Iccotak wrote: »

The Main Story is a major let down every time because it hyped up a Big Bad who is in all actuality extremely easy and boring to beat.

Even if you nerf yourself it’s just a longer fight with bare minimum mechanics designed for beginners.

I cannot emphasize enough how much this design choice completely ruins the main story of installments and the overall year long story.

Main Story bosses (and mini-bosses) NEED difficulty options.

Story instances should have a Solo/Group & Difficulty setting

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Heck, Delves need difficulty options. I did a delve that was connected to 2 side quests which hyped up a dangerous argonian necromancer only for him to be a total punk.

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For a game that focuses so much on combat, the only engaging PvE combat is relegated to unrelated endgame group content.

Solo play is often incredibly boring when it comes to combat gameplay and that often undermines the story.

People want engaging gameplay with their story and exploration.

I don't want to play through the vanilla zone content more than once, with the exception of maybe a couple of relatively quick quests I can do to get a skill point. I played the game prior to One Tam, where going into the next zone before you levelled up sufficiently meant it was a constant struggle to do anything that involved fighting. Hell, I quit in the first few months of release because I couldn't solo a dolmen, and being in Australia means that the server is a lot quieter at the time I usually play.
I don't care if it takes a few light attacks to kill mobs and a couple of rotations to kill a quest boss. So... no thanks to harder overland - unless it was an option.

Vhozek wrote: »

I think we should sit back and take a second look at this game's overworld to make it more interesting and exciting. Bumping up the mob difficulty seems to be a good start. I really doubt many people would complain. The only issue is that it can't just be done as a lone update but rather paired up with a sort of re-launch or massive event advertising the game. What do you think? What else could be implemented to make leveling exciting and not just a delay to end-game content? Because that's basically what it is, it's just a delay not even a challenging obstacle.

What is this "end game" content you speak of? I've been here since beta, and haven't bothered with "end game" anything.

There is a, possibly large, portion of the players who are actually interested in playing the stories, doing the questing, and exploring the world. For the non-competitive, rather be picking flowers and decorating my houses players really aren't interested in ramping up the difficulty of normal content. There is no point at all in damage sponge enemies for the sake of "difficulty". There isn't a lot of interest in being the ultimate uber-leet personification of destruction when you aren't interested in pvp and don't care whether someone else kills your character or not as long as you get to finish the story quest you're on.

Until there is some means of splitting the "worlds" so the uber hard core "Dark Souls is too easy" difficulty junkies are not the governing factor for the normal story-questing flower picking house decorating players, "let's make Dark Souls look as easy as Barbie Pearl Princess" ideas aren't going to get much traction.

Jack-0 wrote: »

SilverBride wrote: »

"Can we get a vet mode for delves and quests? Uh, so we had that ... at launch. It was called Cadwell's Silver and Cadwell's Gold. Nobody did it and everybody hated it, so we took it out. We put the challenge into World Bosses, and into solo Arenas, and into Dungeons and Trials." - Rich Lambert

https://clips.twitch.tv/BovineLovelyGrassTakeNRG-IGkmH8s1XHeD9P2u

That’s really disappointing and Rich Lambert is wrong, I highly enjoyed doing Cadwell’s gold and silver, so no, not everybody hated it.

Rich Lambert knows more than you - he would have access to the actual statistics of how many players actually did Silver & Gold. Maybe he should have said "The majority did not do it" instead of nobody - but his point is still correct in that it was not a popular aspect/part of the game. I'm happy for you that you liked it, but you =/= everyone.

From the onset of ESO up till when Cadwell's silver & Gold were removed there was a common theme from many players who did do them - how empty they were, how they could go back to 'normal' and the game was teeming with players, but Silver/Gold had hardly anyone playing there. You will still find ppl posting here on these forums to this day who state they remember Silver/Gold being barren of people.

This is why they scrapped the whole Silver & Gold aspect - because so few peopple played it, and they had quite a lot of achievements , loot, story, etc tied behind it - ppl were more inclined to run run 3 characters to get the 3 alliance stories than run 1 character through everything.

Same goes with Craglorn - it was supposed to the the big, bad, super-hard "must group" area. After the initial rush of interest, most people stopped going. Why? Because it was too difficult, because it was forced grouping or never go the story. Yes it had it's die-hard players... ppl who farmed mats, or did the events, and some who would group up for the story.

However once again, Zenimax admitted the majority of players avoided the zone. Most players had not done any of the story at all. Thus it was changed, so the main storyline in Craglorn could be done solo.

See a trend here?

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Looking at the number of people playing New World right now is irrelevant. It's the new shiny MMO on the scene, with lots of twitch streamers playing it, lots of interest, etc. So yes it's obviously going to have a lot of ppl playing it right now.

A more realistic thing would be to come back in 3+ months and see how many are still playing it, what the game is like at that time, how the PvP is doing, how the open-world PvP (if any - I don't know if there is), etc. Only then can you possible try and compare how liked/unliked the gameplay/difficulty/etc is.

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On another note, and this is actually extremely relevant to ESO: I've seen someone say they've never seen another MMO which made it's overland combat/questing/etc as easy as ESO. I guess they've never played Guild Wars 2.

GW2's base game open-world combat was fairly dead easy, you could solo just about everything (there was only a few specific 'world boss' fights that couldn't be solo'ed), and there was no forced grouping or anything.

People like those who create these "Make ESO Overland harder!" threads did the same over there. They spent years whining to ANet that the overland was too easy, not complicated enough, not challenging enough, etc. In the same way as they do here... over and over again the same type of arguments were made.

ANet listened, and when the 1st expansion came out... it was more difficult, harder to solo, more group focused, more content locked behind stuff that would require finesse to do or groups, etc. It was exactly what the 'hardcore' had been asking for... and these ppl sung it's praises on the forums.

Within a week or 2 of launch however the official forums filled up with thread after thread of people complain about how difficult it was, how it was too hard for them to just move around the maps, how they struggled to do map events and such. Soon afterwards the threads changed to people complaining how empty the expansion maps were, how they were struggling to do group events all due to lack of players - they were using party/group finder with multiple ppl jumping around spamming it and still couldn't finish events or difficult content. It wasn't just the expansion maps that suffered, ppl were reporting the base game's population was down dramatically as well.

ANet listened to ppl who make these kinds of threads. The result?

- They had the biggest 6 month loss of revenue that they have ever had (before & afterwards). They lost 66-67% revenue in the 6-months after the 1st expansion launched.

Now while you will expect to lose revenue in a period after an expansion - ie revenue goes up due to expansion sales, and early game dlc sales, then once that's over it'll go back to normal - it's not normal, or expected for the revenue to drop that dramatically. You can look at what happened with the revenue after GW2's 2nd expansion: it only dropped 43% revenue over it's 'peak' increase. This is more inline with what you would expect.

The difference? ANet listened and made their 2nd expansion more easy, more solo friendly, and more attuned to the casual player. The revenue reflects that once they moved back into this direction, they stopped hemorrhaging players.

Yes, they were hemorrhaging players after the 1st expansion - it was so bad that they had to make a public apology & statement, apologizing for making it too hard for most players. They had to go and nerf a lot of what ppl were struggling with - moving mobs further apart, changing class-essential stuff from being locked behind group-orientated content to stuff that could be solo'ed, downgrading many events from group-only to being able to be soloed, etc.

This is relevant to ESO - because like ESO, GW2's base game open-world difficulty was fairly easy. Like each other, both games have had their vocal calls on their respective forums to raise the difficulty of said open-world content... with both saying that players would adapt, ppl would get better, that only a small fraction would be left behind, and that making stuff harder would attract hordes of new players.

Well, looking at GW2 & it's Heart of Thorns expansion... we can see just how well that went. Combined with how well ESO's own "Cadwell's Silver", "Cadwell's Gold", & the initial release of Craglorn went.... making ESO's overland more difficult to suit the extreme minority of forumgoers would be an unmitigated disaster for ESO.

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However as I've said every time I've responded to one of these threads. If those pushing this instead pushed Zenimax to offer alternate server's / instances for players where mobs had better ai, better skillsets, etc to make the game more difficult and challenging for them while leaving the rest of the playerbase to be in the 'not difficult' normal gameplay that the majority likes... I'd 100% back that.

Now that Microsoft owns Zenimax, maybe those who seek more difficult overland could start asking them to spend some money on ESO server equipment so new instances/server's could be implemented that has a harder overland for those who like it. I'd say that you'll probably have more luck now that previously when Zenimax wasn't owned by Microsoft.

Here's a handy tip! If you're going to add some weird statistic to your argument to make your argument have more merit then it does, then you need to offer the proof and where that number even came from. I can say 800K people just LOVE grinding out rare items and ZOS needs to make drop rates even harder for everyone! So if you can't offer evidence of things pulled out of your bum, then don't expect anyone to take it seriously...

@RisenEclipse

I agree with what you said about taking the time to demonstrate the information provided is accurate. Below is a link to an article that seems to pegs Steam sales of the game at over 700k as of 9/28. I do not think this includes purchases made outside of Steam.

https://www.geekwire.com/2021/amazons-new-world-already-steams-played-new-game-2021/

However, this does not mean all those people agree with the statement made in the OP and title. Heck, much of the game is very easy and I expect most of those players will quit the game which would toss the premise of this thread into doubt. The game is also a very different business model which makes comparisons of copies sold and active players more like apples to oranges.

[snip]

Guess what, every good MMO in the last 20 years became good by stealing ideas from other mediocre MMOs, adding them to their already good game, and expanding upon them. If something gets positive feedback and obviously works, there is no reason not to consider implementing it in your own game. For profit at least, if not anything else.

[edited for baiting]

Kamatsu wrote: »

Looking at the number of people playing New World right now is irrelevant. It's the new shiny MMO on the scene, with lots of twitch streamers playing it, lots of interest, etc. So yes it's obviously going to have a lot of ppl playing it right now.

A more realistic thing would be to come back in 3+ months and see how many are still playing it, what the game is like at that time, how the PvP is doing, how the open-world PvP (if any - I don't know if there is), etc. Only then can you possible try and compare how liked/unliked the gameplay/difficulty/etc is.

I think that New World needs to make a number of changes before it will have mass appeal. I play it, and it can be an intensely frustrating game. When I say "frustrating", I mean not enjoyable at all. I expect this because it is launch, but they do need to fix it. I will stick with the game, but right now the decks are awash in the storm.

ZOS has solved the bulk of the issues that plague New World. The Achilles heel for ZOS is large encounter performance, which they still need to solve.

New World is very deeply mired a problem similar to the one that One Tamriel addressed. One Tamriel may not be a perfect balance and may result in an overland that is easy for some people, but it keeps all those areas that used to be under leveled actively played.

Kamatsu wrote: »

However as I've said every time I've responded to one of these threads. If those pushing this instead pushed Zenimax to offer alternate server's / instances for players where mobs had better ai, better skillsets, etc to make the game more difficult and challenging for them while leaving the rest of the playerbase to be in the 'not difficult' normal gameplay that the majority likes... I'd 100% back that.

Now that Microsoft owns Zenimax, maybe those who seek more difficult overland could start asking them to spend some money on ESO server equipment so new instances/server's could be implemented that has a harder overland for those who like it. I'd say that you'll probably have more luck now that previously when Zenimax wasn't owned by Microsoft.

ZOS is never going to do this. No business justification. The development, operations, and support are not matched by expected customer demand for the product. That is what I draw from all the statements that have been made on this subject, and ones like it.

Being owned by Microsoft does not change anything. Microsoft knows cloud, but ESO is not a cloud game. It is very much a game that is rooted in traditional datacenters. We can see the mess that the largest cloud provider in the world made of a cloud MMORPG that tried to scale up to ESO.

Jameson18 wrote: »

trackdemon5512 wrote: »

According to ZOS during their most recent stream on Friday 19 million people seem to be just fine with gameplay as it is now.

[snip]

That 19 million is in total game copies sold. They had, per Steam, a peak of 2.5m concurrent players on average since 2017. They also sold over a million copies during covid/2020. While that concurrent player number never yielded a sustainable increase. [snip]

As of last week, after the release of NW, that "800,000" number that's being thrown around, is what they're down from the 2.5m average, on Steam alone.

Actually, the 19 million is the number of verified accounts created since the 2014 launch. It reportedly does not include beta or trial accounts.

Steam numbers are faulty and I never use them to support, or debunk, activity for any game, including ESO. I can start up Skyrim on Steam, let it sit on the title screen for hours, and Steam will count this as me playing the game and add hours to my play time. The same applies to ESO. Steam can't tell what you are doing in the game, or even if you are in the game.

On top of that, Steam is the minority platform on what might be the minority platform (PC). We don't know what the breakdown is between XBox, PC, and Playstation. At one time, Firor said they were roughly equal, and even if that remains the case today, Steam is still the minority of 1/3rd of the population.

[edited to remove quote]

Jameson18 wrote: »

On the other note, if Steam is in fact the minority platform, and it takes that kind of hit? That's cause for even greater concern.

Huh? New World by design requires a steam account to play, so of course it is the ESO players of Steam that will take a large hit while some of these players might try out this new MMO in town.

WhyMustItBe wrote: »

No one is asking to go back to veteran zones. What people are asking for is an OPTION to play them that way, and people here are basically saying "no, I don't want to allow you to play the way you like even though it doesn't effect me in any way."

I am not against anyone playing the way they like as long as it remains within the confines of what is good for the game. Optional veteran levels would affect everyone as I will reiterate below.

• It would separate the playerbase
• It would give an unfair advantage to end game players IF there were increased rewards and drops
• It would turn overland into end game content, which has never been its intended purpose
• It would take time, manpower and cost that is better spent on issues that would benefit everyone

Rich Lambert recently discussed veteran levels in a Twitch stream that I linked in a previous post, and basically said no to the request.