My thoughts on the Mysterious Box Event

Uzmati

So the event ended just now and i wanted to share my personal pros and cons on this, so ZoS could, on theory, take note of them to improve its events. Said this, there's my pros/cons:

Pros:
- I've been leveling, playing and discovering new alters, new builds and ways to play the game, motivated by this event
- The game felt more plenty of life than ever. I've never seen the cities so full of people and new players doing this
- Now i have a bunch of lvl 20 characters ready to be leveled to level 50

Cons:
- Clearly the servers weren't prepared for both free-to-play week and MB event. The queue and the lags were crazy, specially the first days.
- Having a 20/24 repeat hour save is just ***, because you can't plan well when to use your characters without losing one wave of boxes. I think that a daily reset at, let's say, 6:00 AM would be better for this class of events.
- Due to this problems, i think we deserve one extra day of Mysterious Box event

I encourage the community to do this, exposing its personal pros and cons so maybe ZoS hear us. Anyway, i consider this a good event and i would repeat on 2018.

Irfind

Ha ha

first day no dungeon - browser was broken
last day - i have a Job ZOS ? 20h cd on box

so im missing 2 days ... nice

also the rng is strong in ZOS why no tokens and you can choose and buy what you want ?

Korah_Eaglecry

Pro: I got what I was after in the mystery boxes.
Con: It was entirely too much of a headache for me to ever want to do this sort of thing again.


I should never feel punished for being successful at something. And I felt punished more than I felt rewarded for my successful runs of the dungeons. Had the same problem with the Witches Festival, 21 sticks later and no useful drops and I quit. Wont be taking part in the New Life Festival if its similar to this sort of punishing grind.

zaria

Pro: No queue as DD, think my healers waited longer
Con: lots of fake tank an healers, wonder if its an connection. Overall an win.

Pro: +700K gold from selling blueprints, more undaunted keys and transmute crystals is nice.
Con: did not get dark shaman on 54 runs.

Overall it was an win, even if it will be some time until I run an random dungeon again.

Linaleah

pro's

leveled a bunch of characters and got like 20 cp levels. or was it 10? not sure. feels like a lot, I'm 20 away from current cap now.
got a ton of tanking and healing practice, often on characters that are less then optimal for it, but kinda interesting nonetheless (I wasn't fake tanking/healing exactly, I did cobble up some sets together and made sure to have at least one taunt
got a few nice looking furniture patterns and 2 costumes.
I may grumble about surveys, but I do use them regularly, becasue of all the writ crafting, so while I wish we didn't get them in boxes still, at least its not lockpicks.
running dungeons with my guildies was fun, even if it would often amount to careful juggling of low and high level characters

cons.

20 hour cd per character. it is stressful. it forces you to either accept that you have to skip days/characters, or spam dungeons one after another at highest possible speed per dungeon, in order to keep those cooldowns manageable. or in other words, that careful character juggling mentioned above? I wish we didn't have to resort to that, to force low level shorter dungeons.

awful rng. I managed to get 54 total runs done and out of those runs, far too many had very uninspiring rewards. coupled with annoyance of 20 hour cooldown, it was just .... disappointing.

the pool of rewards in general was far too padded with common stuff. dear zos. treasure maps are about as rare as ancient elf motifs. that is to say - not at all. and then of course... there were lockpicks. sigh. seriously?

already buggy dungeon finder made even buggier. several times, I would join in progress dungeon and would be unable to zone in. even after waiting for a few minutes (surely by then instance would make room, right? right?) would get a message of "instance is full" the "someone denied invite" bug. when you see it while solo pugging.. maybe its a bug, maybe someone walked away becasue they waited too long, who knows... but when you get it while in a premade group? yeah. bug. not to mention being unable to queue up at all. a premade group shouldn't wait 30+ minutes to be able to queue up for a dungeon.

and the last one. while yes i enjoyed running with my guildies and even most of the pugs I did.. I'm still not exactly happy about it being tied to random dungeons.

makreth

Pro: It's over. Filled up with some extra lockpicks.

Con: I'm running low on lockpicks again.

stevenbennett_ESO

Good thoughts. I feel much the same. On the Pro side, I'd never really used the Dungeon finder before, and am more likely to do so in the future.

On the con side...

- The Dungeon Finder definitely has queue bugs. I have a lot of alts, and about half are pure damage dealers. Sometimes the queue wait time was LONG. However, this doesn't seem to be related to how many damage dealers there are in the queue -- I could wait 10-15 minutes with one character, drop out of the queue, switch to another character, queue up, and be in within seconds. It's very weird, and happened multiple times.

- OTOH, perhaps I was just lucky the times I got in quickly. It would be really nice if the dungeon finder gave us more clue as to our position in the queue than just "Queued".

- Possibly because of the queue problems, I ran quite a few dungeons where the healer and/or tank was... very... suboptimal. People seemed to be queueing for those roles a LOT without being able to handle them. Fortunately, most of my builds have a lot of built in self-healing, and more than once one of my healers were assigned to do damage dealing, and ended up doing most of the party healing because the "healer" wasn't able to do so.

- At the very end, I was already in a dungeon when the event ended... Even though the Dungeon Finder said I'd get a Mysterious Reward Crate when I queued - I didn't get it because we ended the dungeon a few minutes after the deadline. A little unclear there that you needed to finish the dungeon, not just start it, before the event ended.

- There are a LOT of players who know these dungeons and slam through them fast in PUGs, when other players who are doing the dungeon for the first time are waiting on cutscenes for the quests and the like. I got left behind a lot. I kind of get their point of view - they've done this dungeon umpteen jillion times... but some of us haven't, or haven't with that particular alt. It made me very aware of the long time required for a number of those cutscenes, and made me wonder - is there any possible way to tweak those dungeons to speed that up?

- I find the RNG for picking the dungeon to be... skewed. On the first day I played, I got Banished Cells FIVE times. Four of them in a row. Despite having ESO Plus, I never got a DLC dungeon the entire event. I got a massively disproportionate number of the early dungeons (Banished Cells, Darkshade Caverns, Fungal Grotto, in particular...) despite running champion level characters for the most part -- even on characters where I've done just about every dungeon in the game. Not sure if this is intended, or a bug.

TheValar85

It was a disaster, i dont want to see any sort of event like this in the future with such a bad RNG. So if they kepp adding this RNG system to any further events it would be best if those evetns will not exists anymore.

Goddess_Althena

stevenbennett_ESO wrote: »

- I find the RNG for picking the dungeon to be... skewed. On the first day I played, I got Banished Cells FIVE times. Four of them in a row. Despite having ESO Plus, I never got a DLC dungeon the entire event. I got a massively disproportionate number of the early dungeons (Banished Cells, Darkshade Caverns, Fungal Grotto, in particular...) despite running champion level characters for the most part -- even on characters where I've done just about every dungeon in the game. Not sure if this is intended, or a bug.

It may be that Banished Cells was the pledge that day and so more people were specifically queuing for that dungeon to complete to pledge. I know it happened to me several days. Also some people were strategically running low level characters so that they would end up in the most basic entry dungeons as they're fast and easy for speed runs. I got a good deal of DLC dungeon queues and was truly cursing having ever purchased them as some of them were torture to do with everyone's crafting alts.

FloppyTouch

Pros- chefs costume, imperial mount, imperial dog, 50k gold from 10k items, 2 green 1 purple cwc motif.

Cons-no blacksmith costume

Great event I made out great was a lot of fun

luen79rwb17_ESO

I liked the event but sad that rewards were RNG. I'm mostly happy with what I got but would have liked to get the horse. Got the ugly dog instead

theivorykitty

Pros:
- My husband and I each started a new character for the event and were reminded how fun the game is when you first start out; we got to experience the new Morrowind tutorial which is way better than the old one; we set up the game to feel like a single player experience (turned off red glow on enemies, all health bars, most UI and played in the first person)... that was fun.
- I played a lot of my alts that I don't normally play, and received skill points for it (dungeons I'd never been in with them before).
- Playing my alts reminded me that I enjoy some other play styles, like tanking, which i hadn't done in a while.
- Having dungeons available all the time inspired my dad to use the dungeon finder, which previously he was always afraid to do because he feels that he isn't as skilled as other players. It went really well for him, especially since he is a real tank and people were thankful for that. So, that was lovely to see.
- I saw actual new players in dungeons and was excited to explain the mechanics to them and help them out. I am always happy to see that ESO is doing well and still getting new players.

Cons:
- The loot table was severely miss-represented in the ZOS' event announcement. While the new event text changes they posted later would have given me a much more realistic view of the awards I should have expected to receive, I'd already poured a lot of time and energy into the event before the new text was published (or at least before I'd had a chance to see it was quietly changed). That gave me feeling like ZOS intentionally misled us, though I'm guessing the marketing department and coding department just had a miscommunication. I wish they had handled it differently than just quietly changing the text. That leaves a sour taste in my mouth.
- I was severely disappointed with the 'rewards', some of them even laughable (lockpicks?). Especially considering the point above.
- The dungeon finder was broken such that it took far too long to get into dungeons.
- The event took way too much time from my personal life (my husband and I each playing with 6 to 10 alts), which I gave up believing that I would get something of value in return. Since I didn't get anything of value, I feel the time was wasted. I wish they had given everyone at least one reward.

ghwaite

I enjouée the event, had some great dungeon runs with lvl 10-20 players for a change

Some nice loot but RNG always hates me

obscure7

Pros -

- It was fun running random dungeons with random people
- It brought a lot of people out of their shells who had never done a dungeon before, and will probably be more likely to run dungeons in the future. It brought me out of my shell where I did a bunch of runs as a healer.
- decent rewards: costumes, furnishing plans
- low level characters were actually in demand, rather than scorned

Cons -

- terrible rewards: lockpicks, etc.
- RNG
- It reminded me how long the group finder has been screwy. It's been like this since the beginning, basically. It is difficult to comprehend how a billion dollar company running a AAA game can let a key feature be neglected so badly. My 2 cents: a broken grouping tool = a broken MMO.

zaria

stevenbennett_ESO wrote: »

Good thoughts. I feel much the same. On the Pro side, I'd never really used the Dungeon finder before, and am more likely to do so in the future.

On the con side...

- The Dungeon Finder definitely has queue bugs. I have a lot of alts, and about half are pure damage dealers. Sometimes the queue wait time was LONG. However, this doesn't seem to be related to how many damage dealers there are in the queue -- I could wait 10-15 minutes with one character, drop out of the queue, switch to another character, queue up, and be in within seconds. It's very weird, and happened multiple times.

- OTOH, perhaps I was just lucky the times I got in quickly. It would be really nice if the dungeon finder gave us more clue as to our position in the queue than just "Queued".

- Possibly because of the queue problems, I ran quite a few dungeons where the healer and/or tank was... very... suboptimal. People seemed to be queueing for those roles a LOT without being able to handle them. Fortunately, most of my builds have a lot of built in self-healing, and more than once one of my healers were assigned to do damage dealing, and ended up doing most of the party healing because the "healer" wasn't able to do so.

- At the very end, I was already in a dungeon when the event ended... Even though the Dungeon Finder said I'd get a Mysterious Reward Crate when I queued - I didn't get it because we ended the dungeon a few minutes after the deadline. A little unclear there that you needed to finish the dungeon, not just start it, before the event ended.

- There are a LOT of players who know these dungeons and slam through them fast in PUGs, when other players who are doing the dungeon for the first time are waiting on cutscenes for the quests and the like. I got left behind a lot. I kind of get their point of view - they've done this dungeon umpteen jillion times... but some of us haven't, or haven't with that particular alt. It made me very aware of the long time required for a number of those cutscenes, and made me wonder - is there any possible way to tweak those dungeons to speed that up?

- I find the RNG for picking the dungeon to be... skewed. On the first day I played, I got Banished Cells FIVE times. Four of them in a row. Despite having ESO Plus, I never got a DLC dungeon the entire event. I got a massively disproportionate number of the early dungeons (Banished Cells, Darkshade Caverns, Fungal Grotto, in particular...) despite running champion level characters for the most part -- even on characters where I've done just about every dungeon in the game. Not sure if this is intended, or a bug.

It has an queue bug, very often then it says some refuses to queue its the server who refuses not the players. Why should a tank refuse, he has no queue. We even got some refuses lots of time in an row in an preformed group.
Also if you get you are in front of queue you are in front and usual get in fast except this bug. Another bug is phantom queue, it say you are queued and in front of queue but wait forever, in this case leave and re-queue, you tend to keep your place in queue. I generally got in very fast after the first days chaos, even on damage dealer who normally has 10 minutes queue.

And yes giving position in queue or at least an status like the population bar in cyrodil would be nice.

Lots of players run fake healer and tanks to get faster queue, This works most of the time in the normal dungeons, not always
Also the stress factor was because many was running all their characters and wanted to be done fast, normally things is far more relaxed, not always but most of the time.

RNG is also slanted because of the event, lots more low level characters running, they always get the easy dungeons so if you end with them you get it. Also if all 4 select random and one don't have the dlc you will not get an dlc dungeon.
Normally you tend to get pledge dungeons a lot more, as lots do them and if you select random you fill out missing slots.
DLC is also pretty common for random normal as many to the non dlc as veteran and the harder dlc in normal.

Zhaedri

Pros:
-Got over my irrational fear of group content
-Learned and leveled my alts in a way that taught me their class skills, rotations, and roles rather than just tagging targets at Dolmens
-Met some cool people and developed team skills together. Had some really amazing groups, as well as some less than amazing but very resilient and friendly players.
-Got to do some runs with friends and guildies, and made at least one new friend
-Gave away 1 WW bite and 1 Vamp bite to people I ran with; nice to see the skill points put into being able to do that not wasted
-Discovered I really enjoy the healer role in dungeons (at least in normals) more than damage; moved one character to fully heals from heals/dps. May decide to move other heals/dps to heals/heals as well. Keeping heals/tank as that for now.
-Got a bunch of CWC furnishing plans. I'm not fond of the aesthetic of CWC so these plans are being sold.
-Got a horse, treasure hunter, and dark shaman drops.
-Tons of random gear to deconstruct between my main crafter and baby crafter. Lots of 'Intricate' gear and blues for leveling skill.
-Imperial crafting motif found in an urn in Direfrost Keep. Nice.
-Saw a lot of content I had not previously seen. Previously doing dungeons was a once every 3 months thing so over the 2 years or so of playing the game, very few dungeons were done. This event and the desire for some of the rewards from the mystery boxes drew me out to play the dungeons and experience the content.
-Some of my characters got the chance to feel badass. Did a single City of Ash II run that felt like it took for-ever. The character I was on was meant for dps/tank but did not have the confidence to run as tank so was skilled as dps. Being able to more or less just walk through fire in all-black demonic looking armor and kick butt was a cool feeling when most of my damage dealers are a lil bit squishy.
-Some runs gave me warm fuzzies, like the one I was on where all the other characters were level 14 or less. The patience that everyone had to look at stuff, gather loot, do the quest, learn or do the mechanics, and generally be chill was so nice. It took longer than a usual speedrun or run with characters that had more skills or in CP levels, but honestly not by much and it was a good time. A different dungeon and group had this conversation: Group Chat: Tank> Sorry for messing up. Haven't seen this one before and first time tanking. Everyone else> Nah man its all good, everyone has to learn somewhere. You did ok. (I love seeing players help players and treat each other gently)
-Thought I would get yelled at if my dps wasn't high enough, or similar mechanics based complaints. Thought I would get kicked from groups. This did not happen at all, and was able to perform the basic functions of my assigned roles well enough. I should probably stop letting elitist forum snobs make me feel my characters are totally inadequate. Running normals mostly amounted to 'don't stand in the stupid if you can avoid it.'
-DPS queue was usually not to bad; more often than not, less than 7min. Healer popped right away.

Cons:
-The endless bugs associated with group finder that plagued the event. Premades and the endless 'Someone in your group has declined the invite'. Servers going down at the start. Group finder sometimes being outright broken. Once queued solo as dps and waited in the queue for 15 min, but someone declined and it told me I was moved to the front of the queue. Stayed queued for another 55 min with no further pops before switching characters. Pretty sure that was some sort of bug and it just forgot I was there.
-Free weekend + event brought out more boneheads than usual. Roughly one-third of the groups I was placed with had one or more of the following major issues: rude/trash talky, running ahead without letting others take or do quest, not performing chosen/assigned role, or not bothering to say anything or even hello in group chat.
-Nine characters every day. 6 dps and 3 healers. Lost the entirety of my weekend to this. 54 runs total.
-Poor loot table from mystery boxes. Wanting stuff from the boxes was what dragged me to participate, and getting things like lockpicks and maps was really frustrating. Did not get the two items I wanted which were the Chef and Blacksmith costumes from the 54 runs I did, which I would have happily paid for had they been put into the crown store. I think the loot and 'celebration' aspect of the event were very poorly handled. Drop chance of hyped items was terrible.
-Did not have confidence to try tanking on characters I built to have that as one of or their main role and ran them as dps. This one is more on me than anything else. Inflicting my no-experience on random others with this role makes me nervous.
-Inventory juggling game. Nine characters getting a ton of gear every run to funnel to crafters for decon or research. Had to expand my bank to 300 slots and still had issues with inventory micromanagement.
-One of my characters gets to spend the next three days doing maps and surveys. I already had a bunch saved up, but now I have no choice but to do them or destroy them. Thank the gods for that addon.
-My dedication to running through every alt and getting their mount training faltered. Missed a few days of that and some timers got screwed up for it too. Easy fix at least.

I could expound on the loot drop con, but it really only needs one bullet point. As ragey as I got about the drop table, overall the event was a positive experience for me, and grinding for the damn crates was the only thing that pulled me into it. Some of my characters will continue to do dungeons more often, some won't.

So, next time they do an event like this, I hope they change how the loot works instead of tying it entirely to RNG, and address the issues related to the downtime and bugs with whatever system or process is going to be filled with people. But I do hope they do more events that are not tied to real world holidays or their in-game equivalents.

Kiralyn2000

Pros - it got me to try dungeons in this game for the first time; pug dungeon runs went well (max ~10m queues, almost no group issues); some good XP; got the loot I wanted

Cons - it's not going to convince me to run dungeons regularly (more of a con for ZOS, I suppose)

Wildberryjack

It would be nice if we did not have to wait twenty hours to go again. Ten hours is plenty. Way too many of those boxes had pure junk in them so letting us try more times would be nice. Or don't have such junk in the boxes at all. Sure I know we can't expect a guaranteed mount, costume, or pet on every run, but the number of times I got pocket change and a lockpick was a bad joke. Crap like that doesn't encourage people to keep running the event.

Also, yeah the queue issue was quite a mess. Half the time it didn't work right so I had to leave and requeue multiple times.

Acrolas

Uzmati wrote: »

Anyway, i consider this a good event and i would repeat on 2018.

Did you read the box?

Nihilos

I got a bunch of crown repair kits and crown mimic stones


PREEEETTTY DOPE DUDE

code65536

I took a systematic approach to the event, in part because I would be traveling this week, so I wanted to maximized the first few days.

I coordinated runs with a couple of friends, and I was able to get 23 boxes (across multiple accounts on both NA and EU) in the span of 3 hours. The groups were 100% preformed, so queues were instant. We always made sure that each run had one strong character who could solo the dungeon and essentially carry the alts that were hitchhiking, and we tried to space out our lowbie alts, because the presence of a lowbie alt meant that we would not get a DLC dungeon and if sufficiently low-level, it'd mean that we'd get dungeons like FG1/SC1/BC1.

It was still exhausting, but the end result was that we were an extremely fast well-oiled box-farming machine, and I think the ease with which we farmed the boxes took away a lot of the downside.

But for people who were using the dungeon finder in the more typical way--without a full preformed group, having to deal with PUGs, queue times, etc., I can see it being very frustrating. On the last few days of the event, I did my runs the "normal" way because I was traveling and could only do a handful of runs at weird hours, and I simply can't imagine doing the number of characters that I did without my pre-organized groups.

And I think that's where a lot of the frustration comes from--the reward just doesn't seem to fit the effort for the people doing the event the way the devs intended.

And I'll echo again the call for an event token system. I mean, how long have people cried about the RNG in this game? ZOS had drastically increased monster helm/shoulder drop rates (used to not be guarantees) and Master/Maelstrom weapon drop rates (also used to not be guarantees) and on top of that, they added a token system (Transmutation). All because getting screwed by RNG isn't fun. Why didn't they apply this lesson to events like this?

Zhaedri

Acrolas wrote: »

Uzmati wrote: »

Anyway, i consider this a good event and i would repeat on 2018.

Did you read the box?

Since when are lockpicks, undaunted plunder, furnishing patterns, and regular treasure maps crown store items?

TarrNokk

Haha you guys who complain and demand one more day are so pathetic.

Caff32

The biggest thing this event revealed is how broken the dungeon finder is on Xbox. I would frequently get stuck in a loop when I queued with another person where the dungeon finder would give the ready check over and over again, sometimes faster than we could even respond before it would eventually put us in the dungeon. Sometimes you'd have to ready check 25-30 times before it would actually pop even with a premade group. The ready check has NEVER worked properly and should just be eliminated.

And lockpicks should never be a reward for an event. That's just embarrassing.

Phyllya

Zhaedri wrote: »

Acrolas wrote: »

Uzmati wrote: »

Anyway, i consider this a good event and i would repeat on 2018.

Did you read the box?

Since when are lockpicks, undaunted plunder, furnishing patterns, and regular treasure maps crown store items?

Maybe we will be able to buy gold and monster sets on crown store .. but.. since it didnt happen yet.. it was just a fake event where only free week players get mounts that they will never use again.. a bit sad, drop % were terrible apart from the fake rewards.

VirtualElizabeth

Pros: Lots of fun running dungeons with my friends. My expectation of loot was very low so I was pleasantly surprised at to what I received.
Cons: Made me realize how clunky the 20 hour reset thing is. @ZOS_GinaBruno - Please look into changing the dungeon reset to match the daily writs. A set time would be a lot better for being able to plan for dungeon runs in the future.

Thanks!

Acrolas

Zhaedri wrote: »

Since when are lockpicks, undaunted plunder, furnishing patterns, and regular treasure maps crown store items?

The takeaway was that this was just for the sweepstakes and will not be repeated.

But with the potential to do around 84 dungeon runs per account, the average box had one crown store item, with some containing none, and some containing two. There had to be filler boxes so that the average reward was the same whether you ran 2 or 7 or 14 a day.

The false expectation was thinking you'd grab every single pet, mount, or costume when it would impossible to achieve that many rare items even at maximum dungeon runs.

LadyAstrum

Positives:

Encouraged people out of their comfort zones to try dungeons and pugs (me included). Learnt a few things. Got some clockwork recipes, chef outfit, and the dog. Came across some friendly people.

Negatives:

Disappointing loot, such as: maps and dye stamps. Crashing upon entering dungeons. Once-per-day boxes. Should be able to farm them.

zaria

Phyllya wrote: »

Zhaedri wrote: »

Acrolas wrote: »

Uzmati wrote: »

Anyway, i consider this a good event and i would repeat on 2018.

Did you read the box?

Since when are lockpicks, undaunted plunder, furnishing patterns, and regular treasure maps crown store items?

Maybe we will be able to buy gold and monster sets on crown store .. but.. since it didnt happen yet.. it was just a fake event where only free week players get mounts that they will never use again.. a bit sad, drop % were terrible apart from the fake rewards.

Some other said that the furniture plans should be the rare drops to reward grinders, the costumes, horse and dog should be pretty easy to get so players with just one character also had an chance. I made an million, not earned so much since the anniversary event.

zaria

VirtualElizabeth wrote: »

Pros: Lots of fun running dungeons with my friends. My expectation of loot was very low so I was pleasantly surprised at to what I received.
Cons: Made me realize how clunky the 20 hour reset thing is. @ZOS_GinaBruno - Please look into changing the dungeon reset to match the daily writs. A set time would be a lot better for being able to plan for dungeon runs in the future.

Thanks!

I found it clunky back during the witchmother event then I ran random dailies on alts to level them, random dailies on a low level alt with 100% xp bonus and +50% xp potion gives you 3 levels
it also give skill points who is nice for the ones who ran into my characters during this event.

Rittings

Irfind wrote: »

Ha ha

first day no dungeon - browser was broken
last day - i have a Job ZOS ? 20h cd on box

so im missing 2 days ... nice

also the rng is strong in ZOS why no tokens and you can choose and buy what you want ?

Fully agree... a token system would have been SUPERB... Rewarding those who put the effort in...

Nothing was more discouraging to me than running 150+ random dungeons on my NA/EU toons and drawing a blank and watching a guildie run 2 dungeons and get the mount and pet right off the bat.

Because of this event, I'm having an ESO free week... it might even be the nail in the coffin.