"Something for Everyone"... except playing with friends?

peacenote

Is it me or is ToT lacking if you enjoy playing with friends most of all?

I can quest in a group, I can conquer a trial or dungeon grouped with a friend, I can traverse Cyro grouped with a friend, it has now been restored that we can queue for BG'S with a friend... but if I want to play ToT with a friend I can't obtain rewards like I would if I challenged strangers or NPCs?

I can understand some limits to avoid abuse but shouldn't playing with friends count for more?

Anyone else agree and/or have I missed some benefits of challenging a friend?

I want to be able to complete dailies and rank up while playing against people I know! Anyone else agree?

Fennwitty

It would be ridiculously hard to police for bad behavior.

If the numbers were anywhere near even the NPC amounts, people would be 'playing' themselves with secondary accounts over and over for fast wins.

Ginge

Fennwitty wrote: »

It would be ridiculously hard to police for bad behavior.

If the numbers were anywhere near even the NPC amounts, people would be 'playing' themselves with secondary accounts over and over for fast wins.

This says something very interesting about ESO players. This does not happen on my chess server

VaranisArano

Ginge wrote: »

Fennwitty wrote: »

It would be ridiculously hard to police for bad behavior.

If the numbers were anywhere near even the NPC amounts, people would be 'playing' themselves with secondary accounts over and over for fast wins.

This says something very interesting about ESO players. This does not happen on my chess server

Win-trading is definitely not unique to ESO.

Yakidafi

You are talking about a matchmaking system based on ranks. That do not work if you get to pick your opponents. You are talking about the rubedite and those ranks yes?

Maybe they could add dailies like play 5 games like in general, play 10 cards of specific deck and then friendly matches could count.

You can challenge your friends or whoever ina friendly duel no? you can hone your skills that way if you need a reason why you are playing your friend if not for fun and games.

dmnqwk

I think you are right - there should be a reward for playing with a friend once per 20 hours!

DinoZavr

I think nothing bad could happen if you play a friend UNRANKED.
I doubt it should count for daily quest (as it is easy to cheat playing with your alt or make a deal with a friend they simply click "end turn" each move).
But if these friendly matches do not count for ranks - i don't see solid reasons to disallow that.

peacenote

dmnqwk wrote: »

I think you are right - there should be a reward for playing with a friend once per 20 hours!

Yes, something like this is what I meant. And I don't really see the harm in the daily quest "counting" if you play with a friend. It's to get you "into" it. Also if you are close enough in rank, getting a small amount of ranked points on a timer (again, once a day, once a week, whatever) really wouldn't be horrible either.

Obviously it shouldn't count the same as going through the system and it shouldn't be unlimited... but SOMETHING would be nice.

They could also add a daily for playing with friends that's slightly different. All I want is to be able to pursue some kind of goal while playing with my friends. It wouldn't necessarily have to be the existing rewards and/or as much of one.

fizzylu

Wow, so you don't get anything from playing against a friend or just randomly challenging a player...? That's really.... sad. I already don't care for ToT since I find most games of it to be way too drawn out and dull, but I thought maybe just playing it with friends might make it more interesting; so to hear that you get nothing out of doing so is even more disheartening. I wasn't even against the card game when they announced it since I really enjoyed FFXIV's, but Zenimax really dropped the ball on this one.

kevkj

There's no reason to stop people from gaining ToT xp from non matchmade games. You should also get similar reward coffers for non-matchmaker pvp games as you do with NPC games. So what if they 'farm' it? It doesn't matter since you could get the same result by grinding NPC games.

As long as non-matchmaker games didn't count towards ranked tiers or give the same rewards as matchmaker games, it's pointless/harmless if people want to just 'farm' it with a friend. They don't really gain anything over anyone else.

I don't quite agree with non-matchmaker games counting towards the daily quest, they want you to populate the queue to get your coffer. Not all dailies have to be easy to complete, if you win 3 against an equal opponent then you get your coffers otherwise you don't.

Veryamedliel

Ginge wrote: »

Fennwitty wrote: »

It would be ridiculously hard to police for bad behavior.

If the numbers were anywhere near even the NPC amounts, people would be 'playing' themselves with secondary accounts over and over for fast wins.

This says something very interesting about ESO players. This does not happen on my chess server

Of course it does. Chess.com has (and really NEEDS) tons of protection to prevent misuse. There's just not telling you directly,. Why? Simply because there's money involved in the games that are played. And when there's money to be made, people will find and abuse any weakness the server may have, for example the use of chess engines.

And ,with all respect, if you don't have that same kind of protection, you're either extremely gullible because once people find out your server's weakness it will be abused, or you have only people on that server that you actually know in real life and can safely trust not to try and find and abuse the weaknesses your server has. And yes, even chess.com has weaknesses, so please don't say your sever does not.

But more importantly, chess is not ToT or an MMO. In MMO's it's all about time investment for gain. In chess on a private server you gain nothing but pride or humiliation and nothing more is expected. You can't compare the 2.

But back on topic: Do you get anything besides honor or humiliation from a friendly PVP duel? Nope. And that's why it's the same with TOT.

jaws343

DinoZavr wrote: »

I think nothing bad could happen if you play a friend UNRANKED.
I doubt it should count for daily quest (as it is easy to cheat playing with your alt or make a deal with a friend they simply click "end turn" each move).
But if these friendly matches do not count for ranks - i don't see solid reasons to disallow that.

Let's say an average match takes 10 minutes. So, it takes 10 minutes to get rewards for that match.

Now, take two friends, just playing each other and alternately, intentionally conceding the match. Every 30 seconds or so. In that 10 minute time it takes a legit player to get rewards, those players would have 10 winning rewards and 10 losing rewards. It is very easy to see how this would be a bad thing.

fizzylu

jaws343 wrote: »

DinoZavr wrote: »

I think nothing bad could happen if you play a friend UNRANKED.
I doubt it should count for daily quest (as it is easy to cheat playing with your alt or make a deal with a friend they simply click "end turn" each move).
But if these friendly matches do not count for ranks - i don't see solid reasons to disallow that.

Let's say an average match takes 10 minutes. So, it takes 10 minutes to get rewards for that match.

Now, take two friends, just playing each other and alternately, intentionally conceding the match. Every 30 seconds or so. In that 10 minute time it takes a legit player to get rewards, those players would have 10 winning rewards and 10 losing rewards. It is very easy to see how this would be a bad thing.

Yeah, man.... can't have players getting too many junk rng reward boxes <.< it'd be super unfair for them to have so many white consumables to vendor.
But honestly haha I'd like to think that ESO players have something better to do with their time than farm ToT rewards hahahaha I think even running around IC for a bit would be more beneficial. And not that it really matters, but from my experience the average match takes like 20 minutes.

DewiMorgan

Proposal: in friendly games, have the reward scale off some form of time spent or activity level (in seconds, in number of cards played, in number of rounds for the match, whatever).

So, in game design terms, it's the "attention economy", basically. You're rewarding players for spending time playing together and increasing stickiness, partly counterbalancing their opportunity cost of benefits they could have got from solo-grinding ingame in some other way. If the average player gold-gain is, say, 6k gold per hour (I have no idea!), then a player in a 20 minute friend-game should get 2k gold of rewards.

If people try to cheese it with super fast games, or a fast challenge/resign loop, they quickly find they get super-trashy rewards: 1 gold, or maybe even nothing if they finish two games within a cooldown.

Super easy to balance using usage metrics. Rewards players for doing things you want to encourage in the game.

peacenote

Veryamedliel wrote: »

But back on topic: Do you get anything besides honor or humiliation from a friendly PVP duel? Nope. And that's why it's the same with TOT.

Actually, in a weird way, this is my point. There is a reason I only duel maybe...once a year. It's because an endeavor would like me to, or I want to quickly test something with my build in a controlled environment. For me, dueling is not worth my time in game, because it isn't attached to any kind of goal. It's not fun, for me, if it doesn't lead to anything. If I was retired and had all the time in the world I might do more things "just because" but with limited play time, I prefer to choose activities that are tied to an accomplishment. I play ESO with the vague goal of completing "everything" while not taking it so seriously that I actually get upset if I miss a holiday event or something. But there's always more content to beat and never enough time, so standing around dueling is NOT at the top of my list.

But dueling is one of many ways to PvP. I like PvP and playing with friends, so instead I choose to queue with them in BG's or group with them in Cyro or IC.

If I like ToT and playing with friends, the rewardless match is my only option. My friend and I did one game, realized it counted towards nothing, and said "oh this is kind of lame." So since this is an MMORPG I'd like to see ZOS come up with rewards and reasons to play with friends, which for now can only be against friends since it's a two person game, same as all of the other major types of activity in ESO - PvP, questing, organized PvE content. Even fishing I can do WITH my friend, chase fishing holes and fish side-by-side, and get something for it. And I especially would like to see this happen since ToT was billed as "something-for-everyone" and the main thing I like to do in ESO is play WITH friends! It feels like a bit of an oversight with ToT since I know I am not the only player in the world like this.

And to be very specific what I personally want is to be able to play against my friends to unlock whatever is out there to unlock in ToT. I want to level, and get any cards or card upgrades and decks and achievements and collectibles, and I'd like to do that by playing with my friends when they are logged in as opposed to strangers. I don't care that much about the leaderboards or any non-ToT rewards. I'll take a reward box, but tbh why I'm playing ToT is to "complete" ToT.

DewiMorgan wrote: »

Proposal: in friendly games, have the reward scale off some form of time spent or activity level (in seconds, in number of cards played, in number of rounds for the match, whatever).

This is a cool idea.

peacenote

kevkj wrote: »

I don't quite agree with non-matchmaker games counting towards the daily quest, they want you to populate the queue to get your coffer. Not all dailies have to be easy to complete, if you win 3 against an equal opponent then you get your coffers otherwise you don't.

Yes, thinking about it more, this logic makes sense to me. Like the daily random dungeon queue's purpose is really to help others get fills in the queue.

I would say instead there could be a daily quest added for challenging players directly in the world, to have the option there, and the current daily should probably stay as-is.

Necrotech_Master

maybe they should make it so that you cant get rewards if someone concedes, but if you actually play to a legit win then you get something

i agree doing a "friendly"/"duel" type game gives no rewards, and there isnt even an achievement and you cannot progress any of the ToT achievements (such as using patrons), then i dont see much reason to do that unless you are trying to help teach someone the game

the only advantage to the friendly game is that there is no turn time limit, so it is a great method to try to help teach someone the game, but with the lack of rewards (tangible reward or achievement progress) i dont see any reason to do it much

barigood54_ESO

Maybe I missed something but there is a daily TOT quest from Marunji that gives a challenge to seek out adventurers like yourself for TOT games for rank and rewards. The cat is in the Gonfalon game house next to the daily quest giver. Granted it's only once a day, but it's there....