Aylish wrote: »

There is no fun if you don‘t have a large group. And those missive quests? You stumble upon them or you miss them. And you can‘t complete them if your team goes elsewhere.
This is chaotic.
And how do you even complete the events at the wells? They don‘t end ever…

Yup and on PlayStation finding a group is close to impossible cause no one is really playing the event.

To make it worse season zero is free but will charge us in future seasons. Imagine paying for this content lol and eventually we will have to since they are bringing it back so people can join other factions.

If there is no improvements during this season and soon a lot of us will not be purchasing season 1

I've given it a go. I've played a little solo, played some more in large groups. I've completed the starter quests, and few dailies, and tried to be open-minded.

Here's my feedback:

1. Elder Scrolls is about the stories, the rich lore that transcends any single game - the lore that was generally deeply entrenched in Chapters and DLCs. That in mind, I just don't get the point or purpose of Night Market. It's a lot of running around, but for no apparent reason. There's no story. There's zero that compliments ES lore. What relevance does this "event" have? I could have been playing any one of a thousand other games. So, in terms of lore friendliness and purpose, it gets a 1/10 from me. This isn't Elder Scrolls.

2. The difficulty is set too high, and I can't work out why that is, either. It's not a little too high - it's far too high. Most players with a friend or two are going to struggle to complete very much at all. They're going to need the largest groups the game will allow, which isn't what a lot of people want. Interestingly, it's not "hard" because the mechanics are hard - it's just a load of boring trash mobs that have been juicing on steroids. It seems to be aimed exclusively at the small-but-loud extreme DPS brigade. OK, great, but that's just not me. I don't think that's more than a tiny percentage of the game population. So for playability it gets another 1/10.

3. Rewards.... I honestly despair. More of the same-old-same-old. Yet more currencies (it's getting ridiculous now). So few items that are interesting or new (especially if you've played this game as long as I have), it's almost depressing. I'll give it another 1/10 - and that's generous.

To summarise, as "new content" goes I think this was a hugely misjudged fail - which after last year's failed Seasons launch is unforgivable. This isn't what Elder Scrolls is about. Right now, ZoS is tragically failing as the custodian of this franchise. I'm not convinced there's anyone left who understands the franchise at all.

I've been playing the Night market quite a bit, I'm a fairly endgame raider, I'm not totally BIS but I run a combination of Corpse Burster, Perfected Null Arca, and Velothi's/Pale Order depending on if i'm grouped or solo. I've done quite a few veteran trials and trial HMs, but no trifectas. I felt like the difficulty was appropriate to my skill, it wasn't too punishing, but I still had to pay attention to not die.

My main feedback is that I feel like the daily quests in each area are too scattered out, since you have to find them around and then actually run around and do them. It made exploring between mobs a bit tedious, and when with a group, I felt rushed through or didn't have a chance to turn in. If there was a central pick up / drop off area like IC has, then that would help alleviate this.

I also feel like the favors are too slow to earn, and I also wish that we could use our favors themselves to purchase things with as opposed to gold. As it stands, it's not a satisfying method of progress.

Some instances felt incredibly full, while others were pretty barren. Getting either or feels like a coin flip. A small increase in population, or an easier way to find people in each instance (such as a signifier outside of the the Parch, Skittering, and Sorrows) would help.

nb_rich wrote: »

Lydawobbles wrote: »

Are those numbers per faction across all platforms?

Good question cause it shows a lot of points accumulated, but I can’t find anyone in the night market unless its people just standing around lol people are barely even posting “lfg” in the zone chat.

Imo it's gotta be platform specific.

This activity is being driven only by a few hundred players at best.

tomofhyrule wrote: »

I do think the new style of drip-feeding content is also exacerbating the “there’s no content for us” problem.

We have seen that the ESO playerbase tends to grind hard and fast as soon as something is available (the poor horker population on the shores of Wrothgar may never recover). But that also means we as a playerbase have a very “what have you done for me lately” view on things.

With the Chapter model, where everything that’s part of the patch drops with the patch, it then gives everyone a chance to look at what they’re interested in right away… and pretend the things they’re not interested in don’t really exist.
Take Necrom’s drop for example: the trial population had a fresh new trial, the people who like to explore zones had a whole new place (two of them!) to check out. People who enjoy dailies has a bunch of those ready to go. And everyone had a new Class full of new skills to level up for PvE or PvP. There really was something for everyone, and far too much to do at once.

With the drip-feed model, we get more frequent drops of way less. That means that this month’s drop of the Night Market, which is designed for high-level players and groups, is the only thing that dropped. Players who are not in that cohort then feel left out, like ESO has abandoned them… even if the next few drops in Season One are going to be all solo quests in the new TG line, new Sheo line, and all of the Favors, solo players don’t see any of that now so they feel betrayed.
That also means that Season One is going to get griping from group players, since the next group thing to drop won’t be until U51’s High Seas event, which seems to be more like the Writhing Fortress than a standard trial. They will get a full Trial in U51 as well, but then again the solo players will feel left out.

Not all content needs to be for all players. But if players are getting the perception of being left out, that leads to a lot of frustration, as we see now.

As to what I would do to change the Night Market for the return at the end of the year? I would add another daily quest to the central area similar to Cyrodiil scouting quests - an NPC sends you to the districts to put some tracker rune on the rooftops. That would not only teach the jump pad mechanic, but also it should have the NPC specifically suggest sneaking around and using invisibility potions or the Shadow line to get around without being hurt. That would allow players to interact with the zone in a different way, but still get credit.
I might also modify the difficulty of certain things a bit. Currently most basepop (trash) is balanced as normal trial basepop. I would actually reduce the difficulty of specifically the basepop mobs to normal dungeon difficulty - not the bosses, and not even the elite mobs (the big enemy in each pull), but I would pull the handful of trash down a bit. That would really not change much for vet players (unless they are specifically looking for difficulty in being swarmed), but less experienced players could then better focus one dangerous mob in the pull instead of being oneshot by everything.

Yes, you hit the nail on the head very much. I'll die on the hill that chapters were superior but everyone was so happy they were gone without realizing maybe what was in store for them. The rest of us knew.

ESO is now on the seasonal model. This is going to be a big change for some people. No more big content drop with something for everyone. Each season will have some content but small and focused and ESO wants to not release it on the new season but instead double drip feed. Drip feed content throughout the year and drip feed each seasons content throughout the season. People need to get used to the fact that some seasons will just be a busy for them. The battle pass rewards might not interest them, the content may not be for their playstyle. This is what the people that cheered the death of seasons were cheering for. Call it formulaic, but you understood the value of what you were getting. Now Zos is free to experiment, and they have, but we all have to get used to the fact that every season may bring different things and it may not be for us. This seasons offering is an event zone experiment that for many players means you need to get a group. Next season there will be no group content, but ALL solo questing and exploration content. The season after who knows. The ship event maybe and the dynamic Skyrim stuff leading us into the next zone next year probably. This is just what it is now. We're going to have to adapt.

I want to also give a little more feedback as I've had the chance to do night market with an optimized raid team split in half, calling ultimates and making sure all buffs were provided etc. With 5 people we destroyed everything in our path and as we went on we collected more and more people following us. This was so simple it almost felt too easy.

Last night I brought a group of about 18 at the max and 12 at the low end over the 3 hours we were there, split into two groups all in voice. These were many casual, solo questing people and some new low CP guildmates. We had 1 very experienced tank and healer and a couple of us were experienced vet and hm trials players. We had a much harder time and I can see the difference being optimized makes. We still got everyone all skirmishes and bosses and most people have all splinters except the coffer ones. We died a lot. We had people follow us, sabotage our mini games, steal taunt and over taunt bosses but all in all it was a pleasure to have my guildmates who wouldn't be able to do these things solo, in a group and getting stuff done. Some of them had never grouped and didn't even know how to travel to player.

I know some people are opposed to grouping. Don't want to feel forced. Want to do everything solo. I wish they had made difficulty levels but they did not. Things are the way they are. The night market is an amazing zone and a super fun time. I would encourage people to try it out. Ask in guild if there's anything going on. If you're on PSna, and want to follow a group this evening, we'll be going till midnight Eastern, dm me and I'll send you my account name. You can join people that are just there to have fun and where saying sorry is 10k to the guild bank.

Frayton wrote: »

Why can't we enter the vault room in the house? It's just visual with a popup if you interact. It feels like a cheaply made free mobile game.

I've not unlocked it yet, but watched a video, and noticed that that text showing up isn't just showing us the amount of gold, but feels like it's speaking (one line, for example is "Take a breath and admire your riches!") - the big question to me is why it's talking, or who is talking? (I'm aware it's probably not supposed to be speech, but I wonder why it needs some random commentary coming somewhere out of the void at all?)

dannv wrote: »

Sadly, this zone is almost as bad as your last chapter relase and the promise to fix the vent and bring it back early this year (which you failed to do.)

They actually did. It was just so badly announced that most people missed it.

Re: "silence from the devs"

They aren't going to say anything yet, we're still in public testing and evaluation phase, they're likely looking over the forums for bug complaints, watching metrics, and making hot fixes as necessary. I do hope they're listening to feedback because there are issues with the event but that's more incentives and such.

Ingel_Riday wrote: »

Update: finally had an hour today to try it out.

Core plaza was dead. Just a few people running here or there. There's no dungeon finder functionality, because why add convenience to forced grouping? So I went to the group finder where people can list their groups. Only five groups listed, none for the section that my intro quest was in.

@Ingel_Riday Try making a group yourself in the group finder. They fill extremely quickly.

You do not need a trial group or guild. The Night Market is very puggable with 12 randoms from the group finder.

TinyDragon wrote: »

Ingel_Riday wrote: »

Update: finally had an hour today to try it out.

Core plaza was dead. Just a few people running here or there. There's no dungeon finder functionality, because why add convenience to forced grouping? So I went to the group finder where people can list their groups. Only five groups listed, none for the section that my intro quest was in.

Waited an inordinate amount of time, refreshing the ground finder list every minute while sighing in exasperation, and logged off. RIVETING. This is day 2. This mode just came out and it's a ghost town. I guess that I could try to play during prime-time, whenever that is, but my schedule is helter skelter.

I think the only way that I could feasibly do this content, which is the only content we're getting for months other than FOMO chorelists, would be to join one of the few active trial/vet content guilds left in this game. Even then, I don't have any of the relics that enable convenient world traversal and I don't have the schedule reliability necessary to make long-term guilding work. I'm out of luck already.

Lovely. If this is the direction ESO is going, I'm not going to stick around. Solstice was a clear end to this game, anyway. Tied up most loose ends and had a bunch of callbacks to 2014. I'd rather leave and have that mostly positive memory (you made me fight a wall) than stay and have every zone I used to love tainted by month after month of chorelists, with the only distractions being excursion zones designed for the top 1% of the playerbase that I can't ever feasibly do and an occasional hour-long quest chain every six months.

Ugh.

____________________________
Oh, and even if I did find a trial guild, joined it, regimented MY LIFE AROUND A VIDEOGAME, and really gave it my all (despite my better judgment)... it wouldn't be enough to do that for just a week or two. Oh no, this event is from the Matt Firor school of "we're going to add things to keep players busy." The grinding of favor points is purposefully designed to force interaction with this mode for weeks upon weeks upon weeks. Progress has been intentionally slowed to drag out what little is here for as long as possible.

You've succeeded in making me not understand why I'm wasting my time here. Instead of doing this, I could devote the same time to countless other better things. Hiking, playing Crimson Desert, finally finishing Demon's Souls Remastered, dates with the wifey, reading my old English Lit collection (King in Yellow is calling me from the shelf), getting back to The Legend of Zelda (I'm 4 games into the 21 or so official releases), learning more Japanese to bypass awful localizations, just lounging outside while sipping a cold beer, or so on. A very long list of enjoyable things to do.

ESO had a place on that list when it was focused on being an Elder Scrolls game that happened to be online. I loved just doing quests and exploring zones. Made 7 characters, one of each class, to experience it repeatedly. It has no place in my life as a life service FOMO time-guzzler wearing Elder Scrolls like a skinsuit. I've been grimacing ever since the battlepass was first announced to absurd fanfare, and it's just gotten worse and worse.

Eh, oh well. I had a good run here. I hope you get enough hardcore people turned on by this mode and the chorelists to make up the difference, though judging from the lack of group finder entries and the dead Night Market central area... I'm not so sure your coveted audience exists in numbers sufficient to support you. We'll see.

Edit addition: throwing this out there... the more I've watched ESO's trajectory over the past month, the more I've admired Pearl Abyss's decision to make Crimson Desert a single player title. Playing that game is an experience that is night and day different from Elder Scrolls Online. It's fun. It's fun. It values my time and it's fun. I wanted the Bow of Fleeting, so I figured out what I'd have to do to craft it and spent 20 hours over two weeks working towards my goal. It was an epic adventure, i got the bow, and... I didn't like how the quiver looked. Decided not to use it, haha. But I had such a wonderful time that I didn't mind. The journey was the real reward. Made me smile. I'm so grateful that they didn't choose the path that ESO is on.

I've seen many of my trade guilds in there, I don't think you'd need to find a trial guild.

My housing guild had a rowdy time in there last night if guild text chat was anything to go by.

HuciturGuru wrote: »

@ZOS_GinaBruno @ZOS_JessicaFolsom just wanted to bring your attention to an image claiming to be from ZOS making the rounds. Obviously you can see its fake but paints ZOS in a bad way

Plus, says a lot about the person/people who made it.

Hopefully this isn't lost in the feedback but as someone who is thoroughly enjoying Night Market and using the group finder to find people to play with, I think a lot of headaches would be prevented if

1) There was a big in game warning encouraging players to use the Group Finder and warning them of the difficulty. This would give a nudge to players so that they better understand why trash packs are face rolling them if they go in solo.

2) The instance pop cap was raised slightly, to 48 or 60. This would help with the perceived notion that the Night Market is always "empty" even though hundreds of my guildies (even PvP guildies) are actively in the Night Market every time I log in.

tomofhyrule wrote: »

I do feel like a statement from ZOS would be prudent.

It is fine to have content targeted towards the high-end community. The problem is that a lot of people are mistakenly thinking that this is a permanent thing, which it’s not. The people who do mostly solo content are not likely to be the ones on PTS to know what’s coming in the future, so they don’t see that U50 is almost exclusively adding solo content, they only see the latest content drop as exclusionary.

If ZOS came out with a statement of “We made this for our endgame community since there are no dungeons this year, and they really have not gotten much difficult content in the past. But don’t worry, we have two entire solo questlines dropping in June/July/August along with the solo Favors system for other players to enjoy. Please also see our roadmap for even more content for everyone to enjoy, from solo players to groups to casuals to those who want to sweat, we have something for everyone coming this year!”

And please, rethink this drip-feed through the Season. I feel like if we had gotten like the Sheogorath line and the Night Market simultaneously (yes, Sheo is not in this patch so it would have needed to be there since January then), and the Pursuit had split between Night Market and some silly Sheo stuff, people wouldn’t be as mad about it.

But the fact does remain that the point of rewards is to entice people to try parts of the game they don’t normally try. It’s not a failing that the dyes (or whatever) are locked behind it; it’s a feature. The goal is to try to push people to expand their horizons. You as a player not have a choice to forgo the reward, or to break out of your mold to go for it.

Always good to make assumptions about other players based on your own opinion.

So, several things.

The team at ZOS that is responsible for content announcement and public messaging should take a good hard look at themselves. The Night Market is fine, its difficulty is more or less enjoyable (for asterisks see below), and I seriously hope they'll weather the storm and not tune down (substantially) one of the very few group content releases this year.

But by announcing this as "for everyone (even if you've just run around Auridon for a few hours)" or "sure, go in alone, though it may be difficult (there are players who find delves difficult)" or "THIS IS THE NEW THING!!! GO PLAY IT!!!", ZOS have done themselves a huge disservice.
Maybe next time, be clear who this is actually for and who is supposed to play this. And by that, I don't mean experienced dungeon teams or trial prog groups. But players who are fine with grouping, zerg-surfing, and random PUGs.

Very few people complained that Kyne's Aegis had no solo content, that random PvE quests in Rockgrove are a bit rare, and that killing trashpacks in Dreadsail Reef is somewhat difficult and not very rewarding. This is that sort of content but with more open and flexible grouping, and ZOS should've communicated that from the beginning and very clearly.

---

That said, there are a few things that are genuinely not very well thought-through with this incarnation:
As many have pointed out, it's a very confusing mess of missing information.

The UI is downright weird (did ZOS poach their lead from Civ7's UI team? and that is meant as a mild insult ;-) ), is very bad at showing the actually important information, not customisable enough, and the whole UI mechanic (similarly to Tomes) is ... I don't know, not very ESO-like. F5 opens a massive panel, with a button somewhere for another massive panel, and both panels tell you too little for how big they are, really important stuff is hidden in achievement submenus without any pointers, while very useless information (faction score) is hogging valuable screen space. It's a mess that's all over the place. Have the UX team play the Night Market for a season, and then start over.

Progress through the Night Market is very badly telegraphed and explained. What things are needed for what, which things to get which component of fragments within parts, the whole relic-key-boss-more boss chain, different categories of daily quests with no indication that they are, in fact, different categories with different rewards (or none)...

For the factions, I can only quote the Roman poet Ovid: "from out of the labors of a mountain, a laughable mouse is born". :-D
For all the fanfare and effort put into the factions, from the quest to the whole layout and design of the zone, the UI prominence, the unnecessarily restrictive choice - for all that, the actual choice has (fortunately) a very low impact. It added quite a bit to the confusion, but in the end, it doesn't really matter. And to be clear: with how the faction scoring is set up, and how it's not just a snowball effect but a whole avalanche once one faction has turned into the clear favourite, it is a good decision to let the choice have minimal influence.
For the next iteration, maybe abolish the account-wide restriction, turn up the roleplay elements of the choice, and dial down the artificial competition between the players.

Rewards for playing are all over the place, and mostly ... underwhelming. The daily coffers from the plaza are fine. But the dailies within the sections are ridiculous. Oh yeah, a blue-quality Mother's Sorrow bow and literally nothing else. I can hardly contain my excitement. Unless you plan to make MS into the meta again, which would be kind of amazing. :-D

Enemy groups still respawn somewhat too fast, and are too close to each other in many places. It's almost unavoidable to drag them into each other and then into an ongoing boss fight, and if the boss fight takes a bit longer, you'll kill the same random bystanders three or four times.
And enemy trashpacks should never ever interfere with the mini games. That players can disrupt an ongoing minigame by pulling a few packs of enemies into the area, is just a terrible idea.

Not to mention that there is no decent explanation for the minigames and races whatsoever.

The respawn thing is seriously strange. I can do all sorts of stuff while in ghost form, it takes ages to get out of it - which is good to run back to the actual fight, but why not allow resurrecting at the spot at all, like basically everywhere else? I still haven't understood the reason behind this. And the respawn points need to be closer to where the action was. It's bad that I can basically respawn halfway across the map from where I died.

All in all, the zone suffers from the open design. Organised groups steamroll the bosses, smaller or inexperienced groups have all sorts of problems. It's still fun and should return, but it shouldn't be the way forward for group content. I look forward to have actual dungeons next year again - and the Night Market from time to time.

Edit: Smileys are weird now.

kate.georgeb16_ESO wrote: »

I mostly play solo so the night market is very disappointing for me, I'm not a "tank" type either. I don't get a lot of time to play each day, I just want to do a few quests and progress a bit. I'm really disappointed that you keep trying to force people into groups, I rarely ever do dungeons and never trials, I just want to play solo. Why are you ignoring solo players like this? Please do better.

They aren't ignoring solo players. 90%+ of the content in this game is for solos. This is a single content drop geared for groups.

If it's not your thing, it's not your thing. That doesn't mean they're ignoring solo players. There are 3 new content drops later this year exclusively for solo players.