Layers of Grind and Making the Grind Moar Grindy - Or Not Maybe?

Magenpie

I forgot to say something in another thread about the Murkmire event, but realised I had a lot to say, and decided to start my own. Apologies, this is probably going to be tldr, but it's regarding one of my pet peeves which I also think caused the event frustration.

ZOS is obsessed with making us go through stages of gameplay, having layers of mechanics and currency, whether it's getting boxes, to get fragments, to get pets/momentos, or getting capped tickets, to buy bloody feathers to get a limited time indrik, or buying Crowns, to get Crates, to get Gems. And it drives me effing NUTS.

I can imagine some of the thinking behind it, I think? It creates busy work, which means people spend more time in the game. It eeks out the reward system by giving us rewards for rewards for rewards, and ofc in terms of Crowns, it hides the actual RL money value of the store items. I'll get on to the Crown Store, but the in game stuff is just so...damn...dreary. All mmos are made of grind from top to bottom, but bloody hell there are ways of lightening the process. There are elements of ESO determined to make the whole experience as drawn out and joyless as possible. That's what events are supposed to be, surely, a break from the grind where you give people more carrots than sticks to keep them playing the game.

I honestly think it's partly responsible for the Murkmire disgruntlement. It's several layers of frustration and disappointment. A miserable drop rate for boxes and tickets, miserable drop rate for artifacts in the boxes, and a miserly cap on the ticket cache. It's like there's a big sign in the ZOS office saying, 'Remember, Treat 'Em Mean, To Keep 'Em Keen'.

Just let the stuff DROP! Why do we need to collect 'bits' of things? It's so painfully dull. If you want to retain players in a zone, let them collect multiple pets or momentos, making some rarer than others, but give them actual items. I'm sorry to invoke WoW here, but I've killed a certain kind of mob for DAYS because I know a pet drops from them. If I get fed up, I'll go and do something else and come back another time, but I know when it drops, I'll have it. Not a 1/10 body part. The process in ESO is so disheartening.

I want to play this game because I like it, so much so that I've subbed for a year for the first time ever in any mmo I've played. I even wouldn't mind spending more money in the cash shop, if I felt I wasn't being treated like a rube at carnival game. So rather than spending money because I feel happy about it, I am extremely careful about when and where I spend my crowns, because I know I'm being 'handled' with imaginary limited stock, currency exchange and a lack of items I want to buy when I want them. I can't just make an Argonian, rock up to the shop and buy a load of Argonian themed things because it's all carefully drip fed to make me panic buy on another occasion. Apparently. Except I see it coming, it p**ses me off, so I don't.

Before anyone says anything edgy about capitalism, you can sell people things without treating them poorly or like commodities themselves. Yes, it's up to me whether I want to play the game or not, but I'm also within my rights to express my opinions about a product I'm using, especially if I think it could be improved. I don't believe ESO *needs* to work this way in order to make (more) money and grow as a game. I think there are more imaginative generous fun ways of getting people to stick with it.

I'm sorry to sound so negative, I honestly love the game and I'm having a great time in it for the most part, but the 'marketing' methods are SO DAMN OBVIOUS and awful, it ruins my immersion (man,) and makes me feel resentful about spending any more money on the game other than my sub and expansions. I'm really not complaining for enjoyment, I genuinely want ESO to make pots of money, be really successful and go from strength to strength.

If you read all this, thanks for sticking with me.

Brandathorbel

Events are designed to bring people back into the game
These bad decisions only push those people out for good.

They will continue to lose players if they don't start making sound decisions.

VaranisArano

Your description of what ZOS is doing and why is pretty accurate.

Thing is, they won't stop doing it because there are plenty of bright-eyed and bushy-tailed new players for whom this is all very exciting who will replace the tired or jaded players who are just done with the event grind or grinding in general.

Michae

Spot on, my friend.

Brandathorbel

I think it will push away these new players when they see how bad the grind is for things

January1171

The way this event was designed can only be explained two ways

1) ZOS was trying to keep people from min/maxing the event and entice them to actually play the zone. I do get that if they made the rewards too easy, people would just grind one thing and use it to earn gold, instead of actually playing and enjoying the zone.

2) Cash grab

Either way, the way they designed it was a sure fire way to get people to min/max dailies for rewards only kindof tied to the event and/or leave the zone as soon as possible.

NordSwordnBoard

At the end of the day, did I really need a booger pet? No, but I'm not that mad at how I had to get it. It went quickly for me, I was lucky Vet Players need to realize nobody will judge them for skipping these things, and you feel better when you do sometimes.

The mounts obtainable only by crate, with no gem option are egregious imo. Although my opinion on that could change if I had one, to keep it very rare lol.

The games playability is just bad right now, and if we get what PC got like we usually do on console... Well, who buys crates if theyre hardly playing?

Magenpie

I can't edit my original post for some reason, but I also meant to say, if you've subbed for any length of time, the drawn out reward => reward => reward layer mechanics are doubly infuriating because you've already paid your damn money to be in the game. You don't need the busy work to make you stay in, you're already there!

Unless it's for log in stats, but we've got the log in rewards to cover that, right?

Kartalin

I stepped into Murkmire just once during this event. I got one of the boxes with some random fragment that I'll never find the remaining bits for. I didn't even get event tickets since I was maxed at 12 from the previous event. I went to the impresario and didn't find a single thing I wanted to spend those tickets on so I will go into the next event still having those 12 tickets. I created one indrik pet over the past couple years and honestly that's one more than I really care about.

I understand that some people are really into these events and that's fine. But I'm not and that's fine too. The only thing that I'm interested in is if there's double exp if I need to level yet another character (13 max level, almost 1400 cp, after almost 6 years of playing) or if there's double AP or double drops for something I actually need.

Best thing for your own sanity is to decide whether or not you really want to participate in these things. Just don't do it because you feel you are supposed to do so.

Magenpie

Kartalin wrote: »

I stepped into Murkmire just once during this event. I got one of the boxes with some random fragment that I'll never find the remaining bits for. I didn't even get event tickets since I was maxed at 12 from the previous event. I went to the impresario and didn't find a single thing I wanted to spend those tickets on so I will go into the next event still having those 12 tickets. I created one indrik pet over the past couple years and honestly that's one more than I really care about.

I understand that some people are really into these events and that's fine. But I'm not and that's fine too. The only thing that I'm interested in is if there's double exp if I need to level yet another character (13 max level, almost 1400 cp, after almost 6 years of playing) or if there's double AP or double drops for something I actually need.

Best thing for your own sanity is to decide whether or not you really want to participate in these things. Just don't do it because you feel you are supposed to do so.

What frustrates me isn't that I feel I need to take part in them, but I want them to be BETTER, because they could be! They could add life to the game rather than drudgery. Y'know a 'Yay, it's Murkmire Festival! I got a pet/bit of furniture/mount that's cool!' rather than, 'Meh...to get anything I have to do a bunch of repetitive boring stuff, to get more boring stuff and I might not get anything anyway. I'll not bother.'

We know mmos are all basically The Grind, but there are better ways of getting people to do more of it, and importantly making people feel good when they do.

Starlock

Magenpie wrote: »

I'm sorry to sound so negative, I honestly love the game and I'm having a great time in it for the most part, but the 'marketing' methods are SO DAMN OBVIOUS and awful, it ruins my immersion (man,) and makes me feel resentful about spending any more money on the game other than my sub and expansions. I'm really not complaining for enjoyment, I genuinely want ESO to make pots of money, be really successful and go from strength to strength.

I'm in much the same place right now.

Elder Scrolls Online is a solid game that delivers excellent content upgrades on a rapid schedule. So rapid that it's pretty mystifying how it all gets done and the team responsible for this deserve serious kudos for their hard work. We have a fantastic landscape in this game for telling our own stories (among other things) that has few parallels. This game deserves its success. Between the subscription model and delivering solid content upgrades, that revenue by itself is enough to keep a studio going.

However, like so many things, excessive greed and profit motive is ruinous. The game doesn't really need a cash shop. I don't have a problem with its presence as an additional revenue stream provided its offerings are reasonable and don't excuse bad game design elements. The cash shop has never been either of those things, unfortunately, but it has gotten significantly worse for the customer over time. And as you begin to watch the trend line of how this game is monetized, it absolutely makes a customer feel resentful about spending money on this game. I'm right there with you.

This game has become a bad deal. I stopped even glancing sideways at crown packs last year because of it. After this latest event fiasco, it's looking quite likely this'll be my last year playing this game at all. That's unfortunate, because stripped of all its predatory monetization ESO is a great game. They need to stop ruining it.

FierceSam

I think you’re pulling two strands together here.

I like the idea of events. They can be fun things that bring players into the game or highlight a particular area or play type that players may not be familiar with and build up a critical mass in those areas. I’ve really enjoyed many of them.

I don’t like the grindy predatory side of them which ZOS seems determined to introduce. The unnecessary taskage, the badly designed, poorly resourced, long time spawning opponents. The despicable methods of reward distribution. Everything that conspires to reduce fun events into tedium and choreage . Above all the collective lack of imagination and thought that seems to have gone into them. It’s almost as if the dev team aren’t even involved in these and they’re simply being contracted out to some commission incentivised marketing spav.

They seem doubly less fun when you consider they’re occurring at the same time as key elements of the game are being released. So you have Dragonhold released 3 days into the Witches Festival (which totally killed any anticipation or enthusiasm for the DLC), Harrowstorm being released halfway through Murkfest. 2 totally separate things fighting for the same players and PR space. Over and over again. It really is as if one side of the room doesn’t know (or care about) what the other side is doing. Which really isn’t a great vibe to be sending to your players.

SidraWillowsky

Are they ever going to stop with the *** Indriks? I hate them and have zero interest in the mounts. Hasn't that all been played out at this point? It's been over a year of feathers...

Magenpie

FierceSam wrote: »

I don’t like the grindy predatory side of them which ZOS seems determined to introduce. The unnecessary taskage, the badly designed, poorly resourced, long time spawning opponents. The despicable methods of reward distribution. Everything that conspires to reduce fun events into tedium and choreage . Above all the collective lack of imagination and thought that seems to have gone into them. It’s almost as if the dev team aren’t even involved in these and they’re simply being contracted out to some commission incentivised marketing spav.

Absolutely, but especially this, and omg you're so right about the 'farmed out' construction. That's EXACTLY how it feels. No love or care, design or purpose, just a thing to be a thing to make players do stuff. So depressing!

Veinblood1965

I'm not up to speed on who owns what with this game but my money is on whoever calls the shots is just demanding too high of a percentage of the profits. Limited budget left over for ground breaking programming anymore which just leaves reskins. True new programming is going into new expansions at they turn a profit and also keep players playing and players who have quit like myself coming back) I'd imagine they were told that if they want more money then they need to find a way to increase profits. Although many players leave due to this much more probably purchase crown store items which makes way more profit than was lost due to monthly subscription fees.

I haven't bought one single thing for cash with this game except the monthly sub and ESO plus since I enjoy crafting. And agree with the OP that it's super obvious and in all likelihood the cash grab is going to get worse.

Just my guess as to what is going on.

FierceSam

SidraWillowsky wrote: »

Are they ever going to stop with the *** Indriks? I hate them and have zero interest in the mounts. Hasn't that all been played out at this point? It's been over a year of feathers...

Oh yes this ^^

<bangs head on table repeatedly>

#deathtoindriks

Hellvlad

Another issue is that by creating events over events for any little thing, you get more vents uptime than "regular" time in the game. In the end the "event" becomes the norm, and especially given the quality of the last ones, playing your ESO daily routine is slowly changing into " go there, do this little daily thing to get your tickets for your 123644th indrik berry". I'm am subbed since One Tamriel but I start really to feel the burn out. This constant push for new meaning less events is just slowly eating my enjoyment of the game.

And I'm not even talking about the immersion...

- OMG dragons attacking, it's the end of the world, Molag Baal wants to take over Tamriel, Sea Sloads are conspiring to destroy Summerset, Vivec is dying, we need a hero!!!

- Nah,i'm gonna just go to Murkmire kill a bunch of crocs, heard they can get my a small slime companion!

Magenpie

Hellvlad wrote: »

Another issue is that by creating events over events for any little thing, you get more vents uptime than "regular" time in the game. In the end the "event" becomes the norm, and especially given the quality of the last ones, playing your ESO daily routine is slowly changing into " go there, do this little daily thing to get your tickets for your 123644th indrik berry". I'm am subbed since One Tamriel but I start really to feel the burn out. This constant push for new meaning less events is just slowly eating my enjoyment of the game.

And I'm not even talking about the immersion...

- OMG dragons attacking, it's the end of the world, Molag Baal wants to take over Tamriel, Sea Sloads are conspiring to destroy Summerset, Vivec is dying, we need a hero!!!

- Nah,i'm gonna just go to Murkmire kill a bunch of crocs, heard they can get my a small slime companion!

I'm completely with you on the indriks, but I don't mind a good sprinkling of events as long as they're done well. I also empathise with that burned out feeling, but again, if you've played an mmo for any length of time, I think it's pretty common and understandable to feel that way.

Your last points made me laugh too but in a good way, I promise. Again, I think this is a problem with most mmos, and you have to check in your disbelief at the door when you log in. The number of times my character has been urgently encouraged to follow a 'world saving' plan by a panicky NPC, but stops along the way to pick flowers or mine ore...yeah those world(s) ought to be in ruins by now, all because my character dawdled for some mat farming.

dazee

I ignore indriks altogether, I care about almost nothing which uses fragments. I spend all my event tickets on style pages pretty much. only thing worth it to me.

Gatdangmayne

Yep indiriks were of zero interest to me. I had 12 tickets for over a year, then I bought the ep and ad banner emotes. Been at two since then.

I basically ignore events and enjoy my smooth, enjoyable, crash and bug free game time spent in pvp.

Wait a sec...

geonsocal

put another way - just get off the hamster wheel grind...you can do it...you are in control...

geonsocal

Gatdangmayne wrote: »

I had 12 tickets for over a year, then I bought the ep and ad banner emotes. Been at two since then.

yeah, how'd them spiffy "alliance" banners work out for ya

ugh, i have 3 myself