The three things that have had the worst impact on ESO for me

Rylana · May 2014

1. Ongoing exploits or ones that were never really reversed (see item duping, fixed but never cleansed out of the market), powerleveling by killing unintendedly fast respawning world bosses and not reverting the levels. I could go on with this, the whole first month has been a rampant race to find the next exploitable thing and abuse the hell out of it.

2. Class balance is absolutely horrendous. For a game that has a major push towards the PvP zone early on and makes the whole main story about the three way war in cyrodiil (overlooking the part about coldharbor, but i digress there), allowing one i win build after another to flourish has effectively killed PvP to all but the most hard headed or hardcore at this point. Even in PvE content you see the issue with some certain classes having virtually no point. The fourth man on a team should be a nightblade, since there are four classes, but you will almost always be better off with a second sorc. There are a few competent NB healer or aoe DPS specs, but they have to try very hard to barely do what a mediocre sorc can. Powers in general are completely screwed up.

3. Making the rewards for actually playing the content so ridiculously bad that everyone just wants to do number 1 on this list, because time spent for reward earned is absolutely terrible. Did a Craglorn mission night before last, spent over 2 hours doing the whole chain with three guildies, went through some pretty tough bosses and so many adds it wasnt even funny. The reward? 300 gold, 12k vp, and a green staff. Are you serious? At least give something purple for all that trouble and ten times the gold/vp. Seriously. Two full hours? For a one off mission chain youll never do again on that toon? Ive never once seen a gold drop item, nor have I ever seen a purple set piece. Nor have I ever seen a unique item with an enchantment that was better than something vendor purchased or barely specced enchant craftable. Its all vendor trash and desconstruct fodder (and you cant even hit the highest quality level that way, you have to wait on a silly hireling for that part or a lucky refine on some scraps for just ONE or TWO of the FIFTY SIX youll need for a guaranteed gold upgraded armor suit, not including weapons or shields here.)

In summary the only people that are really getting anywhere in this game are the ones that happened to want to be a sorc or dk and item duped/xp exploited their way to easy mode.

Seriously?

Tjeerd · May 2014

I disagree with all three points:

1. The question should be: how does it affect 'regular' players if some others have abused exploits. The exploiters will be higher level, so you do not see them ingame yourself. Also, there is no benefit to have the most gold or progress in this game, it's all about your own experience. Also, it's not the abusers fault if some boss respawns too quickly, so you can't really take their progress for that particular part of the game away to punish them. All together, this subject just should not have had impact on your experience at all.

2. There is a very clear pinned post from ZOS about the problems with NB at this moment. They will be fixed and balanced within weeks.

3. This argument has been used by many bad reviewers. If you just look at the plain endscreen of a quest, it might look like a bad reward, but the reward is actually allready in your inventory before the end. By killing and looting you will gather extra gold and alot of gear and items during questing. After one hour of questing your inventory is full and worth alot. There just is no need to have a huge reward at the end of a quest. It looks like the reward system was designed to give players small rewards during the game, instead of one big reward after a much longer timespan.

Arreyanne · May 2014

1. Meh could care less about what the exploiters do they are going to exploit anyways no getting around that

2. Agreed wholeheartedly, NB issues not being fixed until the next content patch was the OFFICIAL RESPONSE, , that another 4-8 weeks for something that should have been fixed before Cragfail. Basically in this game atm if you are not a sorc or a DK what the heck is the use.

3. on the fence about the rewards, like that the crafted stuff can be better than anything you get for a reward, of course some of the post concerning Cragfail, tend to make me think here we go again unending gear grinding.

One thing I would add is the horrific amount of time it takes to get from 1-15 after that i find the leveling curve not real bad, tedious is the word I would use, but those first 15 levels are some of the worst . It should not take 7-15 hours to go through that

Indarqeen · May 2014

I agree all work no fun that is a big issue and it will make players quit

j.frank.nicholsb14_ESO · May 2014

Arreyanne wrote: »

One thing I would add is the horrific amount of time it takes to get from 1-15 after that i find the leveling curve not real bad, tedious is the word I would use, but those first 15 levels are some of the worst . It should not take 7-15 hours to go through that

LOL - I assume this was meant as a joke! LOL! Good one. 6 weeks into the game and my highest toon (of 16 toons) is a 14. And I am loving the game.

As always people think that what they want is all that matters.

Arreyanne · May 2014

j.frank.nicholsb14_ESO wrote: »

Arreyanne wrote: »

One thing I would add is the horrific amount of time it takes to get from 1-15 after that i find the leveling curve not real bad, tedious is the word I would use, but those first 15 levels are some of the worst . It should not take 7-15 hours to go through that

LOL - I assume this was meant as a joke! LOL! Good one. 6 weeks into the game and my highest toon (of 16 toons) is a 14. And I am loving the game.

As always people think that what they want is all that matters.

I never said that what I want is all that matters, you find it enjoyable to do all that low leveled stuff, I Don't no big deal, you don't want to get off the starter islands that's good for you

I however do not enjoy it, its like a job which I already have and don't wish a second one. So where is my alternative to doing 15 hours of quest.

To me the purpose of a beginner area is to get the customer wanting to continue the journey it doesn't do that for me if it does it for you great.

It also lessons, to me, the re-playability of the game.

In some other games i could choose to level a toon in a different manner, grind, Warzones-Battlegrounds, and questing and exploration. No variety, no OMG THAT WAS AWESOME MOMENTS in the game and my main is VR5

Spiritreaver_ESO · May 2014

@ the OP

1) I have to disagree somewhat here. There are always going to be exploiters early on in games, not gonna change that. But i also think that the spoils of their exploiting should have been removed. Level gain from exploiting is harder to deal with, i'd say an official warning permanently slapped on the account is prolly the best way on that issue. Though any real consequences are moot now as ZOS did nothing and its too late now to dole out punishment imo.

2) Agree 100%. ZOS is still in the grace period to turn things around on the class balance front. But their choices as to their priorities(new content that a good bit of their playerbase could go a while still before bothering with being pushed out while core gameplay issues and core class issues are continually pushed back) are going be filed away by me and evaluated come time to resub in a few months.

3) Personally, i'm never one to 'lot-***' it up in MMOs. Not saying you are, but usually the experience of the run is enough for me. Extras of any kind given at the end of a run are just bonuses. I could do with or without them.

irishdexy · May 2014

Well for Point number 3 I can see the OP's point, while going to through the High Level VR Zones you simply don't kill everything in sight. Sure that's great if you have a 4 man gank squad against the enemies but you may not have that all the time and its time consuming as well

As for the Nightblades they need to have that fixed sooner or later as anyone who has played NB's knows how pathetic it is at times if you don't have the optimum set up or you want to think out of the box a little ya know.

rawne1980b16_ESO · May 2014

I agree, especially with 3.

Questing is starting to feel more like work than fun.

Although it isn't just quest rewards that are bad. Cyrodiil used to be quite good for getting a few rewards in the mail every so often and that's been nerfed.

Censorious · May 2014

It's the mess in Cyrodiil that gets to me, especially since I'm pretty well a PvP-only player.

The first few people past lvl10 made it into Cyrodiil withinn the first couple of days and because of the bounty quest having been set to repeatable, they levelled obscenely quickly. They shot to VR rank before the early access period expired and amassed huge amounts of Alliance Points in doing so.
They also made fortunes in gold and materials from the reward system.

To 'correct' this, Zom slammed on the brakes, cut the quest down to a daily and effectively cut-off all the players who missed the boat. These people will never catch up and unless the points system is reset for each campaign, none of them can ever hope to become an Emperor or even match rank with one of the elite.

Further changes have made it harder and harder. The latest move to increase NPC damage and health to FOUR times the average VR player's level just adds to the ignominy. And of course, the rewards have been nerfed.

ArRashid · May 2014

1. Patches rushed and written REALLY BADLY
- so bad actually that it looks like it's done on purpose
- how can you ruin 2 things by fixing ONE? Seriously, with each patch there are MORE bugs, not less

2. BAD decisions - ZERO LOGIC BEHIND THEM
- "counters" to bots have so far had ZERO effect on bots. Instead, they hurt regular players.
- there wasn't a single good anti-bot decision made yet. All of them work against players, not bots.
- they are just making players want to "*** whole crafting" (aka right now there are zero-to-none resource nodes out there. I haven't found a single metal, wood or rune node in Alik'r today, and just 2 cloth nodes. That's INSANE. If you reduce number of nodes and increase their respawn timer, then make them friggin drop more than 3-4 at once (1 for rune)!

3. TARDED PLAYERS (aka the only one not created by Zenimax)
- exploiters everywhere, not even trying to disguise themselves as grinders. Just standing at the most obvious "insant respawn point" literally 24/7.
- tards exploiting their way to VR10 then crying about not having "endgame" for a month till Craglorn was introduced

Saint_JiubB14_ESO · May 2014

Censorious wrote: »

Further changes have made it harder and harder. The latest move to increase NPC damage and health to FOUR times the average VR player's level just adds to the ignominy. And of course, the rewards have been nerfed.

Ok, these posts were done today so I am confused, did you miss the big blue box at the top that says the vet difficulty was a bug and they have reverted it? Its literally not an issue. and this is like the 4th or 5th thread I've read in 15minutes where somebody was talking about the difficulty increase, even though it is gone, so I don't get why it keeps happening all over the forums. Rewards were nerfed? I wasn't aware, unless you are talking about the motif/recipe drop rates, but that was all bogus, the admins addressed that already in another thread. Otherwise I was unaware of any recent loot changes, the loot timer to delve/world bosses I fought against, but that was awhile ago.

1. People made a big deal about the exploiters but with the exception of the AP issues they seem to not have any real impact on the community (and the AP issues will be gone when all the campaigns are reset). Also that is normal for an MMO huge exploits are always common during launch.

2. Balance takes time, the NB fixes are an ongoing process, it is taking a long time but it is happening. They also got a big delay on working out the kinks because of the brokenness of Vamps. They have started tweaking the DK and some of the Sorc Combos, so other than the delay to NBs I think they are doing an alright job.

3. The rewards system is kind of bad, but not the part you are talking about. I am generally satisfied with quest rewards other than the fact that Blacksmithing items dominate most rewards. The loot timer, and the changes to the drop rates of improvement materials from beta to live really hurt the looting system. Also the loot lockout cap for levels compounds the problems. That is probably the biggest disappointment I've had since beta. I mostly hope that they change some aspects later down the road to undo some of the damage they did trying to triage the problems caused by bots.

Censorious · May 2014

Saint_JiubB14_ESO wrote: »

Censorious wrote: »

Further changes have made it harder and harder. The latest move to increase NPC damage and health to FOUR times the average VR player's level just adds to the ignominy. And of course, the rewards have been nerfed.

Ok, these posts were done today so I am confused, did you miss the big blue box at the top that says the vet difficulty was a bug and they have reverted it?...

Not in Cyrodiil. The notice refers to a BUG in PvE zones that was (partially) reverted. The NPCs in Cyrodill were bolstered intentionally and remain so.

zgrssd · May 2014

Rylana wrote: »

1. Ongoing exploits or ones that were never really reversed (see item duping, fixed but never cleansed out of the market), powerleveling by killing unintendedly fast respawning world bosses and not reverting the levels. I could go on with this, the whole first month has been a rampant race to find the next exploitable thing and abuse the hell out of it.

Finding an Exploit and not reporting it can get your account banned per TOS.
That being said, if there is no way to proof they used it there is no legal way to take any actions against them.
Binding Contracts and all.

Rylana wrote: »

2. Class balance is absolutely horrendous.

You bought an MMO at launch. You either lie when you said you expeted it to be balanced, or you lied about your age when buying it.
There is just no way the average 18 Year old would expect any Multiplayer game to be balanced at launch. Much less an Massively Multiplayer game with PvP.

Rylana wrote: »

3. Making the rewards for actually playing the content so ridiculously bad that everyone just wants to do number 1 on this list, because time spent for reward earned is absolutely terrible.

See point 2.

alphawolph · May 2014

1. What other people do has never bothered me.
2. Meh, just play what you think is the most OP. If playing these games has taught me anything is the fact that these things change. They only way to balance the classes is to make them the same. I would rather have them be different.
3. And I can't believe I'm going to say this. But, for this game it's true. The "reward" was running around for two hours with your friends killing and overcoming obstacles.

My three would be.
1. No AH
2. Guilds seem impersonal, I like my guildies to be allies not potential customers.
3. Colliding with NPCs is such a pain. Immersion, blah, blah, it kills me to be stopped dead trying to get through a door cause a npc is standing there.

Nooblet · May 2014

Being sorc doesn't make anything easier, except running away from fights.

Roneth · May 2014

WoW has been out for a decade and still suffers from class balance.

ErilAq · May 2014

My biggest issue is the bots. Coldharbour is rife with them. they run around killing mobs before I can even reach them for my quests.

the balance will come in time, WoW at launch was unplayable, and entire classes were useless, and some were so OP it makes DK's look underpowered. (even into burning crusade, who remembers shadowbolt locks?)

As for the quest rewards, I like it. I like the story, I like running with friends. Plus killing all the mobs nets good gold and gear. I LOVE that crafting gear has a priority (instead of the quests that give you a "free" epic) and that you can upgrade any gear found in the world. My only complaint on that aspect is rings/necklaces. Please give us the ability to craft those things.

Kayira · May 2014

I just want to say something about your number 3 reason. If everyone would get a purple or blue item per quest there would be no difference in players. Everyone would be wearing the best gear and that has never been the idea of any MMO. Have you ever seen an MMO where you get the best gear from the quest in the dungeon and NOT from the boss mob you killed before?
THey want to reward you for killing the boss quickly with synergies and give you a bit of extra for doing the entire dungeon. So I think number 3 is really no point to complain about.

Innocente · May 2014

For me it is -

* Crashing to Desktop
* Speed Hackers
* Teleport Hackers
* Z-Plane Hackers
* Gold Spam Mail
* Broken Quest Lines
* Broken Quest Rewards
* Underdeveloped UI
* No Global Market Store
* Broken Gear Crafting Design
* Really Poor Loot Drop Itemization
* Reductions In Character Ability Effectiveness
* Broken Class Abilities
* Lack of Information on In-Game Status (For example: Buffs/Debuffs)
* And more...

Just my experience in the game.
I am sure lots of folks don't have all these issues.
But I bet everyone has experienced at least one or two of them.

Vlaxitov · May 2014

Kayira wrote: »

I just want to say something about your number 3 reason. If everyone would get a purple or blue item per quest there would be no difference in players. Everyone would be wearing the best gear and that has never been the idea of any MMO.

Its a good thing blues and purples aren't the best gear then huh?

It doesn't matter what you say or how legit your critique is, there will always be fanboy white knights ready to rush in and talk over you with an apologetics campaign.

irishdexy · May 2014

I believe from what the OP means is that for all that work (and at that VR level of grinding it can be work as a NB) you should get something nice that's useful. Not in terms of wearing it but for Decon.

Everyone needs mats these days lol and purple drops on a crafting account are verry nice

MCrusader · May 2014

i even cannot go play on , i was busy with quest 55+ on shadowfen last visible mission , and now the reset to 0 i cannot compleet shadowfen quest and missions ( reset to shadowfen , deshaam , stonefalles ) yep great work agian of patch that ,,, slow your down and reward the bots and real players get ... up

Lynnessa · May 2014

The only thing that has bothered me about the game so far is the forum. Bunch of crybabies around here, I tell you.

irishdexy · May 2014

wait we're crybabies for posting up legitimate problems about the game? Yea... just keep thinking that buddy while we actually discuss important bugs in the game that need addressed

NerfEverything · May 2014

Wow, nice post. I just listed all 3 of these things as the reasons for cancelling my sub in the Poll thread. I'm glad I'm not the only one that was really bothered by these things.