PTS Update 40 - Feedback Thread for Infinite Archive

FantasticFreddie

The concept isn't bad. I like the random bosses, the boosts you get are fun, and I like the little side content, the whole thing looks cool overall.

But, less trash, more rewards.

Tandor

prof-dracko wrote: »

This is fascinating. They've introduced new things before that people didn't like, but this is the first time the opinion has been so overwhelmingly negative. Like some others have said, they've likely committed to the concept already and were never planning on changing much, if anything. PTS, for all its merits, is a very small sample size of the player base. It's mostly here for bug fixes, not really beta testing. Once it goes live and more and more players start expressing their disappointment, THEN we'll get some proper changes. Eventually.

81 or so pages of responses to the introduction of account-wide achievements last year were overwhelmingly negative, even those who wanted it in principle weren't happy with its implementation.

The difference now is that with account-wide achievements there was no option but to have it forced on you, whereas with Endless Archive there is always the option not to run it. It'll be interesting to see how many players do run it when it goes Live, as hardcore players find it too easy, casual players find it too hard, and nobody wants to commit multiple hours to a grind for little worthwhile reward. Still we await clarification from ZOS as to what exactly "the intended audience" as mentioned in the patch notes actually comprises. If we knew that, it might help some players frame their feedback more effectively while other players would know it wasn't going to be for them and not spend any more time on it.

Necrotech_Master

prof-dracko wrote: »

This is fascinating. They've introduced new things before that people didn't like, but this is the first time the opinion has been so overwhelmingly negative. Like some others have said, they've likely committed to the concept already and were never planning on changing much, if anything. PTS, for all its merits, is a very small sample size of the player base. It's mostly here for bug fixes, not really beta testing. Once it goes live and more and more players start expressing their disappointment, THEN we'll get some proper changes. Eventually.

from what ive seen a lot of people like the general idea of the archive, the buffs and the boss fights

the biggest problems ive seen complained about were pacing and amount of trash fights makes it too slow in its current form

i personally am still excited for this to come out lol, so i wouldnt say the response has been overwhelmingly negative

since i havent been on PTS yet, i can only go off what others are saying and it currently sounds "rough around the edges" right now and needs some refinement, which likely wont happen fully until post release

FantasticFreddie

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

prof-dracko wrote: »

This is fascinating. They've introduced new things before that people didn't like, but this is the first time the opinion has been so overwhelmingly negative. Like some others have said, they've likely committed to the concept already and were never planning on changing much, if anything. PTS, for all its merits, is a very small sample size of the player base. It's mostly here for bug fixes, not really beta testing. Once it goes live and more and more players start expressing their disappointment, THEN we'll get some proper changes. Eventually.

from what ive seen a lot of people like the general idea of the archive, the buffs and the boss fights

the biggest problems ive seen complained about were pacing and amount of trash fights makes it too slow in its current form

i personally am still excited for this to come out lol, so i wouldnt say the response has been overwhelmingly negative

since i havent been on PTS yet, i can only go off what others are saying and it currently sounds "rough around the edges" right now and needs some refinement, which likely wont happen fully until post release

The concept is there, and it isn't bad.

Current implementation is bad, and I am hoping against hope they make some changes week 5

Rkindaleft

I will say what many people have already posted but the majority of people who were saying the progression needed to be changed didn’t mean that they wanted to get harder faster, but rather the amount of time invested, the actual amount of hours spent to progress through Arcs. The changes just made the problem worse. Even though Arc 1 is faster, because of the changes to Arcs 2 and beyond it now takes significantly more time to get to the higher number Arcs. The amount of trash needs to be reduced, or straight up remove one of the stages between cycles.

These changes in 9.2.2 just made it a poorer experience for everyone. Most players will never get past Arc 1 now and the elite players are now forced to spend more time in each Arc which feels unnecessarily grindy and now even more unrewarding.

Elsonso

prof-dracko wrote: »

This is fascinating. They've introduced new things before that people didn't like, but this is the first time the opinion has been so overwhelmingly negative. Like some others have said, they've likely committed to the concept already and were never planning on changing much, if anything. PTS, for all its merits, is a very small sample size of the player base. It's mostly here for bug fixes, not really beta testing. Once it goes live and more and more players start expressing their disappointment, THEN we'll get some proper changes. Eventually.

Uhm. No, this is not the first time.

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

the biggest problems ive seen complained about were pacing and amount of trash fights makes it too slow in its current form

My biggest concern with the initial rollout was that it needed to be tuned. The first Arc is a fine entry into the content up until the big bad. I am guessing that a lot of people can complete that, but I am also going to guess that a lot of people will find it hard but not impossible. Then they get to the end of the Arc, and it is like taking your Tiny Tikes car out on the freeway.

Nothing says, "don't waste your time," better than having fun in content and then getting nuked from orbit.

vingarmo

The idea about endless arena with gradually increasing difficulty, bosses from different types of content, rewards based off unique currency and class based sets is really refreshing and something that has (or had great potential to shine).

My main issue with this arena is that it is essentially duo arena and for solo it is just as good as soloing dlc dungeons and four man arenas with the only redeeming distinction separate leaderboard. You can’t progress far as the damage you take ramp stupidly high to require fully geared tank (which is another big drawback even for duo as you can’t go as 2 dds and forced to run arguably the most boring role in eso), it takes much longer to clear the stage and from rewards perspective it’s not worth bothering. Personally, I think that without complete rebalance for solo play, at least you should get 1.5-2 times more currency while alone and double potency for verses and visions or unique damage done/damage resistance buffs for each completed arc so you could progress at least somewhat deep.

It’s also a big disappointment that companions didn’t get any role in this (Separate leaderboard or availability in solo leaderboard), as i kind of expected they could be a big part of this arena instead of being a minor help which would automatically put you out of leaderboard. It could be a great opportunity to introduce gold companion gear or even some potent sets to buff them for harder content. Huge missed opportunity.

The rewards themselves are very subpar for efforts you’d need to put getting them. Class sets already limiting in who could use them and with amount of grind to get enough correct pieces is rough, with that in mind they should be just about as viable as meta dungeons and trials sets. Currently their power equals to some worthless crafted and overland sets nobody use (even more so 2 sets which was at least decent in pvp got nerfed into useless state already). Furnishings are also kind of meh as the rewards since housing and challenging combat don’t overlap that much to be of interest to target audience of this arena. None of the rewards actually creates longevity to justify “endless”. Something like actually powerful class sets and better use for currency (for example bi stat glymphs, transmutation of armor to different weights, upgrading non trial gear to perfected or gold companion gear as mentioned before) would provide justification to the “ endless” but not what’s dropping/selling now.

Overall this arena seems kind of alright only for duo (at least for dps + tank only as you can’t progress far without tank) and it’s longevity much shorter than it should be as there aren’t many things in there to motivate run it for more than a few times. Pity, because it could be so much more fun and rewarding.

J18696

The big issue with the trash rooms is more or less you don't actually get anything from doing them and they also take up the bulk of the experience

Cycle bosses drop a chest with some currency arc bosses drop the same with class set pieces marauders can also drop set items but you only get one spawn per arc

Either reduce the amount of trash encounters or reward us for doing them give some currency or something

Parrot1986

I'll give more feedback after the weekend once I've had a chance to properly play it and get as far as I can. Right now I've had c.10 hours played over 3 sessions and not came to an end i.e. lost all my threads.

I was really keen (still am) for this game mode. I played a lot of WoW during Shadowlands and enjoyed large parts of Torghast and there's obviously a lot of similarities and mainly from the good parts and not the parts WoW did horribly like making it a weekly grindfest for legendary upgrades etc. Also some of the features we have right away like to currency to spend to make your runs better going forward were late additions for WoW and having these right away is much better.

For me I enjoy the concept of the ramping difficulty but the path to get there is really boring. There's been really little danger and it feels like very little reward as well. Having add packs spawn after ones cleared isnt really necessary, I wouldnt mind having them all spawn as you enter and you can decide whether to pull pack 1 only or pull 2 and 3 as well if you feel you can handle it. I know it's not about speed as a score bonus but ultimately I want to spend as little time on those early rounds as possible.

On the topic of trash, right now it really is living up to the name. There's no reward or benefit. Having them maybe drop gold, chance to drop class sets, the currency and even buffs on rare occasion would make it so much better and at least feel like your getting something.

Also I'm not a fan of buffs dropping off and re-collecting. It makes the trash part even more useless. I dont see a need for this? Sure you can get super powerful potentially but thats the point, just make the content scale with you and you can always even it out. Right now my power progress takes massive spikes and dips at times and it's not the most enjoyable.

My main issue though comes around the premise of it being "endless" but with no save mechanic. A lot of players want to get to their furthest point and then try and beat it. But when thats taking c.10 hours to do for people then it's just not possible or healthy for most people to do. This is a real issue for me.

I think a better solution would be that your progress saves after each cycle is completed. WoW did this with Layers and it really worked. Although that reset your progress once a layer was completed and you'd start again. That takes away from the "endless" feel but there needs to be some way to break up runs.

The making it much more difficult options doesnt really work either, since it's endless it should take a while and I dont think it would be very in line with this if it only lasted 90 mins before it got too hard for people to keep playing.

Overall there's a great content sink here but right now it's really poorly thought out from a player perspective and will be in danger of being something people do for collections, achievements, dailies and never return too which would be a shame.

Aka_

prof-dracko wrote: »

This is fascinating. They've introduced new things before that people didn't like, but this is the first time the opinion has been so overwhelmingly negative. Like some others have said, they've likely committed to the concept already and were never planning on changing much, if anything. PTS, for all its merits, is a very small sample size of the player base. It's mostly here for bug fixes, not really beta testing. Once it goes live and more and more players start expressing their disappointment, THEN we'll get some proper changes. Eventually.

I think it really comes down to a fantastic idea that many of us were interested in challenging ourselves with being hugely disappointing and knowing that thus feedback will not do anything at all. More and more often the pattern you described means that we'll not see anything meaningfully improve until it's released. The concept is awesome, but the way it's being handled is just confusing and disappointing, in my opinion and many others now.

maboleth

As far as Endless Arena goes, I hope you will add continue option for non-Leaderboard players.

Elvenheart

I think two simple (sounding) things could help. 1) At the third death, leader board progression is done, but you can rez and keep trying to go forward as long as you like (endlessly), and 2) Some sort of system that, upon successfully completing an arc, that info is saved for that char and you are allowed to start new runs at the next arc if you choose.

smdalyb14_ESO

• What level were you when you went through Endless Archive? CP1100
• Did you play solo, with a companion or with another player? Solo
• What Stage, Cycle, and Arc did you reach? Only bothered with Arc 1 (so I "reached" Arc 2)
• Which bosses were the toughest? Final boss was the only slight challenge
• Which Cycle and Arc did you fight the boss on? 1 - 5
• Which Verses did you find the most and least effective? Any damage buffs
• Which Visions did you find the most and least effective? Any gold drop buffs
• Did you use any Portals to the Unknown? Yes
• Which side content did you do? Saw puzzle similar to one from Grave Deep (I think), and left.
• Did you feel adequately rewarded? meh
• Did you use any Verse Scrolls? Yes
• If so, how effective were they? The damage and shield ones were ok
• Would you use them again? Given the choice? Why would I skip extra damage/shields.
• Did you have fun? At first, yes. By the end, no.
• Do you have any other general feedback? This is not the "Endless Dungeon Runner" originally announced. This is an "Endless Arena" mode and calling it anything else is misleading. I was excited for the *exploration* aspect of a procedural dungeon along with the random boss encounters - getting yet another arena mode is beyond disappointing.

smdalyb14_ESO

Oh one more thing: absolutely need a skip mechanic for Arcs previously completed. Doing Arc 1 and 2 on repeat will be beyond boring.

flizomica

prof-dracko wrote: »

This is fascinating. They've introduced new things before that people didn't like, but this is the first time the opinion has been so overwhelmingly negative. Like some others have said, they've likely committed to the concept already and were never planning on changing much, if anything. PTS, for all its merits, is a very small sample size of the player base. It's mostly here for bug fixes, not really beta testing. Once it goes live and more and more players start expressing their disappointment, THEN we'll get some proper changes. Eventually.

It reminds me of the Necrom PTS, where people overwhelmingly said Bastion Nymic had a lot of design issues in its current form (needing to grab the 5 ichor, confusing quests, difficulty level relative to solo players, difficulty of manually forming a group, etc). IMO it's still really flawed in a lot of ways, and I believe the only adjustments they have made (?) were to lower the ichor amount from 5 to 4 and make the quests more descriptive.

As a result, if there aren't significant changes to EA in the PTS cycle, I can't imagine live will see much beyond things like health of mobs/damage done tweaks. Certainly not structural things like massively cutting down on the number of trash packs that you fight. I don't think they tend to mechanically change much on live in general, but I may be mistaken.

Necrotech_Master

flizomica wrote: »

prof-dracko wrote: »

This is fascinating. They've introduced new things before that people didn't like, but this is the first time the opinion has been so overwhelmingly negative. Like some others have said, they've likely committed to the concept already and were never planning on changing much, if anything. PTS, for all its merits, is a very small sample size of the player base. It's mostly here for bug fixes, not really beta testing. Once it goes live and more and more players start expressing their disappointment, THEN we'll get some proper changes. Eventually.

It reminds me of the Necrom PTS, where people overwhelmingly said Bastion Nymic had a lot of design issues in its current form (needing to grab the 5 ichor, confusing quests, difficulty level relative to solo players, difficulty of manually forming a group, etc). IMO it's still really flawed in a lot of ways, and I believe the only adjustments they have made (?) were to lower the ichor amount from 5 to 4 and make the quests more descriptive.

As a result, if there aren't significant changes to EA in the PTS cycle, I can't imagine live will see much beyond things like health of mobs/damage done tweaks. Certainly not structural things like massively cutting down on the number of trash packs that you fight. I don't think they tend to mechanically change much on live in general, but I may be mistaken.

for nymics, they changed the ichor from 5 to 4, but the bigger thing was they significantly nerfed the seekers quite a bit (they got a roughly 50% health reduction so its like 850k hp instead of 1.6 mil)

so if your in a full group, you only need to kill 1 seeker, and the seekers also die significantly faster than before, even if you solo the seekers, killing 4 of them now in terms of total health is way less than 5 before (850k x4 is 3.4 million hp worth, 5 seekers at 1.6 mil each was 8 million hp worth)

nymics also suffer the problem of a lot of time investment for not overall great rewards (some mats and overland set gear is what you get commonly)

UntilValhalla13

prof-dracko wrote: »

This is fascinating. They've introduced new things before that people didn't like, but this is the first time the opinion has been so overwhelmingly negative.

Cough card game cough

SirLeeMinion

Not that it will change anything, but this is not the content I was looking for. Ramping difficulty that takes hours to place on the leaderboard, inability to swap builds, take a bio break, or put the kids to bed. No, this is not it. I do solo vet Regular and DLC dungeons. But then I usually do it once unless it's an easier vet or I need the Jewelry. I can post leaderboard scores on most classes. But I rarely bother unless I need chromium grains.
Even adding a save point won't help much as I've noticed that as content gets truly hard you are just stuck until new gear comes along. As an example, I was stuck on the final boss of BC2 for over a year. New gear would come along, and I'd think, "do I really want to spend 45 minutes just getting to the last boss to see if I can finally solo it?". This content suffers from the same false dichotomy that plagues combat design. Players aren't simply divided into two groups, "sweaty tryhards with buckets of time" and "Casual noobs" who just login to kill a dragon or something.
A procedural dungeon that gave us freedom to play at our desired difficulty within or own time constraints, that would have been handy. Currency that could buy existing trial and dungeon sets, that would have been enticing. Camping out on the edge of an icy precipice knowing that tomorrow we were surely going to get past the frost dragon, that would have been adventure. This? This is disappointing. As a long time fan of the Elder Scrolls franchise, I know you can do better.

Tannus15

Finally had a change to do a solo EA run tonight to check it out and it's fun but super grindy and unrewarding

i basically concur with what everyone is saying. too much pointless trash. you could have 1 longer trash stage between each boss and it would be much better.
the trash buffs are pointless expect the one you get vs the boss, i stopped even looking at them.

the serpent killed me a twice until i changed my build a bit, then it was fine, but less casual players will struggle solo. probably fine with a decent tank and dps duo though.

was in there about an hour and got 3 set peices. the loot drop and reward is basically insulting compared to vMA or dungeons.

for comparison I average 35m for vMA and that gets 9 set items and an arena weapon.

should be small armour drops, big armour drops, jewel / weapon for the bosses in an act.

RicAlmighty

I have to give Zos credit here. They listened and removed a stage from the Endless Archive, so it will now be three total stages including the boss.

This is a very good change and I appreciate it very much

i11ionward

RicAlmighty wrote: »

I have to give Zos credit here. They listened and removed a stage from the Endless Archive, so it will now be three total stages including the boss.

This is a very good change and I appreciate it very much

I agree, it’s nice to understand that the developer sometimes listens to the community. I hope in the next update they will also listen to the community and buff weak classes.

Entaro

removing a stage is good. Adding overland gear as cycle boss reward does nothing to address the loot concerns unfortunately, nor does the very nominal currency cost decreases.

The silver lining is that the class sets are not particularly interesting anyway so there won't be much grind pressure.

Parrot1986

Whilst having less trash is better the trash we have is still useless. Having buffs remove after the next phase is pointless and having them not carry on is a major issue.

Adjust the buff amounts but allow them to continue to stack through the runs would at least give some value.

give trash packs the chance to drop buffs would be amazing too. For me this game type is about investing and building into style and working on it as you progress. This doesn’t allow you to do it and is just lacking in far too many bits.

As it stands I’ll do the achievements and never touch it again and basically treat it like ToT.

RicAlmighty

Parrot1986 wrote: »

Whilst having less trash is better the trash we have is still useless. Having buffs remove after the next phase is pointless and having them not carry on is a major issue.

I don't necessarily agree fully with this. The "trash" in the 2 stages is akin to the trash in Dungeons or Trials, it's there to get in your way and you get nothing from it in either of those too. I don't need verses to carry through the whole cycle, but it would be nice to have more "boss specific" verses that you can choose specifically before a boss fight. Some of the general verses are kind of useless against bosses and it feels like you got screwed by RNG in those cases.

I think the number of Fortunes needs to be increased dramatically if the vendor prices are going to stay at what they are on the PTS. Considering most players are not going to get much farther than Arc 2, if they even make it that far, you are looking at a lot of 30 minute runs just to get something reasonable from the vendor. The time being spent is not worth the reward currently, on that I agree. But I think the overall reward segmentation is ok for the most part.

ESO_player123

Entaro wrote: »

removing a stage is good. Adding overland gear as cycle boss reward does nothing to address the loot concerns unfortunately, nor does the very nominal currency cost decreases.

The silver lining is that the class sets are not particularly interesting anyway so there won't be much grind pressure.

I was thinking the same. Why would people that participate in EA have any interest in overland gear? By the time you are at least somewhat ready for EA all overland gear is already collected (or the person can buy the missing pieces for pocket change).

Luke_Flamesword

Overland gear is just a trash to decon for endgame players, even for newer players it will be much easier to farm it, well... in overland which is easiest piece of content

Seriously, it's just look like you want to give us something without really giving anything. Put there at least some housing materials, which are real pain to farm - stupid piece of mundane stone will be better reward than this.

Tannus15

as long as the overland drops are curated i'm fine with it.
at least there is something now.

removing 1 trash stage is fantastic and I hope it's enough.

Dagoth_Rac

RicAlmighty wrote: »

I have to give Zos credit here. They listened and removed a stage from the Endless Archive, so it will now be three total stages including the boss.

This is a very good change and I appreciate it very much

I think cutting out a bit of time before next reward is good. But we are still stuck with the trash-to-boss ratio being way too high. With only 3 lives, this is not a normal dungeon/trial progression. In those, the ratio of trash-to-boss in absolute numbers may be similar to Endless Archive, but actual played experience is much different. You make way through trash quite quickly in dungeon/trial, then spend most of your time (and infinite lives) fighting the boss. But since every boss in Endless Archive is either kill it quickly or start entire progression over from scratch, the time spent fighting trash versus time spent fighting bosses is excessive. If your night in Maw of Lorkhaj was 15 minutes to get to Twins, 2 minutes dying 3x to Twins, 15 minutes to get back, 3 minutes dying 3x to Twins, your patience for trial trash would probably be greatly reduced.

With no end, EA seems primed for endless progression. But it is designed like a dungeon/trial/arena you have "on farm". But a dungeon/trial/arena "on farm" has much higher rewards/hour compared to EA. EA has a weird and awkward rhythm to it. It is the first time ZOS have attempted something like this. And it may be too late to make serious changes before live. But hopefully we can just highlight the continuing pain points and ZOS will get to them. All of us are hoping this is not like Heists or Sacraments where it is released and quickly abandoned.

Hopefully there will be endless enhancements to the endless archive.

DeathStalker

I believe the difficulty is too easy for top players and way too hard for casual players. This needs a vet and normal mode. Make vet much harder for the top players and make the normal version on the difficulty level of a public dungeon for the casual players. As it stands right now it gets way to hard, way to fast for casual players. you need to pick which group ( top or casual ) this content is for, or make a Normal and a Veteran version.

ssewallb14_ESO

Ok, much better. But,

1. Arc 1 still feels like waiting for an elevator.
2. Base pop is still a bit too tedious

If I were to design this:

1. 2 stages and 3 cycles per arc
2. Tone down arc 2 so the content isn't too short for casual players.
3. Setting the instance to vet starts you at arc 3 or 4. Adjust rewards accordingly.

Also, you get the unfair platformer problem with some mechanics when you only get 3 lives instead of infinite.
I get it that ESO in general has little conveyance deliberately, but it becomes unfun with limited lives. Someone mentioned letting the player complete a stage after losing all lives before resetting the instance, which seems like a good solution.