Ascending Tide Feedback Thread

KMarble

From the website, posted on 02/23/2022:

Account-Wide Achievements

To ensure that ESO’s performance can keep up and grow with the game’s new experiences, most achievements will become account-wide with Update 33. This means that an achievement that you’ve earned on any one of your characters may also be considered completed across all your characters. By consolidating achievements, we can retain and improve the way the game handles this type of data and the overall experience. With the database’s overall footprint reduced, it will be more performant across the board, which may manifest itself in faster load screens and improved performance on other database-heavy operations. Most importantly, this change helps to keep the game performant as we continue to add new content and achievements in the future.

From the Q&A thread:

Hi everyone, thanks so much for staying patient while we worked through gathering answers to some of your questions about Account Wide Achievements. We know everyone is extremely passionate about achievements. So much, in fact, that globally we have granted over 1 billion achievements! As high as that number is, this surprisingly isn’t the largest footprint of player generated data. As ESO continues to grow and evolve, we need to be proactive and find ways to ensure the data will always be available in real time.

Lately, we have been working on ways to trim the data footprint while still recording all the monsters you slay, items you hoard and achievements you ding. By consolidating achievements, we can retain and improve the way the game handles this type of data and the overall experience. With the database’s overall footprint reduced, it will more performant across the board, which may manifest itself in faster load screens and improved performance on other database-heavy operations. Most importantly, however, this change helps keep the game performant as we continue to add new content and achievements in the future.

Now that you have some context for the backend benefits of Account Wide Achievements, we’d like to get into the Q&A. If you have additional questions or feedback, we encourage you to post your questions/feedback here.


Q: Why switch to Account Wide Achievements?

A: We decided to move to Account Wide Achievements for two main reasons. First, this has been a requested feature by players for years and is a nice quality of life improvement. It gives players a lot more freedom to explore the world on any character, without the fear of missing out on getting achievements or making incremental progress on their “main” character. Second, as mentioned in the intro, this change will result long term maintainable database stability and performance. By reducing the amount of data we have to store, the database doesn’t have to work as hard so the time it takes to search, load and save data will be sped up, leading to a more consistent user experience as the years go by and more data is added to the database.
...
Q: Can Account Wide Achievements be opt-in? Why/Why not?

A: Account Wide Achievements cannot be opt-in. As noted above, one of the big reasons why we decided to move to Account Wide Achievements is the performance gains we get on the backend. Being able to opt-in essentially wipes out any performance gains.
...

ZOS_Kevin wrote: »

...

However, we wanted to address Account Wide Achievements in relation to this thread. When we gather feedback, we share both positive and negative sentiment with the dev team. This is for the team to have player information in addition to the many other data metrics they have to make the best decision at the time. As noted in another thread, sometimes player expectation does not match what the dev team is able to do. And there are a myriad of reasons why this can happen. As we noted in the Q&A, the current implementation of Account Wide Achievements needed to happen to reduce the data footprint for achievements. This is ultimately for long term maintainable database stability and performance.

...

AWA, the way it was implemented, isn't a fix to a problem that shouldn't even exist in the first place. AWA is paliative care. You guys trade six for half a dozen, and we the players got a short change for it.

Do the devs realize that as the game gets more content, more achievements will be added to the database and they'll find themselves facing the same problem in the future?

Since the introduction of the sticker book, the game has been (gently) pointing players that having fewer (only one?) characters is the way to go. I guess they decided that a "clue by four" was necessary because players weren't paying enough attention.

I've asked this in the PTS sub-forum, but no one bothered to answer. Why allow people to buy extra character slots if those extra achievements were making the database less performant? Was there anyone assigned to monitor the servers' performance each time some change - like increasing the maximum amount of chars we could have - was introduced to the game?

Giving the devs the benefit of the doubt and assuming they've been noticing a decline in performance for a while now. Why were achievements that were introduced in the last year (at least) not been coded in a way that they'd have less impact in the performance? Or was this only found out after the last DLC from 2021?

One last question: why, despite 5 weeks of intense feedback, have so little been fixed before this went live? Sorry, one more question: why couldn't AWA had been postponed as so many of us asked in the PTS sub-forum?

freespirit

@ZOS_Kevin you say this thread is for feedback on the whole of Update 33 not just AWA, well there lies the problem for me......

Everyday this week when I have logged in I have found another new "shared achievement" to annoy me! Infact I have been so disgusted that I've actually spent more time here reading than in-game playing! The result of that is I have no interest in trying the 2 new dungeons and even f I did I'm not sure which character I would want to use

I was actually one of the few looking forward to the card game, now I'm not sure if I can even be bothered!!

I have been here since launch with a very few short(like a week at most, a couple of times) breaks, I have been subbed since day dot, I am addicted to housing so you have earned money out of me there too.

Over the years there have been many changes some I liked, some I did not, I'm sure many, many long term players feel the same but I loved the game and it's variety so I knuckled down and got over it.

This however is so ridiculously awful to me for the reason below....

I like rolling a new character and playing things differently, watching her progress through achievements you have removed that fun, it is very, very saddening!

Somebody said in another thread somewhere that you have effectively removed the "RPG" from MMORPG, when I read it, it made me smile, a few days later I am no longer smiling!

proprio.meb16_ESO

Since @ZOS_Kevin asked, yep, i've tried the two new dungeons, directly on vet (no hm)...

Coral Aerie? Actually pretty nice
Shipwright's Regret? Not bad, but last boss too complicated

That's all, there's nothing more to say about them. They work well and, since they are brand new, they're even quite fun. Yep your designers can still create dungeons (but with a constant lack of interactable items inside since a while).

Now we can focus again on the horrible implementation of AWA, which is a far more serious and complicated trainwreck.

Raevenglass

@ZOS_Kevin Thank you for saying SOMETHING. You've been the only one I've seen acknowledge the discussions we've been having and it means a lot.

I'm sure its frustrating to put out the new content and not hear more about the other pieces and hear mostly about AwA. This focus was pretty evident given the activity on the PTS threads, so I'm sure it wasn't a surprise.

There are so many issues storming around here but think it boils down to a few important ones:

1. Communication - there have been calls from both sides (ZoS and players) for better communication. But asking for feedback and not providing any response to it, or fixing issues, isn't great communication. Reasonably, we know not everyone's wishes can be incorporated into the game, but when people tell you of actual bugs on a PTS, there should be some acknowledgement that these are noted by the ZoS team, whether they choose to fix them or not.

2. How people play - one of the best things about ESO is you can play however you like best. Some days, I just run around and clear all my maps and surveys - get my dopamine hit - and log off. Other days I'm progging vCR+3 and working my tail off. It's about immersion, and people you meet, and teamwork, and solo play. It's a one stop shop.

It's been heartbreaking to read posts from people pleading with ZoS NOT to take away the ability to immerse in the story with different characters in different ways. Yes it's one person behind the account - I've heard the arguments. But my Argonian warden is a different character with a different backstory than my High Elf Sorc. Imagination is a huge part of the game for me. I want to continue to play like they are different characters. I'll get over who gets "credit" for the achievement. (Leave the tooltip - if someone hates it, they don't have to hover over it.) I'll use addons to find my skyshards and I'll learn to wait for delve bosses. Honestly - at this point I don't care that all the titles are shareable or that all the kills are added up.

I do care, a lot, about my level 10 character being hailed as a Savior of Blackwood when she's never been there. It's really fun to see dialog change once you've done the quests, but just get rid of it. Save the database even more and dump the updated quest language or those NPCs so I can immerse in the game. Or better yet - give me a setting where I can turn off achievement related dialog on my alts. It's not perfect, but I could live with it.

3. What does AWA mean? - this hit and miss of this has been galling. If it's account wide achievements - then once I've leveled riding on my account, that should count for every character I make from that point onwards. Same as CP. I get it's incentive to log in more or buy crowns and purchase riding lessons, but messing the game up, calling it a QOL improvement, but then excluding things that you want us to purchase? Can you see why we're all feeling disappointed and cynical about this new feature?

Thanks for listening. I just hope the Devs actually are as well.

Rae

Bragerth

zaria wrote: »

RavenXIV wrote: »

Jaraal wrote: »

RavenXIV wrote: »

Please remove earned by from other characters there is no need for that tooltip or at least hide it in the background so we dont have to use addons to hide it @ZOS_Kevin @ZOS_GinaBruno

Yes, because “Earned By” is a misnomer. “Completed By” would be more accurate, and “Stolen By” even more appropriate in many cases.

its not about that but if your going to call it account wide achievements then make them truly that because its not truly an awa system when you have other characters tied to it. at that point they should have just left the system the way it was. just look at gw2 for example it has a true account wide system. no earned by completed by it might be hid behind the scenes.

How does the GW 2 system work? Yes how they did it in ESO is stupid in that aggregated achievements get counted from all characters for everything like master crafter who counts motifs known and adds up all the base game racial ones on adds up so now all with 5 alts should have it.

you earn the achivement you earn it no dates no completed by nothing its one and done thats it not implemented like this was maybe eso was trying but they need to go back and take out some of the things they kep in with it. tbh i think way back when the game came out they talked about motifs being really for one character and not needing to really focus on them for another character hence they should have just made the motifs for everyone. having to relearn them all again is a pain....

Tandor

KMarble wrote: »

From the website, posted on 02/23/2022:

Account-Wide Achievements

To ensure that ESO’s performance can keep up and grow with the game’s new experiences, most achievements will become account-wide with Update 33. This means that an achievement that you’ve earned on any one of your characters may also be considered completed across all your characters. By consolidating achievements, we can retain and improve the way the game handles this type of data and the overall experience. With the database’s overall footprint reduced, it will be more performant across the board, which may manifest itself in faster load screens and improved performance on other database-heavy operations. Most importantly, this change helps to keep the game performant as we continue to add new content and achievements in the future.

From the Q&A thread:

Hi everyone, thanks so much for staying patient while we worked through gathering answers to some of your questions about Account Wide Achievements. We know everyone is extremely passionate about achievements. So much, in fact, that globally we have granted over 1 billion achievements! As high as that number is, this surprisingly isn’t the largest footprint of player generated data. As ESO continues to grow and evolve, we need to be proactive and find ways to ensure the data will always be available in real time.

Lately, we have been working on ways to trim the data footprint while still recording all the monsters you slay, items you hoard and achievements you ding. By consolidating achievements, we can retain and improve the way the game handles this type of data and the overall experience. With the database’s overall footprint reduced, it will more performant across the board, which may manifest itself in faster load screens and improved performance on other database-heavy operations. Most importantly, however, this change helps keep the game performant as we continue to add new content and achievements in the future.

Now that you have some context for the backend benefits of Account Wide Achievements, we’d like to get into the Q&A. If you have additional questions or feedback, we encourage you to post your questions/feedback here.


Q: Why switch to Account Wide Achievements?

A: We decided to move to Account Wide Achievements for two main reasons. First, this has been a requested feature by players for years and is a nice quality of life improvement. It gives players a lot more freedom to explore the world on any character, without the fear of missing out on getting achievements or making incremental progress on their “main” character. Second, as mentioned in the intro, this change will result long term maintainable database stability and performance. By reducing the amount of data we have to store, the database doesn’t have to work as hard so the time it takes to search, load and save data will be sped up, leading to a more consistent user experience as the years go by and more data is added to the database.
...
Q: Can Account Wide Achievements be opt-in? Why/Why not?

A: Account Wide Achievements cannot be opt-in. As noted above, one of the big reasons why we decided to move to Account Wide Achievements is the performance gains we get on the backend. Being able to opt-in essentially wipes out any performance gains.
...

ZOS_Kevin wrote: »

...

However, we wanted to address Account Wide Achievements in relation to this thread. When we gather feedback, we share both positive and negative sentiment with the dev team. This is for the team to have player information in addition to the many other data metrics they have to make the best decision at the time. As noted in another thread, sometimes player expectation does not match what the dev team is able to do. And there are a myriad of reasons why this can happen. As we noted in the Q&A, the current implementation of Account Wide Achievements needed to happen to reduce the data footprint for achievements. This is ultimately for long term maintainable database stability and performance.

...

AWA, the way it was implemented, isn't a fix to a problem that shouldn't even exist in the first place. AWA is paliative care. You guys trade six for half a dozen, and we the players got a short change for it.

Do the devs realize that as the game gets more content, more achievements will be added to the database and they'll find themselves facing the same problem in the future?

Since the introduction of the sticker book, the game has been (gently) pointing players that having fewer (only one?) characters is the way to go. I guess they decided that a "clue by four" was necessary because players weren't paying enough attention.

I've asked this in the PTS sub-forum, but no one bothered to answer. Why allow people to buy extra character slots if those extra achievements were making the database less performant? Was there anyone assigned to monitor the servers' performance each time some change - like increasing the maximum amount of chars we could have - was introduced to the game?

Giving the devs the benefit of the doubt and assuming they've been noticing a decline in performance for a while now. Why were achievements that were introduced in the last year (at least) not been coded in a way that they'd have less impact in the performance? Or was this only found out after the last DLC from 2021?

One last question: why, despite 5 weeks of intense feedback, have so little been fixed before this went live? Sorry, one more question: why couldn't AWA had been postponed as so many of us asked in the PTS sub-forum?

My suspicion is that the answers to the questions posed in your last two paragraphs are the same - if there is a performance issue that the achievement change is designed to overcome then the extent of it was only fully apparent when they had a working version of the card game, and because they can't drop the card game from the June update this "fix" therefore had to go Live now so they could sort out any issues before June. Clearly they underestimated the issues in part, I also suspect, because the achievement change was designed and coded in a rush and barely tested before it went on the PTS. It's inconceivable that internal testers wouldn't have picked up most if not all of the issues we picked up inside the first few days on the PTS. It also seems inconceivable to me that the achievement change is something they could have been working on for months, or again they would have realised what they were getting themselves into.

FluffyReachWitch

I liked the new dungeons, but the problems stemming from the Account Wide Achievements implementation overshadow that. The glitched world events and the broken map and zone guide affect the whole game. And the experience nerf created by AwA, which goes far beyond the Undaunted progression changes, is not insignificant.

Merlin13KAGL

AWA is the big item. It should have been a summary addition, not a replacement for the individual achievements.
A bit more load time during login would have been acceptable to most. The only other time it should have been updated would be after an achievement triggering event.

I have serious doubts that this was about performance so much as cost savings - a savings a lot of people probably would have been happy to foot the bill for, if that's really what it took.

Other options would have been local storage (client side) with the server having the 'real' say as to what achievements are valid and when they occurred. This would have allowed people to track per character statuses with almost zero stress to the server DB. Only a message trigger would have been required. There would have been no concern in hacking, either, as the character achievements would only be for the benefit of the person on the other side of the keyboard.

People have been asking for AWA for some time. They have not requested individual progress be wiped out in the process.

If it were truly about storage space or DB entries, there wouldn't be leftover fragments of items no longer attainable showing up in our collections (Indiriks, etc.). There wouldn't be need for duplicate item sets with the exact same setup across 18 characters. Things like this would have made sense for reduction of required storage.

AWA's implementation is simply about convenience, and not that of the player.

You either dropped the ball on this implementation, or you simply didn't listen or didn't care.

You didn't listen to the PTS feedback (again). I don't have high hopes here.

Disappointing.

shadyjane62

Perhaps if the object behind this travesty is the reduction in chars, I fell for it and deleted chars. I have paid for max char slots.

Perhaps I should remake 17 more chars.

Sylvermynx

I'm not deleting anyone. Things are fine for me, as I don't care about achievements at all, and never used them for "alt tracking".

I'm sure I'm fairly singular in that though.

ashadris

Playing eso now feels like a watching a slideshow in cities, lowering the settings wont do much since a pc with i9 and 3080 will go down to 30 fps lol

Jaraal

shadyjane62 wrote: »

Perhaps if the object behind this travesty is the reduction in chars, I fell for it and deleted chars. I have paid for max char slots.

Perhaps I should remake 17 more chars.

Or ask for a refund, since the originally intended functionality no longer exists.

vingarmo

Dungeons
Gameplay-wise they are more interesting and refined than older dungeons with better range for difficulty options, memorable bosses and extra exploration. I enjoyed soloing them on normal and I’m glad it’s possible to do secret bosses without group. I did them on vet as well through group finder in under 15 minutes each so they are quite short without secret bosses and doable with random group. Visuals and atmosphere were also kind of cool.

Stories were bad. You start them rescue Jakarn and his package or to get ship plans for Za’ji and you finish them with it. No interesting new developments in the process to make them memorable. What little information you could get through all dialog options or scattered notes could be easily expressed in one short sentence: Ascendant Order and sea elves are up to no good (but you can’t learn more about it now because it would be revealed in future DLCs). And that is just another sad example of how quality of the stories decreased because of year-long expansions where dungeon stories cut to the point where they lost their individuality and are nothing more than prologues of prologues.

As a side note, my main character who completed all zone quests was recognized as a known ally with all extra dialog options while my alt who didn’t was treated as a complete stranger with no such options (even though I logged on all my 18 alts prior to that and completed both dungeons on my main first). So integrity of interactions is not broken to an extent some comments on this forum led me to believe or only present in selected circumstances I haven’t encountered yet.

Rewards are trash. Markings and mementos never were among sought after cosmetics, very few of them look actually decent but the ones you get for completing Ascending Tide not among them. And that’s while cool costumes, skins and personalities go straight into new crates making actual in-game rewards look lackluster in comparison. If you combine it with useless niche sets where out of 8 only 1 tank set is semi decent and the fact that motifs will only drop several months later there is little motivation to complete them now.

Account wide achievements
I was genuinely satisfied by what I saw on PTS and it was mostly smooth experience for me on live so far. I went from 32k to 37k in achievements point finishing some grindy ones I gave up years ago. Finally I can view what I’m actually missing, decide what I want to accomplish and I can do it on any class I like. I’ll admit for me achievements never were part of character identity (it was rather their name, appearance, personalities, mounts and pets, etc.) so consolidating them for account didn’t change the way I play and I could only feel sorry for those who feel differently.

That being said, for me RPG aspect of ESO was killed since One Tamriel, which removed any form of character progression and loss of coherence for all subsequent stories. Impactful choices that were made before are now obsolete (hello, reincarnation of main quest characters), npc reactions from completed quests discontinued and no important decisions even present in new DLCs because they sold primary for new players. The tiny bits of extra dialogs are just small reminders of what little left from roleplay but even there not everything is affected by AwA like in my example from new dungeons making the impact of implementing it less harmful than some making it out to be.

While I haven’t saw this change coming it allying pretty well with the game direction in recent years. And that’s probably why I can’t really relate to those who was hurt by this change, because those small RPG elements still left in the game seems rather insignificant now after all shifts and changes over the years.

2 problems I encountered so far:
Skyshards tips in zone guide for Deadlands was shown completed for me on all characters while zone guide itself correctly displayed real progress. All other zones was ok so far.

Delve bosses respawn time is way too long and should be revisited.

Overall, I’m happy with that change as it provides exactly what I would have expected from account wide achievements and anything relevant to me I can track through zone guide or map.

Removal of Deathmatch queue.
7 matches, not a single death match.
That was just lazy move, which made me doubt promises about increase of pvp performance or importance of the tests where it’s clear that for several years now pvp modes are forgotten and abandoned. “No new features until we fix a performance” is not compelling argument for ignoring one piece of pvp content, which doesn’t have performance problems. No new maps, no new type of games, achievements, not even new sets or cosmetic rewards for battlegrounds in years are all good reasons why population would decline further and further. That change only add additional layer of frustration to the mode, which was neglected for years.

Kalik_Gold

If we delete characters can we turn off the slot and get the crowns back? This surely would alleviate some server issues right?

aussie500

I am starting to think this DLC should have been left out with the tide. Ever since the update all 3 of my accounts have had issues with the server, from mail bugs, guild store and guild banks not working or just pausing all the time, the many disconnects and crashes. My dissatisfaction with the map changes since my main character has done everything and as far as I am concerned it should all be white. I got disconnected one time too many this morning, trying to get into Rawl'ka and just gave up. I will calm down eventually and come back later when there are not so many people on.

But it is pretty pathetic we cannot all play when we want to because the server cannot handle it.

JoeCapricorn

ZOS_Kevin wrote: »

Welcome to Ascending Tide, everyone!

This is the Ascending Tide Feedback Thread. This is your place to give feedback on the content experience of Ascending Tide. Are there new items or furnishing you find cool? Did you find the new dungeon mechanics challenging? Do you like the music? Is there anything we can improve in the future? Let us know in the thread! As always, please keep the feedback constructive and adhere to community guidelines.

NOTE: This is not the place to report bugs. If you have a bug related to U33 and Ascending Tide, please note that in the Bug Reports section of the forum.

The more I read about what AWA breaks in terms of replayability and character identity, the more depressing it becomes.

And clearly the 94 pages of discussion on the subject was entirely ignored.

It is obvious that you don't care.

I didn't think AWA would have been implemented this badly. I actually liked the idea, but I figured that character specific things such as factions and quest achievements would *remain* character specific. I guess they don't? I'm reading about specific dialogue things becoming locked out away from all new characters.

And I guess they never will come back, because what point is there in asking?

This is horrifying, and it really kills ESO for me. I love playing multiple characters, and I was reliving ESO's past adventures on an alt.

But now that is getting ruined? That is thrown away? Suddenly that alt has defeated Molag Bal, all the while still having Soul Shriven in Coldharbour in the quest journal on the task "speak to hooded member"?

That makes no *** sense and you damn well know it!

Ugh_Tech

KMarble wrote: »

From the website, posted on 02/23/2022:

Account-Wide Achievements

To ensure that ESO’s performance can keep up and grow with the game’s new experiences, most achievements will become account-wide with Update 33. This means that an achievement that you’ve earned on any one of your characters may also be considered completed across all your characters. By consolidating achievements, we can retain and improve the way the game handles this type of data and the overall experience. With the database’s overall footprint reduced, it will be more performant across the board, which may manifest itself in faster load screens and improved performance on other database-heavy operations. Most importantly, this change helps to keep the game performant as we continue to add new content and achievements in the future.

Has anyone experienced the announced improvements after the update has been put live?

Fun fact from my personal experience: the one change I did to my PC (and environment) which resulted in significantly faster load screens (especially when returning to a zone previously visited during my session or 'intra-zone' telepoting) was a new GPU with more VRAM. Nothing else (faster CPU, more RAM, faster internet connection) came even close!

ArchangelIsraphel

Ugh_Tech wrote: »

KMarble wrote: »

From the website, posted on 02/23/2022:

Account-Wide Achievements

To ensure that ESO’s performance can keep up and grow with the game’s new experiences, most achievements will become account-wide with Update 33. This means that an achievement that you’ve earned on any one of your characters may also be considered completed across all your characters. By consolidating achievements, we can retain and improve the way the game handles this type of data and the overall experience. With the database’s overall footprint reduced, it will be more performant across the board, which may manifest itself in faster load screens and improved performance on other database-heavy operations. Most importantly, this change helps to keep the game performant as we continue to add new content and achievements in the future.

Has anyone experienced the announced improvements after the update has been put live?

Fun fact from my personal experience: the one change I did to my PC (and environment) which resulted in significantly faster load screens (especially when returning to a zone previously visited during my session or 'intra-zone' telepoting) was a new GPU with more VRAM. Nothing else (faster CPU, more RAM, faster internet connection) came even close!

Not seeing performance improvements at all. In fact, on a brand new custom machine with a new GPU and much more VRAM than I once had, all the performance improvements I was seeing (My load screens were nearly instantaneous before the update, gameplay was beautifully smooth even in cyro) I am now having load screens get bogged down, seeing FPS throttling, and other issues. My other games are running just fine. I've been trying to troubleshoot it for days to figure out if its my PC or the update just being terrible.

You're definitely right about the GPU and VRAM, but for some reason this update has nerfed me XD

KMarble

Feedback from both dungeons

I first ran both with guildies on Monday evening. Coral Airie was OK (I'm not a huge fan of Summerset anything). We missed the first secret, so we backtracked and ended up messing the alternative ending. We also didn't find out we could pet the baby gryphons until we had finished (more on this later).

I found the new mechanics a little confusing, but I don't usually figure things out fast in dungeons. Maligalig's fight was fun and I was surprised to be the first one to figure out the mechs in this one (but then again, synergies are my Pavlov = I see X, I hit it).

The Shipyard... Between absurdly long loading screens, some odd glitch while trying to pass crown, a group member DC'ing and having a hard time logging back in, and an issue with some of us not being able to see Za'ji, it took us around an hour to start.

I loved the atmosphere and visuals for that dungeon. The secrets were easy to find and the dungeon itself was very straight forward. I liked it.

Yesterday (17th) I ran them again with a group of friends on a secondary character. Being allowed the baby gryphons was an awesome addition. Because we ran them earlier in the day we didn't have any of the issues we encountered on Monday.

The character I choose to run with yesterday has NOT done Elsweyr - none of it. Yet Za'ji greeted her as if they were old friends. He wasn't (as expected) using the Dragonguard uniform, but behaved like my char and him had met before. Caska did not recognize my char.

tomfant

ZOS_Kevin wrote: »

Those with performance issues, you should be seeing some of that clear up over the next day or so. We will also follow up with any additional guidance for players as the dev team works to address some of the issue mentioned.

I didnt notice any improvement yet. Still get serious FPS drops into 20ish values because CPU usage goes through the roof.

WhitePawPrints

VarisVaris wrote: »

PvP balance is at the worst state it has been in years
In this post I'll point out which things are overperforming/game breaking and in which way they could be brought back in line.

The majority of skills I'll list will be related to high survivability as this is currently the biggest issue in PvP causing fights to take ages or be stalemates that can possibly only end with coordinated ultimate drops.

Skills

Intensive Mender

This skill offers healing way beyond other HoTs while being really cheap and also allows for insane crosshealing capabilities. The easy way out is simply reducing the heal because right now it's simply too strong, this should be done by reducing the overall heal by 25% but increase the duration to 12 seconds this keeps the skill rather cheap but prevents it from basically being a burst heal every time it heals you

Living Dark

This skill has been indirectly buffed to mindbogglingly high healing numbers with the changes to how people can stack spelldamage, but even a build that doesn't fully builds into stacking damage gets more healing out of this ability than other Hots can provide, additionally the way it works makes this heal even better as it always heals you when you take damage and therefore acts as a direct reduction to the damage you take. Depending on who you fight (read this as anything that isn't a full damage build) this ability will keep you alive infinitely with no chance for the enemy to ever kill you, it might even outheal the damage from the skills you're eating.
This ability should retain it's function but have it's healing potential against single targets reduced significantly. Having 5k hps in duels vs another templar from a single skill is just laughable.
Therefore the heal should still have a 500ms cooldown but can only be procced by each target every 2 seconds.
This makes it a great option when fighting outnumbered but prevents it from turning templars into unkillable damage absorbing blobs of doom

Bombard

This skill provides way too much bang for its buck, not only does it deal great damage while being undodgeable, it also comes with a root that you can refresh over and over again on targets who can't break the root in the first place, no other skill offers this much utility by chewing through the enemy's stamina while also helping ball groups to kite and keep people locked in places to nuke them afterwards.
This skill should lose its root and rather gain something else and AoE Root with high damage simply isn't balanced and it won't ever be even if you remove the snare it also offers like you did in Patch v7.3.0

Radiating Regen

This is the biggest offenders when it comes to high survivability of ballgroups and groups in general, this skill is so powerful that the viability of a certain spec instantly increases when it can slot this ability, this goes so far that stamsorc in smallscale runs bow+resto now
This ability has to have it's crosshealing capabilities nerfed significantly, make it so that you can only have 2 Radiating regen active on you (like vigor before it was changed to a single target heal) at any given moment, this way it won't hurt PvE but it will help PvP significantly

Sets
Caluurion's Legacy

This set offers too much burst especially when using it on NB which guarantees a hit in conjunction with cloak, with it being able to crit it's damage numbers went through the roof and now once again allows people to have oneshot gank builds with little to no counterplay depending on how good or bad performance is and if you break-free button is responsive.
The amount of burst this set offers is simply too much and should be split into a direct damage and dot portion to make this set less bursty but keeps it's damage consistent overall.

Draurgkin

This set allows people to achieve burst and pressure numbers that simply shouldn't be reachable with how many different damage instances one can squeeze into those 6 seconds it provides way too much damage compared to other sets.
This set only working against a single target doesn't work as enough of a drawback as you can use this set to obliterate this target, in a situation where you only face a single opponent there is no set that comes even close to the power Draugrkin offers.

Ironblood

This set offers too much survivability while the drawback isn't anywhere near enough to keep this set in check, additionally the potential uptime of the set is really high (66%)
The cooldown of this set should be increased to 25 seconds up from 15 seconds in order to give people a slight chance of killing someone using this set

Other issues
Undeath and CPs

Please read this post as it describes the issue more detailed.
https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/comment/7510100#Comment_7510100

Harmony

This jewelry trait allows people to generate incredible burst that's not tied to the global cooldown. These synergies often provide more damage than ultimates while only having a 20 seconds cooldown per person. Due to Synergies being able to be stacked this gives groups way more power than they should have access to.
This Trait should be reworked completely. Synergies are fine the way they are without anything buffing them

Crossheals in general

Although I have touched on this a little bit above already by mentioning Intensive mender and radiating regen, I want to emphasize once more that crosshealing in its current iteration is too powerful and often results in fights being endless stalemates that can only be ended by dropping multiple ultimates on a single person because otherwise they'll never die.
This also means that the time between ult drops won't help you make any progress which makes PvP feel very frustrating. It's a cycle of tanking each other's damage and then praying that your ult drop every 2 minutes gets you a kill.
There is no perfect fix for this issue as crossheals scale with the amounts of players involved in a fight.

This is why I propose a new healing reduction added to battle spirit that directly targets crossheals. "Any healing you receive from other players is reduced by X%" in a first iteration it should be tested with a 15% reduction as this change could have big impact on how PvP plays

The upcoming changes that we can currently test on the PTS will further worsen balance.
Hybridization of almost any skills will result in an unhealthy meta where only a single build for each Class will be viable, many skills will become worthless as they won't find their way onto bars as the competition just became way harder.
The potential for gamebreaking combinations has increased significantly, especially when it comes to healing and survivability.
Those changes will have such a strong impact on the meta that it is insanity to push this in one go.
All healing abilities should retain the old scaling in order to prevent Specs to merge completely and also to prevent the survivability to go through the roof.

Two more issues on the PTS:
Burning Embers being changed into a HoT is laughably broken, there is no way this should ever make it to the live server. Magdk has always been built around being forced to fight for their heals, they had to stay in a fight to get their powerlash heals, to recast their burning embers to get the heal early or to heal themselves by using Draw Essence. The addition of Cauterize and Coagulating blood are more than enough to allow magdks to have healing even when they don't face an opponent atm.

Power Bash and morphs counting as Bash damage. I totally get where the idea came from but it is unbalanced as heck. You can easily stack bash damage via bash glyphs, deadlands demolisher and other bash sets. This is totally fine on the live server, however the new interaction with a skill that has the regular meele spammable TT is too much, on non optimised build you can easily reach Power Slam tooltips of 15k without even having the 33% extra damage.
This interaction with additional bash damage for Power Bash should be removed, Power Bash and it's morphs should retain the function of bash to interrupt targets channeling a skill.

Javalin

With the current patch ZOS has added a new version of this by making Piercing Javalin unblockable you can once again remove any Counterplay that should always exist for combos that can one-shot people with full tank builds.
And we only have duels there so the fights are rather linear with not many variables to account for.

The second this change will make it to the live server it will create a highly unhealthy playstyles that kills anyone who drops under a certain threshold of hp, that depending on the builds sits around 30k! and doesn't use Mistform to counter the whole thing.


On top of this highly broken combination, Templar shouldn't have access to an unblockable stun in the first place, it already has multiple options to deal with targets that are blocking:
Backlash and morphs ignore block
Crescent sweep dot also ignores block
Piercing spear increases the damage by 10% vs blocking targets
Jabs cause the blocking target to lose more stamina because it deals multiple damage ticks over 1 second.

That is enough to deal with blocking targets, other classes would love to have even 1 of those things to stop them from being hard walled by blocking opponents.

I'm confident that tackling all these issues will significantly improve PvP balance and saves us from another unbalanced patch.

Man if only I believed ZoS would read their feedback post and discussed player feedback to make positive changes.... if only....

I watched the cinematic trailer and it bored me to TEARS. I thought these new "chapters" were meant to be part of the collective of ESO but instead each one is so far removed from existing content it's like they're just "spin off books" instead of "chapters".

LashanW

Here's my feedback about this update. Bit of a long post

Performance
After the update was released, the first couple of days were very rough in terms of performance. Long loading screens, frequent disconnects and random lag spikes here and there. Things seem to have gone back to normal now. But still I don't see any performance increase anywhere. It actually seems to a take a bit longer for me to log out of a character than last patches. This is a bit annoying as I have many characters and I swap between them a lot on a daily basis.

Account Wide Achievements

• Cumulative achievements
  I like how all of my characters can contribute to various achievements that required me to do something several times, like "kill X type of enemies Y times". Got some new battleground achievements when their progress across all my characters combined, so that's cool. But not a fan about how achievements like Style Master are calculated in a bugged manner.
• "Earned by" Tag.
  This is completely useless. Other players can't see this unless you send them screenshots. And it's not even fair how this tag is decided as it's based on the order of the characters you logged in. If you guys are so worried about performance concerns then don't implement pointless features like this tag.
• Difficult achievements being account-wide
  I think it's not good that hard achievements are account wide (titles being account wide is ok imo, people bought carry runs all the time for titles anyway). There's a sense of accomplishment when you see the pop up for a hard achievement appear on a different character/role. Like getting Spirit Slayer achievement on a different class. That impact is lessened now.
• NPC interactions, reactions and Questing flow. And encounters being already completed on newer characters
  I hear that this stuff no longer reflect individual character's actions but rather on your account's deeds. This seems like a major step back in the wrong direction. Personally, I don't really care. I stopped caring about your overland questing content and overland exploration long ago due to lack of any semblance of challenge (apart from isolated world bosses/events) and no meaningful options to increase their difficulty to match their narrative.
  
  But I MUST say, character individuality is a very important thing for people who like to roleplay and play different characters in different ways. Combined with awesome character customization and exploration being character specific, these resulted in ESO having a very high replayability. This was a wonderful game for the casual questing crowd because of these features and the AwA change seems to have greatly jeopardized that. Replayability is super important in a MMO where people keep paying for subcriptions, so I don't know why you chose to shoot yourself in the foot by forcing such a change.

Skill hybridization and other combat changes
Oh I am so loving this. This opened up so many new options without really downgrading existing character builds. As a magsorc main I'm having a blast incorporating Bound armaments and Hurricane in to my builds. I even tried very strange stuff like changing my main resource from magicka to stamina and then using crystal weapon as a spammable with an inferno staff while still using the magicka pets and magicka skills on the backbar. It actually did very good damage while having insanely good sustain. Absolutely wild
Btw thanks for making magicka sustain even more easier by reducing the cost of elemental weapon. Also appreciate the stickerbook update. (perfected items auto filling non-perfected entries)
Only downside I feel is PvP balance. It's a bit of nightmare now. As for battlegrounds, I like having objective modes back, but deathmatches are much harder to find now. Back to square one I guess.

Music
I like it. The beginning part of the track is lovely. Wish I could hear it more often in the game.

New Dungeons
I soloed both of them on normal as I wanted to experience the story and explore everywhere without interruptions. I really appreciate that you made it possible to solo them on normal, including ALL the secret bosses (I also like how the secret bosses weren't that difficult to find). I really disliked soloing Black Drake Villa, Red Petal Bastion and the Dread Cellar because secret bosses were inaccessible when you are solo. Really wanted more of the approach you took for Unhallowed Grave. So thanks again.

• Coral Aerie
  I love this dungeon. The visuals are amazing (I always liked Summerset), enemies are varied and bosses were very intriguing. Mechanics were super cool and innovative.
  Not that much of a fan of Kaleen and Jakarn (I never liked them back when I was still questing in overland), but it was interesting to see Yaghra and the Ascendant order fighting each other. Story and the lore was pretty decent alltogether. I recognized the names of the gryphons that fought alongside Varallion (last boss) thanks to a lorebook I found earlier in the dungeon so that was a pretty awesome moment.
  Secret bosses in this dungeon are amazing! I was so baffled when I heard the voices of the guardians, really didn't expect those machine like voice lines. I was sad how it all ended though. Why Z'Baza? why? We were homies
  
• Shipwright’s Regret
  Really like this dungeon as well. The abandoned and haunted atmosphere was well done. Enemies weren't always that interesting but I liked the bosses. Mechanics weren't as cool as the other dungeon but was still interesting.
  The NPCs; Captain Zaji and his trusty companion Caska. I freaking love them. This was my first time meeting them actually. (since I stopped doing overland stuff). Story was amusing because of these two.
  Secret bosses were interesting, I like how it was about helping their spirits pass from this world, especially the first and last ones. Their voicelines were kinda sad.

Can't wait to try out these two dungeons on vet hard mode with my buddies. Can't say much about their difficulty until then. Soloing on normal they seemed a bit easier than previous couple of dungeons, which is not a bad thing.

FluffWit

I'd try out the new dungeons and give you some feedback but unfortunately I haven't been able to play them as the dungeon finder has been broken since they released.

Did you enjoy them @ZOS_Kevin ? Or have you had the same experience and simply haven't been able to play the new content we purchased?

Xandreia_

Days of eso plus wasted (should have known better than to waste money on this game tbh so that is my fault I guess) lack of honest communication, game breaking issues not being addressed and fixed, not being able to log in/stay logged in, game performing like a 2000's PowerPoint presentation, no attempt by developers to swiftly correct the mess they created with the new patch.....

Your consumers are spending money on a broken product! If it was any other product there would be huge shouts for refunds! Get it together zos!

joerginger

While it is absolutely great that this game finally has account wide achievements, I think the implementation is far from perfect.

Unfortunately lots of things are still not account wide because the achievement system was not decoupled from all the other systems in the game. This should have been the first thing to do. E.g. tracking eligibility for crownstore purchases like skyshards should have been done by entirely different means than the achievement system. The same applies to calculating chances for master writ drops in the crafting system. These are just examples, there simply should be absolutely nothing character-specific in the game that has to check the achoievement system.
All character progress should be recorded and checked from some kind of quest log - which must be in the game in some form already anyway. Everything related to quests, story and exploration should be completely independent of the achievement system, especially discovering and completing anything on the map.
This would also ensure that no dialogue options like the conversation with Count Ravenwatch after the Markarth epilogue could be lost for any characters doing the story after a different character had already done it.

Any need to track by which character an achievement was earned could be eliminated this way because it was earned by the player playing the account and would have nothing to do with the state of a given map a character is in.

Closely related to this, I think the way cumulative achievements were handled also wasn't good.
I knew my main character had completed some of them, but I also knew that it was inevitable a random character down my list would be listed as completing a different cumulative achievement even though they might only have contributed the last missing piece.
An alternative approach might have been checking which charcter had contributed most. But without having this "earned by..." tooltip at all, the issue would never even have come up.

Other feedback:
Perhaps as expected, performance has decreased even more as it has happened in every recent patch, for example skills sometimes don't go off even when merely soloing a dungeon and loading screens tend to take ages.

A new annoyance related to the cumbersome hireling mail system has appeared. At least my NA characters don't receive all their five mails at the same time, it has become necessary to change zones to get the missing ones.

heaven13

ZOS_Kevin wrote: »

Hey All, wanted to clarify a few things here regarding why we are asking for feedback. First, thanks to everyone who has provided feedback so far. We started this feedback thread to encompass everything to come with U33 and Ascending Tide. While Account Wide Achievements are apart of that, they are not the only thing that released with U33 and Ascending Tide.

[snip]

We hope this helps regarding why we are asking for feedback. It is not only asking for feedback on Account Wide Achievements, though those are welcome. We are looking for feedback overall on everything in U33 and Ascending Tide.

Accountwide Achievements might not be the only thing that launched with Update 33 but they are so intrusive and destructive to the way I play that I have completely uninstalled the game. There won’t be feedback for the other bits because I won’t see it.

When something is released that touches every aspect of the game, affects every kind of player you have, and is implemented in such a heavy handed, irreversible way, you cannot ask for people to disregard that and focus on some dungeons (oh which we get 4 a year). You can’t just cherry pick what kind of feedback you want. I’d say I’m sorry if it feels like everyone is negative, but I’m not. We tried to have this discussion with you, weeks ago.

SilverBride

joerginger wrote: »

A new annoyance related to the cumbersome hireling mail system has appeared. At least my NA characters don't receive all their five mails at the same time, it has become necessary to change zones to get the missing ones.

The same thing is happening to me.

Saieden

heaven13 wrote: »

ZOS_Kevin wrote: »

Hey All, wanted to clarify a few things here regarding why we are asking for feedback. First, thanks to everyone who has provided feedback so far. We started this feedback thread to encompass everything to come with U33 and Ascending Tide. While Account Wide Achievements are apart of that, they are not the only thing that released with U33 and Ascending Tide.

[snip]

We hope this helps regarding why we are asking for feedback. It is not only asking for feedback on Account Wide Achievements, though those are welcome. We are looking for feedback overall on everything in U33 and Ascending Tide.

Accountwide Achievements might not be the only thing that launched with Update 33 but they are so intrusive and destructive to the way I play that I have completely uninstalled the game. There won’t be feedback for the other bits because I won’t see it.

When something is released that touches every aspect of the game, affects every kind of player you have, and is implemented in such a heavy handed, irreversible way, you cannot ask for people to disregard that and focus on some dungeons (oh which we get 4 a year). You can’t just cherry pick what kind of feedback you want. I’d say I’m sorry if it feels like everyone is negative, but I’m not. We tried to have this discussion with you, weeks ago.

Can't emphasize this enough. We gave you feedback that the issues of implementation the eclipse everything else in the release because it would negatively effect the largest portion of the playerbase that any other single change, probably since One Tamriel (how ironic). Most players, for example, are not nearly as affected by hybrid skills as much as even they themselves might think.

You (ZoS) completely failed to address or even acknowledge these warnings, and dug your head in the sand. Now that it's live, you will see that same feedback eclipse everything else you do from now on a 1000-fold over, especially once players realize that there is no way to reverse this without destroying thousands of hours of player progress.

kringled_1

I have a longer post to fully write later, but in the meantime:
If you're actually interested in feedback, please tell the moderation team to stop closing threads on Awa and pointing them to the PTS thread. If you want feedback consolidated someplace (this thread or another one in general) then fine, but pushing discussion of the live patch to the PTS thread for a closed PTS cycle sends the message "post your complaining here in the circular file where it won't bother anyone".
This has been the case for multiple threads in the past few days.

kamimark

ZOS_Kevin wrote: »

reasons why this can happen. As we noted in the Q&A, the current implementation of Account Wide Achievements needed to happen to reduce the data footprint for achievements. This is ultimately for long term maintainable database stability and performance.

Well, that hasn't been visible in any way, load screens and lag are worse than before. Buying a few more hard drives seems like a better solution than wrecking the game experience for everyone who plays more than one character as a character (not just a different combat load-out for PVP or dungeon finder). Other MMOs seem to manage with vastly more data on vastly more characters.

The skyshards, delves, quests unfinished are impossible to find now; I was working thru Silver and Gold on my current main, but now there's no point, no way to see any progress, because they're marked done by another character years ago. The maps are utterly broken on this.

Since I bought this expansion, and none of my chars have done it, I can still wait and do that. Afterwards, that's it. Game over. You've killed the game worse than Star Wars Galaxies did. All of this could've been avoided by reading feedback *before* shipping, instead of excuses after.