Pepegrillos wrote: »

There might be a survivorship bias. Most people sticking with the game seem to like it. At the same time, player population is at its lowest point in 8 years. Those who left or didn't come back might not like it that much.

People have a habit of accrediting their personal problems with the reason why other people aren’t happy.

Let’s not ignore the fact that this is lightest content year we’ve had so far, and we’ve had no new systems introduced; as Subclassing is just a remix of pre-existing content. Even the assets for Solstice are primarily reused Summerset and Murkmire structures.

I would be more inclined to believe the population is lower than ever, is more to do with the lack of an ESO Direct like the years prior, and that we’re following up “Spellcrafting” last year with nothing…

Zodiarkslayer wrote: »

And it's not to the pve player's detriment.

It is at group PvE end-game, where build requirements are enforced.

ZOS gave solo players and low-end content players 10,000 builds, when they already had 2,000 builds; and in the process took the number of high-end content builds from 3/4 (already too little) per role to 1 per role.

I feel like this is the crux of the issue.

Solo players - those who are using ESO as their TES6 proxy - are the ones that Subclassing was specifically designed for. Most people who love Subclassing love it for exactly that reason. The problem is that solo players aren't the only ones who play ESO, and Subclassing - at least the way it was implemented - destroyed endgame and balance for group PvErs and PvPers.

The reason it is so favored among soloists though is that the downsides of Subclassing (lack of Class identity, lack of balance) are things that are utterly irrelevant if you're not considering other people. It's very easy to consider a change as either "good" or "bad" when you are the only person you need to ask. The lack of balance in other parts of the game that soloists do not look at are therefore not even a factor in how it feels afterwards.

The reason for having distinct Classes is because it is an MMO at its base level, and that means that the Classes are a way to ensure that one player can'thave everything - that's the design, not a flaw. We can even see that in games like D&D, where the idea is that different characters should have different strengths and weaknesses, which ends up inspiring grouping with people to cover our weaknesses or to make multiple characters to see the world in many different angles. Games like Skyrim that allow you to do anything tend to follow that every player will make one character, stick with them the whole way through, and then not be interested in replaying right away because you did everything the first time. There's a reason that everybody who says "I want to replay Skyrim but as an [X] this time!" ends up with a stealth archer by the time they get through Bleak Falls Barrow.

Like most ESO changes, this could have been avoided, or at least the issue minimized, had they spent a bit more time thinking about how changes would affect the whole playerbase and not just one subset of it. They could have put in Subclassing in a way that would allow the solo- and RP-focused players to get the freedom they want (heck, they could have offered even more freedom actually, allowing swapping of all three lines or accepting multiple from the same parent class) without affecting endgame PvE or PvP by:

• Spending the time to properly balance the Class lines before merging them all so there is less of a power difference between builds
• Restricting Subclassing to overland and normal content, but keeping PvP and vet content as is with the same logic of the Armory assistant not being useable in leaderboarded content
• Giving bonuses to staying with a pureclass build, or adding some tradeoff penalities to Subclassing to make it an actual build choice instead of just allowing players to stack all strengthsand no weaknesses

What I do not like is the number of soloists who are now coming out of the woodwork to say things like "ESO needs to become more like the solo games! Remove Classes! Make Cyrodiil PvE! Stop making Dungeons! Hide everyone else in the world so I don't have to see other people!" This is a game for all of us, and it is not a good look for one playerbase to specifically desire the others to leave.
...and I get it. I can't wait for TES6 either. But I absolutely do not want ESO to turn into TES6. I want a TES6 with amazing graphics, a deep story with decisions and consequences and choices (I'll admit, BG3 spoiled me horribly for that so I have high expectations for the writing, and ESO's is not cutting it at all), moddability, and a world I can lose myself in for months.

I want ESO for the group content that I can't get from a solo game. That's the big thing that TES6 won't have, and it's a strength that ESO should realize. ESO needs to have an identity apart from TES6, and it really is that ESO has other people around - people to play with or against, and friends who will serve as an anchor to keep us around.
And I want ESO to stay around for a long time. Remember, ESO is a live-service server-based game, which means it's only around as long as Microsoft considers it profitable to keep the servers alive. If ESO pivots too hard to act as a TES6 proxy and drives away the group PvE and PvP playerbases, then who is going to come back to ESO when TES6 does release? Will that be enough people to convince Microsoft to keep it open, or will ESO soon after go the way of Legends...?

AI still likes to make up information, Minecraft’s new helper AI is notoriously bad at its job, and “AI psychosis” is on the rise. Let alone other things like public feelings about AI.

So, no. We need less AI, not more.

It may not be against the ToS but it's a pretty awful thing to do to someone. And I don't think there should be add-ons to help players do it.

I have a pretty good idea who this player is.

Friend of mine streamed for me and showed me her friends list, we have a lot of the same people on ours. 3 friends were on, out of a maxed friends list, on a Friday night.

exiars10 wrote: »

From the yesterday's (Friday) evening.

This is all fake news, right? It can't be real?
According to some forum members here, server has 80 pop cap, no?

120+ AD players at siege.


80+ AD players at castle defense.


110+ AD players at castle defense.

Nobody said it was. The whole point of my thread was to make the argument that the pops seen during V1, V2, and during primetime weekend V3 is not sustainable over a full week and over months.

At least not for PC NA. Maybe for PC EU it will be. But from my experience logging in all week all I saw on other factions not named EP was to log out due to being flat out zerged down.