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Faction (im)balance in Cyrodiil
d_20
Member RarePosts: 1,878
I think pre-1.6 NA balance is borked. That's just my opinion, I admit.
Thornblade (NA) is supposed to be the most competitive campaign but EP seems to win regularly now and by a wide margin. Fewer and fewer DC and AD players are coming out. EP must be getting bored as well. As an AD, I don't have much motivation to go into Cyrodiil these days.
Before ESO, a lot of people said Warhammer failed because it had only two factions. Three factions were supposed to ensure a kind of balance because the two underdog factions would join against the dominant one -- hearkening back to the good old (rose tinted?) glory days of DAoC. But it doesn't seem to be working out in ESO right now.
How did three factions work in DAoC? Was it balanced? Is there anything ESO can do differently (like DAoC or otherwise) to make 3-way pvp work in Cyrodiil?
Do you think the NA campaigns are faction-imbalanced now? (If you give an opinion, please say what faction you mainly pvp for.)
Are there any games that have managed to solve this type of problem? What can be done?
Comments
Thats actually a really good point. And the problem is with the players not the system. Three faction PVP like you said is supposed to work because the two underdogs are meant to team up to take on the big dog. The problem lies in the type of player that we have these days. Everywhere you look, players are looking for "the path of least resistance". It stems from the same "I want everything" mentality of todays gamers, and what ends up happening is the two underdogs fight each other, seeing each other as the weaker threat. The big dog preys on both, because they are both weaker for fighting each other, and pose no real threat to them.
The only way to fix the system, is to fix the gamer. Players need to learn that together they can take out a much larger/stronger force, and work together. It would probably require some sort of incentive from the developer to get them to do this. So far, I havent seen a game that incentives factions to work together for a common goal. Until that happens, the strong get stronger, while the weak prey on each other.
"If I offended you, you needed it" -Corey Taylor
As usual in game have faction
but i think everyone sub out and wait 17 march after 2 moth probably devs can adjust numbers campaing and players seek
but since cyrodill bit large i believe dont need more 2 or 3 sad thing depend how many player engine can handle it
its why camelot unchained spend good time code it
its base to any massive pvp game
The easiest solution is to control the numbers better, don't allow a difference great than 10 players between highest populated and lowest populated faction. If EP has 200 players and AD has 180, don't let anymore EP log into campaign til AD are 195 or sufficient EP have logged out so difference is under 10. Sure thats going to cause problems too, but queueing a little more for a better experience can't be all bad?
TBH, the biggest problem is still AoE, stun and AoE is a poor excuse for combat, but the easy way out for those who can't target.
The problem like every other RvR setup is nightcapping. 3 weeks into the last campaign all three factions were within 400 points of each other. That's 2 hours from third to first. Then came the Aussie EP nightcap crew. 2 times in the last 10 days they capped the entire map from 4-6 am. Before that point Daggefall the smallest of the 3 factions (pop locks usually an hour after the other 2) had the lead.
This is what leads to a lopsided score. On the 1.6 PTS there seems to be some scoring adjustments that on paper should lessen the impact of night capping. We will see though.
Do gw2 ever put relics back in the game?
I'm part of the AD Aussie crew and there really aren't many of us AD and DC. We are seriously outnumbered by EP at that time.
@bcbully - nightcaps are common thing in Gw2 as well, but they do not bork the game. Fact. No need to make excuses on Bethesda's part by bashing Gw2's removed relics, which were removed for a good reason. Where's your imperial city almost an year in? And what sort of paygate would it have
On the topic. I think what plagues the faction imbalance is the lack of players and in TESO's case, switching campaigns. From what DMKano posted a month or so ago, I don't believe there are many PvPers in that game, which might be your problem OP. People who do PvP stick up with the stronger faction. There is no rotation like in Gw2. The rotation in Gw2 provides balance. You'd be an idiot to change the server every week
That shit costs money, especially moving to gold league. So...there is a server loyalty, and people try their best. History also shows that some servers managed to convince enemy guilds to join them. You'd be surprised how much a single experienced guild can change the game.
If you look at the real world, two things would happen: mercenaries and alliances. To enforce this in game:
- Losing realms bring player mercenaries in, i.e. people fulfilling objectives in game for losing faction get paid constant salary (i.e. 100g/min spent fighting objectives). This would incentivise people in the losing factions to still go and fight. They could even be transferred temporarily from other servers where your faction is winning.
Lore wise: Your faction is recruiting everyone for war!
- Force losing realms to be allied with each other (and become non attackable) when they are being overwhelmed (say less than 20% map control for 24hrs). In lore terms, this only means your "politicians" decided to ally against a stronger enemy. Once territory is taken back, then this drops after a period of time. But at least, this should seriously set back the dominant faction.
Lore wise: Your leaders have made a temporary alliance against a common enemy!
- More generally, prevent people to join a PvP map as part of a dominant faction to prevent massive imbalance (do not allow more than 20% difference between winning faction/losing faction). If people want to PvP, they either join a losing faction or change server. If a specific faction is dominant everywhere and you can't PvP with this specific faction on any server - then too bad for you. Life is unfair so either play the faction you want or PvP as much as you want and deal with it.
no idea if it was solved in daoc, but they gave boni to the other realms if you joined em.
eg, if oyu had a max lvl char on that realm, sometimes you could just go and create a new max lvl char (or lvl 20 or 30, depended on the imblanace) for the underpowered factions.
"I'll never grow up, never grow up, never grow up! Not me!"
If i'm not mistaken DAoC offered low population realms a 30% boost to xp to encourage players to re-roll and play that realm. On my server it was always Hibs and Mids vs Albion and the numbers seemed fairly balanced in that 2 v 1 scenario. Maybe ZOE could do something similar if it was suggested.
You're never going to get a perfect balance between factions but if you want to bolster under populated factions they need to be made more attractive to the players. A simple XP boost is probably the easiest way to achieve that.
Edit:
The above mentioned boost was availeable to all players with a L50 char. Any new char you made could be boosted to L20 at your trainer by using a simlpe /level command, regardless of realm.
Low pop factions got a similar bonus in both Planetside games and it didn't work.
The solution is directed rewards, where both underdogs get a very strong bonus for attacking the dominant faction. The bonus also has to be strong enough to overcome the fact that fighting against a population disadvantage implies a lot more time spent losing.
Basically you need the reward to override players' natural tendency to make self-destructive bad decisions ("gosh, fighting the other underdog sounds a lot easier than fighting the dominant faction!") Which is why the reward needs to be related to making good decisions (related to actually fighting the leading faction.) It's virtually always the wrong choice for underdogs to fight each other, and that behavior shouldn't be rewarded at all (ie they should remove global bonuses for being a low pop faction.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
No, I'm referring to the Imperial City. An actual central location that is fought over. GW2's relics have nothing to do with the Eternal Battlegrounds central castle.
"If I offended you, you needed it" -Corey Taylor
This is 100% spot on. I am EP also, and during the hours I play it's pretty competitive, and the map is typically very balanced.
I like your first suggestion. I've suggested something similar. Except my suggestion was a dynamic increase in guards vs population. Something to slow down the pvdoor crews. The problem is it most likely would take massive develop and programming.
The simplest solution would be to region lock Alliance war servers. EU, NA, Oceanic. I know this idea is something the Oceanic folks aren't too keen on.
Yeah we all know it's going to happen. 30-50 EP at 5am... 30 to 50 people, this is the population imbalance people are speaking of... That's it... Nothing more, maybe less.
Like I said until a developer chooses to develop and tackle the night capping issue this will continue to be a problem in ALL AvA, WvW, RvR formats.
I often play at night and I don’t understand is why there is always a large group of people who play at night in these games that don’t want any competition and they don’t spread out in the factions.
Is the population that bad in RvR right now ? because night capping usually only happens in very low pop games.
Can you still belong to more then one campaign and then switch to others really easily ? those two things really took out the faction/server pride or whatever you want to call it.
Having played DAoC for quite a while and now ESO I think the problems in Cyrodiil go beyond the gamer types playing today vs. 14 years ago.
Chief among them is the megaserver tech that doesn't keep the players that PVP together, leveling together. In DAoC's servers (I was Albion in Guinevere) we knew each other well and had a chat hierarchy beyond guilds into alliance chat for several guilds that were in an alliance.
We planned and coordinated a lot more and we all knew who was leading and what the objectives were. And the alliance leaders knew who the leaders were on the other two sides so two sides could indeed coordinate and take out the dominant side a lot of the time.
Cyrodiil in ESO is more like a "drop-in" version of DAoC where a lot of people who don't know each other all that well come up with impromptu plans and you have a whole bunch of random rogue groups or individuals often acting against the best interest of the alliance at any given time just farming wherever they feel like farming,
We had night caps in DaoC too and we also had coordinated volunteer night-owls to counter them. But in order to do that you need coordination and leadership... neither of which is particularly evident in ESO.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
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DAoC was a different game played by a different crop of players. It's the players, not the game. Back in the day there was no social media, we were not on cell phone texting + tweeting + taking selfies, etc while playing games. Basically, what you have these days is players in the wrong game. At least DC serves as cattle. And last trailer confirms this.
QFT
People keep asking how DAoC got it right and other games like Warhammer & ESO don't. DAoC was in a different era. The first thing that it had that is missing from the modern games is what became known as realm pride. In DAoC once you chose your realm you were locked into it. You couldn't go and create an alt that belonged to a different realm on the same server. Each of the three realms spoke different languages. This was simulated by the game turning anything you typed into a mixed up mess for the other two factions. If you typed hello your own realm saw hello, the other two saw something like fgfdrdg. You will never get that again because these days everyone uses voice comms like teamspeak etc.
Then you had a central dungeon filled with the best loot that only the faction with the most relics had access to. This gave the other two factions a vested interest in not fighting each other until the dominant faction lost control of the dungeon so temporary alliances just happened. They were not planned too often as you couldn't speak to each other to plan them.
Third were the game mechanics that nowadays everyone seems to frown upon. Bunny hopping around in PvP didn't happen because it was pointless. DAoC had /stick & /face commands that meant the combatants stood there and actually fought each other in melee instead of trying to jump through your opponent so that you could spin around and hit him from behind. Today's gamer doesn't want that. Instead they want twitch combat where the fastest fingers or more often the lowest ping wins. DAoC also had a large array of classes with different abilities so there were no real cookie cutter builds that just get boring. But most of all it was the realm pride and the community, the likes of which simply do not exist anymore.
That's a large part, right there. In ESO, you could literally be in a guild chatting with a guy from the opposing faction. That didn't happen in DAoC, and it contributed to the alien feel you got when staring down a player of another faction. It gave you a reason to look at things in an Us vs. Them mentality that made things more interesting. Megaserver tech has destroyed that.