Does anyone actually do their pledges anymore? Or has the game just died.

Smasherx74

Everytime I try to get on to do pledges It takes me an hour+ to find a group as DPS, but if I use a healer/tank then there will be so little DPS that I can't stand it.

There was a time when everyone was generally decent, and you only had a few noobs here and there who have no idea what they're doing. Now it seems like everyone is a noob, everytime I try to do a pledge I can't complete it because of my team. There are numerous times where I'm a DPS living on my own without a healer or tank, to the point where if you threw in 2 other NCP group members I would of been better off.

Idk what's happening but I don't see how anyones completing their pledges daily anymore. The community is dead and there is people with no idea how to build flooding the que.

STEVIL

I do daily pledges frequently but i solo them so... not as much help.

phileunderx2

I also do the pledges that I can solo. will do them on my healer when the mood strikes.

Artis

1. Find a guild. After you complete pledges, friend some tanks and healers for future.
2. For example, I currently don't do them because I got caught up in Morrowind. Slowly doing quests, trying battlegrounds ..
3. Things should come back to how they were after more people finish playing with vvardenfell. Especially because Wardens will want their Undaunted exp.

code65536

It's a feedback cycle. Experienced players will run with people they know, not randoms because of the risk of being placed with bad players. But the more this happens, the worse the random pool becomes and the more off-putting PUGing becomes for experienced players.

Magdalina

This is gonna be very old and unoriginal - join a guild. Yes, people still run pledges though the attention focus is currently on Morrowind and new Trial.

As for the noobs, I feel you. Pugs quality has declined somewhat awful since One Tamriel. It's the direct result of all of the open world being open and being nerfed down to light attack fest while having literally 0 learning curve in any part of the content up til (vet) dungeons. Zenimax clearly doesn't see it as a problem because rather than working on a learning curve they decided to remove skill trees for new players altogether so they don't even know what they can possibly do.

One other advice I can give you is make a capable friend and then queue together with one of you being dps. One dps+one support (healer/tank) get groups pretty quickly and can carry most pugs through fairly painlessly.

Roovin

Have you thought about joining a PvE guild?

Taleof2Cities

There's new content out ... players aren't running as much.

lillybit

I think partly it's the group finder, it just doesn't seem to work sometimes

Alaztor91

Queue as a DPS to ensure that there will be enough for a smooth run ---> gets an hour long queue

Queue as a healer or tank to get faster queues ---> gets 2 heavy armored light attack spamming DPS


Those 2 are the reasons that make me happy that I have a sorc and that I can solo most of the pledges within a reasonable ammount of time.

f047ys3v3n

I think 4 things are happening:
1) Players playing new content and ignoring daily type stuff because yay, new content.
2) Lots of players quit because the new resource management / combat scheme is ***.
3) Players ignoring higher level content that used to play it and pairing down their play time sort of lurking and hoping that changes are made to improve combat.
4) Players are grinding up wardens

I'm not sure if the game is dying but there are certainly a lot less active quality players on (my friends list shows half the people online it used to on average), those players are doing a lot less strenuous content, and those players are avoiding pugs to an even greater extent given how the floor dropped into the sub basement with the changes. They didn't listen and stepped in it. I'm sure there are like 50 players in battlegrounds that justify the whole mess though.

JWKe

This game plays like a single player game. That's why. WoW im getting queues at around 15 min as a dps even for dungeons that are 2-3 expansions old.

Also, I get the feeling that Zo$ is trying to hide player numbers at every turn. Only way I can gauge the amount of players playing is by the people spamming obscene things onto chat.

JWKe

f047ys3v3n wrote: »

I think 4 things are happening:
1) Players playing new content and ignoring daily type stuff because yay, new content.
2) Lots of players quit because the new resource management / combat scheme is ***.
3) Players ignoring higher level content that used to play it and pairing down their play time sort of lurking and hoping that changes are made to improve combat.
4) Players are grinding up wardens

I'm not sure if the game is dying but there are certainly a lot less active quality players on (my friends list shows half the people online it used to on average), those players are doing a lot less strenuous content, and those players are avoiding pugs to an even greater extent given how the floor dropped into the sub basement with the changes. They didn't listen and stepped in it. I'm sure there are like 50 players in battlegrounds that justify the whole mess though.

100% this.

Drummerx04

code65536 wrote: »

It's a feedback cycle. Experienced players will run with people they know, not randoms because of the risk of being placed with bad players. But the more this happens, the worse the random pool becomes and the more off-putting PUGing becomes for experienced players.

And yet when I pug pledges to try to end such a cycle and find more decent players, a certain mNB who shall remain unnamed judges me harshly for pugging anything... strange

Smasherx74

code65536 wrote: »

It's a feedback cycle. Experienced players will run with people they know, not randoms because of the risk of being placed with bad players. But the more this happens, the worse the random pool becomes and the more off-putting PUGing becomes for experienced players.

I stopped playing regularly about 9 months ago. I casually get on looking to maybe do a pledge. I used to PUG all the time, I would pug imperial city and other hard pledges. However now the community is so dead it's impossible to que for a pledge, and if you do the players are always cp100 and really bad.


I have my own guild but everyone has died besides a few randoms.

Darlgon

The list of why few pledges? Off the top of my head:

Group finder is still broken
People dont trust the group finder to find them a pledge group
People only do pledges with a group they know can and will finish, which means guidlies
Most pledges are still from 3 years ago, just revamped.

People are in Morrowind, doing new content
People are doing the dailies in Morrowind
People are doing the dailies in Gold Coast for Motif pages worth a lot of gold
People are doing the dailies in Hews Bane for Motif pages worth a lot of gold

Basically, people dont have time for daily pledges with too much other content.

kalarro

Alaztor91 wrote: »

Queue as a DPS to ensure that there will be enough for a smooth run ---> gets an hour long queue

Queue as a healer or tank to get faster queues ---> gets 2 heavy armored light attack spamming DPS


Those 2 are the reasons that make me happy that I have a sorc and that I can solo most of the pledges within a reasonable ammount of time.

If you can solo a dungeon, wouldnt it be just faster with any pugs, no matter how bad they are?

JWKe

kalarro wrote: »

Alaztor91 wrote: »

Queue as a DPS to ensure that there will be enough for a smooth run ---> gets an hour long queue

Queue as a healer or tank to get faster queues ---> gets 2 heavy armored light attack spamming DPS


Those 2 are the reasons that make me happy that I have a sorc and that I can solo most of the pledges within a reasonable ammount of time.

If you can solo a dungeon, wouldnt it be just faster with any pugs, no matter how bad they are?

Because queue times.

MjolnirVilkas

Darlgon wrote: »

The list of why few pledges? Off the top of my head:

Group finder is still broken
People dont trust the group finder to find them a pledge group
People only do pledges with a group they know can and will finish, which means guidlies
Most pledges are still from 3 years ago, just revamped.

People are in Morrowind, doing new content
People are doing the dailies in Morrowind
People are doing the dailies in Gold Coast for Motif pages worth a lot of gold
People are doing the dailies in Hews Bane for Motif pages worth a lot of gold

Basically, people dont have time for daily pledges with too much other content.

People aren't really doing pledges in Gold Coast or Hews Bane, expect odd 2-3 players. Also Hew's Bane motifs from dailies (aka Outlaw Motif) aren't worth a lot of gold at all.

Uncle_Sweetshare

code65536 wrote: »

It's a feedback cycle. Experienced players will run with people they know, not randoms because of the risk of being placed with bad players. But the more this happens, the worse the random pool becomes and the more off-putting PUGing becomes for experienced players.

Pretty much this. As someone that has tanked for more random Vet PUGs than I could possibly count, I would say 80% of the groups have terrible DPS, 15% have decent DPS, and 5% have great DPS. Healers don't matter much to me because I can heal myself, but bad DPS makes a run exponentially longer and thus more miserable.

makreth

Play with your healer, save the world. Since dps doesnlt matter except for a couple of encounters a healer can sustain the whole grp even tank at times, at least to my experience. It's not gonna be a 15min run dungeon but alas.

Wifeaggro13

Smasherx74 wrote: »

Everytime I try to get on to do pledges It takes me an hour+ to find a group as DPS, but if I use a healer/tank then there will be so little DPS that I can't stand it.

There was a time when everyone was generally decent, and you only had a few noobs here and there who have no idea what they're doing. Now it seems like everyone is a noob, everytime I try to do a pledge I can't complete it because of my team. There are numerous times where I'm a DPS living on my own without a healer or tank, to the point where if you threw in 2 other NCP group members I would of been better off.

Idk what's happening but I don't see how anyones completing their pledges daily anymore. The community is dead and there is people with no idea how to build flooding the que.

The MMO part of this game has departed

LadyLavina

Occasionally, but only because I'm a tank. If I played dps i would never bother with it given the f**kery and arguments that happen.

Alaztor91

kalarro wrote: »

If you can solo a dungeon, wouldnt it be just faster with any pugs, no matter how bad they are?

Most of the time yes, but that would mean that I have to queue as a DPS(and get a long queue) or else people are gonna be mad that I queued as a tank/healer, and that they are dying because I'm not bothering to heal them or take aggro away from them if I'm going with a solo build.

Sometimes you also get that super annoying ''tank'' that taunts stuff away from the ground aoes, or those guys that don't break free at direfrost keep last boss, etc.

Also since I don't need or want the helmet on most of the dungeons, I usually just solo them on normal unless they have mechanics that prevent it like FG2,CoH2,BH,etc.

lagrue

What's is a ... plll...edge?

No seriously though I don't do them, I lost my Dungeon group because they're all filthy casual (seriously they've had the game since console launch, and not one of them reached level 50 in like 3 years time lmao)- and I'm too antisocial to make new friends online - that means the only pledge I'm left to do is the crappy one for Delves, which is just an utter waste of time.

I can dream, that one day we can have solo instanced and scaled Dungeons, but I also know the mere suggestion of it is the equivalent of priming my butthole for a serious forum bashing.

WatchYourSixx

Actually the group finder is bugged. If you try to group with one or two other people, you have a 50/50 chance that the queue will never find anyone no matter how long you are in queue. I confirmed this with support, and they are aware of the issue. They just told me to look for improvements in future patches though.. so don't expect it to magically work in the next 2 months, or longer.

O_LYKOS

Don't know what platform you are on but when I queue for dps it's been a lot better recently on PS4.

Daily I will do both my healers on random daily dungeon, fingers crossed I get a pledge dungeon. Then I may do a few on my dps characters. I haven't waited longer than couple of minutes in a long time now.

whiteshadow711jppreub18_ESO

Darlgon wrote: »

The list of why few pledges? Off the top of my head:

Group finder is still broken
People dont trust the group finder to find them a pledge group
People only do pledges with a group they know can and will finish, which means guidlies
Most pledges are still from 3 years ago, just revamped.

People are in Morrowind, doing new content
People are doing the dailies in Morrowind
People are doing the dailies in Gold Coast for Motif pages worth a lot of gold
People are doing the dailies in Hews Bane for Motif pages worth a lot of gold

Basically, people dont have time for daily pledges with too much other content.

the Motif's that are worth alot of gold are Mazzatun, Silken Ring, Ebony and Akaviri (somewhat). The reason the 1st two are expensive is that not alot of people want to do the Veteran DLC shadow of the Hist dungeons as they are quite difficult..

RosieTheRadiant

Maybe teach some people? Seriously, how do vets ever expect newer players to learn if they are just getting pissed at them all the time?

Dasovaruilos

I used to do all pledges multiple times a time. Usually with my main healer quickly, then my tank to help guildies.

But 3 months ago ZoS broke group finder and doing them with anything other than a pre-made group of 4 is just too much of a hassle and waste of time.

I'd love to go back to doing pledges, but ZoS need to fix group finder.

Bad thing is: I ended up losing the habit of doing them. Now, I doubt I'll go back to my usual schedule even if they fix it.

It is kind of unbelievable that in 18 months playing this game the group finder has been completely broken for 6...

RoamingRiverElk

Many people already have their undaunted helms and shoulders. Also - who would want to do the same dungeons for two years and more?