Can ESO get a bit more social and sandboxy?

LaiTash

Now this is gonna be a meaningless wall of text. I don't really have any ideas or proposals on how to improve things and i leave it to professionals i know zeni has in their stuff. And my english isn't that good so you might want to avoid reading this.

Now, for the good part: the game is AWESOME! Seriously, it's a shiny top-purple-quality product. The amount of details, the storylines, the sounds, the visual design - this is all awesome. I play with quest markers disabled because it makes questing even more interesting. If a couple of years ago someone told me i'll be doing this in a MMO i'd think he's a crazy braindead psychopath and should be locked away before he harms anybody. And now i'm slacking and nolifing like i'm not over30 and don't have any responsibilities. Every time i'm thinking i'm done with a zone and there's nothing else to look at, ESO surprises me, be it a random letter with no ingame value at all (i was virtually shocked when i saw a Darien's letter in Orsinium temple library), some unexpected dialogue, just bits and details. Seriously, try to disable all those markers (questgivers included) and you'll be surprised how incredibly detailed this game is. This is great. Designers, loremasters, scriptwriters, artists etc - i love them all.

It could become a game of year and beat witcher 3 to death if zeni were selling it as a single player RPG. Unfortunately, this is where problems begin. The MMO part.

Now, when someone makes a MMO he faces two things: limitations and opportunities. And we have plenty of the former. We can't favor one faction over the other if the outcome would be visible to other players. We can't kill someone and expect he's dead for good. We can't walk into an ayleid ruin and find a unique kickass legendary boomstick like in original ESO titles. We can't even kill an important NPC and render story progression impossible like in Morrowind. Many things that were great in single-player games are in the trash bin because it would screw up the balance or are technically impossible to recreate in a MMO. Or some people want a pet dragon, but even if it made sence lore-wise, everyone can't have a pet dragon. Well, it's not a problem, really. We all understand the limitations. The real problem here is opportunities. And that's where zeni screwed everything.

These opportunities of a MMO are meant to come from social and/or PvP features. Now what we do have: group dungeons, random grouping, trading, cyrodiil PvP.

On group dungeons and grouping: i HATE it and i think i'm not alone here. I'd prefer to be able to solo all the dungeons, so at least i could understand WTF is going on story-wise, but instead i have to skip all conversations. I've been to some dungeons many times and still don't get what's going on there. Fellow group members are 95% silent. Hello, thank you, bie. I know grouping is inevitable in a MMO (well at least it's a truth for most of them). I know there are lot of people who love it. I know there are even people who'd wait until i finally read all the NPC dialogue text and maybe even give me the time to hear all the voice over and MAYBE even read all the notes and letters lying around. Too bad they rarely meet each other and if there's a one such person, the other rushes into action. So for me it's not an advantage of this game being a MMO but actually the opposite. The utter annoyance. Even if i find an RP guild who'd be willing to run dungeons in such a slacky manner i doubt they are willing to RP the same dungeon run over and over.

And i tusking KNOW i'm not alone. People hate each other. People don't like other players around. If i see a delve or a dungeon i've never been to before and there's another player enters it, i wait for a couple of minutes hoping he/she will be to deep in the dungeon by then and i'll never see him/her again and the respawn will undo the damage. I know it shouldn't be like this. I know i shouldn't act like this. I've been to online gaming since the time of MUDs and had no such problems. I would expect people to avoid a fellow player IF it was a FFA open world PvP game, but even in such games people tend to be more friendly and social. There you have friends, foes, you just get to know other players by names... not here. Or is it normal to theme park mmos? Honestly, i've never played one before. If that's correct then something is very wrong about the whole idea of theme park.

I think that's because people don't need other players. If i neither need other players nor i have a reason to fear them, i just don't give a tusk about them. Instead of being a help or a threat they become annoyance. In the end, when you look behind all the quests and details it's a very empty game. No stories to tell except for the ones zeni has written for you. But you don't tell them because everyone already know that story. Or if he doesn't it'll be a spoiler.

Trading - weeeeell. I like the guild vendors. It's almost as good as UO player vendors, except for i don't get to personalize my shop. But... unfortunately it's mostly all about the looted stuff. BECAUSE, given enough gold, you can max any tradeskill in like an hour, and the amount of SP makes turning to other players pointless. Fortunately someone came up with a brilliant idea of trait research, so lowbies like me still must ask their assistance to craft a high-tear 9-traits set. But this is only good for blacksmithing/woodworking/clothing. As for the alchemy/provisioning... who the tusk thought adding combat passives to tradskill lines is a good idea? This way, EVEN if leveling those skills were taking more then a couple of days with no gp investment, everyone still had them. Because we all want these pasives. So much for the division of labour. I wonder why people still buy my potions sometimes. I think that's because their price is cheaper then the sum of their components. I know the division of labour idea don't work so well in other mmos, because of alts or exhaused economy. Still it's rarely that bad. Because here, it was designed not to work.

PvP is a bit better. I don't like being confined to a large battleground nor i revere the RvR idea, but still that's something that brings players together in a reasonable manner. Too bad it's usually quite random run there - oh we're no longer needed here - lets run there. Some sort of central command would certainly help. But as i said, i'm not here to give any ideas. Otherwise, it will get down to PvP-justice discussion, and i've had enough of this.

Duh. Time to get to bed.

newtinmpls

I'm sorry for your frustration. I'm glad you like the game.

I'd love to meet you in-game, as I too like to *** around in lairs/undaunted areas and make sure I loot every single crate and say hi to folks.

I tend to try and Skype with folks who will let me (no visual, pointless as we are all in game) makes 'sploring that much more enjoyable.

disintegr8

Quite a long read.

Group finder is mostly only good for finding people to complete a dungeon with. If you want to do the dungeon and take time to explore, interact and the like, you need to find some friends or join a guild with like minded people.

I think I enjoyed group dungeons before I used group finder because you needed to be more sociable to find players. This meant you were usually talking to each other before you started the run and were quite often of similar levels. The dungeon also stayed down at a lower level instead of everything being leveled to CP160.

Although mostly not needed, friends can be found for PVE and it can be a lot of fun running with other people. I prefer to run solo myself most of the time as I don't want to feel tied into others demands. Currently I spend a bit of time online with a friend in the US (I am in Oz) and it works well because of the time zone difference - our online times crossover so we run together for a while but still each have our own time when the other is not on.

When you are leveling up your initial characters it is often good to have someone to help out with bosses, dolmens and such, but when it comes to 2nd, 3rd or 4th characters and you have experience and CP behind you, most of them can be soloed. The trick with finding someone to run with when leveling is trying to match character levels. If one of you is a much higher level it takes away a lot of t he fun.

I think the increased number of sets being brought out and veteran removal have had a negative impact on trading and crafting. We all have to level up through all of the different vet level gear but only ever need it on our first character. Unless they change crafting I think a lot of people will not bother to even start it in the future, which is a shame because it will become another part of the came that is obsolete.

PVP can be fun but it can also be mindless - we take a keep and move on to take a resource, another faction comes back and retakes what we took 10 minutes ago and so the circle goes round and round. I can be in a campaign and see the screen all red and come back two hours later to see it all yellow or blue. Maybe it isn't a big enough area or something and that is why it just seems to be a constant repetition of we take something, we lose it, we retake it, etc.

SantieClaws

Khajiit is not sure she wishes to be social when she is using the sandbox.

This one she thinks it is perhaps one of those times when it is better for all to be alone yes.

Yours with paws
Santie Claws

Mandragora

ESO actually made me to like other players around by giving them disguieses. I never experienced that feeling like saying to my self: so many NPCs around, it looks almost crowded, just to realised it is so many players doing the same quest!

I have to agree that ESO would be easily the best singleplayer storytelling game, even competing with Witcher 3, but on the other hand I really miss some features from Skyrim, that would make this game much better MMO. So I feel a bit strange when someone turns this 180% around saying that those, who want more of Skyrim made bad reviews about this game. Not true, it is that I know, that some features from Skyrim would make this game much more popular MMO, but they taken a lot of features from Oblivion - like story based quests, which is not bad, but I think that Oblivion isn't ideal model for MMO.