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• NA megaservers for patch maintenance – December 17, 4:00AM EST (9:00 UTC) - 12:00PM EST (17:00 UTC)
• EU megaservers for patch maintenance – December 17, 9:00 UTC (4:00AM EST) - 17:00 UTC (12:00PM EST)
Had tons of fun yesterday
Nihili
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This is a story. So it's a lot of writing. Recently this game hadn't really done it for me. I'm the type of guy that finds PvE to be boring, "Point A to Point B", kind of stuff with no real challenge (Sorry PvE'ers, I'm not trying to downplay what you guys do), and though PvP excited me, if you weren't in a zerg you'd find yourself tearing your hair every night because you were "so close to getting a decent 1v1 and then that guys 4 friends joined and wrecked you".
With most of my deaths in PvP being admittedly my fault where I maybe strafed to close to a zerg, the deaths themselves were hastened by lag and unresponsive controls, so each time I died I felt cheated. I was also tired of never hearing the news I want from the devs: of possible small scale PvP updates, assassin and thieves guilds, etc. ...ESO has fishing but no small scale PvP system, for goodness sake. The game felt stupid and I was over it -- I went so far as to uninstall it on my laptop, and only kept it on my PC because I felt I had put to much effort into my main to completely take all that away.
Then for a while I went back to Guild Wars 2. It felt great to be playing a game that had sorted out most of its gameplay problems a long time ago, that had small scale PvP that, mind you ZOS, is an absolute blast with the player base. It was smooth and I kept wanting to compare it to ESO: "why doesn't ESO have similar reward systems to Gw2?" Why isn't leveling in ESO as easy as Gw2?". I did a lot of that while playing Gw2 and so I figured I'd go back and play a bit of ESO to really look into why I disliked it so much.
And then one thing led to another. When I logged back in I forgot about analysing ESO so much and just picked up where I left off with one of my characters. I was working through Cadwell's Gold and was in Glenumbra. I started questing through the entire zone and at one point another player coincided with me during a quest and we grouped up. It turned out we were both doing Cadwell's gold so we decided to stick together through the whole area. If you've yet to play the quests in Glenumbra you've got something to look forward to I'll tell you that right now. It was just so fun playing with this random dude I encountered. I'm not a PvE'er but the quest lines were good-- and we discovered we were both werewolves and so it was super ironic that we were hunting werewolves in Cramlorn. When we fought against Faolchu the Reborn (a werewolf boss) we both turned into werewolves and it was so fun having 3 werewolves on screen clawing at each other. In the 2 man group I got more XP and I even levelled up a Vet rank-- something that happens so rarely it's always a good feeling. When we finished up the area my new friend asked me if I wanted to head to Stormhaven too. I told him I was a bit tired of questing (even though it was crazy fun) and would finish the night off with a bit of PvP.
I jumped into Cyrodill and immediately I told myself "It's been a good night so far, but now you're doing PvP and it's a two-faced mistress you have to deal with now." So I played it safe and instead of trying to solo roam Cyro like I usually do I immediately grouped up with a PUG zerg and prayed there'd be no lag. And there wasn't. It was actually, again, a lot of fun. The moment I had 15 other people around me I could comfortably walk into the middle of an enemy zerg, rather than cry behind a rock when I encounter one solo.
I don't think this game is perfect, and I still wholly believe ESO can learn a thing or two from previous MMO's such as Gw2, and I'm still super upset with the devs lack of enthusiasm to small scale PvP or a countless stream of other sensible cool stuff, but yesterday's gameplay kind of redeemed it a little bit. Currently reinstalling it on my laptop.
With most of my deaths in PvP being admittedly my fault where I maybe strafed to close to a zerg, the deaths themselves were hastened by lag and unresponsive controls, so each time I died I felt cheated. I was also tired of never hearing the news I want from the devs: of possible small scale PvP updates, assassin and thieves guilds, etc. ...ESO has fishing but no small scale PvP system, for goodness sake. The game felt stupid and I was over it -- I went so far as to uninstall it on my laptop, and only kept it on my PC because I felt I had put to much effort into my main to completely take all that away.
Then for a while I went back to Guild Wars 2. It felt great to be playing a game that had sorted out most of its gameplay problems a long time ago, that had small scale PvP that, mind you ZOS, is an absolute blast with the player base. It was smooth and I kept wanting to compare it to ESO: "why doesn't ESO have similar reward systems to Gw2?" Why isn't leveling in ESO as easy as Gw2?". I did a lot of that while playing Gw2 and so I figured I'd go back and play a bit of ESO to really look into why I disliked it so much.
And then one thing led to another. When I logged back in I forgot about analysing ESO so much and just picked up where I left off with one of my characters. I was working through Cadwell's Gold and was in Glenumbra. I started questing through the entire zone and at one point another player coincided with me during a quest and we grouped up. It turned out we were both doing Cadwell's gold so we decided to stick together through the whole area. If you've yet to play the quests in Glenumbra you've got something to look forward to I'll tell you that right now. It was just so fun playing with this random dude I encountered. I'm not a PvE'er but the quest lines were good-- and we discovered we were both werewolves and so it was super ironic that we were hunting werewolves in Cramlorn. When we fought against Faolchu the Reborn (a werewolf boss) we both turned into werewolves and it was so fun having 3 werewolves on screen clawing at each other. In the 2 man group I got more XP and I even levelled up a Vet rank-- something that happens so rarely it's always a good feeling. When we finished up the area my new friend asked me if I wanted to head to Stormhaven too. I told him I was a bit tired of questing (even though it was crazy fun) and would finish the night off with a bit of PvP.
I jumped into Cyrodill and immediately I told myself "It's been a good night so far, but now you're doing PvP and it's a two-faced mistress you have to deal with now." So I played it safe and instead of trying to solo roam Cyro like I usually do I immediately grouped up with a PUG zerg and prayed there'd be no lag. And there wasn't. It was actually, again, a lot of fun. The moment I had 15 other people around me I could comfortably walk into the middle of an enemy zerg, rather than cry behind a rock when I encounter one solo.
I don't think this game is perfect, and I still wholly believe ESO can learn a thing or two from previous MMO's such as Gw2, and I'm still super upset with the devs lack of enthusiasm to small scale PvP or a countless stream of other sensible cool stuff, but yesterday's gameplay kind of redeemed it a little bit. Currently reinstalling it on my laptop.
4
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Glad you had fun. Sometimes our box feels a bit cramped and we need to step out and stretch a little. :-)
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spoqster✭✭✭✭✭Nice! The same thing happens to me a lot. I get tired of the game and frustrated by bad game design decisions when better ones are obvious and employed in other games, then I come back with lowered expectations and have fun.
But that doesn't change the fact that they have the chance to create the best possible MMO here and they are not doing it.0