barney2525 wrote: »

I think it is wonderful that we have such wise and understanding players around, who will share their Dictates and Orders to the world on what Everyone else Must do to live up to their personal expectations.

In spite of the sarcasm, this is entitled BS. If you want to play as a part of a team then you should expect to need to do your fair share of the work. Not saying you need to pull 100k+ dps but if you could manage 50k? 30k? Things would go way more smoothly.

twisttop138 wrote: »

allochthons wrote: »

just begging for pitchforks.

Begging for Pitchforks is my new Rage Against the Machine cover band.

While I think the TP to gold conversion is the best short term solution, and thank you for that, I think all of Code's post on page Two is excellent. There is a ton of confusion around Tome Points, re-rolling, and the whole system. I see it in guild chat, in zone chat, and on discord.

Also, there are a significant number of people who play ESO who have never encountered a battle pass in a different game. That's neither good nor bad, but I think there's a fair bit of assumption about what players will Just Understand, and that is a big source of a lot of the confusion. Not all of it, but some.
Please run the written articles, plus the planned changes, past someone who has not used a battle pass before.

The confusion is very real. I try to be the guilds information officer and I was very surprised the amount of members in that guild and my other ones that just had no idea what was going on. Never experienced a battle pass. Had no idea things changed even. People that thought the game was closing after the removal of daily log ins and endeavors. The lack of solid in game information has been hard for many people. I was very surprised to learn that there is a not insignificant number of players that do not want to go outside the game for information. That don't think you should have to. Zos needs to do better, not just on that but a lot of tomes roll out was a mess. Yes they're fixing the egregious stuff but it shouldn't have gotten so bad.

I agree with all this.

There's definitely an underlying assumption that everyone has enough experience with battle/season passes (and the similarities and differences between the two) that ZOS just needs to specify how theirs are different to some generalised typical model, but that only works for those players who genuinely are familiar with several passes from other games.

It shouldn't be a surprise that a lot of ESO players aren't familiar with it. ZOS have said many times they know this game attracted a lot of TES players who hadn't played an MMO before and they say they design the game with both them and the MMO audience in mind, but it often seems like it's one or the other, and this is one of those times. All the marketing and information around this system is clearly aimed at people who have played lots of online games with a seasonal, pass-based model before, and ignoring those who have not, or have had very little to do with it.

I've sort-of encountered season passes before, but only in Among Us and my involvement with that system is limited to being told at the end of a match I have some points, so I go to a menu which looks like a maze and click on cosmetic items until I run out of points. I've never learned how it works and certainly never looked into buying one.

My main frame of reference is the Wizard's Vault in Guild Wars 2, which is explicitly not a battle/season pass but is similar to one (I think the main difference is there is no paid version) but that's also quite different from Tamriel Tomes. For one thing you can just buy the rewards you want once you have enough points to pay the individual item's cost, there's no secondary, higher cost just to buy things from that page/tier/whatever.

That's the main thing putting me off engaging with this system right now - the page unlock costs make the free items far more time consuming to get than they appeared to be at first. I have 1,903 points, more than enough to buy all the free items from page 5 but apparently I need another 1,327 points just to get permission to do that.

To get access to Bonus Page 2 I have to earn 15,230 points (I'm currently on page 4, I can't check what it was at the start) but buying every single item in the free version of the tome will only cost me another 11,170 points. Meaning I'll have 4,060 left over. And that's assuming I buy everything, including the items I don't want and cannot use.

I know I can turn the excess points into a trivial amount of gold, but the problem for me is having to earn 4,060 useless points, meaning I'll need to waste time completing several weekly challenges I could otherwise skip, to get points I cannot spend and cannot save, just because the pages have an arbitrary unlock cost which seems to have been based on the assumption that everyone would happily throw money at you for the junk in the paid version.

I did not buy, because I never do. It has nothing to do with my hope or lack of hope for the game. I just don't buy crowns.You really miss that option in the poll as an opposite for "I always do".

twisttop138 wrote: »

There should 100% be challenging content for people that can't or don't want to do vet. It's the newest dlc dungeon and we're in the era where dps are doing crazy numbers.

Um. You realize that the power creep isn't free, right? ZOS didn't press a button to magically make everyone's attacks do X% more damage. You have to do things to claim that power. You need to subclass. You need to update your gear. You need to make sure you have a proper build. If you don't do any of that, if you are still running a pureclass mag NB with False God and Mother's Sorrow like it's 2019, then you will still be doing damage like it's 2019 and there's been absolutely zero power creep for you (actually, there's been a slight power nerf).

The people who are "doing crazy numbers" are keeping up with the meta. They're reading build guides, updating their gear, playing around with subclassing, and... wait, are you sure that these are people who "can't or don't want to do vet"? Because people who do that don't belong in normals in the first place.

You have no idea what kind of people normal content is actually supposed to target. They're people who play casually, who don't update their builds, and who put skills on because it sounds nice, not because they read a guide. Or maybe they're experienced players, but leveling a character with a RND, so that character doesn't yet have a proper gear and skills. Or maybe a new player who hasn't collected the gear and is still wearing a mish-mash of stuff that they found and who doesn't know that this specific dungeon is newer and harder than the others they've seen.

If people want a challenge, that's why vet and vet HM exists.

For the record, I'm the kind of person who only does DLC dungeons on vet HM. Normals (and even regular vet) are not intended for me, so why would I want to have normal difficulty jacked out of the comfort zone for people that normals are actually intended for?

twisttop138 wrote: »

You can make the argument that it's harder than other dlc dungeons, sure. Agreed. But there is no reason to nerf it.

I dunno, "out of line with expectations" sounds like a good reason to me.



(I do want to clarify, though, that I don't completely fault ZOS for the poor balance of normal Naj. The kinds of people who test new DLC dungeons on PTS are probably not the kind of people who the normal mode is intended for, so I feel like normal doesn't get much testing and feedback as a result. Personally, all the feedback that I gave during PTS was for vet HM and I never set foot in normal until well after the live release.)