https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/590162/overland-content-feedback-thread#latest

Check this thread.

And you are right it has become a problem and has got worse in recent years due to power creep.

Its interesting to see that new players are also experiencing these issues, and you are right that the foundation for the game is otherwise great. Its just lack of developer foresight and ignorance that is the issue.

SlipKnot wrote: »

I think that set a personal pve difficulty that multiplies the damage taken from enemies and reduce the damage you made them, isnt to hard to implement and solve a huge part of the problem, cause the enemies has abilities that you dont need to dogde or block it.

Mixing together players who can one-shot everything they come across with players who want engaging, challenging fights is not a combo that works. No matter how difficult you make content for yourself, you will be surrounded by players who can stomp the enemies you are fighting in 2 seconds, short circuiting any challenge you are trying to create for yourself. The only effective way to do multiple difficulties is multiple instances. It is why for dungeons the dungeon itself is normal or veteran, rather than everybody going into the same dungeon and the individual players being set to normal or veteran difficulty. The difficulty others players face is intertwined with your difficulty in a multiplayer game. But having multiple instances of game world at different difficulties is what game had in the beginning and it was not very popular. It led to splitting up the player base and a lot of barely populated zones that looked desolate and dead.

This is a really difficult problem to solve in MMOs, where having busy zones buzzing with lots of other players is so critical to a game's success.

Basically, individual player difficulties only work if no one else is around. But having no one else around is something MMO designers don't want to see in their game.