Why the 10th anniversary has been a disaster even without the PTS fiasco

MreeBiPolar

Let's take a look at the event rewards, most of them special for this anniversary, how it all was communicated.

1. Special drops requiring excessive grind and not obtainable in any other way (even for tickets). The drop rate is all over the place, some people getting them after just 15 tries or so, others not getting after 600+ dolmens. Seriously. SEVERAL HUNDREDS of dolmens/geysers.
2. The special mount reward obtainable in a very convoluted way -- daily gold box drops plus NECESSARY ticket purchases, which was not communicated in any sensible way (no in-game announcement or description making any sense, only on the web site, and even there, in a very unclear way, not referencing the mount or the confetti packs directly), which made it extremely confusing to lots of people. Questions about it have been all over guild/zone chats for at least a week. Add to it a COMPLETE lack of a way to track how many pieces you need to buy (the achievement doesn't count, pun intended, because it doesn't provide any way to know how many are you still gonna get, not to mention cases where you forget to open the box, or to use the confetti pack before the character swap, etc), and quite a few people have overspent the tickets on confetti packs even without the event extension. I know at least three dozens only within my guilds.
3. Bags of Jubilee Yesteryear, which usually say they provide only rewards from past events which are NOT obtainable in any other way, dropping pages or Worm style -- that drops right, left and center this event. I've got and given out at least seven full sets of it. Again, I know dozens of people spending tickets on those (whether because they knew they missed something else, or because they saw the pack active on their character other than the main crafter, and didn't read the description this time too closely) and getting the useless Worm pages which aren't even tradeable. MAYBE, it would have been acceptable if they dropped books of the style, not the single pages, but even then, it is definitely anything but "not obtainable". And there's no way to tell if you actually miss something.
4. The cake slices. Again, the in-game description is confusing, and question about it have been popping for over a week, lots of people assuming they need to use the specific years mementos, not buy (and not even use) the slices per se.
5. Blink-and-you-miss-it elevated endeavor rewards. Again, these have not been announced in any clear way in-game, and lots of people have missed the elevated endeavor rewards by accidentally completing other endeavors first, or even before noticing the rewards differ this time around. And not even just on the first day.

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<snipped for Abusive Language and Disruptive Behavior>

Soraka

I wonder if making the pages bound was intended to have them remain exclusive to people who participated in the 10th anniversary event. I don't have an issue with that.

However, I feel like the entire player base doesn't feel celebrated due to the level of grind needed to achieve all five drops in this time frame. A lot of players enjoy ESO because we are able to play it more or less how we want. I don't enjoy long times grinding. I don't have time to. There's entire days I miss of the event and usually that's okay. The drop date seems ridiculous this time.

This aspect of the event feels like it's only celebrating the pve grind players who enjoy farming the same thing for hours on end. That's why I'm jealous of the rewards those locked out. No, I don't want to be in their shoes and I don't want their compensation changed. Don't get me wrong. It's a very awful thing that happened. I also don't get to play a lot during the event and cannot commit to grinding the rewards. I know that's a me thing, but if still makes me sad I'll probably end the event with my 3/5 pages and purchasing mount tickets so I can have the exclusive "I was here for the 10th anniversary and all I got was this t-shirt" feeling.


And yes it has been rather confusing on what I do and do not have to buy with my tickets.

BetweenMidgets

I also feel like there isn't anything good to spend my tickets on.

• I don't like ESO horses, so I am not buying the fragment for the horse.
• I don't like Indriks (see above)
• Despite having played for more than 3 years, I only have access to the cakes that are themed (aka the last 3 years worth). Those really only work for a housing build specifically incorporating that style, so for me, big no thank you.
• I already have a backup for the Morpholith pet and molag smol pet.
• I bought all the available fragments for the personality.
• I bought the style pages for what I wanted from the event. Same with previous years. (I personally don't feel the need to complete the entire set, I'm happy with the pieces I actually want) so I don't really want to dump in to the Yesteryear bag.

It just feels so bleh.
I'm not a fan of companions but it is legitimately the only thing I feel I can dump tickets in to. It feels like such a let down to not be able to get something "good".

Reginald_leBlem

Oh crap I have a bound worm cult chest I don't want or need, I accidentally bought a bag via a miss click and I'm sure that's where it came from

code65536

Soraka wrote: »

I wonder if making the pages bound was intended to have them remain exclusive to people who participated in the 10th anniversary event. I don't have an issue with that.

These aren't people who "participated" in the event; these are people who slaved away at the grind during the event.

If they're going to make it bound and unticketable, the drop rate should have been MUCH higher.

And it's just pure RNG. Which is never a good thing. ZOS (deservedly) received a lot of criticism about this with vMA back in the day. There were people who got their sharpened Maelstrom inferno on the first drop, and people who never got it after 500 runs. Seriously. Half a thousand runs of vMA. There are players who quit the game over that.

ZOS has since taken steps to fix the RNG grind, with things like retrait, sticker book, and eventually curation, but then we get this event where it seems like they had completely forgotten their past mistakes with pure RNG grinds.

And the other thing about the RNG grind is that it is fundamentally UNFAIR. For example, I farmed for one of the pages on two different accounts. One account got that page on the 2nd try. The other account got it after the 237th try. Was one account somehow more deserving of it than my other account? But this is the kind of stupidity that can happen when you resort to pure RNG with a low drop rate.

Finally, if ZOS wanted to make it feel rewarding, they should've tied the drop chance to in-game progress. For example, if you have zero achievements in Summerset, you get the stupidly low drop rate that you have now for the geyser page, but if you have it all, then you should be able to get it after one or two geysers. That would've been a way to incentivize people to actually play all of Summerset's content, instead of spending countless hours mindlessly grinding one very specific feature of Summerset.

Or, make the Staff of Worms drop much higher if you've completed the main story line and, you know, defeated the person who wielded the staff.

They could've done some really nice and interesting things with these pages, but instead, it's just a stupid pure RNG grind that made many players bitter.

MreeBiPolar

Soraka wrote: »

I wonder if making the pages bound was intended to have them remain exclusive to people who participated in the 10th anniversary event. I don't have an issue with that.

No, the only bound pages are those you get from the jubilee yesteryear grab bag. You get normal unbound from the event boxes this same event, so these bound pages should not even HAVE been in the grab bag.

Soraka

I just mean if they intended it to be exclusive to this event only because it's "special". I'm not saying I enjoy this design. I absolutely agree there needs to be more ways to unlock them and much less rng aspect. I agree the grinding is excessive, which is literally what the rest of my post was saying.

I simply stated I don't have an issue with it being exclusive for this event, like people who have the (tiger? I don't have it I don't remember) mount for being active at a certain time. I do have issue with the implementation because lots of people, myself included, were here for the event and still don't have the rewards, and it's only a subset of the population who enjoys excessively grinding.

Dagoth_Rac

"The Daedra. The anchors. You destroy them in vain."

I know. But do you have to rub it in, Molag??

WhiteCoatSyndrome

Soraka wrote: »

I simply stated I don't have an issue with it being exclusive for this event, like people who have the (tiger? I don't have it I don't remember) mount for being active at a certain time.

Yeah it was a tiger. It was specifically for subbing for X amount of time. (I was just active and not subbed so I don’t have it either. 😝)

Soraka

Dagoth_Rac wrote: »

"The Daedra. The anchors. You destroy them in vain."

I know. But do you have to rub it in, Molag??

I wish I could give this more than one awesome. LOL

BlueRaven

If the want them exclusive to the event, fine. But they could have awarded them with a “get 7 jubilee gold boxes” type achievement.

Earning a gold box once a day for seven days seems reasonable. Then “tada!” Style pages get unlocked on the account.

The way they did it… Everyone is agitated by the event. It was not a good experience.

dmnqwk

It's pretty obvious some short-sighted vp failed to understand that people playing is not the way to increase their profits, but actually forcing people to play LOWERS their profits by people unsubbing due to latency, ridiculous behaviours, forced grinding etc.

I think the VP who thought up this anniversary event needs to move on to another company quickly before they get blamed for this.

Desiato

It was 5 style pages out of dozens that were rare. Really, 4 because the Trueflame page was so easy to get. Everyone had a choice. No one was forced.

I don't think most players were miserable. I think it's a loud minority of players who suffer from conditions like FOMO.

IMO, the vast majority of ESO players play it like an episodic single player game and weren't even aware of the rare drops.

This is this akin to the typical social media echo chamber that makes some people believe the earth is flat and pizzagate was real. But again, IMO.

I don't think the style page grind was popular, but reasonable people who didn't like it didn't do it.

General Discussions could accurately be renamed to General Grievances, but that doesn't mean it's reflective of how all players feel. People are far more likely to leave negative feedback than positive feedback. People smarter than me who disagree with the sentiment of these threads avoid them.

amapola76

MreeBiPolar wrote: »

2. The special mount reward obtainable in a very convoluted way -- daily gold box drops plus NECESSARY ticket purchases, which was not communicated in any sensible way (no in-game announcement or description making any sense, only on the web site, and even there, in a very unclear way, not referencing the mount or the confetti packs directly), which made it extremely confusing to lots of people. Questions about it have been all over guild/zone chats for at least a week. Add to it a COMPLETE lack of a way to track how many pieces you need to buy (the achievement doesn't count, pun intended, because it doesn't provide any way to know how many are you still gonna get, not to mention cases where you forget to open the box, or

My biggest pet peeve by far is that there's no tracker for the Jubilee Confetti packs for the mount. I was just looking through
my inventory last night and confirmed that yes, indeed, as I remembered, there are other "Consume 10 of X to get Y" type" items we have had in the past, and many of them have had trackers in the text. So it's not like it's some new unheard of thing that they haven't already done many times.

Jaraal

The thing that stands out most to me is that there has not been a single event this year that launched without problems, bugs, or dysfunction of some sort that required modification of either code or expectations.

WhiteCoatSyndrome

amapola76 wrote: »

My biggest pet peeve by far is that there's no tracker for the Jubilee Confetti packs for the mount. I was just looking through
my inventory last night and confirmed that yes, indeed, as I remembered, there are other "Consume 10 of X to get Y" type" items we have had in the past, and many of them have had trackers in the text. So it's not like it's some new unheard of thing that they haven't already done many times.

@amapola76 It’s under the Holiday achievement category for the Anniversary. Near the bottom.

(Not the most intuitive place for it, I know, but it does exist.)

MreeBiPolar

WhiteCoatSyndrome wrote: »

amapola76 wrote: »

My biggest pet peeve by far is that there's no tracker for the Jubilee Confetti packs for the mount. I was just looking through
my inventory last night and confirmed that yes, indeed, as I remembered, there are other "Consume 10 of X to get Y" type" items we have had in the past, and many of them have had trackers in the text. So it's not like it's some new unheard of thing that they haven't already done many times.

@amapola76 It’s under the Holiday achievement category for the Anniversary. Near the bottom.

(Not the most intuitive place for it, I know, but it does exist.)

Yeah, but it doesn't really help. It shows you how many out of 25 you already used, but not how many are you in theory gonna get.

derkaiserliche

MreeBiPolar wrote: »

WhiteCoatSyndrome wrote: »

amapola76 wrote: »

My biggest pet peeve by far is that there's no tracker for the Jubilee Confetti packs for the mount. I was just looking through
my inventory last night and confirmed that yes, indeed, as I remembered, there are other "Consume 10 of X to get Y" type" items we have had in the past, and many of them have had trackers in the text. So it's not like it's some new unheard of thing that they haven't already done many times.

@amapola76 It’s under the Holiday achievement category for the Anniversary. Near the bottom.

(Not the most intuitive place for it, I know, but it does exist.)

Yeah, but it doesn't really help. It shows you how many out of 25 you already used, but not how many are you in theory gonna get.

its pretty simple math bro?

DoofusMax

To the OP's points

1. Not touching this - complaints about drop rates are about as common as some of those style pages. (anyone want/need Bonemold? I've got several and they aren't worth the trader slot)
2. You have a very valid point on the lack of mount progress indicators. I'm a bit privileged for being on PC with a couple of addons that help with this, but there is no way to easily figure out how many confetti packs I have picked up and how many remain to complete the mount. This is something which probably should have been included in the tooltip for the confetti packs themselves. The mount achievement progress does tell me X/25, but I'm not sure if that's default or add-on behavior. I also have an add-on that will tell me where particular items are stored (unconsumed packs in this case), but it requires that the current character have an unconsumed one to mouse-over.
3. Similar to #2, the only way to check for missing pieces of outfits is to go into collections and manually look it up. AFAIK, there isn't a PC add-on which will give you this info directly. The best I get is that I have already either learned a style page or haven't. I'm back to #1 on the drop rates, however.
4. I'm not touching cake slices (or cakes) aside from pointing out that they are furnishing items and I'm pretty sure their descriptions say as much. They aren't anything that I'm willing to spend event tickets for, but FOMO is about par for the course.
5. I agree with the lack of any heads-up about there being often being one daily endeavor awarding a different number of seals. Seals are not high on my priority list, but they are very high priority for others and a heads-up of some sort that there was something other than the usual 10 or 15 would have been useful. (Heads-up: Steal 10 Items from the environment is a 200-seal endeavor today)

shadyjane62

I had thought that I had overhyped this event in my mind so that when I was disappointed I felt it was my fault.

I no longer feel that way.

Since I decided the grind was not worth it, I have contented my self with alts and writs. But I don't think I'll ever let myself hope so much.

Araneae6537

I thought the bonus Thieves Guild celebration rewards, including the bonus endeavors, were a fun extra. Maybe there should have been a heads up in game about the endeavors? I’m not sure if there was tbh. I knew to be on the lookout thanks to the article link on the forum.

gariondavey

Yeah the event pages having a low drop rate and being bound was just a horrible idea.
Choose 1, not both.

AzuraFan

Yeah, it's a real shame. The 10th anniversary celebration could have been something fantastic that players would fondly remember. Instead, players will remember it as a tedious failure. Also stingy. Imagine having an anniversary horse and they deliberately short-change you on the number of required fragments so you'll have to spend tickets to get it!

(I stopped grinding for the pages a week ago and won't participate in any such grinds again.)

(Also, there are too many events, with the same old stuff at the events vendor.)

SilverBride

This is the worst anniversary event I've experienced and it was all due to the style page grind. I've always supported ZOS and most of the decisions they've made through the years, but I can't feel good about this one.

These style pages could have been earned by doing special event quests as some others have suggested. Or they could have been purchasable with tickets. Both of these ideas require player participation in the event which should be the biggest factor in receiving these pages.

ZOS needs to greatly increase the drop rates of these pages for the rest of the event as a gesture of good customer service.

Ezhh

This event has been a huge let down for me as well. As soon as I realised how much of a grind the pages would be, I threw most of my time into them at the expense of box farming. I NEVER want to do another dolmen or geyser again. But I told myself once I'd done the pages I would know exactly how much time I had for farming boxes...

...only then I got banned because I logged the PTS for 5 mins. And now I will be given the pages anyway (which is making other people bitter and unhappy) while I can't farm my boxes as I planned.

Bans/lock outs aside, those pages made this feel like something that is not a celebration.

onyxorb

SilverBride wrote: »

These style pages could have been earned by doing special event quests as some others have suggested. Or they could have been purchasable with tickets. Both of these ideas require player participation in the event which should be the biggest factor in receiving these pages.

ZOS needs to greatly increase the drop rates of these pages for the rest of the event as a gesture of good customer service.

Having the pages tied to an achievement related to the page would have been GREAT, and felt more like an actual celebration of 10 years worth of amazing story lines.
Mannimarco's staff being a reward for beating him in the main story line quest would have honestly put a smile on my face.

Tickets would have have been a great option too.

Jaraal

SilverBride wrote: »

ZOS needs to greatly increase the drop rates of these pages for the rest of the event as a gesture of good customer service.

Seeing the uproar over compensation from those unaffected, those slightly affected, and those majorly affected by the PTS debacle leads me to believe that if ZOS suddenly made all the style page drops common, then the uproar from those who spent hundreds of hours or farmed hundreds of bosses, geysers, dolmens and fishing holes would be rather loud as well.

NyassaV wrote: »

[snip]

If that were the case, then they would have made the style pages also available for tickets.

[edited to remove quote]

SilverBride

Jaraal wrote: »

SilverBride wrote: »

ZOS needs to greatly increase the drop rates of these pages for the rest of the event as a gesture of good customer service.

Seeing the uproar over compensation from those unaffected, those slightly affected, and those majorly affected by the PTS debacle leads me to believe that if ZOS suddenly made all the style page drops common, then the uproar from those who spent hundreds of hours or farmed hundreds of bosses, geysers, dolmens and fishing holes would be rather loud as well.

I wouldn't and I am one of those that has spent many hours trying for these pages. I have seen others say they have all the pages and would still be fine if the drop rates were increased. Most players don't want others to continue to struggle and still not get their pages, regardless if they got theirs or not.

irswat

Have done these since 2018 and this has been my favorite. Grinding the style pages was tedious but once you get them worth while and rewarding

Jaraal

SilverBride wrote: »

Jaraal wrote: »

SilverBride wrote: »

ZOS needs to greatly increase the drop rates of these pages for the rest of the event as a gesture of good customer service.

Seeing the uproar over compensation from those unaffected, those slightly affected, and those majorly affected by the PTS debacle leads me to believe that if ZOS suddenly made all the style page drops common, then the uproar from those who spent hundreds of hours or farmed hundreds of bosses, geysers, dolmens and fishing holes would be rather loud as well.

I wouldn't and I am one of those that has spent many hours trying for these pages. I have seen others say they have all the pages and would still be fine if the drop rates were increased. Most players don't want others to continue to struggle and still not get their pages, regardless if they got theirs or not.

I spent many hours grinding them and have them all as well. I would rather not see people left out because their RNG was bad. I would be ok with ZOS basically putting them in the crown store for free at this point. However, I can assure you that there would be an uproar regardless.

SilverBride

Jaraal wrote: »

I spent many hours grinding them and have them all as well. I would rather not see people left out because their RNG was bad. I would be ok with ZOS basically putting them in the crown store for free at this point. However, I can assure you that there would be an uproar regardless.

There is already an uproar over the frustration and stress this has caused many. I would take an uproar over them doing something to make this right over the previous any day of the week.