http://elderscrollsonline.com/en-uk/news/post/2013/12/23/ask-us-anything-cyrodiil

New AUA article is up.

PvP and Cyrodiil, a few new bits of information about Cyrodiil.

Thanks for the link.

What costumes are these?

Do costumes have a use in PvP? Can we fool enemy guards or even players? Do they allow infiltrating keeps or outposts?

Players can wear costumes in Cyrodiil if they wish, but they don’t offer any combat advantages.

You can wear costumes, more of a cosmetic thing I'm thinking, to give you a different look, they've said you'll have a costume slot on your character sheet.

No declaration of war is required to attack a keep—they can be assaulted at any time. Let’s say a keep is entirely undefended by players. In that situation, it might take around 15 minutes to take over the keep using a ram and around three groups of players. Capturing an undefended resource won’t take quite as long and should only require one group. However, you’ll have to have healing available in both cases—even if there aren’t any players around, the NPC guards will still be on duty, and they aren’t just for show.

Good to see the NPC guards will be packing a punch too, I recall a few battlegrounds in other MMOs where any NPCs, expect for generals or bosses, were pretty much one shotted, nice to see you'll have to use healing etc even if theres not a lot of enemies defending a particular keep.

Indeed, it's also nice to see when you capture resource points that the keeps will visually improve over time as well as statistically, little things make a big difference

50 PvP ranks as well, I know what I'm spending my time doing now..

Would like to hear some information about how various quests will help the war effort though.

I have that ranking system up on a poster behind my monitor. I'll be hunting down the high ranking ones

"I heard there is a bonus for the number of keeps your alliance controls. Isn’t this going to make it even harder to stand up against a winning alliance?

The interesting thing about those bonuses is how spread out an alliance has to be to keep them. While it does make defeating individual members of that alliance more difficult, it also means there are many more keeps they have to defend, leaving them spread out and vulnerable to coordinated efforts."

May be they defenses to be spread out, but when keep is attacked then can reinforcements come on horses quite quickly?

Reinforcements may come to aid a particular keep quickly yes, they won't be able to teleport to the keep though, so when they are travelling to the keep under attack, if the opposition is smart enough, would send an attack team to the keeps they just left, and attack those as well.

Without going into any detail (NDA) response times I'm sure wont be too high for keeps under siege. Of course that is speculation on my part.

So isn't it source of inbalance - winning side get stronger and the defending many keeps will be same becuase they can come quickly?

ya, perhaps it is not difficult to test during beta.

Well as they said, they'll become more spread out, if it was just two factions they might be able to overpower the enemy from their buffs, but with 3 factions, it becomes a lot harder as the third faction may come in and take over another keep or help out the other faction.

Not sure where the confusion is. If one faction holds more keeps it becomes increasingly harder to defend them all regardless if any bonus you get. It was just said that teleportation is cutoff when a keep is under attack so no reinforcements can't come quickly as they have to travel on foot/mount. Add to that a coordinated attack on several keeps at the same time and defense becomes even more difficult.

This guy gets it

it actually means that two factions must coordinate and strike together (well may be winning side get's tired, but as they are winning they will be more enthusiastic), if not then one faction might be never strong enough to attack the faction that is just stronger and stronger because of buffs. We can only assume that taking the keep takes short time, so if defenders are spread then it might look easy, but remember that it will not be easy to attack far keeps (on enemy territory) - this means that defenders will put most forces on keeps that you attack plus after taking one keep you need to defend it immediately - and the keep is damaged.

so if your team takes 6 keeps, you crown an emperor. then you only have to hold one to keep the bonus right? which means you don't have to spread out to defend all of them?

Not necessarily must coordinate together, it depends on numbers, and player skill as well as human error which happens frequently, they also mentioned it may take a while to actually capture a keep, 15 minutes was mentioned in one of the answers, to capture a keep with no players, just NPC guards.

You need to control the six keeps surrounding the Imperial City is what I understand, as long as you have one keep the Emperor will remain yes, assumingly with the bonus, however the problem will arise if they focus defense on just one keep, where they'll eventually lose the surrounding keeps, then all focus will be on that keep, if you like, a two-on-one faction war at this point, so the numbers will be with the attacker, something will have to give, the majority should in theory take out the one defended keep here.

Then you'd guess the defending faction would use some sense and send some players to one of the other keeps and take that back, so it really depends the pace, skill and how fast players can capture those keeps.

Yeah, stands to reason that if x= minimum needed to defend against attacks on a specific keep and Y is able to attack in force on one keep and launch smaller attacks on other keeps, you're going to have trouble holding those extra keeps just from a logistics stand point. You can't stack each keep with enough people to handle large attacks on EVERY keep. Unless they are all absurdly good players.

this is good. it should be harder to take a keep than defend it.

Exactly so, this will encourage more coordinated teamwork and synergy.

also if keeps were switching hands constantly it would make for really boring pvp. see planetside

What actualy does the elder scroll do, and is there only 1 elder scroll ?