Overall, I've enjoyed this event and think it's nice change from past events. There is definitely a lot of room for improvement yet, some of which really need to be addressed before the next iteration if people are going to continue playing. Below I'll list my thoughts on what's working and what needs to be improved.

Difficulty
Difficulty feels about right. It's challenging enough to require a group to complete everything. None of the mechanics are too complicated which makes it easy enough for most PUG groups to be able to complete. This has been a nice change from previous events.

Spawn Rates
This could be tweaked a little. The adds that spawn around skirmishes respawn too quickly when there isn't a skirmish active. With a group that doesn't have many decent damage dealers, this can end up being endless as by the time your group is on the last group the other groups are already respawning. The other areas don't bother me as much, but my fear is that as the event continues and the population declines, that the fast respawn rates will discourage smaller groups and further exacerbate low population. I don't know if it's feasible, but maybe keep respawn rates high early in the event and add more of a delay as the event progresses?

Rewards
This is the biggest area of improvement needed for the next iteration of the event to continue. Having sets from 10-11 years ago drop is not very enticing. Since many of the bosses come from dungeons, how about a random loot piece from the dungeon the boss is from drop instead? So if I kill Argent Ozezan, he will drop a piece of gear from Scrivener's Hall and a small chance at a motif from that dungeon as well? The rare furnishing plans dropping is nice, but we need more than just a chance at a few furnishing plans to make it worth continuing to go into the Night Market. The faction merchants offerings are also pretty bland. I would suggest the merchants have random "folios" like one for a random furnishing plan, one for a random motif, one for a random style page. You could make it so you have to spend favor for a folio, like say 100 favor to buy a folio. This would encourage people to keep questing in the districts even after they have 10k favor, which in turn keeps the population from dying off.

Bosses
Boss difficulty is good overall. I think the calamitous bosses are a bit too spongy for what they are. Either add more mechanics that change during the fight or reduce their health a bit. The theme seems a bit inconsistent. Cradle of Shadow bosses make sense with Skittering Precinct, but then the Parch bosses all seem random. I like the idea of theme, but I'd like to see consistency, either all bosses are themed with the district or each district is just random. Also, I really really hope that future iterations of the night market will have new bosses. This event will get really stale and people won't want to participate if it's just copy/paste over and over. Make it interesting, give us new challenges!

Factions
The factions each have a very distinct theme and very distinct NPCs, I thought this part was well done. As mentioned previously, the rewards are lackluster and need to be improved. Right now the player distribution for each faction is very skewed. This is from 2 primary reasons, first is the monster set for Thousand Eyes is the most useful of the 3 so that drew players in to this faction early on, and second it's a positive feedback loop where Thousand Eyes is more successful so subsequent players join to be on the winning team which further exacerbates their lead. To make the factions more even, the rewards need to be of similar usefulness, but also the scores for each faction shouldn't be displayed right away. Keep us in the dark as to who is winning until about halfway into the event when the vast majority of players have chosen a faction. At this point players who have dropped out, might decide to come back in to try to help their faction out and place higher.To further incentivize this, be sure to have good rewards for ranking 1st, and maybe make a bonus where if a group of 8+ are all the faction, those players all get an extra 10% favor which can then also be used to buy the "folios" I mentioned earlier. Make ti a fun competition, not a meaningless side aspect.

Dungeons
I like how the dungeons were implemented. I like the fact you have to earn your way into a dungeon by getting the district's relic. I like that they are short and mechanics are basic enough for a low barrier to entry. The bosses feel like the final boss in a veteran dungeon which I think is appropriate.Each one has a unique theme with enemies that are different from the other two dungeons. My only concern here again is the rewards are lackluster.

Trial
I like the trial as well. The difficulty seems to lie somewhere between a normal trial and a veteran trial, but is short enough to provide a low barrier to entry just like the dungeons. There is a very strong theme of 3's going on: 3 stages, 3 mechanics, 3 bosses, 3 zones. No issue with that, but I think the boss fight could have been expanded a little bit, but it may break the strong 3 theme. I think having a boss fight more similar to Black Rose Prison could work here, where we fight each boss individually and see each one's unique mechanics, and then we fight all 3 together after getting each one to yield. I also would like for each boss to have a stronger unique mechanic. As is right now the bosses themselves are kinda lackluster themselves, so maybe swapping the 2 "soaking" aoes at a time during the boss fight with a single one and adding a different stronger boss mechanic instead could work. Nothing wrong with the trial as is, I enjoy it, just ideas for the future.

Keys
I really like the idea of progression: Defeat Brazen bosses to unlock Argent bosses; defeat Argent Bosses to unlock dungeons + extra stuff for the relic; complete all dungeons to unlock the trial. I think this part is great! The part I don't like is that keys are subsumed upon completion of the dungeons/trial. The main reason I don't like this is that it puts players at different stages of progression and makes grouping for the trial especially difficult. I'll have one group of friends with some argent keys but not dungeon keys, another group with dungeon keys and ready for the trial, and I'll have no keys after completing the trial. It makes it so we can't play together without unnecessary extra grinding as we're all at different stages. This is especially difficult for people with limited playing time because of work, we group for trials on the weekend, but wait some people need to do extra farming yet and can't join us, guess they will be left behind. I can't tell you how many people have joined from group finder and are missing a key and can't come into the instance as well. Keep the progression requirements, but get rid of the consuming keys is my suggestion.

House
I like that we got a free house out of the event. I also really like the idea of having to acquire relics to unlock portions of the house, and having to get enough favor to unlock the guild bank - great idea! My only gripe here is the rooms unlocked are quite sad. I was expecting us to unlock wings of the house that greatly add to the house, similar to Hall of the Lunar Champion. Just getting a room with 2 big support pillars in the room was a huge let down.

That's the main things I wanted to point out. I really do like this event and think it was a good change in direction from what has been implemented in recent years. A few changes could really help to make this a very successful reoccurring event. Keep up the good work ZOS!

After grinding NM, I returned today in IA for the first time in 3 months and I'm happy to report: a nice side effect of NM is that it made IA look more enjoyable! I've found it "extremely easy" compared to NM (just completed first 2 Arcs and started 3rd but had to leave). So NM will probably push players to try other "hard content" since in many cases it will be easier than NM.

About the Dunegorger fight... I get that when we defeat it we get out blasting it BUT the question is... When we use the "escape" option... How exactly are our characters getting out of it???

Imperial_Archmage wrote: »

I’ve been away for work and haven’t logged in at all in the last couple weeks so I completely missed the start of this event. From browsing through the comments it seems like it’s a huge slog without a group and there is no replayability so I am assuming no one would be around to do it now. Is that the case, have I missed the window of opportunity?

I am not very motivated at all to do this anyway so I really don’t want to waste my time if it’s pointless to even try. I would be very grateful if someone could chime in and let me know where things stand.

Thanks!

There are still quite a lot of groups during prime time farming the first tier of the event (the brazens and argents in the districts). This is all you need to do most of the event, like getting leads, the relics, unlocking wings of the house and earning favour.

The dungeon and trial groups are hard to fill or find at this point unless you’re a tank; lots of waiting involved for those.

My feedback as a beta tester is that after 11 years of this game having a certain style of content and level of difficulty, you got NM wrong. You simply got it wrong. I can't say it any other way. For most of the players I've talked to about NM, self included, NM is NOT FUN. IT IS FRUSTRATING. It feels like something they HAVE to do, not something they WANT to do. I understand the game needs some harder content, and for the most part, I think the outer parts of NM are fine in that respect. But the Opulent trial just plain sucks. It's not like anything else people are used to in the game. It has a big learning curve, you have to farm layers of bosses and dungeons just to get keys to enter, and the whole preamble of timed maze running while constantly fighting is too easy to get wrong and takes way too long, just to get to where you HOPE you might be able to fight a boss somewhat normally, assuming you don't wipe immediately when the bosses and mechanics spawn. And just to rub a ghost pepper on the wound, you put the monster helms exclusively in that ridiculous trial. Seriously, you need to nerf the Opulent trial, or better yet, just remove it and put the monster helms in the dungeons. That is all.

I think @Cooperharley in the above post said it pretty well. I too think the Night Market concept is really cool when it works, but right now we are experiencing a big dropoff in activity. Most endgame players don't have much to gain by repeating the NM; at the very least they will want the no-death title but I don't see any incentives for replay. The key and relic system was probably intended to prolong the repetition of the NM gameplay loop, but in practice it just made grouping up far less intuitive and more restrictive than it should be. This is why I think it is extra important to have incentives (like evergreen rewards) more than detriments inside a gameplay loop, especially with a limited-time event like the Night Market was intended to be.