We see a lot of people complaining about faction lock these days. We also see quite some supporting it. I get the motivations of both sides to support either implementation, but the core problem lies somewhere else.
First of all - I think Faction Lock is a terrible idea. It prevents people who have levelled multiple characters on multiple factions to play with each other. Its the most radical change against the whole idea of One Tamriel, it makes no sense. But this thread is not about faction lock itself, its about why ZOS felt the need to implement it in the first place. Like I said, I get the idea. ZOS wants to make sure that the players respect the gameplay that Cyrodiil was intended for - playing for their faction, earning points towards winning the campaign, running scrolls and taking keeps. Defending together, attacking together, strategising to take heavily guarded keeps and such. I get it, and its a nice concept. Unfortunately, it only works in theory.
What ZOS does apparently not realise, is that the people who play games are the same people who live on this planet, in real life. And in real life, we (laughably) have the exact same issues as we do in the game: Not everyone cares for the greater good. In fact, (unfortunately) very little people do. I could open up a whole discussion about capitalism and climate change, but I think thats a bit off topic. What I am trying to say is: There will always be alot of people in Cyrodiil who do not play because they want to support their faction and win the campaign (The "Greater Good").
Now, why does this matter?
With faction locks, ZOS apparently tries to solve the problem that multiple people, especially more experienced players and groups, were "hopping" to different factions in order to either find better fights or play with their friends. ZOS however wants to give the people who care about the campaign the feeling that what they are doing is important, so they are taking away the "faction hopping" to prevent that. They want to force people to play Cyrodiil like it was intended: Playing for one faction and working together to win the campaign.
While this is theoretically a good idea, the approach is simply a band-aid fix: Half the PvP community is just mad at the Game Developers because they don't let them play with their friends and restrict them to play on one faction, that might possibly be way too crowded, forcing them to spend their evening in queues instead of playing for the weaker faction. PvP Guilds, who play this game for for competitive reasons, now cannot fight certain other guilds anymore that choose the same faction and instead always fight the same old groups. They are stuck on their faction and can't play for a weaker one to balance out the campaigns anymore.
All this stuff amounts to a much bigger problem ZOS apparently does not realise: If you want people to play the game a certain way, give them incentives to do so!
What do I mean by that?
With Elsweyr, Volendrung was introduced - a very strong weapon designed to disrupt the everyday-business of Cyrodiil a bit. While I dont want to argue about its performance in this post, I will say this: Generally, implementing stuff like these weapons is a great idea.
But if you add such a powerful artefact which obviously every organised group will try to obtain, why don't you use these exact tools to make players fight the way you want them to?
Just a few quick ideas to prove my point:
- Make sure you have to take back home keeps if your faction doesn't have them at the moment in order to keep it charged.
- Make sure to give the carrying player the objective to take an outpost to support their faction in order to keep the weapon charged
Instead, you can port anywhere with the weapon and ball groups will still go for the enemy home keeps to have their fun and kill everyone in it - obviously.
At the same time, implementing one kind of this weapon on the whole map will lead to the next big problem in Cyrodiil: Faction Stacking. You are concerned about Zergs stacking on top of each other because your servers can't handle the load. While that is totally understandable (as a game developer I have a rough feeling how tough it must be for your servers to handle a 40v40v40 battle), you dont use the opportunities to prevent such stacking.
You implement a really strong weapon in the game capable to turn fights around completely. This weapon would bring multiple opportunities to spread out the population in Cyrodiil.
As stated above, you could give the carrier an objective to take back a home keep or to hold an outpost for strategical reasons. Another idea is to make sure to spawn multiple (possibly a bit weaker) weapons (of the same or different kind) that require the people to go to multiple "hotspots" in order to:
1) split the population, instead of everyone going to one weapon and creating the famous faction stacking effect.
2) giving people something to fight for
Even without the weapons, you could do many different things in order to make players play like you want to (no matter if they WANT to play for the faction or not). Some ideas are stated here:
- Make sure that the Grand Warlords of each faction give players multiple "Hot-Spots" to fight at which is marked for everyone on the map and which is rewarded with a meaningful reward. Make sure that people who dont care about the faction go there because its worth it for other reasons (like for instance a lot of ap), instead of trying to force everyone to play for the faction, because thats never gonna happen. This will create multiple spots on the map where people can meet and fight, and achieve 3 things:
1) Spread out the population of Cyrodiil to multiple hot-spots.
2) Give people something to fight for
3) Give people who simply dont care about campaign scoring a reason to still fight for their faction
Faction Locks are not the way to make people play like you want to. Forcing people into certain play styles is the whole thing ESO tries to prevent, in both PvE and PvP. You should give people incentives to support a play style you want, rather than forcing them to play like you want.
/The Elder Scrolls Online/depot/