OK, I can do my best explaining this.
A guild in the early days made an agreement with a Daggerfall guild to trade the center ring for a few days to get everyone on both factions guilds their emperorship abilities. Before the past couple nerfs to the Vampire abilities when you combine vamps with emperorship and legendary gear you end up with a God mode player. What I mean by this is 1 guy can wipe 3 raids in a choke point in seconds. We saw it many times. 3 of those together kick out enough healing that no matter what you throw at them they regen health faster than you can dish it out. Now on Hopesfire there is a pack of 15 of them that roam together and kill anything that moves. When we started our AvA campaigns we had 160+ people out there. The second week we had 140, third week 60. It was quite obvious that going up against these players was destroying morale and any momentum we had in launching into ava in this game. If we continued course on hopesfire we would be running a 20 man now at the most.
Zenimax is actively applying patches to reduce this but those patches will not arrive soon enough. This is why I searched for a new campaign for us. We need a place where we can play and not get spawn camped by gods. Fortunately with enough sacrifices to the gods of hopesfire I got an audience with their leader and explained to them the golden rule of Foghladha. "Never beat your opponent so bad they don't want to play you". I explained to him that while it might be fun for them now, our numbers shrink every week, and if they continue course they won't have anyone left to fight. I told them that we were changing campaigns and we would appreciate it if they go fight someone more their level and leave us to our own devices. They agreed and said they would stay off of Volendrung. Since then there has been no sign of them.
Now Volendrung. Let me talk to you a little about Volendrung. Out of all the Campaigns, Volendrung is the most evenly matched with Ebonheart Pact being the underdogs. I mean look at this scoreboard:
On top of that it is the official server of the Roleplay community (teso-rp.com) and if you ignore the current PC people there who are just there to get emperor and then plan on leaving the natives are very friendly, open to anyone to join them, and are very happy to have us join them a few times a week. For this campaign to be a downright 3 way battle all they needed was a community like ours to arrive and harbor a little more numbers for the Ebonheart Pact.
Here's what the map looks like at 10AM this morning:
I'll take another snapshot at 5PM.
The other main attractor here is that all 3 sides have a Combat Etiquette established that most everyone follows. They always leave the opposing faction one of their home keeps to work out of. They frown on spawn camping and so long as you don't have a scroll behind your wall they leave your home keeps alone. The climate here is much nicer. You can find low levels out there, high levels out there, and a whole lot of 3 way fights. We've had some of the most fun in Volendrung since we started visiting. Plus our numbers have been increasing every week instead of shrinking.
The biggest difference I see is that it's not AD vs EP. It's AD vs DC and EP trying to survive. When we take the field it's a full fledge no holds barred 3 way fight. You've got to worry about 2 enemies not just 1. We want our enemies more concerned with DC than us. That opens up opportunity and keeps our players on off nights from being subject to constant farming. Hope this sums it up.
» Edited on: 2014-05-27 17:02:53