52 Quality of Life features ESO could use

priestnall.andrewrwb17_ESO

Bump! Well thought out QOL points, hope these get introduced at some point! Thanks for taking the time to write that lot out

LalMirchi

Excellent list

Cirantille

Give this man/woman a job at ZoS please

Finedaible

I just remembered another thing, add a "Delete all" to read mail. Or just make it automatically delete the oldest messages. It's a lot of unnecessary key presses just to get rid of mail that stacks up quick from hirelings.

Desperately need a "Reply to" button as well...

Sengra

I feel like 21, 22 and 26 could be fixed by just adding a proper lfg tool where you can advertise your own groups for ANY kind of content.

etchedpixels

8 is a symptom not the cause. When I buy something from a guild merchant just put it in my inventory. I bought it, the fact that it then magically appears in my mail 30 minutes later in coldharbour is just jarring from a story point of view and broken and annoying from a play one.

There are others too -eg
- Turn off/replace the horrible flare to white out with fade to black for folks with visual impairments
- Make the max frame rate settable in the UI instead of by poking in semi-secret half documented config files
- Wiring the game into the windows 10 accessibility framework

trackdemon5512

@Husan OK I have a free day. Let's go through these.

1. Start being consistent with wording

• The language by ZOS in the example you gave is clear. Damage via the ability is returned as health. Damage while wearing the ring restores health. The general conditions are set forth and it's your job to see under what circumstances each works.

2. Get rid of the horse feeding mechanic

• Getting rid of this encourages people to make more alternates characters. Now ZOS loves that people explore the game and makes alternates. At the same time, they're a serious load on the server database and encouraging people to make a ton isn't in ZOS best interest. The mechanic is fine, just time consuming. But hey you're playing a MMORPG, can't have everything instantly.

3. “Dragons! In your own homeland!”

• So ESO is unique in that every character has dialogue. Go load up a AAA title like Dragon Quest and prepare to be disappointed when only the main characters speak and the world feels silent. Having spoken dialogue gives the unique option for the developer for audio queues to signal quests or events. Characters call for help (get louder as you get near) and NPCs alert you to issues that need solving. Seriously if you want to stop these just do the quest.

4. Get rid of the hidden cooldowns between motif drops

• Yes, there are hidden cooldowns on certain motifs and dropped items. The reason being that there are farmers who will gladly spend hundreds of hours specifically farming these items in order to sell them for a profit. They milk this until the cow runs dry and the perceived value of the good drops to nothing. At this point the incentive for players is to simply buy the item from a trader rather than participate in game activities. This in turn makes the game world dead, not to mention that it kills player engagement and they end up leaving the game between DLC releases. Cooldowns are fine and they're adjusted over time.

5. Fix the bug that resets your inventory every time you open a container

• No idea what this is about.

6. Make style pages bankable

• They are. They can be deposited into guild banks. Style pages are designed to be single use per account or in the case of events limited time items. ZOS doesn't want them hoarded. Use em, get rid of them, or store them in a guild bank so multiple people have a chance at them.

7. Implement a different color health bar for people that can not be healed by others

• It's easier to just have that player state in chat what they're doing that prevents healing than have a notification via color bar. The implementation of a color bar would be akin to a system ability proc check. While Pale Order rings are constant, skills like Blood 4 Blood toggle on and off, on and off. That's another unnecessary system check that introduces additional calculations and leads to lag and server issues. This kind of thing is why PVP recently dropped group size down and limited AOE effects to group members only.

8. Mail refresh option

• This can be done but it would need a cooldown to stop abuse and individuals from constantly pinging the server to see if they got mail. A mail check is another server check and doing it constantly increases lag. PVPers learned this from when the system showed all players instantly in what locations they were and by doing so the simple location check increased lag in Cyrodiil. Said lag decreased when players asked the system not to perform these checks.

9. Unlocking perfected weapon / item set in sticker-book should unlock corresponding non-perfected version

• No. Run the content.

10. Using an exp/ap gain buff while having one up already should either extend it or override it

• You can go into the character menu, drop the XP buff, then apply it again. Otherwise you're treating the buffs like food (which they aren't as they're more akin to time-limited status effects.

trackdemon5512

@Husan

11. Implement a deposit all currency button in bank

• This would save literally 1-2 seconds. Unnecessary programming work for the developers

12. Increase the number of event tickets we can hold

• Forgetting to visit the Impressario is your fault. 12 tickets is a number designed to keep players from hoarding tickets and get them to continue engaging in an event. Ticket distribution is set so that players never go over 10 tickets (the maximum cost of an event item) and lose tickets.

13. Allow us to change equipped items when character is dead (and out of combat)

• Weird request with the out of combat (being dead renders you out of combat). This has been done before accidentally and it always resulted in players immediately adjusting builds to counter opponents. It's not cute in PVP.

14. Allow us to change equipped skills when character is dead (and out of combat)

• Same as above. Same issue with regards to PVP and countering.

15. Allow us to open mail when character is dead

• Prep before combat

16. Allow us to open mail when in combat

• Prep before combat

17. Allow us to change quick slot items in combat

• Prep before combat

18. Account already logged in?

• This was addressed in a previous patch update. The delay was specifically introduced for technical reasons and explained.

19. Standardize daily reset times

• Your latter examples are all player specific and not unique. The former examples of dailies change the actual quests themselves in a set rotation every 24 hours. If BGs, Random Dungeons, etc all reset at the same time you would find that player behavior would switch so that the gaming population would try to do these mainly at flip time, back to back. Thus not encouraging players to group at other times which isn't fair to those who can't play at flip time.

20. Group finder with a premade group should be instant

• Can't ignore the group roles because you queued via finder. If someone drops then you're still in the activity system and it would search for a replacement in the corresponding role. Furthermore, group finder does a number of checks on the group before deciding on a dungeon, namely level, if DLC is available, etc. These have to be done every time.

karthrag_inak

trackdemon5512 wrote: »

@Husan OK I have a free day. Let's go through these.
10. Using an exp/ap gain buff while having one up already should either extend it or override it

• You can go into the character menu, drop the XP buff, then apply it again. Otherwise you're treating the buffs like food (which they aren't as they're more akin to time-limited status effects.

No you can't.

Araneae6537

Thoughts / replies to @Husan ’s original post:

1) Consistent wording would indeed be helpful in making it clear what effects / buffs / negates what.

2) The horse training mechanic is tedious and adds nothing to the game in my opinion. I understand they want daily log ins, but crafting writs feel like I’m doing something for gold and materials, whereas the horse training feels like tedium to un-gimp my new character. I would rather horse training be thrown out completely and replaced with a normal skill line leveled through XP and include a separate skill bar specific to riding with abilities like rapid maneuver.

3) Re: NPC exclamations — While I do like that NPC dialogue changes based on quests you’ve done, it would be great if specific lines came up far less often and quest givers at least had cooldowns between their soliciting you. I also found it very overwhelming and confusing (and even a bit stressful) when I was a new player!

5-10) Agreed, especially regarding health bars (7)! As someone who enjoys playing support, I would definitely appreciate a visual indicator (grayed out being ideal) on the health bar of those who can’t be healed. Even if these things were communicated, I react to low health bars in addition to keeping up my regular HoTs and buffs and need to not have to stop and think whether this character is a vampire, wearing Ring of the Pale Order, etc.

12) A maximum of 15 event tickets seems more reasonable with daily tickets earned and how much rewards cost.

13-17) Re: Cannot do while dead / in-combat — It doesn’t seem unreasonable to me to not be able to do the things you’ve listed while dead or in combat. Sure, there are times it would be convenient, but I have never felt it an unreasonable restriction.

I do wish, however, that there were separate quick slots for siege and also for out-of-combat stuff like the Antiquarian eye and mementos and other fun stuff. The current quickslot mechanics feel limited and clunky to me.

19) Re: Reset Times — Maybe it wouldn’t be a big deal for reset times to be standardized, but I fear that I would lose the ability for something I currently do... but maybe not... And it does seem like it would be more user friendly for group finder daily rewards to reset with the Undaunted dailies.

21) Re: Group Finder — There are times I have wished that I could queue for more than one role or more than one activity (dungeons and battlegrounds) and take whichever popped first, but group finder struggles enough as it is — I would not ask for anything additional from it!

22) Re: Group Finder Roles — I don’t see how this is needed — You are already in a pre-formed group that has agreed to play together. If you want to use group finder, call yourselves a tank, a healer and two DD regardless. You’re not skipping line or anything else that is harming anyone, so I don’t see any problem.

23) Re: BG MMR — YES, PLEASE! IMHO, the lack of a proper MMR or league system keeps many people from getting into PvP — it has certainly been a deterrent for me, although I try again from time to time...

26) Re: Better dragon rewards — either from the dragons themselves or the dailies — would be welcome as at this point, it is just not worth it on my glass cannon DD’s. I’m sure I could play better to lower the repair bills too, but right now I rarely join dragon fights except on my tanky characters.

28) Re: Furnishing Slots — I would love to see this, but ZOS has said it won’t happen. I do hope that they will consider other suggestions such as options to increase the furnishing limit of home currently under the 700 cap and allow for some trade-off between number guests and furnishings, etc.

29) Re: Assistant Summoning — If it’s your own home, it doesn’t take but a moment to place an assistant. I imagine the restriction on summoning them is to prevent the cap on such NPCs from being exceeded for performance reasons?

37) ActionDurationReminder — How did I ever play ESO without this add-on?! The answer is, poorly! I agree that this functionality should definitely be an option to enable in the base game!

40) Disguises have unique functionality in that they are unequipped / destroyed if you are spotted so I don’t think it would be an option to make them costumes, except perhaps as a reward after the quest, which could be nice.

41) Fast travel is normally plenty cheap as is and as you pointed out, there are workarounds if you want to pay nothing but at the price of an extra load screen.

43) Filter out motifs/styles/patterns/recipes already known — yes, please!!! I rarely try to look through these things anymore as there are always pages and pages and it’s too tedious to do other than search for specific motifs or pages! Being able to browse all motifs/etc. that I don’t already know would be awesome!

48) Tassets and flaps should be hideable. If this is not feasible when part of one model, can we at least hide the floating tassets? They aren’t attached to anything so it’s not like anything should have to be patched up if they were cut out, right? There are some styles where I like the whole design but others where they just look out of place and who thoughts tassets should ever belong on robes?!

49) Make shoulder armor hideable. Truly, there is no excuse for this not already being an in-game feature!

50) Doing right may cost you, and that is as it should be. There are a bizillion other skill points earnable in game anyway. I know I’m weird, but it would give me a certain satisfaction to know that I missed out on more than a bit of gold by destroying implements of destruction, etc. (I could give specific examples, but won’t in the interest of spoilers.) I guess it’s part of my hero fantasy. I want to be able to do the most noble thing, but unless it actually costs me something, it feels rather empty. “No, I will not give you this potion of plague for your pocket change...” Make it several thousand or some other reward I would want so I should actually feel tempted and greater satisfaction in refusing.

52) A dungeon solo story mode would be great! It doesn’t need to give any rewards or achievements, just the chance to see the whole story and dialogue if I had to fly through it when actually doing the quest.

Regarding the extra point of story bosses, I agree they need to scale MUCH better and/or have an optional hard mode. (No, don’t anyone suggest I fight them barefisted and wearing nothing but my skivvies — do you really think that would make the fight feel more epic and meaningful? Quite the opposite, really.) I had some challenging fights when none of my characters was yet level 50 and I was still learning the game, but that was a long time ago now. I don’t want all overland to be a tedious slog of fighting, no, but the enemies that a story has built up to should require some effort on my part.

zaria wrote: »

53: reply to mail button. Requested this during beta

Agreed! I have always thought it weird that was not in-game!

WiseSky wrote: »

You missed the most important one:

Let us Control the WEATHER since its instanced!

Why??? It makes no sense to me that our characters should be able to control weather in the world. Now in our homes, I would like to have the OPTION to set time of day and weather or to leave it as default.

Lavum

This is a great list, but i honestly don't think the Dev's read the forums.

zaria

Elissn wrote: »

I agree with most of your points, a lot of these have annoyed me for a long time.

Especially the summoned pets getting in the way. For years I played a pet sorc and I also love my warden with her bear, but by the eight, those pets can be so annoying! I'd personally prefer for them to become invisible in safe zones (towns, cities, etc.) with an option to make them invisible all times outside of combat. An easy way to unsummon them would also be awsome.
But this way it's just ridiculous. Bring a flock of Daedra into town, no problem. But gods beware if you accidentally touch a certain axe at a certain writ turn-in.

I have an addition as well: Swimming mounts. By that I mean let all the mounts have the ability to swim. I don't mind if they get a speed penalty in water, that would only be fair. But there's nothing more annoying then having to re-mount after crossing the tiniest of streams.
By the way, almost all animals are able to swim irl, I think even camels are. Likely guars and kagoutis can swim as well, they live in swamps after all. And all those atronarch glowy magic and whatnot creatures are obviously magically enough to cross an arm-wide river, no? The only thing I'm not sure about are the Dwemer constructs, but for one who is skilled enough to build their own riding robot it should be child's play to make it water resistant.

The twilight should land out of combat at least overland like the flying non combat pets, it would actually be pretty cute if they did.

Crocodiles in ESO can not swim.
Worse mounts dissolve in water depth dependent on your character height. So an tiny Bosmer on an indrik will have it dissolve before an tall Altmer on an senche even if the indrik only get its feet wet.
Yes it makes so much sense.

Trying to make sense out of it.

Sergykid

dragons can be soloed, actually. I soloed one myself on my trash casual setup. Just rotate around it, it won't bite you. You just need reasonable amount of dps to not fight it for 20 minutes.

as for the rest of the points, most are debatable. And some are actually bug fixing requests. Don't hope for it, the asylum shield still gives magicka even without reflecting/absorbing a spell, or meteor gives empower at cast and at landing too (empower also is 4 sec instead of 3). So as long as it doesn't become a popular topic that disturbs the majority of players, it won't get attention from the management.

remember that you play a business.

Faiza

For 31 if you cannot go back inside to pick up the page, they are usually moved onto the ground just outside the entrance once you complete the area, are they not?

validifyedneb18_ESO

With maybe 4 exceptions that I am more on the fence about, I seriously hope ZOS sees this list and implements them with haste.

Some of them are 20 min jobs to implement for a single developer, and would be major qol boosts. Only a few are more tricky due to larger design questions or imolentation difficulty.

LadyLethalla

Finedaible wrote: »

Or just make it automatically delete the oldest messages.

I keep a lot of old mails containing gold from guild trader sales as "emergency" cash, so I definitely would not want this.

Rudrani

For me its these. I'll give ☆ to rate them, too!

You forgot one important one: distinct group marker for tanks

Husan wrote: »

☆☆☆3. “Dragons! In your own homeland!”

☆☆8. Mail refresh option

☆☆☆33. Automatically drop combat when not taking damage and not using offensive/healing skills for x seconds

I would say, drop the whole in-combat restriction thing altogether.
If I can manage to change my cp and skills and call my brother for christmass while in combat, without getting killed, why not let me???

Husan wrote: »

☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆
37. Implement a skill duration tracker
☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆

☆☆☆45. Get pets out of the way

I would add, disable non-combat pets in any instance (dungeon/trial)

Husan wrote: »

☆48. Make flaps from heavy armor chests hide-able
☆49. Make shoulder armor hide-able
☆☆☆51. Revise dungeon difficulty levels
☆☆☆☆☆☆☆-> Implement an option to scale overland content
☆-> Implement rewards for achieving certain achievement point thresholds
☆-> Disconnects/crashes should not make you automatically fail no death achievements
☆☆☆☆-> BONUS: Start communicating with your playerbase

dvonpm

Lots of good things here.

Also, let people see their own guild bank deposits for God's sake.

I know there are often complex reasons why seemingly simple changes are harder to do than you would think.

But this one is so dumb it's just kind of insulting.

Wolfshead

Most of OP idea sound more like he/her is to lazy to do thing honest most if those thing he/her want change is useless idea and something like horse is money sinker i dont know about other people but run around almost close 4 milion gold and have nothing spend them i dont mind spend gold on horse training for alt.

Come on change thing when you are dead are OP serious that is most silly thing i read i dont know about other but i hardly dead in dungeon or when i do quest in world.

Nah OP you can remove like 85 to 90 % of you idea change for the are hardly qality of life features

Iarao

39. this is due to gems. they dont want you getting gems from daily rewards.

45. but DO NOT DEREZ WPN "PETS". there is NO REASON the flappy must be so large. nixad size would be best. and yes, my flappy annoys the crap outta me sometimes. and no, i aint derezzing my weapon.

46. i'm waiting for the drop in the crown store for rapids. like skyshards. level it on one toon and you can buy rapids on the rest. they coulda just grandfathered it in, but then there goes their buyers. and of course they dont care that hundreds of thousands of gold is spent on buying keep repair stuff to get rapids on babies and now it is gone.

Iarao

trackdemon5512 wrote: »

@Husan



18. Account already logged in?

• This was addressed in a previous patch update. The delay was specifically introduced for technical reasons and explained.

does this also apply to getting that message the next DAY the first time i try to log on? you know like 10 hrs after i logged off???

Husan

etchedpixels wrote: »

8 is a symptom not the cause. When I buy something from a guild merchant just put it in my inventory. I bought it, the fact that it then magically appears in my mail 30 minutes later in coldharbour is just jarring from a story point of view and broken and annoying from a play one.

Yes! That's a good point, I don't know why it goes through mail instead of directly to inventory in the first place.

trackdemon5512 wrote: »

10. Using an exp/ap gain buff while having one up already should either extend it or override it

• You can go into the character menu, drop the XP buff, then apply it again. Otherwise you're treating the buffs like food (which they aren't as they're more akin to time-limited status effects.

This is wrong. You cannot go to the character menu and drop the XP or the AP buff. I've already said this in my post. Have you actually read what I wrote or are you just roleplaying being in an opposite team in a debate club and trying to find counterarguments based on the bolded points?

Wolfshead wrote: »

Most of OP idea sound more like he/her is to lazy to do thing honest most if those thing he/her want change is useless idea and something like horse is money sinker i dont know about other people but run around almost close 4 milion gold and have nothing spend them i dont mind spend gold on horse training for alt.

Come on change thing when you are dead are OP serious that is most silly thing i read i dont know about other but i hardly dead in dungeon or when i do quest in world.

Nah OP you can remove like 85 to 90 % of you idea change for the are hardly qality of life features

This is why we can't have nice things.



Thanks to everyone with constructive input. Special shoutout for @idk @Nairinhe @Araneae6537 @Rudrani.

LadyLethalla

I've got one:

Don't make improvements to gear a potential 4 step process. If I have to make a crafted item Epic for a writ, I don't see why I have to upgrade it in three steps.
Idk if there's a PC addon for this as I'm on PS5.

validifyedneb18_ESO

@trackdemon5512

So am I right in thinking that because there are inconvenient workaround for everything, you are completely against improving the game in any way?

It seems to me you would rather eso never get another update again, leave it as is, bugs and all, just incase a fix messes with something you don't like

validifyedneb18_ESO

I am staggered by how dismissing some people can be about clearly for the most part good suggestions.

Some good points have been made again a few ideas but for the most part it seems to either be a complete denial that the game is flawed or can be improved in any way.

validifyedneb18_ESO

Wolfshead wrote: »

Most of OP idea sound more like he/her is to lazy to do thing honest most if those thing he/her want change is useless idea and something like horse is money sinker i dont know about other people but run around almost close 4 milion gold and have nothing spend them i dont mind spend gold on horse training for alt.

Come on change thing when you are dead are OP serious that is most silly thing i read i dont know about other but i hardly dead in dungeon or when i do quest in world.

Nah OP you can remove like 85 to 90 % of you idea change for the are hardly qality of life features

I barely understand what yoy are saying. But for one thing if you don't train horses in alts then I doubt you ever use those characters for actual playing (ie pure crafting alts), if you did you would be by far the most annoyingly slow member of any group, deliberately choosing to travel at a quarter the speed of anyone else.

This apparent lack of care to put effort into feeding horses across alts is exactly the justification why it should be removed. It makes new players experience much less fun, it doesn't offer much if any an incentive to log in every day, and most of the time I'm just trying to train ASAP so I can beat the 20hr cooldown and not have my reset pushed too far into the night and miss a day.

But instead you argue *against* the point, saying the Op is too lazy, while at the same time saying you yourself are too lazy to horse feed on alts???

validifyedneb18_ESO

Horse training alternative;

Speed is based in how far you travel by horse, this means that the concept of playing a character a lot still results in a faster horse. Rapid man. Automatically would speed this up too. It should be balanced so that a 2 weeks or regular playing or so would cap you out.

Stamina is based on saddles, a new crafted item that comes in different rarities and levels, needing upgrading until you hit cp160 just like gear

Capacity could just be folded into the existing bag upgrade system, distribute the 60 slots across the bag upgrades so they are no longer a uniform 10 each. Some could be added as base. Ie base 80 slots would be a lot nicer for new players while still providing incentive to upgrade.

Alternatively make it a separate bag upgrade system limited by riding level. But I think this would just be added complexity for new players.

Nairinhe

Husan wrote: »

etchedpixels wrote: »

8 is a symptom not the cause. When I buy something from a guild merchant just put it in my inventory. I bought it, the fact that it then magically appears in my mail 30 minutes later in coldharbour is just jarring from a story point of view and broken and annoying from a play one.

Yes! That's a good point, I don't know why it goes through mail instead of directly to inventory in the first place.

The current system looks like some sort of a workaround for something. Like they didn't manage to fit inventory space check in it, or there was some fancy bug that was easier solved this way, or some other thing not obvious to a user. Or they just did it for the sake of consistency as expired items and profits also arrive in the mail. Or guild purchase is not immediate like a purchase from a vendor and may take some time, and if you close the guild store window item would be lost, something like this.

validifyedneb18_ESO

Nairinhe wrote: »

Husan wrote: »

etchedpixels wrote: »

8 is a symptom not the cause. When I buy something from a guild merchant just put it in my inventory. I bought it, the fact that it then magically appears in my mail 30 minutes later in coldharbour is just jarring from a story point of view and broken and annoying from a play one.

Yes! That's a good point, I don't know why it goes through mail instead of directly to inventory in the first place.

The current system looks like some sort of a workaround for something. Like they didn't manage to fit inventory space check in it, or there was some fancy bug that was easier solved this way, or some other thing not obvious to a user. Or they just did it for the sake of consistency as expired items and profits also arrive in the mail. Or guild purchase is not immediate like a purchase from a vendor and may take some time, and if you close the guild store window item would be lost, something like this.

This was likely done to remove annoyance at inventory size limits when buying large numbers of items. I still think mail is the most sensible solution. A refresh button would be ideal for more than just this use case. It could even have a 1 min cooldown on if I'd ZOS zos worried about server load. The main thing is when I expect mail I can automatically call it as soon as I know I have something.

trackdemon5512

validifyedneb18_ESO wrote: »

@trackdemon5512

So am I right in thinking that because there are inconvenient workaround for everything, you are completely against improving the game in any way?

It seems to me you would rather eso never get another update again, leave it as is, bugs and all, just incase a fix messes with something you don't like

No. A ton of this stuff has already been addressed in the past and can't/won't be dealt with again. What someone may think of "convenient" is actually extremely time consuming for developers with little actual benefit for the player. It's wasted time. Furthermore, after playing for years it starts to become readily apparent why things are done the way they're done. Esp as the developers are making a single game for 3 systems. Saying an add-on can accomplish something doesn't mean that it can be done on the base consoles which have to match.

It's easy to make a list of grievances but you still have to consider whether or not meaningful change is possible before spitting it out.