I vote that the top rankings should not just go to the players that are on 24/7. The following is a proposal for a way to allow players with less than 24/7 availability to fairly compete with others with similar availability.

PROBLEM:

When the game releases and campaigns last for several weeks, the tops of the leaderboards (which determine who becomes emperor when the conditions are satisfied) will be filled with players whose accounts are played around the clock. Usually, these accounts will actually be several players playing in shifts to accumulate as many Alliance Points as possible.

As a result, the leaderboards won't have much meaning to everyone else who plays honestly, since they'll have no shot at becoming emperor. Most people want to have healthy participation in PvP, and it's detrimental to disenfranchise all the players who can't play around the clock.

SOLUTION:

Let players opt into a campaign where each player in that campaign can play up to X hours per week in Cyrodil. For some campaigns X could be 20-hrs per week; for others campaigns, 40-hrs per week; others, 60-hrs per week, etc. For everyone else, they can go about their merry way in unlimited time campaigns.

The idea is that players would select a campaign whose hours are capped at an amount of time similar to what the player would have spent in Cyrodil without the cap. That way he/she is only playing against other players who will be in Cyrodil for a similar amount of time. Cyrodil would still be a persistent world 24/7, mind you, but each individual player who chose that campaign could only be in that world for up to X hours in a given week.

So everyone who plans on playing the game 30-40 hours per week, for example, can join a campaign that limits players' time to 40 hours per week in Cyrodil. That way, the characters played by three or four guys sharing an account in shifts around the clock have no advantage in such a campaign. This choice to join a time-limited campaign is completely voluntary, so if that's not your cup of tea, or if your guild wants to do something else, you're free to join an unlimited campaign.

I would like to preemptively address the common objections with such a proposal:

1. You just want to make the game easier for yourself.

This proposal doesn't make it any easier to become emperor. I want to foster healthy competition, and this system means the rankings will be based on skill rather than availability.

2. This is an RPG, Dedication should be rewarded.

I agree. If a guy who has uber gear from doing PvE for a hundred hours a week wants to join me in a 40-hr per week campaign, I'd welcome him. If he can rack up more kills than I can in that 40 hours, he deserves the victory. I just don't think he derserves the victory for having his buddies play his account while he sleeps.

3. This will split the player base and result in more campaigns.

No, the number of campaigns is based on the total number of ESO players divided by the average number of players in a campaign. It doesn't make a difference if some of those campaigns cap the number of hours per week. It's not unreasonable to expect at least 18 million players of this game. If each campaign has about 2000 players, then there will be roughly 9000 campaigns. That's more than enough to allow some to have time caps for the players that want them.

4. This will make the Emperor title less prestigiuos.

Again, the number of campaigns, and thus the number of emperors, will be no different if this is implemented. If I become the emperor in a 40-hr per week campaign, I won't feel that the guy who became the emperor in a 20-hr per week campaign diminishes my achievement at all. I don't think that players who become emperor in unlimited-time Cyrodil should feel slighted by the emperors of limited-time Cyrodil.

5. All the pros will join the time-limited-campaigns to beat up on noobs.

They're more than welcome to try. I think they'll be surprised to find that players with limited time aren't necessrily less skillful. Either way, that's fine because as I said, the title should go to the player with the best skills. I just reject the notion that you have to play around the clock to be competitive.

6. QQ, my account sharing/cheating will be less effective if I'm only competing against other account sharers/cheaters!

True dat.

Wait for open beta, see what they actually have in place, then grab pitchfork and head to the forums.

I'll say the same thing here I said Elsweyr (never gets old.)

Rather than limiting play time, a better solution would be to just change the metric.

Instead of "most Alliance points overall" which a less good player could accumulate simply by playing 24/7 they could use Alliance Points per hour or Alliance Points per minute (with some minimum amount of play time) or else they could do kill death ratio or players healed/death ratio.

That way its a fairer judge of skill rather than a judge of commitment.

That said, I'm fine with how its currently planned. Emperorship should be something reserved for the dedicated. So someone who plays 24/7 deserves to be rewarded more than someone who plays less. The person who plays more is certainly helping the war effort more overall.

Nobody who plays 3 hours a night stands a chance. Plain and simple. Working as intended.

What you all just don't get is that, once all those omega dedicated players will all been emperor once, they'll stop playing their account 24/7 since they'll have the emperor skill tree so no more need to be cheating and they'll probably start to explore more content than PvP only, also, if you really are a dedicated player that PvP a lot, sooner or later, you should be able to reach the top ladder within a decent competition with others.

So will you be the first emperor ? No
Do you have chances to become an emperor sooner or later without ''cheating'' running your account 24/7 ? Yes

They can pilot or bot 24/7 all they want, that doesn't guarantee them Emperor. The campaigns reset and the leaderboards get wiped frequently. What matters for crowning Emperors the most is the keeps. That's a faction wide effort, not set upon one person that has no life or a couple of overly dedicated friends.

After reading this thread, I will defer Emperorship to anyone who wants it. There is no way I can dedicate the amount of time, on a consistent basis, to become Emperor of Tamriel. My original plan of focusing on PvE is looking better and better.

What do you mean by 20h, 40h, compaign? You know that emperor can be crowned only when one alliance controls all of the Cyrodill, and developers said that it's extremely rare. So if someone plays 24/7 it might take him/her weeks if not more to actually get emperor. Players who don't play a lot will never become emperors, get over it, it's not a big deal.

When did they say that campaigns reset and leaderboards get wiped frequently? Did I miss something?

They've been telling us for awhile that campaigns will last a set amount of time, like 30 days or something, and they will wipe it all after that time and the campaign restarts.

30 days or even 1 week it's not frequently, and it's fine by me. This system reminds me of WoW's vanilla honor system where only one player per server who got the most honor per week gets grand marshal/high warlord rank, good times.

Eh, 30 days is a good time span imho. Frequent or not. You either snag the crown in that time or you try again, better luck next time.

The problem with kill/death ratio is that it rewards people for running away from tough battles, and the devs say they want to encourage people to defend keeps as much as possible to prevent keep swapping.

No, but it makes it pretty much impossible for anyone who doesn't play 24/7 to become emperor.

I mean that players can choose a campaign that caps players' hours at 20 per week or 40 per week. The actual duration of the campaign is the same (30 days or whatever)

Important to note though that Campaign resets do not reset the territory you have, only the point totals.

Personally, I know I have ZERO chance during the school year. During summer break though, there is a chance I might be able to play enough and its certainly something I'll be going for.

That said, I plan to get my guild into the hardest campaign possible with the most organized guilds on the other side. So I may never get it. But if I do, it will be meaningful.

Again, working as intended. Please list off prestigious awards that you obtained ahead of people who put in more time and effort than you did.

ZOS will (hopefully) make sure to get bots banned. someone who plays this game 24/7 normally probably deserves the title of emperor (and the title "I have no life, at all")

Exactly.

I've never seen anyone complain that in order to get MVP in a football game, you need to work harder and train more than the other players.

Emperorship rewards skill and dedication both. A player who plays more does more for the Alliance. They are the biggest part of the reason why you captured the keeps that you did.

Sarcasm aside, I take this to mean that you would feel ripped off by people who became emperor in campaigns that had time caps on them?

I'm looking for honest feedback here, because that is different from how I would feel. I personally wouldn't have any issues with people who became emperor in campaigns that limited players' time to 20 hours per week, even if I had joined a campaign where people played for 40 or 60 hours per week.

That's true, but there are different football leagues.

You can join a recreational league, you can join a varsity league, or you can go professional. My proposal is equivalent to that, IMO.

That is your opinion. A lot of people who play SWTOR HATE the fact that swtor limits f2p players with PVP. HAT IT with a passion. They can take ALL the other problems with the game at least to some extent, but hate the fact you cannot PVP when you want outside of a very rare PVP encounter in the little open world PVP occurs.

The campaigns already have time caps, though. Just far larger than the ones you mention. The problem I have is Cyrodiil is all we really have for PvP, and the system laid out is a damn good one. I don't expect to ever get Emperor post launch and I'm one of those dreaded 24/7 gamers you guys are so worried about. The competition will be absurdly high, and that's how it should be. People who race for it will have the highest chance, but still be limited by the capabilities of their faction as a whole.

Checks and balances. And like PKMN above said, hopefully ZOS will be ontop of things and make sure people are no lifing legitimately. If people are logging in from different IPs on a character that is logged in all day, every day, then our subscription money should be going to keeping that sort of [censored] from happening. Everyone has to sleep eventually, you can play for 38 hours straight or whatever if you want, but you damn well better be logged out for atleast a few hours between those 38 hour sessions, otherwise its pretty obvious there's something going on that needs to be stopped.

The reason there's no PvP in other areas of the game is because they want all fighting to be focused on the war campaigns. I would hazard a guess that splitting into these different campaigns could also have the same effect of taking focus off of their core AvA system, which they have specifically said they don't want with other forms of PvP.

I want my Emperor to be someone who is very involved with the game and not some casual scrub like me thanks

Its the Emperor for crying out loud. I'm fine if someone worked that hard to get it!

Except that using your anology, a League would be the whole game. ESO will be the Pro's, if you want to play at a Rec or amateur level then you'll need to find a different game that suits you. Can't expect a single game to be everything to everyone.

I agree, that wasn't the best anology, because sports Leagues are separated by skill where in this case, players would be separated only by time commitment. Even in the NFL, the MVP goes to the player with the most skill not necessarily the one who practiced the longest.

If a guy throws 5 touchdowns a game and plays 15 games in a season, should he lose the MVP to the guy who only throws 3 touchdown per game but plays 30 games in a season?

That question is moot because all the teams in the league play a the same number of games in the season. That's essentially what I'm proposing here.