Overland Content Feedback Thread

KoIIegoIas

[

spartaxoxo wrote: »

I totally hear you on the difficulty thing. I like things to be more difficult. But you know, the data doesn’t lie. And we have never been more successful than we are today. And a lot of that has to do with just how much freedom players have to go and experience story.

People just did not like the extra difficulty in the story stuff. I get that there’s a lot of people that do like the harder difficulty, but a HUGE portion of our player base just wants to do story, and they don’t want to have to struggle with difficult things.”

That's a difficult one because difficulty is definitely subjective. We have millions of players that play The Elder Scrolls Online, and a large portion of them find the game hard and the Overland content challenging, especially as a new player when you don't have gold, all the gear, and Champion Points. Ultimately it comes down to, if we make the game harder, what are the incentives for players to play it at the harder level? That opens up a whole huge can of worms. I also look back and remember we had harder Overland content. We had Cadwell Silver, we had Cadwell Gold, and players really didn't like it. It was too hard for them, and when we did One Tamriel, we ripped all that out based on player feedback. Like, nobody did it. So it's a challenging subject and a difficult question to answer. All I can really say is we're definitely looking at it, but we don't have any major changes planned for the Overland difficulty."

-Rich Lambert

First of all. Where did you find that Interview where he answered like the first two of your quotes? I just can find the interview with one answer refering to overland of Rich lambert from https://wccftech.com/the-elder-scrolls-online-high-isle-preview-qa-fsr-1-0-support-card-game-and-much-more/ wich is the third of your quotes.

a link wouldn be great.

Okay about the first quote:

Their data showed how many people played cadwells and how many played own faction overland. Its a display of people disliked cadwells because not many played it but enjoyed own faction difficutly. In the forums nobody complained about it also. And a ton did play own faction difficulty without Complains like rich said.

about second quote:

The extra difficulty refers to cadwells silver+gold after own faction. Because cadwells was an extra difficulty to own faction overland. But since the majority enjoyed Own faction difficulty, there is no point quote text messages about people disliked cadwells silver + Gold.

About third quote:

Im sure everyone on the planet read that answer already, since you qoute it everytime to have to say something. But still. People only complained in forums about cadwells silver and gold. thats one fact and refering to the data its the same, because less people played cadwells silver and gold. But its the total opposite with Own faction content.

This makes me wonder if you guys even played ESO before one tamriel, because than you wouldn't ignore and talk more about the fact that Own Faction Overland (before you had Acces to cadwells silver + gold)had a decent difficulty(wasnt hard as cadwells silver and gold, but not that extremly easy like the current shitshow) people enjoyed and played without any complains.

Send me a link please of interview of the first two quotes. thanks in advance

Elsonso

KoIIegoIas wrote: »

[

spartaxoxo wrote: »

I totally hear you on the difficulty thing. I like things to be more difficult. But you know, the data doesn’t lie. And we have never been more successful than we are today. And a lot of that has to do with just how much freedom players have to go and experience story.

People just did not like the extra difficulty in the story stuff. I get that there’s a lot of people that do like the harder difficulty, but a HUGE portion of our player base just wants to do story, and they don’t want to have to struggle with difficult things.”

That's a difficult one because difficulty is definitely subjective. We have millions of players that play The Elder Scrolls Online, and a large portion of them find the game hard and the Overland content challenging, especially as a new player when you don't have gold, all the gear, and Champion Points. Ultimately it comes down to, if we make the game harder, what are the incentives for players to play it at the harder level? That opens up a whole huge can of worms. I also look back and remember we had harder Overland content. We had Cadwell Silver, we had Cadwell Gold, and players really didn't like it. It was too hard for them, and when we did One Tamriel, we ripped all that out based on player feedback. Like, nobody did it. So it's a challenging subject and a difficult question to answer. All I can really say is we're definitely looking at it, but we don't have any major changes planned for the Overland difficulty."

-Rich Lambert

First of all. Where did you find that Interview where he answered like the first two of your quotes? I just can find the interview with one answer refering to overland of Rich lambert from https://wccftech.com/the-elder-scrolls-online-high-isle-preview-qa-fsr-1-0-support-card-game-and-much-more/ wich is the third of your quotes.

a link wouldn be great.

Okay about the first quote:

Their data showed how many people played cadwells and how many played own faction overland. Its a display of people disliked cadwells because not many played it but enjoyed own faction difficutly. In the forums nobody complained about it also. And a ton did play own faction difficulty without Complains like rich said.

about second quote:

The extra difficulty refers to cadwells silver+gold after own faction. Because cadwells was an extra difficulty to own faction overland. But since the majority enjoyed Own faction difficulty, there is no point quote text messages about people disliked cadwells silver + Gold.

About third quote:

Im sure everyone on the planet read that answer already, since you qoute it everytime to have to say something. But still. People only complained in forums about cadwells silver and gold. thats one fact and refering to the data its the same, because less people played cadwells silver and gold. But its the total opposite with Own faction content.

This makes me wonder if you guys even played ESO before one tamriel, because than you wouldn't ignore and talk more about the fact that Own Faction Overland (before you had Acces to cadwells silver + gold)had a decent difficulty(wasnt hard as cadwells silver and gold, but not that extremly easy like the current shitshow) people enjoyed and played without any complains.

Send me a link please of interview of the first two quotes. thanks in advance

Lambert said this repeatedly on his Twitch streams last year, and that might be where those quotes come from. Thanks to ... events ... that happened, I am not sure that the original quotes can be linked to. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The interesting thing about the way he answered is that it takes into consideration all of the rebuttals that I have seen presented. These rebuttals were asked about on the Twitch stream, and a version of the answer was repeated in response to that specific question. It seemed clear to me that he understood the question, and the way it had been changed in order to challenge his previous answers. Over time, it became obvious, as a viewer, that the players are missing a large slice of the big picture in how we think about overland difficulty and what prompted them to move to One Tamriel, and step back from Adventure Zones.

Lysette

There were a couple of issues before One Tamriel

1. friends of different levels had a hard time to play together and often they had to create an alt just to play with friends.
2. one could easily outlevel a zone before even a significant amount of quests were done, which made the rest of the quests even more trivial than they are now. And if one did those, the next zone was outleveled even sooner.
3. the game felt linear and zones were level-gated, there was no freedom where to go
4. just 1/3 of the game was accessible, one could not visit another faction area before having completed the own one.
5. Friends of different factions could not play together.

If the game would have stayed like that, I would have left the game - it was a cage, not an enjoyable game.

Aardappelboom

One Tamriel is definitely a good thing, (and I wasn't here before One Tamriel btw) but again this has nothing to do with difficulty in general, as @Lysette points out, other issues lay at the core of leveled zones, what players want is what every game offers: the ability to change difficulty on the fly as they see fit to either challenge themselves or make it easier to complete.

There's no real downsides to coupling optional difficulty scales to a debuff, hell, they could even buff players and make the game even easier if they want that...

Just saying, in my opinion, the whole pre-one-tamriel discussion is irrelevant, it's a different thing with different problems, same goes for Craglorn btw. Both forced a level of difficulty on players, essentially locking content for some people without any way to overcome the challenge, instead maybe for teaming up. Not everyone likes being stuck but those problems are solved, it's a different game now and it'd be a good thing if they looked at this from a different angle.

Lysette

I don't really know why ZOS is so against a difficulty slider solution - that worked very well in Oblivion and Skyrim, but that is as well why we all have different experiences with those games - for me it was never hard, because I preferred to play on normal, for others these single player games were hard, because they played on highest difficulty - we all have different experiences with TES games - and of course mods made it even more individual.

I see a problem though, when players with different difficulty setting are playing together in the same instance. Think of how you would feel, when doing a quest boss with harder difficulty - and a normal difficulty player comes in and kills your boss with a few strikes - then you would experience what we casuals experience when you guys come in and kill all in an instant.

IMO both groups need to be separated in different instances - but if the mega server is scalable enough to do that, who knows. There might be technical issue, which hinder such an approach.

Lysette

The reason why I mentioned how ESO was before One Tamriel is this.

If someone says the difficulty was good before, then just because he skipped most of the quest content and moved on to the next zone as early as possible. If one stayed in the zone and did the other quests, they were laughably easy, one shooting everything, once one had outleveled the zone - and that happened before even half of the quests were done. So who says, it was good before, had skipped most of the quests or grinded somewhere bypassing the whole quest thing. For someone who did these quests, they were just in the beginning good, but then they became trivial.

Elsonso

Lysette wrote: »

I don't really know why ZOS is so against a difficulty slider solution - that worked very well in Oblivion and Skyrim, but that is as well why we all have different experiences with those games - for me it was never hard, because I preferred to play on normal, for others these single player games were hard, because they played on highest difficulty - we all have different experiences with TES games - and of course mods made it even more individual.

I can't link to the quote, but it seems to me this was asked on the Slashlurk stream. The answer, as I remember it... YMMV... is basically that they never designed the game world to have a variable difficulty, so all of that would have to be added in. The scaling they have right now is applied to the character, not the world. The mobs in the world are set at a fixed value that has been decided and entered in by a dev. Apparently, when they did One Tamriel, some Joe Shmoe had to go do all that manually. For the whole game. Which was much smaller back then.

The same applies to separate veteran zones. No dynamic scaling, so they double the game world and then update each mob for half of the game, or they add in dynamic scaling, double the game world, and set half the game to one difficulty and half the game to another.

So, my takeaway on all of this is that most, if not all, of the solutions that get presented in here are not actually easy for them to do. To get to the part where it is easy will take a lot of work, and that seems to be the inertia holding things back. It could take them months, or years, to add that stuff in before surprising us with "veteran overland" in some January presentation.

Lysette

Elsonso wrote: »

Lysette wrote: »

I don't really know why ZOS is so against a difficulty slider solution - that worked very well in Oblivion and Skyrim, but that is as well why we all have different experiences with those games - for me it was never hard, because I preferred to play on normal, for others these single player games were hard, because they played on highest difficulty - we all have different experiences with TES games - and of course mods made it even more individual.

I can't link to the quote, but it seems to me this was asked on the Slashlurk stream. The answer, as I remember it... YMMV... is basically that they never designed the game world to have a variable difficulty, so all of that would have to be added in. The scaling they have right now is applied to the character, not the world. The mobs in the world are set at a fixed value that has been decided and entered in by a dev. Apparently, when they did One Tamriel, some Joe Shmoe had to go do all that manually. For the whole game. Which was much smaller back then.

The same applies to separate veteran zones. No dynamic scaling, so they double the game world and then update each mob for half of the game, or they add in dynamic scaling, double the game world, and set half the game to one difficulty and half the game to another.

So, my takeaway on all of this is that most, if not all, of the solutions that get presented in here are not actually easy for them to do. To get to the part where it is easy will take a lot of work, and that seems to be the inertia holding things back. It could take them months, or years, to add that stuff in before surprising us with "veteran overland" in some January presentation.

Ah I see, we assumed it to be done by templates - if that is static, that is a mess to deal with.

Aardappelboom

Elsonso wrote: »

Lysette wrote: »

I don't really know why ZOS is so against a difficulty slider solution - that worked very well in Oblivion and Skyrim, but that is as well why we all have different experiences with those games - for me it was never hard, because I preferred to play on normal, for others these single player games were hard, because they played on highest difficulty - we all have different experiences with TES games - and of course mods made it even more individual.

I can't link to the quote, but it seems to me this was asked on the Slashlurk stream. The answer, as I remember it... YMMV... is basically that they never designed the game world to have a variable difficulty, so all of that would have to be added in. The scaling they have right now is applied to the character, not the world. The mobs in the world are set at a fixed value that has been decided and entered in by a dev. Apparently, when they did One Tamriel, some Joe Shmoe had to go do all that manually. For the whole game. Which was much smaller back then.

The same applies to separate veteran zones. No dynamic scaling, so they double the game world and then update each mob for half of the game, or they add in dynamic scaling, double the game world, and set half the game to one difficulty and half the game to another.

So, my takeaway on all of this is that most, if not all, of the solutions that get presented in here are not actually easy for them to do. To get to the part where it is easy will take a lot of work, and that seems to be the inertia holding things back. It could take them months, or years, to add that stuff in before surprising us with "veteran overland" in some January presentation.

Debuffing oneself does not need the game world to change, that's why it's probably the best option, there's nothing stopping them from creating a PVE battle spirit with 20% decrease in damage and go from there, tweak it with a difficulty slider interface and maybe think about start disabeling or enabling based on where the player is, (bg vs dungeon vs overland, probably better to only allow it in overland)

This is not rocket science and this will not take years to develop.

Lysette wrote: »

I see a problem though, when players with different difficulty setting are playing together in the same instance. Think of how you would feel, when doing a quest boss with harder difficulty - and a normal difficulty player comes in and kills your boss with a few strikes - then you would experience what we casuals experience when you guys come in and kill all in an instant.

Good point but is this really a problem? It's still an MMORPG and this is happening right now already, so nothing will really change when, you debuff. When I equiped lvl 10 weapons and removed armor, cp, passives and attributes, I had a lot of interference from other players in a public dungeon, but that's just how the game is, it's online and you play with other people, it's kind of expected.

Your point did make me change my mind: it might not be such a good idea to allow a difficulty slider to buff players to make content easier, it should just be allowed to make it harder. One can change his mind right?

SilverBride

KoIIegoIas wrote: »

First of all. Where did you find that Interview where he answered like the first two of your quotes?

They were from Rich Lambert's Slashlurk stream. I previously posted links to this stream plus a written transcript on post #33 on page 2 of this thread. The Slashlurk link no longer works but a smaller portion of the stream that someone else captured still does. I also provided a written transcrit.

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1133028256?t=1h48m0s 1:48:00 through 1:51:11

It appears the full video is no longer available and may have been taken down, but the first part of the stream is avaialble here:

https://clips.twitch.tv/BovineLovelyGrassTakeNRG-IGkmH8s1XHeD9P2u

Click SPOILER for a written transcript of the portion of the stream discussing this.

Can we get a vet mode for delves and quests? Uh, so we had that ... at launch. It was called Cadwell's Silver and Cadwell's Gold. Nobody did it and everybody hated it, so we took it out. We put the challenge into World Bosses, and into solo Arenas, and into Dungeons and Trials.

[Speaks about skyshards then returns to the topic.]

People didn't do it because they had to go through their own alliance first? That's not actually true. A ton of people completed their own alliance storylines to get to silver and gold. A ton of people did. People just did not like the extra difficulty in the story stuff.

I get there’s a lot of people that do like the harder difficulty, but a HUGE portion of our player base just wants to do story, and they don’t want to have to struggle with difficult things. And so that was why we did what we did and said story is soloable and crit path will always be soloable and if you want the extra challenge you can go seek out other things to challenge you.

I totally hear you on the difficulty thing. I like things to be more difficult. But you know, the data doesn’t lie. And we have never been more successful than we are today. And a lot of that has to do with just how much freedom players have to go and experience story.

And yes, go look at Craglorn. There’s not a lot of people in Craglorn and that’s not super difficult but it’s more hard than the regular overland.

Would it be an option just to give people the choice? It is not as simple as just flip a switch and make things more difficult. There is a TON of work and then as Lucky mentioned earlier you have to also incentivize that. Like just making something more difficult for no reason, if you’re not going to get anything out of it why do it? The satisfaction's there sure but players are always going to do the thing that is the most efficient and is the least difficult thing for their time.

So, you know like I said, we went down that route. We built the game with difficulty in mind and 2/3rds of the game was never played by players so we changed it.

KoIIegoIas

Elsonso wrote: »

KoIIegoIas wrote: »

[

spartaxoxo wrote: »

I totally hear you on the difficulty thing. I like things to be more difficult. But you know, the data doesn’t lie. And we have never been more successful than we are today. And a lot of that has to do with just how much freedom players have to go and experience story.

People just did not like the extra difficulty in the story stuff. I get that there’s a lot of people that do like the harder difficulty, but a HUGE portion of our player base just wants to do story, and they don’t want to have to struggle with difficult things.”

That's a difficult one because difficulty is definitely subjective. We have millions of players that play The Elder Scrolls Online, and a large portion of them find the game hard and the Overland content challenging, especially as a new player when you don't have gold, all the gear, and Champion Points. Ultimately it comes down to, if we make the game harder, what are the incentives for players to play it at the harder level? That opens up a whole huge can of worms. I also look back and remember we had harder Overland content. We had Cadwell Silver, we had Cadwell Gold, and players really didn't like it. It was too hard for them, and when we did One Tamriel, we ripped all that out based on player feedback. Like, nobody did it. So it's a challenging subject and a difficult question to answer. All I can really say is we're definitely looking at it, but we don't have any major changes planned for the Overland difficulty."

-Rich Lambert

First of all. Where did you find that Interview where he answered like the first two of your quotes? I just can find the interview with one answer refering to overland of Rich lambert from https://wccftech.com/the-elder-scrolls-online-high-isle-preview-qa-fsr-1-0-support-card-game-and-much-more/ wich is the third of your quotes.

a link wouldn be great.

Okay about the first quote:

Their data showed how many people played cadwells and how many played own faction overland. Its a display of people disliked cadwells because not many played it but enjoyed own faction difficutly. In the forums nobody complained about it also. And a ton did play own faction difficulty without Complains like rich said.

about second quote:

The extra difficulty refers to cadwells silver+gold after own faction. Because cadwells was an extra difficulty to own faction overland. But since the majority enjoyed Own faction difficulty, there is no point quote text messages about people disliked cadwells silver + Gold.

About third quote:

Im sure everyone on the planet read that answer already, since you qoute it everytime to have to say something. But still. People only complained in forums about cadwells silver and gold. thats one fact and refering to the data its the same, because less people played cadwells silver and gold. But its the total opposite with Own faction content.

This makes me wonder if you guys even played ESO before one tamriel, because than you wouldn't ignore and talk more about the fact that Own Faction Overland (before you had Acces to cadwells silver + gold)had a decent difficulty(wasnt hard as cadwells silver and gold, but not that extremly easy like the current shitshow) people enjoyed and played without any complains.

Send me a link please of interview of the first two quotes. thanks in advance

Lambert said this repeatedly on his Twitch streams last year, and that might be where those quotes come from. Thanks to ... events ... that happened, I am not sure that the original quotes can be linked to. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The interesting thing about the way he answered is that it takes into consideration all of the rebuttals that I have seen presented. These rebuttals were asked about on the Twitch stream, and a version of the answer was repeated in response to that specific question. It seemed clear to me that he understood the question, and the way it had been changed in order to challenge his previous answers. Over time, it became obvious, as a viewer, that the players are missing a large slice of the big picture in how we think about overland difficulty and what prompted them to move to One Tamriel, and step back from Adventure Zones.

I saw this in textform somewhere. Sparta quoted it from somewhere, so there must be a link.

There is no big picture. They made one tamriel because of the instances between people and got rid of cadwells silver, gold difficulty. The two things people wanted. But they nerfed even the difficulty of overland own faction you had to complete before getting access to cadwells silver/gold. nobody asked for that.

Lysette wrote: »

There were a couple of issues before One Tamriel

1. friends of different levels had a hard time to play together and often they had to create an alt just to play with friends.
2. one could easily outlevel a zone before even a significant amount of quests were done, which made the rest of the quests even more trivial than they are now. And if one did those, the next zone was outleveled even sooner.
3. the game felt linear and zones were level-gated, there was no freedom where to go
4. just 1/3 of the game was accessible, one could not visit another faction area before having completed the own one.
5. Friends of different factions could not play together.

If the game would have stayed like that, I would have left the game - it was a cage, not an enjoyable game.

1. One tamriel solved this and it got nothing to do with difficulty in overland, what was one of the main issues of playerbase.
2. Same
3. Same
4. That was the second main issue of playerbase. One tamriel fixed it

But that still have nothing to with the difficulty zos stole from own faction overland. Im not against one tamriel, but they nerfed the difficulty more than playerbase asked for.

Lysette wrote: »

I don't really know why ZOS is so against a difficulty slider solution - that worked very well in Oblivion and Skyrim, but that is as well why we all have different experiences with those games - for me it was never hard, because I preferred to play on normal, for others these single player games were hard, because they played on highest difficulty - we all have different experiences with TES games - and of course mods made it even more individual.

I see a problem though, when players with different difficulty setting are playing together in the same instance. Think of how you would feel, when doing a quest boss with harder difficulty - and a normal difficulty player comes in and kills your boss with a few strikes - then you would experience what we casuals experience when you guys come in and kill all in an instant.

IMO both groups need to be separated in different instances - but if the mega server is scalable enough to do that, who knows. There might be technical issue, which hinder such an approach.

Current overland difficulty is easier than easy mode of the singleplayer games.

Own faction difficulty before one tamriel was like medium mode of singleplayer games. Everybody played and enjoyed it.

Lysette wrote: »

The reason why I mentioned how ESO was before One Tamriel is this.

If someone says the difficulty was good before, then just because he skipped most of the quest content and moved on to the next zone as early as possible. If one stayed in the zone and did the other quests, they were laughably easy, one shooting everything, once one had outleveled the zone - and that happened before even half of the quests were done. So who says, it was good before, had skipped most of the quests or grinded somewhere bypassing the whole quest thing. For someone who did these quests, they were just in the beginning good, but then they became trivial.

I played every single quest in the game before one tamriel and i can tell you that you are totally wrong. The difficulty was good through the whole zone from first to the last Quest.

You didnt get that much experience like you do nowadays. No way you could out lvl everything to kill everything easy after some time.
It looks more like you didnt experience ESO before one tamriel or you would know about the struggle how slow the lvling process was and from one or two lvl advantage you didnt oneshot everything. No lies please.

I had an engaging quest experience until molag bal. Nowadays you lvl up 4 times as fast. Same comparison in cyrodiil with alliance points. Not mentioning experience boots drinks/scrolls.

Same day when one Tamriel came out i killed molag bal in the end of the own faction campagne with an other char. He just died under a minute, without even the need to heal myself. The difficulty was tuned down like 3 times easier than it was before.

Increase the base difficulty of everything in the overland for the amount they nerfed molag bal and the own faction difficulty, when we started the game in 2k14, but let everything else how it is right now, would solve the current sad questexperience.

SilverBride

KoIIegoIas wrote: »

I saw this in textform somewhere. Sparta quoted it from somewhere, so there must be a link.

I just provided the link to the stream and the written transcript in the post before yours.

Elsonso

Aardappelboom wrote: »

Debuffing oneself does not need the game world to change, that's why it's probably the best option, there's nothing stopping them from creating a PVE battle spirit with 20% decrease in damage and go from there, tweak it with a difficulty slider interface and maybe think about start disabeling or enabling based on where the player is, (bg vs dungeon vs overland, probably better to only allow it in overland)

This is not rocket science and this will not take years to develop.

I know. Right? Lambert didn't sound too enthusiastic about that, when asked. Of all the possibilities, this is probably the more technically possible. I get his point, though. Personally, I think this only works if the player isn't aware they are being debuffed, so ZOS would have to come up with a way to hide that.

spartaxoxo

Elsonso wrote: »

Aardappelboom wrote: »

Debuffing oneself does not need the game world to change, that's why it's probably the best option, there's nothing stopping them from creating a PVE battle spirit with 20% decrease in damage and go from there, tweak it with a difficulty slider interface and maybe think about start disabeling or enabling based on where the player is, (bg vs dungeon vs overland, probably better to only allow it in overland)

This is not rocket science and this will not take years to develop.

I know. Right? Lambert didn't sound too enthusiastic about that, when asked. Of all the possibilities, this is probably the more technically possible. I get his point, though. Personally, I think this only works if the player isn't aware they are being debuffed, so ZOS would have to come up with a way to hide that.

Honestly you just make a slider that doesn't mention it. Something like normal (default), hard, hard +, legendary, nightmare.

This is how LOTRO slider looks like, I think. I don't play the game but based off Google images that's what it's like.

Edit

Aardappelboom

Elsonso wrote: »

Aardappelboom wrote: »

Debuffing oneself does not need the game world to change, that's why it's probably the best option, there's nothing stopping them from creating a PVE battle spirit with 20% decrease in damage and go from there, tweak it with a difficulty slider interface and maybe think about start disabeling or enabling based on where the player is, (bg vs dungeon vs overland, probably better to only allow it in overland)

This is not rocket science and this will not take years to develop.

I know. Right? Lambert didn't sound too enthusiastic about that, when asked. Of all the possibilities, this is probably the more technically possible. I get his point, though. Personally, I think this only works if the player isn't aware they are being debuffed, so ZOS would have to come up with a way to hide that.

Well it can't be too hard to make a 5 point slider with a label from easy to extreme difficulty and make a tooltip that explains what you can expect. No need to ever mention it as a debuff, it's just UI/UX at that point.

But I do think it's nice to see somewhere what difficulty you're playing in and I wouldn't mind to find that info under the character tab between my buffs, even the ESO plus buff is there so I don't see

I recently started Skyrim again and it's basically exactly how it's programmed there.

KoIIegoIas

SilverBride wrote: »

KoIIegoIas wrote: »

I saw this in textform somewhere. Sparta quoted it from somewhere, so there must be a link.

I just provided the link to the stream and the written transcript in the post before yours.

Thx a lot. Sadly i can just see where he said that they transfered the difficulty into worldbosses, dungeons and trials.

SilverBride

KoIIegoIas wrote: »

SilverBride wrote: »

KoIIegoIas wrote: »

I saw this in textform somewhere. Sparta quoted it from somewhere, so there must be a link.

I just provided the link to the stream and the written transcript in the post before yours.

Thx a lot. Sadly i can just see where he said that they transfered the difficulty into worldbosses, dungeons and trials.

NP. Unfortunately he removed the stream sometime after I posted the link but a lot of people saw it before it was taken down. There is a written transcript though of the entire overland part of the stream that I put in the SPOILER link because it was so long, but I will post that here to make it easier to view.

Can we get a vet mode for delves and quests? Uh, so we had that ... at launch. It was called Cadwell's Silver and Cadwell's Gold. Nobody did it and everybody hated it, so we took it out. We put the challenge into World Bosses, and into solo Arenas, and into Dungeons and Trials.

[Speaks about skyshards then returns to the topic.]

People didn't do it because they had to go through their own alliance first? That's not actually true. A ton of people completed their own alliance storylines to get to silver and gold. A ton of people did. People just did not like the extra difficulty in the story stuff.

I get there’s a lot of people that do like the harder difficulty, but a HUGE portion of our player base just wants to do story, and they don’t want to have to struggle with difficult things. And so that was why we did what we did and said story is soloable and crit path will always be soloable and if you want the extra challenge you can go seek out other things to challenge you.

I totally hear you on the difficulty thing. I like things to be more difficult. But you know, the data doesn’t lie. And we have never been more successful than we are today. And a lot of that has to do with just how much freedom players have to go and experience story.

And yes, go look at Craglorn. There’s not a lot of people in Craglorn and that’s not super difficult but it’s more hard than the regular overland.

Would it be an option just to give people the choice? It is not as simple as just flip a switch and make things more difficult. There is a TON of work and then as Lucky mentioned earlier you have to also incentivize that. Like just making something more difficult for no reason, if you’re not going to get anything out of it why do it? The satisfaction's there sure but players are always going to do the thing that is the most efficient and is the least difficult thing for their time.

So, you know like I said, we went down that route. We built the game with difficulty in mind and 2/3rds of the game was never played by players so we changed it.

KoIIegoIas

This is a quote of the last words from rich lambert in the twitch topic:

''Would it be an option just to give people the choice? It is not as simple as just flip a switch and make things more difficult. There is a TON of work and then as Lucky mentioned earlier you have to also incentivize that. Like just making something more difficult for no reason, if you’re not going to get anything out of it why do it? The satisfaction's there sure but players are always going to do the thing that is the most efficient and is the least difficult thing for their time.

So, you know like I said, we went down that route. We built the game with difficulty in mind and 2/3rds of the game was never played by players so we changed it.''

That is the Proof of their Data, wich displayed that 2/3 people played cadwells silver and gold. From the forum they had their feedback and opinions from the players about cadwells silver and gold. But again everything is refering to Cadwells silver and gold, but no complains about overland own faction difficulty. But it got nerfed to the ground.
Molag bal was a real Endboss, now he hits like a wet noodle and dies under a minute.

There was no Data, no complains from people in the forum nothing about own faction overland wich people needed to start cadwells. People complained about cadwells silver and gold and not about own faction overland before one tamriel.
But what happened, ZOS nerfed own faction overland aswell, just because they can. Instead of trying out that difficulty for the whole overland zones.

SilverBride

KoIIegoIas wrote: »

So, you know like I said, we went down that route. We built the game with difficulty in mind and 2/3rds of the game was never played by players so we changed it.''

That is the Proof of their Data, wich displayed that 2/3 people played cadwells silver and gold.

What Rich said was that the 2/3 of the game that was Cadwell's Silver and Gold was not played.

"It was called Cadwell's Silver and Cadwell's Gold. Nobody did it and everybody hated it, so we took it out."

spartaxoxo

KoIIegoIas wrote: »

There was no Data, no complains from people in the forum nothing about own faction overland wich people needed to start cadwells. People complained about cadwells silver and gold and not about own faction overland before one tamriel.
But what happened, ZOS nerfed own faction overland aswell, just because they can. Instead of trying out that difficulty for the whole overland zones.

While they haven't discussed that data, they did a deep dive of player feedback when the game almost failed and they looked into making One Tamriel.

I don't think it's either here or there though, as the game's changed significantly since then. The max power level is world's apart from where it used to be. That reason alone should make them reconsider.

Lysette

spartaxoxo wrote: »

KoIIegoIas wrote: »

There was no Data, no complains from people in the forum nothing about own faction overland wich people needed to start cadwells. People complained about cadwells silver and gold and not about own faction overland before one tamriel.
But what happened, ZOS nerfed own faction overland aswell, just because they can. Instead of trying out that difficulty for the whole overland zones.

While they haven't discussed that data, they did a deep dive of player feedback when the game almost failed and they looked into making One Tamriel.

I don't think it's either here or there though, as the game's changed significantly since then. The max power level is world's apart from where it used to be. That reason alone should make them reconsider.

They are not going to shoot into their both feet - that is for sure. The current system sells well and is popular. Why would they want to endanger that revenue with an experiment, which benefits just a few and might alienate a whole lot - see what was said about the Guild wars experience with making things more difficult - that ruined that game nearly.

spartaxoxo

Lysette wrote: »

spartaxoxo wrote: »

KoIIegoIas wrote: »

There was no Data, no complains from people in the forum nothing about own faction overland wich people needed to start cadwells. People complained about cadwells silver and gold and not about own faction overland before one tamriel.
But what happened, ZOS nerfed own faction overland aswell, just because they can. Instead of trying out that difficulty for the whole overland zones.

While they haven't discussed that data, they did a deep dive of player feedback when the game almost failed and they looked into making One Tamriel.

I don't think it's either here or there though, as the game's changed significantly since then. The max power level is world's apart from where it used to be. That reason alone should make them reconsider.

They are not going to shoot into their both feet - that is for sure. The current system sells well and is popular. Why would they want to endanger that revenue with an experiment, which benefits just a few and might alienate a whole lot - see what was said about the Guild wars experience with making things more difficult - that ruined that game nearly.

Why would an optional difficulty setting alienate anyone?

Lysette

spartaxoxo wrote: »

Lysette wrote: »

spartaxoxo wrote: »

KoIIegoIas wrote: »

There was no Data, no complains from people in the forum nothing about own faction overland wich people needed to start cadwells. People complained about cadwells silver and gold and not about own faction overland before one tamriel.
But what happened, ZOS nerfed own faction overland aswell, just because they can. Instead of trying out that difficulty for the whole overland zones.

While they haven't discussed that data, they did a deep dive of player feedback when the game almost failed and they looked into making One Tamriel.

I don't think it's either here or there though, as the game's changed significantly since then. The max power level is world's apart from where it used to be. That reason alone should make them reconsider.

They are not going to shoot into their both feet - that is for sure. The current system sells well and is popular. Why would they want to endanger that revenue with an experiment, which benefits just a few and might alienate a whole lot - see what was said about the Guild wars experience with making things more difficult - that ruined that game nearly.

Why would an optional difficulty setting alienate anyone?

You didn't make it sound as if it would be optional, but that they should reconsider the general difficulty.

spartaxoxo

Lysette wrote: »

spartaxoxo wrote: »

Lysette wrote: »

spartaxoxo wrote: »

KoIIegoIas wrote: »

There was no Data, no complains from people in the forum nothing about own faction overland wich people needed to start cadwells. People complained about cadwells silver and gold and not about own faction overland before one tamriel.
But what happened, ZOS nerfed own faction overland aswell, just because they can. Instead of trying out that difficulty for the whole overland zones.

While they haven't discussed that data, they did a deep dive of player feedback when the game almost failed and they looked into making One Tamriel.

I don't think it's either here or there though, as the game's changed significantly since then. The max power level is world's apart from where it used to be. That reason alone should make them reconsider.

They are not going to shoot into their both feet - that is for sure. The current system sells well and is popular. Why would they want to endanger that revenue with an experiment, which benefits just a few and might alienate a whole lot - see what was said about the Guild wars experience with making things more difficult - that ruined that game nearly.

Why would an optional difficulty setting alienate anyone?

You didn't make it sound as if it would be optional, but that they should reconsider the general difficulty.

I suppose. I was trying to talk in general there, not a specific idea. I agree it should be optional.

Elsonso

Lysette wrote: »

They are not going to shoot into their both feet - that is for sure. The current system sells well and is popular. Why would they want to endanger that revenue with an experiment, which benefits just a few and might alienate a whole lot - see what was said about the Guild wars experience with making things more difficult - that ruined that game nearly.

I don't see this like AwA where they do something and it alienates a whole group of players. They can do it without alienating anyone. Of course, they could have done AwA and avoided a lot of alienation, so what do I know.

Anyway, I expect that it is more "Business" that matters in this case. If they sit down and design something that they think is the right answer to overland content, is it really the right answer for the studio, game, and players? It will cost something to accomplish it. Nothing is free. Time. People. Whatever... it has a cost. Is that the best use of that time? Of those people? Is there a system or QoL improvement that is a better use, that might be more broadly accepted?

Remember that there is no guarantee that what they think is the best answer is what is bandied about in here as the best answer. They are just as likely to reinvent the wheel as stop off at Wheels R Us and buy one. We cannot predict what they might be thinking along the lines of overland content, or how they might design a change to that content. What if what they can afford to do, big picture, isn't something that they want to do? It may never see the light of day.

On top of all that, they are already applying resources to updating server hardware and updating portions of their core server code. They put a lot of resources into the card game, and I am not seeing a broad ground swell of excitement about it. The card game is a bold move, but is it too niche? Things like this might sour them on things like veteran content, if they can't see a solid return on doing it.

Just thinking out loud...

SilverBride

Elsonso wrote: »

If they sit down and design something that they think is the right answer to overland content...

They have never indicated that they think that overland is a problem that needs an answer. The overland we have today is the answer to the old veteran zones that no one played.

Elsonso

SilverBride wrote: »

Elsonso wrote: »

If they sit down and design something that they think is the right answer to overland content...

They have never indicated that they think that overland is a problem that needs an answer. The overland we have today is the answer to the old veteran zones that no one played.

I am not certain how much that really matters, though.

One Tamriel may have been the overland they saw a need for 8 years ago, but what if they now see a problem where there used to be a solution? What if they are just not talking about it while the community stews over it, until it is time for their big reveal some cold January afternoon?

Personally, I am happy with Overland and see no reason for big changes. I think they made the right decision with how it is split, with the veteran content in the dungeons, arenas, and trials. While I might suggest some tweaking to overland to introduce pockets of harder content in the dark corners, that opinion is of little consequence in the grand scheme of things, as near as I can tell.

LashanW

Elsonso wrote: »

I think they made the right decision with how it is split, with the veteran content in the dungeons, arenas, and trials.

One of my biggest issues with that sort of splitting is that it also split the content as solo and as group.

Very easy content -> Intended for solo
Challenging content -> Intended for groups

Only exception is Maelstrom Arena and Vateshran Hollows. They are great but there's only 2 of them.

Imagine you were very much into questing and there were only 2 quests in the whole game (they'll be repeatable atleast)

SilverBride

LashanW wrote: »

Elsonso wrote: »

I think they made the right decision with how it is split, with the veteran content in the dungeons, arenas, and trials.

One of my biggest issues with that sort of splitting is that it also split the content as solo and as group.

Very easy content -> Intended for solo
Challenging content -> Intended for groups

Solo content has to be easy enough to succeed at solo. Challenging content has to be hard enough that it requires a group or else it's not really challenging. How else could it be?

spartaxoxo

SilverBride wrote: »

LashanW wrote: »

Elsonso wrote: »

I think they made the right decision with how it is split, with the veteran content in the dungeons, arenas, and trials.

One of my biggest issues with that sort of splitting is that it also split the content as solo and as group.

Very easy content -> Intended for solo
Challenging content -> Intended for groups

Solo content has to be easy enough to succeed at solo. Challenging content has to be hard enough that it requires a group or else it's not really challenging. How else could it be?

Have you ever actually done VMA or VVH?