The Elder Scrolls Online

The problem with that very common method of client-side location manipulation is that it depends on there being no latency. Yeah, they could probably put it in, but the more tight their tolerance is the more people are inappropriately banned. And given that there's a glut of people who can't get unbanned they're already in trouble with it as it is.

I've been asked to meet with ZOS on Wednesday and talk about what we'd like changed in ESO. We (PRX) came up with a bunch of changes and I compiled them into this list. Please review it and let me know if you have anything you'd want added. Note that I'm focusing on Cyrodiil centric items and don't really care about PVE, crafting etc.

Here's the result of the feedback collected from PRX. We have a long history of being one of the top guilds in PvP and have made a tremendous effort to make Cyrodiil work for us. This information comes from a guild of over 400 people dedicated to PvP. The reasons listed below are the key reasaons why we went from 100+ active members ingame every night to ~20 in a month. This level of attrition for us is unprecedented and disappointing.

I've grouped our feedback into three categories, 1: No community in Cyrodiil or meaning in PVP, 2: Bugs, 3: Misc issues

1. From our perspective the biggest issue why Cyrodiil is experiencing massive attrition is ESO lacks basic tools for communities within it. Virtually all guilds that started playing this at release have either moved on or fight in a segregated way because there's no reason to be part of a coheisve guild in ESO. At an individual level a few players who put in 40+ hours a week gain some level of recognition on a campaign but it's generally rare and short lived. In addition players are poorly rewarded for PvP.

Here are a list of changes that would help rectify this:

. Put nameplates back in.
I don't know which groups I'm fighting. They don't know they're fighting me. The pride we feel when we take a keep is numbed by the fact that only we know we've done it. When we get hit by an organized force we don't know who they are. I've had random people running alongside us, taking territory and kicking ass, and then when we announce what PRX is doing in zone chat they ask, "Who is PRX?". As someone who leads raids regularly this is especially frustrating as if I give an order to move away from a DK spamming talons and shield block and one player stays in melee range I literally have to disregard my own order and get close enough to figure out who it is.

. Cloaks/Tabards/armor dyes
Nameplates were taken out during beta and I don't know if the lead designers at Zenimax Online Studios have faced the reality of their failing game enough to realize the mistake yet. A poor substitute to nameplates would be guild emblems on tabards and cloaks. This has been talked about before and it would help but it is a weak substitute, especially now that organized PvP in Cyrodiil is made up of individuals and not guilds. This would also dramatically help personalization of characters because currently everyone looks the same.

. Add Guild Recognition
If we control a keep our logo should be flown on its walls. GW2 has this, AA has an even better version. There's not much value in defending a keep we hold, we should get some benefit besides an auction house system nobody uses and should never have been attached to a guild keep, ex: buffs, passive income. There should be a scoreboard for guild contribution to Cyrodiil.

. Add campaign pride
Currently there is zero campaign pride. We've effectively won two campaigns and have no pride or reason to celebrate. There are many ways to do this and GW2 paved the way. You could drastically add campaign pride and meaning to PvP by shortening the campaign length, add an ELO matchup system like GW2 had and reduce the ability to switch campaigns. However it may be too late for this to matter as ESO's population can really only support 2 or 3 campaigns. I heard that ZOS is considering two week campaigns. This is better but is still too long.

Another option is to make the campaigns last 5 days and after a campaign is won give unrestricted access to Cyrodiil to the winning side for three days, while offering additional resource nodes, high value NPCs etc in Cyrodiil. This offers hardcore PvP groups a break and gives the winners something tangible to celebrate.

. Leveling in PvP is currently some 10-20% as fast as leveling outside PvP. I heard that XP for player kills is going to be doubled. This is not enough. If I'm not a VR10 anytime I spend doing what I want and fight in Cyrodiil is slowing down my character's progress.

. The PvP Gear Rewards you buy with alliance points are useless. Additionally the currency used to make choices about which siege weapons to use should not be shared with buying gear, the player should not be forced to make a choice between helping win the battle and helping improve thier character. Change the system to mail the player new gear when they achieve a new PvP rank. This gear should be BiS for PvP. The system of sending them vendor trash in the mail is well intentioned but you may as well just send us gold instead.

. There is very little pressure in the campaign to revert to a neutral position. This can be done by buffing the NPCs of objectives held in home territory, increasing the respawn time of players respawning in areas in enemy territory, giving players a buff when they are fighting in their home territory, giving a player a buff when they are heavily outnumbered and any number of other options.

. Reduce the number of campaigns. Currently ESO NA can only support 3 campaigns. At all times except US primetime Cyrodiil has one active campaign.

. It is currently too easy to capture a keep. The guards are too weak, the health of the walls is too low and defending players aren't given enough warning or ability to stop a siege. We are able to capture a keep within four minutes of the initial attack to capturing it. Defending players have no real way to repair the walls/door or defeat the siege weapons outside. A key feature not brought from GW2 was the notion of supply which was stored in a keep and could be used to repair the doors (even under attack) and rapidly build defensive siege weapons. This supply also limited an attacking group from being able to deploy a huge number of siege weapons as those siege weapons had a cost. Currently the cost to siege a keep is negligible.

. It's currently too easy and fast to rejoin the fight after being defeated. Sure it sucks having to wait or run across an empty map, but when I kill the same players over and over in a short time period it shows there is no reason to win a fight as it only gains me a short reprieve from the enemy.

2. Bugs

. The biggest bug in the game is the weapon swaping during any kind of lag. If I press the button to swap weapons and then press an ability hotkey (ex: the 1 button) the ability used should be on the hotbar I swapped to regardless of the condition of the server. This bug is especially infrurating giving the consolitis-bred 5 ability limitation in the game. Without being able to weapon swap effectively I feel extremely limited in the number of abilities I can use.

. Load screens are still a problem. I get stuck in infinite loading screens indefinitely. Many key players in our guild couldn't even play the game for weeks because they'd spend an entire night staring at loading screens indefinitely. There is also no indication as to what is transpiring to allow players to know to alt-f4 and try again.

. Disconnects and intense lag still happen when inviting people (even when they are in the zone). I've had half my raid disconnect because a new person joined our group.

. Lag in general is still a problem. Given that there is only one really active campaign in the game I expected the servers to handle the load better. This problem is intensified because the animation in this game requires a response from the server to play an animation. This causes the player to feel very disconnected from their character during any moments of lag.

. Passives stop working at death and the work around is to relog, this is exacerbated by the loading screen bugs.

. Siege weapons bug out occassionally and become unusable after placement. This is a nightmare when there are key locations for siege placement and you have to wait until they natural expire before being able to place new ones.

. After spending time in Cyrodiil we frequently lose our compass and ability to use a keep's doors.

. The stuck in combat bug is very annoying. I'll be stuck in combat several minutes after leaving an engagement.

. Forward camps are currently very buggy and almost all of them will enter a bugged state where players can't res at them and players can't place another camp down. That being said they should not be in the game or should be more costly than they are now. If they are fixed the PvP will become much worse where it'll be trivial to mass res people close to the fight.

. Bank stacking is very poor in this game. When two players put in the same item it should stack in the bank.

3. Misc Improvements:
. Duels in this game would really add a new dimension of PvP.

. Add contested zones to the game. Same as previous zones but with all three factions in them and engaging in open PvP.

. Improve the Itemization, due to the softcap system there are no interesting item choices to be made at the endgame. Remove or change the softcap system and add more interesting gear choices.

. The game is very imbalanced. Those builds that take advantage of ultimate reducing items are several times more powerful than those that don't. A shieldblocking DK with talons and banner is like a mini-boss we have to focus our entire raid on to kill. Additionally non-VR characters are far too weak. A level 10 shouldn't be on equal footing with a VR10, but it should be much closer.

. Remove all AE damage/debuff caps. AE abilities are the keys used to bust up zergs. Zergs are not only bad gameplay but also the player-driven source of lag in Cyrodiil.

. The quickbar is another symptom of consolitis and it's pretty annoying. Having to change which potions you have bound or which siege weapons you want to use is very frustrating, especially given that you can't do it in combat.

. Score accrual should be based on number of current active players in a campaign. If a faction has a large number of off-peak players who can easily cap a map that shouldn't effectively win the campaign for them.

. Everything in this game should reward the player with XP. Harvesting, crafting etc. ESO attempted to do this but was not complete.

. Werewolf form is too weak. I can't think of a single time I've seen a werewolf in Cyrodiil.

. Add UI tools to individually target raid/group leaders and focus-fire targets

. Add a simple zone shout along the lines of scroll announcements when keeps are taken/claimed.

. Change the API to allow us to properly view Buffs and Debuffs

Abefroman_sl said:

Wasn't almost that entire list complained about on the beta boards for a long time? Now they want to listen, guess they aren't as smart as they thought they were. They really had a chance to have something special here and sabatoged it.

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Yup. PRX was one of the first groups testing ESO and we watched the game get progressively worse as time went on.

sakkath_sl said:

Tuco my #1 complaint about the game is the issue which caused most of my friends to stop playing -> questing together in a group in this game is a simply awful experience
1) they need to change object you click on for quest objectives to have no cooldown - too often one person in a group clicks something and then people have to stand around waiting for it to respawn
2) sharing a quest should share it at the position you're on - sharing a quest im doing only to have my groupmate realise he isn't on the same step as me and has to run across zone to click something next to the original quest giver sucks
3) if something you do in a quest changes the world it shouldn't change it for people in your group who aren't on the same step. the final straw for my main grouping buddy was a quest i progressed which caused the npc to run away. My friend came along 20 seconds later to do the same step and couldn't find the npc and spent 15 minutes hunting around for him since the quest markers still pointed to the place the NPC was no longer at. After finally locating the NPC he completed the quest, logged out, and cancelled his sub.
4) there are still a lot of quest scripting bugs. An example, a friend & I zoned into a little room and had to click a skeleton to get an update. I clicked it while he was still zoning in. Once he finished zoning in he didn't have the update, but couldn't click the skeleton. He ended up having to abandon the quest and do the whole thing again.

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Yeah I can't imagine how frustrating it must have been to try to do quests as a group. This game is the most group and guild unfriendly MMO I've ever played.