ZOS_Amy wrote: »

Hello All,

As part of our ongoing PvP work in ESO, we will be testing the addition of Item Sets in the Vengeance campaign next week. For this test, most Item Set "final bonuses" will be active as we look at server performance. This includes Mythics, Monster masks and shoulders, and five- or three-piece set "final bonuses." Other stats from Item Set bonuses will not be active during this test, even though the UI displays them as enabled.

Some sets are currently not providing bonuses, and this is a known issue, though the majority are.

With this test, both the Gray Host and Blackreach Cyrodiil campaigns will be closed from July 20th to July 27th, unless it is determined that we need to turn them back on due to performance issues in Vengeance.

As always, please let us know your thoughts and feedback during the testing period.

Izanagi.Xiiib16_ESO wrote: »

It seems like this change has just been thrown in with 1 week notice, was this tested at all on PTS first (perhaps I just missed it)?

tomofhyrule wrote: »

All of this is only highlighting one thing: why can't the Combat/PvP team communicate at all?

After the huge layoff wave, player morale is in the gutter - to say nothing of the morale of the remaining ZOS employees. Players are already starting to leave the game because they have no hope in its future. Pretty well every Team Lead who came onto the DevChat streams no longer works at ZOS, leaving the entire future of the game in jeopardy.

And yet, the Combat Team survived relatively unscathed. The Combat Team is the anchor for the whole game right now. And they are slient.

Even before the layoffs, we heard nothing about the Class Refreshes, to the extent that the devs went out of their way to even avoid saying the word 'Warden.' Even now, all we have is "The Refreshes are still planned," and that's it. There is no confirmation that Warden's refresh (assuming Warden is still Warden) will be in U51.
And then, with no warning or testing on PTS, they drop on us that they'll be removing what people like most about Vengeance and removing Grey Host again to keep testing something that we all thought was finished. And again, it's not announced from the Combat Team, it's via a Community Manager as proxy. And again, there's no explanation given, it's just "we're doing this."
Oh, and we still don't have a single word on the Refresh that should be coming out on PTS in a week and a half.

Why is the Combat Team so allergic to communication and interaction with the players? Everyone was blindsided by the layoffs because we all thought the game had turned around after January's reveal promised more communication and working with players instead of against them, but we keep seeing that the Combat Team seems to have missed that memo.

I believe Nick is still at ZOS as Game Director. I implore him to set a meeting with the Combat Team lead to discuss how his refusal to communicate is actively harming the game and destroying the little hope that players have left.

KalevaLaine wrote: »

One simple question - why?

ZOS_Amy wrote: »

Hello All,

As part of our ongoing PvP work in ESO, we will be testing the addition of Item Sets in the Vengeance campaign next week. For this test, most Item Set "final bonuses" will be active as we look at server performance. This includes Mythics, Monster masks and shoulders, and five- or three-piece set "final bonuses." Other stats from Item Set bonuses will not be active during this test, even though the UI displays them as enabled.

Some sets are currently not providing bonuses, and this is a known issue, though the majority are.

With this test, both the Gray Host and Blackreach Cyrodiil campaigns will be closed from July 20th to July 27th, unless it is determined that we need to turn them back on due to performance issues in Vengeance.

As always, please let us know your thoughts and feedback during the testing period.

Erickson9610 wrote: »

TheAwesomeChimpanzee wrote: »

Erickson9610 wrote: »

tomofhyrule wrote: »

Erickson9610 wrote: »

tomofhyrule wrote: »

Marto wrote: »

Stamicka wrote: »

No.

ZOS sold vengeance as a test to learn how to improve performance in Grey Host. This is what ZOS said the purpose of vengeance was at it's inception. This is how they tricked the PvP community into helping develop vengeance. Going forward I have no intention of helping ZOS take away the game mode I log in to play.

And since I will never play vengeance for any reason ever again, at least not until I see first hand how ZOS has used data gained from vengeance to improve GH like they said they were doing. There is no reason that I or anyone else should be forced to play vengeance. It's akin to forcing all PvE zones to have PvP enabled for a week and ignoring all the complaints doing such a thing would legitimately generate.

I will not help ZOS test a game mode I didn't buy and will never play.

I don't know what words to say to explain to you that the purpose of testing a thing is testing said thing.

The point that they're making is that Vengeance was originally sold as a way to make Grey Host better. And then it ended up releasing as its own mode with the threat of Vengeance as is potentially being the replacement for Grey Host and every non-GH Campaign deleted from the game.

People originally thought they were helping test something to improve the thing they had. They did not want the test mode to be the replacement for the mode they liked.

This new test is starting to smell the same. Vengeance released. It needs no more testing since it is an existing game mode. What would be the purpose of testing a change to it... unless the goal would be to put item sets into Vengeance so they could remove the "but why farm gear if I can't use it in Vengeance!" argument?

This is obviously a way to try to entice Grey Host players into Vengeance by dangling some theorycrafting. What they don't understand is that this will drive off the population Vengeance has because they like not having procs, and it will not make the Grey Host crowd any more likely to come in. The fear is that then they'll just pressure everyone into new-Vengeance regardless... by deleting all other non-Vengeance modes.

The no-proc nature of Vengeance wasn't meant to be a permanent feature. Those people who prefer Vengeance without procs (like me, who posted such sentiment as the first reply in this thread) aren't supposed to treat Vengeance like it is Ravenwatch. I see now that Vengeance aspires to be as close to Gray Host as possible, and now it makes sense why all of this development time has been put into making Vengeance at all.

Once again, Vengeance isn't meant to be a secondary mode to Cyrodiil PvP. It's not meant to be that campaign where under 50 players go to learn the basics of Cyrodiil. It's not even meant for the people who preferred no-proc PvP. It's meant to be as feature complete as the primary mode of Cyrodiil PvP.

Which.
People.
DO.
NOT.
WANT.

It's clear that they want to test it because they want Vengeance to be performant and the main Cyrodiil mode. BUT WHY? Why are they so hell-bent on looking at the majority of PvPers who like GH and saying "we fully intend to take this away from you, but keep giving us money regardless."? And even if Vengeance wasn't intended to be the on-ramp or the no-CP-no-Proc zone, that's how it released and there are people who like it because of that. Again, why is the team looking at the positive feedback there and saying "yeah, but that wasn't intended so now we'll just take this away from you and turn it into something you hate, but you'll still play it, right?"

They clearly want Cyrodiil to have 900 players again, which is not possible with the current level of complexity in GH. But if their goal to reduce complexity in GH is to remove what people like about it, then what's the point? Is it going to be worth it for them to kill off the mode and just hope that the players don't care? It won't matter if the server can hold 900 players if only like 60 players are left since the rest got driven off.

This all is feeling like the argument when Tales of Tribute came out: they touted it as a PvP feature (which, technically it is since you can play against another person) and then were suprised that the PvPers weren't super into it... because they weren't looking for "play literally anything against another person," they were looking for a specific playstyle.

They also let slip mentioned their goal of a new PvP mode to allow for a small-scale Cyrodiil-esque thing in the Jeralls, but (as is typical with the Combat Team), we have not heard a single word about it. As such, nobody thinks it's coming. The obvious plan is that the 'new mode' is designed for the ballgroups and their sets, while Cyrodiil becomes all-Vengeance-all-the-time.

In essence, they are 100% throwing out the audiences they have because they don't understand why those audiences like what they like.

If Gray Host as we know it could support a higher population cap, wouldn't people want that? One of the biggest complaints about Gray Host is that the queue takes hours to get into during prime time. Having a higher population cap would mean shorter queues, which every Gray Host player should want.

So the plan is to make a version of Gray Host that is as similar to it as it can be while supporting a higher population cap. It can have just enough complexity to feel engaging, while still remaining performant enough to support that population cap without unacceptable levels of lag.


Adding back Item Sets is the next step in this process. Gray Host isn't Gray Host without the theorycrafting and builds. I imagine we'll have tests for passives, Champion Points, and other skill lines. If ZOS can pull this off, then it will become something that players want to play.

Is it really that hard to imagine a version of Vengeance that is just like Gray Host? If the issue is that skills are too simple — adjust the skills so they're more similar to their counterparts.

People still played during every previous Vengeance test, so it's clear that even if it's the only option, players still want to play in Cyrodiil. There may be some who absolutely don't want this, but it's just not true that nobody wants this.

We just want a shorter queue into the campaign everyone else is playing in, but with less lag and a higher population cap for large scale battles; we are not asking for dumbed down PvP to hold our hands for us. Vengeance is not meant for PvE players to skip the theorycrafting required to be good at PvP.

Let’s be realistic here. Even setting aside the fact that these week-long mandatory tests are frustrating and driving away a large number of consistent PvP players, we are now more than a year into Vengeance testing, and the campaign still resembles nothing like Gray Host. It is not even 10% of the way toward offering the combat depth, build diversity, progression, and overall gameplay that make Gray Host appealing.

Now tell me with a straight face that ESO will still have a PvP population large enough to fill a 900-player campaign by the time Vengeance comes remotely close to replicating Gray Host. I am not convinced we even have half that number actively playing Cyrodiil today, and with decisions like this latest one, people will simply continue leaving.

The scenario you are describing is not realistic. Vengeance is eons away from becoming something the loyal PvP community would accept as a worthwhile replacement for Gray Host. ZOS is spending limited development time and resources on a project that, even assuming the ultimate goal really is a lag-free version of Gray Host, may never reach that point—and may no longer have the population required to justify it by the time it does.

Some effort into PvP is better than no effort into PvP. Especially after the layoffs, ZOS is still allocating resources to get PvP into an acceptable state. ZOS is convinced that using Gray Host as a starting point for fixing PvP is not doable. We saw this with the tests done in the Ravenwatch campaign, which yielded no improvements to Gray Host at all. If Gray Host is truly stuck the way it is, then these Vengeance efforts are at least an attempt to show the PvP community that they are committed to fixing long-term issues with PvP as a whole.

We could argue that ESO itself may not be around by the time Vengeance resembles Gray Host, or that all of the PvP community will vanish by that time. I think features like Veterancy are good steps for retaining the PvP population, and the team at ZOS is still committed to ESO and supporting it. It may be unrealistic to hope that changes happen sooner than later, but that applies to all areas of the game with their current budget.

DarwinStormChaser wrote: »

CaiWenji wrote: »

Great.. now I will have 7 less days to reach max veterancy level using Cyrodiil. I refuse to play vengeance! Please stop forcing us into an almost completely dead pvp mode. Just remove it and replace it with Icereach.

So remove one dead campaign and replace it with a another dead campaign is your answer? Righto

BigPlays420 wrote: »

It is honestly impressive that ZOS has managed to unite both Gray Host and Vengeance players against the same decision.

Gray Host players don't want to lose their campaign. Vengeance players don't want proc sets. Yet here we are. At what point do we admit that this direction is satisfying neither audience?

ZOS_Amy wrote: »

Hello All,

As part of our ongoing PvP work in ESO, we will be testing the addition of Item Sets in the Vengeance campaign next week. For this test, most Item Set "final bonuses" will be active as we look at server performance. This includes Mythics, Monster masks and shoulders, and five- or three-piece set "final bonuses." Other stats from Item Set bonuses will not be active during this test, even though the UI displays them as enabled.

Some sets are currently not providing bonuses, and this is a known issue, though the majority are.

With this test, both the Gray Host and Blackreach Cyrodiil campaigns will be closed from July 20th to July 27th, unless it is determined that we need to turn them back on due to performance issues in Vengeance.

As always, please let us know your thoughts and feedback during the testing period.