Is ESO typical of MMORPGs?

Heindrich

This is my first proper MMORPG, the closest thing to it I have played was Diablo 3, which was a much simpler game with much less content. So I am wondering if ESO is typical of MMOs when it comes to:

1. the gap between casual and elite players.
2. the domination of casual players as proportion of player population.
3. the difficulty of forming groups and general lack of social interaction.

Before anyone releases the attack dogs on me for whatever reason, I am not bashing ESO, or complaining about casual players or elitists. I just genuinely want to understand some of the things I have observed in ESO within the context of MMORPGs in general and perhaps adjust my expectations and/or help ZOS to improve areas of the game that might be improved. Allow me to elabroate...

1) The Elite-Casual Gap

Is ESO more complicated than other MMORPGs or does it just have a more casual player base due to the appeal of the Elder Scrolls franchise?

I started ESO as a super-casual RPG'er who joined along with a few friends from the Baldur's Gate community. I was a shockingly bad player at the start. I was totally clueless about racial passives, I didn't use any buff skills, I didn't use food/drink or crafted gear, I didn't use any addons (except sky shards) and I didn't even read the description of skills and spammed Blood Craze as my main dps ability until VR1! (cos I thought it looked cool and didn't notice it was a DoT skill lol). Oh I was even annoyed by the update when they made bar swapping instant, because it forced me to use a second bar of skills that I never bothered with up till then

However I improved. Once I started to do more challenging content (remember when Cadwell's Silver/Gold was actually kinda hard?) and especially once I started to join groups for veteran dungeons, I started to make an effort to learn game mechanics and improve my performance. Gradually, over weeks and months I became increasingly competent so that by the time I reached endgame, I was capable of at least pulling my weight in the most challenging PvE content in the game (at the time), and I wasn't a total pushover in PvP. In the months since then, dare I say it, I've become a good player, with a decent understanding of core mechanics and decent amount of experience of PvP and PvE.

I expected everyone else to have made a similar journey... but many, perhaps even the majority, did not. They never bothered to learn. Some simply left the game, but many stayed, made new characters, kept doing undaunted dungeons, quests etc... but didn't improve. I never thought of myself as elite, let alone elitist, but I don't understand how somebody can reach endgame and still not understand the basic trinity of dps, healer and tank? I don't understand how somebody can reach endgame and not bother to communicate in a supposedly social game, or make an effort to adapt their build for different circumstances so that they can at least perform their roles to a competent level.

I joined a pug group for Aetherius Archives last week thinking "12x VR16 players in a VR12 trial... surely we can't fail this even if some haven't done it before?" I was wrong. I knew we were screwed the moment I saw two sorcs in the group... one had pets out and the other only spammed Hardened Ward and hard-casted Crystal Frags. The stamina dps weren't much better, there was one who only seemed to spam Snipe and kept dying cos he didn't move out of AoE, and another spammed Rapid Strikes only, and also died constantly. Dps was awful and many souls were lost on each boss... but somehow we made it to the final boss. Of course then I see that our main tank has no ranged taunt and has no control of the Mage's axes. As I expected, we were doomed from the start.

Why does this happen? Is ESO harder and more complicated than other MMORPGs or is the ESO population just much more casual than usual? Am I expecting too much of pugs? How can you have such a huge gap between animation-cancelling min/max'd elite teams that can faceroll every dungeon and trial in the game, whilst others struggle with veteran Banished Cells? Is this normal in MMORPGs?

2) Proportional Dominance of Casual Players

I suppose this point is related to 1)... but are all MMOs basically 80% casual, 19% competent and 1% elite? Okay those numbers are quite arbitrary, but when I mess around in low level zones, I see that there are far more players running around in Stonefalls, Auridon and Glenumbra than I would expect so long after the release of ESO. Also all evidence from various guilds I am in suggests that ESO is constantly loosing players at endgame, but new players are constantly joining, and that the vast majority of players are very casual and play perhaps once a week and take 6 months to a year to quest one character from lv3 to Cadwell's Gold.

I never considered myself an "elite" player, but somehow I've been able to maintain my 50th-ish position on the vMA leaderboard for several weeks in a row, despite having non-optimal gear and playing nowhere near perfectly. Honestly I thought it would be harder to reach those heights, which suggests that either the ESO population is not as large as I thought (Zenimax claimed "millions" of players in their recent 2016 Look Ahead post) or the population is a lot less hardcore than I thought.

3) Singleplayer MMO?

Several of my friends have commented that ESO sometimes feels like a singleplayer game despite the millions of players supposedly sharing the megaserver. I am not the most active or social player, but I do have an almost full contact list and I run one of the most active trade guilds on my server. Even so it is surprisingly difficult to group up for undaunted pledges when you are not VR16 and it's downright painful to try to find a group for a vet dungeon that's not current a daily, and it's even worse if you want to do something like vDSA.

Why is this? Is it because there is actually too much stuff to do so that everyone always wants to do something different? Is it because the content is too hard such that there aren't actually that many people capable of running vICP or vDSA? Is it because of the lack of some sort of ingame learning mechanism to help casual players progress from casual to good so that more can participate in "endgame content"?

Yes I know vDSA and Trials are in a terrible place at the moment due to the total lack of incentives and most raiding guilds have stopped raiding. But even before the slow death of trials, ESO felt difficult to group up and surprisingly more antisocial than I expected for a MMO.

How does it compare with the likes of WOW when it comes to social interaction and player participation?

Many thanks to anyone that bothered to read this wall of text. I am just curious to see if my experience in ESO is typical of MMORPGs in general and/or if my experiences are not as objective as I think they are.

Thanks,
Hein

Robo_Hobo

I'd say that's about right, it is an Elder Scrolls game and so naturally brings in a lot of Elder Scrolls players, which hasn't, before now, had any connection to MMO's, so yeah, a lot of people whom have never played an MMO, like you said yourself - some end up liking the gameplay and adapting to it, while others have had a reason they didn't like MMO's but still enjoy what they came to ESO for in the first place - the Elder Scrolls part.

Personally I'm, I think, v9 or v10 right now, I had another veteran character a long time ago back in the early launch months and stopped about at v6, but I've only ever done a single group dungeon, which was on normal difficulty, and the only reason I did it in the first place was to get a lorebook that couldn't be obtained solo. (I still have one left to get in that Riften group dungeon, but haven't worked up the courage to ask or look for a group to help me get it) If/when I ever get to v16 I doubt that statistic will have changed much. Since quests from all of the factions and DLC get you pretty close to that range already, it's easily possible that people who are v16 haven't fully understood the mechanics of the game yet, because there's completely the chance that they, like me (almost), may have never set foot in a group experience by that point, or even a PvP experience - I've never done anything in Cyrodiil aside from collect skyshards and lorebooks, and close some dark anchors.

iamnotweakrwb17_ESO

1) No
2) Yes
3) No

Pendrillion

I can only say, that yes running trials and dungeons seems pretty hard. I have one VR 16 char. The whole competitive nature of trials is kind of a turn off. Also the atmosphere between the players and the dogmatic way of the "holy trinity" gets on my nerves. I do run group dungeons sometimes but usually I don't expect to win. And only with good friends who don't want to farm drop sets.

I agree that it is all a L2p issue on my behalf, but I prefer to stick to the things that feel fun to me.

Enemy-of-Coldharbour

Heindrich wrote: »

I suppose this point is related to 1)... but are all MMOs basically 80% casual, 19% competent and 1% elite?

What makes you think casual players are not competent?

RDMyers65b14_ESO

Like you, OP, I came to the game because it is an Elder Scrolls game. I had tried various MMORPGs before but they were not my cup of tea. I have stayed here because it is an Elder Scrolls game. I have adapted mostly. It is still hard to not have to do everything alone. I still am not used to having backup.

Spottswoode

1. Raids are not for the casual. Ever. They are meant for experienced players who operate in a large group. There is meant to be be a much smaller margin for error for raids to compensate for the large number of players in them.
I feel that the majority of the Vet Pledges are casual friendly, without being total pushovers.
The mechanics of this game are pretty atypical. I would also bet that a lot of players don't have long experience in MMOs.
There's a learning curve to everything, but the curve in this game isn't steep by any measure. Casual players just don't invest enough time into learning the mechanics and some players just won't adapt to better performing builds.
2. Any F2P/B2P mmo is going to have a predominantly casual player base. It's in the nature of the business model. Some of the freebies will become hardcore or dedicated players, but by and large, the model puts them in the minority.
3. This game definitely does soloplay right. The overall feel definitely comes from the main quest and cadwells silver/gold where you end up doing a lot of quests in phased portions that tend to be separated from other nearby players. That being said, Belkarth was anything but empty last November, so perhaps it's just players moving on to different zones or playing different types of content.
There are some definite problems with grouping in zone quests that should probably be addressed. I think the game has plenty of content, it's just difficult to find someone doing the same zone quests.


Don't compare this game (or any other MMO, really) to WoW socially. We'll never get the player count that WoW has unless WoW comes down to our level.

vyndral13preub18_ESO

WoW. Rift. Secret World. Aion. GW2. Tera. and more.

Very normal.

Smitch_59

Robo_Hobo wrote: »

I'd say that's about right, it is an Elder Scrolls game and so naturally brings in a lot of Elder Scrolls players, which hasn't, before now, had any connection to MMO's, so yeah, a lot of people whom have never played an MMO, like you said yourself - some end up liking the gameplay and adapting to it, while others have had a reason they didn't like MMO's but still enjoy what they came to ESO for in the first place - the Elder Scrolls part.

Personally I'm, I think, v9 or v10 right now, I had another veteran character a long time ago back in the early launch months and stopped about at v6, but I've only ever done a single group dungeon, which was on normal difficulty, and the only reason I did it in the first place was to get a lorebook that couldn't be obtained solo. (I still have one left to get in that Riften group dungeon, but haven't worked up the courage to ask or look for a group to help me get it) If/when I ever get to v16 I doubt that statistic will have changed much. Since quests from all of the factions and DLC get you pretty close to that range already, it's easily possible that people who are v16 haven't fully understood the mechanics of the game yet, because there's completely the chance that they, like me (almost), may have never set foot in a group experience by that point, or even a PvP experience - I've never done anything in Cyrodiil aside from collect skyshards and lorebooks, and close some dark anchors.

^ This is me also. I have no MMO experience aside from ESO. I'm strictly casual, I've been playing since July and I've been in exactly 2 PUGs. I've never been to Cyrodiil. I'm very anti-social. My main character is a v9 in the final area of Cadwell's Silver, where I'm struggling to stay alive. I know I have a very weak build, and someday I might re-spec, but for now he's mainly a crafter for my low level characters anyway.

I've said before that I play ESO solely because it's set in the Elder Scrolls universe. I play it despite the fact that it's an MMO. I'm hoping ESO will keep my interest until such time that Bethesda releases a new solo TES game.

Tors

1) The Elite-Casual Gap

This is far less in ESO than in almsot any other MMORPG

Untill now there was no bar to a player wearing and obtaining whatever they wanted. Yes those who couldnt be bothered to spend time leveling were less powered (obviously) But the main point behind a game that follows the progress of a character as he adventures in the world is progression and that generally involves some form of leveling (of skills if not character)

These people shouild not have been listened too.

NOW we have the problem of god-awefull gear systems being implemented from terrible games that people like me chose to either not play or give up to come here.

Bind on pickup armour is a horrible idea and had no place in ESO. BOP breeds elitism, now there is a part of the community that does not have access to stuff that other do and they become the outcasts.

Next to come is gear that requires a specific CP rank, starting low, but eventually this becomes an issue. In other games this stuff is generally seen as "ievel" people get bumped from groups for not having gear that some 10 year old with the power to kick deems "good enough" or "right for the dungeon"

2) Proportional Dominance of Casual Players

About the same as all games, 90% casual.

Its interesting that the forum is around 2% the total population, yet is used to form public opinion and thus a very vocal minority can change a good game into a bad game just by shouting loudly (happy casuals dont read forums, jaded "Eliteist do"

3) Singleplayer MMO?

THe game does seem such because it is so easy now, you can complete almsot all the main story line solo, in fact many of the dungeons along the way ARE solo.

BUT

PvP is extremely social, I have stuck with ESO despite the terrible performance and the impending *** storm that is the VR to CP change because of the social side of ESO.

Its good, very good, only matched (imho) by some of the early MMORPGs.


NB: Ive around 25 years experiance in online multiplayer games


.

Sausage

ESO isnt typical imho, ESO definitely leans forward Casuality way more than most games does, Enlightment Bank, CP-system etc. I think its just good, it start to pay off after 1-2 year or so, maybe even now already, imagine if this was typical MMORPG, where only the top 1% of the players survives.

Heindrich

Enemy-of-Coldharbour wrote: »

Heindrich wrote: »

I suppose this point is related to 1)... but are all MMOs basically 80% casual, 19% competent and 1% elite?

What makes you think casual players are not competent?

@Enemy-of-Coldharbour
What should I have called them? 80% "bad players"?

When I say "casual players" I mean people who never get good enough to do endgame content like vet dungeons, trials and PvP properly. So yes by my definition casual players are incompetent at endgame. I just chose to not call them "bad" or "incompetent" because they may simply chosen to not care about endgame and group content, like me when I first started ESO, hence "casual".

Tors

Heindrich wrote: »

When I say "casual players" I mean people who never get good enough to do endgame content like vet dungeons, trials and PvP properly. So yes by my definition casual players are incompetent at endgame. I just chose to not call them "bad" or "incompetent" because they may simply chosen to not care about endgame and group content, like me when I first started ESO, hence "casual".

I missed that little gem in your post.

You go from a person making a well structured post to the being in the total dross of MMORPgs

People like you ruin these games for many other players. You own self importance makes you believe that drivel you just wrote and you see yourself as "the elite"

From my long experiance, "the elite" generally suck and were carried along by the hard work of others.

Remind me never to waste time reading any of your posts again

Heindrich

Tors wrote: »

Heindrich wrote: »

When I say "casual players" I mean people who never get good enough to do endgame content like vet dungeons, trials and PvP properly. So yes by my definition casual players are incompetent at endgame. I just chose to not call them "bad" or "incompetent" because they may simply chosen to not care about endgame and group content, like me when I first started ESO, hence "casual".

I missed that little gem in your post.

You go from a person making a well structured post to the being in the total dross of MMORPgs

People like you ruin these games for many other players. You own self importance makes you believe that drivel you just wrote and you see yourself as "the elite"

From my long experiance, "the elite" generally suck and were carried along by the hard work of others.

Remind me never to waste time reading any of your posts again

lol... nevermind. I'm not gonna bother.

Takes-No-Prisoner

Hiya,

I dabble with fighting games and am pretty complainant at understanding how they work. From my perspective-- learning to grow is what keeps me actively engaged. I need to be learning, I love having my brain active. Thinking about how I can change things with my characters keeps me engaged. Least for MMOs in general.

But I also said "Fighting games", well as one might suspect I like Marvel vs Capcom, Street Fighter, King of Fighters, Super Smash Brothers, Tekken and so on. I'm not amazing at these games, but they require you to think pretty dynamically if you hope to stand a chance fighting a real opponent. Point I'm getting at, that this is my cup of tea which stems from my other interests. But lets table flip this.

There is a certain class of folks who play MMOs to relax. To them they already have their eggs into other baskets in terms of learning how X,Y,Z works. To them learning the mechanics of their MMO of choice is probably not something they are natively interested in investing time into. I guess you can call them casual? But isn't the point of a game to be entertaining and relaxing yeah? If that's what they want out of their MMO of choice, who am I to judge them for their experience? I want my experience to be high-level hard core mode in PVP with only myself to rely on. Which is why I never tend to bother anyone while I play. I tend to play PVP by myself so I can improve myself and enjoy my version of a MMO experience.

To each his own.

Khaos_Bane

I have played the original Everquest and WoW. ESO is VERY different, some good ways some bad.

The good ..
1. Very rich lore and good main queslines
2. Much better gameplay
3. Fantastic graphics and gorgeous world
4. Fantastic world content for solo PvE
5. Terrible social interaction and systems that support social interaction

The Bad ...
1. I miss difficult high end PvE content
2. ESO is too easy in solo PvE
3. I miss large group raid content.
4. More difficult content required more grouping and social interaction


Overall it's the best MMO I have played with the original everquest a close second and WoW FAR behind.

Sallington

Khaos_Bane wrote: »

I have played the original Everquest and WoW. ESO is VERY different, some good ways some bad.

The good ..
1. Very rich lore and good main queslines
2. Much better gameplay
3. Fantastic graphics and gorgeous world
4. Fantastic world content for solo PvE
5. Terrible social interaction and systems that support social interaction

The Bad ...
1. I miss difficult high end PvE content
2. ESO is too easy in solo PvE
3. I miss large group raid content.
4. More difficult content required more grouping and social interaction


Overall it's the best MMO I have played with the original everquest a close second and WoW FAR behind.

So basically, it's great at what make a good Solo PvE game, and terrible at what makes an MMo an MMO.

I agree.

Xellos77

1) It most certainly (to me) feels like a single player RPG moreso than an MMO.
2) "Endgame" is a myth.
3) PvP needs much tweaking and expansion.
4) Dungeons need to become viable.
5) RNG needs to take a hike. And get lost in the woods. Then get mauled by a bear and left to rot.
6) Players do come and go. The reason you may see a lot of activity in low-level areas can easily be demonstrated by my own ESO career path. I've got 6 characters. All VRs. Ranging from V16 down to V1. Which did I play the least? My V16. There's simply not much to do "at the top". Dungeons are only good for dailies. Orsinium was "alright". Craglorn rewards are minimal in return for effort involved.. and with gold being so easy to come by, you may as well just skip the nonsense and just buy nirnhoned gear to research. PvP "alright" in small doses, but offers no real variation. What does this all mean? It means people get bored and want to try something new. Ergo, more people in lowbie zones.
7) As far as an MMO is concerned, I rate it in terms of elements needed to remain viable: Endgame, PvP, dungeons, rewards vs. work, community, and options for a player (ie-only 4 classes). In all of these, I rate below average.

Of course, these are only my own opinions. I rabidly played ESO since PS4 launch (so, what, six months?) and pretty much quit at this point. There's just nothing to do. Meanwhile, games like WoW kept me vested for years.

As an ES enthusiast, I love the game. I still may even play from time to time. But not like I once did. Instead of fiddling with CS cosmetic crap ZOS needs to take a page from extremely successful (and long lived) MMOs (like WoW) and fix my points in number 6 above.

My two cents, and only opinion.

NewBlacksmurf

This is not a typical MMO.
I also would suggest Diablo 3 is not an MMO based on the ideas that an MMO are games where massive amounts of players are localized on a server or servers. Diablo 3 tends to be a P2P based game where on PC, text chat is the only MMO like behavior driven by Bnet.

Now the three points you list....these seem to be intentional based on how ZOS outlines their development.
If you have time. Click the press buzz and read their 2012 article. The first one on this site.

dodgehopper_ESO

I think its typical. I find myself dipping between 'elite' and 'casual' on a game a lot of times, or even find myself in a competent happy medium. Real life has a way of yanking you away from a game, particularly if you're not a child. This is why I find the gear dependence and tiers in a lot of games repugnant. I think game designers need to be really careful about creating too many gear tiers. This isn't because the players are necessarily bad or uninterested, but because they have real lives. People get married, they lose jobs, they change jobs, they have children, they have deaths in the family, they have final projects to complete or dissertations, they have businesses to start or close down. The list goes on and on but the point remains that MMO's customer base includes productive human beings who shouldn't be required to spend 20-40 hours a week every week to be able to enjoy the game.

My big issue/fear with gear tiers is that certain tiers will eventually become unpopular when most of the raiding player base has moved on to the next big thing. I have a feeling ESO is trying to be mindful of that to some degree. If you look at me personally right now I definitely fall in the casual range because I simply can't play the game enough right now to keep up. As a player I much prefer to pvp than do Undaunted related activities. My personal view with anything-undaunted is that once I've beaten/mastered something I'm done with it. Pvp isn't like that. In pvp there is always something to learn, something to accomplish, someone to help. I enjoy it more. That's how I feel with most MMO's. In a way I'm happy with being casual right now because I would probably be a lot more frustrated with ESO's current balance and lag if I weren't.

Ultimately, I think player skill should be the most important thing. I'm not fond of gear in general. I know a lot of friends disagree with this matter, and a lot of you will as well. That's fine we can't all be the same. I come from games like Halo, Counterstrike, Battlefront, etc. I like the structure of balance because it means winning is all about player skill. I don't like systems that require you to spend 100's of hours to farm and get lucky to get the helmet you want, or the ring you want. Those are unnecessary time sinks that force you often to play things you didn't want to play that much. That is where 'Play how you want' should really matter most. What I'm saying is the accomplishment should be a lot more than the gear that drops. SWG was awesome in this manner because people earned rewards based upon what they enjoyed doing, but it required a cooperative spirit. I think MMO's need more of the OG-SWG spirit these days.

Spacemonkey

I'd say:

1) Yes
2) Yes
3) No

I always felt ESO suffers on the social aspect. To me that is in huge part because of a lack of chat channels (making the main chat cluttered with spam from guilds, sellers, buyers and people looking for groups)

& The crappy way guilds work. (being allowed to be in 5 different guilds makes it less enticing to really commit to your guild - the main way of joining one being by giving in to annoying recruiting spammers etc...)

But thats just me

dodgehopper_ESO

Spacemonkey wrote: »

I'd say:

1) Yes
2) Yes
3) No

I always felt ESO suffers on the social aspect. To me that is in huge part because of a lack of chat channels (making the main chat cluttered with spam from guilds, sellers, buyers and people looking for groups)

& The crappy way guilds work. (being allowed to be in 5 different guilds makes it less enticing to really commit to your guild - the main way of joining one being by giving in to annoying recruiting spammers etc...)

But thats just me

One area where ESO teaming mechanics has always been flawed is how it deals with players wanting to team of disparate levels. There really needs to be a system that scales us, that way a new player can be joined by his veteran friend. I literally have all vets and one lvl 41 that I kept at low level for newbie pvp. Once that character is veteran I am mostly a liability to help new players out (apart from crafting). What a shame that is. This game has needed Sidekicking/Mentoring type systems for 2 years. I'm hopeful that the way Wrothgar was developed, and the way cyrodiil scales might be applied to pre-vet (Bronze), Silver, and Gold areas. Finally, my V16 might actually play along with a friend in Auridon and both of us could actually earn something useful. As it stands both of us are harmed by the arrangement. This is probably one of the biggest flaws in social interaction with ESO. To be fair, SWTOR I would say has similar problems because of its story driven content and levelling systems, although SWTOR did a fair bit to shore up those flaws in the past few years. I have a feeling the ZoS guys are doing the same thing, which is why I mentioned Wrothgar.

TheBull

1. ESO has a much higher skill cap than most mmorpgs. There is a huge difference between the hardcore best and the new or casual. At the top the game is very balanced it's just the skill cap for some classes is higher than others which leads to casual/new players screaming OP!!3#

2. I think the break down is about the same for most mmorpgs today. There are smaller titles with more of a hardcore base, but the larger AAAs seem to be pretty casual in general with some hardcore elements.

3.Again it's about the same for today's mmorpgs. That being said is ESOs group finder isn't the best, which makes it harder to find pve groups. On the pvp side of things ESO is more group based than most mmorpgs. There's plenty for skilled solo/duo/trio players, but most run in larger groups.

Dawnblade

New to ESO - but played many many MMOs and other online games...

1. All games tend to have a large gap between those that play 'casually' (as in players who pick class, abilities and gear as much for looks, feel, or RP) and those that tend 'elite' (as in those that min / max class, abilities, and gear).
   
2. Casual players when taken more broadly to include those that don't spend as much time and / or are not AS concerned with min / maxing every little aspect tend to make up the majority in every game.
   
3. Social interaction has declined over time in general as the overall population of players online has grown, though as far as things like grouping tools, ESO's seems mediocre at best.
   

Asherons_Call

No it's actually a bit of a departure from traditional MMOs. Check out final fantasy 14 for a pure MMORPG