Ingel_Riday wrote: »

I mean, I get the monetary reason why ZOS is doing them. In the sense of “we need money to fund the team, pay ever-escalating server rental costs, dole out dividends to Microsoft shareholders, avoid unemployment,” and so on… sure. They fit in that sense.

But based on my experience with doing all the Week 1 tasks to completion, Tamriel Tomes are just a tedious list of exceedingly dull chores. Dull chores that have very little to do with any semblance of fun.

For point of comparison, I have bought 8 battle passes in Marvel Rivals… and I’ve always found them kind of fun. One strong contributing factor is that Marvel Rivals has a core hedgehog concept of doing the matches. Whether you’re in “competitive ranked” or “quickmatch” or “practice vs AI,” the end result is the same. You’re running matches. Everything revolves around that solid focal point (save a few cute optional mini-modes).

Since said game has such a laser focus, the developers have been able to design battle pass activities that revolve around doing things that you would naturally be doing ANYWAY. You’re going to be getting 20 critical hits, or killing 75 enemies, or doing 12 matches, or the like by just playing the game. That’s it. They’re not really chores at all. Again, you were going to do all those things ANYWAY. The Battle Pass just gives you extra motivation to log in and play the game. It feels very organic.

Oh sure, sometimes you’ll want to veer away from one kind of character to another to get some of them done in a prompter manner. Play as The Punisher to get 20 critical hits via headshots with your machine gun (which takes less than one match to achieve) or play a healer for 2 matches to get 25k healing done. But at the end of the day, you’re still doing the core activity of playing the matches. You’re doing the thing, just with your toes dipped in a slightly different player experience.

You also have plenty of alternative options. Each week’s list of battle pass activities has 12 or so possible ones to focus on and you are only expected to do six of them. Then you’re done with the weekly challenges. So if you REALLY don’t want to heal, you don’t have to. You have plenty of other things you can do to make progress… all the while enjoying the core gameplay loop. It’s a genuinely nice experience.

Tamriel Tomes… are not a nice experience. Instead of offering a diverse list of activities to participate in that enable people to earn progress by just naturally playing the game, they're just tedious nightmare filler-content. I play this game to explore, do quests, and wander the world… not to run around in circles collecting 90 wood and 90 silken cocoons. Not to camp a public dungeon event boss in Wrothgar for five minutes, kill him in thirty seconds, and then do that cycle another two times while reading a history book about the Panama Canal to stay awake. Not to be part of a herd of players corralled into the Wrothgar Overworld to pick away at 1,000 monsters, which… why? Why even design something like that? The monsters in the overworld aren't numerous enough to support the entire playerbase being funneled into instances of the zone to fulfill personal 1,000 monster kill quotas. You're creating pure tedium.

This isn’t fun. Now, in fairness, I know “fun” isn’t really the goal. Hasn’t been for a while. I mean, look: when you’re paying a monthly subscription of $149.99 per year AND buying loot crates AND sinking money into battle passes that are 50% more expensive than competitors’ battle passes while offering only a fraction of the costumes and cosmetics… you get motivated to take the time to read developer interviews. I read Matt Firor talking about “adding more things to the game to keep players busy.” BUSY. Not entertained. Not having fun. Kept BUSY. A very telling word choice. Stuck with me.

That’s what the Tamriel Tome system currently is. It’s busy work. It’s a second job that you can start when you’re done with your first one. I have 6 to 8 hours to play your game each week, tops. It would take me all that time just to keep up with these chores. Chores that are not only dull the first time, but dull the additional 2 to 5 times that I'm expected to repeat them. I could just not do them, but then I'd get behind... and I'd never catch up. I wouldn't finish the first battle pass and then the second one would drop and I wouldn't finish that one and then the third one would drop and I'd be so far in the hole that I'd never get them done (unless I pay real money for Tamriel Tome points, which I'm sure is in the works). Ugh.

In its present incarnation, I don’t think the Tamriel Tome system is a good fit for ESO. It doesn’t play to any of the game’s strengths, it doesn’t have any intuitive flow with core gameplay loops, and if this is supposed to take the place of new zones to keep us “busy” and “engaged” between major content drops so that we are retained as players… good luck with that. You’re going to burn people out.

______
As an addendum, it doesn’t help that I’m about 62 hours into the excellent Crimson Desert and loving the heck out of it. It is shockingly JARRING to go from an epic adventure replete with stunning vistas, awesome character abilities, and large-scale pitched battles to… ye olde chore list. “Another 30 ancestor silk to go. Oh, better remember to claim my daily log-in bonus of 15 tome points… because ZOS added the daily log-in bonus back into the game, only now with a far shoddier reward… because all the previous rewards are now locked behind these new chores. Stunning and brave.”

Ugh. I loved that month vacation between endeavors and this. Felt like the good ol’ days, before I apparently needed a second job ethnically-cleansing Wrothgar in order to give my kids a new pair of Raynor boots.

ceruulean wrote: »

BardokRedSnow wrote: »

l
They offered double ap for vengeance only alongside greyhost and people still flocked to greyhost... No amount of meaningless titles or the like would get people to move over, and offering rewards like cosmetics and developing the campaign people right now dont wanna play would only ostracize and push more returning players out yet again.

Trying to force customers to like something vs improving upon what they already like is the worst business strategy possible.

What forum goers don't understand overall, because these players don't typically go to the forums, is that most pvpers come from other games like WoW where the actual gameplay and combat is more important to them than anything else. The game mode that gives them the most build diversity and complexity will always win out over what is simple and available to everyone to access out the jump.
...
And a bigger point on that is, if the social aspect was the most important thing, more pvpers would be doing PVE, as PvE is a far bigger social pool than PVP ever could be.

1. So according to you, AP and rewards are not the main motivator for the majority of pvp players. I agree. People who hate pvp will never be enticed no matter how much cosmetics and dyes and AP are offered.
2. ZOS is not forcing customers into Vengeance. They offer incentives to play vengeance. When they're tired of supporting a service, they can disconnect it. Just like how no one forces you to use any kind of software if a dev gets tired of maintaining it. As a customer, you can play or not play. Pretty simple.
3. "Most PvPers come from other games like WoW where actual gameplay and combat is more important than anything else"? Very bold statement. I highly doubt this is the case, but okay. Gameplay and combat mechanics are different from build diversity/gear complexity.
4. "If the social aspect was the most important thing, more PvPers would be doing PvE." These don't logically connect.

Let's just take a look at the minute-to-minute gameplay of Greyhost:

"This. Logged in last night during prime time, 60+ queue, 3 bars across all alliances and the map was so *** dead. No one doing a single thing. Maybe a resource flagged here and there but it felt like people would log in and just go afk on purpose. I stuck around for a hour and dipped, lol"

"When I logged on to PCNA in grayhost on AD, I’d just sit there and talk to people in zone chat. No reason to actually try anything when a Zerg attempts to take a keep and you and 3 other people show up to try to defend."

https://www.reddit.com/r/elderscrollsonline/s/Tl5LHIkd1h

Greyhost is failing to provide meaningful combat for the average player. So why do people still queue in? Socializing and afking is what the majority of players do in Greyhost. This is not a bad thing. Human beings are social creatures, you can't force them to unsocialize in a multiplayer game, and realistically speaking, people need breaks and cannot be battling 24/7. It makes more sense for ZOS to lean into the socialization aspect and make grouping and coordination easier and more meaningful, and implement underdog bonuses to address population imbalances and entice participation. They cannot reach a critical population in Greyhost anymore, so they have to switch to Vengeance.

FieryPhoenix wrote: »

While I agree whole heartedly with you, I’m afraid this trend will only continue as this seems to be happening in all facets of the game. Everything is getting too flashy, too loud, too over the top. The visual effects toggle can’t come soon enough for me.

Note to the devs: Less is in fact more.

Moonspawn wrote: »

Two-sided Battlegrounds are too difficult to balance