Excess Tome Point Disaster and Solutions

JHartEllis · April 10

Excess Tome Points are looking to be a huge impending disaster, and there are already issues with people that opened too many Caches.

“Any Tome Points in excess of that will be redeemed automatically on any unclaimed rewards from owned Tamriel Tomes, starting with the most recent one.”

This raises a ton of questions in how this will be handled, and I’m struggling to see how this won’t be hated by everyone. I recommend NOT doing this.

It seems kind of obvious that the Tome designs borrow heavily from what worked for FO76, but it deviates in a big way in that there are no “sinks” for excess Tome Points whereas FO76 freely allows a range of repurchases from the Bonus Pages.

Any sink would really work, but here are some potential limiting solutions:

Allow all Bonus Page items to be redeemable infinitely (like FO76)
Allow certain Bonus Page items to be redeemed infinitely
Allow all Bonus Page items to each be redeemed X times
All certain Bonus Page items to be redeemed a large number of times

Option: the repeatable options unlock only after all rewards on all pages have been purchased once

With a window for players to spend Tome Points how they like until they are under 2000, it can then be generally assumed they are pretty content, and then an autoredemption could happen at the very end of the season where players just get Trade Bars (or some other basic currency) at a set ratio, or perhaps a sliding ratio based on page unlock progression.

If players open too many caches, they can just spend the Tome Points on the repeatable purchases and not feel so bad about it.

I strongly urge the devs to get ahead of this huge problem as soon as possible. Something could be well thought out for Season One, but I’d encourage at least one repeatable purchase sink to be added for Season Zero if at all possible.

All of this will also shore up the idea that doing the weekly challenges will continue to be rewarding throughout the whole season, which seems like a huge positive.

Destai · April 10

The simplest solution is to remove Tome Caches, and just award Tome Points that never expire. I'm confident they'll survive without that one layer of pressure.

Just from a business perspective, support now has to spend their cycles refunding people their caches. That's time that could've been spent on other activities. It's nice they're doing that, but again, just seems like an avoidable situation.

I went into this thinking that I'll eventually build a nice inventory of Tomes, with activities and rewards, that I could earn at my leisure. That's why I bought it. Instead, I have to make sure I get everything with my points. Really don't want to navigate more layers of FOMO and pressure.

Nemesis7884 · April 10

just give a warning message when opening tome caches in the future... for 2026 what they could do is allow - one time in 2026 - to exchange tome points to other currencies like trade bars

GoldenGirl · April 10

Yep, I'm one of the people who saw tome caches and opened them all, wanting to see all the pages/what rewards were available. I figured it would be like every other currency in the game, in that they would just sit there until they were used. I don't remember an expiration being mentioned at all in the live stream, nor is it mentioned in the tome interface. (I finally found it in the help section for the tomes... way to bury a very important detail, folks.)

Sorry for the vent... all that to say I'm disappointed with the lack transparency regarding them expiring (not to mention the lack of variety in the rewards vs the number of pages, but that's another discussion...) and I agree that they need to revisit this, consider some kind of remediation at least for Season Zero, some great options already given in the preceding posts.

whitecrow · April 10

How are people getting caches? I just get the points.

tomofhyrule · April 10

They just posted the article on Tomes: https://www.elderscrollsonline.com/en-us/news/post/69721

It does give a solution for players who opened their caches, and also suggests that excess points can be turned into gold after this autobuy

PeacefulAnarchy · April 10

whitecrow wrote: »

How are people getting caches? I just get the points.

Buying ESO+ or premium+ tome.

whitecrow · April 10

PeacefulAnarchy wrote: »

whitecrow wrote: »

How are people getting caches? I just get the points.

Buying ESO+ or premium+ tome.

I have ESO+.

PeacefulAnarchy · April 10

whitecrow wrote: »

PeacefulAnarchy wrote: »

whitecrow wrote: »

How are people getting caches? I just get the points.

Buying ESO+ or premium+ tome.

I have ESO+.

Well then either you didn't get what you should, or you're not looking in the right place, or you opened yours without noticing, IDK. You were supposed to get 1 cache for every month of sub since Jan 1 this year. They are listed in your currencies and can be opened on the tome page.

allochthons · April 10

The auto-buy also will skip things like crown meals, and upgrade mat kits.

I still don't like the auto-buy, but getting more poisons and the like was my main complaint.

That article answered many of my questions, and shows that they really are listening to us. Transparency ++.

DenverRalphy · April 10

tomofhyrule wrote: »

They just posted the article on Tomes: https://www.elderscrollsonline.com/en-us/news/post/69721

It does give a solution for players who opened their caches, and also suggests that excess points can be turned into gold after this autobuy

+1

A well outlined explanation, and a fair resolution IMO.

JHartEllis · April 10

allochthons wrote: »

The auto-buy also will skip things like crown meals, and upgrade mat kits.

That had been a worry, too. It's rather brazen that the system presumes an optimal reward path when players are so often *weird* with their priorities.

Some way of accommodating semi-attached players while sweeping old seasons under the rug so everyone is on the same page was probably the goal here. I hope it ultimately works, but a repeatable sink would really help smooth things out here.

Arunei · April 10

@ZOS_JessicaFolsom
The cap needs to be higher, full stop.

As it is now, Caches have a huge chance of being useless and not even something people can make full use of. Because unlocking Pages is tied to how many Points you earn, people can wind up opening five or six Caches to auto unlock up to a Page they want but then not actually spend all those Points before the end of the Season.

Auto-buyer doesn't help. Even if someone gets all the Currencies and winds up with more than 2k Points, all the auto-buyer will do is get things they didn't want. It's still wasting the Points. Yeah it's nice for people who maybe go on vacation near the end of a Season or some other irl thing happens that prevents you from actively spending Points but that likely won't be the case for most players.

It's even worse for people who use Caches but then also do Challenges, especially if those Challenges align with stuff they already do, because there are even MORE Points potentially lost.

Seriously, after a certain point people can wind up with more Caches than they can actually use because of the current cap. And then what's the point of even getting them when using them just sends off the extra over 2k into the void? Sure, someone could argue "oh it's for when you can't play or don't want to", except no, they're meant to be used when and how a person wants to. And again that argument doesn't account for Pages being unlocked as you earn Points, meaning you might not be spending what you're using because you might only be using them to get a certain Page unlocked.

"Oh but then just be patient and only use a few and then do Challenges" ok but then what's the point of getting Caches if you're going to be told not to use them?

The cap NEEDS to be higher so people don't waste Caches/Points AND to avoid making them obsolete after a certain point. And unless each unspent Point will convert to something like 30k Gold or so, it won't be worth as much as just upping the cap.

Danikat · April 10

I agree that removing the cap would be the simplest and best solution. They said they want to reduce FOMO and IMO that could apply to longer time scales than daily/weekly. A lot of people have a variable schedule during the week due to seasonal work and other things so being able to stock up on points to use them during a season when you can't play as much could actually be very helpful.

Yes it might also lead to someone stockpiling them and then barely logging in when they're at home and could be meeting ZOS's KPIs but choose not to, but if they do that it kind of suggests they're not actually enjoying the game and requiring regular engagement isn't going to help the underlying problem.

JHartEllis wrote: »

allochthons wrote: »

The auto-buy also will skip things like crown meals, and upgrade mat kits.

That had been a worry, too. It's rather brazen that the system presumes an optimal reward path when players are so often *weird* with their priorities.

Some way of accommodating semi-attached players while sweeping old seasons under the rug so everyone is on the same page was probably the goal here. I hope it ultimately works, but a repeatable sink would really help smooth things out here.

I'm the weird one.

I don't care much if it dumps excess points into consumables like potions because I can always delete them. I'm more concerned about it forcing collectibles I really don't want onto my account, because those aren't easy to get rid of.

I already had a time a few years ago when a free crown crate gave me a spider pet, and I was able to get customer support to delete it, but I'm not sure they'd do that again. I'm fully expecting a spider to show up in the season pass at some point, probably in October and I'll be purposely avoiding it so I really don't want to get to the end of the season only for the game to go "you forgot this collectible we've decided is a high priority reward so we spend the points you were saving on it!"

I'm glad they said they're looking at a way to opt-out of the game forcing rejected items on you, and I hope they bring it in soon.

whitecrow · April 10

PeacefulAnarchy wrote: »

whitecrow wrote: »

PeacefulAnarchy wrote: »

whitecrow wrote: »

How are people getting caches? I just get the points.

Buying ESO+ or premium+ tome.

I have ESO+.

Well then either you didn't get what you should, or you're not looking in the right place, or you opened yours without noticing, IDK. You were supposed to get 1 cache for every month of sub since Jan 1 this year. They are listed in your currencies and can be opened on the tome page.

Ah, I did get them. Didn't see the "open cache" prompt at the bottom of the screen.

MoonPile · April 10

Agree. There are surely a lot of people who still aren't aware of this – all who basically just play the game and don't go out to read or view external content.

Come start of Season 1, there are going to be a ton of confused players wondering (and probably filing support tickets): "where did all my points go?" and "why do I have all this stuff I didn't want to buy?"

DenverRalphy · April 10

Arunei wrote: »

@ZOS_JessicaFolsom
The cap needs to be higher, full stop.

As it is now, Caches have a huge chance of being useless and not even something people can make full use of. Because unlocking Pages is tied to how many Points you earn, people can wind up opening five or six Caches to auto unlock up to a Page they want but then not actually spend all those Points before the end of the Season

The point of the caches are to enable players to get to the end of the tome faster. If players only spend them when they're needed to get to the end, they'll rarely get spent by anyone except players who entered the game towards the end of the season. Increasing the cap would only make caches even less relevant.

boony · April 10

I opened all my caches on both accounts

After collecting all I wanted I still have 7000 tomes on one and 5000 on the other (could also open premium rewards for one account), no point me doing the challenges then.

Necrotech_Master · April 11

boony wrote: »

I opened all my caches on both accounts

After collecting all I wanted I still have 7000 tomes on one and 5000 on the other (could also open premium rewards for one account), no point me doing the challenges then.

im around the same, i opened 7 caches which started me at page 8, already maxed out all of the free tome items and i dont really have intention of buying the premium tome because it has nothing that interests me (about 70% of the claimables are useless consumables or currencies)

i dont really see why they remove the tome pts, just have 2000 count towards the next season but leave all of your tome pts intact, so your not losing anything, but also not gaining any more than anyone else would

the whole tomes thing could have been significantly less convoluted and more clearly presented from the getgo, have no idea why it was made more complex than it is

the whole thing with the autoclaim process seems also antithesis of player choice, if people DONT claim a reward, they clearly didnt want it in the first place so why go through the whole autoclaim process to begin with too

Umbracat449 · April 11

I think one problem is they're using tome points to do two things. Open pages, for which you need a lot, and buy things, for which you may not need a lot, depending on need or taste.

Perhaps finding another way to open pages?

For every week of challenges you do one challenge, a page opens? Too simple there's a flaw i haven't seen? Too fomo? Probably less fomo than having to earn 15k ish points? You neednt log in every week, just do a challenge from that week- seeing they accumulate.

Better anyway than having to earn large points that you then lose AND plus get stuff you don't want, just to see them spent.

PeacefulAnarchy · April 11

Umbracat449 wrote: »

I think one problem is they're using tome points to do two things. Open pages, for which you need a lot, and buy things, for which you may not, depending on taste.

Perhaps finding another way to open pages?

For every week of challenges you do one challenge, a page opens? Too simple there's a flaw i haven't seen? Too fomo? Probably less fomo than having to earn 15k ish points? You neednt log in every week, just do a challenge from that week- seeing they accumulate.

Better anyway than having to earn large points that you then lose AND plus get stuff you don't want, just to see them spent.

So every challenge unlocks a page, but no more than the number of weeks since the start of the tome? Challenges aren't tied to weeks and they accumulate only up to 12, so anything that tries to track challenges tied to weeks seems like it'd have a lot of issues.

They could just have a page unlock every week regardless of tome points, but keep the current unlock method as well so you can unlock early by earning tome points. This gives those who like grinding and unlocking a benefit still, but allows everyone to get what they'd like by the end of the season as long as they earn enough tome points to unlock it. It also makes the premium pass more appealing to those willing to spend but who don't want to so many challenges.

virtus753 · April 11

boony wrote: »

I opened all my caches on both accounts

After collecting all I wanted I still have 7000 tomes on one and 5000 on the other (could also open premium rewards for one account), no point me doing the challenges then.

Until April 30 they are taking requests to restore opened caches (in exchange for the 2k points to “put back” into each cache, iirc). It’s a one-time exception due to how they rolled out the information about the carryover limit. At least you could have some caches back to carry over to next season.

You can file a ticket from in game or on the website under Help. Just be sure not to file a /bug or feedback ticket, as those don’t get replies by design. The best bet may be on the website (either “in-game item” or “billing > ESO+ issue”).

Umbracat449 · April 11

PeacefulAnarchy wrote: »

Umbracat449 wrote: »

I think one problem is they're using tome points to do two things. Open pages, for which you need a lot, and buy things, for which you may not, depending on taste.

Perhaps finding another way to open pages?

For every week of challenges you do one challenge, a page opens? Too simple there's a flaw i haven't seen? Too fomo? Probably less fomo than having to earn 15k ish points? You neednt log in every week, just do a challenge from that week- seeing they accumulate.

Better anyway than having to earn large points that you then lose AND plus get stuff you don't want, just to see them spent.

So every challenge unlocks a page, but no more than the number of weeks since the start of the tome? Challenges aren't tied to weeks and they accumulate only up to 12, so anything that tries to track challenges tied to weeks seems like it'd have a lot of issues.

They could just have a page unlock every week regardless of tome points, but keep the current unlock method as well so you can unlock early by earning tome points. This gives those who like grinding and unlocking a benefit still, but allows everyone to get what they'd like by the end of the season as long as they earn enough tome points to unlock it. It also makes the premium pass more appealing to those willing to spend but who don't want to so many challenges.

No, doing just one challenge opens a page, from each week of the season. So you can't open page 3 till week 3, after doing just one chalkenge of week 3.

Points for spending, you earn same way.

but as they accumulate you could just log in in week 4 to open week 3 and 2 etc if you wanted, to avoid the must-login-problem.
Unless they only accumulate after you log in.

The point is to avoid needed 15k to 20k points for opening pages when you might not need that much for buying stuff, and then losing all that effort at the end of the season.

So change the price of opening pages, and people will grind for the points they need for the things they want to buy. They won't then have points left over to lose.

Your idea- having pages just open, I did wonder about that too. But I feel they want people to engage with the game, not just have a store expand what's for sale week by week.

Jaimeh · April 11

JHartEllis wrote: »

[*] Allow all Bonus Page items to each be redeemed X times
[*] All certain Bonus Page items to be redeemed a large number of times

I would love this option for the furnishing rewards in particular.

thescrollcat · April 24

Has anyone seen a recent update on the cache point situation? I put in a ticket and got a reply and ended up with them letting me know it was being escalated to the appropriate team but that was over a week ago. I know they are super slammed with everyone trying to get resolution. I just want to make sure I don't miss something and lose 10k+ points (not to mention all the points I spent already to buy everything thinking would lose them anyway so might as well buy something with them, all before the resolutions were offered).

coop500 · April 24

thescrollcat wrote: »

Has anyone seen a recent update on the cache point situation? I put in a ticket and got a reply and ended up with them letting me know it was being escalated to the appropriate team but that was over a week ago. I know they are super slammed with everyone trying to get resolution. I just want to make sure I don't miss something and lose 10k+ points (not to mention all the points I spent already to buy everything thinking would lose them anyway so might as well buy something with them, all before the resolutions were offered).

I think they claimed they'll let us exchange extra points for gold at the end of the season.

Jacozilla · April 24

thescrollcat wrote: »

Has anyone seen a recent update on the cache point situation? I put in a ticket and got a reply and ended up with them letting me know it was being escalated to the appropriate team but that was over a week ago. I know they are super slammed with everyone trying to get resolution. I just want to make sure I don't miss something and lose 10k+ points (not to mention all the points I spent already to buy everything thinking would lose them anyway so might as well buy something with them, all before the resolutions were offered).

Perhaps something changed, or your ticket got bugged/lost.

Forgot calendar date numbers, but I filed my ticket on Friday afternoon PST, no more than 1-2 days after the news article from devs saying exchanging back to caches for original points spent was allowed.

I had 3 ESO+ caches + 2 paid bonus tier ones, and originally converted them all. Like you, and many others, this gave 10k season points and far, far more than I would ever spend.

Friday, filed ticket to convert 6000 pts back to 3 caches, on Wed morning I got email confirming my ticket closed, the request was done. So call it ~3 business days.

Exact sequence of exchange went as follows - Ticket on Friday, got response same day from what sounded like actual, real human. Said would need to send ticket to special team, please be patient, blah blah. On the website, the ticket showed as 'Waiting on Agent' status. Then Fri->Wed, done.

Am happy with the results. With 4000 pts from paid bonus tier, and regular play earning Season 0 points, am now unlocked on both bonus tier pages, have bought literally every single item that has any value to me (skipped all minor consumables, any cosmetics other than skill style colors), and still have ~1300 pts left, with so much of season left, will prob end up buying literally even the useless lockpick and soul gem consumables. (plus keep 2k pts to carry over into next season)

Silaf · April 24

Destai wrote: »

The simplest solution is to remove Tome Caches, and just award Tome Points that never expire. I'm confident they'll survive without that one layer of pressure.

Just from a business perspective, support now has to spend their cycles refunding people their caches. That's time that could've been spent on other activities. It's nice they're doing that, but again, just seems like an avoidable situation.

I went into this thinking that I'll eventually build a nice inventory of Tomes, with activities and rewards, that I could earn at my leisure. That's why I bought it. Instead, I have to make sure I get everything with my points. Really don't want to navigate more layers of FOMO and pressure.

Legally speaking i don't think that's possible. If you purchased an item "tome caches" and ZOS removes it you are tecnically qualified for a refound.

For example i've purchased 12 months of eso+ and zos removes the caches.
I can argue ZOS removed an item associated with my eso+ purchase and ask for a refound.
If denied i can ask steam to arbitrate and probably win it.

The result is that i will obtain a refound and potentially have the eso plus time i already used as a bonus.
I can even use the refounded money to resub after that de facto extending my eso plus benefits beyond the 12 months limit.

The solution is simple. Allow an option to convert tome points to a reasonable equivalent currency choosen by the player at the end of the campaign. Gold, talvar, tradebars, transmute crystals, alliance points... The conversion amount should be based on the market value of each currency.

thedocbwarren · April 24

Silaf wrote: »

Destai wrote: »

The simplest solution is to remove Tome Caches, and just award Tome

The solution is simple. Allow an option to convert tome points to a reasonable equivalent currency choosen by the player at the end of the campaign. Gold, talvar, tradebars, transmute crystals, alliance points... The conversion amount should be based on the market value of each currency.

Even better idea, stop introducing more currencies that don't make sense. I honestly don't understand why they have more than 1 (two if the must separate real money from in-game.)

thescrollcat · April 26

Thanks for the feedback all. They got me all taken care of. I am sure it was just a backlog of users asking for help. They were very gracious and allowed me to revert them all back. One time only of course, but now I am better informed on their use for the future.

DoofusMax · April 26

Transparency up front: I purchased the Premium Tome and did not go wild with caches, so there aren't many of these problems which affect me personally, or at least won't affect me until we reach the end of the season and rollover time.

That said, I still strongly believe that the point requirement to unlock the bonus pages should be no more than the cost to buy everything on the free tier, plus the 2K carry-over. Converting those excess points to gold is better than flat-out losing them, but the conversion is a fallback solution to a problem which wouldn't exist had the unlock requirements been better considered. And yes, that includes increasing the amount of stuff to buy on the free tier by about 3K Tome Points' worth; there is no difference between lowering the point requirements and increasing the amount stuff to buy if they produce the same effect. If a free-tier player wants to continue to do challenges for more points than there is stuff to buy, then that's on them. But the the initial design should have resulted in a free-tier wash or close to it.