Game sorely needs a difficulty slider, it's just too damn boring to quest.

cosmic_niklas_93b16_ESO

Well, I've seen drinks/food etc to decrease the stats of the characters, but I thought I'd suggest something too, what about something like a mundus stone that'll just debuff you instead of buffing by using it? It could have options where you decrease stats by 20%, 40% etc but instead of it being on a timer it could be until you cleanse it by using another option on that same stone or having a different one.

Selstad

Zakor wrote: »

I have to disagree again. If i can't beat a challenge, why would it be a good idea to make it even harder? To me this sounds more like punishment than difficulty. Difficulty in the other way would be, that the player has to think about the encounter and maybe use a different skillset and tactic after death.

Regarding the dynamic buff, i wouldn't even define that one on the player alone, but in the function that calculate the damage of the player for example. The devs can check for the class of the enemy, for example a tank and apply a dmg reduction of lets say 50% from that player since the damage is a combat event between the npc and the player. Another player would hit it normal. This number can scale up to maybe 80% over the duration of the fight (adding a time element, exhaustion). Against a mage the reduction could be only 20% but the mage ignores the players resistance more and more (kinda breaking it) or whatever you may think of. Then apply the exhaustion to the reduction of attributes and regen and you got it. The more enemies you fight the longer the fights will be the harder they will get. Also quest- or even worldbosses would be much harder again.
Though this would include a DPS-Race again (and there are already to many dps-mechanics in this game...) the effects could depend on the weapons wielded by the player (both weapons to be precise) to allow a challenging but fair content also for tanks and healers.

Also im pretty sure the devs are able to check if a player has a specific buff/debuff. This could be used to provide extra effects on abilities the enemies use. They can implement changes to abilities that only affect debuffed players (which would be a lot of work of course).

No timers, no death penalties and no suddenly changing numbers. One important point for me is that the player may think it's hard but always knows how much dmg/healing he is going to do to a specific enemy or which hits he could stand. I think it's totally doable and, when well thought about and tested, not even that hard to implement. And it could make questing in this game fun again.

Punishment is part of the difficulty though. And it's all about a choice, if you want it difficult, you get it, but it also comes with consequences. It's the same if players have to use different skills to manage an encounter, if they don't use the right skills, they're punished for it. How difficult a game is, are many times determined how forgiven it is of your mistakes. Less forgiveness, higher difficulty.

In regards of the dynamic buff, how would you calculate what to do if there's a tank, a healer and a dpser in a group of 3, say a Dragon Knight, a magicka damage dealer and a healer? It wouldn't be problematic if the game "grouped" them together, treating them as 1 entity, but if they have a debuff applied based on what class the player is fighting, you could end up with stacked debuffs, making the fight even harder than intended. Also applying buffs based on what you mouse over, isn't a good solution, since you can target enemies in the distance that you haven't engaged but are within the vicinity of view.

Since the game offers so many variations of enemies, a dynamic buff would be difficult to implement, and even more so to balance. You'd have to consider every potential enemy grouping setup that a player might encounter throughout their gameplay, and apply the correct amount of debuff to apply given the circumstances. I don't see that as a very viable way of doing things.

Dahveed

Phew.... I just woke up to my coffee here and this is a LOT of new reading you guys have posted, I don't have time to see it all before work.

I just read the first couple new posts since yesterday and you guys look like you've really thought this through, so I appreciate your thoroughness.

I'll have to wait to comment though since I simply won't have time to give a fair shake to so much reading!

I'm off to work, be back in 12-14 hours....

Zakor

How difficult a game is, are many times determined how forgiven it is of your mistakes. Less forgiveness, higher difficulty.

This is the point i agree with you. But I think we apply this to different points. While my idea is, that the player has to begin from the start and fight the encounter from the beginning again, you want to punish the player for dying. See, I played Dark Souls a lot and the only death penalty applied there was that you lost all of your ingame currency and started the complete area from the beginning. You were able to regain your "money" and also gain more on the way to the spot you died. The challenge wasn't that you mustn't die, the challenge were to rethink and understand WHY you just died. It should be the same in ESO.

The main problem i see is that there is enough dps in this game to ignore most mechanics, either of normal npc or boss ones. My main goal therefor would be to force the player to know the mechanic well and play it correctly (like its done in vMA mostly). You don't know the mechanic, well, you die. But you can try it again until you beat it finally. It will cost gold and time and concentration. It applies the same as for raid-encounters: Wipe, readjust tactics, wipe again until everyone knows the mechanics by heart and is able to play them correctly.
You are right if you say a simple slider may not achieve this, but it would be the easiest and fastest way into the right direction.

For dynamic debuffs: I'm not sure if you didn't understand me or if Imissunderstand you. Since i would depend this debuff onto the combat events there wouldn't be the need to adjust it for groups of enemies since every enemy in the group "scales correctly" for itself. Let me be more precise: Every combat action triggers an event with two important details, source and target. If I know the source is a player with the "hardmode" debuff I can change the calculation of damage, healing or whatever the event is about. I can also get the number of enemies the player is fighting with via these events. Every enemy can scale itself correct providing a challenging group with just a few checks on codebase. It could also be implemented a check of whether the player tackled one or more groups(which would need more coding as far as i know).

However a simple slider with a static debuff or even the debuff food would make me happy already and i really hope ZOS will think about it.

Alphashado

@Dahveed you can lol all you want at the notion that 1-50 is a starter area, but this simply exemplifies your ignorance. Ignorance is a harsh word, but when you pointedly ignore the facts and base your argument around 1-50 zones, then sorry, that is pure ignorance.

1-50 is a starter area. Get the hell out of the starter area if you want to be taken seriously and stop insisting that the game is too easy based on what you find in the starter area.

Until you get it through your thick skull that leveling from V1-V16 is the VAST MAJORITY of the leveling content in the game and actually stop whining about 1-50 long enough to get a character to level 50 (You could have 8 V1 characters by now) I will no longer take you seriously and I will no longer respond to any of your posts.


Considering the time we are required to spend in V1-V16 content just to get to V16 the time required to dwell in 1-50 is minimal and therefore those zone are no different than a starting area designed to give new players and casual players time to learn the game so they are ready for the HUGE amount of content and leveling required to get from V1-V16.

I will no longer respond to anyone too stubborn to leave the starter area then complain about how easy the game is.
..................................................................................................................................


Now in regards to other responses from people who have actually played the entire game: I am opposed to a difficulty slider/debuff for two main reasons. I have stated them before and I will state them again.

#1 If your debuff effects other players IN ANY WAY, then it's a bad idea imo. Therefore, if you join an open world dynamic event like a Dolmen, Public Dungeon, or World Boss, and that event takes longer to complete than it normally would due to your debuff, then you are effecting other people whether you only have the debuff on yourself or not. When you step into an open world dynamic event, other people are counting on you to do your best to help them finish the event.

Obviously group dungeons/raids are excluded. Any debuff would have to be removed as soon as you entered. None of you have refuted this logic, but my questions is this: How is an open world event any different? People trying to finish that event are still counting on you for all the same reasons they are counting on you in a dungeon.

#2 It is my opinion that it's a waste of resources. If you want hard content, there is plenty of it to find and it's EASY to find. If it's such an easy and cost effective thing for them to do, then why has no other persistant world MMO ever done it before? Nobody has answered that question. And please don't use experimental potions that were meant as a joke and only last a few seconds as an example of how this has been done before.

cosmic_niklas_93b16_ESO

Alphashado wrote: »

@Dahveed you can lol all you want at the notion that 1-50 is a starter area, but this simply exemplifies your ignorance. Ignorance is a harsh word, but when you pointedly ignore the facts and base your argument around 1-50 zones, then sorry, that is pure ignorance.

1-50 is a starter area. Get the hell out of the starter area if you want to taken seriously and stop insisting that the game is too easy based on what you find in the starter area.

Until you get it through your thick skull that leveling from V1-V16 is the VAST MAJORITY of the leveling content in the game and actually stop whining about 1-50 long enough to get a character to level 50 (You could have 8 V1 characters by now) I will no longer take you seriously and I will no longer respond to any of your posts.


Considering the time we are required to spend in V1-V16 content just to get to V16 the time required to dwell in 1-50 is minimal and therefore those zone are no different than a starting area designed to give new players and casual players time to learn the game so they are ready for the HUGE amount of content and leveling required to get from V1-V16.

I will no longer respond to anyone too stubborn to leave the starter area then complain about how easy the game is.
..................................................................................................................................


Now in regards to other responses from people who have actually played the entire game: I am opposed to a difficulty slider/debuff for two main reasons. I have stated them before and I will state them again.

#1 If your debuff effects other players IN ANY WAY, then it's a bad idea imo. Therefore, if you join an open world dynamic event like a Dolmen, Public Dungeon, or World Boss, and that event takes longer to complete than it normally would due to your debuff, then you are effecting other people whether you only have the debuff on yourself or not. When you step into an open world dynamic event, other people are counting on you to do your best to help them finish the event.

Obviously group dungeons/raids are excluded. Any debuff would have to be removed as soon as you entered. None of you have refuted this logic, but my questions is this: How is an open world event any different? People trying to finish that event are still counting on you for all the same reasons they are counting on you in a dungeon.

#2 It is my opinion that it's a waste of resources. If you want hard content, there is plenty of it to find and it's EASY to find. If it's such an easy and cost effective thing for them to do, then why has no other persistant world MMO ever done it before? Nobody has answered that question.

But if someone like me that've done most of the quest zones in both silver and gold says it's way too easy, would you think that matters then?

I was here back in beta, I was here at the pre-launch for preorders, I soloed all the content back when I was a noob with no set gear etc and just used what skills what I liked as I had no idea about how to min/max and then it was even harder to do the solo content than it is now. I killed Doshia and Balreth when they were an actual threat to people and not just the pushovers they are today and I went to the vet zones when they were serious business. These days the adds just ask if you want them to lay down and die for you and there's nothing difficult about it.

And I was quite new to MMO's back then too, played maybe 3-4 months of GW2 and 3 months of WoW before I tired of those. So really, it wasn't that hard back then and it's certainly not in any way anything hard left in solo play these days except maelstrom arena and maybe some world bosses in wrothgar/IC.

Zakor

Alphashado wrote: »

@Dahveed you can lol all you want at the notion that 1-50 is a starter area, but this simply exemplifies your ignorance. Ignorance is a harsh word, but when you pointedly ignore the facts and base your argument around 1-50 zones, then sorry, that is pure ignorance.

1-50 is a starter area. Get the hell out of the starter area if you want to be taken seriously and stop insisting that the game is too easy based on what you find in the starter area.

Until you get it through your thick skull that leveling from V1-V16 is the VAST MAJORITY of the leveling content in the game and actually stop whining about 1-50 long enough to get a character to level 50 (You could have 8 V1 characters by now) I will no longer take you seriously and I will no longer respond to any of your posts.


Considering the time we are required to spend in V1-V16 content just to get to V16 the time required to dwell in 1-50 is minimal and therefore those zone are no different than a starting area designed to give new players and casual players time to learn the game so they are ready for the HUGE amount of content and leveling required to get from V1-V16.

I will no longer respond to anyone too stubborn to leave the starter area then complain about how easy the game is.
..................................................................................................................................


Now in regards to other responses from people who have actually played the entire game: I am opposed to a difficulty slider/debuff for two main reasons. I have stated them before and I will state them again.

#1 If your debuff effects other players IN ANY WAY, then it's a bad idea imo. Therefore, if you join an open world dynamic event like a Dolmen, Public Dungeon, or World Boss, and that event takes longer to complete than it normally would due to your debuff, then you are effecting other people whether you only have the debuff on yourself or not. When you step into an open world dynamic event, other people are counting on you to do your best to help them finish the event.

Obviously group dungeons/raids are excluded. Any debuff would have to be removed as soon as you entered. None of you have refuted this logic, but my questions is this: How is an open world event any different? People trying to finish that event are still counting on you for all the same reasons they are counting on you in a dungeon.

#2 It is my opinion that it's a waste of resources. If you want hard content, there is plenty of it to find and it's EASY to find. If it's such an easy and cost effective thing for them to do, then why has no other persistant world MMO ever done it before? Nobody has answered that question. And please don't use experimental potions that were meant as a joke and only last a few seconds as an example of how this has been done before.

1. You should stop insulting people just because they don't have finished the normal zones yet. Srsly what kind of god are you that you are better than they are?
2. If i follow your logic every "bad" player should be reported in this game since nobody can count onto him in open world events. Do you even think about that what you say there? Few days ago i had a random dungeon grp with 3 dps and me as healer on vet spindleclutch. All 3 dps together did as much damage as a friend of me is able to deal on his own. Should i report them now for being weaker than average? Damn no! And the same applies to people that are willing to "suffer" under the debuff. You can't "count" on somebody just because he is v16 or whatever level and has decent gear. He may just suck at his role, respecced to test something or whatever.
3. Why hasn't anyone done this before? Idk, better scaling, no CP, they havn't had battle leveling in questing areas? Lots of reasons actually. The main reason: The questing system in ESO works different than in other MMO. And again, your argument is "it was never doen, why should we do it?". In this way we wouldn't even have a computer to play the game.

After all you start to repeat yourself.

Alphashado

cosmic_niklas_93b16_ESO wrote: »

Alphashado wrote: »

@Dahveed you can lol all you want at the notion that 1-50 is a starter area, but this simply exemplifies your ignorance. Ignorance is a harsh word, but when you pointedly ignore the facts and base your argument around 1-50 zones, then sorry, that is pure ignorance.

1-50 is a starter area. Get the hell out of the starter area if you want to taken seriously and stop insisting that the game is too easy based on what you find in the starter area.

Until you get it through your thick skull that leveling from V1-V16 is the VAST MAJORITY of the leveling content in the game and actually stop whining about 1-50 long enough to get a character to level 50 (You could have 8 V1 characters by now) I will no longer take you seriously and I will no longer respond to any of your posts.


Considering the time we are required to spend in V1-V16 content just to get to V16 the time required to dwell in 1-50 is minimal and therefore those zone are no different than a starting area designed to give new players and casual players time to learn the game so they are ready for the HUGE amount of content and leveling required to get from V1-V16.

I will no longer respond to anyone too stubborn to leave the starter area then complain about how easy the game is.
..................................................................................................................................


Now in regards to other responses from people who have actually played the entire game: I am opposed to a difficulty slider/debuff for two main reasons. I have stated them before and I will state them again.

#1 If your debuff effects other players IN ANY WAY, then it's a bad idea imo. Therefore, if you join an open world dynamic event like a Dolmen, Public Dungeon, or World Boss, and that event takes longer to complete than it normally would due to your debuff, then you are effecting other people whether you only have the debuff on yourself or not. When you step into an open world dynamic event, other people are counting on you to do your best to help them finish the event.

Obviously group dungeons/raids are excluded. Any debuff would have to be removed as soon as you entered. None of you have refuted this logic, but my questions is this: How is an open world event any different? People trying to finish that event are still counting on you for all the same reasons they are counting on you in a dungeon.

#2 It is my opinion that it's a waste of resources. If you want hard content, there is plenty of it to find and it's EASY to find. If it's such an easy and cost effective thing for them to do, then why has no other persistant world MMO ever done it before? Nobody has answered that question.

But if someone like me that've done most of the quest zones in both silver and gold says it's way too easy, would you think that matters then?

I was here back in beta, I was here at the pre-launch for preorders, I soloed all the content back when I was a noob with no set gear etc and just used what skills what I liked as I had no idea about how to min/max and then it was even harder to do the solo content than it is now. I killed Doshia and Balreth when they were an actual threat to people and not just the pushovers they are today and I went to the vet zones when they were serious business. These days the adds just ask if you want them to lay down and die for you and there's nothing difficult about it.

And I was quite new to MMO's back then too, played maybe 3-4 months of GW2 and 3 months of WoW before I tired of those. So really, it wasn't that hard back then and it's certainly not in any way anything hard left in solo play these days except maelstrom arena and maybe some world bosses in wrothgar/IC.

Yes I will take you seriously. I've made that clear. In your case and cases like yours, I would default back to the old mantra that what is easy for some is hard for others. There are people that say Maelstrom Arena is ridiculously easy, but the vast majority of the player base thinks it pretty hard on vet mode. Easy/difficult is subjective to taste, skill, and preference. I can certainly understand that people in your position want even more challenging content and I certainly understand why you would ask for a difficulty slider/debuff.

But understanding your point doesn't change my opinion on the matter on the two main reasons why we don't have one and in fact nobody does. They are prevalent in single player RPGs and non-existant in MMO for a reason.

cosmic_niklas_93b16_ESO

Alphashado wrote: »

cosmic_niklas_93b16_ESO wrote: »

Alphashado wrote: »

@Dahveed you can lol all you want at the notion that 1-50 is a starter area, but this simply exemplifies your ignorance. Ignorance is a harsh word, but when you pointedly ignore the facts and base your argument around 1-50 zones, then sorry, that is pure ignorance.

1-50 is a starter area. Get the hell out of the starter area if you want to taken seriously and stop insisting that the game is too easy based on what you find in the starter area.

Until you get it through your thick skull that leveling from V1-V16 is the VAST MAJORITY of the leveling content in the game and actually stop whining about 1-50 long enough to get a character to level 50 (You could have 8 V1 characters by now) I will no longer take you seriously and I will no longer respond to any of your posts.


Considering the time we are required to spend in V1-V16 content just to get to V16 the time required to dwell in 1-50 is minimal and therefore those zone are no different than a starting area designed to give new players and casual players time to learn the game so they are ready for the HUGE amount of content and leveling required to get from V1-V16.

I will no longer respond to anyone too stubborn to leave the starter area then complain about how easy the game is.
..................................................................................................................................


Now in regards to other responses from people who have actually played the entire game: I am opposed to a difficulty slider/debuff for two main reasons. I have stated them before and I will state them again.

#1 If your debuff effects other players IN ANY WAY, then it's a bad idea imo. Therefore, if you join an open world dynamic event like a Dolmen, Public Dungeon, or World Boss, and that event takes longer to complete than it normally would due to your debuff, then you are effecting other people whether you only have the debuff on yourself or not. When you step into an open world dynamic event, other people are counting on you to do your best to help them finish the event.

Obviously group dungeons/raids are excluded. Any debuff would have to be removed as soon as you entered. None of you have refuted this logic, but my questions is this: How is an open world event any different? People trying to finish that event are still counting on you for all the same reasons they are counting on you in a dungeon.

#2 It is my opinion that it's a waste of resources. If you want hard content, there is plenty of it to find and it's EASY to find. If it's such an easy and cost effective thing for them to do, then why has no other persistant world MMO ever done it before? Nobody has answered that question.

But if someone like me that've done most of the quest zones in both silver and gold says it's way too easy, would you think that matters then?

I was here back in beta, I was here at the pre-launch for preorders, I soloed all the content back when I was a noob with no set gear etc and just used what skills what I liked as I had no idea about how to min/max and then it was even harder to do the solo content than it is now. I killed Doshia and Balreth when they were an actual threat to people and not just the pushovers they are today and I went to the vet zones when they were serious business. These days the adds just ask if you want them to lay down and die for you and there's nothing difficult about it.

And I was quite new to MMO's back then too, played maybe 3-4 months of GW2 and 3 months of WoW before I tired of those. So really, it wasn't that hard back then and it's certainly not in any way anything hard left in solo play these days except maelstrom arena and maybe some world bosses in wrothgar/IC.

Yes I will take you seriously. I've made that clear. In your case and cases like yours, I would default back to the old mantra that what is easy for some is hard for others. There are people that say Maelstrom Arena is ridiculously easy, but the vast majority of the player base thinks it pretty hard on vet mode. Easy/difficult is subjective to taste, skill, and preference. I can certainly understand that people in your position want even more challenging content and I certainly understand why you would ask for a difficulty slider/debuff.

But understanding your point doesn't change my opinion on the matter on the two main reasons why we don't have one and in fact nobody does. They are prevalent in single player RPGs and non-existant in MMO for a reason.

Well, that's why instead of a slider, make debuff food or something like there's been suggestions of. That wouldn't take too long to make, just make some food give negative stats, give it it's own category in the crafting station and make it all usable from level 1 with different kinds of debuffs that basically exists in buff versions right now.

Sentinel

My idea from another thread:

Sentinel wrote: »

How to implement a "difficulty slider"
Range: Normal-> Impossible
How to affect the character:

• Reduce damage done by X%, (Perhaps 0% to 95%)
• Increase damage received by all sources by X% (Perhaps 0% to 500%)

The slider's effects are weighed into the character, not the environment to hold, so the character is afflicted with reduced damage, and increased damage received. Therefore, someone can play and have complete and utter impossible difficulty and face mobs while a second character fights the same mobs side by side, at normal difficulty with ease.

Normal, one corner of the slider, keeps the base damage %s the same as the current game. The impossible end of the slider should be just that: impossible. It should be an extreme because the extent many would enjoy their gameplay difficulty increased can be just as extreme, and given that it is a slider, anywhere in between can fit anyone else searching for a challenge. It might be good to consider balancing the impossible end to be extremely difficult for even a v16 decked out in 501 CPs to face off a group of mobs in a starter zone. You know, for the masochists.

What limitations should it have? Slider is not functional in any group dungeon, cyrodiil, and trials. If something similar is wanted for activities such as group dungeons and trials, it may have to be a separate issue, with its own ui.

Keep in mind- this is optional, and does not require a massive overhaul of content. There are a large base of players who are not challenged, and would wish to see some modicum of difficulty in an experience that in previous TES games has universally been customizable, and considering the solo content in ESO is just that, basically solo, it is a fair request to let players customize their solo experience to their liking. There are players who are challenged with the current difficulty, they do not need to adjust anything. If someone wishes to adjust the difficulty to be impossible for anything to be done, let them. Giving options is never a bad thing. Also, this will deter players from the mentality of thinking that the only game in ESO is endgame, which is not the case.

(By the way, saying that because something hasn't been done before, it cannot be done is not an argument.)

In addition, the effects this would have on the server would be minimal, as the debuffs being applied likely have the same weight as two stars from the champion system at most.

Do not make a slider more difficult than it needs to be.

Alphashado

Zakor wrote: »

Alphashado wrote: »

@Dahveed you can lol all you want at the notion that 1-50 is a starter area, but this simply exemplifies your ignorance. Ignorance is a harsh word, but when you pointedly ignore the facts and base your argument around 1-50 zones, then sorry, that is pure ignorance.

1-50 is a starter area. Get the hell out of the starter area if you want to be taken seriously and stop insisting that the game is too easy based on what you find in the starter area.

Until you get it through your thick skull that leveling from V1-V16 is the VAST MAJORITY of the leveling content in the game and actually stop whining about 1-50 long enough to get a character to level 50 (You could have 8 V1 characters by now) I will no longer take you seriously and I will no longer respond to any of your posts.


Considering the time we are required to spend in V1-V16 content just to get to V16 the time required to dwell in 1-50 is minimal and therefore those zone are no different than a starting area designed to give new players and casual players time to learn the game so they are ready for the HUGE amount of content and leveling required to get from V1-V16.

I will no longer respond to anyone too stubborn to leave the starter area then complain about how easy the game is.
..................................................................................................................................


Now in regards to other responses from people who have actually played the entire game: I am opposed to a difficulty slider/debuff for two main reasons. I have stated them before and I will state them again.

#1 If your debuff effects other players IN ANY WAY, then it's a bad idea imo. Therefore, if you join an open world dynamic event like a Dolmen, Public Dungeon, or World Boss, and that event takes longer to complete than it normally would due to your debuff, then you are effecting other people whether you only have the debuff on yourself or not. When you step into an open world dynamic event, other people are counting on you to do your best to help them finish the event.

Obviously group dungeons/raids are excluded. Any debuff would have to be removed as soon as you entered. None of you have refuted this logic, but my questions is this: How is an open world event any different? People trying to finish that event are still counting on you for all the same reasons they are counting on you in a dungeon.

#2 It is my opinion that it's a waste of resources. If you want hard content, there is plenty of it to find and it's EASY to find. If it's such an easy and cost effective thing for them to do, then why has no other persistant world MMO ever done it before? Nobody has answered that question. And please don't use experimental potions that were meant as a joke and only last a few seconds as an example of how this has been done before.

1. You should stop insulting people just because they don't have finished the normal zones yet. Srsly what kind of god are you that you are better than they are?
2. If i follow your logic every "bad" player should be reported in this game since nobody can count onto him in open world events. Do you even think about that what you say there? Few days ago i had a random dungeon grp with 3 dps and me as healer on vet spindleclutch. All 3 dps together did as much damage as a friend of me is able to deal on his own. Should i report them now for being weaker than average? Damn no! And the same applies to people that are willing to "suffer" under the debuff. You can't "count" on somebody just because he is v16 or whatever level and has decent gear. He may just suck at his role, respecced to test something or whatever.
3. Why hasn't anyone done this before? Idk, better scaling, no CP, they havn't had battle leveling in questing areas? Lots of reasons actually. The main reason: The questing system in ESO works different than in other MMO. And again, your argument is "it was never doen, why should we do it?". In this way we wouldn't even have a computer to play the game.

After all you start to repeat yourself.

1. ig·no·rance
ˈiɡnərəns/
noun
noun: ignorance

lack of knowledge or information.
"he acted in ignorance of basic procedures"
synonyms: incomprehension of, unawareness of, unconsciousness of, unfamiliarity with, inexperience with, lack of knowledge about, lack of information about;

If a certain individual has 100+ hours and is still in the lowbie areas, intentionally ignores several different options to find more challenging content and refuses to advance into more challenging content, then intentionally dwells in easy content only to express concerns as to how easy the game is, then by definition he/she clearly fall under that above listed word and definition. If you or he/she finds it insulting, then so be it. It's not meant to be insulting, but rather a word used to accurately describe the situation.

2. I didn't say anything about reporting anyone. Some players are good, some players are bad. Debuffs involved in "any sort" of group activity effects everyone involved in that group activity. Therefore by joining any kind of group activity with an active debuff on, you are subjecting those individuals to your nerf. Everything else you are saying is subjective.

3. Of course I am not opposed to innovation. Don't be silly. It is my opinion that developing and implementing this particular type of "innovation" in this particular game would be a waste of resources. You have your opinion, and that is mine.

4. Everyone in this thread is repeating themselves. Don't throw stones if you live in a glass house.

Selstad

Zakor wrote: »

This is the point i agree with you. But I think we apply this to different points. While my idea is, that the player has to begin from the start and fight the encounter from the beginning again, you want to punish the player for dying. See, I played Dark Souls a lot and the only death penalty applied there was that you lost all of your ingame currency and started the complete area from the beginning. You were able to regain your "money" and also gain more on the way to the spot you died. The challenge wasn't that you mustn't die, the challenge were to rethink and understand WHY you just died. It should be the same in ESO.

The main problem i see is that there is enough dps in this game to ignore most mechanics, either of normal npc or boss ones. My main goal therefor would be to force the player to know the mechanic well and play it correctly (like its done in vMA mostly). You don't know the mechanic, well, you die. But you can try it again until you beat it finally. It will cost gold and time and concentration. It applies the same as for raid-encounters: Wipe, readjust tactics, wipe again until everyone knows the mechanics by heart and is able to play them correctly.
You are right if you say a simple slider may not achieve this, but it would be the easiest and fastest way into the right direction.

For dynamic debuffs: I'm not sure if you didn't understand me or if Imissunderstand you. Since i would depend this debuff onto the combat events there wouldn't be the need to adjust it for groups of enemies since every enemy in the group "scales correctly" for itself. Let me be more precise: Every combat action triggers an event with two important details, source and target. If I know the source is a player with the "hardmode" debuff I can change the calculation of damage, healing or whatever the event is about. I can also get the number of enemies the player is fighting with via these events. Every enemy can scale itself correct providing a challenging group with just a few checks on codebase. It could also be implemented a check of whether the player tackled one or more groups(which would need more coding as far as i know).

However a simple slider with a static debuff or even the debuff food would make me happy already and i really hope ZOS will think about it.

It's both a punishment for dying, as well as an incentive not to die in the first place. Dark Souls do punish you for dying, but gives you a chance to make up for your mistakes, as long as you get back to where you died that is. My suggestion though wasn't build around punishing people for dying, but give them an incentive not to. Though it's more or less the same coin but different side of it, incentive or punishment, dying shouldn't be taken lightly, and you should feel a sense of dread for dying, feel that you're punished for it, which also works as an incentive not to die in the first place.

Raid encounters offers a different incentive, and punishment. If you per example don't know the mechanics, you'll get punished, and most likely die. The incentive to win the encounter can be in the form of loot that you want. That approach though, wouldn't work too well in the general world. Learning the monsters and what they do, is what lead us to where we are here. If you don't follow the queues and just stand still, you can easily die in ESO. If you encounter them however and learn what to do, you'll survive. I died often in ESO in the beginning for not knowing what to do, however now that I do, dying isn't that common. So the dynamics and how difficult the game is, is also determined by your knowledge of the game. So you eventually end up at a stage where the game becomes easy because you know how things work. That's why I don't think it works just giving people an incentive to learn the mechanics, you need to work up more systems to make sure that dying does come with its form of consequences in the gaming world, not too severe but also not too forgiving. And that's why the system I've proposed, was build as it was. It's a mixture of carrot and whip, both punishing and rewarding at the same time.

As for the dynamic buffs; I understand your concept, but I don't see it achieve the goal of making the game more difficult. It's one system, and since other players are playing along with you, they'll contribute to make the game easier since they kill things a lot faster than what you do. The damage output would have to be the same on the monsters, so all calculations are done based on your debuff, since other players can also interact with the same targets as you. This means that we're back to the original problem; making the game more difficult. I wished to address that through several systems, both incentives and punishments, so that even if you're playing along with others, you're still punished stronger than normal players, and as such wanted to make sure you don't die. This also helps when you're alone, since you would perhaps then rethink your strategy of rushing in, and instead try to rely on stealth, rethinking your way of approach. That's why I think that more systems are needed to function rather than just a single system debuff.

Zakor

Alphashado wrote: »

Zakor wrote: »

Alphashado wrote: »

@Dahveed you can lol all you want at the notion that 1-50 is a starter area, but this simply exemplifies your ignorance. Ignorance is a harsh word, but when you pointedly ignore the facts and base your argument around 1-50 zones, then sorry, that is pure ignorance.

1-50 is a starter area. Get the hell out of the starter area if you want to be taken seriously and stop insisting that the game is too easy based on what you find in the starter area.

Until you get it through your thick skull that leveling from V1-V16 is the VAST MAJORITY of the leveling content in the game and actually stop whining about 1-50 long enough to get a character to level 50 (You could have 8 V1 characters by now) I will no longer take you seriously and I will no longer respond to any of your posts.


Considering the time we are required to spend in V1-V16 content just to get to V16 the time required to dwell in 1-50 is minimal and therefore those zone are no different than a starting area designed to give new players and casual players time to learn the game so they are ready for the HUGE amount of content and leveling required to get from V1-V16.

I will no longer respond to anyone too stubborn to leave the starter area then complain about how easy the game is.
..................................................................................................................................


Now in regards to other responses from people who have actually played the entire game: I am opposed to a difficulty slider/debuff for two main reasons. I have stated them before and I will state them again.

#1 If your debuff effects other players IN ANY WAY, then it's a bad idea imo. Therefore, if you join an open world dynamic event like a Dolmen, Public Dungeon, or World Boss, and that event takes longer to complete than it normally would due to your debuff, then you are effecting other people whether you only have the debuff on yourself or not. When you step into an open world dynamic event, other people are counting on you to do your best to help them finish the event.

Obviously group dungeons/raids are excluded. Any debuff would have to be removed as soon as you entered. None of you have refuted this logic, but my questions is this: How is an open world event any different? People trying to finish that event are still counting on you for all the same reasons they are counting on you in a dungeon.

#2 It is my opinion that it's a waste of resources. If you want hard content, there is plenty of it to find and it's EASY to find. If it's such an easy and cost effective thing for them to do, then why has no other persistant world MMO ever done it before? Nobody has answered that question. And please don't use experimental potions that were meant as a joke and only last a few seconds as an example of how this has been done before.

1. You should stop insulting people just because they don't have finished the normal zones yet. Srsly what kind of god are you that you are better than they are?
2. If i follow your logic every "bad" player should be reported in this game since nobody can count onto him in open world events. Do you even think about that what you say there? Few days ago i had a random dungeon grp with 3 dps and me as healer on vet spindleclutch. All 3 dps together did as much damage as a friend of me is able to deal on his own. Should i report them now for being weaker than average? Damn no! And the same applies to people that are willing to "suffer" under the debuff. You can't "count" on somebody just because he is v16 or whatever level and has decent gear. He may just suck at his role, respecced to test something or whatever.
3. Why hasn't anyone done this before? Idk, better scaling, no CP, they havn't had battle leveling in questing areas? Lots of reasons actually. The main reason: The questing system in ESO works different than in other MMO. And again, your argument is "it was never doen, why should we do it?". In this way we wouldn't even have a computer to play the game.

After all you start to repeat yourself.

1. ig·no·rance
ˈiɡnərəns/
noun
noun: ignorance

lack of knowledge or information.
"he acted in ignorance of basic procedures"
synonyms: incomprehension of, unawareness of, unconsciousness of, unfamiliarity with, inexperience with, lack of knowledge about, lack of information about;

If a certain individual has 100+ hours and is still in the lowbie areas, intentionally ignores several different options to find more challenging content and refuses to advance into more challenging content, then intentionally dwells in easy content only to express concerns as to how easy the game is, then by definition he/she clearly fall under that above listed word and definition. If you or he/she finds it insulting, then so be it. It's not meant to be insulting, but rather a word used to accurately describe the situation.

2. I didn't say anything about reporting anyone. Some players are good, some players are bad. Debuffs involved in "any sort" of group activity effects everyone involved in that group activity. Therefore by joining any kind of group activity with an active debuff on, you are subjecting those individuals to your nerf. Everything else you are saying is subjective.

3. Of course I am not opposed to innovation. Don't be silly. It is my opinion that developing and implementing this particular type of "innovation" in this particular game would be a waste of resources. You have your opinion, and that is mine.

4. Everyone in this thread is repeating themselves. Don't throw stones if you live in a glass house.

There is just this ONE little point everyone else got and you just don't: We don't talk about other content. We don't want to talk about other content. We talk about the questing content in ESO and that it is too easy. That has absolutly nothing to do with decisions someone may have made. That has nothing to do with other content, may it be as challenging as it wants to.

We proved that it wouldn't be much effort to implement, we proved that there are many ways to implement it and we proved that the other players wouldn't be very much impacted by this system because you can't rely on a complete stranger. At this point i think you don't want to discuss anymore but talk badly about it. I provided answers to every of your concerns. You in turn haven't provided any proof or new argument.

And yeah, you haven't said anything about reports, but what else would you do "against bad players"? Ban them maybe? Aren't they affecting the other players just like people that would debuff themself to get a challenge? Maybe they play bad on purpose to get a challenge? Sorry to tell you, but your argument doesn't hold.

If you think what I've said was subjective you clearly haven't got the message. Actually these players affected my ingame experience. But I didn't care because I...

1. talked to them, found out 2 of them were new in this dungeon and that the other one made bad use of his skills. So i provided them help.
2. had fun with the challenge this provided. I wasn't just healing but also tanking and doing damage. We had to play the boss mechanics and almost wiped at one DPS-Check. It was definately better than rushing through that dungeon in 10 mins and goodbye.

In case you still don't got it: Talk to people! If you see someone behaves bad talk to them. If they have the debuff on them you could ask them to remove it. But don't force players to play a certain way because you don't like the other way or it is like that everywhere else. Yeah, sometimes you may have a jerk or troll in your group. Deal with it. Would be even better if those guys were a reason to don't implement a feature. Even today you got people that won't invite you to a group because you don't have an achievement or don't do xyzDPS. They also affect my ingame experience. So what?

A player that searches for a challenge knows what he is doing. He probably knows the encouters by heart or is very well equipped and skilled. Such a player would also know when he is able to turn difficulty up and when he shouldn't. And such a player would be very likely able to realize if he puts to much weight on a decent group.

Serenityx

The only thing I've found challenging as far as solo PvE goes is running around imperial city by myself.

I found the orsinium DLC to be an up in difficulty as a non-vet player, but I wouldn't call it challenging even on my level 10 "stam" sorc which I'm currently grinding with in Orsinium.

johu31

Difficultiy slider: take off armor, use group finder, and don't eat food.

johu31

Oh.. And play in first person. ^^

Aelthwyn

I certainly think it would be a good idea to provide a means to up the difficulty for those players who want it, as long as it’s not affecting everyone who may be just starting out or not as into having a desperate challenge around every corner. I think it would be great to have it as a simple selection in game settings that would then affect your character with some kind of de-buff as described.

This is why I would not want to see all zones have scaling the way you have in the DLCs. While I’m definitely not an amazing player, and don’t find the content at my character’s level easy-peasy without any gear, I do sometimes enjoy the thrill of taking on something way beyond my level - just not all the time. I also like playing casually and having fun swatting the flies rather than having to be in top form whenever I log on. I don’t feel like the entire game is too easy overall, but I can certainly understand how some people might find it so - especially if you are not solo-ing it.

Dahveed

Alphashado wrote: »

Zakor wrote: »

Alphashado wrote: »

@Dahveed you can lol all you want at the notion that 1-50 is a starter area, but this simply exemplifies your ignorance. Ignorance is a harsh word, but when you pointedly ignore the facts and base your argument around 1-50 zones, then sorry, that is pure ignorance.

1-50 is a starter area. Get the hell out of the starter area if you want to be taken seriously and stop insisting that the game is too easy based on what you find in the starter area.

Until you get it through your thick skull that leveling from V1-V16 is the VAST MAJORITY of the leveling content in the game and actually stop whining about 1-50 long enough to get a character to level 50 (You could have 8 V1 characters by now) I will no longer take you seriously and I will no longer respond to any of your posts.


Considering the time we are required to spend in V1-V16 content just to get to V16 the time required to dwell in 1-50 is minimal and therefore those zone are no different than a starting area designed to give new players and casual players time to learn the game so they are ready for the HUGE amount of content and leveling required to get from V1-V16.

I will no longer respond to anyone too stubborn to leave the starter area then complain about how easy the game is.
..................................................................................................................................


Now in regards to other responses from people who have actually played the entire game: I am opposed to a difficulty slider/debuff for two main reasons. I have stated them before and I will state them again.

#1 If your debuff effects other players IN ANY WAY, then it's a bad idea imo. Therefore, if you join an open world dynamic event like a Dolmen, Public Dungeon, or World Boss, and that event takes longer to complete than it normally would due to your debuff, then you are effecting other people whether you only have the debuff on yourself or not. When you step into an open world dynamic event, other people are counting on you to do your best to help them finish the event.

Obviously group dungeons/raids are excluded. Any debuff would have to be removed as soon as you entered. None of you have refuted this logic, but my questions is this: How is an open world event any different? People trying to finish that event are still counting on you for all the same reasons they are counting on you in a dungeon.

#2 It is my opinion that it's a waste of resources. If you want hard content, there is plenty of it to find and it's EASY to find. If it's such an easy and cost effective thing for them to do, then why has no other persistant world MMO ever done it before? Nobody has answered that question. And please don't use experimental potions that were meant as a joke and only last a few seconds as an example of how this has been done before.

1. You should stop insulting people just because they don't have finished the normal zones yet. Srsly what kind of god are you that you are better than they are?
2. If i follow your logic every "bad" player should be reported in this game since nobody can count onto him in open world events. Do you even think about that what you say there? Few days ago i had a random dungeon grp with 3 dps and me as healer on vet spindleclutch. All 3 dps together did as much damage as a friend of me is able to deal on his own. Should i report them now for being weaker than average? Damn no! And the same applies to people that are willing to "suffer" under the debuff. You can't "count" on somebody just because he is v16 or whatever level and has decent gear. He may just suck at his role, respecced to test something or whatever.
3. Why hasn't anyone done this before? Idk, better scaling, no CP, they havn't had battle leveling in questing areas? Lots of reasons actually. The main reason: The questing system in ESO works different than in other MMO. And again, your argument is "it was never doen, why should we do it?". In this way we wouldn't even have a computer to play the game.

After all you start to repeat yourself.

1. ig·no·rance
ˈiɡnərəns/
noun
noun: ignorance

lack of knowledge or information.
"he acted in ignorance of basic procedures"
synonyms: incomprehension of, unawareness of, unconsciousness of, unfamiliarity with, inexperience with, lack of knowledge about, lack of information about;

If a certain individual has 100+ hours and is still in the lowbie areas, intentionally ignores several different options to find more challenging content and refuses to advance into more challenging content, then intentionally dwells in easy content only to express concerns as to how easy the game is, then by definition he/she clearly fall under that above listed word and definition. If you or he/she finds it insulting, then so be it. It's not meant to be insulting, but rather a word used to accurately describe the situation.

2. I didn't say anything about reporting anyone. Some players are good, some players are bad. Debuffs involved in "any sort" of group activity effects everyone involved in that group activity. Therefore by joining any kind of group activity with an active debuff on, you are subjecting those individuals to your nerf. Everything else you are saying is subjective.

3. Of course I am not opposed to innovation. Don't be silly. It is my opinion that developing and implementing this particular type of "innovation" in this particular game would be a waste of resources. You have your opinion, and that is mine.

4. Everyone in this thread is repeating themselves. Don't throw stones if you live in a glass house.

I fail to understand how I can be "ignorant" and simultaneously hold 3 different university degrees.

If you scroll up Alphashado, you'll see that I've been pretty respectful towards you in most of my responses.

Now you're just being an a$$hole, so I suppose I'll stop taking you seriously as well.

Dahveed

Selstad wrote: »

Joining the fray on this debate again, though let me say from the outset; I'm not against higher difficulty. But difficulty is and will always be a crux, since some think it's too difficult while others think it's too easy. It's a personal experience, and each has his own take on how it should be.

Now to the idea that I read most about is the applying of a buff that decreases your health and damage, and/or increases the health and damage of monsters. Now fundamentally, the idea is sound and good. Practically though, not so much.

Balance the buff to function on all monsters and areas of the game

This is in my view one of the trickiest departments to make the idea work. Each NPC in the game has his sort of damage output. Some are nothing more than canon fodders, others pose a bigger threat. Let me take an example, as a sorcerer with 10k health and 25k shields. However against the archer attacks, I can seriously take a pounding, since arrows count as physical damage, and I have no physical damage mitigation. So it's a ranged attack, dealing damage as a melee attack, but as I'm a ranged, I shouldn't be in range of melee attacks, and as such shouldn't need physical damage mitigation. Now scale this up, and/or scale me down, and this monster will 1 shot me. Other monsters however with ranged attacks - such as magicka based ones - don't do any damage at all to me, due to high spell resistance. These monsters would have to be seriously buffed and me seriously debuffed, to pose an actual threat to me.

Now what is my point here? My point is that balancing the buff that increases the difficulty, is easier said than done. The buff isn't dynamic, yet the damage you receive will be, based on what creature you fight. Where do you draw the line? How much should you decrease the player's health and damage output? Which creature do you base your calculations on? People might not think it will be a balance act, but it will be, and difficulty adjustments in an MMO isn't easy, it's rather complex due to the amount of quests, creatures and abilities.

Another side is that this is an open world MMO, and some might not choose to have that buff on them, so they operate on full power. Why is this important? Well say you have the buff on that decreases your health and damage, happy camper, things take time to kill, and you have to avoid and dodge around to survive. You come across a boss, engages it, it's difficult but fun. Then comes a regular player that doesn't have that buff. Within 3 seconds the boss is dead, mostly killed by the regular player.

Since you will always be along other players that might not choose the same as you, you'll most definitely eventually end up along players that don't have your difficulty setting, and as such kill things quickly, and inadvertently make things easy for you.

What can be done?

This is a rather good question. I do understand that some people want higher difficulty, and perhaps it's about time the MMO companies start looking into the dynamics of difficulties and build their game around that dynamic. Players are not a static group, they're rather complex and diverse, and some want it more difficult than others. I don't think that a sliding difficulty setting or a buff option, is a viable or good solution. I foresee a load of problems that way, as explained above. It sounds good on paper, but it can go sour really quickly.

Lets bear in mind a few points here while going through what can be done:

1. Monsters are dynamic and their damage output is as well
2. Quest diversity and quest specific monsters / bosses have their own difficulty
3. It's an MMO, and as such also an open world with many players around that select their difficulty
4. A lot of different areas, dungeons and other places that offers their own difficult, per example public dungeons

Now all of this has to be taken into consideration, and the difficulty buff has to be balanced so that the player is challenged, yet not overcome by it. Is this achievable with a regular buff? No, I'm sorry, it's not. The game is too complex for that to function, and there are too many areas of the game that has to be taken into consideration when you decide how much of the damage output and health you're going to remove from the player.

Potential solutions

A potential solution is a bit of mixture. Lets lean back a bit; what do we have available that can be used? We can buff players, removing health and damage output. Though as I've said above, this adds a host of different problems that's difficult to do something about in a dynamic world of an MMO. What else do we have? Well, we do have death, and as it stands today, there's not that much of a penalty to die. You die, you resurrect, you take some repair bill, that's about it. Hm, why not use that in some way? Penalize dying in such a way that players would think twice before they set themselves into a dangerous situation. But what else can we do? Consequences? Hm, why not? We have a justice system, and a bounty system, why not a more severe punishment if caught? And at the same time, make it so that sneaking around problems where you can, is a lot better than running strait into battle?

So lets recap and boil a soup of a potential solution to this problem.

First off, this package is selected by players and can be turned on and off at their own wish from an option in the game's menu. However, just to make it interesting, once set, the "reset" time to revert it to the "normal" difficulty, is 2 days. So even if you select to have it off, you still have to wait 2 days until it's normal again. Gives the players something to think about. Now what to do?

We give the players a debuff that decreases the following attributes by 20%:

• Effectiveness of healing
• Health
• Damage output
• Resistances (physical / spell)
• Primary resource (magicka / stamina)

Then we penalize death. Each time you have to resurrect yourself, the above list is increased by 20%. So if you've died 4 times, you're practically useless; you're Soul Shriven. This debuff lasts for 30 minutes and can't be removed. Each time you die, the time resets. As soul shriven, your visuals change to reflect that stage as well.

And to sprinkle it a bit for flavour; the justice system. If you're caught committing a crime, the heat doesn't reset, and the bounty doesn't disappear unless you're paying a fencer for it. And if you're caught, your options on what to do, is based on the heat. If you're a very wanted person, you'll get killed on sight. If you're caught just as a notorious one, you're thrown into jail (good luck getting out of that one). However, sneaking should also come with some benefits, per example, if you're on a quest and you successfully sneak past most of the monsters, you're rewarded for your effort. And a thief who manages to survive without being caught by the guards, gain "notoriety" with the Thieve's Guild, which reaps its benefits as well (such as a higher cut of the ill-gotten goods you're selling).

So lets recap; you're debuffed, penalized for dying, and face some severe consequences for being caught committing a crime. Yet you're also rewarded if you manage to do quests by minimal killing, and gain respect amongst your fellow thieves for managing to avoid the law.

This system should allow players to gain some difficulty back if they want to, and as well reap some rewards if they so choose the harsh life.

I really appreciate your response, you've clearly thought about a LOT of things.

I'll try to go through most of them...

1. Balance the buff to function on all monsters and areas of the game

Interesting points here, but I think we have a different mindset. You gave the example of a spellcaster being vulnerable to archers, but not so much against spells (i.e. high spell resistance). You say that we'd then have to worry about re-balancing these numbers...

My response? No, not all all. If I roll a spellcaster and I *choose* to play at a much higher difficulty, my point of view would be that this imbalance would be FANTASTIC. You know why? Because all of a sudden you've just added a MAJOR strategic consideration to every battle. My squishy mage will be kept on his toes 100% of the time in every fight. I have to know who I am fighting, what level, what class they are, how many of them are there, how to plan my escape if they hit too hard, how to mitigate their damage, LoS, stuns, CoC etc etc etc.... because those archers are now really freaking DANGEROUS! As they should be! Arrows are sharp, and when they penetrate your lungs, they tend to hurt and you normally start to bleed. So your mage might want to think about ways to prevent said arrows from entering your ribcage. As I said in previous posts, what's missing in these kinds of MMO open worlds are UNPREDICTABILITY and DANGER to add some sense of excitement and challenge. As it stands now, we basically know what's going to happen all the time, and nothing feels dangerous. Now those archers are fricken scary, and you'll have to really be aware of them at all times.

2. What if a stronger/higher level/vanilla difficulty character comes along and destroys the boss I'm fighting?

Not much I can do about that, unfortunately. Tough luck. This happens in online games, and it's something I can live with. I remember once back in Vanilla-era WoW I was wiping about 9 times in a row against an elite quest NPC, until I finally got my sh*t together and had a winning strategy,...he was going down and I was winning, it was exhilarating. Until a level ?? guy came up and finished him in one hit, lol. Sh*t happens.

3. "How much damage input/output should be tweaked?"

A: Ideally this is for the player to decide, not ZoS. Ideally (in my version of this) there would be several options. Not too many so as to be confusing and complicated unnecessarily, but not too few either. I had imagined something like this:

Option A (default): Vanilla. Nothing changes; nothing is done; the player doesn't even realize these options exist (i.e. brand new players) and no tweaking is required.

Option B - hardmode. All damage output is reduced by 25%, all damage taken increased by 25%, all healing received reduced by 25%. Option B would be for those player who still want a relatively casual and stress-free experience, but who still want to feel that there is danger out in the world from time to time.

Option C - Very hard. All damage output is reduced by 50%, damage taken by 50%, all healing received reduced by 50%. A very big step up from vanilla for players who want to stay on their toes and feel like their gear upgrades and talent choices are important and meaningfull.

Option D - Hardcore. output reduced by 50%, damage taken increased by 100%, healing received reduced by 50%. The world is a very, very dangerous place, and you are punished for being stupid. If you don't know how to dodge roll, expect to die repeatedly.

Option E - Insane. Output reduced by 75%, damage taken increased by 200%, healing reduced by 50%. For masochists only who really love danger, and who want to grit their teeth and stare death in the face to see who blinks first. Stealth is a must, having an escape route is a must, and you absolutely have to know *exactly* how to play your class, or you're fodder. Ultra realistic mode, as a lot of NPCs could probably kill you in a few hits.

Of course these wouldn't have to be the exact numbers; they could be up for discussion. Personally I'd probably use Option D, or even option E if I were playing a stealth-type character (i.e. nightblade), I would enjoy feeling like a backstabbing rogue having to constantly hide in the shadows or face death. But it's something you could adjust yourself as you play.

4. Penalties for death.

Interesting stuff! Honestly I hadn't even thought of this. I am coming at this mostly from a Skyrim/Oblivion background where the "quicksave" key is a godsend, lol. Not much real penalty for dying, other than the fact that it's a pain in the butt to start over if I forgot to save. For me the "penalty" is merely the knowledge that the game beat me. But this would be interesting to explore... but my own philosophy on the whole idea would be to keep things as simple as possible.

5. Justice system.

Ugh, sorry I'm not even going to touch this one. I applaud ESO for trying this, I really do. My own point of view is that it's too watered down, but still a very interesting mechanic. Like I said in point 4, I think we really just need to stick to basics and keep the idea as simple as possible, kind of like a "beta" version of the idea. The justice system is its own thing and shouldn't be brought into the discussion... sorry. (That is not to say I don't find your ideas interesting in this regard!)

So yeah, in conclusion.... I like what another guy said here, KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid), we shouldn't try to overreach with something like this. It ought to be relatively simple, because otherwise it would require too many resources to balance and maintain over the long-term.

Thanks for providing your input, it was a very interesting read!

Dahveed

Sentinel wrote: »

My idea from another thread:

Sentinel wrote: »

How to implement a "difficulty slider"
Range: Normal-> Impossible
How to affect the character:

• Reduce damage done by X%, (Perhaps 0% to 95%)
• Increase damage received by all sources by X% (Perhaps 0% to 500%)

The slider's effects are weighed into the character, not the environment to hold, so the character is afflicted with reduced damage, and increased damage received. Therefore, someone can play and have complete and utter impossible difficulty and face mobs while a second character fights the same mobs side by side, at normal difficulty with ease.

Normal, one corner of the slider, keeps the base damage %s the same as the current game. The impossible end of the slider should be just that: impossible. It should be an extreme because the extent many would enjoy their gameplay difficulty increased can be just as extreme, and given that it is a slider, anywhere in between can fit anyone else searching for a challenge. It might be good to consider balancing the impossible end to be extremely difficult for even a v16 decked out in 501 CPs to face off a group of mobs in a starter zone. You know, for the masochists.

What limitations should it have? Slider is not functional in any group dungeon, cyrodiil, and trials. If something similar is wanted for activities such as group dungeons and trials, it may have to be a separate issue, with its own ui.

Keep in mind- this is optional, and does not require a massive overhaul of content. There are a large base of players who are not challenged, and would wish to see some modicum of difficulty in an experience that in previous TES games has universally been customizable, and considering the solo content in ESO is just that, basically solo, it is a fair request to let players customize their solo experience to their liking. There are players who are challenged with the current difficulty, they do not need to adjust anything. If someone wishes to adjust the difficulty to be impossible for anything to be done, let them. Giving options is never a bad thing. Also, this will deter players from the mentality of thinking that the only game in ESO is endgame, which is not the case.

(By the way, saying that because something hasn't been done before, it cannot be done is not an argument.)

In addition, the effects this would have on the server would be minimal, as the debuffs being applied likely have the same weight as two stars from the champion system at most.

Do not make a slider more difficult than it needs to be.

Your idea is almost identical to mine. I see we think alike.

We agree on WHAT to implement; the only question is, HOW?

Although I would gladly accept a "slider" in the UI menus somewhere, I think it would be more fun and immersive if this kind of stuff could be applied in the game itself.

Some suggestions so far include:

1 - "Peryite's Blessing", suggested by yours truly: A disease bestowed upon the player (or even upon an entire account) at a Shrine of Peryite;
2 - "Sheogorath's mouldy cheese" - a food which gives you a 2 hour-long debuff, which you eat again to refresh.
3 - Potions crafted with alchemy - apparently, very weak versions of these already exist in the game for various stats. You could call them poisons or something, I dunno. Pretty easy to imagine.
4 - Doomstones - Great idea as well, doomstones were all over the place in Oblivion. They could be located throughout the world, and would give debuffs in the same way that things like "Lady Stone" already gives you a buff.
5 - Costume from the Crown Store - Who knows, they could be creative with this.

But yeah, in terms of the general idea, we are definitely on the same page. I wish people would stop saying it can't be done.

Dahveed

Zakor wrote: »

Alphashado wrote: »

Zakor wrote: »

Alphashado wrote: »

@Dahveed you can lol all you want at the notion that 1-50 is a starter area, but this simply exemplifies your ignorance. Ignorance is a harsh word, but when you pointedly ignore the facts and base your argument around 1-50 zones, then sorry, that is pure ignorance.

1-50 is a starter area. Get the hell out of the starter area if you want to be taken seriously and stop insisting that the game is too easy based on what you find in the starter area.

Until you get it through your thick skull that leveling from V1-V16 is the VAST MAJORITY of the leveling content in the game and actually stop whining about 1-50 long enough to get a character to level 50 (You could have 8 V1 characters by now) I will no longer take you seriously and I will no longer respond to any of your posts.


Considering the time we are required to spend in V1-V16 content just to get to V16 the time required to dwell in 1-50 is minimal and therefore those zone are no different than a starting area designed to give new players and casual players time to learn the game so they are ready for the HUGE amount of content and leveling required to get from V1-V16.

I will no longer respond to anyone too stubborn to leave the starter area then complain about how easy the game is.
..................................................................................................................................


Now in regards to other responses from people who have actually played the entire game: I am opposed to a difficulty slider/debuff for two main reasons. I have stated them before and I will state them again.

#1 If your debuff effects other players IN ANY WAY, then it's a bad idea imo. Therefore, if you join an open world dynamic event like a Dolmen, Public Dungeon, or World Boss, and that event takes longer to complete than it normally would due to your debuff, then you are effecting other people whether you only have the debuff on yourself or not. When you step into an open world dynamic event, other people are counting on you to do your best to help them finish the event.

Obviously group dungeons/raids are excluded. Any debuff would have to be removed as soon as you entered. None of you have refuted this logic, but my questions is this: How is an open world event any different? People trying to finish that event are still counting on you for all the same reasons they are counting on you in a dungeon.

#2 It is my opinion that it's a waste of resources. If you want hard content, there is plenty of it to find and it's EASY to find. If it's such an easy and cost effective thing for them to do, then why has no other persistant world MMO ever done it before? Nobody has answered that question. And please don't use experimental potions that were meant as a joke and only last a few seconds as an example of how this has been done before.

1. You should stop insulting people just because they don't have finished the normal zones yet. Srsly what kind of god are you that you are better than they are?
2. If i follow your logic every "bad" player should be reported in this game since nobody can count onto him in open world events. Do you even think about that what you say there? Few days ago i had a random dungeon grp with 3 dps and me as healer on vet spindleclutch. All 3 dps together did as much damage as a friend of me is able to deal on his own. Should i report them now for being weaker than average? Damn no! And the same applies to people that are willing to "suffer" under the debuff. You can't "count" on somebody just because he is v16 or whatever level and has decent gear. He may just suck at his role, respecced to test something or whatever.
3. Why hasn't anyone done this before? Idk, better scaling, no CP, they havn't had battle leveling in questing areas? Lots of reasons actually. The main reason: The questing system in ESO works different than in other MMO. And again, your argument is "it was never doen, why should we do it?". In this way we wouldn't even have a computer to play the game.

After all you start to repeat yourself.

1. ig·no·rance
ˈiɡnərəns/
noun
noun: ignorance

lack of knowledge or information.
"he acted in ignorance of basic procedures"
synonyms: incomprehension of, unawareness of, unconsciousness of, unfamiliarity with, inexperience with, lack of knowledge about, lack of information about;

If a certain individual has 100+ hours and is still in the lowbie areas, intentionally ignores several different options to find more challenging content and refuses to advance into more challenging content, then intentionally dwells in easy content only to express concerns as to how easy the game is, then by definition he/she clearly fall under that above listed word and definition. If you or he/she finds it insulting, then so be it. It's not meant to be insulting, but rather a word used to accurately describe the situation.

2. I didn't say anything about reporting anyone. Some players are good, some players are bad. Debuffs involved in "any sort" of group activity effects everyone involved in that group activity. Therefore by joining any kind of group activity with an active debuff on, you are subjecting those individuals to your nerf. Everything else you are saying is subjective.

3. Of course I am not opposed to innovation. Don't be silly. It is my opinion that developing and implementing this particular type of "innovation" in this particular game would be a waste of resources. You have your opinion, and that is mine.

4. Everyone in this thread is repeating themselves. Don't throw stones if you live in a glass house.

There is just this ONE little point everyone else got and you just don't: We don't talk about other content. We don't want to talk about other content. We talk about the questing content in ESO and that it is too easy. That has absolutly nothing to do with decisions someone may have made. That has nothing to do with other content, may it be as challenging as it wants to.

We proved that it wouldn't be much effort to implement, we proved that there are many ways to implement it and we proved that the other players wouldn't be very much impacted by this system because you can't rely on a complete stranger. At this point i think you don't want to discuss anymore but talk badly about it. I provided answers to every of your concerns. You in turn haven't provided any proof or new argument.

And yeah, you haven't said anything about reports, but what else would you do "against bad players"? Ban them maybe? Aren't they affecting the other players just like people that would debuff themself to get a challenge? Maybe they play bad on purpose to get a challenge? Sorry to tell you, but your argument doesn't hold.

If you think what I've said was subjective you clearly haven't got the message. Actually these players affected my ingame experience. But I didn't care because I...

1. talked to them, found out 2 of them were new in this dungeon and that the other one made bad use of his skills. So i provided them help.
2. had fun with the challenge this provided. I wasn't just healing but also tanking and doing damage. We had to play the boss mechanics and almost wiped at one DPS-Check. It was definately better than rushing through that dungeon in 10 mins and goodbye.

In case you still don't got it: Talk to people! If you see someone behaves bad talk to them. If they have the debuff on them you could ask them to remove it. But don't force players to play a certain way because you don't like the other way or it is like that everywhere else. Yeah, sometimes you may have a jerk or troll in your group. Deal with it. Would be even better if those guys were a reason to don't implement a feature. Even today you got people that won't invite you to a group because you don't have an achievement or don't do xyzDPS. They also affect my ingame experience. So what?

A player that searches for a challenge knows what he is doing. He probably knows the encouters by heart or is very well equipped and skilled. Such a player would also know when he is able to turn difficulty up and when he shouldn't. And such a player would be very likely able to realize if he puts to much weight on a decent group.

1000x this.

If you're THAT worried about your precious group content being "imbalanced" or "ruined", I personally would take an expert, debuffed "hardmore" player over a non-debuffed noob player any day of the week.

For me, the debuff would be proof that the player knows what he is doing and would be a welcome addition to a challenging fight.

spoqster

There have been a few counter arguments to difficulty sliders by @Alphashado and @Selstad. These arguments include the following:

1. If a player debuffs himself, he will negatively influence group activities.
2. Other players who are not scaled down will run in and destroy the experience for the debuffed players.
3. It's hard to balance the player debuff because of the complexity of the world.

Please let me know if I missed any important ones.

I'd like to focus this discussion a little bit and take it step by step. So for the moment I am asking you to look only at Wrothgar and ignore everything else (just for now, we'll get back to it later). Let's answer the question: Can a difficulty slider be implemented for Wrothgar? And after that we will look a the arguments above and see if they are valid or not.

Currently Wrothgar is a v16 zone. Everyone who is not a v16 is scaled up to v15 while in Wrothgar. ZOS is calling this system Battle Leveling. I have tried Wrothgar at every level (fresh new character, mid-level non vet character, low-level veteran character and max-level v16 character), and the difficulty level is slightly higher for scaled characters than for v16 characters, and significantly higher for scaled characters compared to their respective leveling zones. (@Dahveed you'll enjoy it from the start, if you want to play ESO, jus buy Orsinium and play that.)

So what about v16s who think Wrothgar is too easy? There might even be people who go in there at lvl10 and think it is too easy. A difficulty slider would alleviate these problems.

Since Wrothgar is already battle-leveled, the easiest way to implement a difficulty slider is to simply tweak the player's battle leveling. What do I mean by that? Simply let the player manually choose the level to which he should be scaled up (or down) to. Let's look at an example (and I'll get to the counter arguments in a minute).

• Maybe a v16 character wants more of a challenge, because Wrothgar is the only new single player content in a while and he wants to do it on his main, and he wants to prolong the experience. With a difficulty slider he could just go into the options and set his level to v12 or v14 (instead of v16) while in Wrothgar. I'll be calling this "debuff slider".

Now, let's look at the counter arguments from above.

1. If a level 7 character goes in there, he is already weaker than a fully specced v16 character. This lvl 7 character will already contribute less damage on world bosses than a v16. If the v16 would gimp himself to v14 or v12, his damage might be comparable to that of a scaled up level 7. And remember, we're looking only at Wrothgar here, not yet at dungeons or anything else. I think it's fair to dismiss counter argument #1 on the grounds that the mentioned situation already exists in the game naturally, with no ill effect.
2. This was one of the better counter arguments. It goes like this: Player A debuffs himself for a better experience, picks a fight and musters all of his skill to beat the opponent down, only to be overrun by player B, who chose not to apply the debuff on himself, running in to finish off the enemy with a swift stroke - experience ruined for player A. First of all, this already exists in the game like the argument above (if you are in a low zone fighting mobs at your level, and a higher level jump in), but it is already a real problem in the existing game (unlike the bullet above). What can be done here? I'd like to have a discussion about this, but my immediate suggestion is to reward debuffed players with more xp and higher loot drop rates. Why? The idea behind it is two-fold: First, offering such a reward will encourage players to use the debuff, significantly lowering the number of players who play without it, and thus significantly lowering the probability that a scenario as described above will occur. Ideally the debuff slider will lead to a game environment in Wrothgar where everyone will be doing roughly the same damage, merrily playing together. Second: There may be a second bird to be killed with this stone. This mechanic could be a solution to the grinding problem. What grinding problem you ask? Many players grind their way up to v16, because they consider questing boring or too time consuming. How does the debuff slider with xp rewards solve it? If it is possible (I'd need the actual game data to be able to decide) to scale and balance this system properly, a scenario could be created where doing one very, very hard quest (with frequent dying and it takes an hour) could yield the same xp as one hour of grinding. This would at least give players (who are set on reaching endgame quickly) the choice of whether to grind or to quest.
3. I think the third argument is void in this particular scenario, as Wrothgar and the enemies within, are already balanced. Applying a debuff to a player would evenly scaled down the player and not mess with the existing balance.

For the sake of having a fruitful discussion, I suggest we discuss this particular Wrothgar specific implementation first, before we talk about how to apply this solution to the remaining leveling zones.

Note 1: Punish dying
Someone suggested optional harder punishments to dying instead of a difficulty slider. I'd like to point out that this type of game mechanic actually makes the fighting easier instead of harder. That is because in order not to die, the overall difficulty needs to be low, so that you have at least an 80% chance not to die in any fight. I think what most people in this thread are looking for is a level of constant challenge, where death is around every corner, and where many bosses will take 5 or 10 deaths to understand and beat. Thus I consider this suggestion as beside the point.

Note 2: Are 1-50 starter areas or not?
@Alphashado I understand your point, but I can hardly imagine that you will find a single employee of ZOS who will agree to call the zones 1-50 "starter areas". After all, this part of the game includes the character's main skill progression and the main story lines. BUT the main argument should not even be about how to call these zones, it should be the following: If there is a way to adjust these zones, so that everyone could enjoy them, why shouldn't that be done? After all ZOS put so much work and love into these zones, why not let ALL players enjoy them?

Dahveed

I would also just like to add that if this were added into the game today, by tomorrow I would be a $15/month subscriber and would instantly buy all available DLCs.

Selstad

Dahveed wrote: »

I really appreciate your response, you've clearly thought about a LOT of things.

I'll try to go through most of them...

1. Balance the buff to function on all monsters and areas of the game

Interesting points here, but I think we have a different mindset. You gave the example of a spellcaster being vulnerable to archers, but not so much against spells (i.e. high spell resistance). You say that we'd then have to worry about re-balancing these numbers...

My response? No, not all all. If I roll a spellcaster and I *choose* to play at a much higher difficulty, my point of view would be that this imbalance would be FANTASTIC. You know why? Because all of a sudden you've just added a MAJOR strategic consideration to every battle. My squishy mage will be kept on his toes 100% of the time in every fight. I have to know who I am fighting, what level, what class they are, how many of them are there, how to plan my escape if they hit too hard, how to mitigate their damage, LoS, stuns, CoC etc etc etc.... because those archers are now really freaking DANGEROUS! As they should be! Arrows are sharp, and when they penetrate your lungs, they tend to hurt and you normally start to bleed. So your mage might want to think about ways to prevent said arrows from entering your ribcage. As I said in previous posts, what's missing in these kinds of MMO open worlds are UNPREDICTABILITY and DANGER to add some sense of excitement and challenge. As it stands now, we basically know what's going to happen all the time, and nothing feels dangerous. Now those archers are fricken scary, and you'll have to really be aware of them at all times.

2. What if a stronger/higher level/vanilla difficulty character comes along and destroys the boss I'm fighting?

Not much I can do about that, unfortunately. Tough luck. This happens in online games, and it's something I can live with. I remember once back in Vanilla-era WoW I was wiping about 9 times in a row against an elite quest NPC, until I finally got my sh*t together and had a winning strategy,...he was going down and I was winning, it was exhilarating. Until a level ?? guy came up and finished him in one hit, lol. Sh*t happens.

3. "How much damage input/output should be tweaked?"

A: Ideally this is for the player to decide, not ZoS. Ideally (in my version of this) there would be several options. Not too many so as to be confusing and complicated unnecessarily, but not too few either. I had imagined something like this:

Option A (default): Vanilla. Nothing changes; nothing is done; the player doesn't even realize these options exist (i.e. brand new players) and no tweaking is required.

Option B - hardmode. All damage output is reduced by 25%, all damage taken increased by 25%, all healing received reduced by 25%. Option B would be for those player who still want a relatively casual and stress-free experience, but who still want to feel that there is danger out in the world from time to time.

Option C - Very hard. All damage output is reduced by 50%, damage taken by 50%, all healing received reduced by 50%. A very big step up from vanilla for players who want to stay on their toes and feel like their gear upgrades and talent choices are important and meaningfull.

Option D - Hardcore. output reduced by 50%, damage taken increased by 100%, healing received reduced by 50%. The world is a very, very dangerous place, and you are punished for being stupid. If you don't know how to dodge roll, expect to die repeatedly.

Option E - Insane. Output reduced by 75%, damage taken increased by 200%, healing reduced by 50%. For masochists only who really love danger, and who want to grit their teeth and stare death in the face to see who blinks first. Stealth is a must, having an escape route is a must, and you absolutely have to know *exactly* how to play your class, or you're fodder. Ultra realistic mode, as a lot of NPCs could probably kill you in a few hits.

Of course these wouldn't have to be the exact numbers; they could be up for discussion. Personally I'd probably use Option D, or even option E if I were playing a stealth-type character (i.e. nightblade), I would enjoy feeling like a backstabbing rogue having to constantly hide in the shadows or face death. But it's something you could adjust yourself as you play.

4. Penalties for death.

Interesting stuff! Honestly I hadn't even thought of this. I am coming at this mostly from a Skyrim/Oblivion background where the "quicksave" key is a godsend, lol. Not much real penalty for dying, other than the fact that it's a pain in the butt to start over if I forgot to save. For me the "penalty" is merely the knowledge that the game beat me. But this would be interesting to explore... but my own philosophy on the whole idea would be to keep things as simple as possible.

5. Justice system.

Ugh, sorry I'm not even going to touch this one. I applaud ESO for trying this, I really do. My own point of view is that it's too watered down, but still a very interesting mechanic. Like I said in point 4, I think we really just need to stick to basics and keep the idea as simple as possible, kind of like a "beta" version of the idea. The justice system is its own thing and shouldn't be brought into the discussion... sorry. (That is not to say I don't find your ideas interesting in this regard!)

So yeah, in conclusion.... I like what another guy said here, KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid), we shouldn't try to overreach with something like this. It ought to be relatively simple, because otherwise it would require too many resources to balance and maintain over the long-term.

Thanks for providing your input, it was a very interesting read!

My point with the spellcaster Vs archer was the imbalance of the game's mechanic. Basically a sorcerer avoids physical encounter through melee, because it's a weakness, we roll, dodge and do what we can to avoid it. An archer brings physical damage at a range, making it unavoidable and imbalanced since the game doesn't have any "ranged" damage, and counts arrows on the same ledge as swords and other melee weapons. This makes it so that a buffed archer would 1 shot a class that's vulnerable to physical damage if they're increased in damage output. A challenge doesn't necessitate that a player shouldn't stand a chance because the game's mechanics doesn't allow it.

We know what's going to happen and how to encounter it because we've played the game. That is something you can't program away. In the beginning, it would be "difficult", with these changes, but eventually you learn and the game becomes "easy" again. Simply amping up the damage output and lowering your damage and health, doesn't change too much, it's just one system and you'll learn quick enough.

In terms of players coming around and 1 shotting the mob, it is a problem if you wish for difficulty. If you take 1 player that's been debuffed and 1 player that hasn't, and put them against a boss, the debuffed player would spend more time trying to survive, while the unchanged player could ignore certain abilities or survive them where you couldn't. So the unchanged player would kill of the boss while you roll around. How fun would that be? Would you feel like you accomplished anything? Or would you feel like you were "carried" through that encounter by the stronger player?

The problem with having so many options as you suggest, is that you eventually need to balance it in the world. Difficulty isn't simply making the game, then increase / decrease health and damage output, you also need to consider what monsters and how they work. Per example in an FPS, the damage you do and receive is often not changed by big variables, instead the difficulty comes in less ammo, less health packs and more accurate enemies. Increasing and decreasing stats is an incredible difficult way of making things more difficult, since you have to make sure that each and every monster becomes more challenging, yet doesn't become impossible for the player to kill. Take the storm antronachs, back in the beginning they were impossible to kill even for Dragon Knights, on solo. Especially on Veteran rank. They had this insane AoE that they more or less pulsated all the time, and even with stamina up the wazoo, you still ran out of it and couldn't roll and dodge any more, and so died. Then again you had other monsters that you could steam roll. The difficulty in the beginning of this game was all over the place and rather unpredictable, and annoying. That is what you would introduce by a simple slider system with increased / decreased stats. Some monsters would 1 shot you without you having a chance to do anything, while others could be steamrolled.

Dahveed

Selstad wrote: »

Dahveed wrote: »

I really appreciate your response, you've clearly thought about a LOT of things.

I'll try to go through most of them...

1. Balance the buff to function on all monsters and areas of the game

Interesting points here, but I think we have a different mindset. You gave the example of a spellcaster being vulnerable to archers, but not so much against spells (i.e. high spell resistance). You say that we'd then have to worry about re-balancing these numbers...

My response? No, not all all. If I roll a spellcaster and I *choose* to play at a much higher difficulty, my point of view would be that this imbalance would be FANTASTIC. You know why? Because all of a sudden you've just added a MAJOR strategic consideration to every battle. My squishy mage will be kept on his toes 100% of the time in every fight. I have to know who I am fighting, what level, what class they are, how many of them are there, how to plan my escape if they hit too hard, how to mitigate their damage, LoS, stuns, CoC etc etc etc.... because those archers are now really freaking DANGEROUS! As they should be! Arrows are sharp, and when they penetrate your lungs, they tend to hurt and you normally start to bleed. So your mage might want to think about ways to prevent said arrows from entering your ribcage. As I said in previous posts, what's missing in these kinds of MMO open worlds are UNPREDICTABILITY and DANGER to add some sense of excitement and challenge. As it stands now, we basically know what's going to happen all the time, and nothing feels dangerous. Now those archers are fricken scary, and you'll have to really be aware of them at all times.

2. What if a stronger/higher level/vanilla difficulty character comes along and destroys the boss I'm fighting?

Not much I can do about that, unfortunately. Tough luck. This happens in online games, and it's something I can live with. I remember once back in Vanilla-era WoW I was wiping about 9 times in a row against an elite quest NPC, until I finally got my sh*t together and had a winning strategy,...he was going down and I was winning, it was exhilarating. Until a level ?? guy came up and finished him in one hit, lol. Sh*t happens.

3. "How much damage input/output should be tweaked?"

A: Ideally this is for the player to decide, not ZoS. Ideally (in my version of this) there would be several options. Not too many so as to be confusing and complicated unnecessarily, but not too few either. I had imagined something like this:

Option A (default): Vanilla. Nothing changes; nothing is done; the player doesn't even realize these options exist (i.e. brand new players) and no tweaking is required.

Option B - hardmode. All damage output is reduced by 25%, all damage taken increased by 25%, all healing received reduced by 25%. Option B would be for those player who still want a relatively casual and stress-free experience, but who still want to feel that there is danger out in the world from time to time.

Option C - Very hard. All damage output is reduced by 50%, damage taken by 50%, all healing received reduced by 50%. A very big step up from vanilla for players who want to stay on their toes and feel like their gear upgrades and talent choices are important and meaningfull.

Option D - Hardcore. output reduced by 50%, damage taken increased by 100%, healing received reduced by 50%. The world is a very, very dangerous place, and you are punished for being stupid. If you don't know how to dodge roll, expect to die repeatedly.

Option E - Insane. Output reduced by 75%, damage taken increased by 200%, healing reduced by 50%. For masochists only who really love danger, and who want to grit their teeth and stare death in the face to see who blinks first. Stealth is a must, having an escape route is a must, and you absolutely have to know *exactly* how to play your class, or you're fodder. Ultra realistic mode, as a lot of NPCs could probably kill you in a few hits.

Of course these wouldn't have to be the exact numbers; they could be up for discussion. Personally I'd probably use Option D, or even option E if I were playing a stealth-type character (i.e. nightblade), I would enjoy feeling like a backstabbing rogue having to constantly hide in the shadows or face death. But it's something you could adjust yourself as you play.

4. Penalties for death.

Interesting stuff! Honestly I hadn't even thought of this. I am coming at this mostly from a Skyrim/Oblivion background where the "quicksave" key is a godsend, lol. Not much real penalty for dying, other than the fact that it's a pain in the butt to start over if I forgot to save. For me the "penalty" is merely the knowledge that the game beat me. But this would be interesting to explore... but my own philosophy on the whole idea would be to keep things as simple as possible.

5. Justice system.

Ugh, sorry I'm not even going to touch this one. I applaud ESO for trying this, I really do. My own point of view is that it's too watered down, but still a very interesting mechanic. Like I said in point 4, I think we really just need to stick to basics and keep the idea as simple as possible, kind of like a "beta" version of the idea. The justice system is its own thing and shouldn't be brought into the discussion... sorry. (That is not to say I don't find your ideas interesting in this regard!)

So yeah, in conclusion.... I like what another guy said here, KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid), we shouldn't try to overreach with something like this. It ought to be relatively simple, because otherwise it would require too many resources to balance and maintain over the long-term.

Thanks for providing your input, it was a very interesting read!

My point with the spellcaster Vs archer was the imbalance of the game's mechanic. Basically a sorcerer avoids physical encounter through melee, because it's a weakness, we roll, dodge and do what we can to avoid it. An archer brings physical damage at a range, making it unavoidable and imbalanced since the game doesn't have any "ranged" damage, and counts arrows on the same ledge as swords and other melee weapons. This makes it so that a buffed archer would 1 shot a class that's vulnerable to physical damage if they're increased in damage output. A challenge doesn't necessitate that a player shouldn't stand a chance because the game's mechanics doesn't allow it.

We know what's going to happen and how to encounter it because we've played the game. That is something you can't program away. In the beginning, it would be "difficult", with these changes, but eventually you learn and the game becomes "easy" again. Simply amping up the damage output and lowering your damage and health, doesn't change too much, it's just one system and you'll learn quick enough.

In terms of players coming around and 1 shotting the mob, it is a problem if you wish for difficulty. If you take 1 player that's been debuffed and 1 player that hasn't, and put them against a boss, the debuffed player would spend more time trying to survive, while the unchanged player could ignore certain abilities or survive them where you couldn't. So the unchanged player would kill of the boss while you roll around. How fun would that be? Would you feel like you accomplished anything? Or would you feel like you were "carried" through that encounter by the stronger player?

The problem with having so many options as you suggest, is that you eventually need to balance it in the world. Difficulty isn't simply making the game, then increase / decrease health and damage output, you also need to consider what monsters and how they work. Per example in an FPS, the damage you do and receive is often not changed by big variables, instead the difficulty comes in less ammo, less health packs and more accurate enemies. Increasing and decreasing stats is an incredible difficult way of making things more difficult, since you have to make sure that each and every monster becomes more challenging, yet doesn't become impossible for the player to kill. Take the storm antronachs, back in the beginning they were impossible to kill even for Dragon Knights, on solo. Especially on Veteran rank. They had this insane AoE that they more or less pulsated all the time, and even with stamina up the wazoo, you still ran out of it and couldn't roll and dodge any more, and so died. Then again you had other monsters that you could steam roll. The difficulty in the beginning of this game was all over the place and rather unpredictable, and annoying. That is what you would introduce by a simple slider system with increased / decreased stats. Some monsters would 1 shot you without you having a chance to do anything, while others could be steamrolled.

Rather than nitpick examples again, I think I'll address your overall concern: That a slider would basically throw things out of balance in unexpected ways. I get it.

But I'm still willing to take this risk in order to make the game even playable. As it stands now everything is unbalanced in the player's favor, as you can see in the video. I had about 3 hours or so played on the Nightblade character, none of which have been even remotely exciting.

I think I died once because at level 4, with no gear, I was trying to solo a level 10 elite boss. It took me a few tries, but I beat him. To me *this* is interesting gameplay, and I don't see why other bosses can't be like this, instead of the pushovers they are now.

If I were geared and had a level 10 character, that boss would would have lasted about 4 seconds instead. Why? Because of the numbers, and ONLY because of the numbers.

You (and others) have argued that difficulty is more than just numbers. I of course agree with you. But in ESO's case I think that is the major problem right now.

They already have a decent combat system in place, with things like blocking, dodge rolling, positioning and LoS to consider. Furthermore, the "difficulty" or challenge in this kind of game also comes from the necessity to pay attention to your character's skill choices, your professions, your stats (health magicka stamina), your perks, your gear choices, and so forth.

However all this "challenge" is thrown out the window, simply because the numbers are so incredibly skewed in the player's favor (i.e. you kill things too quickly and take barely any damage) that all these choices are essentially meaningless; they are just aesthetic fluff.

Should I use a 2h axe or two 1h swords? Who cares. When you attack that NPC your choice will be meaningless, because it will die within 3 seconds anyways. So the only question is, which one looks cooler?

So yes, I really think that in the case of ESO it really is all about the numbers. The rest will take care of itself.

And if this occasionally throws things out of balance to make the game more unpredictable and occasionally frustrating, I would welcome this change of pace with open arms.

Destyran

Sharee wrote: »

Skip a zone. I went from rivenspire straight to bangkorai skipping alik'r desert. Made things a bit more interesting.

Im in caldwells silver on a do all quests for gold toon and im vr 6 and just reached riven spire a vr 3 area. Already leveled past bangkorai.
At this rate ill be vr 16 before reapers march

Stalwart385

Not sure why people would be against the idea. It does seem fairly simple imo also. It also seems vital to bring enjoyment to PvE in scaled areas and naturally progressing through the game. If you faceroll to endgame, you get people who think the game has no mechanics. Because they never had to use them.

I skip zones when I progress a new character. A new player shouldn't have to do that to find enjoyment. It can be game breaking for some people. Then if you go into scaled DLC you have no choice but to face roll through the quests.

Luckily when I started, the game had really difficultly. VR levels meant you better be prepared or bring a friend.

Dahveed

Stalwart385 wrote: »

Not sure why people would be against the idea. It does seem fairly simple imo also. It also seems vital to bring enjoyment to PvE in scaled areas and naturally progressing through the game. If you faceroll to endgame, you get people who think the game has no mechanics. Because they never had to use them.

I skip zones when I progress a new character. A new player shouldn't have to do that to find enjoyment. It can be game breaking for some people. Then if you go into scaled DLC you have no choice but to face roll through the quests.

Luckily when I started, the game had really difficultly. VR levels meant you better be prepared or bring a friend.

Some people just hate change. They've probably played MMOs all their lives, have grown accustomed to the "grind" to endgame, and just naturally assume that this is the way things have to be.

I think ESO has in a lot of ways missed a real opportunity to shake things up in the MMO genre by truly hybridizing their game and changing people's mentality about how to approach MMORPGs. I think they really missed it, unfortunately.

So far pretty much everything I've seen is almost a direct copy/paste of any other bland MMO with a simple change of skin and slightly tweaked mechanics. Neat that you can wear different armor, neat that the class system is pretty open, but when it comes down to the actual game, it's just a rather standard "combat simulator" where you just plough through endless NPCs for loot and progression, rather than an exciting journey of challenge and discovery.

Unique classes yes, but the combat mechanics end up being the same: walk up to an NPC, press a few buttons, and it dies. Rinse repeat x10,000 until you "level" and then finally get to something which is (supposedly) challenging or interesting, so you can repeat that thing over and over again to improve your item level and swap your blues for purples. (Like I said, just like every other MMO on the planet.)

Arreyanne

Thats a great Idea for the way you want to play. However I want to get through 1-50 as fast as possible. Everytime some place is discovered that increases XP per hour ZeniMax nerfs the crap out of it.

Take the sewers Skevers used be 500 XP each now they are 20 XP each.

So if they wont let me play the way I want why should you get preferred treatment? Just asking, what makes you a special snowflake

Dahveed

Arreyanne wrote: »

Thats a great Idea for the way you want to play. However I want to get through 1-50 as fast as possible. Everytime some place is discovered that increases XP per hour ZeniMax nerfs the crap out of it.

Take the sewers Skevers used be 500 XP each now they are 20 XP each.

So if they wont let me play the way I want why should you get preferred treatment? Just asking, what makes you a special snowflake

The proposed change wouldn't change the way you want to play at all. You could voluntarily opt out of it, i.e., do nothing and keep burning through the content.

If you want to burn through it even faster as you say, then there are already options in the game to speed it up even further, such as account-wide CP, Crown Store xp buffs, etc.

I would take your question and flip it around: If there are already options to accelerate XP and make the game even easier, why shouldn't there be the same option to decelerate it and make it harder?