Thank you and suggestions - a review

Nihili

I wanted to quickly take a moment to thank ZOS and the devs for the effort they have put into the continued patches, their transparency with regards to their goals, and in general making such an enjoyable game. I did not participate in the beta and have not played the game since release, but in my time I've built up a Nightblade from scratch to finish in the Dominion and then again built up a Sorcerer in the Pact.
No, I'm not claiming to be an exceptionally experienced gamer and I'm not claiming to have utterly cultivated your game for all it has, but I have* enjoyed it in a casual sense and so I wanted to take a moment to make some constructive criticisms and compliments, as someone who enjoyed your game casually, that I hope you would take on board. I added a poll for one reason only, and that is to see if the majority of the community agrees with some of the things I have to say.

(<+>=Compliment, <-> = Criticism, <S> = Suggestion... I will not be giving much evidence for my opinions, because I have a lot to cover, but I will answer some specific questions and revise statements if you convince me I'm wrong somewhere)

<+> I'd like to start off with giving credit where credit is due: the "story" of your game is rich with wonderful characters, numerous gripping plots and sub-plots, and an amazing fantastical setting. World-design is beautiful, voice acting is great, and the enjoyable quests are abundant. These are things you've always done well with the Scrolls series and you did not drop the ball here, but there's one peculiar trait I've enjoyed thoroughly in your game: you aren't afraid of making the player feel central to the story, and even the lore, from the very beginning*.
There isn't a long wait until you as the player get to do something absolutely amazing, and it's definitely not the case where you have to wait until end-game to do some "world-affecting" quests. From the beginning, "I stopped an assassin from killing Queen Ayrenn". What would have happened if the player wasn't there?

<+> Latching on from the previous point, you provide the players with the opportunity to immerse themselves in their character. It's an MMO, but it's still a "Role-playing game", and the nature of your game, or more specifically your quests, makes it easy to role-play. It's not long before you feel the insult or flattery directed at your character by an NPC personally, because it's so easy to lose yourself in your character.

<S> TIme for the first suggestion: keep doing what your doing in this regard. Your quests are good, if there's a seriously out-of-hand amount of bugs then I haven't experienced it, but you basically just want to fix the bugs where necessary, but not change the quests. Just please be careful of not making every quest a "central" quest. I love being important, but where are the "non-life-and-death" quests? The Scrolls Series are known to have some funny quests too, and though the Mages Guild quests can be an example of this I did not experience too many quirky quests in the bigger picture. Food for thought for the development team charged with this type of thing.

<-> Some of your quests are too reminiscent of previous quests. If the majority of the towns/cities I'm ever going to reach is occupied by invaders/pirates the moment I get there and I have to go through the process of cleaning up the place to properly unlock it, I'm going to start feeling like there's a lack of creativity. I understand the desire to make the player work to enter a cool city, but could you not be more creative in choosing his/her work?

<-> On the point of "work", exactly how intentional is the pricing of horses? I must say that the Wayshrine fast-travel system is a "useful" system, and the concept for "Recall" fast-travel at increasing price increments was cleverly done. But the price of a horse makes the frugal player die 9 deaths (unfortunately I had to scale that number to include my cat friends, the Khajiit, with their nine lives because yes, it IS so bad that everyone, including them, needs to die). I'm playing a game and in a sense it's your job to make a game that I enjoy, but one thing that you made really hard for me to enjoy is this choice: run through the whole game or pay the disgusting "pound of flesh" 17,200 gold? And that's the cheapest one! If you're wondering I ran* the whole game instead of waste that money. The drop rate of gold does not justify this type of amount, in case you thought you were generous in that regard. You are literally encouraging me to not get a horse. And no, it's not the case where it's an "end-game" objective, where getting a horse is really only a luxury you can afford once you've reached end-game, because it's not: 17,200 gold is a lot even at end-game, and there are numerous - there are mountains* - of other things you can buy instead of a horse with that amount of gold. Don't get me started on the 42,700 gold horses...

<-> Another point that relates to gold is inventory space and bank space. Why is it that I have 60 slots, but to increase that amount by a mere 10 slots I have to pay so much gold? I could have a whole different poll on this and I am 75% sure that the whole community would agree there's an issue with the limited bag space. And bank as well. I have 60 slots that I'm hard pressed not to cap when I have one character. When I have two characters I still only have 60 slots.
What if I have eight characters? 60 friggin slots. The ratio is getting worse.
So let's get this straight: the more I play this game the more drops I'll get, which in turns makes it harder to make use of 60 slots effectively, but if I play this game even more and start playing with more characters, their drops will need bank space as well. So the more I play the more impossible to keep cool stuff. Oh and what's that? You charge increasing increments for each bank upgrade?
So which part of this is meant to be fun? Where I spend hard earned cash to make something tedious easier, because you unnecessarily made it stupidly hard? Where I spend 3 out of every 7 minutes managing my inventory, because I refuse to spend that money?

<S> Cut down the prices of horses and inventory upgrades even if it's just a small amount. 10,000-14,000 gold for the cheapest horse is fair. 25,000-32,000 gold for the expensive horses is still ridiculous, but I suppose I could call it more fair. Inventory space... Just make it more. The inventory upgrade should get you an added 15 slots. We don't like* spending money. We like spending money for something cool. These things aren't cool enough to warrant your pricing.

<+> Dungeons are good. In fact I've found dungeon quests to be the most gripping of them all, but I've already spoken about quests extensively so I'll talk about what I like of dungeons other than their quests. The difficulty. What I'm saying is you've gotten a good balance between "This is too difficult" and "This is too easy", with it leaning a bit to the difficult side. This gives it a "This is pretty hard, but damn is it rewarding!" feel. I can tell you without feeling too self-concious about it that when I enter a fight against 20 NPCs and my group of 4 rises up victorious after an intense fight - it feels good. Defeating bosses at the end feels important. It's like you've actually risen above this dungeon that was so difficult and strenuous and now your better for it, better than the average player, better geared for the game. I haven't dungeoned too much, but I wish I had, because each time it felt more rewarding.

--- I'm now going to be focusing on classes and skills. Because there's too much to mention, I'll probably be talking more about the skills I think need to be changed rather than talking about how well thought-out some are. They will, in that sense then, mostly be suggestions. A fair warning. ---

<S> Make werewolf ultimate powerful. More powerful. The werewolf skill line is cool because of the ultimate, not the passives or the actives, just the ultimate. Once you realize that it's the case where everyone get's werewolf for* the ultimate, you need to change your approach. Make the ultimate build-up a lengthy situation, and make the cooldown even longer. The type of scenario you want from werewolves is where they change the tide of battle utterly and completely - but because it took them so long to be able to do that they actually don't want to turn the tide of the battle all that often. I'm talking an hour of gameplay before they can get their ultimate off.
But when they do, prepare to die.

<S> Vampires... As I understand it there has been some call from the community to nerf vampires, but I frankly don't understand the view all that much. There is one skill I would request you buff: elusive mist. I'm curious as to why a skill that has "elusive" in it's title is so bad at making me elude my enemies. A 24% (or is it 30%?) increase to my movement speed is nothing*. That is the equivalent of sprinting, for goodness sake. If I was being chased be a sorcerer they could use bolt escape to do circles around me - stop, point and laugh - AND then kill me before I got anywhere near a safe distance from anyone. Please improve the movement speed increase of this skill to 50%. Please greatly improve the poison mist damage so that it actually becomes a viable alternative and not just a sitting duck. The rest is, in my opinion, fine.

<S> Buff heavy armor. How is it that a light armored tank can potentially be a better tank than a heavy armored tank? I understand your sincerest desires for versatility in build-making, but that's a bit of an extensive joke right? And note, I'm calling for the buffing of heavy armor and not the nerfing of light and medium armors. Those are actually fine - you just need to look into improving heavy armor.

<S> On weapons: I have no issue with destruction staff, restoration staff, bow and sword and shield. I would like to ask that you take a look at Two Handed and Dual Wield. On dual wield possibly improve Twin slashes, Whirlwind and Sparks. Two Handed I haven't actually played, but judging from the community it may need a buff? (Not my experience that it needs a buff, but then I don't have much experience with it.)

<S> Nightblade: Can we get an overall buff to the siphoning tree? The Assassination and Shadow trees seem to be the only trees anyone really cares about, possibly because of the crit damage improvements. Perhaps make siphon moves heal oneself for more, making it more viable for survivability and tanking. There's a lot wrong with the Nightblade apparently , but having played it I can't say I have all that many issues with it, other than the weak siphon tree. The archetype of the Nightblade is a rogue, so it makes sense for it not* to be on equal footing in zerg pvp, because shadows and stealth have no place in large scale battles. The archetype for the Nightblade is suited to stealthing, and in turn suited to 1v1s. This doesn't make the Nightblade broken. It makes it different to the other classes. People have been complaining about this class for the wrong reasons.

<S> Sorcerers: "Buff" Daedric summoning, but do NOT touch the ultimate. Change the familiars - make them cooler and more desirable or more useful. I honestly had no desire to go into the Summoning skill line because it had nothing good enough for me to warrant a skill point - other than the ultimate. Sorcerers do not need buffs, they're a good class. Just change up the summoning skill tree to make it cooler.

<S> DragonKnights: I don't want you to change anything about DragonKnights. Some in the community have called for the nerfing of some skills, but I don't share that view. DK's are strong, but I wouldn't call them brokenly strong, and if they are too strong make the other classes stronger to match them. It's a cool awesome class.

<S> I haven't played Templars and I have shown no interest in them since I started, so I am not qualified in the least to comment on them. Maybe the community will share an opinion on my behalf.

And that's it for me. These are mostly opinions, some of them I believe are shared by the community, some of them aren't. But I had fun reflecting on the game like this and thinking how and what I would change. My point with this post was just to show you what "we" (or you know, maybe just me, but whatever) think will help make this game cooler. More fun. Better.

Me out