playing in. ZOS could easily make Vengeance the dominant mode by offering more social opportunities, titles, alliance-lock and balancing, announcing intent to actively develop Vengeance, and incentives that are only achieved through Vengeance, and just ignore Greyhost and let people run however they want, letting it go the wayside. Once enough people convert to Vengeance, people will follow along like the social creatures they are.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect

They offered double ap for vengeance only alongside greyhost and people still flocked to greyhost... No amount of meaningless titles or the like would get people to move over, and offering rewards like cosmetics and developing the campaign people right now dont wanna play would only ostracize and push more returning players out yet again.

Trying to force customers to like something vs improving upon what they already like is the worst business strategy possible.

What forum goers don't understand overall, because these players don't typically go to the forums, is that most pvpers come from other games like WoW where the actual gameplay and combat is more important to them than anything else. The game mode that gives them the most build diversity and complexity will always win out over what is simple and available to everyone to access out the jump.

Thats why pro vengeance posts here are so loved despite that sentiment not being matched in game. PvErs populate these threads, and if social dynamic was all that was needed to bring pvpers over, they would have been playing vengeance when it was the only game mode available. Instead, many of us sat it out before and will again come april 20th.

And a bigger point on that is, if the social aspect was the most important thing, more pvpers would be doing PVE, as PvE is a far bigger social pool than PVP ever could be.