The Elder Scrolls Online

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Xaxius

Lord Nagafen Raider
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Tamriel Infinium: An open letter to the creators of Elder Scrolls Online

TLDR pro-tips:

- Keep your promises you make
- Don't keep making promises you cannot keep
- Do your research
- Be honest in communication with the playerbase
- Drop your sub/go B2P
- Make Craglorn free
- Stop double billing people
Nice read and most of it could have been applied in an open letter to the entire MMO industry. I also got a nice little chuckle out of this...

When Matt Firor promised a "polished and lag-free" launch, you were just asking for trouble.
 

Utnayan

F16 patrolling Rajaah until he plays DS3
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Tuco

I got Tuco'd!
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Blackwulf

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I was going to post a lengthy discussion about what I like and don't like, but I'm really just not in the mood to be verbose. You guys don't want to read a lot of blather, anyway. Here are some bullet points:

Good:
  • Nice Graphics.
  • Fun VR dungeons when you are with a group of friends.
  • Good music.
  • Great character diversity, if there weren't so many OP skills that become a must.
  • Fun (in my opinion) combat.
  • No latency (for me.)
  • A huge world that feels like a world.
  • PVP - it has really fun moments, but also see my negatives below:
Bad:
  • End game loot that I've seen is extremely lackluster. What am I grinding this dungeon for again?
  • Grinding quests gets old. I stopped and basically leveled up to VR 10 doing dungeons. I'm not excited about going back and figuring out what quests I need to do to get skill points.
  • PVP imbalances are ruining the small man/solo game. From retarded shield bash spam, to retarded bat spam, to retarded bolt escape spam. Two are getting fixed, but if you aren't a sorc, good luck in small group situations (my preferred pvp style.)

Eh, I could go on, but suffice it to say I pretty much rage quit tonight after going out on my horse with a couple guildies to hunt some enemies in Cyrodiil. One of my group of three was a sorc, and that was a good thing, because nearly every solo enemy and every small group of enemies we ran into were comprised of sorcs. All I could really do was twiddle my thumbs and watch fucking blue lightning bolts spam around the countryside.

So am I quitting? No - I'm sure there will be a lot of patches and a lot of overpowered builds over the life of this game, and I'm overall pretty pleased by what they SAY their plans are in near future. I'll give them some months to deliver some content and see how things shake out. I will honestly say that it could go either way for me. Three weeks ago, I would have said that I was for sure going to be playing this game long term, but after seeing how the Cyrodiil game has matured, I'm less optimistic. Until they fix bolt escape, I have a couple options: develop my stealth/range game (kinda cool that any class has that option), or roll a sorc alt. I'm not gonna fucking go through that level grind again yet!!

Anyway, no way in hell I'm quitting before I see how the "Darkness Falls-like" Imperial city pans out.

So, since I'm too lazy to do a verbose review, here are somenegativethoughts from a guy named "TrollingSince1900" on reddit that I basically agree with:
Character Customisation
Softcaps RUIN THE FUN.
Two different DPS sorc will have same magicka regen, around 90-100.
Stamina based classes will have the same stamina regen.
Spell resistance? Same for everyone, around 1.6-1.7k
There are spells that add 800 armor, 2k armor, and even 4k armor. Why? It's pointless. Softcap will also take care of them all. Why did they bother creating spells that we will never be able to take advantage of?

I would like to see real customisation options when it comes to stats important as those, but once you re r10, it feels like the game makes you follow a specific path, it doesn't let you do whatever you want with your char.
If I want to go over 2.1k magicka points, I 'll have to sacrifice like 400 health points for every 100mp over the softcap. (by not using hp enchants, but mp ones) So ofc I won't do that, and I will just make my character same as all others.

With the restrictions in the glyphs that give weapon / spell damage -they can only be used on jewels- a sorc can have up to ~120 spell damage maximum, while the softcap is ~160. Do people in ZOS believe that it's logical for a sorc to have 180 weapon damage and never be able to go close to the spell damage softcap? Did you intend to make people who want to use a bow/greatsword do that on a sorc or something? And if a sorcerer can't even go close to the spell damage softcap, which class can? No class. Why is the softcap so high then? Just curious..

Many of us morphed skills without knowing how the game mechanics work. It was just a click back then at level 30. Many people morphed a spell to something not that useful, and now they can't take it back without paying 20k gold. I don't want to pay 20k gold every time I want to try something different on my character! Add a cooldown, make us pay 1k, the current system is far away from what "unlimited customisation" means, and that is what you promised us. Some morphs are broken. Some tooltips totally misguide the player and make us choose the wrong morph. I don't want to do research online before morphing a skill, I want to try them all and see for myself what works best for my char. Right now, it's impossible. For example, I am still curious how "Daedric Mines" would be if I had taken the "3 mines in a line" - Will I pay 20K to find out? No.

PVP
I am a vampire sorc. I won't even start talking about bat swarm, we all know it's imbalanced. I just want to say this: I can literally run in Cyrodil forever in mist form, with annulment, immovable and rapid maneuver on, and never die. EVER. I can just blink inside a group of 40 enemies and laugh at them trying to kill me or even damage me for more than a minute, then just blink away. A nuke of 1000 damage would do like 200 damage to me, just cus of annulment. That is without the mist form damage reduction. I can spam annulment and have it always on, mist form too. A 50k hp world boss would die faster to 40 people attacking it than I will, with my 3k HP. I can't be stunned, can't be rooted, can't be knocked down, can't be damaged for more than ~50 hit points, can't be seen! Too many defensive spells stacking with each other make it impossible to kill a player with enough HP. Armor doesn't even matter. I am a "glass cannon" sorcerer. Not a tank.

A keep can be captured without a wall / door going down. Level up a DK to level 10 in another alliance, then use the chain pull skill to get your "ex allies" up on the walls of a keep. They will take the keep in no time, noone will even notice the keep is gone for some minutes. This is actually happening in Auriel's bow.

If I want my character to have it's passive skills working, I have to relog every time I die in Cyrodil. It's come to a point I don't care about losing a 1v1 pvp anymore, I just want to stay alive mostly for that - not having to relog. Vampire passives (faster speed while sneaking, some more regen, damage mitigation) are not working if you die - I can live without those, I can't pvp without my light armor bonuses though. Magicka reduction passives are broken after you die (doesn't happen every time, it has ~25% chance), making me go out of mp after nuking 2 enemies. This is probably the most frustrating issue for me of anything I am posting here.

I have made like 800k alliance points in Cyrodil which means I pvp'd a lot. Like 40% of the players are vamps. I have seen only 4 - yeah, FOUR people using a werewolf transformation, either allies or enemies, in so many hours. I would love to see 10 werewolves casting mass fear etc in a mass pvp, maybe boost WW or something? Also, please make it possible for a magicka based char to be a WW? Anyone can be an effective vamp, why not a WW?
The items you can buy with your alliance points SUCK. Why spend 650k a.p. to buy an epic armor vr10 which costs like 10k gold? The a.p. exclusive sets are for r1 or r6, and they are not good enough. So wtf should we do with our a.p.? I always buy siege equipment, repair kits, forward camps but I hardly spend 20% of my a.p. on those.

People have come to a point, they say "Buy the ring, it's worth the a.p." So the epic ring (costs 650k a.p.) gives you 5 more health points than the green one. But your HP will probably be overcharged, so you will take like 2 points. So, believe it or not, 650.000 alliance points will buy you 2 more hp and that's THE BEST you can do with them. I have seen people selling those 650k ap items for 25k gold and noone even buys them. A hardcore PvPer will probably make around 70k alliance points per day. Do the math. The alliance points you need a day full of pvp to get, can hardly be sold for 3k gold. For those 70k ap, you will also get ~30 boxes. ~15% of the boxes have a set item. So let's say you get four r10 set items per day, at rank 10 thats 4 x 5k = 20k gold.
Your boxes, for a day of HARDCORE pvp, cost 20k gold and your alliance points cost 3k gold. That's 7 to 1. That's making the alliance points USELESS. It is the first time I see a game with a "second currency" so useless as in ESO. I felt like ZOS is trolling me when I saw that you can buy siege equipment with normal gold as well. Like, the devs telling you "here, spend gold and save your valuable alliance points for our cool items!"

PVE
Not challenging. There is not one area that can actually challenge a group of 4 vr10s. A nightblade tank can apparently make the bosses just auto attack until they die, without using ONE aoe ability on the group or something. Killing a level 15 skeleton was harder than killing bogdan in elden hollow with a NB tank. Going invisible when the boss is on you just makes it go all lazy, and do nothing. Let's say you don't want to use this exploit and after waiting 10 minutes to find a group, you get that NB as a tank in your group. Now what? The dungeon will be the most boring thing you have ever done.

Banished Cells? Don't get me started. All bosses are bugged. Darkshade? Thanks for the purple jewels with 1 stat on - Automaton Gems or w/e their name. That, if u don't die from the previous boss and the whole dungeon resets. Fungal? Challenging, if Mephalla's Spawn (that idiotic spider) decides to actually pull a player in her cave. I wish we had 6 vet dungeons like Fungal though. That's what all vet dungeons should be like.

Anchors : I cleared every anchor in every 1-5 zone with a group of 8 rank 1-3 players. Apparently, a group of 3 imperial archers (random enemies) is more challenging than a daedric invasion. I also solo'd a ~45 level anchor as a vr10. Three rank 10 BEES will kill you in no time though. And you better not piss off rank 10 mudcrabs / guars. They hit harder than a lower level Watcher / Harvester.

How hard would it be to design dungeons with adjustable level of difficulty with different rewards for each? The "Wayrest Sewers" speed achievement comes after finishing the dungeon in less than 20 minutes. I have finished it in nine minutes, only to get a grand soul gem. THREE TIMES IN A ROW. Now I don't expect 2 epic drops per run, but a reward for doing it so fast would be nice. Or, even better, an option to run a hardcore version of a dungeon if you complete it in less than X minutes. That would add so much to the pve part of the game, at least for me.

For VRs : Completing a solo dungeon will give you the xp you would take after killing XXX enemies. It makes killing anything other than the boss pointless. That stupid troll at the entrance of the dungeon isn't worth your 20 seconds. Run past it, take 4-5 more enemies with you, die, res on spot, reach the boss as a ghost, kill it, take the shard, port out. Is that what we are meant to do? Because most people are doing that.

The game has hundreds of books. SO much lore. I don't know how many persons / hours it took to create all this lore around the game. Other developers would kill to have this story and develop a game around it. Why not use it to it's full potential? I mean SPOILER for non veteran players you kill Molag Bal and after that, what? Is it a different game now? Where are all those evil daedric princes from Oblivion after you hit vr1? Sometimes, I almost forget I am playing Elder Scrolls. All those sieges, generic solo dungeons etc, do that for enough time and you will be thinking you are playing Lineage 3 or the new DaoC.

I want a bound on pickup - legendary (YEAH, GOLD) necklace named "Azura's Star" with 0.2% chance to drop in a veteran dungeon. I want it to be part of the "Daedric Princes 5 Parts Set" along with "Mehrune's Razor" and other daedric artifacts which would give you +15% weapon and spell critical chance, or something UNIQUE. Not a fkin Witchdrinker / Garron's staff or w/e purple trash I will deconstruct the moment I am done with the dungeon. Because the purple sets currently available are not good enough - light armor set is good but still doesn't have traits.

Enough with the purple drops - candidates to become grain solvents. Give us a real reason to re-run the dungeons. That, along with x2 experience for completing it, would solve so many problems for the game you can't even imagine. People would find a way to level up without doing 5 thousand quests and hate / leave the game.

Crafting / Gear
Many people still use warlock's set at rank 10. Why? Because most set bonuses are totally useless, I don't even understand why they exist. "Pendant of the storm knight" or whatever. Part of the storm knight's set, which gives 1250 SHOCK RESISTANCE! Who wouldn't want that bonus, right? No words can describe how useful it can be! "X of the useless X" - when attacked with hp below 20% - GAIN 5% MAGICKA! This effect can only happen once every 780 minutes because it's too good to be true!

The sets we will be able to craft after researching 8 traits also seem useless. I would expect something 10x better than those bonuses for a research that takes 25 days (+25 for the whole set = 50days), ZoS. Example :
Oblivion's Foe : 3 Items - Adds 13 Magicka Recovery // 5 Items - Recover two soul gems when resurrecting a fallen ally. 60 minute cooldown. Seriously? This is an endgame set bonus?
Eyes of Mara : 3 Items - Adds 80 Spell Resistance. (LOL) // 5 Items - Reduce the Magicka cost of ability by 3% when wielding a Restoration Staff. (Same thing as the seducer's set, but in this case you HAVE to use a resto staff.. WTF)

There are no rank 10 food / pots. With the softcaps taking all the fun away, even 100more hp/mp points would be nice to have. Potions crit effect lasts for like 10sec. Use it, if u have some lag in Cyro or something or swap weapon - we all know how fast weapon swap can (not) be - the effect is over.
Potions are useless @ rank 10. I was thinking that just one quickslot for all those items can be tricky, but now I see that a 400HP potion if you have 3K hp isn't really helpful. Could we please have higher quality potions? Or will this be the first MMO in which potions have no effect at all? 400 hp instant heal and some more over time won't do any good when a rank 10 non elite enemy can hit you for 1.5K damage. I have ~2.7K HP and a NON elite necromancer killed me from 100% hp the other day. 2.850 fire damage on my poor vampire.

In many cases, a crafted glyph for rank 6-8 has exactly the same stats on it as the 8-10 one. Also, enchanters can't craft "Monumental" enchants, splendid is the last one they can craft.

A month after launch, many crafted sets still don't give you the bonus they are supposed to. I don't care much, but for a level 40 player who spent time and maybe 50% of their gold to craft a specific set only to find out that "SURPRISE! IT'S NOT WORKING, FOOL!" , a warning on the tooltip would be nice. Something like "Not working yet" - If you can't just fix it asap.

I have traded / grouped with various people in the game, only to find out days later by accident that some of them are in my guild! Kill a player in a mass PvP and you won't even know who you killed. Maybe it was the guy who killed you earlier. Maybe it was the reddit mod who pissed you off! (j/k). I understand it would break immersion to show the name of a player right above the char and not up there on our screen, but something needs to be done.
Guilds don't mean much in ESO in most cases, but they should be a vital part of any MMO. After the leveling and trading phase is over for most people, I would expect a different approach on the matter. One guild, 200 members, A GUILD TAG, that's it. Why force us to join 5 guilds just because you decided that you don't want an auction house and want to replace it this way?

If you actually read all this, you must be thinking I hate the game. I don't. I love the game, I just want to make sure ZoS keep in mind that all those need to be reworked asap. There are more, just posting what I think is most important for the game to remain fun.
I see people replying "What did you expect after rushing to rank 10?" Did I say anything about the lack of endgame content? Everything mentioned above would still be the same if I was rank 1 - it wouldn't matter.
 

Tuco

I got Tuco'd!
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Blackwulf come play AA with us, ESO will never be fixed!

Tonight 30 of us entered in an all call. We choose our home campaign, AB because we only held 3 keeps and the enemy had an emperor who was on the field.

We initially struct toward Red who had the current emperor. We took back Alessia and pushed passed Sejanus to BRK. We ground the enemy down there by first capturing the supply camps and then stormed the postern door. After Alessia the enemy fortified Arrius but we skipped to Chalman instead, which was an easy victory. After Chalman the enemy had only one keep left to hold on to the emperorship, Aleswell. We captured Arrius and completely cut them off, then went to Aleswell to finish the job. Aleswell was an amazing battle but due to their supply lines cut off they eventually exhausted.

ZfxQeyc.jpg


We then pushed blue who had three scrolls. We took Glademist and Ft. Ash (Grats to Silverfawx on getting emp). We then pushed and took Warden getting our first scroll of the night. After this we marched to Ni-Mohk and captured its scroll. Our next target, Rayles was heavily defended by blue's entire force but we fought through it.

IK85MbU.jpg


After Rayles, blue had one more objective, the scroll of Alma Ruma which we captured and took home.

All in all we had a great night. We started off owning 3 keeps, 3 scrolls and an enemy having emperor and ended the night with all 6 scrolls, 12 keeps and having crowning a new emperor.
 

sakkath

Trakanon Raider
1,739
1,073
All in all we had a great night. We started off owning 3 keeps, 3 scrolls and an enemy having emperor and ended the night with all 6 scrolls, 12 keeps and having crowning a new emperor.
Christ there's been a lot of swings in power in the last 24 hours. When I logged off last night (~14 hours ago) AD had every scroll, all bar on keep, and Silverfawx was complaining that he wouldn't be able to get emp because blue/red didnt have the power to retake the emp forts so we could recapture them. Somehow they managed to lose everything in time for you guys to claim it all back.
 

RobXIII

Urinal Cake Consumption King
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""Buy the ring, it's worth the a.p." So the epic ring (costs 650k a.p.) gives you 5 more health points than the green one. But your HP will probably be overcharged, so you will take like 2 points. So, believe it or not, 650.000 alliance points will buy you 2 more hp and that's THE BEST you can do with them"

I was already done with the game, but I did peek at the AP items you can buy when higher rank, and they were just so expensive *and* underwhelming, with shitty set bonuses. Nothing to strive for.
 

Nybling_sl

shitlord
13
0
""Buy the ring, it's worth the a.p." So the epic ring (costs 650k a.p.) gives you 5 more health points than the green one. But your HP will probably be overcharged, so you will take like 2 points. So, believe it or not, 650.000 alliance points will buy you 2 more hp and that's THE BEST you can do with them"

I was already done with the game, but I did peek at the AP items you can buy when higher rank, and they were just so expensive *and* underwhelming, with shitty set bonuses. Nothing to strive for.
Shitty and underwhelming describes itemization in ESO perfectly.
 

Tuco

I got Tuco'd!
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I'm actually glad that ap can only be usefully spent on siege. Forward camps for everyo..... Oh its bugged nm.
 

bayr_sl

shitlord
715
0
I've never understood the appeal of realm vs realm pvp. I understand conceptually being part of a huge battle is a cool idea, but in practice it's always been the most awful, boring shit. I mean Tarren Mill was the best battle in an MMO I've personally been apart of, the more you design your game for it the more awful it seems to be.
 

Muligan

Trakanon Raider
3,231
901
So, what is the best PvP game out right now? I've played them all, except ESO, because they all end up leaving me pretty unfulfilled. Getting the itch now the H1Z1 could be postponed and was my hopeful PvP fix.
 

Rescorla_sl

shitlord
2,233
0
PVP in MMOs just sucks guys. Face it. Go play a real PVP game and stop bitching.
Partially agree. IMO one of the worst design decisions a MMO can make is to combine PVE and PVP into one game. It creates a permanent balance problem where abilities are buffed/nerfed because of a problem with it in PVP that screws with class balance in PVE and vice versa.

EQ1 was designed from the ground up to be a PVE game. GW1 was designed from the ground up to be a PVP game. In those two games, every buff/nerf only affected that one gameplay aspect the game was designed around. While I enjoyed playing WoW, IMO combining PVE with instanced PVP is one of the worst legacies that game created.
 

Abefroman

Naxxramas 1.0 Raider
12,594
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I've never understood the appeal of realm vs realm pvp. I understand conceptually being part of a huge battle is a cool idea, but in practice it's always been the most awful, boring shit. I mean Tarren Mill was the best battle in an MMO I've personally been apart of, the more you design your game for it the more awful it seems to be.
I guess it depends if you are with a good guild or not. Seiging in GW2 was some of the most fun times I have ever had in a game with PRX. It still had it's flaws with keeps flipping fast and no real long term ownership of keeps. ESO imo has been horrible. Easy mode seige, no supply, keeps flipping at a pace even faster then GW2 and of course all the other thing like no nameplates.

It's a good concept but you need to give people ownership of something for long term success.