Zenimax offers lots of answers to PvP questions on Elitist Jerks boards.

Cyrodiil Zone

Cyrodiil, at the time of TESO, was supposed to be a large jungle zone, Talos having later changed the climate. Instead, Cyrodiil will look like it does in Oblivion, and there’s a book in the game explaining why. You’ll have to explore Cyrodiil to find the answer!

The PvE content within Cyrodiil, like the quests quests in Bruma, Cheydinhal, Chorrol, Cropsford, Vlastarus and the caves, will have no direct influence on the war but will help you gain weapons, armor and gold to outfit yourself, buy weaponry.

Cyrodiil is not only about fighting. The war is also economic as, when a wall is destroyed, you need to rebuild it by using both gold and time. If you cannot take a keep over, you can destroy wall sections to force your enemy to rebuild and spend gold or alliance points in doing so.

The PvP map of Cyrodiil is very very large. On foot it would take you roughly 20-30 minutes to cross it from north to south.

Campaigns Mechanics

Standard Campaigns will last 3 months. Scoring and duration changes can be made depending on player needs. There is a great deal of flexibility with the Campaign system and they’ll look at what players are asking to determine which Campaign rules they add. Beta has a 48 hour Campaign ruleset.

To balance population within Cyrodiil, ZeniMax plans to have many Campains available but not so many that population is sparse. They have tools to report population and know if more or less campaigns are needed depending on time and concurrency of players online. There are populations caps per Alliance within Cyrodiil and differential bonuses to Campaign scoring helping the two “underdog” Alliances to help balance per side.

The number of Campaigns at launch is not known yet, but it will be possible to switch from assigned campaign and from Guest Campaign. All players start with a Home Campaign switch freeby but it will later cost Alliance Points. It is possible to join other players in their Campaigns if you’re in their group. Assigned or "Home" Campaigns will determine where you get bonuses from in Cyrodiil.

Guild Oriented Information

Some large PvP oriented guilds were already invited in beta and they’ve worked out great. More invites will come in time.

Guilds can claim one keep, farm, lumbermill, or mine at a time (only one... not one of each). Claiming is done by talking with the Quartermaster at those locations.

Guild stores in Keeps (and resources) are available when a guild claims a keep or resource (farm, lumbermill, mine).  The Quartermaster will then show the Guild Store to anyone that interacts with him/her and players can purchase whatever the guild that owns the claim has posted in their Guild Store.

There are no mechanics in game for a guild to declare war against another guild. It can be done, RP-wise, on message boards outside the game of course.

Miscellaneous

PvP in TESO will be only centered against Enemy Alliances within Cyrodiil. There will be no equivalent to the Mordred server on DAoC (no PvP server).

Players from each Alliance within Cyrodiil can use emotes to communicate with adverse players but public messages or zone chat from the enemy are blocked.

Frame rate is a top concern for the ZeniMax team and they do their best to optimize the game both on local installations and on the servers. There are many graphical options which can be adjusted to help get faster graphical performance.  

More types of Siege equipment might be added in the future but for now the standard weaponry and ammunition types within those weapons offer more than enough destruction and chaos.  

Guilhemette "Whilhelmina" Giacopazzi