The Elder Scrolls Online

Blackwulf_sl said:

What if they make the transfer cost Alliance points? Like more than they'd get if their Alliance won? What if they put something like a month long timer on transfers? What if they say you need to have x alliance rank to join the super cool veteran campaign? I mean, there are ways they could be creative with this. I will hold judgement until I see final implementation or detailed rules.

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These are cool ideas if you want to force people to play around failed design :"hey look, there are about 300 Cyrodiil instances, you can be in any of them, but each time you jump from one to another we'll rape your character from gear progression and advancement". Another example : my friend Kevin is in Cyrodiil 34 and I'm in Cyrodiil 207. I want to play with Kevin. Whose character gonna get crippled from instances jumping ? This design will also prevent communities beyond guilds, since there won't be servers or realms. Competitive /powerhouse RvR guilds (if there is any) won't be able to coordinate themselves if they put significant fences around instance jumping. That's the whole design problem with Elder Scrolls Online's AvA : you don't play with people, you play around people.

Dahkoht_sl said:

"You can switch If you want to" sums up all that's needed about how this massive PVP will work out.

They know nothing.

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This is pretty much it. You should never be able to switch unless you make a new character. Or if you want to switch campaigns for PVE reasons thats cool, but your original choice is what sticks in the PVP area.

Eh, I kinda agree that they need to keep campaign placement as permanent as possible. Hopefully they are listening, and either come up with something genius or change their plan a bit.

Listening? LOL

Utnayan_sl said:

Because the reason why this went with this method is due to 1) Controlling infrastructure costs. 2) Accessibility.

We already know they are charging alliance points to switch campaigns. But when the game dies down in 3-4 weeks (Par for the course now) without any perpetual meaning to the alliance war, no one will log in and they will need to consolidate so those folks can now play on a populated campaign. The point here is they aren't thinking this through. They are addressing a concern Firor had in DAOC and the nightmare of server infrastructure and accessibility opp cost, and they are coming out with something that addresses that * Only * from a business perspective and not from what will make a fun purposeful * game to play *.

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The trick is to design a system that is economically feasible but still offers a good PvP experience. Ultimately there are ways to design around it, but you sacrifice some things. For example, I think they should have ditched the idea of Cyrodil being 1 large, instanced, zone. Instead break the zone up into a series of smaller interconnected capped ones that you "zone" into for a PvP fight.

You lose a lot of the "world" and "OMG huge battles" abstractness but what you gain is a tighter, better, focused, and more stable PvP experience that doesn't degenerate into Zerging. Also you can set it up so that everyone in the entire world can play with one another if they want. You still move across the map, still attack persistent things, but it is easy to split across multiple servers and with a player cap much easier to design better levels. Also you can add and remove zones as befits the player population just by connecting or disconnecting maps, and if you are super hard up it is possible to reuse maps but make them unique and persistent.

I don't get developers who think mega battles of 200 v 200 is a fun thing. Have these people never played in a zerg vs zerg fight? It's boring as fuck.

Draegan_sl said:

I don't get developers who think mega battles of 200 v 200 is a fun thing. Have these people never played in a zerg vs zerg fight? It's boring as fuck.

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200x200 in one large zone that is packed with objectives could be a lot of fun. Use battle-turning objectives to funnel players into smaller groups. Players can decide which objective they want participate in.

Draegan_sl said:

I don't get developers who think mega battles of 200 v 200 is a fun thing. Have these people never played in a zerg vs zerg fight? It's boring as fuck.

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That's the problem with any kind of open world pvp in general. Either you tightly control your pvp instance in arenas and battlegrounds or expect your pvp to be a meaningless zerg fest. All the methods devs have used to control open world pvp- spread objectives, calculated spawn points, etc. are limited at best at reigning-in the almighty zerg.

Felmega_sl said:

200x200 in one large zone that is packed with objectives could be a lot of fun. Use battle-turning objectives to funnel players into smaller groups. Players can decide which objective they want participate in.

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I thought this was the thought process behind GW2 world vs world. While there certainly are different objectives you can do, disrupting supply and such, that can screw up your opponent's day, really what it comes down to is zerg vs zerg. People gravitate to the zerg no matter what, generally hoping to beat down smaller forces.

While likely there are quite a few folks on these boards who are PVP alpha dogs, my experience with GW2 mass PvP was that most folks just want to run around and get easy kills by ganging up on people or exploiting whatever mechanics they can, or join the big zerg led by the one or two guys who know what they are doing and rack up kills that way. Alterac Valley in WoW was pretty much the same way alot of the time.

On top of that, what little WvW I checked out in GW2, the fights were very much lopsided. One side became the obvious winner pretty early, then the losing team would just ignore it until that match was over. I see no reason that all the problems with GW2 WvW won't happen here again - except worse with campaign hopping.

I am glad everyone else sees it as well, theideaof large scale PvP battles is awesome but the reality isn't anywhere close.

And the player behavior behind it makes perfect sense. Force concentration & local superiority are basic military concepts that are simple but incredibly effective. If you hand players a simple to execute and extremely effective strategy on a platter they are going to use it just like anyone else would in a real conflict and you get Zergs.

Felmega_sl said:

200x200 in one large zone that is packed with objectives could be a lot of fun. Use battle-turning objectives to funnel players into smaller groups. Players can decide which objective they want participate in.

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That never works. Unless you have 200 people in one guild, working comms, people will just blob together. The majority of players are sheep so they will just go to wherever the most people are.

If you are going to create large open world environments that you want to strictly PVP in, you will have to artificially create separations and they have pros and cons. Here are some retarded ways to do it:

1) Artificially limit population whether by server, instances etc.
2) Artificially punish players for blobbing up. (Debuffs with -damage or whatever.)
3) Create so large a map with long travel times so people stay in local areas. The con here is that people say fuck it, I'm not walking back and log off.

There are more subtle ways to do like interweaving PVE and PVP together and make sure you don't care if player's PVE is either shutdown or harassed. In order to get smaller groups, or spread people out, you need to make the gameplay not solely about PVP. What I mean by this is that your pvp game needs to have farming, leveling up, searching, exploring etc. In GW2 and what I assume is in ESO, you have a game map where all you do is kill people or kill castles. When you zone into the map you're there for killing shit. You're not there for doing other things. Those other things should be gear farming, crafting, leveling or whatever.

You need to force the players in to making play time decisions. Do I sit here and zerg and get saturated kill totals? Or do I spend my time more wisely hunting down people solo or in small groups? Or do I spend my time farming a better weapon (with a chance to do small scale PVP on the way)?

Essentially your whole game needs to be in that map. The least efficient method should be zerging and getting experience and badgets/loot from the graveyard of the other zerg. Honestly you should not be rewarded at all for zerging.

I think there are some non-retarded ways to have large PVP that doesn't turn into blobs. For example - no tab targeting, using collision detection for projectiles, swings, and even player bodies standing next to each other. You couldn't have two hundred people hitting the same door, because only realistically say 10 could get close enough lined up. This would force the fights to be small focused fights that happen out around the map or whatever as well.

However, then of course you run into the "but this is an internet game with latency" and even with a high speed connection, it's hard to get real-time interaction like that with large player counts. I just don't think it'll ever work well in this genre (it being large scale player battles).