In Depth Imperial City Rework Idea - The PVP content ESO needs in 2023

React

I've thought about fleshing out this idea here on the forums for quite some time. Decided to finally pull the trigger this morning.

We're in dire need of new PVP content on ESO. This isn't a secret - the last BG map was released over 3 years ago, and since then we've had no real content. Players are tired of doing the same things over and over with no real incentives or reward structures, and this has been reflected in the PVP population. While it is understandable from a business standpoint that Zenimax wouldn't spend a large amount of time or resources on an area of the game that isn't as popular as other areas, I think that with a little effort and imagination the content we already have could be revived. Creating something new and enjoyable with proper rewards and incentives would drive players to this area of the game, introduce new people to PVP who may have not tried it otherwise, and increase the longevity of PVP in ESO.

ESO has almost every format of PVP available in one way or another. We have dueling for 1v1s, cyrodiil for large scale battles, small scale battles, solo outnumbered play, battlegrounds for a controlled 4v4v4. The format that is missing from ESO is "free for all". There is nowhere within the game where you can play as a solo player or in a small group, and have every single player you encounter be an enemy. I think imperial city would be the perfect candidate to support this PVP. The content has been struggling for some time now with little population and incentive for people to play in there, despite it being wonderfully designed. I'd propose that the following changes be made to the functionality of imperial city in order to create this new PVP format, and perhaps breathe new life into this zone.

• Free for all PVP - The alliance war within imperial city has come to an end, with the factions withdrawing their troops and only roving bands of mercenaries remaining to battle the daedra and eachother. Everyone outside of your group is an enemy now.
• Group limit of 6-8 players maximum - Imperial city should be a middle ground in terms of PVP scale. Limiting the group size to 6-8 will provide an environment where it is possible to team up with other mercenaries to make a formidable group, but without allowing the total domination that a 12 man group is capable of.
• Spawn system/sewer base - With the alliances being removed, the sewer bases and spawns will need a slight rework. Each time you die, rather than spawning in a district of your choosing, you spawn in the sewer bases and can then enter the districts via the ladders. The transit shrines that are in each sewer base between the ladders now have a new functionality, allowing you to travel between each sewer base since they are no longer alliance locked. The set of ladders in each base will now take you to a different spawn within each district - so for example, what was previously the AD sewer base will take you to the AD district spawns, what was previously the DC sewer base will take you to the DC district spawns, and what was previously the EP sewer base will take you to the EP district spawns. To ensure that no "spawnkilling" can happen, the entire spawn areas within the districts must now have the "silence" effect enabled until you leave them.
• Flags - With the alliances removed, the functionality of flags must be changed. Overall the amount of telvar earnable should NOT be decreased within imperial city, so to ensure this I would propose that every player have the same base modifier that is available when your alliance holds all 6 flags on the live server. The flags now start at 0% and must be held to 100% uncontested by any enemy players in order to "flip" them. Upon flipping, you receive the base AP you'd normally get (something like 2k AP), continuous attack, and a bonus 10% modifier to telvar gains for 10 minutes. You can flip flags during your 10 minute buff, but you should not gain AP from flag flipping until that 10 minute buff expires (to avoid people boosting).
• Monthly weekend events - Having one weekend each month where there is increased rewards such as double telvar, fragments, or some of the "anniversary" style loot boxes from bosses would be huge for drumming up interest in IC and exposing new people to the environment.

These fundamental changes will bring a new format of PVP to ESO that has been missing from the game since launch. While this will be incentive for many PVP oriented players to give imperial city a shot, it won't be enough alone to guarantee longevity. In order to guarantee longevity we need to have rewards that will remain valuable in the long term, incentives that make doing things in imperial city uniquely better than elsewhere, and long term goal oriented rewards such as a new ranking system and super high priced telvar untradeables. I would propose the following as ideas for these new incentives and rewards

• Imperial City TelVar Rank - A rank that displays next to your name, similar to how your alliance rank displays. This would be based on your telvar gain from both farming mobs and killing players, and the final rank should be somewhat similar in time investment to what reaching rank 50 in pvp takes. To prevent boosting, the amount of telvar gain from a single player that can contribute to your rank should be capped at 10k, and you should have a cooldown on how frequently killing a specific player will contribute to your telvar rank (i.e a 5 minute cooldown).
• TelVar Rank Rewards - there should be new dyes, titles, achievements, and furnishing items tied to these telvar ranks. Additionally, there should be some enticing and worthwhile reward for reaching max rank - such as a unique mount or polymorph.
• "Big Ticket" TelVar Untradeables - Creating some enticing and desirable rewards that require you to have a large amount of telvar will add longevity as players must collect the telvar on their own if they're interested in them. Things like a molag kena polymorph, a clanfear mount, a dylora's staff motif, an imperial physique "skin" that gives you the aura without the beam at all times, etc all in the range of 250k/500k/1M tel var come to mind.
• TelVar Gain in overland imperial city - As mentioned earlier, the amount of telvar earnable up top in imperial city should remain the same, or greater than what is possible when your alliance holds all 6 flags on the live server. Since every player will now have the base modifier that 6 flags would offer, and they can gain an additional temporary 10% modifier from "claiming" a flag, the amount earnable will increase slightly. Additionally there should be 1-2 new modifiers added for telvar held on your person - currently it caps out at a 4x modifier for 10k telvar held, but this could be increased to a 5x modifier at 25k telvar held and a 6x modifier at 50k telvar held.
• Effects of increased overall telvar gain - Since the telvar gain in imperial city will increase with this rework, imperial city as a method of making gold will become much more viable for many players just through the purchasing of basic rewards such as alchemy bags and hakeijos. This is good - imperial city should be one of the better money-making methods in the game as it is a "risk vs reward" environment.
• Set reworks - The sets within imperial city are mostly outdated, with only a few being useful/viable. The lesser used sets should receive reworks to make them interesting and viable, so that they can be another reward people would enter the city to seek. It would also be worthwhile to begin placing newly designed sets that WOULD have gone into rewards for the worthy into imperial city instead.
• District monster sets - Despite some of these being useless, it is really cool that zenimax has begun adding them. I would recommend that this trend continue with 2 monster sets being added with this rework, and a further two being added the following two updates, eventually covering the remaining district bosses two updates post-IC rework.

Finally, I wanted to share some ideas for the sewers. The sewer areas in imperial city have been home to some of the most unique and fun PVP engagements I've ever had on ESO. Nowadays, there is simply no reason to be down there. The telvar you can earn is much lower than up top, where you can kill the district bosses. The sewer bosses are generally much more difficult than the district bosses, but simultaneously offer less telvar. There used to be a reason to grind for EXP down here, but with methods like skyreach and nBRP this has been rendered moot. I'd propose the following changes to add new reasons to enter the sewers.

• Sewer TelVar Modifier - The sewers should offer the same modifier that the upper districts offer, i.e the "6 flag" modifier plus the 10% bonus claiming a flag would grant. Having this modifier active at all times will create an opportunity for players to simply kill normal mobs for telvar, which is generally much slower than hunting bosses.
• Trove and cunning scamps - The amount of rewards these grant should be vastly increased. For example, killing a cunning scamp should grant a satchel that randomly gives 10k-25k TelVar, rather than the few hundred TelVar they give now. The trove scamps should grant a guaranteed hakeijo/kuta + 5k telvar, and perhaps there could be some unique reward only obtainable from these scamps. The spawn rates of both should probably be increased slightly to boot.
• Roaming Sewer Bosses - The telvar these bosses grant should be increased significantly. I believe on the live server, killing a district boss solo with all 6 flags and a 4x telvar modifier grants you 14k telvar. Killing one of these sewer bosses solo with a 4x modifier should grant somewhere in the 20k telvar range.
• Sewer EXP - Increase the EXP rates in the sewers by a huge margin. The mobs in the sewers are generally weak enough that a low level player (15+) can kill groups of them by themselves. This used to be done for levels back in the day, but has been rendered moot by things like skyreach and nBRP. If the rates down here were increased by a huge margin, it would provide a training method for low level players, low CP players, and people looking to level skill lines that could also be profitable at the same time. High risk vs high reward.
• Conflict Markers - Any time players get into an engagement, even if it is just 1v1, there should be a conflict marker on the sewer map. This will make finding PVP action in the sewers much more viable, and allow people to seek out or avoid areas where there combat.
• Double AP - If I'm not mistaken, the sewers have double AP active on the live server. This is great, and should be left alone.
• Molag Bal - There should be some new incentive added to molag bal, so that it becomes a hotspot and point of contest within the sewers. It should reward more telvar than it does currently, including from the portal bosses that spawn before molag bal does. Additionally, earning credit for the molag bal kill should grant some sort of telvar buff while in the sewers, for example a 30 minute buff of +50% telvar or something similar.

In conclusion, this is a rework that I could see being a massive hit amongst PVP and PVE players alike. It would add all sorts of never-before experienced PVP action into the game, create new methods for training and gold making, add new rewards and ranks for the long-term goal hunters out there, and so much more. The best part of this is that the vast majority of the content is already in the game. While I am sure there would be significant dev time required to make this a reality, it would be exponentially less than what would be required in the creation of a new zone.

DerpyBossGamer

I think this is a great idea. I've been silently wishing for free for all pvp for a while. I think one of the biggest issues that could arise from this is that for people farming tel var from bosses would have a very hard time getting any tel var when everyone they run into is an enemy. I think ZOS would need to change how tel var is rewarded from bosses. Otherwise I think this is a very well thought out idea I would love to see added to the game in any capacity.

React

DerpyBossGamer wrote: »

I think this is a great idea. I've been silently wishing for free for all pvp for a while. I think one of the biggest issues that could arise from this is that for people farming tel var from bosses would have a very hard time getting any tel var when everyone they run into is an enemy. I think ZOS would need to change how tel var is rewarded from bosses. Otherwise I think this is a very well thought out idea I would love to see added to the game in any capacity.

Thanks for the feedback.

I'd like to think that with the increased rates achievable both the districts and in the sewers through this suggestion, killing bosses would no longer be the only viable way to gain telvar. Ideally players would be able to kill normal mobs aswell, both up top or in the sewer, and do things like hunt scamps or kill molag bal for comparable gains per hour.

I think that a big reason we don't see many people in IC now is because the only way to farm telvar effectively is to kill bosses by yourself or with one other player, while having all 6 districts and no competition from anyone else. One of the many things about this idea which I hope will attract more people to IC is the ability to efficiently earn telvar through the alternate methods mentioned above.

auz

Free for all imp city sounds fun as.

DrSlaughtr

Telvar drop rate increased 50% across the board. Everything that costs telvar is overpriced and it's easy to lose it anyway. There's a reason why the place is dead outside of double telvar.

Small scale only. No groups bigger than 6.

I like the idea of free for all but I don't think it's necessary.

Increased rewards for questing and killing bosses.

What if taking all flags in ic gave a small but noticable AP bonus to cyrodiil? Player only. Not affecting score. Otherwise it would be heavily abused.

Stamicka

There's definitely some cool ideas in this post. I've actually recommended and thought about something similar, but in practice (especially in the current state of the game) I just don't think it would work. First, Imperial City in its current state is already better than Cyrodiil for pure Player vs Player action. IC tends to perform better, gives more rewards, and the smaller map allows you to quickly find fights. Cyrodiil in it's current state is far too large for the amount of people it holds which leads to tons of horse riding. Additionally, on most servers, Cyrodiil is unplayable at or even near full population. Imperial City is the clear winner if you're wanting fast paced player vs player action. Bizarrely though, Imperial City rarely sees any population while Cyrodiil reaches full population on most nights.

So why is this the case? I don't know for sure, but I think it sheds light on the current demographic that plays ESO. Many players must see some big appeal in playing for your alliance and sieging keeps. Otherwise, I think IC would be more popular than Cyrodiil. In recent years it has only become more common for me to see enemy players completely avoid me in order to siege a keep. So not only are those who enter PvP a small demographic in ESO, but of those who do enter PvP, they seem to not even be interested in actually fighting other players.

In your proposal, you are describing a pure PvP zone where you can only have a medium sized group and there are no keeps to siege. Unfortunately, this just wouldn't be a big success in a game filled with PvE solo questers and PvPers who enjoy large scale alliance/ keep based battles.

In short, what you're describing would be great for players who actually like to fight other players and smallscalers, but that type of player is a unicorn at this point. I would love it, but I know that I am in the smallest minority of players. ZOS has run off the vast majority of people who actually want to fight other players. It's a cool idea on paper, but ESO just doesn't have enough of the right types of players to make this idea succeed right now. Now you could argue that the reason that ESO doesn't have the demographic to support this idea is BECAUSE it hasn't been implemented yet, but PvP has a long list of issues outside of a lack of content that caused the lack of PvPers we see today.

keto3000

React wrote: »

I've thought about fleshing out this idea here on the forums for quite some time. Decided to finally pull the trigger this morning.

We're in dire need of new PVP content on ESO. This isn't a secret - the last BG map was released over 3 years ago, and since then we've had no real content. Players are tired of doing the same things over and over with no real incentives or reward structures, and this has been reflected in the PVP population. While it is understandable from a business standpoint that Zenimax wouldn't spend a large amount of time or resources on an area of the game that isn't as popular as other areas, I think that with a little effort and imagination the content we already have could be revived. Creating something new and enjoyable with proper rewards and incentives would drive players to this area of the game, introduce new people to PVP who may have not tried it otherwise, and increase the longevity of PVP in ESO.

ESO has almost every format of PVP available in one way or another. We have dueling for 1v1s, cyrodiil for large scale battles, small scale battles, solo outnumbered play, battlegrounds for a controlled 4v4v4. The format that is missing from ESO is "free for all". There is nowhere within the game where you can play as a solo player or in a small group, and have every single player you encounter be an enemy. I think imperial city would be the perfect candidate to support this PVP. The content has been struggling for some time now with little population and incentive for people to play in there, despite it being wonderfully designed. I'd propose that the following changes be made to the functionality of imperial city in order to create this new PVP format, and perhaps breathe new life into this zone.

• Free for all PVP - The alliance war within imperial city has come to an end, with the factions withdrawing their troops and only roving bands of mercenaries remaining to battle the daedra and eachother. Everyone outside of your group is an enemy now.
• Group limit of 6-8 players maximum - Imperial city should be a middle ground in terms of PVP scale. Limiting the group size to 6-8 will provide an environment where it is possible to team up with other mercenaries to make a formidable group, but without allowing the total domination that a 12 man group is capable of.
• Spawn system/sewer base - With the alliances being removed, the sewer bases and spawns will need a slight rework. Each time you die, rather than spawning in a district of your choosing, you spawn in the sewer bases and can then enter the districts via the ladders. The transit shrines that are in each sewer base between the ladders now have a new functionality, allowing you to travel between each sewer base since they are no longer alliance locked. The set of ladders in each base will now take you to a different spawn within each district - so for example, what was previously the AD sewer base will take you to the AD district spawns, what was previously the DC sewer base will take you to the DC district spawns, and what was previously the EP sewer base will take you to the EP district spawns. To ensure that no "spawnkilling" can happen, the entire spawn areas within the districts must now have the "silence" effect enabled until you leave them.
• Flags - With the alliances removed, the functionality of flags must be changed. Overall the amount of telvar earnable should NOT be decreased within imperial city, so to ensure this I would propose that every player have the same base modifier that is available when your alliance holds all 6 flags on the live server. The flags now start at 0% and must be held to 100% uncontested by any enemy players in order to "flip" them. Upon flipping, you receive the base AP you'd normally get (something like 2k AP), continuous attack, and a bonus 10% modifier to telvar gains for 10 minutes. You can flip flags during your 10 minute buff, but you should not gain AP from flag flipping until that 10 minute buff expires (to avoid people boosting).
• Monthly weekend events - Having one weekend each month where there is increased rewards such as double telvar, fragments, or some of the "anniversary" style loot boxes from bosses would be huge for drumming up interest in IC and exposing new people to the environment.

These fundamental changes will bring a new format of PVP to ESO that has been missing from the game since launch. While this will be incentive for many PVP oriented players to give imperial city a shot, it won't be enough alone to guarantee longevity. In order to guarantee longevity we need to have rewards that will remain valuable in the long term, incentives that make doing things in imperial city uniquely better than elsewhere, and long term goal oriented rewards such as a new ranking system and super high priced telvar untradeables. I would propose the following as ideas for these new incentives and rewards

• Imperial City TelVar Rank - A rank that displays next to your name, similar to how your alliance rank displays. This would be based on your telvar gain from both farming mobs and killing players, and the final rank should be somewhat similar in time investment to what reaching rank 50 in pvp takes. To prevent boosting, the amount of telvar gain from a single player that can contribute to your rank should be capped at 10k, and you should have a cooldown on how frequently killing a specific player will contribute to your telvar rank (i.e a 5 minute cooldown).
• TelVar Rank Rewards - there should be new dyes, titles, achievements, and furnishing items tied to these telvar ranks. Additionally, there should be some enticing and worthwhile reward for reaching max rank - such as a unique mount or polymorph.
• "Big Ticket" TelVar Untradeables - Creating some enticing and desirable rewards that require you to have a large amount of telvar will add longevity as players must collect the telvar on their own if they're interested in them. Things like a molag kena polymorph, a clanfear mount, a dylora's staff motif, an imperial physique "skin" that gives you the aura without the beam at all times, etc all in the range of 250k/500k/1M tel var come to mind.
• TelVar Gain in overland imperial city - As mentioned earlier, the amount of telvar earnable up top in imperial city should remain the same, or greater than what is possible when your alliance holds all 6 flags on the live server. Since every player will now have the base modifier that 6 flags would offer, and they can gain an additional temporary 10% modifier from "claiming" a flag, the amount earnable will increase slightly. Additionally there should be 1-2 new modifiers added for telvar held on your person - currently it caps out at a 4x modifier for 10k telvar held, but this could be increased to a 5x modifier at 25k telvar held and a 6x modifier at 50k telvar held.
• Effects of increased overall telvar gain - Since the telvar gain in imperial city will increase with this rework, imperial city as a method of making gold will become much more viable for many players just through the purchasing of basic rewards such as alchemy bags and hakeijos. This is good - imperial city should be one of the better money-making methods in the game as it is a "risk vs reward" environment.
• Set reworks - The sets within imperial city are mostly outdated, with only a few being useful/viable. The lesser used sets should receive reworks to make them interesting and viable, so that they can be another reward people would enter the city to seek. It would also be worthwhile to begin placing newly designed sets that WOULD have gone into rewards for the worthy into imperial city instead.
• District monster sets - Despite some of these being useless, it is really cool that zenimax has begun adding them. I would recommend that this trend continue with 2 monster sets being added with this rework, and a further two being added the following two updates, eventually covering the remaining district bosses two updates post-IC rework.

Finally, I wanted to share some ideas for the sewers. The sewer areas in imperial city have been home to some of the most unique and fun PVP engagements I've ever had on ESO. Nowadays, there is simply no reason to be down there. The telvar you can earn is much lower than up top, where you can kill the district bosses. The sewer bosses are generally much more difficult than the district bosses, but simultaneously offer less telvar. There used to be a reason to grind for EXP down here, but with methods like skyreach and nBRP this has been rendered moot. I'd propose the following changes to add new reasons to enter the sewers.

• Sewer TelVar Modifier - The sewers should offer the same modifier that the upper districts offer, i.e the "6 flag" modifier plus the 10% bonus claiming a flag would grant. Having this modifier active at all times will create an opportunity for players to simply kill normal mobs for telvar, which is generally much slower than hunting bosses.
• Trove and cunning scamps - The amount of rewards these grant should be vastly increased. For example, killing a cunning scamp should grant a satchel that randomly gives 10k-25k TelVar, rather than the few hundred TelVar they give now. The trove scamps should grant a guaranteed hakeijo/kuta + 5k telvar, and perhaps there could be some unique reward only obtainable from these scamps. The spawn rates of both should probably be increased slightly to boot.
• Roaming Sewer Bosses - The telvar these bosses grant should be increased significantly. I believe on the live server, killing a district boss solo with all 6 flags and a 4x telvar modifier grants you 14k telvar. Killing one of these sewer bosses solo with a 4x modifier should grant somewhere in the 20k telvar range.
• Sewer EXP - Increase the EXP rates in the sewers by a huge margin. The mobs in the sewers are generally weak enough that a low level player (15+) can kill groups of them by themselves. This used to be done for levels back in the day, but has been rendered moot by things like skyreach and nBRP. If the rates down here were increased by a huge margin, it would provide a training method for low level players, low CP players, and people looking to level skill lines that could also be profitable at the same time. High risk vs high reward.
• Conflict Markers - Any time players get into an engagement, even if it is just 1v1, there should be a conflict marker on the sewer map. This will make finding PVP action in the sewers much more viable, and allow people to seek out or avoid areas where there combat.
• Double AP - If I'm not mistaken, the sewers have double AP active on the live server. This is great, and should be left alone.
• Molag Bal - There should be some new incentive added to molag bal, so that it becomes a hotspot and point of contest within the sewers. It should reward more telvar than it does currently, including from the portal bosses that spawn before molag bal does. Additionally, earning credit for the molag bal kill should grant some sort of telvar buff while in the sewers, for example a 30 minute buff of +50% telvar or something similar.

In conclusion, this is a rework that I could see being a massive hit amongst PVP and PVE players alike. It would add all sorts of never-before experienced PVP action into the game, create new methods for training and gold making, add new rewards and ranks for the long-term goal hunters out there, and so much more. The best part of this is that the vast majority of the content is already in the game. While I am sure there would be significant dev time required to make this a reality, it would be exponentially less than what would be required in the creation of a new zone.

Love all these ideas! They would definitely add 'freshness' to current gameplay.

I would also like to see, maybe, WEEKEND IC events with objecitves added in districts or sewers & juicy rewards.

Maybe allow sections of each district to get captured and needing to be held/defended for points, in similar style to BGs maps.

auz

You could be right, maybe no one will play the new improved IC. But no one is playing IC anyway. A revamp as described seems to require minimal investment, to my uneducated perspective, as most the assets and services in the game exist already. The pvp populations, particularly IC, don't exactly seem to be thriving now. Why not a revamp? ZOS will have to do something to keep pvp going at some stage, or everything ends at TES6.

Xandreia_

While i love these suggestions, i feel like zos are just going to ignore this.

IC has needed a huge rework for years (same as cyrodiil! for the love of god give us a scenery rotation or something with each dlc!)

i really do hope this is seen and at least considered, if not all, just some of these suggestions would be great!

endgamesmug

IC before flags were introduced were some great times, easy to get back to the fight seemed to work. I have been back time to time but its just dead and boring to me, no reason to check anymore it seems.

BenTSG

Wow, a load of thoughts been put into this, good stuff!

I myself think some sort of IC rework would be nice, and am quite enjoying what you're suggesting. Having a area where it's nothing but your buds against the world sounds like a fun time! You've my vote.

Now if we was to ever get a rework, how decent it would be, and how well it would end up working though is anyone's guess

Vyrthuryol

As an IC andy i really appreciate the thought put into these suggestions. I personally feel that a rework of IC would be a step in the right direction towards making pvp more active and alive. It's unfortunate that you only see a few regular faces in the districts and those new faces leave if they get killed.

A complete set rework or even an addition of new sets both monster or merchant/crafted sounds great. There's little nooks and crannies in the sewers, which could be the perfect location for a new crafted set location. I would even propose a sort of golden vendor be introduced to the city but the problem would be that it's redundant. Maybe that could be the high ticket vendor on a weekly rotation? Make the vendor the rat from the arena district for extra flavor.

An FFA faction in IC and even Cyrodiil sound really awesome, and it would definitely bring back the cutthroat feeling to IC when it was freshly added content.

You definitely have my vote when it comes to these proposed reworks, i just hope that someone at ZoS reads and passes some of these ideas up as they're really well articulated

boi_anachronism_

I thought this was going to be another "turn IC into a pve zone!" Posts 😂 pleasantly surprised. Some solid ideas in here.

gariondavey

Very insightful and well presented idea. I'd love to see a rework like this.

@ZOS_Kevin would you mind reading this proposal that a lot of effort and time went into?

Thanks!

CameraBeardThePirate

PvP is hemorrhaging veteran players - our guild that would once have anywhere from 60-100 players online at once now has a staggering 15 players on at any given time. PvP has become stale - BGs no longer give the choice of modes and are dreadfully unbalanced, and IC is a ghost town most of the time because there's no real reason to go there.

I think all of these proposals are excellent. IC would be a perfect place to implement pseudo-free-for-all PvP since the inherent danger in IC is higher with the roaming horrors. Something needs to be done soon to inject life back into PvP, and I think this idea is a fantastic one to do just that. Please please please ZOS, the PvP gameplay in this game is phenomenal. Sure, it might not be as popular as other content, but if you give it more attention you will breathe new life into the PvP playerbase.

ChunkyCat

Don’t change Imperial City or the sewers. I’ve made over 20mil gold just by farming telvar.

Leave my gold farm alone. 💀

gariondavey

ChunkyCat wrote: »

Don’t change Imperial City or the sewers. I’ve made over 20mil gold just by farming telvar.

Leave my gold farm alone. 💀

Uhh...you could make even more gold with the proposed changes

CameraBeardThePirate

ChunkyCat wrote: »

Don’t change Imperial City or the sewers. I’ve made over 20mil gold just by farming telvar.

Leave my gold farm alone. 💀

Pretty selfish statement here not gonna lie. There's plenty of ways to make gold, and with the changes React proposed you'd be able to make even more gold in IC.

KuroyukiESO

Mostly replying to bump, but I also agree 100%. IC has been in DESPERATE need of some love for years now. If ZOS were to do even a fraction of what you have proposed, there would be a noticable, if not LARGE boost in player engagement in the zone. FFA PvP is something that we need very badly. After all, these hands are rated E for everyone.

Icyfire369

I love all this stuff! I've always been a huge advocate for the Imperial Sewers and it makes me happy reading this post! I hope @ZOS_Kevin and @ZOS_GinaBruno and give it a read!

Some things I would like to add:
Roaming Sewer Bosses - The telvar these bosses grant should be increased significantly. I believe on the live server, killing a district boss solo with all 6 flags and a 4x telvar modifier grants you 14k telvar. Killing one of these sewer bosses solo with a 4x modifier should grant somewhere in the 20k telvar range.

My recommendation:
A few of these bosses need some Quality of Life (QOL) improvements. Bug fixing mostly.

1) On the 2nd zone coming out of AD side, a lot of the bosses get glitched out simply by walking around. You'll see one just standing still but it's not actually there. Then you go two rooms over and you run into them. Which then causes their frozen image to catch up to where you are and then act normally. This has been happening for at LEAST three years since I started playing.

2) A lot of the melee banners (Sword Board DK, Two Hander, and Dual Wield Nightblade) need a ranged mechanic they can use to access players that are out of range. The Nightblade Dual Wield banner is okay because he has a gap closer, but the Sword Board and Two Hander should have a pull mechanic added to their basic rotation.

Conflict Markers - Any time players get into an engagement, even if it is just 1v1, there should be a conflict marker on the sewer map. This will make finding PVP action in the sewers much more viable, and allow people to seek out or avoid areas where there combat.

My recommendation:
I love this idea a lot! The moment there is any sort of Player on Player damage being done, the conflict marker shows up on the map. And it refreshes every 15-30s or so. Or at least at a minimum, every minute, based on the last tick of damage that was dealt.

Molag Bal - There should be some new incentive added to molag bal, so that it becomes a hotspot and point of contest within the sewers. It should reward more telvar than it does currently, including from the portal bosses that spawn before molag bal does. Additionally, earning credit for the molag bal kill should grant some sort of telvar buff while in the sewers, for example a 30 minute buff of +50% telvar or something similar.

My recommendation:
I love this idea of having a 30min (or 1 hour) Telvar Buff while in the sewers.

1) There should be an indicator on the map or somewhere in the UI that lets everyone in the sewers know that someone is attacking the three portals at the center and trying to summon Molag Bal for a fight. Similar to how we get those Leaderboard announcements in Overland whenever someone in Cyrodiil is doing something like taking the scroll or becoming Emperor. The idea is meant to encourage people from all over to rush to mid to help or fight for the right to kill Molag.

Again! I really like this post! Thanks @React !

Icyfire369

Almost forgot to add!

Group size!

I would keep this to SIX maximum in Imperial City. Small scale fights are the best!

gariondavey

Some good input @icyfire36!
I also hope that @ZOS_GinaBruno and @ZOS_Kevin read this thread and could help get behind it. Changes like this would be way less work to do, like react says, than building a new zone. Giving a renovation to an existing zone would be incredible as it wouldn't divide up the pvp population anymore into another zone.

These changes would be awesome.

Please zos, check this out.

Vizzini

I think these IC changes sound awesome. I've been wanting to find a game that has factionless pvp.

PS: please stop ganking me TY

Necrotech_Master

i kind of like IC as it is, the only changes i would make would be:

• increased tel var gain like overall, its a good spot on the double tel var events
• allow respawning at any surface spawn point regardless of who owns the flags

my bold point is the biggest kicker for me, i hated when they added that change and one of the reasons i generally avoid the surface entirely (aside from there being more pvp up there)

i dont mind the flags, but i hate if you have no respawn up there, dying just kills the pvp because then you have to sit through 2 load screens to just get back to the surface if your faction owns no flags and contributes to the faction stack zerging on the surface

JerBearESO

Really interesting ideas! I would love to play this kind of thing

Just a few points that came to mind:

1. This doesn't actually need to be an IC overhaul, as we can see this implemented as a unique IC version which leaves the current ones untouched; in case people are concerned about losing the live versions of IC.

2. A party of 6 sounds great! ...but some people may want different party sizes, and therefore it may be worth noting that the different IC sections could serve to host different party sizes, if desired. Perhaps have a lone wolf section, a duo section, a party of 4 section, then let the rest be party of 6, for example.

3. One of the main things that keeps me out of IC is JUST the telvar system. The rewards are decent, though we could use more reward goals from telvar merchants. Mainly I feel losing half upon death ruins the idea of grinding it out for many. I get that it's for risk/reward impact, but the impact hits so hard it sends me flying out of IC, personally. I have ZERO motivation to farm telvar since I feel it will be ganked right out of my pocket. And telvar kinda is the reward system here, so.... We need a telvar rework. Like we should NOT lose any telvar upon death, but instead base the multiplier alone off how long you go without dying.
I may have skimmed over where you likely spoke about telvar...but that's how I feel about telvar 4.

React

JerBearESO wrote: »

Really interesting ideas! I would love to play this kind of thing

Just a few points that came to mind:

1. This doesn't actually need to be an IC overhaul, as we can see this implemented as a unique IC version which leaves the current ones untouched; in case people are concerned about losing the live versions of IC.

2. A party of 6 sounds great! ...but some people may want different party sizes, and therefore it may be worth noting that the different IC sections could serve to host different party sizes, if desired. Perhaps have a lone wolf section, a duo section, a party of 4 section, then let the rest be party of 6, for example.

3. One of the main things that keeps me out of IC is JUST the telvar system. The rewards are decent, though we could use more reward goals from telvar merchants. Mainly I feel losing half upon death ruins the idea of grinding it out for many. I get that it's for risk/reward impact, but the impact hits so hard it sends me flying out of IC, personally. I have ZERO motivation to farm telvar since I feel it will be ganked right out of my pocket. And telvar kinda is the reward system here, so.... We need a telvar rework. Like we should NOT lose any telvar upon death, but instead base the multiplier alone off how long you go without dying.
I may have skimmed over where you likely spoke about telvar...but that's how I feel about telvar 4.

Thanks for your feedback. My concern about making this an addition to IC is that many of these changes are integral to how IC/telvar operates as a whole, and additionally this would look to add population to IC rather than further spread it amongst more instances.

I think that the group cap of 6-8 as the overarching limit works well as it allows for folks that want or need a large group to do that, while preventing people from going into full on 12 man groups that are just unstoppable without simlar numbers.

I do not think the risk aspect of telvar should EVER be changed. Losing half of your stones on death is what keeps the PVP exciting, with a looming sense of danger and incentive to play more carefully. Ideally through what I've suggested, there will be new ways of farming telvar across the entire city and sewers rather than just killing bosses - allowing people to utilize lesser travelled areas for similar tel var rates to what you can get farming bosses on the live server.

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

i kind of like IC as it is, the only changes i would make would be:

• increased tel var gain like overall, its a good spot on the double tel var events
• allow respawning at any surface spawn point regardless of who owns the flags

my bold point is the biggest kicker for me, i hated when they added that change and one of the reasons i generally avoid the surface entirely (aside from there being more pvp up there)

i dont mind the flags, but i hate if you have no respawn up there, dying just kills the pvp because then you have to sit through 2 load screens to just get back to the surface if your faction owns no flags and contributes to the faction stack zerging on the surface

Unfortunately, as evidenced by the population, simply doubling the telvar and adjusting the spawns without making any fundamental changes to IC wouldn't do much for the population. The idea of this suggestion is to create something new and rewarding that will entice returning and new players, rather than temporarily enticing the (few) people that already play in IC.

I think that forcing people to respawn in the sewers is the best way to tackle the spawns - it prevents the instant returning of larger groups of players, but also allows for them to directly choose which district to then proceed into, rather than the current system which frequently forces you to spawn cross-city from where you died.

ChunkyCat wrote: »

Don’t change Imperial City or the sewers. I’ve made over 20mil gold just by farming telvar.

Leave my gold farm alone. 💀

The idea with this is that you'll be able to earn MORE telvar than what is currently possible, and through more methods than simply killing district bosses.

Stamicka wrote: »

There's definitely some cool ideas in this post. I've actually recommended and thought about something similar, but in practice (especially in the current state of the game) I just don't think it would work. First, Imperial City in its current state is already better than Cyrodiil for pure Player vs Player action. IC tends to perform better, gives more rewards, and the smaller map allows you to quickly find fights. Cyrodiil in it's current state is far too large for the amount of people it holds which leads to tons of horse riding. Additionally, on most servers, Cyrodiil is unplayable at or even near full population. Imperial City is the clear winner if you're wanting fast paced player vs player action. Bizarrely though, Imperial City rarely sees any population while Cyrodiil reaches full population on most nights.

So why is this the case? I don't know for sure, but I think it sheds light on the current demographic that plays ESO. Many players must see some big appeal in playing for your alliance and sieging keeps. Otherwise, I think IC would be more popular than Cyrodiil. In recent years it has only become more common for me to see enemy players completely avoid me in order to siege a keep. So not only are those who enter PvP a small demographic in ESO, but of those who do enter PvP, they seem to not even be interested in actually fighting other players.

In your proposal, you are describing a pure PvP zone where you can only have a medium sized group and there are no keeps to siege. Unfortunately, this just wouldn't be a big success in a game filled with PvE solo questers and PvPers who enjoy large scale alliance/ keep based battles.

In short, what you're describing would be great for players who actually like to fight other players and smallscalers, but that type of player is a unicorn at this point. I would love it, but I know that I am in the smallest minority of players. ZOS has run off the vast majority of people who actually want to fight other players. It's a cool idea on paper, but ESO just doesn't have enough of the right types of players to make this idea succeed right now. Now you could argue that the reason that ESO doesn't have the demographic to support this idea is BECAUSE it hasn't been implemented yet, but PvP has a long list of issues outside of a lack of content that caused the lack of PvPers we see today.

I think that this idea goes quite a bit further to provide content for PVE players and achievement hunters than you're giving it credit for. Through this rework, the most profitable ways to make gold and the fastest ways to advance your telvar rank will be killing mobs/bosses, both up top AND in the sewers. A group limit of 8 certainly doesn't force people into small groups either. This rework allows people to farm in areas where they couldn't before, away from the open-air districts where they are much more likely to encounter other players. I think it would be MUCH more appealing to non-PVP focused players than it is currently.

Necrotech_Master

React wrote: »

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

i kind of like IC as it is, the only changes i would make would be:

• increased tel var gain like overall, its a good spot on the double tel var events
• allow respawning at any surface spawn point regardless of who owns the flags

my bold point is the biggest kicker for me, i hated when they added that change and one of the reasons i generally avoid the surface entirely (aside from there being more pvp up there)

i dont mind the flags, but i hate if you have no respawn up there, dying just kills the pvp because then you have to sit through 2 load screens to just get back to the surface if your faction owns no flags and contributes to the faction stack zerging on the surface

Unfortunately, as evidenced by the population, simply doubling the telvar and adjusting the spawns without making any fundamental changes to IC wouldn't do much for the population. The idea of this suggestion is to create something new and rewarding that will entice returning and new players, rather than temporarily enticing the (few) people that already play in IC.

I think that forcing people to respawn in the sewers is the best way to tackle the spawns - it prevents the instant returning of larger groups of players, but also allows for them to directly choose which district to then proceed into, rather than the current system which frequently forces you to spawn cross-city from where you died.

personally, i dont really care about the overall population, its actually easier to farm tel var with less people there

with more people theres more risk of losing your tel var (and no i dont really think removing the "lose tel var on death" is a good idea either, thats why its risk vs reward, there is no risk in cyro whatsoever, you can just go bash your head into the wall and earn AP regardless how many times you die)

also, there is absolutely no reason it should force you to respawn in the sewer, if you can just go up the ladder, why not just save the 2 freaking load screens and just respawn directly up on the safe spot in the surface? forcing respawn in the sewer just frustrates people because of that

ive heard the complaint from people on "both sides" of the population:

• the questers hate it because it just takes longer to get back to where they were doing the quest
• pvpers dont like it because it kills the flow of action and completely supports faction stacking into zergs so its near impossible to counter

apart from my original list, an actual improvement would be allowing trove scamps and the bosses (banners and fixed bosses in the sewer at least) to drop set gear (curated or not, dont really care, but forcing to spend tel var on all the gear is awful to try to collect)

• overall would i want increased tel var gain, sure
• do i want the overall mechanics that are currently there to change? absolutely not outside of the QoL stuff i mentioned liked the respawns on the surface
• do the sets need some updates/made easier to get? absolutely
• and if your forgetting there IS already tel var purchasable style pages which cannot be traded that cost a total of about 350k tel var, should there be some more stuff like that? i dont see why not

gariondavey

React wrote: »

JerBearESO wrote: »

Really interesting ideas! I would love to play this kind of thing

Just a few points that came to mind:

1. This doesn't actually need to be an IC overhaul, as we can see this implemented as a unique IC version which leaves the current ones untouched; in case people are concerned about losing the live versions of IC.

2. A party of 6 sounds great! ...but some people may want different party sizes, and therefore it may be worth noting that the different IC sections could serve to host different party sizes, if desired. Perhaps have a lone wolf section, a duo section, a party of 4 section, then let the rest be party of 6, for example.

3. One of the main things that keeps me out of IC is JUST the telvar system. The rewards are decent, though we could use more reward goals from telvar merchants. Mainly I feel losing half upon death ruins the idea of grinding it out for many. I get that it's for risk/reward impact, but the impact hits so hard it sends me flying out of IC, personally. I have ZERO motivation to farm telvar since I feel it will be ganked right out of my pocket. And telvar kinda is the reward system here, so.... We need a telvar rework. Like we should NOT lose any telvar upon death, but instead base the multiplier alone off how long you go without dying.
I may have skimmed over where you likely spoke about telvar...but that's how I feel about telvar 4.

Thanks for your feedback. My concern about making this an addition to IC is that many of these changes are integral to how IC/telvar operates as a whole, and additionally this would look to add population to IC rather than further spread it amongst more instances.

I think that the group cap of 6-8 as the overarching limit works well as it allows for folks that want or need a large group to do that, while preventing people from going into full on 12 man groups that are just unstoppable without simlar numbers.

I do not think the risk aspect of telvar should EVER be changed. Losing half of your stones on death is what keeps the PVP exciting, with a looming sense of danger and incentive to play more carefully. Ideally through what I've suggested, there will be new ways of farming telvar across the entire city and sewers rather than just killing bosses - allowing people to utilize lesser travelled areas for similar tel var rates to what you can get farming bosses on the live server.

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

i kind of like IC as it is, the only changes i would make would be:

• increased tel var gain like overall, its a good spot on the double tel var events
• allow respawning at any surface spawn point regardless of who owns the flags

my bold point is the biggest kicker for me, i hated when they added that change and one of the reasons i generally avoid the surface entirely (aside from there being more pvp up there)

i dont mind the flags, but i hate if you have no respawn up there, dying just kills the pvp because then you have to sit through 2 load screens to just get back to the surface if your faction owns no flags and contributes to the faction stack zerging on the surface

Unfortunately, as evidenced by the population, simply doubling the telvar and adjusting the spawns without making any fundamental changes to IC wouldn't do much for the population. The idea of this suggestion is to create something new and rewarding that will entice returning and new players, rather than temporarily enticing the (few) people that already play in IC.

I think that forcing people to respawn in the sewers is the best way to tackle the spawns - it prevents the instant returning of larger groups of players, but also allows for them to directly choose which district to then proceed into, rather than the current system which frequently forces you to spawn cross-city from where you died.

ChunkyCat wrote: »

Don’t change Imperial City or the sewers. I’ve made over 20mil gold just by farming telvar.

Leave my gold farm alone. 💀

The idea with this is that you'll be able to earn MORE telvar than what is currently possible, and through more methods than simply killing district bosses.

Stamicka wrote: »

There's definitely some cool ideas in this post. I've actually recommended and thought about something similar, but in practice (especially in the current state of the game) I just don't think it would work. First, Imperial City in its current state is already better than Cyrodiil for pure Player vs Player action. IC tends to perform better, gives more rewards, and the smaller map allows you to quickly find fights. Cyrodiil in it's current state is far too large for the amount of people it holds which leads to tons of horse riding. Additionally, on most servers, Cyrodiil is unplayable at or even near full population. Imperial City is the clear winner if you're wanting fast paced player vs player action. Bizarrely though, Imperial City rarely sees any population while Cyrodiil reaches full population on most nights.

So why is this the case? I don't know for sure, but I think it sheds light on the current demographic that plays ESO. Many players must see some big appeal in playing for your alliance and sieging keeps. Otherwise, I think IC would be more popular than Cyrodiil. In recent years it has only become more common for me to see enemy players completely avoid me in order to siege a keep. So not only are those who enter PvP a small demographic in ESO, but of those who do enter PvP, they seem to not even be interested in actually fighting other players.

In your proposal, you are describing a pure PvP zone where you can only have a medium sized group and there are no keeps to siege. Unfortunately, this just wouldn't be a big success in a game filled with PvE solo questers and PvPers who enjoy large scale alliance/ keep based battles.

In short, what you're describing would be great for players who actually like to fight other players and smallscalers, but that type of player is a unicorn at this point. I would love it, but I know that I am in the smallest minority of players. ZOS has run off the vast majority of people who actually want to fight other players. It's a cool idea on paper, but ESO just doesn't have enough of the right types of players to make this idea succeed right now. Now you could argue that the reason that ESO doesn't have the demographic to support this idea is BECAUSE it hasn't been implemented yet, but PvP has a long list of issues outside of a lack of content that caused the lack of PvPers we see today.

I think that this idea goes quite a bit further to provide content for PVE players and achievement hunters than you're giving it credit for. Through this rework, the most profitable ways to make gold and the fastest ways to advance your telvar rank will be killing mobs/bosses, both up top AND in the sewers. A group limit of 8 certainly doesn't force people into small groups either. This rework allows people to farm in areas where they couldn't before, away from the open-air districts where they are much more likely to encounter other players. I think it would be MUCH more appealing to non-PVP focused players than it is currently.

Well said.

MetallicMonk

I can pretty much agree with everything put in here or ideas along the same lines making Imperial City much more enjoyable and also becoming healthier in population outside of events.

I'd definitely rather it to be a complete free for all and no groups whatsoever, but I also know that it would be more fun and enticing for most players if they were still able to group and play with friends in the instance so it's probably a better idea.

Trandaner

I agree with all the proposed changes and would like to add to fix all the safezones (being able to streak/bunnyhop into them).

Stamicka

React wrote: »

I think that this idea goes quite a bit further to provide content for PVE players and achievement hunters than you're giving it credit for. Through this rework, the most profitable ways to make gold and the fastest ways to advance your telvar rank will be killing mobs/bosses, both up top AND in the sewers. A group limit of 8 certainly doesn't force people into small groups either. This rework allows people to farm in areas where they couldn't before, away from the open-air districts where they are much more likely to encounter other players. I think it would be MUCH more appealing to non-PVP focused players than it is currently.

I understand that the proposed changes provide PVE content, but the PVE content is in an area with unoptional pvp. This is an automatic deal breaker for most of ESOs population. There’s a reason many MMOs with both PvP and PvE allow you to unflag for PvP. Many PvErs hate the competitive nature of PvP. Even if they die once they will claim that you are “griefing” them and ruining their experience. In fact I see this sort of thing in IC already. Any zone with PvP is a repellent for most PVErs, it doesn’t matter how good the rewards are. They’re basically playing a different game altogether. These sorts of people make up the majority of ESO’s population now. It really is a good idea on paper, but current ESO is far too casual and only the smallest portion of the population plays ESO like a competitive game. If released, this version of IC would die very quickly.