Five User Experiences That Are Still Fundamentally Broken in ESO - An Open Letter

spoqster

TL;DR - The open world, "Play as You Like", inventory, crafting and economy expierences are still bad - after two years.


Dear @ZOS_MattFiror,

I am returning to the game after a six months hiatus, so I have a somewhat fresh perspective on the game. I love the DLCs and the corresponding updates have been great! But a few aspects of the game are still substantially broken. Let's take a look.

1. Open World & Social

• One of the great things about a game like Skyrim is that you are free to choose which content you want to play when. ESO doesn't offer a true open-world experience.
• Yes, technically you can access large parts of the world rather freely, but in reality many parts are locked away from the user. There are content walls (Cadwell's Silver and Gold), group walls (Craglorn), level walls (veteran dungeons and trials) to name a few.
• The worst case of locking players out, however, is what I like to call the "power wall". In the questing part of the game if the quest's level is too high or too low, you either can't do it or you're not going to have fun doing it.
• Let's look at the latter case, namely over-leveling: If you're questing at level 10 and you go into PvP or do a few dungeon runs and level up to lvl 13 in the process, the quests will still be at level 10, and thus be trivially easy for a level 13 character. Just by deciding to play "something else" for a few days, a player can de-facto lock himself out from content he would otherwise love to play at some other time. And this effect stacks on top of the effect that the questing part of the game is already so trivially easy, that you'll always want to play quests that are a few levels above your level to be able to enjoy it.
• In addition, the significant power increase with leveling up makes it difficult to play with your friends unless you are roughly at the same level as them.
• For a true open world experience, I'd expect to be able to spend 5 levels questing and then 5 levels in PvP and still come back to challenging questing content, without having to skip content. I'd expect to be able to set the difficulty so that I can enjoy the questing part of the game (it's a large chunk after all) at any skill level, and I'd expect to be able to play with my friends no matter how much more time they or I have spent in the game.

2. Play as you like

• While technically possible, magicka/stamina hybrids are realistically not viable. In reality, you will sacrifice a lot of power and effectively lock yourself out of endgame content if you decide to run around with a two-handed sword and a destruction staff.
• A 10% increase in stamina or magicka not only means you have a larger pool, but since damage scales off of these numbers, you'll have significantly higher damage values as well.
• A true "play as you like" experience would allow the player to freely mix weapon and class abilities. The power of a build should depend on how well these abilities synergise with each other and with the sets he is wearing, and how well these choices allow him to manage his resources in combat. Power should not be a function of "how high can I stack stamina and weapon power on one character". I realize this cannot be changed anytime soon, but I still wanted to mention it.

3. Inventory & Loot

• Inventory management in ESO is simply a disaster. Without proper addons, all armor pieces, for example, are stuffed into one big bin that you can't properly sort. Try finding something in between 80 armor items. (On consoles it is a nightmare.)
• The worst part is that you can get all these cool set items from endgame content, but there is no built-in tool to systematically organize and present these items to the player. (I am not even discussing all the useless green and blue junk you find as loot all the time, which clogs up your inventory.)
• Let's look at an example: A well skilled casual player will do a few veteran dungeon runs and a trial run in a week and maybe get some rewards from playing PvP. The player might also farm specific dungeons once in a while. It's a realistic scenario that a player will collect 40-50 set pieces (the monster pieces alone are 20 in total), without getting a single full set. And since most items are not tradable but Bind on Pickup, the player can do nothing but keep them for later (or deconstruct them). So where does he keep all this stuff? Is he supposed to just dump it all into the bank which is filled with crafting mats? If he keeps it on a character, other characters will not have access to it, if he keeps it on alts, then it becomes a huge pain to keep track of where all the items are.
• A good user experience would consist of taking all that tedious work of micro managing all these item sets AWAY from the user.
• It will not be enough to simply add a separate inventory for crafting materials. One way to solve this problem properly would be to add a "Gear Set Collection UI" to the game, which will neatly list all existing gear sets in the game and highlight the ones that you have found/earned, while greying out all others. Gear should be available to all characters simultaneously, so that you don't have to move items to your bank and back (and you have to remember where you put it), and to allow two characters to wear the same pieces. The Gear Set UI could also list where to find the missing pieces. That way players could plan their build before they get all the pieces and then farm specific dungeons to acquire missing pieces in their collection. Look at a game like Hearthstone and how they have designed their collection manager and their dust mechanic. They offer a much better user experience.

4. Crafting

• Crafting is a pain. I am not arguing that crafting should be trivial or that the crafting skills should be acquired easily. Crafting just doesn't feel smooth enough.
• Let's look at a real life example: You've leveled your veteran character from v1 to v5 and decide to make new gear for the toon. As most players use alts for crafting, you first have to note down all the relevant information (which style and weight on which body part) then you have to log in to your crafting characters, go to multiple crafting locations, craft all the items and upgrade them. All the while you have to be really careful to not mess anything up and not to forget any materials, otherwise you have to travel back and forth again. Then you have to enchant all the items and put them in your bank (all at different locations), before you can finally log back to your target character and equip the items. We're looking at a process that will likely take over 2 hours (!) just for upgrading your gear - no planning, no thinking, no skill involved - just 2 hours of tedious work.
• Another tiresome pain is that because inventory management is such a disaster, it's really tedious to dismantle items. Let's say you have a character that carries around 80 set items you want to keep and now you want to go dismantle 30 items with this character. That task consists of finding these 30 items within the total of 110 items, without accidentally deconstructing you precious monster helmets. Another really annoying user experience that exists simply because in ESO you can't put items into a bin called "I want to keep this, don't show it in the deconstruction interface".
• A good user experience would, again, take all the tediousness away from the user. It would be great if crafting were account bound and you could upgrade items to a higher level (at the same cost of creating a new item). If crafting worked like that you could simply go to crafting station and upgrade your gear on the character that is wearing it without wasting 2 hours of your life. It would still cost the same, you would still have to find all the crafting stations at least once, research all the traits, level up the skill lines, etc.

5. Economy

• The economy is a mess. Let's face it, without the right addons the guild stores are completely unusable. Their interface is terrible (search settings are not even remembered when walking from one trader to another) and you'd have to go to every single trader in Tamriel to be sure that you can't find that one rare item you're looking for. Now, with more and more items being Bind on Pickup, the economy is even less important than before, because it doesn't assist you in completing your set collection.
• I'm not calling for an auction house here (there are a few creative ways to solve this problem while keeping ZOS's vision of a segmented economy intact).
• A good user experience would allow the player to leverage the economy to his needs. It would allow him to sell anything easily that he doesn't need at the moment (and then buy it back when he does need it), and allow him to complete his collection of set items.
• If ESO were to give players a true open world feeling, there would be no Bind on Pickup and no Bind on Equip. Everything would be freely tradable (and the "right to wear" items would be tied to achievements) and the economy would be much more conveniently accessibly. Of course this would be more difficult to balance, but not impossible. A Bind on Pickup mechanic is simply the equivalent of the developers saying "I forfeit".

Final Thoughts
This is just a brief overview of my arguments. I could go into much more detail, but I wanted to keep this as brief as possible.
I'd like to finish with highlighting a bad user experience that ties many of the above mentioned issues together:
Playing, collecting items and leveling up don't give players a "yay" feeling, as they should. Instead, when you level up, that brief feeling of "yay" is quickly smothered when you remember that leveling up also means that

• Oh no, I have to upgrade my gear now!
• Oh no, now there are even more quests that are too easy to play!
• Oh no, now I've got all this useless stuff in my inventory that I have to deal with (or I found useful stuff that I can't use, but I don't know where to store it)!
• Oh no, if I level up more, will I still be able to play with my friends?

Good user experience is about removing points of frustration. And despite the great content updates and balancing improvements, ESO still feels very frustrating, even after almost two years.

Thanks for reading!

Sincerley, @spoqster


EDIT: Added TL;DR

Gidorick

Well said @spoqster ... Unfortunately I don't think there is ANYTHING on their priority list that would address any of these issues. So... :shrug:

Zerok

spoqster wrote: »

[*] Let's look at a real life example: You've leveled your veteran character from v1 to v5 and decide to make new gear for the toon. As most players use alts for crafting, you first have to note down all the relevant information (which style and weight on which body part) then you have to log in to your crafting characters, go to multiple crafting locations, craft all the items and upgrade them. All the while you have to be really careful to not mess anything up and not to forget any materials, otherwise you have to travel back and forth again. Then you have to enchant all the items and put them in your bank (all at different locations), before you can finally log back to your target character and equip the items. We're looking at a process that will likely take over 2 hours (!) just for upgrading your gear - no planning, no thinking, no skill involved - just 2 hours of tedious work.

Really? You must be doing something wrong. Crafting new gear takes me 30 minutes at most.

spoqster

Gidorick wrote: »

Well said @spoqster ... Unfortunately I don't think there is ANYTHING on their priority list that would address any of these issues. So... :shrug:

Well, the way they applied player scaling to Wrothgar, Cyrodiil and the PvE dungeons suggests that they have realized that ESO's world is not truly open, and that they are actively working on fixing that. Then, in The Year Ahead Matt wrote "... and will be working on much more in 2016, including a major change in how world zones treat player character levels". It's rather vague, but it does give me hope that they might add player scaling to the questing zones as well.

There is so much they could do to make the base game more appealing, just in terms of mechanics without having to change anything about the world itself:

• Scale players to the zones, so that we're not constantly over-leveled.
• Introduce a difficulty setting that allows a player to downscale his character in PvE in exchange for higher item drop rates.
• Scale the re-spawn rate for overworld mobs with player density in the area.

Sure, the magicka/stamina balance is not easily fixed. They've decided on a road that took them away from "Play as you like", but now they have to stick with it for the time being.


As to inventory management, I am getting the vibe that they are working on making things better. They're taking the darn trophies out of the inventory and are adding a mobile banker with the Thieves Guild, and they're thinking about putting the crafting mats into a separate inventory. It's just that they are taking baby steps, and I am trying to help them think outside the box a little.

A seperate UI for gear sets would offer a great user experience, because it would untangle the mess there is in the vanilla inventory, help players learn where to find items (and thus create additional motivation for playing the content) and it would add value to bad armor sets, because players will want to collect them. This collection mechanic has proven to be very successful in collectible card games, so much, that EA has adpoted that mechanic for Fifa's Ultimate Team mode (with grand success) - and Fifa's player base is arguably different than that of a CCG. So there are strong signs that a collection mechanic is appealing to a wide audience.

They could do it in a very lore friendly way, too, by making the character call a dremora butler who will be carrying all the armor pieces found by that account, neatly stucked away in a pocket of oblivion and organized by set. The player can then pick pieces to wear. Not the actual pieces, but representations of the pieces, so that the pieces stay available for his other characers. The same UI could also allow the player to save 3 pre-made outfits. I mean they can't really expect anyone to run a vet dungeon, a trial and a pvp raid with the same gear on, right? So if having specific outfits is an integral part of the game, there should be a UI for that.

munkt0r

I'd like to state I don't think there is anything "wrong" with your views/opinions. I think you did a great job of identifying and explaining your thoughts without sounding as if you were complaining or recklessly belittling.

But I will say, from my perspective, a lot of your issues stem from a min/max mentality.

It doesn't seem like some of the issues you have stem from a direct wish to just enjoy and have fun, but moreso because you recognize what it takes to be upper tier.

Again, you're not wrong for feeling that way - but I wanted to point out that I think some of your approaches require the caveat "If you want to be the best // if you want to gain the maximum benefits"

Tandor

While I don't like the present trading system and don't use it, I don't personally have any problems with the remaining issues listed, and that's without using any addons.

Inarre

Open world will always be somewhat restricted due to the alliances and the general story line, but with the recent changes to cadwells quest line being released in theives guild update i think they are putting more effort into the open world feel of the game.

I agree with your point about storage and decomposing needed items. It is great but also sad we count on our player base to provide needed adjustments to the game ui. That said not only are addons allowed (which i think allows the player base a lot of freedom to better their experience) but i have heard rumors to updates to the storage issue in the upcoming patches as well. Probably wont fix everything but again i think this issue is acknowledged and being addressed.

Your other opinions, while valid, i dont really share so i cant comment

Reedx

Good user experience is about removing points of frustration. And despite the great content updates and balancing improvements, ESO still feels very frustrating, even after almost two years.

Thanks for reading!

Sincerley, @spoqster


EDIT: Added TL;DR[/quote]

Well said sir. well said

idk

I did not have to read the entire wall of words to realize the OP has a pipe dream that ESO would become a completely different game from the foundation up within the last 2 months.

Not every MMO needs to be the same and for the most part ESO is clearly a good game but not the game for you. Also for the most part, your points you made, that I read, have no logical place in discussing this game since you already knew what was here initially.

Everyone should move on. I think the OP just wanted to complain or feel as though he is enlightening us.

spoqster

munkt0r wrote: »

I'd like to state I don't think there is anything "wrong" with your views/opinions. I think you did a great job of identifying and explaining your thoughts without sounding as if you were complaining or recklessly belittling.

But I will say, from my perspective, a lot of your issues stem from a min/max mentality.

It doesn't seem like some of the issues you have stem from a direct wish to just enjoy and have fun, but moreso because you recognize what it takes to be upper tier.

Again, you're not wrong for feeling that way - but I wanted to point out that I think some of your approaches require the caveat "If you want to be the best // if you want to gain the maximum benefits"

It's interesting, @munkt0r, to see that you read this into my post. The truth is however, that I am not a huge fan of the min/maxing principle. I think it should be ONE way of creating a powerful character, not the ONLY way.

I have beaten pretty much every content in the game, yes, but I wouldn't call myself a top-tier player. In fact most of my views come from the perspective of a casual or new player:

• Open World - I am looking back at my experience on my first playthrough (and others' ofc). I didn't feel free in my way to play the game. I wanted to do the quests that were on my level, and so I felt constantly geared on a specific path. I was worried about over-leveling, so the game wouldn't become even more easy, so I was trying my best to gain as little xp as possible. Then I wanted to go into Craglorn, and I was repeatedly blocked out due to the group wall (where you need exactly 4 players to advance a quest step). Then, back before they introduced dungeon scaling, it was really hard to find a group for the vet dungeons until you hit v12. Nobody wanted to play with you. And then suddenly that world opened up when I hit max level. I could list more examples, but the gist is that I was very frustrated because there was all this great content, and I couldn't experience it because I was either locked out or the content was too easy. They've done such a fantastic job on the combat, the quests, the art, the atmosphere - it's just that the game mechanics around all that constantly put stones in your way. Now I don't mind so much when I am on my max level character because I don't go back into these zones. But once I start to bring up a new character, the pain starts again. The problems even extend to the new DLCs like Wrothgar. Playing through it on my v16 is just too easy. It's not fun. But they already implemented the scaling mechanic (that was the hard part), why not allow players to scale their v16s down to v10 or v5 while in Wrothgar? That would enable players with powerful characters enjoy all of Wrothgar and not only Maelstrom Arena.
• Play as you like - Here I actually for the existence of hybrid builds.
• Inventory & Loot - I fully understand why they've chose to implement the inventory in this simplistic form. You start the game, you find loot, you find it in your inventory. Simple. If the inventory had sub tabs and other quality of life improvments new players would get lost quickly. Alright. But at what cost? As soon as you find 20 items or 30, you're already searching around. And it's much worse on consoles. And now fast forward to a player who has played for more than a year, has one main, multiple crafting alts, has stacks of all relevant crafting materials and over 100 item set pieces he stores in the bank and on mule characters. You can barely handle that on the PC with the addons, now think about consoles. I had my account copied to consoles. When I logged into my main and tried to craft something, or wanted to find an item and didn't remember where it was bc I hadn't played in a few weeks, the experience was a disaster. Of course I am not asking them to ruin the experience for new players by making the system more complex, but there are creatives ways to amend the current inventory system (I can think of a couple) and sell that as an upgrade to experienced players in the crown store.
• Crafting - Here I can see that the problem I describe appears to be one mainly for higher level characters, but actually it's a fundamental problem. Having to log to another character and back into your main to do something is a bad user experience. It's fundamentally bad because it takes a long time, and because it doesn't feel like your doing what you're supposed to do. Having to relog comes from using alts, and you have to use alts because of the way they implemented the crafting system. With the extremely long research times and huge amounts of IP you need to level enchanting it is entirely unrealistic that anyone would ever max out the same crafting skills on multiple characters (except for alchemy and possibly cooking). So you basically have to use an alt. Now if I look at this system from a developer's perspective it becomes immediately obvious that this system is bad, simply because users have to endure a bad experience (relogging multiple times) to do something the game wants them to do. Another side of the coin is that by using alts to achieve your crafting needs crafting effectively becomes a system that works on the account level, rather than the character level - that's because all the characters in your account have to work together to craft a set. It feels unnatural to have this account level mechanic tucked away inside the character's skill trees. The natural solution would be to move the crafting skills to the account level, just like they've done with the Champion System. Everyone loves that you can earn CP with all of your vet characters, right?
• Economy - Here I really don't see how my criticism only applies to top tier players. Simple example: You're level 10 and you find your first set item. You level up to level 13 and find another set item, from another set. You realize that these items are so rare that you have to buy the rest of the items otherwise you're going to outlevel the ones you already have before you'll get a full set. Good. Now where do you go? Finding the right items for your level at the best price means you'll have to check at least 15 guild traders with this terrible UI and ask in multiple zone chats. No Thank you. Again: There is great content (the sets) and you can't get to it because the mechanics around it are so terrible. Another bad user experience is understanding how the overworld traders (not the guild traders) work. You walk up to first and think "cool, I can buy swords here" and then you quickly realize that they're just selling overpriced junk and work as a money sink. Again: Great content (all these merchants have voice overs and are well-designed) but unusable because of the mechanics associated with it. Now imagine we could solve both problems with one stone: Use these already existing npcs and let them act as commission-based vendors for players (much like the guild store works), and A) only for the things they're already selling and only in the zones level range. So an armorer would only re-sell armor, a mystic would only re-sell the things a mystic already sells, etc. An armorer in Wayrest would then only sell lvl 15-25 armor (if you're DC). Why is this a good solution? A) It makes it much easier for players to find what they need, while keeping them in the game when buying (not sending them to an abstract auction house), and it integrates the existing npcs into the game which is better for immersion.

Anyway, this turned out to be longer than I originally wanted. I'll stop here. I hope I've made my point, that I am not arguing from the perspective of a top tier player, but rather from the perspective of the casual player.

KaleidoscopeEyz

This kills me and I feel like it should not be a difficult fix but I'm not a programmer.

•Another tiresome pain is that because inventory management is such a disaster, it's really tedious to dismantle items. Let's say you have a character that carries around 80 set items you want to keep and now you want to go dismantle 30 items with this character. That task consists of finding these 30 items within the total of 110 items, without accidentally deconstructing you precious monster helmets. Another really annoying user experience that exists simply because in ESO you can't put items into a bin called "I want to keep this, don't show it in the deconstruction interface".

eventide03b14a_ESO

spoqster wrote: »

TL;DR - The open world, "Play as You Like", inventory, crafting and economy expierences are still bad - after two years.


Dear @ZOS_MattFiror,

I am returning to the game after a six months hiatus, so I have a somewhat fresh perspective on the game. I love the DLCs and the corresponding updates have been great! But a few aspects of the game are still substantially broken. Let's take a look.

1. Open World & Social

• One of the great things about a game like Skyrim is that you are free to choose which content you want to play when. ESO doesn't offer a true open-world experience.
• Yes, technically you can access large parts of the world rather freely, but in reality many parts are locked away from the user. There are content walls (Cadwell's Silver and Gold), group walls (Craglorn), level walls (veteran dungeons and trials) to name a few.
• The worst case of locking players out, however, is what I like to call the "power wall". In the questing part of the game if the quest's level is too high or too low, you either can't do it or you're not going to have fun doing it.
• Let's look at the latter case, namely over-leveling: If you're questing at level 10 and you go into PvP or do a few dungeon runs and level up to lvl 13 in the process, the quests will still be at level 10, and thus be trivially easy for a level 13 character. Just by deciding to play "something else" for a few days, a player can de-facto lock himself out from content he would otherwise love to play at some other time. And this effect stacks on top of the effect that the questing part of the game is already so trivially easy, that you'll always want to play quests that are a few levels above your level to be able to enjoy it.
• In addition, the significant power increase with leveling up makes it difficult to play with your friends unless you are roughly at the same level as them.
• For a true open world experience, I'd expect to be able to spend 5 levels questing and then 5 levels in PvP and still come back to challenging questing content, without having to skip content. I'd expect to be able to set the difficulty so that I can enjoy the questing part of the game (it's a large chunk after all) at any skill level, and I'd expect to be able to play with my friends no matter how much more time they or I have spent in the game.

2. Play as you like

• While technically possible, magicka/stamina hybrids are realistically not viable. In reality, you will sacrifice a lot of power and effectively lock yourself out of endgame content if you decide to run around with a two-handed sword and a destruction staff.
• A 10% increase in stamina or magicka not only means you have a larger pool, but since damage scales off of these numbers, you'll have significantly higher damage values as well.
• A true "play as you like" experience would allow the player to freely mix weapon and class abilities. The power of a build should depend on how well these abilities synergise with each other and with the sets he is wearing, and how well these choices allow him to manage his resources in combat. Power should not be a function of "how high can I stack stamina and weapon power on one character". I realize this cannot be changed anytime soon, but I still wanted to mention it.

3. Inventory & Loot

• Inventory management in ESO is simply a disaster. Without proper addons, all armor pieces, for example, are stuffed into one big bin that you can't properly sort. Try finding something in between 80 armor items. (On consoles it is a nightmare.)
• The worst part is that you can get all these cool set items from endgame content, but there is no built-in tool to systematically organize and present these items to the player. (I am not even discussing all the useless green and blue junk you find as loot all the time, which clogs up your inventory.)
• Let's look at an example: A well skilled casual player will do a few veteran dungeon runs and a trial run in a week and maybe get some rewards from playing PvP. The player might also farm specific dungeons once in a while. It's a realistic scenario that a player will collect 40-50 set pieces (the monster pieces alone are 20 in total), without getting a single full set. And since most items are not tradable but Bind on Pickup, the player can do nothing but keep them for later (or deconstruct them). So where does he keep all this stuff? Is he supposed to just dump it all into the bank which is filled with crafting mats? If he keeps it on a character, other characters will not have access to it, if he keeps it on alts, then it becomes a huge pain to keep track of where all the items are.
• A good user experience would consist of taking all that tedious work of micro managing all these item sets AWAY from the user.
• It will not be enough to simply add a separate inventory for crafting materials. One way to solve this problem properly would be to add a "Gear Set Collection UI" to the game, which will neatly list all existing gear sets in the game and highlight the ones that you have found/earned, while greying out all others. Gear should be available to all characters simultaneously, so that you don't have to move items to your bank and back (and you have to remember where you put it), and to allow two characters to wear the same pieces. The Gear Set UI could also list where to find the missing pieces. That way players could plan their build before they get all the pieces and then farm specific dungeons to acquire missing pieces in their collection. Look at a game like Hearthstone and how they have designed their collection manager and their dust mechanic. They offer a much better user experience.

4. Crafting

• Crafting is a pain. I am not arguing that crafting should be trivial or that the crafting skills should be acquired easily. Crafting just doesn't feel smooth enough.
• Let's look at a real life example: You've leveled your veteran character from v1 to v5 and decide to make new gear for the toon. As most players use alts for crafting, you first have to note down all the relevant information (which style and weight on which body part) then you have to log in to your crafting characters, go to multiple crafting locations, craft all the items and upgrade them. All the while you have to be really careful to not mess anything up and not to forget any materials, otherwise you have to travel back and forth again. Then you have to enchant all the items and put them in your bank (all at different locations), before you can finally log back to your target character and equip the items. We're looking at a process that will likely take over 2 hours (!) just for upgrading your gear - no planning, no thinking, no skill involved - just 2 hours of tedious work.
• Another tiresome pain is that because inventory management is such a disaster, it's really tedious to dismantle items. Let's say you have a character that carries around 80 set items you want to keep and now you want to go dismantle 30 items with this character. That task consists of finding these 30 items within the total of 110 items, without accidentally deconstructing you precious monster helmets. Another really annoying user experience that exists simply because in ESO you can't put items into a bin called "I want to keep this, don't show it in the deconstruction interface".
• A good user experience would, again, take all the tediousness away from the user. It would be great if crafting were account bound and you could upgrade items to a higher level (at the same cost of creating a new item). If crafting worked like that you could simply go to crafting station and upgrade your gear on the character that is wearing it without wasting 2 hours of your life. It would still cost the same, you would still have to find all the crafting stations at least once, research all the traits, level up the skill lines, etc.

5. Economy

• The economy is a mess. Let's face it, without the right addons the guild stores are completely unusable. Their interface is terrible (search settings are not even remembered when walking from one trader to another) and you'd have to go to every single trader in Tamriel to be sure that you can't find that one rare item you're looking for. Now, with more and more items being Bind on Pickup, the economy is even less important than before, because it doesn't assist you in completing your set collection.
• I'm not calling for an auction house here (there are a few creative ways to solve this problem while keeping ZOS's vision of a segmented economy intact).
• A good user experience would allow the player to leverage the economy to his needs. It would allow him to sell anything easily that he doesn't need at the moment (and then buy it back when he does need it), and allow him to complete his collection of set items.
• If ESO were to give players a true open world feeling, there would be no Bind on Pickup and no Bind on Equip. Everything would be freely tradable (and the "right to wear" items would be tied to achievements) and the economy would be much more conveniently accessibly. Of course this would be more difficult to balance, but not impossible. A Bind on Pickup mechanic is simply the equivalent of the developers saying "I forfeit".

Final Thoughts
This is just a brief overview of my arguments. I could go into much more detail, but I wanted to keep this as brief as possible.
I'd like to finish with highlighting a bad user experience that ties many of the above mentioned issues together:
Playing, collecting items and leveling up don't give players a "yay" feeling, as they should. Instead, when you level up, that brief feeling of "yay" is quickly smothered when you remember that leveling up also means that

• Oh no, I have to upgrade my gear now!
• Oh no, now there are even more quests that are too easy to play!
• Oh no, now I've got all this useless stuff in my inventory that I have to deal with (or I found useful stuff that I can't use, but I don't know where to store it)!
• Oh no, if I level up more, will I still be able to play with my friends?

Good user experience is about removing points of frustration. And despite the great content updates and balancing improvements, ESO still feels very frustrating, even after almost two years.

Thanks for reading!

Sincerley, @spoqster


EDIT: Added TL;DR

I agree 100%.

eventide03b14a_ESO

spoqster wrote: »

Gidorick wrote: »

Well said @spoqster ... Unfortunately I don't think there is ANYTHING on their priority list that would address any of these issues. So... :shrug:

Well, the way they applied player scaling to Wrothgar, Cyrodiil and the PvE dungeons suggests that they have realized that ESO's world is not truly open, and that they are actively working on fixing that. Then, in The Year Ahead Matt wrote "... and will be working on much more in 2016, including a major change in how world zones treat player character levels". It's rather vague, but it does give me hope that they might add player scaling to the questing zones as well.

There is so much they could do to make the base game more appealing, just in terms of mechanics without having to change anything about the world itself:

• Scale players to the zones, so that we're not constantly over-leveled.
• Introduce a difficulty setting that allows a player to downscale his character in PvE in exchange for higher item drop rates.
• Scale the re-spawn rate for overworld mobs with player density in the area.

Sure, the magicka/stamina balance is not easily fixed. They've decided on a road that took them away from "Play as you like", but now they have to stick with it for the time being.


As to inventory management, I am getting the vibe that they are working on making things better. They're taking the darn trophies out of the inventory and are adding a mobile banker with the Thieves Guild, and they're thinking about putting the crafting mats into a separate inventory. It's just that they are taking baby steps, and I am trying to help them think outside the box a little.

A seperate UI for gear sets would offer a great user experience, because it would untangle the mess there is in the vanilla inventory, help players learn where to find items (and thus create additional motivation for playing the content) and it would add value to bad armor sets, because players will want to collect them. This collection mechanic has proven to be very successful in collectible card games, so much, that EA has adpoted that mechanic for Fifa's Ultimate Team mode (with grand success) - and Fifa's player base is arguably different than that of a CCG. So there are strong signs that a collection mechanic is appealing to a wide audience.

They could do it in a very lore friendly way, too, by making the character call a dremora butler who will be carrying all the armor pieces found by that account, neatly stucked away in a pocket of oblivion and organized by set. The player can then pick pieces to wear. Not the actual pieces, but representations of the pieces, so that the pieces stay available for his other characers. The same UI could also allow the player to save 3 pre-made outfits. I mean they can't really expect anyone to run a vet dungeon, a trial and a pvp raid with the same gear on, right? So if having specific outfits is an integral part of the game, there should be a UI for that.

They should have had a sandbox and not a themepark from the beginning. I would include the fact that quest item rewards are all absolutely terrible. There is no point in doing any of the quest unless you just want the XP or the random skill point. Whoever designed the quest rewards should be fired.

Elsonso

While a way to organize sets would be nice, what ZOS needs are ways to put things into containers for each set. I do not agree that armor sets should be available to all characters simultaneously. These are not costumes, one character at a time.

No, crafting should not be account wide. It is working very well right now and does not need to change to the account level. I do exactly as you would like to change. I see this as multiple characters working together, not as something I am doing as the player. I don't want more things moved to the account level. It will make the game too easy and ultimately remove an aspect of game play that actually keeps me around and not bored.

I will agree that they need a better UI for guild stores. They should use Awesome Guild Store as the reference. Easy searching that is saved, plus very fine tuned search criteria. With that, the bulk of the problems with separated guild stores vanishes.

eventide03b14a_ESO

Giles.floydub17_ESO wrote: »

I did not have to read the entire wall of words to realize the OP has a pipe dream that ESO would become a completely different game from the foundation up within the last 2 months.

Not every MMO needs to be the same and for the most part ESO is clearly a good game but not the game for you. Also for the most part, your points you made, that I read, have no logical place in discussing this game since you already knew what was here initially.

Everyone should move on. I think the OP just wanted to complain or feel as though he is enlightening us.

The problem with ESO is that it's EXACTLY the same as every other MMO in terms of progression and where it differentiates are in tedious ways. You would know that if you actually read it, instead of just commenting on it. @spoqster made a very well thought out thread and it deserves attention.

Ch4mpTW

This should be a very interesting thread to watch. Hm...

wolfydog

I never really had a problem with inventory management in this game. The fact is presented in alphabetical list and then you can click on catagories ike weapons or armor to make it even easier. I find this a lot more manageable then the days of WoW, EQ2 or even GW2 where you just have stuff drop in your next available bag slot.

Crafting in this game is super easy. The fact you can use mats from you bank makes the whole system very convenient. There is no reason you should have to be traveling around. At most you should have to check your bank or a crafting stations before you teleport to the set crafting station you want to use. I run my bank as my warehouse because its not like you really it for anything else? I also keep all those dumb pulbic dungeon trophies in my bank, so next update when those go into collections Im going to get a lot of spots back which will be awesome. But anyways, currently, my bank is full of one stack of each crafting mat in the game, all wood, ignots cloth, leather, stack of each racial stone, all attributes stones, alch mats, tempers, etc. Basically everything but all the food mats and enchanting mats. I can go to a crafting station on any character on my account and if they have the skill I can make anything. The only thing crafting is really missing is a way to lock stuff out of being deconstructed. That would go a long away when your bags are full of loot and you wanna clear out quick. I am kinda lucky right now being the sole player in a 10 person guild, so I basically have an entire guild bank to myself too so I drop all my food and enchanting mats there. Once the trophies are out of the bank I'll prob keep mats for high level food in my own bank since Im not to concerned about making low level food for alts.

The guild traders definatly need some work. Having addons in PC can fix a lot of problems but its still not perfect. The default UI definatly needs some things like remembering you search specifications from trader to trader and just a box to type in words like every other MMO out there so you can just look for specific items. You do this with addons and it saves a ton of time, but it should be there by default. And my experience with addons like awesome guild store is they don't work perfectly.

Some things I disagree, the game is an MMO so there kinda has to be a leveling path. It would be great though if theres multiple 1-16 zones and then multiple 16-24 zones that you could do at time in your own faction. But at least with caldwells silver and gold being remove soon that might open the game up more to be like a single player ES where you can go around more freely.

Shogunami

OP, you have many valid points and I agree with most of it.

Some things are inherently "ESO" and can't really be changed, I would guess. But some things really need a reworking. Leveling alts is a chore because you have to grind the same things you've already done with your main or other alts. Hence, when Veteran Ranks are removed they really ought to make ALL ZONES scale like Wrothgar. Having to grind Cadwell's Silver and Gold is in itself really tedious, you just rush through quests to get skillpoints and then grind mobs for leveling.

Having said that, I don't really mind going through the other alliances' zones because the questing and fighting in this game is generally fun, but it's like you say that players are restricted to and from content certain zones.
Still, I wish I could start leveling an alt and not feel forced to do main quests just to get skill points, and while in veteran zones not feel forced to do only main quests because they are the only ones worth doing - mostly because of skill points, and the rest is grinded.

There's no real progression and once you have the gear you need or want there's not really anything else to do.
Good thing I really like the trading in this game even if I don't have any reason for earning gold since I already have everything I need and want


I have many gripes with this game, but it's still the only game I can be arsed to play nowadays, and it's still the most rewarding (for some inexplicable reason) MMO I've ever played.

Tandor

eventide03b14a_ESO wrote: »

Giles.floydub17_ESO wrote: »

I did not have to read the entire wall of words to realize the OP has a pipe dream that ESO would become a completely different game from the foundation up within the last 2 months.

Not every MMO needs to be the same and for the most part ESO is clearly a good game but not the game for you. Also for the most part, your points you made, that I read, have no logical place in discussing this game since you already knew what was here initially.

Everyone should move on. I think the OP just wanted to complain or feel as though he is enlightening us.

The problem with ESO is that it's EXACTLY the same as every other MMO in terms of progression and where it differentiates are in tedious ways. You would know that if you actually read it, instead of just commenting on it. @spoqster made a very well thought out thread and it deserves attention.

It is perfectly possible to read a post that has been very well thought out and disagree with it. The fact that some of us disagree with the original post doesn't mean we are only commenting on it without having read it.

spoqster

eventide03b14a_ESO wrote: »

spoqster wrote: »

Gidorick wrote: »

Well said @spoqster ... Unfortunately I don't think there is ANYTHING on their priority list that would address any of these issues. So... :shrug:

Well, the way they applied player scaling to Wrothgar, Cyrodiil and the PvE dungeons suggests that they have realized that ESO's world is not truly open, and that they are actively working on fixing that. Then, in The Year Ahead Matt wrote "... and will be working on much more in 2016, including a major change in how world zones treat player character levels". It's rather vague, but it does give me hope that they might add player scaling to the questing zones as well.

There is so much they could do to make the base game more appealing, just in terms of mechanics without having to change anything about the world itself:

• Scale players to the zones, so that we're not constantly over-leveled.
• Introduce a difficulty setting that allows a player to downscale his character in PvE in exchange for higher item drop rates.
• Scale the re-spawn rate for overworld mobs with player density in the area.

Sure, the magicka/stamina balance is not easily fixed. They've decided on a road that took them away from "Play as you like", but now they have to stick with it for the time being.


As to inventory management, I am getting the vibe that they are working on making things better. They're taking the darn trophies out of the inventory and are adding a mobile banker with the Thieves Guild, and they're thinking about putting the crafting mats into a separate inventory. It's just that they are taking baby steps, and I am trying to help them think outside the box a little.

A seperate UI for gear sets would offer a great user experience, because it would untangle the mess there is in the vanilla inventory, help players learn where to find items (and thus create additional motivation for playing the content) and it would add value to bad armor sets, because players will want to collect them. This collection mechanic has proven to be very successful in collectible card games, so much, that EA has adpoted that mechanic for Fifa's Ultimate Team mode (with grand success) - and Fifa's player base is arguably different than that of a CCG. So there are strong signs that a collection mechanic is appealing to a wide audience.

They could do it in a very lore friendly way, too, by making the character call a dremora butler who will be carrying all the armor pieces found by that account, neatly stucked away in a pocket of oblivion and organized by set. The player can then pick pieces to wear. Not the actual pieces, but representations of the pieces, so that the pieces stay available for his other characers. The same UI could also allow the player to save 3 pre-made outfits. I mean they can't really expect anyone to run a vet dungeon, a trial and a pvp raid with the same gear on, right? So if having specific outfits is an integral part of the game, there should be a UI for that.

They should have had a sandbox and not a themepark from the beginning. I would include the fact that quest item rewards are all absolutely terrible. There is no point in doing any of the quest unless you just want the XP or the random skill point. Whoever designed the quest rewards should be fired.

Yeah, they should award set pieces for certain quests, such as for the key quests in one zone. Just so you'd get a full set when you played through the main storyline of a zone.

spoqster

wolfydog wrote: »

Some things I disagree, the game is an MMO so there kinda has to be a leveling path.

This I don't understand @wolfydog. Why does there have to be a leveling path because this is an MMO? What does this logical implication consist of?

Yes, many MMOs in the past have used the leveling path mechanic, WoW in particular. This particular design got the nickname "themepark" mmo, because it's constructed in a way that you only have follow the markers to know what to do. And yes, WoW was very successful with this mechanic, but that was ten years ago.

The Elder Scrolls franchise is know for doing pioneering work in game design and for placing a strong focus on player freedom. That's why many players expected ESO to be a sandbox MMO and not a themepark MMO.

What is more, the quest design already offers players a path to follow, it works as a guide through the game. So with this "soft" path in place, there is no need for a "hard" leveling path that forces you down a path by locking quests to specific levels.

Elsonso

spoqster wrote: »

wolfydog wrote: »

Some things I disagree, the game is an MMO so there kinda has to be a leveling path.

This I don't understand @wolfydog. Why does there have to be a leveling path because this is an MMO? What does this logical implication consist of?

Yes, many MMOs in the past have used the leveling path mechanic, WoW in particular. This particular design got the nickname "themepark" mmo, because it's constructed in a way that you only have follow the markers to know what to do. And yes, WoW was very successful with this mechanic, but that was ten years ago.

The Elder Scrolls franchise is know for doing pioneering work in game design and for placing a strong focus on player freedom. That's why many players expected ESO to be a sandbox MMO and not a themepark MMO.

What is more, the quest design already offers players a path to follow, it works as a guide through the game. So with this "soft" path in place, there is no need for a "hard" leveling path that forces you down a path by locking quests to specific levels.

Actually, all of the Elder Scrolls games, at least since I started with Morrowind, follow a leveling path. As far as leveling 1-50, the main quest and the guild quests, it is so TES that you might as well have pulled it right out of a BGS title.

spoqster

lordrichter wrote: »

spoqster wrote: »

wolfydog wrote: »

Some things I disagree, the game is an MMO so there kinda has to be a leveling path.

This I don't understand @wolfydog. Why does there have to be a leveling path because this is an MMO? What does this logical implication consist of?

Yes, many MMOs in the past have used the leveling path mechanic, WoW in particular. This particular design got the nickname "themepark" mmo, because it's constructed in a way that you only have follow the markers to know what to do. And yes, WoW was very successful with this mechanic, but that was ten years ago.

The Elder Scrolls franchise is know for doing pioneering work in game design and for placing a strong focus on player freedom. That's why many players expected ESO to be a sandbox MMO and not a themepark MMO.

What is more, the quest design already offers players a path to follow, it works as a guide through the game. So with this "soft" path in place, there is no need for a "hard" leveling path that forces you down a path by locking quests to specific levels.

Actually, all of the Elder Scrolls games, at least since I started with Morrowind, follow a leveling path. As far as leveling 1-50, the main quest and the guild quests, it is so TES that you might as well have pulled it right out of a BGS title.

As I mentioned there are two aspects of the "leveling path" concept. One aspect is the quest design that gives you a path through all available paths. This is very Elder Scrolls, yes. They have it in ESO as well and that is good. The second aspect is the leveling aspect. In WoW there zones of different level ranges (just like in ESO), and this tells you go to this zone first, then to that one and so on.

I am arguing that the first aspect of providing a leveling path is "good" because while giving players orientation, it allows plenty of freedom to do side quests and spend their time with other activities, while the second one is "bad" as it locks the player to specific quests at certain level ranges.

It was one of the most enjoyable aspects of Skyrim, that you could choose to do a full guild quest line with no detriment to the main story. You could also do the complete main story first and then do the rest, because the game world simply scaled around your character. This feature was so central to the open world user experience, that ZOS shouldn't have said "well, this is an MMO, we can't do this here", but rather "wow, this freedom is so important, how can we get that into ESO - let's think outside the box".

Hand_Bacon

Shogunami wrote: »

I have many gripes with this game, but it's still the only game I can be arsed to play nowadays, and it's still the most rewarding (for some inexplicable reason) MMO I've ever played.

I feel the same way. The inexplicable part comes for me every time I read the forums. So many posts are telling me the game is broken and I shouldn't be having fun, but I am and I know others are. Maybe I've mellowed with age or seen so many bad things that I can appreciate the good.

I agree with the OP that some of those things can be a minor annoyance. However, for me to consider them fundament flaws that break the game, I'd have to make mountains out of molehills.


P.S. I did enjoy reading the OP as it was well written with some genuine thought put into it. This is always appreciated by the reader in me.

sekou_trayvond

Good points and well-spoken, OP.

My thoughts re: each point:

1. Yeah, not sure what to do here. Leveling the entire game world to max level would probably work best, but the two sets of "numbers" for normal and leveled may be confusing/off putting to new players. As for questing together, I learned early on that questing content was better done solo and leaving world bosses, dolmens, dungeons etc for grouping was way more enjoyable.

2. I think the game is pretty much play as you like-a lot more so than other MMOs, from my understanding. Much of this depends on what your attitude to point #1 is and, to a further extent, towards end game. If you just want to be about in an ES world, I think there is plenty of RP latitude in build choice. That all being said, I understand why there isn't a more open class system and that being the devs need a reasonable set of boundaries for the amount of power the player(S) are bringing to an encounter.

3. Loot and UI. No arguments here. Yep. It's abysmal.

4. I'm pretty fine with crafting as is. My only suggestion would be combined materials items- say 3 wood, 1 leather and 4 ore make, I dunno, a shield or whatnot.

5. Disagree on the economy. I enjoy the topsy turvy setup we have now. It feels more organic and player driven rather than a static, layered system placed upon us.