Overland Content Feedback Thread

SilverBride

Snamyap wrote: »

SilverBride wrote: »

Overland is for the story, not for a challenge. No one should have to struggle with these mobs and as it is now they don't have to.

How good would the story of Lord of the Rings be if the fellowship could just mow down the goblins and the troll in Moria? If Gandalf was done with the Balrog in 10 seconds? If Sam didn't need to rescue Frodo from Shelob because she was never a threat to begin with?

This is not a movie where the battles are expected to be epic to entertain the masses. Masses that are watching the battle, not having to participate and succeed themselves. This is a game, and mudcrabs that have nothing to do with the plot of the story are not supposed to be epic battles.

I don't see everyone else's story being played out, I only see mine. The one where I am the hero. The one where players from level 1 to CP 3600 can all succeed because it is not too challenging for that to happen.

Gaeliannas

WiseSky wrote: »

Hexnibbler wrote: »

I made an Orsimer Sorcerer. Named him "Gruk The Challenged".
I don't use weapon. Bare fists. Nor armors. Or skill points. Or skills. Or Stats. Or anything.
So I go around, punching mobs in the face with light attacks, blocking theirs.
And it works. It works surprinsingly well.

I hear Rocky's theme song in my head when I punch my way through "sneaking" missions. Gruk doesn't sneak.
When there are traps to avoid, I run through them. Gruk doesn't avoid.

I one shot wolves "adds" (the ones spawning from the "Howling" attack) with a single light attack of my mighty fists.
I killed the "bone dude" boss in the first Molag Bal quest with my fists too. It's labelled as "hard". Gruk is harder.
New players seeing me playing try to "E" me because they think Gruk is an NPC in their quest.

The best challenge I had was a fight against 3 mobs. Nearly depleted my stamina bar and lost 1/4 of my health.

I'm now level 10, way past the tutorial phase and still "Rocking".
Can't wait to strangle Mannimarco with my hands.

Even I, who is actually doing it myself and witnessing it firsthand, am under the impression that this description above is a huge trolling exageration of the truth when writing it.
And it is not.

Gruk doesn't exagerate.

Althought It's a bit of a provocative post from my part, It is factual. Anyone can check it in his own account. There is no interpretation about it.

I certainly will have to put some of those level up point in stamina or health at some points in Gruk's improbable story. I can see that my light attacking fists are now dealing below 2K damage, and the the mobs attacks are going above 1k unblocked. So maybe in a few level I will need to put a few points. Or wear equipement.

What matters in that experiment is that the game current balance isn't about being too easy, because this Gruk way of life isn't even hard (try it ! don't just imagine or judge, try it.).

Can't say that it is hard to right click while a mob attack and left click twice after that. (hint: they attack, then they idle so you can attack. then they attack. Sometimes instead of idling they charge a telegraph)
A telegraph that lasts between 1 to more than 2 seconds,
meaning you have between 500ms up to 1500 ms to react on a 500 ping connection.
Human reaction is 200 to 250ms.
So someone would need to be two time slower than what is scientifically measured to be the average of human reaction to be physically unable to meet the required motor skills to play this game on an internet connection that has a 500 ms delay in the very worst case scenario of a 1 sec telegraph that can still be anticipated through watching the mob....

No, this is not about difficulty or accessibiility.

The game current balance is allowing players to just randomly place points and randomly use skills and gear so that they cannot, mathematically, put themselves in a situation where the combat can be lost unless there are many concurrent mobs.
Again, this is pure facts : You still win fights without any equipement (armor AND weapons), without any points in any skills, without any "attribute allocation" and just spam light attack in the face of monsters at level 10. And without blocking or dodging any of his attacks including the heavy ones. So, if you can still beat it that way, you can certainly beat it with uninformed or very bad allocations.

You start to need "block" against "Hard" monsters such as boss (purple healthbar) :




I'll take note of the level at which it becomes necessary to use armor and/or weapon to win this way. And how long the game (not "me" : the game.) allow to win this way onward.

So while it's all fun to try to decipher the will and intent of a majority of player across differents cultures, ages, countries and equipements, we can go the other way around and try to understand if it is likely that the majority of players consider the current state of balance preferable.

If it does it would imply that the majority of players are asking to protect the rocky balboa gameplay where mobs are simply loot container of the exact same nature as resources nodes at the expense of a normal fantasy mmorpg gameplay that includes weapons, skills, armor, stats, etc to win fights overland.

I don't belive so.

What the current balance allow is, as far as overland content is concerned, for people to wipe entire delves without stopping, blocking, dodging or interrupting while spamming skills. So much that in most cases when you have to go through a delve because of a quest you won't have to fight 90% of its content because someone else has already wiped it.

This is again a factual description of what is happening in game.

What probably happend, If I need to guess, is that some people had difficulty with the game -maybe- because as usual when stats are meaningful in a mmorpg, some people just don't know how to use the system to keep their character in-line with the game expectations.

So their mistakes in allocating points makes the game more challenging as they progress in level (in the sense that it makes the amount of hits to win higher and/or the amount of mistakes required to lose lower).
It's a classic issue in mmorpgs.
Those who knows "how to", and don't need less difficulty, makes the game easier for themselves.
Those who don't know "how to", and don't need more difficulty, makes the game harder for themselves.

Just as if they were playing Gruk without knowing they can put a weapon, attribute point and armor in those slots, they play and at some point it becomes too difficult. Just my guess.

Keeping the balance as it is right now is the equivalent of saying "ok Gruk is a valid gameplay." over "Ok we need to help people put their points and understand the game mechanics so that they don't end up in a situation where the game becomes too challenging or impossible".

Even IF somehow this radically change above level 35+ (that's my highest character, who is a normal character) it still is the experience new players go through and that is what they will judge the game to be.
Saying if they want challenge they should go towards hard level content is the exact same thing as saying to those who felt the game was too hard should have limit themselves to mudcrab farming.
I don't find either of those to be relevant answers, and frankly it isn't respectful either.

The goal of my post here is to show some undisputable facts alongside what simply is my opinion.
And just to anticipate : my opinion is not shared to be changed or marginalized through forum quote wars, and facts are facts.

If ZOS wants the game to stay this way that's under their responsability.
At the end of the day it is a commercial product so if it leads to more customers rather than less then it's a good thing for them.
But I would be surprised that the retention rate of new players is better this way than it would be with a serious balancing pass.

Lovely play style.

I for one have my own challenging way to playing.

If you are CP 160 with no armor and skills and no Cp you will die to Mudcrab just punching them cause of the level scaling just wanted to chime that in. But at level 10 its fine

Well you kind of made his point, as hopefully by CP160 someone figured out how to equip weapons, wear armor and allocate their points in some reasonable fashion. By balancing the game for people who choose to not learn those simple things, it is pretty boring.

SilverBride

Gaeliannas wrote: »

Well you kind of made his point, as hopefully by CP160 someone figured out how to equip weapons, wear armor and allocate their points in some reasonable fashion. By balancing the game for people who choose to not learn those simple things, it is pretty boring.

Knowing how to do something doesn't mean we want to. Players who enjoy overland as it is know how to play. We just don't want a challenge in the story.

Sylvermynx

Gaeliannas wrote: »

Well you kind of made his point, as hopefully by CP160 someone figured out how to equip weapons, wear armor and allocate their points in some reasonable fashion. By balancing the game for people who choose to not learn those simple things, it is pretty boring.

Oh, I know how to equip weapons, wear armor and allocate skill points and CP. I know about using buff food etc. None of that helps aging reflexes and 750ms + ping. Also doesn't help that while I have several master crafters, I'm not much good at theory crafting builds. It's not something I've ever been very good at.

Now, I repeat: if a harder overland is produced and isn't optional, I'll give it my best (which actually isn't very good any more). But there's a limit to how much "diediedie you fool" I'm willing to accept. Right now, I can avoid much of the combat that winds my characters up dead asap, because I've been around here almost 4 years and I know where it all is by now (except for newly released content of course - and my first thing to do with that is figure out where it's too hard for me, and not go there again....)

We'll see what happens.

Parasaurolophus

I'd just like to urge players not to get into a heated argument here, otherwise, as Kevin said, this thread will be closed. I understand that it's hard to hold back when some people seem to not read the arguments at all and try to start a new cycle of this conversation again. But please, there are a lot of great, constructive and detailed reviews regarding overland content.

Parasaurolophus

Tonight, when my group and I were going to raid vKA (progress group DB), a few people were discussing that they don't really get into the game at all. They turn on the game only for the time of the RT and that's it. Some said that they still do craft dailies, but also admitted that they themselves do not understand why they do it.
Sometimes I ask myself this question. I complete all new dlc in 4-5 nights of smooth gameplay. And then it all ends again. If only the quality of writing has not yet fallen.

CP5

SilverBride wrote: »

Snamyap wrote: »

SilverBride wrote: »

Overland is for the story, not for a challenge. No one should have to struggle with these mobs and as it is now they don't have to.

How good would the story of Lord of the Rings be if the fellowship could just mow down the goblins and the troll in Moria? If Gandalf was done with the Balrog in 10 seconds? If Sam didn't need to rescue Frodo from Shelob because she was never a threat to begin with?

This is not a movie where the battles are expected to be epic to entertain the masses. Masses that are watching the battle, not having to participate and succeed themselves. This is a game, and mudcrabs that have nothing to do with the plot of the story are not supposed to be epic battles.

I don't see everyone else's story being played out, I only see mine. The one where I am the hero. The one where players from level 1 to CP 3600 can all succeed because it is not too challenging for that to happen.

But shouldn't the big bad, or the impending army, the things the plot intentionally hypes up, at least have the option to live up to what the story says they are? This is a game, and it can be played in many ways, to that end every piece of content in the game except the world offers this choice. My own story in all the years I've played has stopped for the year-long content because that story is always so uninteresting and disingenuous, the story I see doesn't need me, because if the npcs could get up and do something all their issues would have been resolved by now.

For exactly the reason you were put off, by the story being gated behind to challenging content, so too are some players put off by every single encounter, from exploring the world to saving the day, being so trivial that they're also driven away by it. In the past, you didn't leave the game because you were burnt out and didn't want to engage with it more, and that is the same for us. For other people, not like you, this should be an option entertained by ZOS, and we all know they have a means of doing this without taking away anything from those who enjoy the content as is.

spartaxoxo

What happens to trash in many cool fantasy stories

But bosses won't be pushed around like trash


The trash mobs shouldn't be hard. It's the elite mobs and quest bosses that need to be more challenging. Fodder should be easily decimated. It adds to the power fantasy and makes playing less tedious.

Hard to buy your guy as one of the most important heroes of Tamriel and you struggle against some lame bandit or grunt of some cult. But Molag Bal and Rada al-Saran shouldn't be easy. They are world destroyers. Quite literally, world ending levels of threat. They should be tough.

CP5

And if a story has some complicated quest to counter an army of enemies, like "should we raise an army of the dead using this ancient artifact?" Instead, every single one of those instances boil down to "why don't I just kill them instead?" Town under siege? Quit with the round about task, just let me kill them. Same with exploration, what difference is the deadlands to stormhaven if the deadra are just reskinned bandits? The more the same everything is, the less reason there is to go anywhere else.

spartaxoxo

Hence why I included elite mobs in what ZoS needs to make harder.

Edit:
But you do also need fodder. It's tedious and makes your guy look weak if everything is difficult. Fodder makes powerful things look more powerful by comparison.

spartaxoxo

And for anyone unaware, elite mobs are the ones that are already "harder" on the map compared to trash mobs. They have a different looking health bar, but they aren't named because they aren't bosses.

CP5

True enough, but it would be nice for npcs to not waste so much time during fights aiming knives or jumpping in the air.

Snamyap

SilverBride wrote: »

Snamyap wrote: »

SilverBride wrote: »

Overland is for the story, not for a challenge. No one should have to struggle with these mobs and as it is now they don't have to.

How good would the story of Lord of the Rings be if the fellowship could just mow down the goblins and the troll in Moria? If Gandalf was done with the Balrog in 10 seconds? If Sam didn't need to rescue Frodo from Shelob because she was never a threat to begin with?

This is not a movie where the battles are expected to be epic to entertain the masses. Masses that are watching the battle, not having to participate and succeed themselves. This is a game, and mudcrabs that have nothing to do with the plot of the story are not supposed to be epic battles.

I don't see everyone else's story being played out, I only see mine. The one where I am the hero. The one where players from level 1 to CP 3600 can all succeed because it is not too challenging for that to happen.

Shelob and the Balrog obviously aren't the mudcrabs of Middle Earth. Neither was de Cave Troll. They were important plot characters, build up to be powerful adverseries, and they were.

SilverBride wrote: »

Gaeliannas wrote: »

Well you kind of made his point, as hopefully by CP160 someone figured out how to equip weapons, wear armor and allocate their points in some reasonable fashion. By balancing the game for people who choose to not learn those simple things, it is pretty boring.

Knowing how to do something doesn't mean we want to. Players who enjoy overland as it is know how to play. We just don't want a challenge in the story.

I would never support a change that makes it harder for everyone. There are obviously enough players that like it the way it is. I, like many others, just want a harder option, preferably a separate instance

WiseSky

LashanW wrote: »

WiseSky wrote: »

If you are CP 160 with no armor and skills and no Cp you will die to Mudcrab just punching them cause of the level scaling just wanted to chime that in.

Nope.
I checked with my Redguard nightblade (CP2493).
Loaded an empty build from armory.
No skills/passives, no armor/jewels, no weapons, no CP, no attribute points. And no buff food. Still had the mundus, I don't know how to take it off. (right clicking on character screen didn't remove it) and ofc no potions or poisons. It's kinda weird but you can equip poisons without any weapons. Guess my dude just dips his bare hands in poison.

Punched a mudcrab to death (can't take on more than 1 tho)

Felt extra brave. So punched a bear to death too. This was fun actually, much more interesting than the boring mudcrab.

In both cases I had 35% or more health left. But you have to follow the basic combat stuff like blocking heavy attacks and moving out of red AoE (bear has a conal attack). Rest of the time I just held down the attack button (which results in a heavy attack spam)

I remember having trouble with a Mudcrab as I was playing a Cast away on an Island.
I was then mistaken but I remember then being a challenge and dying must have taken two of them.

LashanW

Sylvermynx wrote: »

Oh, I know how to equip weapons, wear armor and allocate skill points and CP. I know about using buff food etc. None of that helps aging reflexes and 750ms + ping. Also doesn't help that while I have several master crafters, I'm not much good at theory crafting builds. It's not something I've ever been very good at.

Yeah 750+ ping is a big problem.

There are AFK builds that literally kills everything around you while healing you, but it requires gear from DLC dungeons. But in your situation getting that gear in the first place is very difficult, unless you have people willing to help in social guilds.

Btw that AFK build is Leeching Plate + Crimson twilight + Malacath ring. The 5pc sets are heavy and their procs deal damage while healing you when you take damage. And the best part is they scale with max health. I've seen people solo some base game dungeons with that build while being mostly AFK. They just jog all the way to a boss and stay there. All the trash mobs follow and they all slowly die along with the boss. The player doesn't even have their weapons drawn.

Aardappelboom

Just some food for thought, especially for Rich, but single player games offer optional difficulty sliders to maximize attraction for different players. If anything, this topic shows there's an audience for both, easy and difficult content.

Why not maximize attraction for al these players? DLCs focus on story and are very similar to a single player experience, difficulty sliders would definitely create value for different players further justifying the price tag for each content drop.

As for rewards, there's not any single player game that gives better rewards on higher difficulty, sure there's an achievement here and there but I'm 100% sure that creating optional difficulty sliders without rewards will create value nontheless.

One thing I'd like to add to the discussion is that it would be smart to further divide overland into story-arc dungeons and bosses and "random mobs on the world map" I would love for story dungeons to offer some challenge, but I wouldn't nescessarily want wolves and bears scattered around the world map to give me any difficulties.

Sylvermynx

LashanW wrote: »

Sylvermynx wrote: »

Oh, I know how to equip weapons, wear armor and allocate skill points and CP. I know about using buff food etc. None of that helps aging reflexes and 750ms + ping. Also doesn't help that while I have several master crafters, I'm not much good at theory crafting builds. It's not something I've ever been very good at.

Yeah 750+ ping is a big problem.

There are AFK builds that literally kills everything around you while healing you, but it requires gear from DLC dungeons. But in your situation getting that gear in the first place is very difficult, unless you have people willing to help in social guilds.

Btw that AFK build is Leeching Plate + Crimson twilight + Malacath ring. The 5pc sets are heavy and their procs deal damage while healing you when you take damage. And the best part is they scale with max health. I've seen people solo some base game dungeons with that build while being mostly AFK. They just jog all the way to a boss and stay there. All the trash mobs follow and they all slowly die along with the boss. The player doesn't even have their weapons drawn.

Thanks for that info. That's the thing - I'm never sure what the sets from dungeons do, and I'm not really sure I can get them, but I at least have a little list now of things that can help.

What I wish is that the "infrastructure" improvement for rural broadband was going to happen here. It's not. Town of less than 200 full time residents? Nope.

Gaeliannas

Sylvermynx wrote: »

Gaeliannas wrote: »

Well you kind of made his point, as hopefully by CP160 someone figured out how to equip weapons, wear armor and allocate their points in some reasonable fashion. By balancing the game for people who choose to not learn those simple things, it is pretty boring.

Oh, I know how to equip weapons, wear armor and allocate skill points and CP. I know about using buff food etc. None of that helps aging reflexes and 750ms + ping. Also doesn't help that while I have several master crafters, I'm not much good at theory crafting builds. It's not something I've ever been very good at.

Now, I repeat: if a harder overland is produced and isn't optional, I'll give it my best (which actually isn't very good any more). But there's a limit to how much "diediedie you fool" I'm willing to accept. Right now, I can avoid much of the combat that winds my characters up dead asap, because I've been around here almost 4 years and I know where it all is by now (except for newly released content of course - and my first thing to do with that is figure out where it's too hard for me, and not go there again....)

We'll see what happens.

As someone who is also fairly old with bad reflexes, I too limit what I do in game based upon that. I will never be top DPS and be able to weave again, so I avoid vet trials and such. But living in a rural area with bad Internet, that shouldn't be a thing ZOS should have to take into consideration for the masses when designing a AAA title.

While I am empathetic to your issues, those are simply your and my issues (with reflexes at least), and we do not need to inflict them on everyone else and reduce their challenge (to the point of it being a joke) to make our lives a bit easier. Basically, regardless of challenge, we will still struggle, and everyone gets to yawn their way through content. Who was served well by this? ZOS could make their game playable on a 300 baud modem as well, because their might be some poor soul out there still using one, but why should they?

And even with my poor reflexes and reaction times, overland, delves and public dungeons are a joke. There is literally no chance of me dying unless I AFK on a spawn. Which doesn't make me feel like a hero at all, it feels more like I am bullying the MOB's. Maybe I am alone in this, but one of the main reasons I play MMO's, is so I can feel like a virtual hero, so at least give me the illusion f being one.

Hexnibbler

I did a short video trying to formulate my understanding of the balancing issue regarding difficulty.
Then I also added a run of a main quest dungeon with Gruk.

It starts with a few slides meant to be "paused".
The goal was to try to analyse the combat system and understand its construction "bottom up".
Then I try to draw relations between various issues of the game and the question of balance within that system.

I can see many issues that can be read here and there on the forum, not directly related to difficulty, being at least partially explained in that abstraction (healer/tank < dps, complaints about "lack of content", etc) but I tried to concentrate on difficulty/appeal of the game loop.



I had fun with the run honestly. Felt like a real dungeon. Definitively continuing to play Gruk and hoping they'll be able to fix that massive problem.

(I also found 2 bugs)

WiseSky

I was bored and found this Post in 2014, interesting to read for sure.

Too many fights are just STUPID hard

colossalvoids

WiseSky wrote: »

I was bored and found this Post in 2014, interesting to read for sure.

Too many fights are just STUPID hard

Finding it quite funny that mate was asking for optional stuff but absolutely everything was reworked same as usual in the end. But their wish of more balance passes was granted, it's absolutely different game by now and surely there's an audience for a different kind of changes to happen nowadays. Optional, again.

Hexnibbler

CP5 wrote: »

True enough, but it would be nice for npcs to not waste so much time during fights aiming knives or jumpping in the air.

IMO this just highlight what was designed and what it became with nerfs.

Those are 2 moves that makes the 1v2 or 1v3 fights more engaging. I.E. you know he's moving back to throw a knife, so you move to put the other mob between you and him and fight that 1v1 while standing ready to block/reflect their knife.
The jump is of the same "mobility" nature, but puts you inbetween the 2 mobs so that you can't block both if you don't move.
Moving around also sometimes trigger more aggro from another mob and turn the fight into an even more chaotic one.
Like the fight might evolve with some surprise even against 2 or 3 generic bandits.

Most mobs really have some kind of "personnality" aligning their "look" with how they "feel" when you fight them. I.E. werewolves feels super aggressive, exhausting (stamina wise) and relentless. 2 of them feels like being attacked by 2 dogs, where you kick one away the other tries to bite you.
It just feels like "another mob" without Grukking the balance.

That's one of the reason I defintively don't agree with the "thrash mob" argument. The game clearly designed fights to be 1v1, 1v2 or 1v3 (rarely 1v4).

Why make thrash mobs with so few of them concurerntly, or why attacks such as that jumping in the air, walking back to throw a knife, etc occurs if their sole purpose was to get bruteforced like mobs in a game like diablo2 ?

It brings something that makes sense and work in a gameplay sense when they are not trivially thrashed away, it feels buggy and ridiclous when balanced in a way that turns them into trivial nuisance.
So the conclusion would either be that people working on those thing did bs, or that they did a good job that is now buried below 20 levels worth of battle leveling. I can't see alternative explanations to this.

CP5

It's confetti, it has been for years, honestly. That leap attack can do moderate damage if you don't move for its entire duration, but it mostly acts to make the fight easier by reducing the number of enemies you have to fight and by having that dramatic visual come in, making it seem like the fight is more intense than it actually is. Same with pyromancers and their ground aoe's. Those aoe's are weak now, sure, but they've always been so small and intentionally shot in far off places, setting parts of the battlefield on fire to make things more intense, but not accomplishing anything. It's just, once you notice this trend and have done content that goes beyond it, stepping back into it just feels dull.

Tornaad

Last night I witnessed the most powerful reason for getting harder overland content.

I was playing ESO snuggling next to my wife on the couch and got up briefly to get something, when a monster respawned next to me. My wife who was sitting next to my controller asked if she could try to kill the monster, after I told her yes, she said "I actually figured this out. All you need to do is hit buttons and you kill them." I then witnessed her kill an overland monster with her back facing to the monster, looking at a rock the whole time (because trying to move and press buttons is a challenge for her) all while barely losing any health.

At this point, I don't care what you do, please give us more difficult overland content.

Edit:
And just so you know, she knows so little about video games that after laughing about what I previously wrote, she said "I didn't realize I was looking at a rock the whole time."

Please ...
please ...
give us more difficult overland content.

oranje_elf

If anyone from zos is collecting feedback here, +1 for increasing the overland difficulty, be it optional (a vet switch?) or not. Anything would work. You may keep all rewards as-is, an immersion/RP and fun gameplay are both good enough incentives to permanently keep the vet option on.

SilverBride

Zuboko wrote: »

Last night I witnessed the most powerful reason for getting harder overland content.

I was playing ESO snuggling next to my wife on the couch and got up briefly to get something, when a monster respawned next to me. My wife who was sitting next to my controller asked if she could try to kill the monster, after I told her yes, she said "I actually figured this out. All you need to do is hit buttons and you kill them." I then witnessed her kill an overland monster with her back facing to the monster, looking at a rock the whole time (because trying to move and press buttons is a challenge for her) all while barely losing any health.

At this point, I don't care what you do, please give us more difficult overland content.

Edit:
And just so you know, she knows so little about video games that after laughing about what I previously wrote, she said "I didn't realize I was looking at a rock the whole time."

Please ...
please ...
give us more difficult overland content.

That shows that overland trash mobs are easy for most players, which no one is disputing. This is not a bad thing or anything that needs to be changed.

CP5

SilverBride wrote: »

Zuboko wrote: »

Last night I witnessed the most powerful reason for getting harder overland content.

I was playing ESO snuggling next to my wife on the couch and got up briefly to get something, when a monster respawned next to me. My wife who was sitting next to my controller asked if she could try to kill the monster, after I told her yes, she said "I actually figured this out. All you need to do is hit buttons and you kill them." I then witnessed her kill an overland monster with her back facing to the monster, looking at a rock the whole time (because trying to move and press buttons is a challenge for her) all while barely losing any health.

At this point, I don't care what you do, please give us more difficult overland content.

Edit:
And just so you know, she knows so little about video games that after laughing about what I previously wrote, she said "I didn't realize I was looking at a rock the whole time."

Please ...
please ...
give us more difficult overland content.

That shows that overland trash mobs are easy for most players, which no one is disputing. This is not a bad thing or anything that needs to be changed.

It's every zone, every story, every place in the world you go. How long would it take a new player to no longer be new? To outgrow that level of content or to be conditioned into believing that was all they're capable of doing and seeing anything beyond it as too demanding and unfair? Why is it that this content should only be designed around this base, when all other places in the game where gameplay is relevant has options? That comment shows just how important it is to provide a choice, because when the only way to enjoy the content is skewed so heavily to one side you alienate a large number of players, regardless of if you prefer it that way or not.

spartaxoxo

Every zone is marketed with new players being able to play in mind. All zone stories are intended to be able to be played by anyone buying whatever the current chapter is for the first time. This is not a game with leveled zones.

spartaxoxo

Zuboko wrote: »

Please ...
please ...
give us more difficult overland content.

A bandit dying to aoe is not that big of a deal. They should have some mobs that die to aoe, otherwise their encounter design of having large groups of enemies attack you would be completely unreasonable. It's the elite enemies and bosses that need to be harder, as those are supposed to require focus and be harder.

I don't think many of us are asking for long fights with mudcrabs. I think most of us just want the stories to have real stakes, so being asked to kill that tough Sargeant or the Big Boss and his allies actually means something.

CP5

spartaxoxo wrote: »

Every zone is marketed with new players being able to play in mind. All zone stories are intended to be able to be played by anyone buying whatever the current chapter is for the first time. This is not a game with leveled zones.

It isn't, and being free from having a finite number of zones to explore based on your level, which is one of the reasons why I liked silver and gold zones since the 5 level range covered more areas, but having no choice or option to account for more players will remain an issue unless all players who would care for such a thing give up or leave. Neither of those are good for the game long term, and adding an option for some players shouldn't be manifesting this 'us vs them winner take all' mentality, but without ZOS input fears are allowed to go unaddressed creating the situation we see now.