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Players constantly switching sides/alliances
askdaboss
Member UncommonPosts: 631
I haven't played the beta, and I am wondering: will players be locked in a specific alliance with all their characters?
The way MMOs traditionally do this is: you are locked in a specific alliance in one specific server. This way you can experience the different alliances. But not here with the megaservers (tm) - if I understand correctly.
So the megaserver (tm) leaves us two possibilities:
- Player can create characters from any alliance on the megaserver (tm):
Consequences: players can switch sides constantly depending on the wind, depending on what side is winning/losing (this would be worsened if there are "bonuses" or "loots" for the winning side, you would probably see a good 50% of the alliances switching sides to benefit from those bonuses).
- Players cannot create characters from another alliance on the megaserver (tm):
Consequences: players who haven't pre-ordered (any race/any alliance) will NEVER be able to experience other races than the ones from the alliance they have initially chosen. There is no "other server" where you can try another alliance "a la WoW".
Thoughts? Or even better: official word/experience? Anything done to mitigate the above problems?
Comments
you can create any character on any alliance you want you wont be able to join the same CAMPAIGN as an opposing Alliance character.
So if you join Campaign A on an ebonhart allied toon you wont be able to join campaign A on a daggerfall or A.D. allied toon. If you have multiple Ebonhart toons they can all join the same campaign.
Despite what people say its set up very similarly to how GW does it except GW organizes theirs by servers, in ESO theyre organized by campaigns. Semantics really.
I was concerned about this too. That's at rest, but now it brings up more questions.
I thought there was only one Emperor, this way is sounds like there are the possibility of multiple Emperors. And will I always match up with the same people? How do I build pride/ rivalries if the battlefield combatants are different people every time I join. (I know this excludes friends and guilds as you can join the same"instance" as them)
How can you build pride if you can't build a community. It seems like randomly joining a different instance of the same war would not help that at all- - and at that, how do you keep the wars the same? What if one side wins the scrolls on one instance but another in another instance, are there benefits for your side if you have the scrolls? How does this work?
Edit: Spelling
Think "server" whenever you see "campaign" and you'll get the hang of it. One megaserver for PVE but the Cyrodiil Alliance Wars PVP happen in servers (campaign) which all have unique names.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
Ok, that's good to hear.
Do we know how many people are with us in a given campaign yet? I found this, but I doubt the number is that low:
"It’s designed to support up to 200 players, but smaller skirmishes with a few dozen players can have an impact as well as can solo play as well, either by securing map objectives such as farms and mines or killing off stray opponents."
Also, they say it persists for 3-6 months (seems similar to GW2 indeed):
"Status of the Alliance War will persist for anywhere between three to six months on a particular campaign to make the battles more meaningful, although Sage didn’t reveal exactly what the benefits will be."
(http://www.elderscrollsguides.com/massively-previews-elder-scrolls-endgame-pvp-and-crafting/)
I can't remember where I saw it but 2,000 players per campaign is what I think I read.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
No one knows the campaign cap yet, it hasn't been announced.
People are speculating 1200.
This would mean 300v300v300 (900) as the softcap and 1050 (allowing for an extra 100 players per faction) for friends to play together with each other before hitting the hard cap.
They said they want to keep the campaigns balanced between all 3 factions so 2000 wouldn't be in line with that. Firstly it's not a balanced number (667 players for 2 factions, 666 for another) and secondly it could lead to 667 vs 200 which is a massive imbalance.
Official quote:
Yes, campaigns feature a soft cap to limit the number of participants from one alliance. There’s room for overflow that will allow you to join your friends or guild members in an otherwise full campaign, but eventually there is a hard limit to that. You’ll be able to join campaigns with your friends, but we want to ensure that an alliance can’t bring too many additional combatants in and hurt the overall balance.
From what I understand there will be two primary campaigns which reset every 90 days and every subsequent campaign will reset on a 48 hour basis. You will have your main campaign which you're locked to for 48 hours and you can join as a guest in other campaigns (one off joins).
The system will attempt to place people where they should be (unless you want to specifically play with friends), as opposed to letting the players fully decide. There are also no battlegrounds and there's also PvE incentives to be inside Cyrodill.
Overall they're taking measures to rectify what went wrong with GW2 so to speak. Given the Megaserver technology, it means the worst you will see is lesser populated campaigns but generally new campaigns will only open when the rest are TOTALLY full of "main" campaign players (not guests).
Ah here it is. Found the link: http://elderscrollsotr.mymiddleearth.com/2013/07/27/updated-german-site-posts-qa-with-matt-firor/
buffed: How many players are possible per campaign?
Matt Firor: The beta test will show that. Our starting point at the moment is at 2,000 players and 200 participants per battle. Cyrodiil is huge, it is nine times the size of a PvE area! So 2,000 people can be in different parts of the area and participate at the same time in different battles.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
Aye, sorry, I meant to say confirmed, not announced. They're still toying with those figures and I assume will make a decision on this weekend's test.
Also depending how you read that, it means 200v200v200 is the targeted amount for concurrent players? Feels a little low. I don't really understand the "200 participants per battle" thing.
They can try all they like to 'fix' whats wrong with GW2 but they wont, because it is impossible. PvP is player controlled no matter what safeguards are put into place.
Even if its 2000 people per campaign, if there are a million people (maybe more the first month) playing the game (with multiple toons) how many campaigns will that be?
This idea that there are only going to be two campaigns is ridiculous.
There are also restrictions as it goes to guilds and them getting first refusal to the campaigntheir guild joins.
So many moving parts is going to make this a mess.
dd in the PvE aspect and the fact that markets and AHs are guild based and accessed from the PvP area and it adds a completely ridiculous twist to the whole thing.
There will for awhile be close to if not more than 500 campaigns open. So that will give some people ample time to get emperor I am sure as each campaign has their own emperor.
I think some of this is why they decided to unlock race alliance guidelines and got soft on their whole 'Alliance pride' stance because I think someone mixed in a calculator and saw that there were going to be a lot of campaigns going on and depending on what campaign you were in would determine how proud you really were. Because Ebonhart might be owning in a few dozen but getting wrecked in a hundred more same as for every other alliance.
Thats why I say people will trying to figure out the system and ride along with the strong organized groups and stay on the hot sides. That includes groups that have world wide coverage so as they can dominate on the off hours. Which is something that cannot be policed as long as the campaigns are 24/7 and have no restrictions based on time or population.
It means that is how big a single battle can be in a particular area. Cyrodil will support up to 2000 players.
cant wait for the meeting of all 3 zergs in one spot and see if it crashes the whole thing or just that particular campaign. Because no matter what it will fall into a zerg on zerg mentality for the most part with the typical smaller groups hitting random targets but for major fights it will definitely be zerg on zerg, thats just the nature of the beast.
Lol. We used to crash DAoC on a regular basis during Relic Raids in the early days. Sometimes we were also fighting at 1 frame every 5 seconds
I expect much better here but there will be hiccups...guaranteed.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
I was talking purely from a balance perspective, I think the control of the campaign system gives them the balance they need. I don't know if GW2 changed over time but generally it was unbalanced from the get go. Our server was one of the biggest at the time and utterly smashed in WvW every week, it was boring. As more people learned we were the dominant server, more people came and joined it, abandoning their already struggling server. It was screwed from the outset.
I don't see why having 500 campaigns up at once is a bad thing so long as they ALL contain their quota of players? The faction cap means numbers won't get too far out of line and the system measures being put in will work to ensure that happens.
This was ultimately the problem with ArenaNet: they expected players would resolve it themselves and really put in no measures to guide or encourage people.