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Suggestions and Feedback for arenas, trials, and more
Fat_Cat45
✭✭✭✭✭
Trials, Maelstrom, and the weekly leaderboards
Ever since the level cap was raised to v16 the amount of players who regularly completed trials has dropped drastically. My guess was that ZOS wanted to make Imperial City and Wrothgar the main source of v16 items to promote the sales. It got to the point where hundreds of teams were doing trials a week, and now less than 50 a week go for it. But now with the Thieve's Guild dlc the incentive to complete trials for leader board positions should be returning.
The methods which they implement these incentives is important, and also need to follow mmo standards for making the content replayable with a sense of progression mixed in there. ZOS has mentioned v16 items from trials, but have not revealed any details about the ways of obtaining them.
I propose the following:
• The weekly leader board mails have a loot table containing existing trials sets as well as the sets found within that weekly trial (all scaled to v16 max)
• The purple Undaunted Coffer, which can be obtained once per week per character, can also drop the current set items along with scaled up items from the trial it was earned from.
•Each of the trials now drop their own unique Undaunted Coffer, still with a 1 week cool down for each.
• No v16 items outside the leader board mails or weekly coffers (except the new trial with Thieves Guild)
An example of this would be receiving gold v16 Storm Knight set from an Aetherian Archive weekly leader board, or v16 Nikulas from earning an Undaunted Coffer from Hel Ra.
What are the positives to the changes?
• Promotes players to create alts to gain more coffers per week. Which will also let people diversify their playstyles.
• The v16 items will be uncommon enough to take time to earn in desired traits, but also not so rare it will take months upon months.
• Encourages player trading and interaction. For example, trading item sets from AA coffers for HRC coffers.
• Guilds will see a large increase in participation from their members for an extended period of time because the v16 items will only have 2 sources
• And more.
So why not just make the mobs and bosses in HRC, AA, and SO drop v16 items? The short answer is longevity of the game content. A typical mmo theme and a way to manipulate character progression rates. It also supports a healthy game economy where items are not too common to be worthless or to uncommon to be ridiculous prices (rings of agility).
Maelstrom Arena
I believe Maelstrom would be perfect if they reverted the change which gives a maelstrom 100% of the time from the weekly mails. I spoke to a good amount of players and that change alone was the only factor they stopped caring about doing the weekly.for Maelstrom
Weekly leaderboards for Trials
If thieves guild dlc is successful for bringing life back to trials, and a change such as the one I suggested above gets implemented, then the leadboards must hold 100 teams instead of 100 players. The Orsinium update 'broke' the leaderboards for trials and removed any weekly reward mails from trials. I don't know if it was intentional or not, but I will treat it as if it were.
That's a short summary of my feedback/suggestions for trials in the next patch. If you all have any as well as other improvements then let us know.
PvP and structured arenas
Adding arenas to ESO has been a hot topic for a long time, and needs to be implemented carefully or else Cyrodiil will suffer. I have a few ideas which will promote players to enter Cyrodiil as well as strive to beat their competition in structured arenas.
So, how do you keep a healthy population in Cyrodiil when a good amount of those same players would only do arenas? There needs to be an equal incentive to do both types of content, as well as a way for both to support each other.
My suggestion is that reward for the worthy mails will contain an 'Arena Ticket'. This is the currency you will spend to enter the structured arenas (which hopefully have a ranking or MMR system and leaderboards). These arena tickets can be banked and withdrawn on any of your characters, but can not be traded to other players.
So why not allow the arena tickets to be tradable? The short answer is manipulation of the system. Guilds could start farming AP with cross-alliance characters in order to sell the tickets (think back to guilds who participated in emperor swapping). It also forces players to go back to Cyrodiil and earn more tickets once their supply has run out, helping keep population numbers higher.
But now more about the tickets and their functions. It is a universal ticket to any of the arena types ZOS will add, such as 1v1, 2v2, 5v5, and so on. Pretty simple stuff. Alliance Points can be earned from the arenas, and I'll explain my suggestion for implementation.
The amount of AP you may earn from arenas will not allow you to stay in there forever, implying you won 100% of the time. Here is how it would work:
• Winning an arena will earn you 25% of the AP required for a reward for the worthy mail (which contains the arena tickets)
• Losing the arena kicks you out, and you earn 1 Arena Credits (AC).
• Winning an arena gets you 2 AC and presents you with a new option, cash out on your accumulated AC or risk it and earn more for your next win.
• Losing an arena after risking it for a greater AC on your next win will only get you 1 AC as normal.
So why the decision between the instant AC after winning or upgrading your AC reward on consecutive wins? Risk vs reward. Some players enjoy thrilling arenas knowing something valuable is on the line, some players would go for the largest win streak, and some players are trying to farm AC.
Here's an example of Arena Credits and a win streak. You win your first arena, and choose to bet your 2 AC on your next arena. You win that one as well, and now you earn (2 AC for the win) + (summed AC) + (# of wins in a row). Here's a small table of what it would look like:
1 win: 2 AC
2 wins: 6 AC
3 wins: 11 AC
4 wins: 17 AC
5 wins: 24 AC
and so on.
A 5 win streak would earn you 24 AC opposed to 10 AC from individual wins.
And what can Arena Credits be spent on? Well I haven't though of something for that yet. Possibly new item sets, resources, costumes, mounts, and so on.
That's a fairly unrefined idea I had to make Cyrodiil relevant for players who wish to do arenas, and other suggestions are welcome.
I'll probably edit this later, ran out of time for the other points I wanted to bring up as well.
Edited by Fat_Cat45 on December 21, 2015 12:17PM Ever since the level cap was raised to v16 the amount of players who regularly completed trials has dropped drastically. My guess was that ZOS wanted to make Imperial City and Wrothgar the main source of v16 items to promote the sales. It got to the point where hundreds of teams were doing trials a week, and now less than 50 a week go for it. But now with the Thieve's Guild dlc the incentive to complete trials for leader board positions should be returning.
The methods which they implement these incentives is important, and also need to follow mmo standards for making the content replayable with a sense of progression mixed in there. ZOS has mentioned v16 items from trials, but have not revealed any details about the ways of obtaining them.
I propose the following:
• The weekly leader board mails have a loot table containing existing trials sets as well as the sets found within that weekly trial (all scaled to v16 max)
• The purple Undaunted Coffer, which can be obtained once per week per character, can also drop the current set items along with scaled up items from the trial it was earned from.
•Each of the trials now drop their own unique Undaunted Coffer, still with a 1 week cool down for each.
• No v16 items outside the leader board mails or weekly coffers (except the new trial with Thieves Guild)
An example of this would be receiving gold v16 Storm Knight set from an Aetherian Archive weekly leader board, or v16 Nikulas from earning an Undaunted Coffer from Hel Ra.
What are the positives to the changes?
• Promotes players to create alts to gain more coffers per week. Which will also let people diversify their playstyles.
• The v16 items will be uncommon enough to take time to earn in desired traits, but also not so rare it will take months upon months.
• Encourages player trading and interaction. For example, trading item sets from AA coffers for HRC coffers.
• Guilds will see a large increase in participation from their members for an extended period of time because the v16 items will only have 2 sources
• And more.
So why not just make the mobs and bosses in HRC, AA, and SO drop v16 items? The short answer is longevity of the game content. A typical mmo theme and a way to manipulate character progression rates. It also supports a healthy game economy where items are not too common to be worthless or to uncommon to be ridiculous prices (rings of agility).
Maelstrom Arena
I believe Maelstrom would be perfect if they reverted the change which gives a maelstrom 100% of the time from the weekly mails. I spoke to a good amount of players and that change alone was the only factor they stopped caring about doing the weekly.for Maelstrom
Weekly leaderboards for Trials
If thieves guild dlc is successful for bringing life back to trials, and a change such as the one I suggested above gets implemented, then the leadboards must hold 100 teams instead of 100 players. The Orsinium update 'broke' the leaderboards for trials and removed any weekly reward mails from trials. I don't know if it was intentional or not, but I will treat it as if it were.
That's a short summary of my feedback/suggestions for trials in the next patch. If you all have any as well as other improvements then let us know.
PvP and structured arenas
Adding arenas to ESO has been a hot topic for a long time, and needs to be implemented carefully or else Cyrodiil will suffer. I have a few ideas which will promote players to enter Cyrodiil as well as strive to beat their competition in structured arenas.
So, how do you keep a healthy population in Cyrodiil when a good amount of those same players would only do arenas? There needs to be an equal incentive to do both types of content, as well as a way for both to support each other.
My suggestion is that reward for the worthy mails will contain an 'Arena Ticket'. This is the currency you will spend to enter the structured arenas (which hopefully have a ranking or MMR system and leaderboards). These arena tickets can be banked and withdrawn on any of your characters, but can not be traded to other players.
So why not allow the arena tickets to be tradable? The short answer is manipulation of the system. Guilds could start farming AP with cross-alliance characters in order to sell the tickets (think back to guilds who participated in emperor swapping). It also forces players to go back to Cyrodiil and earn more tickets once their supply has run out, helping keep population numbers higher.
But now more about the tickets and their functions. It is a universal ticket to any of the arena types ZOS will add, such as 1v1, 2v2, 5v5, and so on. Pretty simple stuff. Alliance Points can be earned from the arenas, and I'll explain my suggestion for implementation.
The amount of AP you may earn from arenas will not allow you to stay in there forever, implying you won 100% of the time. Here is how it would work:
• Winning an arena will earn you 25% of the AP required for a reward for the worthy mail (which contains the arena tickets)
• Losing the arena kicks you out, and you earn 1 Arena Credits (AC).
• Winning an arena gets you 2 AC and presents you with a new option, cash out on your accumulated AC or risk it and earn more for your next win.
• Losing an arena after risking it for a greater AC on your next win will only get you 1 AC as normal.
So why the decision between the instant AC after winning or upgrading your AC reward on consecutive wins? Risk vs reward. Some players enjoy thrilling arenas knowing something valuable is on the line, some players would go for the largest win streak, and some players are trying to farm AC.
Here's an example of Arena Credits and a win streak. You win your first arena, and choose to bet your 2 AC on your next arena. You win that one as well, and now you earn (2 AC for the win) + (summed AC) + (# of wins in a row). Here's a small table of what it would look like:
1 win: 2 AC
2 wins: 6 AC
3 wins: 11 AC
4 wins: 17 AC
5 wins: 24 AC
and so on.
A 5 win streak would earn you 24 AC opposed to 10 AC from individual wins.
And what can Arena Credits be spent on? Well I haven't though of something for that yet. Possibly new item sets, resources, costumes, mounts, and so on.
That's a fairly unrefined idea I had to make Cyrodiil relevant for players who wish to do arenas, and other suggestions are welcome.
I'll probably edit this later, ran out of time for the other points I wanted to bring up as well.