very excited to see what is in Update 48.

LunaFlora wrote: »

very excited to see what is in Update 48.

Agreed, and for some reason I'm mostly excited at the idea that we could start seeing overland difficulty being tested - no official info about it, just a hope and a feeling...

Edit: also, hopefully, this article today means tomorrow we'll have the crown store showcase from Master Kevin, without having to wait after the weekend...

Please Don’t Make Vengeance PvP Tests Mandatory Again

With the recent announcement of another mandatory Vengeance PvP test, I feel compelled to speak up—not just for myself, but for many in the dedicated PvP community who’ve voiced similar concerns. While ZOS might be hoping this new event revitalizes interest in Cyrodiil, forcing all players into a homogenized test environment does more harm than good. Here's why:

1. Casual-Friendly Doesn’t Mean Better for the Game
Let’s be real: Vengeance is clearly tailored to casual players. And that’s fine in itself—new players should feel welcome. But when accessibility comes at the cost of depth and mastery, it sends the wrong message. Many casual players are enjoying Vengeance simply because it strips away the usual barriers to PvP—build knowledge, gear farming, group coordination. But that’s not accessibility—that’s flattening the experience.

There are plenty of viable, craftable builds. The issue isn’t that PvP is too hard or too gated—it’s that the current generation of players often isn’t encouraged to explore the deep systems ESO already has. Instead of empowering players to learn, Vengeance just hands them a shallow PvP experience where individual effort and ingenuity barely matter.

2. Zergs Dominate, Strategy Dies
One of ESO's greatest PvP strengths used to be the satisfaction of a skilled small group outplaying a massive zerg with positioning, communication, and smart build choices. Vengeance replaces that with pure number-stacking. The scaling and skill loadout changes mean tight-knit teams can no longer punch above their weight. Victory doesn’t go to the clever or the skilled anymore—it goes to whoever brings the most bodies and spams the most light attacks.

This undermines what made PvP in ESO compelling: it wasn't just about stats—it was about strategy.

3. Theorycrafting is Dead in Vengeance
ESO has always been about making your character your own—choosing specific gear sets, refining your build, and grinding to optimize. That effort used to matter. In Vengeance, it doesn’t. Everyone’s forced into bland, uniform setups, which eliminates one of the last truly Elder Scrolls-ish elements left in PvP.

Why bother testing, farming, and crafting when the game now tells you “don’t worry, we’ll flatten it all for you”?

4. The Skill Gap is Gone
PvP should reward mastery. Right now, it doesn’t. Vengeance's systems minimize the differences between a veteran and a newcomer, not by lifting new players up, but by dragging veterans down. There’s no reason to improve, because improvement no longer yields meaningful results.

Outplaying someone used to feel earned. Now, with simplified skills and watered-down mechanics, the thrill of besting an opponent through superior skill is all but gone.

5. Combat Feels Awkward and Clunky
The Vengeance-specific abilities are a poor fit for ESO's combat system. They don’t flow, they don’t feel responsive, and they break the rhythm veteran players have spent years mastering. PvP combat should feel fluid and impactful—not like you’re fighting with training weights on.

Instead of enhancing the experience, these abilities turn combat into a chore. It’s not fun. It’s not satisfying. It’s not what PvP in ESO was built to be.

The Bigger Problem: A Philosophical Shift
What’s most concerning is what Vengeance represents: a departure from what made ESO PvP great. This isn’t just a change in design—it’s a shift in philosophy. ZOS seems increasingly willing to prioritize short-term casual engagement over the long-term health and depth of competitive play.

Yes, you might gain some new or returning players who enjoy the simplicity. But at what cost? You risk losing the very players who’ve kept PvP alive—through bad patches, imbalances, lag, and everything in between. The players who studied, adapted, and helped build the community that exists today.

To those of us who’ve invested years into builds, rivalries, and skill-based progression, Vengeance feels like a betrayal.

Please Keep Vengeance Optional

If elements of Vengeance are going to make it to live service, then let it live as a separate ruleset campaign. Let new players ease in there. Let casuals enjoy it. But do not force all of Cyrodiil into this design mold.

We need space for competitive, strategic PvP to survive—where skill, creativity, and mastery still matter.

Please, ZOS: support the diversity of your community, not just its lowest common denominator.

Sincerely,
A Veteran PvPer Who Still Believes ESO Can Do Better

I loved vengeance because it didn't have procs, pull sets, ball groups, and excessive cross healing. Please make it permanent, thank you!

Can't wait for Vengeance especially during another event happening.

XSTRONG wrote: »

Undaunted celebration is the best event in eso, looking forward to it

It's a great event for leveling up the undaunted skill for your secondary characters while collecting some useful amour/weapons sets.

I'm happy to take part in the Undaunted celebration. But it bothers me to no end that we still didn't have a chance to earn the Frostbane pets that were in Undaunted celebration in 2018

@ZOS_Kevin It's been two years of anniversary, we had a chance to get some past rewards, Impresario assistant has some, but this one bunch of pets is forever missing.
Please, if it's possible, could they be added for tickets during Undaunted event? If it's too late to do it, can we get them somehow? It's been years !
Personally I'm after the senche, but others were cute too. Pretty please, bring them somehow back, preferably not RNG bound.

https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Online:Frostbane_Sabre_Cat_(pet)

OccultOverload wrote: »

Please Don’t Make Vengeance PvP Tests Mandatory Again

While I agree with you that Vengeance is an awful mode, my understanding is that it was simplified to zero in on the worst server side problems. They can set a controlled environment and then see what part of the system is breaking. For example, just to make something stupid up, let's say for the sake of argument that looting containers was making cyro fall apart. They could use Vengeance to create a baseline with that off, then turn on just that one feature, run it again, and see how things change. It's nice.......................

...............in theory.

Where this theory breaks down is two fold. First, the parameters of the campaign are controlled, but the inputs to the model are not. The same players are not performing the same actions from the same geographical / network location. Instead, they are relying entirely on entropy to overcome the massive error margin. This is somewhat ok given enough entropy, and it is admittedly difficult to inject enough scripted events and synthesized traffic to mimic what real humans do, but it's a limiting way to conduct data analysis. By that, I mean that the conclusions you can draw are limited. For example, if you create a controlled environment where one particular background process is pegged at 100%, and then compare that to another process and see if it's affected, you could identify that *correlation*. What you can't do is identify *causation*, at least again without sizable error bars on that plot.

This all leads into the second problem, which is that we have yet to see practical changes to non-vengeance cyro. We only see them hinting more and more that Vengeance itself is the real answer, and they'll keep adding features to it until it becomes a permanent campaign. That makes the whole idea of testing kind of pointless, because it doesn't appear to be testing geared towards improving existing campaigns.