Are The Tome Challenges As Ludicrously Unfair As It Seems?

Trier_Sero · April 6

BretonMage wrote: »

lowest weekly estimate = 360 × 5 × 14 = 25200 (27720)
highest weekly estimate = 600 × 5 × 14 = 42000 (46200)

Those are two extremes. In reality most people will get something like 35-38k tome points per season, which is more than enough to get everything in the premium tome and even save up for the next one.

barney2525 · April 6

This IS all out of whack. Option - Open 1 ( That's ONE ) treasure chest - 75 points
Option 2 Mine 15 nodes of ore ( understand Half the nodes you find will be jewelry so it will take about 30 nodes to get that 15 ) - 60 points

Oh yeah, that's balanced

barney2525 · April 6

Tommy_The_Gun wrote: »

Wait. If you re-roll you can get different or better reward ? And some one (if lucky) will get better reward cuz it is RNG ? Like what in the hell... I thought that re-roll is there if you would get "do a 12 man trial" task or "do IC task etc". I thought it is there so that you can re-roll content you don't do...

Why some one who designed this made different rewards ?! What were they thinking lol. Reward should be the same. Otherwise it will have impact on what costs how much to unlock later on, as ZOS will just have a statistical data on what is the average amount of tome points players have and what is they highest amount of points someone has, so they will just adjust prices...

Reroll changes the task. Each task has it's set amount of points given.

BretonMage · April 6

Trier_Sero wrote: »

BretonMage wrote: »

lowest weekly estimate = 360 × 5 × 14 = 25200 (27720)
highest weekly estimate = 600 × 5 × 14 = 42000 (46200)

Those are two extremes. In reality most people will get something like 35-38k tome points per season, which is more than enough to get everything in the premium tome and even save up for the next one.

Only for those with the time to play. What about those with only a few hours to play on weekends? What if they got really bad RNG (it happens) and had used up their rerolls?

I just think that adding RNG to a rewards system that didn't have that before is a bit disappointing. It's not the end of the world, sure, but honestly wish they didn't have to put RNG everywhere.

tomfant · April 6

Trier_Sero wrote: »

BretonMage wrote: »

lowest weekly estimate = 360 × 5 × 14 = 25200 (27720)
highest weekly estimate = 600 × 5 × 14 = 42000 (46200)

Those are two extremes. In reality most people will get something like 35-38k tome points per season, which is more than enough to get everything in the premium tome and even save up for the next one.

So, the Tome chaches you'll get with ESO+ are basically worthless. We can unlock everything by normal play and even generate quite an excess of Tome points (which gets stripped down to 2000 going into the next season). What is the point then in opening Tome caches? You can open the last Tome pages earlier, but loose even more points at the end of the season.

allochthons · April 6

Trier_Sero wrote: »

Those are two extremes. In reality most people will get something like 35-38k tome points per season, which is more than enough to get everything in the premium tome and even save up for the next one.

Alas, no. Only 2000 Tome Points will roll over to Season 1. The rest will expire.
(I'm not going to cite a source because there are multiple threads on the forums about it)

allochthons · April 6

barney2525 wrote: »

Reroll changes the task. Each task has it's set amount of points given.

Not exactly. A re-roll gives you a good chance of getting a new task. There are plenty of examples given here on the forums of people re-rolling repeatedly and getting the same task. There is no mechanism that guarantees you won't re-roll what you already have.

OTOH, there is also a chance of getting duplicate tasks: i.e. two tasks for doing the Kvatch Arena. And each time you complete it, you update both tasks.

It's messy.

allochthons · April 6

tomfant wrote: »

What is the point then in opening Tome caches? You can open the last Tome pages earlier, but loose even more points at the end of the season.

What I've heard (I think on a stream? But I'm not sure) is that the Tome Caches are designed to help out if for some reason a person can't do many of the tasks during a season, for whatever reason. Since they don't expire, we can save them up for a rainy day when we can't play for a month or three (for example). I really wish that had been made much clearer. It would have saved a lot of pain.

FurryCandyHearts · April 6

Emeratis wrote: »

I'm gonna quote a post from a discord from a person who's better at math than me because I think it will help ease a few worries:

18k tome points needed to unlock all pages up to page 10
another 2k tome points for both bonus pages (but the bonus pages only give consumable items and in-game currencies, no collectibles or trade bars, so not really necessary)

non-premium collectibles cost: 4600 tome points
non-premium trade bars cost: 3450 tome points
non-premium total: 8050 tome points

premium collectibles cost: 9700 tome points (!!!)
premium trade bars cost: 400 tome points
premium total: 10100 tome points

non-premium + premium total: 18150 tome points

========================================

14 weeks of challenges, 5 challenges per week, not including seasonal event injections (anniversary was a 1500 one-off), plus the daily login (99 × 15 = 1485)

lowest challenge i've seen seems to be 6 × 60 = 360 (396 for ESO+)
highest challenge i've seen seems to be 3 × 200 = 600 (660 for ESO+)

lowest weekly estimate = 360 × 5 × 14 = 25200 (27720)
highest weekly estimate = 600 × 5 × 14 = 42000 (46200)

I think the system is designed for you to do tasks you want to and even the lowest value will easily go over what is needed if you are playing regularly. I do understand the worries though and we won't fully know for certain until we see how this whole season plays out and this alongside the event fragment rng does go into the issue of perceived fairness and systems that mean well but feel bad for the player.

I also know Night Market on pts and other events should also have an additional payout of tome points. Night Market's was earn x points in the Night Market so events will add to the seasonal section of challenges.

and so b/c of the vast excess in availability of tome points one could earn, they expire at the end of every season. seems legit. other wise someone could earn enough tome points in one season to buy out 3 seasons...

tomofhyrule · April 6

Trier_Sero wrote: »

BretonMage wrote: »

lowest weekly estimate = 360 × 5 × 14 = 25200 (27720)
highest weekly estimate = 600 × 5 × 14 = 42000 (46200)

Those are two extremes. In reality most people will get something like 35-38k tome points per season, which is more than enough to get everything in the premium tome and even save up for the next one.

Another thing to add here is that the math was already done on how many points are needed: https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/comment/8451135/#Comment_8451135

So if someone is low rolling every single time and getting the lowest values (technically, there is a single challenge that only gives 350 instead of 360 right now, so the absolute lowest possible value you could get is 24500, which requires getting that one challenge for every one of your rolls), they still will have 8510 points more than is needed to unlock everything at the free tier, which puts you on the bonus pages and gives you points to carry over.
And of course the low value ones are the ones that are easiest to knock out, so players with low amounts of time would be better served by those low value ones anyway so they could complete them, instead of them trying to get "run specific trial" versions that they don't have time for and thus don't get anything.

While it does feel bad that people could end up with vastly different numbers, the fact that even the lowest case grants so much more than needed and points expire at the end of the season means the entire discrepancy is "but my friend is throwing away more points than I am." Now yes, for the premium tier, you need more points to unlock things. But those also don't ever expire, so once you get into later tomes where you have loads of points left over, you can still go back to the first one and now actually have a use for those points you can't use from the other. So it will even out.
Honestly, the only people who get royally screwed are those who:

Buy Premium of every tome AND
Lowroll on every challenge AND
Don't play the game much AND
Don't have ESO+ so they have no Caches to spend AND
Want to buy every single thing on there, including the stuff everyone complained was trash when it was still daily rewards.

FurryCandyHearts · April 6

i'm gonna say it loud, I LIKE THE TOME SYSTEM JUST AS IT IS THANK YOU ZOS first thing you did in a while that added something to the game that i will actually use

Companions are annoying
Card games don't interest me
Not Scying ever
Never gonna scribe either
Many events i just am not interested in
Fashion and Housing i have no investment in
Trials i can take or leave. I've done a few but mostly avoid them
Infinite Archive i just havent gotten around to
New dungeons are generally done well but i don't always want them in my queue
Battle grounds i hated b/c only 2 of the 3 teams got any bonus but that seems better now
Cyrodil i have enjoyed some on and off again

Crafting and daily dungeons is about as much as i consistently do and b/c of the chakram shields of arcanist i often enjoy daily dungeons a whole lot less than i used to Esp when people follow me around the dungeon as i am running away from them casting it on me just to harass me. Still happens. Telling people o stop only seems to give them more pleasure in it.

Emeratis · April 6

BretonMage wrote: »

Emeratis wrote: »

I'm gonna quote a post from a discord from a person who's better at math than me because I think it will help ease a few worries:

(snip)
lowest challenge i've seen seems to be 6 × 60 = 360 (396 for ESO+)
highest challenge i've seen seems to be 3 × 200 = 600 (660 for ESO+)

lowest weekly estimate = 360 × 5 × 14 = 25200 (27720)
highest weekly estimate = 600 × 5 × 14 = 42000 (46200)

The disparity isn't insignificant. And for those without a lot of time to do all the challenges, it could affect their rewards unfairly if their (say) 8 hours isn't valued at the same level as another player's 8 hours of play. That's the frustrating thing about RNG. And while I get that we have many systems using RNG in the game, it was not like this before for the daily logins/endeavors system.

I can agree and I kinda feel a little vindicated about talking in the fragment vs buying it with 1000 trade bars thread because I had a similar feeling of getting 12 hypothetical fragments vs having to buy them is a 12,000 trade bar difference and I did wonder if we would see some of this behavior in tomes. I admit I like most of the new direction of things but this kind of rng where a player's experience with events and tomes, which are meant to be an exciting and happy thing, can be soured by having to do double the work for less rewards is not a good thing. I am a firm believer of if you put a reasonable amount of effort into events or a battlepass, you should be able to get everything before it's over and right now events are definitely not doing that and while 42,000 is over double the points needed to complete the battlepass, how fast or slow you complete it depending on whether you roll lucky value missions or not doesn't feel good. Also, if the battle pass gets an endless track as a solution to people opening their boxes it means that even with something such as gold a player could get a bonus income or not depending on something outside of their control.

I really do hope ZOS addresses these pain points and concerns and not just the known bugs with the tomes because this is something the community doesn't feel good about and ZOS should listen to that.

Mission · April 6

I think what is even worse about the system. since everyone has random tasks. You can't even complete them together with a friend

salander7 · April 6

I think that, while the reward discrepancy between highest and lowest yielding challenges (350 vs 600 points) should be reduced, it's kind of whatever in the end.

As someone wrote down, even with the worst potential rewards you'll get more points than you need or can carry over to next season. That's even assuming we're going to buy all the possible rewards, and some of them are rubbish anyway, particularly in the bonus pages.

BetweenMidgets · April 6

salander7 wrote: »

I think that, while the reward discrepancy between highest and lowest yielding challenges (350 vs 600 points) should be reduced, it's kind of whatever in the end.

As someone wrote down, even with the worst potential rewards you'll get more points than you need or can carry over to next season. That's even assuming we're going to buy all the possible rewards, and some of them are rubbish anyway, particularly in the bonus pages.

This is the first time that we, the players, are interacting with this system.

I seem to recall when endeavors were first rolled out people did potential calculations on how many we'd get and what we'd be able to buy. Then, as time went on and the amount we were awarded on the regular was dramatically reduced. So the reality was we could get much less than was speculated at first.

To assume that we will always have enough points to purchase all that we want with points remaining is not a forgone conclusion.

Not picking on you, @salander7 , I saw this same train of thought throughout the whole thread, yours was just closest to the bottom

TwinLamps · April 6

Challenges related to dungeons or trials

- I would rather die than do these

Oh, well, guess no points for me then

NoticeMeArkay · April 6

My new seasonal task is "Finish 1000 endeavours while in a group".

Quick question...

...How?

tomofhyrule · April 6

NoticeMeArkay wrote: »

My new seasonal task is "Finish 1000 endeavours while in a group".

Quick question...

...How?

Do you play a translation?

We should all have the same Seasonal challenge of “kill 1000 foes in Wrothgar, Hew’s Bane, or Gold Coast,” so it could be a transcription error. It wouldn’t be the first time they shifted something in the translation table.

Koshka · April 6

TwinLamps wrote: »

Challenges related to dungeons or trials

- I would rather die than do these

Oh, well, guess no points for me then

You don't even have to talk to people to do a normal dungeon/trial. Just pretend they are npcs.

oddarin · April 6

tomofhyrule wrote: »

We should all have the same Seasonal challenge of “kill 1000 foes in Wrothgar, Hew’s Bane, or Gold Coast,” so it could be a transcription error. It wouldn’t be the first time they shifted something in the translation table.

Can confirm this. I also had the line "finish 1000 endeavours..." in my task, but when I switched client to English, it said "kill 1000 foes..."

JemadarofCaerSalis · April 6

One thing to remember about the disparity between the numbers is that people are talking about 'well, it will even out in the end'.

But, that is only for people who have the time and ability to do all the challenges. So, they have the time to mine 15 nodes, six times over, they have the time and ability to capture 1 keep however many times it allows you to do that.

For people who don't have the time and or ability, that disparity could be the difference between getting something they want, and just ending up frustrated with the whole thing.

Not everyone has the time to play consistently. Not everyone has the ability to play for long periods of time. Not everyone has the ability to do certain challenges.

For those that can? Sure, even if they get the low point ones, they will be fine.

For those that can't, on the other hand, those low point ones, with all the higher point ones potentially out of reach or simply not being given due to RNG and limited rerolls, means that they likely won't unlock most of the pages of the tome, let alone finish it.

Athory · April 6

Emeratis wrote: »

"............

========================================

14 weeks of challenges, 5 challenges per week, not including seasonal event injections (anniversary was a 1500 one-off), plus the daily login (99 × 15 = 1485)

lowest challenge i've seen seems to be 6 × 60 = 360 (396 for ESO+)
highest challenge i've seen seems to be 3 × 200 = 600 (660 for ESO+)

lowest weekly estimate = 360 × 5 × 14 = 25200 (27720)
highest weekly estimate = 600 × 5 × 14 = 42000 (46200)

.........""[/quote]

Oh boy, oh boy… we’re gonna need a Hodor Reflexes addon, a mix of Combat Alerts, and something like that just to keep up with all those accounts. Jesus!

Trier_Sero · April 6

BretonMage wrote: »

Only for those with the time to play. What about those with only a few hours to play on weekends? What if they got really bad RNG (it happens) and had used up their rerolls?

I just think that adding RNG to a rewards system that didn't have that before is a bit disappointing. It's not the end of the world, sure, but honestly wish they didn't have to put RNG everywhere.

You have 10 tasks that take something from 30 minutes to 1 hour each every two weeks. That's plenty of time to do them. Not to mention some of them can be done together or you can roll 2 or more of the same challenge.

allochthons wrote: »

Alas, no. Only 2000 Tome Points will roll over to Season 1. The rest will expire.
(I'm not going to cite a source because there are multiple threads on the forums about it)

I meant those 2k when i said save up

Silaf · April 6

allochthons wrote: »

tomfant wrote: »

What is the point then in opening Tome caches? You can open the last Tome pages earlier, but loose even more points at the end of the season.

What I've heard (I think on a stream? But I'm not sure) is that the Tome Caches are designed to help out if for some reason a person can't do many of the tasks during a season, for whatever reason. Since they don't expire, we can save them up for a rainy day when we can't play for a month or three (for example). I really wish that had been made much clearer. It would have saved a lot of pain.

Yes i like the opportunity to take a week off the game and go to a vacation with my family without losing tings.

katanagirl1 · April 8

JemadarofCaerSalis wrote: »

One thing to remember about the disparity between the numbers is that people are talking about 'well, it will even out in the end'.

But, that is only for people who have the time and ability to do all the challenges. So, they have the time to mine 15 nodes, six times over, they have the time and ability to capture 1 keep however many times it allows you to do that.

For people who don't have the time and or ability, that disparity could be the difference between getting something they want, and just ending up frustrated with the whole thing.

Not everyone has the time to play consistently. Not everyone has the ability to play for long periods of time. Not everyone has the ability to do certain challenges.

For those that can? Sure, even if they get the low point ones, they will be fine.

For those that can't, on the other hand, those low point ones, with all the higher point ones potentially out of reach or simply not being given due to RNG and limited rerolls, means that they likely won't unlock most of the pages of the tome, let alone finish it.

Yes, thank you, I came here to say this.

Also, some people might want to have time to do things they enjoy just for fun, not day after day of hours of chores. This new system is great if you just want shineys but not if you want to actually play the game.

EDIT: typo

SeaGtGruff · April 8

I was also worried about the discrepancies in the number of Tome Points at first, but after reading some of the posts in this thread I'm not worried about that anymore. It looks like the system has been designed such that we could consistently get the lower amounts of rewards yet still end up with more Tome Points than are needed to buy everything, even if we miss some of the challenges or decide to skip certain types of challenges.

One of the things I was worried about was trying to decide which rewards to buy with my Tome Points, but now I realize that I don't need to worry about that because I should be able to buy everything, even the rewards I don't particularly care about. In fact, if I decide that there are certain rewards I don't wish to buy, then I'll have even more wiggle room about being able to skip certain challenges that I'm not interested in doing.

Also, I was confused about being able to buy Seals and Trade Bars with my Tome Points, because why would I want to buy one type of currency with another? But now that I realize we won't be able to keep all of our excess Tome Points-- because we can carry over only 2000 from one Seaon to the next-- I realize that being able to buy Seals and Trade Bars is actually a very good thing, since those types of currency never expire and have no caps. In short, I think I'll probably prioritize buying Seals and Trade Bars over buying any rewards I don't particularly need or want.

barney2525 · April 8

allochthons wrote: »

barney2525 wrote: »

Reroll changes the task. Each task has it's set amount of points given.

Not exactly. A re-roll gives you a good chance of getting a new task. There are plenty of examples given here on the forums of people re-rolling repeatedly and getting the same task. There is no mechanism that guarantees you won't re-roll what you already have.

OTOH, there is also a chance of getting duplicate tasks: i.e. two tasks for doing the Kvatch Arena. And each time you complete it, you update both tasks.

It's messy.

I have not had that experience. The rerolls I have tried have always popped a different task.

salander7 · April 15

BetweenMidgets wrote: »

I seem to recall when endeavors were first rolled out people did potential calculations on how many we'd get and what we'd be able to buy. Then, as time went on and the amount we were awarded on the regular was dramatically reduced. So the reality was we could get much less than was speculated at first.

To assume that we will always have enough points to purchase all that we want with points remaining is not a forgone conclusion.

Not picking on you, @salander7 , I saw this same train of thought throughout the whole thread, yours was just closest to the bottom

To be fair, I think there's a sensible difference, endeavours were forced on zos as a consequence of anti-gambling regulation and whatnot. They were complying, against their commercial interest (tldr the higher the free sourcing, the lower the sales).

Here they don't get much if they force people to play more for the same reward.
Considering:
1. Challenges and rerolls don't stack past a couple weeks, it rewards regularly playing.
2. Points are not saved from season to season (you get to keep 2k, which is a small fraction of what you need).
3. Point caches are not obtainable on demand. You get em if you pay eso+, but you can't pay extra for them (such as paying for rank skips in other games)

People will be less likely to pay for the season pass if they have the feeling they will have to play more to be able to get the worth out of it.
If they make season pass harder to complete, they're not getting more money out of it, but chances are they lose sales, and some players may lose interest.

Unless they make purchasing rank skips with real money an option (and I hope they don't go down that path), there's no reason to make ranks harder to progress.

(no problem about the mention btw, it's a healthy debate even if it was targeted just at me)

CalamityCat · April 15

I wish they'd just make the rewards the same even if there are more or less repeats to level them out. I'm trying to re-roll the lowest value tasks off the list, but then I'll end up doing the same few higher earning items over and over each week

I hope more activities and equal rewards get added later, because it would mean we can just pick the tasks we like without taking a hit on the rewards. I'm not obsessing about it or worried I won't finish, it's just an unnecessary irritation to have the rewards so different that they become a distraction.

FurryCandyHearts · April 17

chub loons farming for poultry is def now a thing if it wasnt b4. me poor loony chubs!