Canceled Subscription Due to Bad PvP Balance

malistorr

Xbox NA Blackreach I couldn't cast bow skills last night because the campaign was almost full. Snipe and morphs just points the bow up in the air for 3-5 seconds and sometimes fires, sometimes doesn't. It doesn't really matter as the skill pretty much has a 6-second channel/cast time with skipped animation instead of the already too-long 2ish seconds. The game was basically unplayable for me and my kills were about 20% what they should have been.

Voice chat (Guild chat 1 channel for my PVP guild) was not working even after closing out of the game 100% and clearing cache. It doesn't start working until enough people drop off the server/out of the campaign. This was the behavior for all of the event and it's back whenever the campaign gets close to full.

Until they've either finished the recode changes and/or replace the server hardware this will NOT get better unless they allow maybe 60-70% of the current max amount of players in the campaign. I'd very much like to say positive things about ZOS and this game but horrible decisions obviously made by the bean-counters there leave me constantly disappointed. I'm sure most of the employees there wish they could fix things for us players but management at the highest level holds them back. I know because I work in tech and have worked at many companies like this before. It's nice to say things like you're working to fix the game in 2022 when this all should have been done in 2018.

Unified_Gaming

nb_rich wrote: »

I think they have a post that they haven’t forgot about PvP and they are working on some things they just need some time. At least the acknowledged they are working on it

How did that work out?

tnanever

Unified_Gaming wrote: »

nb_rich wrote: »

I think they have a post that they haven’t forgot about PvP and they are working on some things they just need some time. At least the acknowledged they are working on it

How did that work out?

It's ironic that PvP was better before all their trash "balancing" attempts. I'd be having more fun with magicka sorc if they literally did nothing for 2+ years.

DrSlaughtr

malistorr wrote: »

Xbox NA Blackreach I couldn't cast bow skills last night because the campaign was almost full. Snipe and morphs just points the bow up in the air for 3-5 seconds and sometimes fires, sometimes doesn't. It doesn't really matter as the skill pretty much has a 6-second channel/cast time with skipped animation instead of the already too-long 2ish seconds. The game was basically unplayable for me and my kills were about 20% what they should have been.

Voice chat (Guild chat 1 channel for my PVP guild) was not working even after closing out of the game 100% and clearing cache. It doesn't start working until enough people drop off the server/out of the campaign. This was the behavior for all of the event and it's back whenever the campaign gets close to full.

Until they've either finished the recode changes and/or replace the server hardware this will NOT get better unless they allow maybe 60-70% of the current max amount of players in the campaign. I'd very much like to say positive things about ZOS and this game but horrible decisions obviously made by the bean-counters there leave me constantly disappointed. I'm sure most of the employees there wish they could fix things for us players but management at the highest level holds them back. I know because I work in tech and have worked at many companies like this before. It's nice to say things like you're working to fix the game in 2022 when this all should have been done in 2018.

I was in the same campaign. Can confirm. I didn't even consider streaming.

Vetixio

PC NA Cyrodiil has been bad since the patch its a lag and crash fest atm.

Mayrael

drsalvation wrote: »

I cancelled subscription due to bad everything at this point.

Mindless RNG for fake player retention:
You want that shiny new mythic to improve your build, that's good, now you have to farm it.
There's nothing wrong with grinding, but the RNG-based grind is a prison.
There are ways to make grinding for shiny artifacts way more engaging than just repeating the same task over and over again

My solution, at least for mythics was a lot more simple and yet more engaging:
Instead of looking internet videos to see where to find the leads for a mythic item, let us go back to the antiquarian house (or maybe a version of it in vanilla zones to avoid DLC) where we can get a daily quest. The daily quest takes us to any sort of dungeon, either a delve, a public dungeon, a group dungeon, etc. Once inside, we can use the antiquarian's eye to find a chest within said dungeon which will uncover a clue for a lead. Once we unlock 5 clues of a lead, we can then proceed to go to wherever the lead is unlocked (like the chest in falkreath hold) and get a guaranteed unlock. Otherwise we can brute force it and try to get it based on RNG the way we already do. The guaranteed drop sounds like something that will break a mythic, but considering you need 5 clues for one lead, and 5 leads for the mythic item, it would take 25 days to get a mythic.
It's a long time, that's for sure, but then again, it took me the same time of just mindlessly grinding for that belharza's band lead in falkreath hold over and over again.
This way, players have a reason to log in every day and actually do some in-game content. This also feels like we're actually making any sort of progress unlike running falkreath hold over and over again never knowing if you'll be lucky or not.

No RPG in this MMORPG
I guess it all depends on what "role" means to us individually. Tank, Heal, Damage roles are naturally essential, but this game takes things to an extreme where it's not necessarily enjoyable. Anything fun tanks had going on for them has been reworked to pander to the DPS roles (I'll keep bringing up power slam's rework) because of course that DPS don't block, so why would they want to block 10 attacks? Tanks shouldn't deal damage so let's take that skill away from tanks and give it to the DPS types of people (with that logic, DPS shouldn't block, that's the tank's job).
So either support roles are completely useless, or absolutely mandatory, however the rest of the game ONLY REWARDS your DPS outcome, you can tell because there are no training tank dummies to see how much damage you can mitigate, or healing dummies to see what your HPS is. There's just DPS dummies and DPS checks. Vateshran would've been a fun dungeon for all roles if not because you get punished for your low DPS with a blocker: Either pass this check, or fail the final boss.
So there's no real incentive to get better at a support role, and armory is there to remind us that support roles are just an after thought, once you're done with your dungeon or trial, it's time to switch back to the only build that actually matters. (At least I don't have to pay to respec anymore so thanks for that I guess?)

My solution is to stop exaggerating the numbers to such great extents. Tanks have a cap on how much armor they can reach, healers and DPS don't. By forcing something like that you're alienating issues that cause a massive balance struggle.
Tanks shouldn't be towel holders, they should be able to deal damage too, give us back damage skills based on tanking, like power slam. Making offense out of defense is a good way to keep roles engaged in whatever other activity, no more fake tanks either. I'm not even asking for tanks to do the DPS, just something that will help the overall DPS output the same way DD's can block and mitigate a lot of damage. Not everything should revolve around DPS.
Make defensive skills scale off max health or armor, and motivate players to make good tank builds, otherwise, there's no real point.
As for PvP, who cares? It's all about burst damage, it's not like a tank blocking 10 times to do a 15k burst (7.5k with battle spirit) is going to break the balance of the game. But I'll get to that later.

But what about actual character roleplay?
At this point, writers don't care anymore, this is a linear game with no choices. I get it's both a live service, so none of your choices change anything, and an MMO so the best you can do is choose which character dies and I see the other one alive while my brother sees the dead one alive. And as a live service, you will never really stop anything, the planemeld will continue even after defeating molag bal twice. I don't necessarily like that, but I get it and I can tolerate it given the circumstances of this service we call a game.
But that is no excuse for poorly written dialogue on which our characters suffer from amnesia, where we are FORCED to ask to remind us again what's going on, where we are FORCED to choose only 1 single dialogue choice on meaningless conversations. Again, why are we forced to be nice to Eveli and say she looks good in that dress? Why not a sarcastic/jerk response too, which changes nothing, but at least we can choose our own personality while having conversations.
The character we're playing is dumb as bricks, it's an empty shell that we're supposed to pour our personalities into but can't even express it in game. And we're forced locked into alternative routes (WHICH ARE THERE) just because of a questline we did YEARS AGO. Again, why are we forced to confess to eveli we're part of the brotherhood? I know there's another dialogue branch if you never joined, my character hasn't done any brotherhood quests since morrowind released.
But that's not the baffling part, the check where dialogues show if you're part of the thieves guild or not isn't even related to quests, it's related to your skill tree. I picked up a thief's trove ONCE, a few minutes BEFORE going to Borderwatch.
Think of it this way: One moment I'm going up north to do a main quest to get all help I can get from all available allies. Then I stumble upon this glowing chest my brother always takes, but he's not there at the moment, so I see if I can pick it up despite the fact I've never joined the thieve's guild. It turns out I CAN pick it up and it unlocks the TG skill tree. I don't care so I just keep going north to borderwatch, start the main quest, meet a couple of new characters I've never seen before.
The ONLY dialogue choice I have is "I'm part of the TG and I've never heard of you before"

My solution:
Give us choices. Give us the option to keep secrets to ourselves, at least it would help to know that I can still choose a story where I don't boldly claim to be part of a well renowned criminal organization just because I opened one single chest a few minutes ago.
We don't need significant choices in every dialogue branch, but just give us a basic good guy/jerk guy branch that changes nothing but the immediate response, it's a simple thing, but it would improve dialogue a bit more.
Or at the very least, don't force us to ask stupid questions. I did murkmire, spent a lot of time delving into argonian lore, I can infer what ojel means, there was no need for my character to go full amnesiac and forget about murkmire, just so that I could have a lazy excuse to visit the argonian in gideon to translate something I already know how to infer.
A lore dialogue: "What is ojel bak?" and get expo dump where you need to go to gideon
A veteran dialogue: "I know what it means, but I might need some more info on the tribe" And now you go to gideon to ask for intel.
The story won't change, the journey steps are the same, but now we go there not feeling like amnesiac bricks who are just artefacts to witness a story.

No real PvE motivation to actually get stronger
In story quests, which are insultingly easy, they try to sell you this main antagonist as a major threat to existence. There's molag bal and the planemeld. The only way you can make that battle a hard one is by completely removing your gear.
This completely ruins the grind for better equipment, either you lose your mind with mindless RNG for that shiny new mythic, or run dungeons over and over and over again for their gear set and then get doomed to a walk in the ball pit, or don't grind for anything, don't make any specialized builds, and actually try a challenge.
It's backwards mentality, the difficulty is supposed to motivate us to grind for those gear sets, not show us how unnecessary it is to actually do so.
I know trials and dungeons are hard and you should get better gear to be able to run them. But trials and dungeons have no story attached that would relate to the main quest. Story content is the vast majority of content in this game, there are many reasons to explore overlands, but the story is the only thing that pushes you to do so. So dungeons and trials are completely optional, that's fine, this means dungeons and trials are nothing but gear farms, where you farm your gear and move on to the next farm to keep farming. It feels shallow, it lacks any sort of real depth.
What if I wanted to stop molag bal but kept failing, so now I have to farm gear on dungeons that will help me against molag bal? NOW I have an actual motivation to do all that farming.

My solution:
I know there's people discussing veteran overland, I personally think a simple veteran story mode would suffice. No need for "better rewards" just give +100 gold to whatever we already make and purple/gold gear instead of green/blue.

Terrible Balance issues
The most fun I've had in this game was when I could deflect all sort of damage back to mobs and defeat overland creatures just by blocking using resilient yokeda and harbinger. My gear allowed me to do that in overland (to be fair, it still can)
It was the ONLY thing I was using to actually deal damage, other than light and heavy attacks, the rest of my bar was for shields, defense runes, and some HoTs since I main templar, everything to aid my survivability.
Now, imagine how fun it would be if those gear sets still have their original damage numbers. The only way to deal damage is to block. Meanwhile every other skill is for survival and protecting your team.

Naturally, they got nerfed to the ground because it was breaking PvP.
People will complain how boring it is to just hold block and that's it.

Same thing with other skills that break PvE, like mist form.

Personally, I think the developers should have in mind all skills available and design the game around it, not the other way around. They say "play as you want" but then proceed to rework skills so that we play as THEY want us to play. Mist form was a creative solution that required a specific build, it was one of many solutions, now we can't have that.

My solution:
The same as every single living being has said countless of times before.
SEPARATE PVP FROM PVE
A battle spirit check would help a lot.
Harbinger and resilient yokeda is too OP in PvP? Good, with battle spirit, that's no longer the case, it now only works in PvE (at least it's more effective in PvE)
That said, I don't think they should completely remove PvE from PvP like they did with mist form. Mist form could easily have a battle spirit buff. It has 30% dmg reduction in PvE, but with battle spirit, it has 75% NOW players can still use mist form as a way to protect themselves while not completely overhauling a dungeon cheese.




This game has become a chore for me
I'm tired of it. I log in every day to train my horses on my alts, but I wonder why I'm doing it, I say it's to hunt skyshards quicker, but I still won't do it, I'm tired of that. The only reason to have alts is to try different builds, but the only reason to try different builds is for vet content or pvp, which I have no plan on partaking in anymore, it's all pointless.

Not only that, after grinding PvP for the cool aesthetic items I wanted, like the lion, the centurion title, the gladiator outfit, I came to realize that this game is no different from mobile games, except with better input.
It's all just a numbers game. You can do everything right behind your controller, but if you don't have the numbers in your side, no matter what you do, the fight is already rigged. It's easy to see when you've lost the fight when you don't even chip more than 5% of your PvP opponent and even with your best burst and follow up combo, you're running low on resources. There's nothing you can do at that point than just run and wonder why the hell nothing worked until you realize it's your gear.
When I started decimating players when I updated my gear, I never felt satisfied, it never felt like it was MY victory, it felt like it was just the game playing itself, using me as a vessel to see how nice the numbers my gear provided outpeform the numbers my opponent's gear provide. I did the same things, but now I was winning? Just because of gear?
The same thing happens when I lose. It never feels like it was my own fault, but my gear's. And as long as it never feels like I'm the one responsible behind my outcome, it will never feel like any of it actually matters.

This is the reason why people still complain about gear being nerfed or buffed, because it's the determining factor on weather you win or lose.

For this and many more reasons that have been piling up and crawling up, I cancelled my subscription, and most likely will end up never coming back.
Which is a shame, this game is the reason I got an xbox one instead of switching to Ps4, it's the first game I got on my console, and it's the only game I haven't stopped playing since.
But I can only take so much before something I used to enjoy becomes a tedious, meaningless chore where anything that's fun will be tweaked just because it's what the numbers dictate.

The devs have clearly let the numbers decide how to play the game, and by doing so, the game has lost its soul.

Spolier to cut long post.

I totally agree with you.

I started this game back in 2014 because of the great PvE, full of challenges and freedom unprecedented for that time in terms of character building and builds. Because of the difficulty, I loved playing with builds in PvE. The quests and storyline of this game just sucked me in like a black hole. Then when I first saw siege with my own eyes, I knew that PvP would be what I would love about this game.

But as time went on, problems started to arise. PvE became boring, repetitive and not presenting any single-player challenge, making even the greatest story completely lose imersion.

In PvP, proc sets began to appear, gently at first in the form of monster sets, but then more and more flooded Cyrodiil. Although ZOS balances them after a while, that timing is precisely the biggest problem. Three months between updates with broken sets is unacceptable.

Character balance has always been shaky, and bugs lay untouched for months and sometimes even years.

Performance? EU has always gotten the shorter end of the stick and that will never change.

What really hurts the most is ZOS's dismissive approach to the subject, completely as if they don't want to succeed, let's just keep this game alive as long as we can, and once it stops making the expected profits, let's garbage can it.

Celephantsylvius_Bornasfinmo

Lots of lag on PC EU too, worse 'all day round' than it was before.
We've also come back to the unkillable 2 man/3 man era (Wardens mostly) and it's not very fun to play against

soniku4ikblis

This patch is very disappointing. The developers haven't made any new strides in their effort to streamline the discrepancies of their former ideas.

I am so glad there are many other games to play and this one can sit on the back burner and collect dust.