Its time we had another talk...

Defatank

ZOS,

I want to preface this post with this is coming to you in 100% in good faith constructive criticism as one of your biggest supporters of this game since day 1 beta. Those who know me know I have been around for a very long time and that I have been a huge supporter of this game, but I have also had zero fear of calling ZOS out on steps that I feel are going in a wrong direction. I encourage our community to chime in on this post with their thoughts as well but please keep things constructive to the betterment of this game and try your best to not bash that is not the intent here whatsoever.

Now thats out of the way. I just jumped in and was pretty excited to see what new content I was going to see with "Phase 2". Those who've already started phase two already knows where I am about to go with this I'm sure...

Bottom line up front, "Phase 2" is nothing more than a "We need more time" extension on content that isn't ready yet. This type of behavior screams of the exact same execution of content that I seen back in year 2 to year 3 of ESO that ultimately led me to cancelling my subscription and simply logging in from time to time just to see what had been done. It took about 2 years for your team to get things straight and start cranking out quality content again and turning the ship around heading in the right direction. That is why I am making this post now, because I feel like we're heading back towards the wrong direction of things and as your customer / strong supporter of wanting to see this game succeed to being the absolute best it can be its my duty raise my concerns.

Now for the details of what I am talking about...

1. We were presented with this "New" model of doing things. "Shaking things up" and doing more regularly released content throughout the year. While that type of model isn't really "new" to ESO because it was the original idea out of the gate but kind of fell flat on its face due to bugs and not enough team members to crank out the content and things went to a yearly model etc.

2. We are then given this "new first of its kind historical live event" Now this yes is "new". Phase 1 we got to see some new activity in the camps, monsters actually fighting the fellowship etc, but it became very apparent that while it was "new" it was basically a copy / paste / reskin of alik'r desert dolmen farming with some dailies thrown in. That is NOT "new" content.

3. Phase 2 and this is what is chapping my backside. The whole presentation of this event was "we're going to do this in phases and see which server does the completion first" oh and that brings up another thing of the progress percentages being adjusted which yes I know you guys said it was across the board etc, but I personally seen PC NA was at 79% on P1 when I logged in that morning and then around lunch time we were at like 85%. There is NO way we gained 6% in the span of a couple of hours at all. Its been taking days to get those kinds of gains. So in regards to the "progress" in my opinion its irrelevant and will be whatever ZOS deems it should be in order to progress the phases. (and yes I would still be saying this is PC NA was in "first" for progress too).

4. Back to my initial thought of Phase 2 and I'm going to spoiler this point for those who have not started the quest or whatever.

Phase 2 is basically go out to an old game zone, find a solider on his deathbed, collected a couple of notes and see a new monster model. Come back and talk to the fellowship and continue to do the exact same dailies that have been being done for the past what 3 weeks now? with the ability to collect some new fragments for a skill style.

^^^ This is NOT "New" content nor should it be dedicated to an entire "Phase"!!!!! (For those who don't want to click the spoiler, I basically am saying its a very short quest line that leads to us continuing to do the same set of dailies we've been doing) The way your team present this event with "phases" was it was going to have actual real new content to it with things changing. Well I guess things did technically "change". We got a gold beam hitting the wall now and the wall has a new layer of visuals applied to it. My point being PHASES are intended to feel "different" and like you're progress that has been made has lead to you having to do "different" things and NOT continue to do the exact same things you've been doing in the previous phase in order to progress things to the next phase. In all honesty ZOS what you SHOULD have done here is combined Phase 1 and Phase 2 together. Make phase 1 of course last longer which would make us doing dailies until december of course and that would have not been good but what could have helped was as phase 1 was being progressed say 30% visually upgrade the lens, more monsters start spawning to fight. 60% again upgrading the lens more and maybe start adding little mini dolmens that just start popping up as we're fighting. 80% the lens visually is upgraded and starts blasting the wall and then when phase 1 completed THEN the wall comes down and leads into a new "Phase 2" section, THAT is what I believe MOST of us envisioned was going to happen was that type of progression, but now we're hit with "hey we appreciate 3 weeks of dailies and oh by the way do another 3 or 4 weeks of them". ZOS people are not doing your dailies like you hoped. Most of us are just doing the dailies to get the gold reward box and then going onto something else and giving you your time you need to get the content ready for something that is actually "new". Now once that wall comes down yea there is going to be a influx of activity to get in there and see what is going on. My fear at this point is we're going to be met with the same let down of this "Phase 2" we're looking at now.


Looking at the bigger picture here and THIS is the part where "We need to talk...." comes from and I beg you ZOS, PLEASE listen to us. You absolutely told us things was changing at ZOS alot and things were getting shook up. This also means hey this new content we got now isnt really the greatest we could do but its something we're trying to get out there for you guys to have something to do while we're working on something bigger and I hope that is the case. Going into 2026 I hope that we absolutely will be seeing some solid real content coming down the pipe with amazing changes that brings life back into this game that captivates people and makes them WANT to play the game more and it not being what we're looking at right now of "I just log in to make sure I'm collecting the "new" stuff in the game so I don't miss it.

My personal recommendation and I have been saying this for a few months now. Focus on the things that EVERYONE does all the time... Combat and Exploration. Make combat addictive so that when you choose to engage something and your clicking your buttons you can FEEL the effect of them just like when youre getting hit you FEEL the effect of it and the abilities youre using have actual meaning AND there is cost associated to what youre doing. Right now I feel like combat has feel more into a "rotation" and that is a bad place to be because players are just hitting abilities because it's "time" to hit them and if they're not up then its "wrong". Combat should again be reactional, not proactional. In the regards of exploration, when the game first came out Paul Sage himself said the game was designed to support exploration that if you seen a cave and thought hmmm that looks interesting, you go over there and explore it. You had absolutely no reason to go over there at all but you went because it just caught your eye. Where we are now is "if I dont have a reason to go over there, I'm not going over there because I'm not going to get anything for it" Leverage the game world you have at your hands ZOS and make things more dynamic of just random things popping up all over the world that simply because you chose to explore the world it lead you to getting cool things and get away from static rewards of simply because you showed up to a specific location you're rewarded with something that quite literally the entire server gets simply because they chose to show up there and no effort required from anyone to get it.

I know I've went on a rant here for some time but I made a very similar post about this many years ago with the same type passion about this game because I felt then just like I feel now we're heading in a wrong direction that is quite literally easily savable. ZOS easily has the strongest MMO foundation in their hands right now for any MMO someone could ask for and I feel like I speak for alot of the community in saying this.... You also have a player base that supports your MMO and is very passionate about it as well. I'm sure I'm going to get a few people here that is going to be "games fine bro" and respectfully no it isn't.

Thank you,
Defatank

SneaK

They don’t care what we think. I’m worried it’ll just get worse if I’m being honest, NW fallouts will spend money trying to get into the game so they’ll view that as current success.

shadyjane62

Thank you for the spoiler. First time I heard of this. Where do I get that quest?

Nemesis7884

Lol people still think this new model is anything beyond more revenues for less input since xbox gaming needs to massively increase their margins from below industry average to 50% above due to MS

colossalvoids

This year already said it all by itself.

We were promised a more agile development and fixes, more consistent feedback loops etc. but it was the exact same q1234 stuff but significantly smaller (meaning one q4 dlc slashed in two, basically), the greatest asset reuse to date, key feature being a base game reuse, more broken stuff without even a mention of any fixes going forward and zero attention to correction mistakes mid patch be it "subclassing" or an event, which can only get loot table changes and minor tweaks that aren't patch notes worthy for other companies to even post.

It's just embarrassing at best.
Can't see a "lesson learned" part anytime soon as the last big communication piece in form of a Reddit QnA about new leadership being "excited for communication" didn't aged well. Same rhetorics as the previous one, same silence considering things that matter. But even then communication is not enough at this point, it isn't enough for quite a while already counting years, it's time for constant action but that's comical to expect.

SkaiFaith

Just want to put out an opinion that could be hot take but I can't keep it for myself: about exploration, I loved Oblivion and Skyrim but ESO has a lot to learn from games like Genshin Impact, Breath of the wild, and the likes - I felt like exploration was way more rewarding and fun in those games, while in ESO falls flat.
Skyshards were a good idea! But these days, if we compare how chests work in ESO and in other games... I think a lot of ESO players just avoid chests and even get annoyed by them, while in other games they actively look out for them and explore everywhere just to find them, rejoicing in seeing one.

Chrisilis

SkaiFaith wrote: »

Just want to put out an opinion that could be hot take but I can't keep it for myself: about exploration, I loved Oblivion and Skyrim but ESO has a lot to learn from games like Genshin Impact, Breath of the wild, and the likes - I felt like exploration was way more rewarding and fun in those games, while in ESO falls flat.
Skyshards were a good idea! But these days, if we compare how chests work in ESO and in other games... I think a lot of ESO players just avoid chests and even get annoyed by them, while in other games they actively look out for them and explore everywhere just to find them, rejoicing in seeing one.

If they reduced world chest numbers by 25 percent (or something) but guaranteed zone specific furnishings (more than one furnishing, say 20 new unique furnishings per zone) ((or praxis/patterns, unique motifs, etc. new and zone specific)) people would be crawling all over every zone in ESO to find them. Exploration would go crazy with people on every map hoping to snag a new furnishing or furnishing recipe. Something simple like that would reinvigorate every zone and wouldn't be bad for the in game economy either assuming they weren't bound. Binding them would be a mistake, just sayin. I for one would love to canvas over existing zones for a chance at a chest like that.

Spell-Slinger

Chrisilis wrote: »

SkaiFaith wrote: »

Just want to put out an opinion that could be hot take but I can't keep it for myself: about exploration, I loved Oblivion and Skyrim but ESO has a lot to learn from games like Genshin Impact, Breath of the wild, and the likes - I felt like exploration was way more rewarding and fun in those games, while in ESO falls flat.
Skyshards were a good idea! But these days, if we compare how chests work in ESO and in other games... I think a lot of ESO players just avoid chests and even get annoyed by them, while in other games they actively look out for them and explore everywhere just to find them, rejoicing in seeing one.

If they reduced world chest numbers by 25 percent (or something) but guaranteed zone specific furnishings (more than one furnishing, say 20 new unique furnishings per zone) ((or praxis/patterns, unique motifs, etc. new and zone specific)) people would be crawling all over every zone in ESO to find them. Exploration would go crazy with people on every map hoping to snag a new furnishing or furnishing recipe. Something simple like that would reinvigorate every zone and wouldn't be bad for the in game economy either assuming they weren't bound. Binding them would be a mistake, just sayin. I for one would love to canvas over existing zones for a chance at a chest like that.

No no no don't you see, we must put that in the random zone treasure maps that there's no way to farm for specifically! That makes SO much more sense! /s

Katahdin

The content is finished, they just want to drag it out I guess.

People been asking for content the players can directly impact, well this is it.
Participation, or not effects the speed at which we get to see the next phase

Im as disappointed as anyone that phase 2 is just more of phase 1 with 2 camps up at the same time (which only one at a time seems to be getting done much of the time) with more things added to the drop table

Defatank

shadyjane62 wrote: »

Thank you for the spoiler. First time I heard of this. Where do I get that quest?

You're welcome. The next step in the quest line for this event is in the Stirk Fellowship main camp where the dailies are. Skordo the Knife has a new quest for it. You just talk to him and follow where it wants you to go.

Destai

It'd be nice to have another talk with ZOS, but honestly, I'm just not seeing the point. Here's a few of my observations.

1. Overall, I don't feel like ZOS has the bandwidth for actual discussion. The main thing I see from the CMs, which is valuable, is running interference on recent topics. The larger issues around communication don't feel like they're being addressed though. Things like this year's PVP Q&A, the big performance thread, PTS feedback being ignored, and countless other questions about studio-level things don't often get a response. I'm not sure where their priorities are at this point. Talking on their own forums just doesn't seem like it. They're probably doing all they can do, but again, that's on them to clarify.
2. The hard topics get avoided. They had interviews where they went on about how they learn from their mistakes. In the recent AUA, I asked about what they consider "mistakes" from their end. Response - crickets. And now recently, many people have tagged @ZOS_Kevin quite a few times about the PTS and asking why things make it to live despite being poorly received. Again, crickets. You can't expect people to not get salty about that, I'm sorry. Answering the "why" is just as important as "passing along the feedback".
3. When answers are given, they tend to generate more concern and more questions. Again, the recent AUA is a great example. Every time this happens, the subsequent questions and concerns don't get addressed. It becomes one more thing held against ZOS, especially because they don't answer the hard questions. It's a vicious cycle. And it's not just technical things like combat updates either. It's business things too. The EOY letters, the surveys, forums posts, event announcements - they all have either a tone-deafness, aloofness, hurry, or confusion about them. A lot of people are irritated with the "stay tuned" typed messaging and it keeps happening. Again, can't expect people to not get salty about that.
4. I'm not confident they're willing to change based on a discussion. Going back to the AUA, there was an exchange between SkinnyCheeks and ZOS. He articulated some really good points. I didn't see that strong of a response from ZOS. That exchange created two impressions for me. One, he knew more about combat than the studio itself, or at least could articulate his knowledge better. Two, when better reasoning is provided, it's not even entertained. There's a spreadsheet, there's a vision, there's some other something that gets in the way of feedback changing their minds. Whatever that is, isn't communicated. Even PTS feedback, no matter how well documented, rarely seems to do it. Again, no explanations as to why.

kind_hero

In my opinion, ZOS needs to deliver a very strong chapter/DLC next year. I really want to get sucked in good story, and breathtaking visuals. They really need to listen to the community, or just be very transparent about what they want with this game.