Why Some of Us Are Upset About CP 2.0

ZOS_ConnorG

Greetings all,

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SilverBride

Games change. Games will always change. If changes make you quit playing you were probably close to that decision already.

AlnilamE

VaranisArano wrote: »

It wouldn't have been "free CP." CP comes from the experience we earn in game. X amount of CP = Y amount of experience. When ZOS changed the exp curve, they said "Now, Y amount of exp will get you to a higher amount of CP" except that they didn't give us any credit and so we're stuck at X amount of CP.

It would have been giving us the credit for the exp we earned, and everyone in game would have been remapped to the new, accelerated exp curve according to the exp they'd earned.

Instead, we effectively "lost" any exp that's above where we currently sit on the new curve.

It's so strange to me, but the thought of ZOS suddenly putting me at 2200 CP without me doing anything is upsetting.

I am happy to have something to work towards again. Having been above cap forever, none of the CP I earned were of any use, and they came with a 50% penalty to boot.

It's nice to have "growth" goals again, alongside the "completion" goals.

trackdemon5512

furiouslog wrote: »

trackdemon5512 wrote: »

My experience:

• Started in October 2017. Fresh off the boat in Morrowind without a clue of what to do. Witches Festival was going on. Halfway through I discovered that if you drink the brew you get 2x XP.
• November 1st, 2017 - I hit Lvl 50. Woo Hoo. Time to realize that means the training wheels are off and I need to learn about the game.
• December 9, 2017 - I clear vet Asylum Sanctorium
• Jan 20th, 2018 - I hit CP 450
• Anniversary April/May 2018. I hit max CP AND get learn every motif in the game.

6 MONTHS AND I WAS CP 690 OR 720 (can't remember).

I wasn't hardcore grinding XP or looking for exploits. I was just playing the game as the developers intended. I participated in the events and got 2x XP and most importantly I had fun. I took my time and enjoyed the stories and spoken dialogue.

I hit CP 1000 for my first anniversary. 1 year of playing.

I hit CP 1500 for my second anniversary.

Fast forward to this year and I'm CP 2K+ on PS4. I enjoyed every minute of playing and earned that XP through questing and experiencing the game.

The leveling is what you make of it. You don't have to set anniversary thresholds like I do but I didn't make CP leveling a chore, it just came naturally. And I've earned far more XP in getting to my current CP than new players will see in getting to 3000+

I don't feel my time is wasted because like I said I enjoyed every minute of my experience (outside of the Dragonhold update which I'm quite sure destroyed my PS4 hard drive from blue screens).

If you don't want to put effort in like I did you don't have to. But please don't complain that playing X amount of time means you deserve a certain level or CP. If you want those stats then put in the work for it. Because if I can get CP720/810 in 6 months back in 2018 then a new player enjoying the events can definitely get to 1200 in less than that.

And for the older player who have been around, I hope that outside of Cyrodiil it has been a good ride. Because if you spent the road trip just reading the odometer instead of taking in the scenery then what was the point?

Your Farm Rate is clearly higher than mine. Do you mind posting your /played stats, # of toons, and current CP level? I'd like to see the difference from mine, because it might represent a more accurate benchmark for someone who has played the game in an exp-driven way. I was definitely a tourist for the first year of playing the game, In the last two years I ramped up my activity and started optimizing around building an endgame capability. My rate was higher than what some others posted in here, so I figure that I'm somewhere in the middle of the pack.

Now, if you enjoyed every minute of your experience, that is good for you, but I think that's a fundamental difference between you and me. We can't relate to each other's experiences because If you ever did the Allkr Desert and Skyreach grinds, I can't believe that you found that fun. I can't relate to that. If I didn't do that stuff, I would be nowhere near where I am now. If you never did it, I find it hard to believe that you made that rate naturally only by doing things that you actually enjoyed. But, I could be wrong. Maybe you are a unicorn (I mean that in a good way).

Just answer this honestly: did you ever do something that was purely goal-focused to earn anything in the game that you found kind of boring and repetitive? I definitely have. Did you ever farm for a randomly dropped weapon for ages of time because you wanted it in your build? I have. But why did I do that?

Part of it is this intrinsic motivation that some players have to reach a destination of being "perfect", for lack of a better word, and I want to do that as efficiently as possible. Being the best you can possibly be is the goal. One poster pointed out that part of the CP redesign was to remove the meaning of CP and reduce impact on performance. Why would they then just not retroactively grant the XP equivalent of CP to players who already grinded that XP if it really makes no difference? It should not matter if I am way higher than what a new player has, because it will not really boost my performance that much. You can't have it both ways. If that's the case, then going back to motivation, what they are doing is manipulating players who play the game the way I do (to reach the goal of having the "perfect" build) into continuing to grind the game in order to hit their goals. New players who are coming in fresh with the same motivation are given a relative boost to hit that destination so that they feel like they can reach that destination quickly, and I already said that this is a good thing. The bad thing is that they moved my finish line too far down the road. Way too much. It requires a lot of time spent doing things I don't enjoy because I have already done them over and over and over and over to meet my game-related goals. Giving me CP equivalent to its old XP value won't actually hurt newer players because they can catch up to viable endgame participation a lot faster than I did, and they are going to play more hours per week than I will because I am settled, which means they will overtake me more quickly anyway because they have more in the tank.

For PVPers who hate PVE, this is far worse for them. I have run dungeons with a number of these guys and they seriously hate it. They hate farming PVE for gear they need for BGs and Cyrodiil, but they do it. Because they want to hit that goal of having the perfect build and dominate their opponents. This class of players has it far worse than I do.

I already know what you're probably going to say, and others have already said this to me: just quit the game. I don't want to because I spent a lot of time building a community and have gathered a number of friends who I enjoy playing with. If I could settle back and pick and choose what I wanted to do without having this sense of being far behind my personal destination, I would just keep playing and enjoying the moments I choose to play. But now there is this sense of being behind and incomplete, and I'm not talking about the things that they added to the tree. I like that there are more ways to progress and that they designed in choices to make trade-offs That provides a lot of flexibility. But having to work more to progress to where I already was by doing things I don't enjoy is infuriating. I thought I'd be using the CP I had to play with the flexibility instead, which would be enjoyable and fun for me, and based on what people have already pointed out, will make no difference on the ability of a new player to catch up and participate because CP matters a lot less. Great, then give me the XP equivalent of the CP (which, btw, I'm not actually asking for - I think there is a fair intermediate solution).

If I get to the point where it's too much, maybe I'll take that advice and get off the treadmill, and do something else with my 15 hours. But I'm still stuck in "Bargaining", so I'm kind of hoping that ZOS hears this perspective and addresses it. I don't want to get to "Acceptance" until I'm ready to give up on it.

@furiouslog

1) Do you mind posting your /played stats, # of toons, and current CP level?

I'm currently running a contest in my guild to guess my current CP at the time of the update so I can't reveal that but it is above 1800 by a considerable amount as I've previously stated. I refuse to look at /played because after a COVID year (in which I had it and the serious after effects) that's a reminder. I now have 18 characters but I should point out that I only created the most recent this year. I use all of my characters to experience the different builds (mag necro vs stam, stam sorc vs mag, etc). I only created new characters during 2x XP events as to optimize play time.

2) On the topic of the "grind"

I look at grinding as unhealthy. More importantly, it's not optimal. If I spent all day in Skyreach, Spellscar, Alikr, etc. then what do I get for that? Experience yes but nothing to sell, no real mats, no motifs, and no storyline. It's pointless to me.

If an event comes up I participate. The bonuses far outweigh playing outside of it. 2x drops, 2x XP, or whatever. Doing the event when playing long-term saves time in the end. Like high end trial groups I don't spend more than a certain amount of time to attempt content. There's no point in 20-hour Aetherian Archive vet runs because it devolves into a nightmare and the rewards aren't worth it.

You need to optimize that play time. Why farm a zone for a gear piece when a look up shows that a quest rewards it? Why singularly focus when you can multitask? Don't just go into a public dungeon, do it when the daily for it comes up. If you're going to do the Psijic Skill Line, save some time and grab every skyshard along the way instead of just warping. You're going to come back and get them anyways but why double your time when you can kill several birds with one stone?

The one thing I ever grinded for was a Burning Spellweave Inferno. But you can waste time running the COA1, hoping for a chest or final boss to drop it. Or begging other group members to give it to you (provided they won't keep it themselves). Those are pointless grind methods. Esp when thought about it you could slot invisible pots or cloak, run around the dungeon, open chests, and then reset. Time optimization right there.

Ruins of Mazzatun speed run. Do you increase your DPS to quickly kill every enemy along the way or do you have every player slot Invisible Pots with Expedition to pass by every mob without any effort? Optimization.

3) Crafting

Soooooo many players ignore this but investment into crafting is a huge long term play time saver. The passive rewards are amazing when properly invested into. Transmutation vs farming for a specific trait. Reconstruction vs piece farming. Foods, potions, glyphs, all available without wasting time begging in zone chat for help.

And master writs. I could level up a new character stupid fast with master writs. But I always made sure they had skill points so they could level up the skills simultatneously. That goes back to the concept of optimization. I get no skill points for grinding Alikr, Skyreach, or Spellscar. None of those grinding methods reward skill points. And without skill points a CP 3600 character is literally trash. They can't do any damage, defend themselves, or grab so many passive benefits.

4) On Perfection

“The perfect being, huh? There is no such thing as perfect in this world. That may sound cliché, but it’s the truth. The average person admires perfection and seeks to obtain it. But, what’s the point of achieving perfection? There is none. Nothing. Not a single thing. I loathe perfection! If something is perfect, then there is nothing left. There is no room for imagination. No place left for a person to gain additional knowledge or abilities. Do you know what that means? For scientists such as ourselves, perfection only brings despair.” - Tite Kubo

Perfect doesn't exist in ESO with the build variety. And if it did with the snap of ZoS' fingers it's gone in 3 months when an update drops. People need to set a goal of being acceptably proficient and gauge for themselves whether the time needed to get there is worth it. I'm not going to sit around for 20 hours in a week just dummy humping to go from 100k dps to 105k. I abhor combat dummies for that very reason. If you're smart, pay attention to allies in PVE or what your enemies do in PVP you will learn and gain at the same time. Optimization of time.

5) Don't Quit

Just think better. Do you really need something now or can you wait? Why farm vMA for a staff when you know an event will double drop in 2 months? Why run vMA on a sorc when doing so on a less popular class with guarantee a scoreboard placement and thus a free extra drop? Why run vMA with only one character when you can learn on multiple characters and each gets a scoreboard placement at the end of the week.

Yes, there is a minimum time investment for optimization processes but you save sooooooo much time in the long run and avoid frustration. And less time spent in this game means less burnout and more importantly more time in the real world to be a functional human being with a proper life.

furiouslog

@trackdemon5512

I appreciate that you're sharing your methods for optimizing experience gathering. I do all of that too. Every single thing you mentioned specifically, I have done. I run everything quickly and optimally. The fact that you employ these tactics means that you have the same perspective that I do, because you want to get the thing you want faster and more efficiently. That's not a "natural" way of playing. It's unnatural.

I did the sneak/chest thing for COA1 over and over. I never got the staff to drop that way. I got it when someone gave it to me during a random pug. But I still spent a lot of time doing the sneak thing. I didn't enjoy it. The moment I started working on getting that staff, I recall it was about 8 months before I got it. Some people get lucky - one of my guildies got it on the first drop when they went in there just after crossing 160 CP. Another guildie has been trying to get it for over a year, playing naturally, combined with short bursts of COA1 farming.

When Rich did his VH run on twitch, he said he was going to run it "like a player would". Basically, he skipped mobs and took short cuts whenever he could. That shows an awareness from the dev team that players who push score and play competitively do it in a way that circumvents their intended player experience. He knows that their players do not play the way that the game is designed. It's not exploiting anything since it's allowed, but it is a different style of play that does not represent design intention.

Extrapolate that to the rest of the game, and consider the amount of content required to be completed to get to a certain level of CP. Right now, here is where I am at: I've pretty much gotten the gear I want (except for the vMA inferno staff and a set of perfected Siroria's). I don't bother with those things because my magplar does not hit the dps benchmarks necessary to get in a regular hardcore vCR group - I'm already not "perfect". Why do I not bother? Firstly, check out this aggregation of DPS stats from U29:



These are medians from thousands of samples from ESOLogs. I main a magplar. Templars are designed to have improved survivability at the cost of DPS. But that survivability does not translate to DPS performance in a trial. If you look at the vet trials, for non-Crag trials, magplar is less then 10 percent of the sample in those trials, because only truly exceptional players are able to pull their weight. The samples are dominated by the top 3 dps classes.

Admittedly, I am also not exceptional. I mean, I'm okay, but not great. So I'm in a catch 22 - will perfected Siroria's get me to the point where I cross the line? Probably not, but to wonder and be caught in this catch 22 is frustrating. I parsed 89K on the trial dummy in U29. Now, I am at 77K. Many endgame guilds I track have set the bar for my class at 80-85K for inclusion in achievement trials because Liko can break 95K on nearly every class, so the thinking is that I should be able to also. In order to hit that, now I need to go grind the dual wield tree to 50 to supplement my dummy DPS, because that's how Liko got there (which is weird and an abomination, given that I'm a mag class). That's another 1.9M XP I have to grind, being nerfed the whole time I'm doing it because I have to wait to unlock the important passives, so I don't grind that in important content, I do it with daily randoms and other stuff where it won't matter, which also takes longer. At least I'll get more CP for it while I do it.

As for the vMA staff, I need to run it 60 times to have a 99.9 percent chance of it dropping (I have a thread on this in this forum). I generally hate vMA. So I don't run it over and over again unless I choose to do it for my enjoyment. This is not intended to open up a new discussion on class balance or vMA, I'm just providing information so you can understand my context.

So here's the gist of your question to me: can I wait? If waiting is the difference between me participating in certain endgame activities on my main is my goal, then no, I don't want to wait as long as the dev team wants to me wait given that I had already achieved a certain level in the game, and now I have to keep employing these optimization methods running content I don't want to really run again because I've been in the game since beta. So my choice is this: accept my feeling of frustration and exploitation and keep at it, or stop playing and lose contact with the many ESO friends I have made over the last two years. That's a terrible decision to have to make, either play angry and possibly get toxic about it, or say goodbye to a lot of neat people.

Evidently, not only are these circumstances acceptable to you, but you find the situation inherently enjoyable. I don't. I want to do other things I have not done yet. I want to get new achievements. I just don't want to mindlessly grind repetitive content.

Here's a flawed analogy, but it explains how I feel: I've saved for retirement, have retired, and want to enjoy the remainder my life. I paid my dues and put in the work. Then, my savings are wiped out, and I have to go back to work to live instead of enjoying my life. I don't think this is how I'm supposed to be feeling about my entertainment time.

Cirantille

I am annoyed not because newer players get cp fast

I don't care, good for them, happy for them

No one should grind anything

I am annoyed because I didn't ask for this type of "upset the system" change and I was certainly content with finishing my progress slowly

I honestly don't have time and I am not willing to spend my real life time into some hasty decision so nay it is not fair

trackdemon5512

furiouslog wrote: »

@trackdemon5512

I appreciate that you're sharing your methods for optimizing experience gathering. I do all of that too. Every single thing you mentioned specifically, I have done. I run everything quickly and optimally. The fact that you employ these tactics means that you have the same perspective that I do, because you want to get the thing you want faster and more efficiently. That's not a "natural" way of playing. It's unnatural.

I did the sneak/chest thing for COA1 over and over. I never got the staff to drop that way. I got it when someone gave it to me during a random pug. But I still spent a lot of time doing the sneak thing. I didn't enjoy it. The moment I started working on getting that staff, I recall it was about 8 months before I got it. Some people get lucky - one of my guildies got it on the first drop when they went in there just after crossing 160 CP. Another guildie has been trying to get it for over a year, playing naturally, combined with short bursts of COA1 farming.

When Rich did his VH run on twitch, he said he was going to run it "like a player would". Basically, he skipped mobs and took short cuts whenever he could. That shows an awareness from the dev team that players who push score and play competitively do it in a way that circumvents their intended player experience. He knows that their players do not play the way that the game is designed. It's not exploiting anything since it's allowed, but it is a different style of play that does not represent design intention.

Extrapolate that to the rest of the game, and consider the amount of content required to be completed to get to a certain level of CP. Right now, here is where I am at: I've pretty much gotten the gear I want (except for the vMA inferno staff and a set of perfected Siroria's). I don't bother with those things because my magplar does not hit the dps benchmarks necessary to get in a regular hardcore vCR group - I'm already not "perfect". Why do I not bother? Firstly, check out this aggregation of DPS stats from U29:



These are medians from thousands of samples from ESOLogs. I main a magplar. Templars are designed to have improved survivability at the cost of DPS. But that survivability does not translate to DPS performance in a trial. If you look at the vet trials, for non-Crag trials, magplar is less then 10 percent of the sample in those trials, because only truly exceptional players are able to pull their weight. The samples are dominated by the top 3 dps classes.

Admittedly, I am also not exceptional. I mean, I'm okay, but not great. So I'm in a catch 22 - will perfected Siroria's get me to the point where I cross the line? Probably not, but to wonder and be caught in this catch 22 is frustrating. I parsed 89K on the trial dummy in U29. Now, I am at 77K. Many endgame guilds I track have set the bar for my class at 80-85K for inclusion in achievement trials because Liko can break 95K on nearly every class, so the thinking is that I should be able to also. In order to hit that, now I need to go grind the dual wield tree to 50 to supplement my dummy DPS, because that's how Liko got there (which is weird and an abomination, given that I'm a mag class). That's another 1.9M XP I have to grind, being nerfed the whole time I'm doing it because I have to wait to unlock the important passives, so I don't grind that in important content, I do it with daily randoms and other stuff where it won't matter, which also takes longer. At least I'll get more CP for it while I do it.

As for the vMA staff, I need to run it 60 times to have a 99.9 percent chance of it dropping (I have a thread on this in this forum). I generally hate vMA. So I don't run it over and over again unless I choose to do it for my enjoyment. This is not intended to open up a new discussion on class balance or vMA, I'm just providing information so you can understand my context.

So here's the gist of your question to me: can I wait? If waiting is the difference between me participating in certain endgame activities on my main is my goal, then no, I don't want to wait as long as the dev team wants to me wait given that I had already achieved a certain level in the game, and now I have to keep employing these optimization methods running content I don't want to really run again because I've been in the game since beta. So my choice is this: accept my feeling of frustration and exploitation and keep at it, or stop playing and lose contact with the many ESO friends I have made over the last two years. That's a terrible decision to have to make, either play angry and possibly get toxic about it, or say goodbye to a lot of neat people.

Evidently, not only are these circumstances acceptable to you, but you find the situation inherently enjoyable. I don't. I want to do other things I have not done yet. I want to get new achievements. I just don't want to mindlessly grind repetitive content.

Here's a flawed analogy, but it explains how I feel: I've saved for retirement, have retired, and want to enjoy the remainder my life. I paid my dues and put in the work. Then, my savings are wiped out, and I have to go back to work to live instead of enjoying my life. I don't think this is how I'm supposed to be feeling about my entertainment time.

You’re looking far too much into these stats to enjoy the game properly it seems. Race changing for best PvP. Race changing for best PVE. Perfected Siroria vs regular. Etc. It doesn’t seem that you’re playing for enjoyment anymore as instead it’s for that ideal of perfection.

Players like Liko and the rest obsess over statistics and builds like this in the way that a stockbroker would be looking to squeeze every penny out of a stock. For them it has become a job and one that they’ve monetized. Are you monetizing? Is this some sort of income for you?

When I started my first character was a khajiit nightblade. I didn’t choose it based on racial passives or such. I just thought a stealth cat would be fantastic to play as. 18 characters later I’ve never race changed and that toon has close to 40,000 achievement points. It’s still my main and in no way the best at what it does but I enjoy it because there is the history behind it.

That kind of play is how 95% of ESO players enjoy this game in that they do what they want, they get by, and are constantly learning.

I think you personally need to roll the pure stats back. I once had a player who grouped with me and asked about builds. Then they went on for almost an hour in voice chat about perfecting a unique build in an absolutely out of the box way. They quoted calculated fractions of percentages and situations to get that perfect unstoppable build.

But as I listened it became incredibly clear that this person had gotten so far away from the concept of enjoying the game that they isolated themselves. Pure stats was all he could talk about and no one wanted to listen because it wasn’t fun. It clearly wasn’t fun for him and attempting to listen was pointless because any other player knew his build would be nerfed or negated by a patch at some point.

No one needs to be the absolute end all best. It’s a great concept but one that isn’t achievable. Not without serious sacrifices along the way. It would seem that you’re sacrificing casual enjoyment over that fleeting quest for perfection.

Take a step back and re-evaluate.

In relation to your retirement analogy, do you save, retire, and do nothing? Or do you look for something new to do/learn? Do you sit around reading books and remembering what has come before or do you learn about films and video games and explore new mediums? You may want to get to a stasis point but the world around you will constantly be in flux. You will always have to continue to learn in order to survive, even with all you have saved up.

jle30303

It's nothing to do with "phases" and everything to do with the fact that players do not like being made empirically weaker, which is what has happened to a lot of players.

Phaedryn

All that time, and verbiage, for "some players are self imposing an artificial floor and I am not happy"

Also...it's a video game. If you are participating in activities you do not enjoy (mindlessly "farming" anything) you are doing it wrong. There is only one way to play a game wrong, and that is in a manner that is not enjoyable.

Both of those are on you, the individual player, not Zos.

jle30303

From the perspective of a lot of players:

Before the patch, they could do X, Y and Z.

After the patch? They can't do X *at all* as well as they used to, no matter how many CPs they put in it, because that's been nerfed considerably. And as for Y and Z, they don't have enough CPs to put in to do Y and Z *both* as well as they used to, and even if they did, they're now slottable stars rather than passives so you have to choose between one and the other.

Nothing to do with "comparisons with other players". They're empirically weaker.

Nothing to do with "phases of argument from denial to bargaining to acceptance". They've been knocked backwards. They can't do, today, what they used to be able to do last week, and it will take them ages to get back to the same place for most of it, and in some cases they can't get their old capabilities back at all.

This is the sort of thing that makes players quit, or stop subscribing.

furiouslog

@trackdemon5512

No, it's definitely not a money maker for me. It's an enjoyment maker. That's why I posted this thread. This is killing my enjoyment.

I do look at stats because that's the part of the fun for me, but assembling these particular stats were to frame a conversation about why what ZOS is doing is killing my enjoyment of the game. I wouldn't do it if I didn't care about trying to preserve my enjoyment of the game.

What I am actually doing right now, in real time over the past couple of weeks, is stepping back and re-evaluating. That is the point of the discussion. To me, the "learning something new" part would be spending my time looking at new PVP builds and playing with the CP I'd expected to earn, and playing new content. The new content is finite, so what is left in the game for me is theory crafting and using my imagination (fun). In order to get there, I now have a giant time wall to get through to do that (work). Hence, the retirement analogy. Extending your metaphor beyond the game, my obvious solution is to leave the game and find something new, because all that is "new" in the game for me is more work to get where I already was.

I don't think I can explain it any more clearly than that. Telling me to roll the stats back is pointless. I would not even be using these particular stats if I were not in this position, and they are only there to create an awareness of the situation that apparently affects a lot more people than myself. I didn't make these charts for personal fun or to min/max, I made them to communicate my issues with patch implementation and to enumerate the issue in real world terms. You clearly pay attention to your own statistics. All of your optimization suggestions are short cuts to maximize your XP. That uses statistics, so it's sort of disingenuous for you to tell me not to pay attention to stats in general, when it's obvious that you're using the same exact math to optimize your own playtime.

I think that you just don't mind it as much because you are where you are. Since you are over 1800, you're in a sweet spot where you're actually beyond the point of having to grind. You have 18 toons. I can pretty much guess how many hours you put into the game, because I have some farm rate numbers from console people who moved to PC that are going through their own re-grinds now, to get a sense of what that looks like before I posted this thread. It's almost certainly more than 15 hours per week. So I think that you just can't appreciate my perspective on this, because our idea of enjoyment is different, and my time constraints are different than yours, and I can't change who I am to become you.

So I'm taking your logic as this: if I want to enjoy "retirement", go learn something new that is fun to do. In other words, go do something else other than ESO.

Fair enough.

ElvenOverlord

Gythral wrote: »

amm7sb14_ESO wrote: »

If you have to pull out math and spreadsheets regarding a video game, I'm automatically tuned out.

LOL, guess playing EvE is out for you then

I mean I do fine in PVE without it so its not like its a must have lol

Ramber

Can you recalculate this using 50, 100 and 150 exp scrolls? when doing the daily randoms at least

Redguards_Revenge

furiouslog wrote: »

TLDR: Disgruntled vet player whines about CP 2.0 using a lot of math and a fancy Excel chart.

Introduction

Hey all, I just wanted to share a little chart I made to show why I think that the way that the CP were translated from 1.0 to 2.0 have upset some veteran players. I don’t think I’ve explained the underlying thought process adequately to date given the push back, so here is one last try to articulate what I see as the inequity. I'm also trying to address expected criticism based on the positions I've already heard. Warning, this is long, but it takes a while to explain it fully. To understand the chart below, let’s look at some assumptions and methods (everything can be changed to suit your own assumptions, but I’m not going to do it myself, feel free to grab this methodology and do it for your circumstances):

Assumptions

1. I calculated the “Farm Rate” for XP in the game by looking at my total hours played on all toons, and then figuring out the total XP earned, and dividing them. I have 12 toons. If you do this yourself, it takes about 2.8M XP to get to level 50 (depending on which update you were in when it happened, and it’s still imprecise due to XP leveling calculations), so you take that for each toon you have, and then all CP XP is on top of that. If you want an alternative to try to parse out time leveling new toons, you can just subtract the time spent getting to 50. On my best day, it took about 20 hours to get to 50 while doing dolmens, quest-unlocking some trees and buying others, and efficiently maximizing skill points. Anyway, after all of that, my personal CP Farm Rate is about 101K XP her hour played. That includes all buffs applied, enlightenment, as well as time spent doing stuff that earned no XP like housing, making a contest video, human lawn darts, coaching, parsing, parsing, parsing, more parsing, etc. I’ve logged over 6000 hours across all toons over nearly 7 years, with most of them on my main, and most of them in the past two years. When I am specifically earning XP, I pop a scroll or a potion, and I do big pushes in farm areas during XP buffed events. I’m sure it’s possible to get better than that in an optimized situation, but you’re not a tourist in the game at that point like I was. Consider my rate a representative mix of buffed XP farming, general questing, and silly time.

2. There are a finite number of quests in the game, and they earn a certain amount of XP to complete. Even though one necessarily would not want to do all of the quests, it’s reasonable to assume that if you still have content to complete in the game, and like the game, that all incomplete content represents an opportunity for entertainment. There are, based on current public data, 2173 original quests in the game, all offering varied levels of XP as a reward. The average quest awards 7485 XP (unbuffed). You also get XP for clearing areas, and discovering map points. Totaling all of this up, if you deliberately went through and did every quest in the game just once, and found every map area, you’d earn an estimated 30M XP (unbuffed). To account for the enjoyment of repeating quests (dungeons and dailies in particular), I multiplied that XP by a factor of 4 and assumed that all of that additional XP farmed was fundamentally entertaining (you exclusive PVPers and console transients will definitely disagree). I’m referring to this period of discovery and content completion as the “Honeymoon Phase”. During this period, I’m assuming that we play ESO for about 15 hours per week. Your mileage may vary. As a benchmark, the average US citizen spends about 5 hours of leisure time per day, including everything that they might do (TV, sports/exercise, music, reading, chatting with friends, other hobbies, etc). TV, reading, and socializing make up 3-4 of those averaged hours.

3. Once you complete content and have repeated quests enough that you are satisfied, and if you still want to play, the remainder of the time spent is purely on achieving the objective of getting to an optimized endgame spec. This is basically the extra time and hours spent required to farm XP and the appropriate gear needed to get to the current proposed target of 1170 CP and gear out our toons. Because it’s perceived as a precursor for endgame, we continue our playing time at 15 hours per week because we are focused on the goal, sometimes focusing on XP, sometimes farming gear, and sometimes doing something for fun. This period is called the “Optimizing Phase”. This is mostly the “grind” that we experience.

4. The 1170 CP 2.0 benchmark as the optimization floor for endgame is based on the video analysis of CP 2.0 posted by skinnycheeks, as well as a nod to the other people on this forum with whom I have debated who have taken a position on where the new min/max performance floor resides. It’s also the number that some score-pushing guilds I know are now throwing around. Can you go into a veteran trial with less? Yes, but you still have room to grow before you are “settled”. FWIW, I personally think it’s too low. I’m at 1310 and I don’t feel “settled”. I have to make trade-offs in the blue tree and have to grind some more to close gaps in passives due to those trade-offs, but it would have been impossible to get the same maxed stats under CP 1.0. I know this. We have to draw the line somewhere, so I took the lowest floor that appeared equivalent to 810 in CP 1.0, an issue on which most people seemed to agree.

5. There is a point in the game I perceive wherein players shift from this optimization phase and move on to a more casual approach, basically logging in just for scheduled events that they like, or to do newly released content. It’s not super realistic, but for the purposes of the analysis, and given that a lot of veteran players are upset about the changes, I’d say that they are beyond the point of wanting to optimize, but still desire to optimize and play more hours per week to do so. Using the Farm Rate, that comes to 2800 hours played, at which point they basically have “player fatigue”. So, I’m stipulating that if you are a hardcore player with a variety of in-game interests that is still reading this forum, you’re probably willing to put a total of 2800 hours in to get to where you want to be in the game. Again, your mileage may vary, especially if you don’t do a lot of crafting/housing. Once you hit this point, if you still play, you are actively playing at about 5 hours per week, whether its for trials, dungeon achievements, events, or PVP stuff. I’m calling this the Casual Stage, where you play purely as a function of choice and because it’s fun. I imagine that this would shift around a lot for different players. The range of time people spend in ESO in my guild who are at this casual stage where they are not working on character improvement at all is typically between 2-12 hours per week.

6. A caveat: I know new content will be released over the time period. This analysis is a cartoon depiction of reality because of that, and all prior content time spent being entertained is compressed in the first period of time for both players, which is not realistic. However, because I applied my Farm Rate over the course of the game, and because I played since beta at different levels of engagement at different times, it’s representative of an actual consumer journey with all changes and sporadic content releases included, averaged over time. Reality is a lot more bumpy (check Steamcharts for details). I acknowledge that with new content, there will be future XP earning opportunities that also provide new entertainment. If you want to get into those details, take any major chapter release, count up quests, figure out the XP, and apply a factor that you think is fair for repeatable entertainment value. That amount is reasonable to adjust from the Optimization Phase, but I assure you that it is not as significant as the remainder of time. Also, you have to pay a premium for that content in the short term, so it gets complicated to account for trade-offs.

Methods

What I did, using those assumptions, is calculate how long, given the Farm Rate, that it will take for a player to get to 1800, and what that would probably look like in a simulated reality. I have two hypothetical players to compare, basically the same exact person but under different circumstances:

1. The Veteran Player hit 810 on March 7, 2021. I back calculated the number of hours it would take to achieve that position, and then applied the 15 hours per week to calculate their start date. They start Match 8th with 810 CP earned.
2. The New Player hit 50 and just enters the CP phase on March 7, 2021, and starts March 8th with 0 CP earned.
3. Given the assumptions about the fatigue point, and because new players who are engaged and want to do endgame are trying to catch up, they continue to push CP at 15 hours per week after hitting 1170, until they reach the natural fatigue point that the Veteran Player hit of 2800 hours, because they are basically the same person just with different circumstances – the Vet Player had more in the tank, so does the New Player. Once they hit that natural fatigue point, they move to 5 hours per week. This is necessarily arbitrary because the reality is personal to each player, but again, I chose what seemed to be a logical point to clearly illustrate the issue. Timing and knots can change with different assumptions, but the pattern will be the same.

Chart

https://imgur.com/wvhsZeF



Findings

Some observations from the chart (Y-axis is CP, X-axis is Time):

1.By the time the Vet Player exhausted all new content and went through repetitions, they were 1 year and 4 months into the game, and hit about 590 CP. The new player spends the same amount of time, but is at 840 CP. The New Player can get to a higher CP than the Vet Player was able to do at 810 without ever entering the Optimization phase.
2.The calendar time for the Vet Player to get to the current Endgame Spec is 3 years and 7 months after start of play, with 2 years and 3 months spent purely optimizing to get there. The New Player spends 2 years and 4 months from start, with one year of pure time spent in Optimization. The Vet Player spent about 63% of their time basically grinding. The New Player spent 42% of their time grinding, with 1 year and 3 months less calendar time grinding.
3.If the New Player has equal tolerance for grinding time as the Vet Player, the New Player will eventually overtake the Vet Player in CP about 3 years after they start playing, and then they will basically be about the same after that.
4.Everything else being equal, if you play for 15 hours per week no matter what, the Veteran Player will hit 1800 7 years and 9 months after they started playing the game, on May 8, 2025. The New Player will hit 1800 6 years and 5 months after the start, on September 4, 2026, about 1 year and 4 months later than the Veteran Player.

Analysis, Counterpoints, and Conclusions

Where I think that the disconnect in the perception of fairness in this circumstance happens between players is in the relative perception of the grinding time. I know personally that I spent a lot of time farming gear because of stat changes and such (*cough* vMA). I accept that as a condition of frequent changes made for balancing and to keep the game dynamic, but frankly, I don’t enjoy much of that time and changes are way too frequent. I spent all of that time because I am competitive and it was a necessary evil to achieve my game goals. The fun time is spent in challenging dungeons and trials getting achievements, designing new housing, or horsing around in Cyrodiil. The rest of the time was basically playing a slot machine that takes between 5-60 minutes to stop spinning. Part of what mitigated the cost of the time I spent doing any grinding was this thought in the back of my mind: “Well, at least I’m still earning CP. That will pay off some day.” That made doing something insane (like having to level DW on my magplar to get a higher parse) just as much less annoying a week ago as it does today. Some people who play don’t make that assumption because they have a different mental model due to the influence of other MMO game designs that are must worse about messing with their players. Those people are not me. I’m just not going to accept the that point as a given, because you cannot retroactively change how I’ve always thought about it.

To those of you who are empathetic to the New Player: I hear you, and I think that the new system is way better for them, which is a good thing. I also think that CP 2.0 is actually well designed, (but they really should add two more slots to the Green Tree IMO – that would pretty much fix my current issues with it). The rest of it is really good and the intent of trade-offs is broadly fair and well applied. We could get persnickety about it, but at a high level, it’s a decent upgrade. It also gets the New Player to a viable endgame point (not optimized), without ever leaving the Honeymoon phase. That is ideal. By Mid-2024, this model shows that they are about at parity with the Vet Player, which is good, but the Vet Player spent considerably more effort and enjoyed the game less to get there, which is bad. As such, I have two core objections to ZOS's implementation:

1. My objection to the way CP 2.0 was rolled out is that any Veteran Player who was trying to reach their goal of finishing the grind to 810, and then focus only on the things that are enjoyable to them personally, is now forced to spend nearly another year of time, playing at their standard “honeymoon” rate of 15 hours per week, before they get back to that point where they feel like they can settle down and just work on optimizing their toon(s) and having fun doing the things that they want to do, rather than the things they have to do. I think that’s not fair, and it’s a massive time penalty to competitive veteran players. If you are not competitive, you probably don’t have an issue and don’t get the fuss, but then this post does not represent you at all and is irrelevant. That’s fine, you do you, but don’t assume that I feel the same way or can be coached in that direction. When I go out shopping or whatever, if a person pulls up in a car in the lane next to me at a stop light, that person and I are about to have a race.

2. My other objection is that unless I make ESO a second job, both of my kids will probably graduate college before I hit 1800. And 3600? Yeesh. That’s a me thing though, it’s not a fairness thing. Everyone is in the same boat, if you look at the chart. Who knows if the game will even be around by then?

I’m sure that there will be some disagreement with my interpretation, some of which will be based on assumptions. I’m not married to my assumptions, and I’m willing to admit that my foundational data could be flawed (I got a lot of it from gathering stuff from UESP and tried to be careful and accurate) – if you disagree and want to show where I'm off base, go ahead and pull out a spreadsheet and go for it with your own data and post it. I probably won’t disagree, because if you feel your assumptions are valid and based in reasonable data then there is no reason to disagree, we are just different. If I made a mistake in gathering my source data, I’ll thank you for pointing it out, and I’m happy to make a revision.

I am confident that some of you will reference prior VR/CP cap issues as justification for the current course of action. As I have stated multiple times in the past couple of weeks in various threads, doing a bad thing in the past does not justify doing a bad thing today. It’s a spurious, illogical, and completely unconvincing position. If you are merely saying it to say that it was unfair before, I agree with you, it’s just a lot harder to fix. I’ve played since beta. I get it. I just didn’t care about it as much then as I do now, because I had not discovered the joys of endgame at that point, and ESO life was a lot simpler when I was playing casually and ignorant of how these details directly affected my experience and investment of time.

The thing that’s just really upsetting me in particular about this is that I really love the game. I love the lore, the stories, the voice acting. Even the combat, as much of a frustrating time sink as it’s been, was also challenging and satisfying when I started improving. I’m just way past the point of fatigue, and even though I don’t want to lose touch with all of the friends I’ve made, and the guild I helped to build, there’s a point where I have to wonder if all of the personal resources that I’ve put into ESO are worth it and will continue to be worth it. The developers are basically stewarding my primary source of entertainment, into which I have invested both time and money with highly variable rates of return. I wish they were better about that. I wish I felt like they cared about it that way. I get it, it’s a business. I am a customer for that business, so I feel like I and people like me are owed consideration, but maybe we’re just not their target customers. Knowing what I know now, I probably would not have put so much time into the game or gotten so invested. I am still waiting to see if I get over it. As @VaranisArano posted in his 5 Stages of Patch Note Grief, I should be at Acceptance now. I’m stuck in Bargaining, I guess.

So here’s where I stop articulating the point. This is my best and last attempt at trying to objectively communicate the underlying mental model that is leading to this apparently broad perception of unfairness, and I hope ZOS takes it as constructive feedback that is important enough to address with action. I doubt it, though. I literally have nothing else to say on the matter as it is clear to my mind, and will consign any future consumer feedback, positive or negative, to the ticketing system and the appropriate review outlets, because honestly, that's where I get traction. Discussions on this forum appear to be too easily dismissed.. Unless any of you find some flaw in my underlying data, take it or leave it as you see fit. Even you still don’t agree, maybe at least you’ll appreciate my effort to improve the dialogue by sharing an alternative view of the mentality behind the discontent. Thanks for reading.

Or maybe that vet player can use his...you know ...skills and not worry about the upper echelon CP distro. I just ran around in CP CYRO with no CP in ... wasn't too bad....

Reverb

You’ve not touched at all on what bothers me about
It. It’s the lack of moderate changes. CP 2.0 was introduced at the same time a bunch of combat, racial, and set changes went live. Why do they think we should all be happy to spend hours to completely redo the build for every character so frequently?!

More importantly, Why is Zeni allergic to doing one major change at a time?

RavenRoxie

VaranisArano

Phaedryn wrote: »

All that time, and verbiage, for "some players are self imposing an artificial floor and I am not happy"

Also...it's a video game. If you are participating in activities you do not enjoy (mindlessly "farming" anything) you are doing it wrong. There is only one way to play a game wrong, and that is in a manner that is not enjoyable.

Both of those are on you, the individual player, not Zos.

Funny how player reactions to a system 100% designed and implemented by ZOS to put the majority of the playerbase at 1/9th of the new CP cap is entirely on the individual player, with nothing to do with the Devs and their decisions.

Look, the Devs designed and implemented CP 2.0 knowing the majority of the playerbase is at CP 410. Then they say:
"300-600 CP is where ideally, you should be able to do vet content.
If you’re aiming for a leaderboard CP, you’ll probably need to be around 800-1100."
And
"CP 1800 is the new expected curve for diminishing experience, but Enlightenment is the same.
Around CP 2000, there are no more passives to unlock, but you will have access to Quality of Life changes."

Please, let's not ignore the decisions the Devs made. They deliberately designed CP 2.0 to cover a wide variety of gameplay, with a high CP requirement for players to get both combat effectiveness and QOL filled out. In many ways, this is a good thing for the rework, but it wasn't done by accident. The Devs did this knowing the majority of the playerbase has a long way to go to get what they want for combat and for QOL. They chose not to scale our current CP to the new curve, knowing this leaves a maxed 810/810 player at around 1/5th of the current cap. They chose to do this, knowing that Veteran players like the OP and myself don't have a lot of "new" exp sources that don't come from grinding, grinding dailies, grinding events, or rerunning quests on alts, while the Devs wasted the exp we did earn after reaching 810.

I mean, if I keep playing the way I used to play before Update 29, taking in the scenery and only ever doing what I enjoyed doing, it's going to be a long, long haul before I ever see 1400 CP, much less all those sweet QOL passives I want. It's a lose-lose for me. Grind and don't enjoy it in order to get to the content I like quicker vs play the game the way I want and take forever to get the CP I'd like to have. What you miss, to be blunt, is that the Devs designed that Lose-Lose situation so that either way, they maximize my sunk-cost of time and effort in ESO.

It's almost like the Devs want players to play ESO for a long time and they don't particularly care whether we're happy or unhappy as we play, so long as we play. They'd love happy players, but they don't particularly care if I as an individual am unhappy so long as I'm logging in. And if I quit, well, there's plenty of new players with rose-colored glasses to replace me. I see that story play out on the forums every update. It's just business.

Don't ever forget that it takes two to tango. When you point the finger at the players for their reactions, never forget that the Devs are the ones who control the gaming environment. It's by their decisions that we're in this situation, trying to make the best of what's been handing down to us.

trackdemon5512

jle30303 wrote: »

From the perspective of a lot of players:

Before the patch, they could do X, Y and Z.

After the patch? They can't do X *at all* as well as they used to, no matter how many CPs they put in it, because that's been nerfed considerably. And as for Y and Z, they don't have enough CPs to put in to do Y and Z *both* as well as they used to, and even if they did, they're now slottable stars rather than passives so you have to choose between one and the other.

Nothing to do with "comparisons with other players". They're empirically weaker.

Nothing to do with "phases of argument from denial to bargaining to acceptance". They've been knocked backwards. They can't do, today, what they used to be able to do last week, and it will take them ages to get back to the same place for most of it, and in some cases they can't get their old capabilities back at all.

This is the sort of thing that makes players quit, or stop subscribing.

At the same time ZOS said that you shouldn't be able to do X Y and Z at the same time or as well as you did before. As for X for example in Cyrodiil you shouldn't be a heavy armor tank that could OHKO other players and heal through almost all damage. Or you shouldn't be able to burn trial bosses in hard mode while skipping some mechanics (like VCR+3 and groups leaving Galenwe alive through the execute and achieving Gryphon Heart).

And then with regards to Y and Z you have to understand that after 5 years ZOS realized there was too much front loaded into those things. Players had near final growth and no compromise. That's broken and falls back to a developer problem of not being able to design around it. How does one develop content for an entire player base and make is challenging but acceptable for the lowest of players and the highest? Something has to give and it was that combat omnipotence that 810s were currently able to achieve.

CP 2.0 is a reckoning and a course correction and provides room for future growth and development that CP 1.0 just didn't. And if you've been here long enough you've seen that ZOS does try to color within the lines of what they already had. They tweaked a ton under the hood for Cyrodiil to work better despite what the CP system was causing in terms of performance issues. Years went into that and despite all of those changes it came down to that what was going on just wasn't working. So we got group caps, heal restrictions, and PC tests.

CP 1.0 was tweaked many many times to keep power creep down. It had to be cut off 2.5 years ago because there was no way to keep up with it. Builds were breaking the game.

If you love the game and want it to continue CP 2.0 and its nerfs were necessary. Your power had to be checked. Otherwise you would have a small population of overpowered players and a huge population of those who can't play against or with them.

trackdemon5512

Reverb wrote: »

You’ve not touched at all on what bothers me about
It. It’s the lack of moderate changes. CP 2.0 was introduced at the same time a bunch of combat, racial, and set changes went live. Why do they think we should all be happy to spend hours to completely redo the build for every character so frequently?!

More importantly, Why is Zeni allergic to doing one major change at a time?

ZOS has been doing moderate combat changes forever. The last big ones were the racial passives rework and the consolidations of stats like breach/fracture.

The set changes in this patch were standard tuning of over performing sets. Nothing new there.

The limited racial changes were in order to balance with what was provided with the new CP system. Without those changes those classes would be overperforming.

VaranisArano

Reverb wrote: »

You’ve not touched at all on what bothers me about
It. It’s the lack of moderate changes. CP 2.0 was introduced at the same time a bunch of combat, racial, and set changes went live. Why do they think we should all be happy to spend hours to completely redo the build for every character so frequently?!

More importantly, Why is Zeni allergic to doing one major change at a time?

If you think about it as a lack of major gameplay changes leads to stagnation leading straight to players getting bored and leaving for other new and exciting games, then it starts to make more sense why ZOS grabs the snow globe and gives it a vigorous shaking every so often.

That's pretty much the idea behind the constant shakeups in the PVE and PVP metas, the periodic reworks of racial passives, and so on. It's horizontal progression by means of "shaking things up" rather than vertical progression by actually making players more powerful.

So by the time you've reset all your characters and begun to explore the CP 2.0 system, it all feels "fresh" and definitely not like someone shook the snowglobe so the snow lies differently over the same base landscape.


(I forget which forum user first used the "shaking the snowglobe and calling it "fresh and new"" analogy to describe horizontal progression, so I can't credit them. Nevertheless, it's stuck with me as a particularly apt description for what ZOS does with these major changes update after update.)

Ratzkifal

VaranisArano wrote: »

Ratzkifal wrote: »

That argument about someone who has finished all quests in the game and only plays one character who is now forced to grind because they can't go questing since they've already done the quests is the most compelling one I've heard. A situation like that indeed sucks and personally I have no idea how that could be elegantly resolved. I still don't think giving out free CP is the right approach to this problem though.
Perhaps ZOS could add NG+ for quest lines where you basically get to press a button, then confirm that you are really sure you want to reset the completed questline, and play through it a second time.

Every PvP player who thinks they can't compete anymore like this can check out no-CP PvP and Battlegrounds.

It wouldn't have been "free CP." CP comes from the experience we earn in game. X amount of CP = Y amount of experience. When ZOS changed the exp curve, they said "Now, Y amount of exp will get you to a higher amount of CP" except that they didn't give us any credit and so we're stuck at X amount of CP.

It would have been giving us the credit for the exp we earned, and everyone in game would have been remapped to the new, accelerated exp curve according to the exp they'd earned.

Instead, we effectively "lost" any exp that's above where we currently sit on the new curve.


As for "just play in No CP PVP"...

I'm going to be as polite as possible, but NO. My guild plays CP PVP. And I don't like No CP PVP Cyrodiil, having tried it.

I'm sure you mean well, but that's more akin to rubbing salt in the wound than offering helpful advice.

Look, if you are 1300CP before and ZOS bumps you up to 1700CP in CP2.0 that is free CP in my book, because that's not the value you've left off at and it's not a conversion thing like when vet-ranks were removed either. It's just bumping it up to more than it was.
I am looking at it this way: If you bought the latest iphone for 1700$ and it's worth just 1300$, and you knew that and did it anyway, that doesn't give you the right to get the next iphone 400$ cheaper because you paid too much last time. You grinded slowly towards your current CP in the understanding that this would be your CP value the next time the cap was raised, also understanding that next time it would take less XP to get those same CP, just like it has been done every single time before. That is exactly what we got again now, so I don't think demanding more CP is the right call here.
I totally get the frustration, don't get me wrong. But the issue does not lie with the adjusted curve nor with the 1:1 conversion of CP. The issue lies with the new thresholds being put where they are. That is the issue here. ZOS didn't need to put the end of vertical progression at somewhere between 1800 and 2000. They could have put it at 1000 too if they wanted.
People are demanding stuff now that I don't think should be given out just like that. I see my position as defending a principle we shouldn't abandon just because ZOS made a stupid decision. Two wrongs don't make a right.

I don't think there is a point to raising the cap if people are being dragged along with it. At that point we could have just stayed at the old cap. Part of the motivation for the CP overhaul was that veteran players had nothing to work towards anymore. The 1800 threshold is a bit much, I agree, especially since it's vertical progression and not horizontal progression, but we don't need to bump someone who is already at 1800 today up to 3600, otherwise what was the point? It certainly doesn't give me any "catch-up" vibes anymore either.

My comment about no-CP PvP... well, I don't get what people's issues are with no-CP. Especially now with the increased base values, no-CP and CP should be closer together than before. It's more fair because it is less about how much time you've spent every day and more about how good you actually are, siege does actual damage because mitigation is lower - you probably don't care about my reasons.
I really only mean well with that advice, it has been given to low CP players for years after all. It just hurts that formerly high CP players are now low CP players again, but it is the truth of the matter, and that is due to the 1800 threshold, not the lack of "compensation".



As for what @Agenericname suggested, that is a compromise I can accept, since that would be in the spirit of "catch-up" without ruining the point of allowing "endless" progression again and won't result in as crazy jumps in CP. I don't really get the point of a penalty on top of a curve that's becoming progressively steeper anyway.

Agenericname

Ratzkifal wrote: »

I don't think there is a point to raising the cap if people are being dragged along with it. At that point we could have just stayed at the old cap. Part of the motivation for the CP overhaul was that veteran players had nothing to work towards anymore. The 1800 threshold is a bit much, I agree, especially since it's vertical progression and not horizontal progression, but we don't need to bump someone who is already at 1800 today up to 3600, otherwise what was the point? It certainly doesn't give me any "catch-up" vibes anymore either.

My comment about no-CP PvP... well, I don't get what people's issues are with no-CP. Especially now with the increased base values, no-CP and CP should be closer together than before. It's more fair because it is less about how much time you've spent every day and more about how good you actually are, siege does actual damage because mitigation is lower - you probably don't care about my reasons.
I really only mean well with that advice, it has been given to low CP players for years after all. It just hurts that formerly high CP players are now low CP players again, but it is the truth of the matter, and that is due to the 1800 threshold, not the lack of "compensation".

I think you're right, the threshold being moved so far is a but much. We went from the end of vertical progression being 810CP to somewhere between 1200-1500CP and 1800CP for some of the QoL. That's a sizable jump, even with the new curve it represents a significant amount of time. I don't think its reasonable to move it closer without losing too much "flavor."

I think part of the issue is, and it has been mentioned prior, is that some players have already completed a sizable portion of the content. Is there enough left for them to get to max CP? Is there enough left to get to 1800 CP? Looking through the achievements leaderboard thread there are folks in there that have every single achievement and are below 1500 CP. Granted they would have earned most under the same 50% penalty that we all were and will no doubt level faster now, but it leaves them with a grind to earn more now. That's a bit discouraging.

The no-CP is a good idea and that's probably what I will do, but personally I think PvPers got shafted. Some went from equal footing to disparity overnight. No-CP would correct that, but if they're in guilds, have friends, groups, etc that do not want to migrate, this changed a lot for them. The group that I play with will likely go no-CP.

I forget who it was that said it when ZOS made the changes to the vMA weapons, but they said that earning a new weapon was easy, but the precedence set was much more unsettling.

mover1799_ESO

I don't like this patch at all, taking a break from the game until some other positive changes happen....and no you can't have my gear.

pelle412

I really enjoy the new system. For years I had zero vertical progression. CP 2.0 has breathed new life into the game for me.

Katahdin

Im kinda laughing about this right now.

A good portion of the player base has been asking for a CP revamp for years and now that its here, there are lots and lots of complaints. I guess the moral of the story is "be careful what you wish/ask for" lol

There are parts of the CP2.0 that Im not liking either, such as you are only limited to slot 4 things per category when we used to be able to get multiple things by putting points in. I also dont like the pathing of the green tree and having to "waste" points on things I dont want just to get to things I do..

Im still getting used to it so I dont have a final opinion yet

SilverBride

Katahdin wrote: »

There are parts of the CP2.0 that Im not liking either, such as you are only limited to slot 4 things per category when we used to be able to get multiple things by putting points in.

You aren't limited to 4 passives... just to 4 slottable passives. This was taken from the patch notes:

Stars within constellations are categorized under two main types:

Non-Slottable: These are stars which give you their noted stats and do not need further interaction other than adding the requisite points to activate the stat bonus listed.

Slottable: These are stars which give you their noted stats and must be added to the new Champion bar to activate the bonus listed in the star. When actively slotted, their art will update in the constellation to indicate this.

amm7sb14_ESO

furiouslog wrote: »

amm7sb14_ESO wrote: »

It's a role playing game, so the point is to 1.) play a role ("role playing") and 2.) have fun ("game")

Sitting with calculators and spreadsheets to min / max the math of the game goes against both of those things imo, because you are neither playing a role, nor is it fun. You turn the entire game into just a fancy set of mathematical equations.

I'd rather spend time coming up with characters, designing concepts, finding playstyles that are fun and thematic, and... playing the role of that character.

XP comes as it comes. I'm not gonna sit here and be worried that XP was slower for the past however many years, and use a spreadsheet to figure out that if XP was gained at the same pace, I would be X levels higher than I am now. I'm not gonna sit here and pull out a calculator and spreadsheet to find that if I use sets A and B, that I can do X amount of damage more than the sets and skills that I am doing now, just because X > Y.

Min / Maxing goes against the entire idea of why we play games, imo.

I read an article about why we play games a week or so ago. There was a long list of reasons, and the list did not have a lot of overlap.

Min/maxing is a big part of the competitive offerings in the game. Sometimes the point of a game is to get a high score. Score depends on ability. Ability is a function of time invested. There is a lot of scoring and tallying in ESO that requires an investment of time, and because I put time in, I care about it. I acknowledge that if you are not that kind of player, that none of the stuff I was going on about would really apply to you, because the experience that you enjoy is not the same experience I am currently focused on. For the first year I played ESO, I was pretty casual, questing and pretending to be my character as part of a story. When I got to a point where I started doing trials and PVP, my focus changed. I paid real money for a target dummy. I started getting into the statistics. Full disclosure: I'm a statistical researcher by trade, so I see the world that way to start with.

But I think we both have a valid "point" to our gaming. ESO provides enough variety and depth to appeal to both of us on different levels, given the number of very different possible reasons we game in the first place, and that is okay. I don't get RP guilds. I want nothing to do with it personally, but I'm actually glad that they are there because it's nice to see that they have a role and a way they enjoy the game, and also they care about way different things than I do which offers variety when they provide input. I get that you don't see why I would even go through the effort to do this to start with. Here's why: it's because I really care about it.

[snip]

Once you have figured out the math, and come to the answer that player math > boss math, or player a math > player b math, then that's it. Game over. If that's all you're playing for is the math, then why even log into the game? You figured out your math, you loaded up your Mother's Sorrow/ False God's / Zaan's, you plugged in your CP's to the peak before diminishing returns, and its over. You've won the spreadsheet. Nothing left to do.

If the numbers are that important to you, then you don't even need the game. Just put the math into your spreadsheet, punch it into your calculator, and done. Game over.

You say that you are glad that RP guilds exist even tho you don't like them, but little do you realize that your way of playing is actually detrimental to RP'ers, or anyone who doesn't play Elder Spreadsheets Online. Because when all you do is min / max the spreadsheet, it creates a power creep that seeps into the rest of the game, and leads to either pressure, if not full blown requirements, for everyone else to do the same thing if they even want a chance to participate in content.

[snip]

This update has problems to be sure, but if there is one thing that I do enjoy about it, is that for at least a short period of time, the meta isn't so rampant. [snip] I can explore a new CP system and explore ways to build my characters and individualize playstyles without having Yolna and Alkosh forced mindlessly on my tanks.

That's great if you find enjoyment out of a spreadsheet, I suppose. You and I are not the same. If you are just looking for the #'s, there's no need to even play the game. But the fact that you do log into a game that uses those #'s shows you know there are reasons beyond a spreadsheet to play a game.

[Edited to remove Baiting]

furiouslog

amm7sb14_ESO wrote: »

furiouslog wrote: »

amm7sb14_ESO wrote: »

It's a role playing game, so the point is to 1.) play a role ("role playing") and 2.) have fun ("game")

Sitting with calculators and spreadsheets to min / max the math of the game goes against both of those things imo, because you are neither playing a role, nor is it fun. You turn the entire game into just a fancy set of mathematical equations.

I'd rather spend time coming up with characters, designing concepts, finding playstyles that are fun and thematic, and... playing the role of that character.

XP comes as it comes. I'm not gonna sit here and be worried that XP was slower for the past however many years, and use a spreadsheet to figure out that if XP was gained at the same pace, I would be X levels higher than I am now. I'm not gonna sit here and pull out a calculator and spreadsheet to find that if I use sets A and B, that I can do X amount of damage more than the sets and skills that I am doing now, just because X > Y.

Min / Maxing goes against the entire idea of why we play games, imo.

I read an article about why we play games a week or so ago. There was a long list of reasons, and the list did not have a lot of overlap.

Min/maxing is a big part of the competitive offerings in the game. Sometimes the point of a game is to get a high score. Score depends on ability. Ability is a function of time invested. There is a lot of scoring and tallying in ESO that requires an investment of time, and because I put time in, I care about it. I acknowledge that if you are not that kind of player, that none of the stuff I was going on about would really apply to you, because the experience that you enjoy is not the same experience I am currently focused on. For the first year I played ESO, I was pretty casual, questing and pretending to be my character as part of a story. When I got to a point where I started doing trials and PVP, my focus changed. I paid real money for a target dummy. I started getting into the statistics. Full disclosure: I'm a statistical researcher by trade, so I see the world that way to start with.

But I think we both have a valid "point" to our gaming. ESO provides enough variety and depth to appeal to both of us on different levels, given the number of very different possible reasons we game in the first place, and that is okay. I don't get RP guilds. I want nothing to do with it personally, but I'm actually glad that they are there because it's nice to see that they have a role and a way they enjoy the game, and also they care about way different things than I do which offers variety when they provide input. I get that you don't see why I would even go through the effort to do this to start with. Here's why: it's because I really care about it.

[snip]

Once you have figured out the math, and come to the answer that player math > boss math, or player a math > player b math, then that's it. Game over. If that's all you're playing for is the math, then why even log into the game? You figured out your math, you loaded up your Mother's Sorrow/ False God's / Zaan's, you plugged in your CP's to the peak before diminishing returns, and its over. You've won the spreadsheet. Nothing left to do.

If the numbers are that important to you, then you don't even need the game. Just put the math into your spreadsheet, punch it into your calculator, and done. Game over.

You say that you are glad that RP guilds exist even tho you don't like them, but little do you realize that your way of playing is actually detrimental to RP'ers, or anyone who doesn't play Elder Spreadsheets Online. Because when all you do is min / max the spreadsheet, it creates a power creep that seeps into the rest of the game, and leads to either pressure, if not full blown requirements, for everyone else to do the same thing if they even want a chance to participate in content.

[snip]

This update has problems to be sure, but if there is one thing that I do enjoy about it, is that for at least a short period of time, the meta isn't so rampant. [snip] I can explore a new CP system and explore ways to build my characters and individualize playstyles without having Yolna and Alkosh forced mindlessly on my tanks.

That's great if you find enjoyment out of a spreadsheet, I suppose. You and I are not the same. If you are just looking for the #'s, there's no need to even play the game. But the fact that you do log into a game that uses those #'s shows you know there are reasons beyond a spreadsheet to play a game.

I don't think your take away is representative of my actual viewpoint. The statistics and analysis that facilitate optimizing a toon is one way to figure out how to clear certain kinds of content. The spreadsheet is a prerequisite, not the end. The rest is practicing and mastering combat, and then mastering the specific mechanics. Does that make sense?

Min/maxing players and RP players can live in the same world without much overlap. I don't see how my desire to eventually achieve hard mode in a number of dungeons and trials hurts the RP experience. Those guys don't need Perfected Siroria to do a big group chat around a wayshrine. They don't even need any CP at all.

As for builds being "forced" upon you: support roles need to coordinate builds in order to ensure optimum uptimes on the buffs that assist the entire team. If you can find a good way to do that outside of the "meta", I'm sure any reasonable raid leader will listen. DPS is easier to get outside meta if there are multiple options, because you can parse and go into raids, and the logs will show if you're doing your job or not. As long as you're doing that job, no one cares what builds you're using. I've switched builds around to my personal benefit doing DPS, and raid leaders actually appreciate that kind of thinking. It's always been that way. But the math and statistics still support that fact that there is usually a better way, in context, so people do that in order to get the advantage those things bring, hence the existence of DPS meta builds. I have a vSS specific set of builds depending on boss/trash. I have a specific set for vMOL, depending on boss/trash. If you go do most build sites, there is one "best" build, but that's not what happens in reality.

You can hate that, but it actually has nothing to do with your gaming experience, so you are okay with what ZOS has done. It definitely affects me, so I'm not okay with it. Your proposed solution to my problem is this: just stop caring about it. If I could clear all content without issue without having to continue grinding XP for another year of my life, I probably would stop caring.

But then what would be the point in getting more CP? It should be to broaden playstyles and open up more possibilities by unlocking more slottable skills. That's what I was looking forward to. Now it seems so far away as to be a pointless goal, when the skills I already earned have been taken away and locked behind hundreds of hours of grind. I was looking forward to the horizontal progress, not more vertical progress to get back to where I was. All the numbers do is show the a real world estimate of that stake. If you care about your time, you should not be ignoring that. If you don't care, no big deal.

Jeremy

amm7sb14_ESO wrote: »

furiouslog wrote: »

amm7sb14_ESO wrote: »

It's a role playing game, so the point is to 1.) play a role ("role playing") and 2.) have fun ("game")

Sitting with calculators and spreadsheets to min / max the math of the game goes against both of those things imo, because you are neither playing a role, nor is it fun. You turn the entire game into just a fancy set of mathematical equations.

I'd rather spend time coming up with characters, designing concepts, finding playstyles that are fun and thematic, and... playing the role of that character.

XP comes as it comes. I'm not gonna sit here and be worried that XP was slower for the past however many years, and use a spreadsheet to figure out that if XP was gained at the same pace, I would be X levels higher than I am now. I'm not gonna sit here and pull out a calculator and spreadsheet to find that if I use sets A and B, that I can do X amount of damage more than the sets and skills that I am doing now, just because X > Y.

Min / Maxing goes against the entire idea of why we play games, imo.

I read an article about why we play games a week or so ago. There was a long list of reasons, and the list did not have a lot of overlap.

Min/maxing is a big part of the competitive offerings in the game. Sometimes the point of a game is to get a high score. Score depends on ability. Ability is a function of time invested. There is a lot of scoring and tallying in ESO that requires an investment of time, and because I put time in, I care about it. I acknowledge that if you are not that kind of player, that none of the stuff I was going on about would really apply to you, because the experience that you enjoy is not the same experience I am currently focused on. For the first year I played ESO, I was pretty casual, questing and pretending to be my character as part of a story. When I got to a point where I started doing trials and PVP, my focus changed. I paid real money for a target dummy. I started getting into the statistics. Full disclosure: I'm a statistical researcher by trade, so I see the world that way to start with.

But I think we both have a valid "point" to our gaming. ESO provides enough variety and depth to appeal to both of us on different levels, given the number of very different possible reasons we game in the first place, and that is okay. I don't get RP guilds. I want nothing to do with it personally, but I'm actually glad that they are there because it's nice to see that they have a role and a way they enjoy the game, and also they care about way different things than I do which offers variety when they provide input. I get that you don't see why I would even go through the effort to do this to start with. Here's why: it's because I really care about it.

[snip]

Once you have figured out the math, and come to the answer that player math > boss math, or player a math > player b math, then that's it. Game over. If that's all you're playing for is the math, then why even log into the game? You figured out your math, you loaded up your Mother's Sorrow/ False God's / Zaan's, you plugged in your CP's to the peak before diminishing returns, and its over. You've won the spreadsheet. Nothing left to do.

If the numbers are that important to you, then you don't even need the game. Just put the math into your spreadsheet, punch it into your calculator, and done. Game over.

You say that you are glad that RP guilds exist even tho you don't like them, but little do you realize that your way of playing is actually detrimental to RP'ers, or anyone who doesn't play Elder Spreadsheets Online. Because when all you do is min / max the spreadsheet, it creates a power creep that seeps into the rest of the game, and leads to either pressure, if not full blown requirements, for everyone else to do the same thing if they even want a chance to participate in content.

[snip]

This update has problems to be sure, but if there is one thing that I do enjoy about it, is that for at least a short period of time, the meta isn't so rampant. [snip] I can explore a new CP system and explore ways to build my characters and individualize playstyles without having Yolna and Alkosh forced mindlessly on my tanks.

That's great if you find enjoyment out of a spreadsheet, I suppose. You and I are not the same. If you are just looking for the #'s, there's no need to even play the game. But the fact that you do log into a game that uses those #'s shows you know there are reasons beyond a spreadsheet to play a game.

It's not just the "meta" who is affected. I've never played the "meta". Every individualized play style I've ever come up with on this game they have trashed through updates and dramatic gameplay alterations. I would even go so far as to say they especially target individualized play styles for extinction. Anything that is new or interesting or the least bit effective they end up crushing. As an example: I was probably the only one - or at least one of very few - who actually played a health regen/mist form build. In all of my time of doing battlegrounds since Greymoor was released I did not see one other person use it. Not a single one. So the very last thing it was was rampant.

It's frankly twisted. This game gives players a wide selection of gear and tools to come up with "individualized play styles" as you put it - but then immediately nerfs them into the ground the second they come up with one. It's like some kind of diabolic experiment and we are the guinea pigs. So I would refute what you say that this game is interested in promoting individualized play styles. Because I have gotten the exact opposite impression from them, and feel as if they wont' be happy until we are all playing generic, bland, and terrible builds. Because it seems unless you playing one of those you are not safe and could have your character completely obliterated at any moment.

These frequent and massive changes to the gameplay were suppose to be temporary while they transitioned into some kind of new development structure anyway. Or at least that is what they said. But considering that was years ago when they said it I think it's safe to assume that was less than true.

fxeconomisteb17_ESO

Jeremy wrote: »

As an example: I was probably the only one - or at least one of very few - who actually played a health regen/mist form build. In all of my time of doing battlegrounds since Greymoor was released I did not see one other person use it. Not a single one. So the very last thing it was was rampant.

I use that too. Mist Form/Health regen is the thing to do. Well, now they completely removed all regens. I think it's still manageable. While my main set was for self heal this didn't influence me too much, but what upset me is they blocked the stamina regen too, as you need time to time to exit it to blocking mode, and this means there's no way to regen stamina. And yes this means another set change...