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

hiyde

Jaraal wrote: »

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

100% agree. The ship on adjusting drop rates during the event has sailed. This needed to happen between PTS and start of event, or *very* quickly after it launched.

While a lot of people who've gotten them all would be OK with drop rates being improved for everyone else, there are also people who would have an aneurysm if their hard work got "invalidated" by lowering drop rates now. And they'd kinda have a point. (to be clear I'd personally be fine with it).

I'm hoping that ZOS is taking this feedback into consideration for future events and not doing ultra-rare limited-time bind-on-pickup grind-your-face-off drops during birthday parties. (as others have said, Pick *2*)

Also hoping that at some point this year, they make these pages attainable again. That would give those who did the grind some "exclusive" time with the styles and still give everyone else another (hopefully better) chance to get what they missed. (this too, if they do it, will come with aneurysms lol)

Just one opinion and I'm sure not everyone agrees...and that's fine! I'm just trying to put some (hopefully) attainable solutions out there.

amapola76

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.)

Thank you, that's very helpful information!

All the same, I still feel that they could easily have included that information in the text when you hover over the item in your inventory, as they have done for so many of the other holiday items in the past. (Albeit never as consistently as they should have.)

liliub17_ESO

MreeBiPolar wrote: »

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

Both of these points illustrate how the PLAYER needs to pay attention and not simply expect everything to be blasted on a huge banner.

Cake - The cake slices are an achievement and seen in the player's achievements holiday event log. If you follow the instructions and "acquire" - from the Impresario who handles all such special event items - every slice, you receive the achievement. Since the Impresario is visited to spend down tickets anyhow, it should be obvious this is how to acquire the slices.

Endeavors - These are listed in the endeavors menu every day and the PLAYER should be checking the endeavors log on their account if they are participating (some players do not). The rewards are clearly stated there. If, for some reason, the player does not wish to check -or- like I do, wishes to preview the endeavors, there are a couple reputable sites which list them.

While drops of the special motif/style pages are apparently abysmally low, there is absolutely no reason a player should miss out on the other things unless they 1) have no time to do activities (and that sadly may be the case for those of us who work or go to school full time or have other stuff going on) -or- 2) expect everything spoon fed.

YMMV

SilverBride

liliub17_ESO wrote: »

...expect everything spoon fed.

Spending over 40 hours trying to get one drop and still not getting it... and wanting these drop rates increased to something more reasonable, isn't expecting to be spoon fed.

hiyde

SilverBride wrote: »

liliub17_ESO wrote: »

...expect everything spoon fed.

Spending over 40 hours trying to get one drop and still not getting it... and wanting these drop rates increased to something more reasonable, isn't expecting to be spoon fed.

Not at all what they were saying. They were talking about *information about the event* being spoon fed.

Jaraal

liliub17_ESO wrote: »

MreeBiPolar wrote: »

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

Both of these points illustrate how the PLAYER needs to pay attention and not simply expect everything to be blasted on a huge banner.

So, what's going to happen when the player has been paying close attention to the event page on the website, the event timer on the character select screen, and the event timer on the quest starter in the crown store that STILL say that the event ends on Tuesday? What's going to happen when they grab that last confetti from the gold boxes late Monday or early Tuesday, and then purchase the balance from the Impresario with tickets to combine for their anniversary mount? And what's going to happen when they discover that the event is still going on all day Tuesday, Wednesday, and part of Thursday with no huge banner from ZOS anywhere in the game, or even on the forums? How are those players going to feel when they loot 2 or 3 more confettis that they no longer need and have already wasted tickets on?

That's not on the players. Most do not come to the forums, and even if they do, not everybody is looking several posts deep into a thread about compensation for locked out players where they might accidentally discover that the event has been extended. In fact, I saw somebody mention the event being extended in zone chat last night, and they were met with derision and comments that ZOS has not said anything about extending the event, why are you torturing us like this with jokes when we've been grinding our butts off to get these drops and have already pre-bought our make up confettis with tickets, etcetera.

It's going to come as a big surprise to most of the player base, and not everyone will be reacting with joy. So yeah. Some things do need to be blasted on huge banners.

majulook

1.Lots of players do not like the low drop rate RNG of the special style pages.
2. Lots of players are confused about the eat cake achievement.
3. Lots of players are confused about the confetti and how to track them.
4. Lots of players do not even know the event is extended.


IMHO this sums it up:

Confusion will be my epitaph
As I crawl, a cracked and broken path
If we make it, we can all sit back and laugh
But I fear tomorrow I'll be crying
Yes, I fear tomorrow I'll be crying
Yes, I fear tomorrow I'll be crying

Anifaas

Celebration in name only. Good for the metrics though. Play as you want. We respect your time. Bob’s your uncle. Don’t forget to buy a mount!

blktauna

Desiato wrote: »

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.

speak for yourself there. I am in 3 full discords of people raging about this setup. If youre going to run an event to celebrate the game and the players, maybe try not to enrage them with time disrespecting mechanics.

RebornV3x

I think it the 10th anniversary was a disaster but for other reasons they really needed to showcase how far the game has come we should have gotten a soft remaster of older zones at the very least the starter islands and The alliance capitals, some Skyrim nostalgia. All this scribing stuff would make more sense in a The Pale Chapter with the College of Winterhold .While I like Gold Road this should have been next years area nothing really feels special other than this so-so event and the IRL event earlier.

Naftal

MreeBiPolar wrote: »

1. Special drops requiring excessive grind and not obtainable in any other way

This is the part of your post that I agree with. Everything else is very stupid.

ESO_player123

I'm not sure what is unclear about the confetti and the mount from the news post:
What’s in these wonderful boxes, you might ask? In the case of the Glorious Anniversary Jubilee Gift Boxes available once daily, they contain:

Crafting materials
A motif chapter, furnishing recipe, or style item
New: A tradeable outfit style page for the Earthbone Ayleid armor style
New: A fragment for the new Jubilee Steed mount (note that you need 25 total fragments to make the steed, so keep some Event Tickets ready if you want this one!)
1 to 10 Transmute Crystals
Desecrated Grave Soil, the Worm Cult style item

So, you get one confetti pack each day form the coffer. You know how many days the event lasts, how many days you missed, and that you need 25 packs total. So, a bit of subtraction and addition should give the answer.

Edit: agree about the grind, of course.

SeaGtGruff

I've been enjoying the event as much as usual, but I think that's because last year I adjusted my attitude about trying to collect all of the outfit style pages. No longer do I feel obsessed with trying to grind for or buy every single page, especially since I've never actually used the outfit system beyond the occasional "Hide helmet" for a daily endeavor. I'd still like to collect all of the pages if I can, but I'm not going to grind day after day for them, or get upset if I can't collect them.

As far as the potential special rewards from completing a dolmen, completing a geyser, and killing a Vvardenfell world boss, I look at those as special prizes that are intended to be found by just a few participants, not something that everyone should be expecting to get. It's like when you attend an event and they advertise that 10 lucky attendees will win 10 various special gifts, such as 1 gift that's the absolute best (e.g., a high-end gaming computer), 3 gifts that are also pretty good (e.g., UHD monitors), and 6 gifts that are so-so (e.g., gaming controllers)-- no one expects that every attendee will get those things. I'm not saying it's a great design on the part of the event planners, or that it doesn't result in a lot of disappointed attendees; I'm just saying that that's how I'm viewing these particular potential event rewards.

liliub17_ESO

Jaraal wrote: »

So, what's going to happen when the player has been paying close attention to the event page on the website, the event timer on the character select screen, and the event timer on the quest starter in the crown store that STILL say that the event ends on Tuesday? What's going to happen when they grab that last confetti from the gold boxes late Monday or early Tuesday, and then purchase the balance from the Impresario with tickets to combine for their anniversary mount? And what's going to happen when they discover that the event is still going on all day Tuesday, Wednesday, and part of Thursday with no huge banner from ZOS anywhere in the game, or even on the forums? How are those players going to feel when they loot 2 or 3 more confettis that they no longer need and have already wasted tickets on?

That's not on the players. Most do not come to the forums, and even if they do, not everybody is looking several posts deep into a thread about compensation for locked out players where they might accidentally discover that the event has been extended. In fact, I saw somebody mention the event being extended in zone chat last night, and they were met with derision and comments that ZOS has not said anything about extending the event, why are you torturing us like this with jokes when we've been grinding our butts off to get these drops and have already pre-bought our make up confettis with tickets, etcetera.

It's going to come as a big surprise to most of the player base, and not everyone will be reacting with joy. So yeah. Some things do need to be blasted on huge banners.

None of your premise was in the original post nor was it mentioned in my post.

Apples and oranges are both fruit, but they are not necessarily interchangeable.

But let's say I'm a player who does not use the forums, and I don't subscribe to any ESO social media outlets (rare but not inconceivable). If I saw in zone chat someone saying something about "compensation" or the "PTS". I might ask in-game if I hadn't seen something on the launcher screen ... like a link to the website, for example. I mean, even I was affected by the server screw-up and wondered if we were going to just miss out on the day's login rewards and event goodies since many can only log in the evenings (when this happened). I just followed the link to the celebration page, and it does not include information on the extension. That is on ZOS, by the way. If I still didn't discover the event was extended - because I declined to visit any source which had information on the event at all or inquire further if I heard something in in-game chat - then yes, it does default back to me, the player.

Sometimes people need to see beyond their own sense of self.

Much backspacing was done to not offend people needlessly. Probably didn't work, people being people.

hiyde

Right here, on the launcher (or on the Steam Launch page, can't speak to consoles) they have unlimited space to update us on what's going on.

And they are putting updates in there about in-game 10th Anniversary events in between all the Amsterdam stuff. (but nothing about the 2-day extension, which is kinda important). I'd argue they could make even better use of that space so that people can find out (or at least get links to) everything they need to know without having to visit the myriad of other places ZOS posts updates.

Yeah it's on us to keep ourselves updated but it's just smart content management to use spaces like this for everything they want us to know.

Jaraal

liliub17_ESO wrote: »

But let's say I'm a player who does not use the forums, and I don't subscribe to any ESO social media outlets (rare but not inconceivable). If I saw in zone chat someone saying something about "compensation" or the "PTS". I might ask in-game if I hadn't seen something on the launcher screen ... like a link to the website, for example. I mean, even I was affected by the server screw-up and wondered if we were going to just miss out on the day's login rewards and event goodies since many can only log in the evenings (when this happened). I just followed the link to the celebration page, and it does not include information on the extension. That is on ZOS, by the way. If I still didn't discover the event was extended - because I declined to visit any source which had information on the event at all or inquire further if I heard something in in-game chat - then yes, it does default back to me, the player.

So in the perfect world, every player gets to be in a zone where people just happen to be mentioning an event extension, and every player has the fortitude to ask questions of total strangers in zone chat, and everyone has the time and inclination to peruse various social media, request an invitation to the forums, and once on the forums, scour a plethora of threads (none titled "Event Extension") and read a number of posts looking for clues about when or even why an extension would be necessary? Well, we don't live in a perfect world, and I guarantee you that any extension will be a surprise to many.

And I say why an extension would be necessary because many people don't even know that anything out of the ordinary happened. One person was asking in zone chat yesterday why people were talking about being locked out, since that person wasn't playing ESO on the first day of the event, and had no idea that the servers were taken offline. So no, nothing defaults to the player. The player has no reason to question the information that ZOS has posted in multiple places that says that the event will end on Tuesday as planned. No, the entire responsibility is on the host of the event. The player should not be blamed for assuming that everything will proceed according to plan.

Skullstachio

A big problem that I also see here is to do with something that someone once said in a comment about blizzards paywall backfiring: "you want the rewards... for something you don't want to do."
Players have been trained to play games they don't want to play for rewards they don't actually care about. (Not all have the same mindset.)
And this here is especially true in the case of FOMO when such items are gated behind limited time events.

Eso is really looking more and more like nexons maplestory, where they manipulate item drop rates based on player activity, engagement, etc. lock it behind obscure drop rates that are never revealed to the public in a "Numerical manner" and "barely" communicate it and other issues to players, and even if they did, what are the chances of said comms being lined with silver?
I say this because I hold a valid concern for the direction this game and it's devs are going, and it is not looking good for either side...

hiyde

Ya know, I gotta say, this coincidentally just now came up as a topic in two big guilds that I'm in.

I'm honestly surprised how many people have no clue the event has been extended when everything they're looking at is pointing at it ending Tuesday.

liliub17_ESO

Jaraal wrote: »

So in the perfect world, every player gets to be in a zone where people just happen to be mentioning an event extension, and every player has the fortitude to ask questions of total strangers in zone chat, and everyone has the time and inclination to peruse various social media, request an invitation to the forums, and once on the forums, scour a plethora of threads (none titled "Event Extension") and read a number of posts looking for clues about when or even why an extension would be necessary? Well, we don't live in a perfect world, and I guarantee you that any extension will be a surprise to many.

And I say why an extension would be necessary because many people don't even know that anything out of the ordinary happened. One person was asking in zone chat yesterday why people were talking about being locked out, since that person wasn't playing ESO on the first day of the event, and had no idea that the servers were taken offline. So no, nothing defaults to the player. The player has no reason to question the information that ZOS has posted in multiple places that says that the event will end on Tuesday as planned. No, the entire responsibility is on the host of the event. The player should not be blamed for assuming that everything will proceed according to plan.

I'm not sure why you feel the need to double-down on this, especially since you took me to task for things which were not said in the beginning, but here we are.

In a perfect world, whatever happened with the PTS would not have occurred. In a perfect world, we would all have every one of the special style pages by the time we'd done a half dozen iterations of whichever-activity awarded them (allowing for others to also have the chance). In a perfect world, we'd have all the leisure time we wanted for playing computer games (or other relaxing whatever). In a perfect world, people wouldn't twist themselves and others' words in a tangle about a silly game.

*I* didn't know about the extension - even though I am a member of the forums AND of the Facebook group AND one of the other social media groups AND a few other online sources of information. I actually heard it mentioned by guildmates on Discord and in-game. I then went looking to confirm the information. But that's me, being all curious and taking responsibility for my own actions regardless of what the game devs do or do not. What a silly goose I am.

hiyde

But I guess that's kinda the point? All those hoops to figure out what's going on? It doesn't make you silly, it just feels kind of uneccessary.

I just watched a convo in 2 guilds at the same time where a lot of people were shocked the event is running 2 more days.

Jaraal

hiyde wrote: »

But I guess that's kinda the point? All those hoops to figure out what's going on? It doesn't make you silly, it just feels kind of uneccessary.

I just watched a convo in 2 guilds at the same time where a lot of people were shocked the event is running 2 more days.

My only concern is for the people wasting tickets (like I did) on enough confetti to make 25 ahead of time, since they don't know and ZOS has not made the knowledge easily obtainable that there will be two extra days of free confetti.

I saw (through the official announcements) that there would be 20 free confettis if one played every day, as I planned to, and the need to purchase 5 with tickets, so, since I still had a stack of 12 tickets from the last event, went ahead and used them on confettis. So I'll either be getting 2 extra confettis, or I'll be getting gold boxes without confettis..... but I'll have wasted tickets (because of ZOS' error and subsequent projected adjustment) that could have been used on furnishings, style pages, companion commendations, annual reward fragments, or past goodies.

It would be good if the minimum amount of people were negatively impacted in this way. But I'm puzzled by ZOS' nonchalance in getting this information out to the general public anywhere other than a blurb several paragraphs deep on one forum post that will be read by only a small fraction of the general player base.

How many people who don't know about the extension through Thursday will be buying their last required 5 confettis on Monday or early Tuesday morning? I guess we'll find out. And I bet plenty of people will show up here to voice their opinion after the fact.

Natakiro

I wasn't aware that you could only get 1 piece of confetti for the horse a day (thought it was something we could grind for) and spent my tickets on Indriks, definitely won't have enough tickets to get the mount without spending real money on the tickets

evymyu233

i hope i can get old Jubilee Cakes to spruce up my house

MreeBiPolar

Desiato wrote: »

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.

Not really.

liliub17_ESO wrote: »

MreeBiPolar wrote: »

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

Both of these points illustrate how the PLAYER needs to pay attention and not simply expect everything to be blasted on a huge banner.

Cake - The cake slices are an achievement and seen in the player's achievements holiday event log. If you follow the instructions and "acquire" - from the Impresario who handles all such special event items - every slice, you receive the achievement. Since the Impresario is visited to spend down tickets anyhow, it should be obvious this is how to acquire the slices.

Endeavors - These are listed in the endeavors menu every day and the PLAYER should be checking the endeavors log on their account if they are participating (some players do not). The rewards are clearly stated there. If, for some reason, the player does not wish to check -or- like I do, wishes to preview the endeavors, there are a couple reputable sites which list them.

While drops of the special motif/style pages are apparently abysmally low, there is absolutely no reason a player should miss out on the other things unless they 1) have no time to do activities (and that sadly may be the case for those of us who work or go to school full time or have other stuff going on) -or- 2) expect everything spoon fed.

YMMV

Actually, both of these points illustrate why it needs to be, using your words, blasted on a huge banner and spoon-fed.

Cake - the wording is not "buy", it's "acquire", and makes no reference to Impresario, furnishings, anything. On day one, players get the event intro quest, *ACQUIRE* the anniversary cake tool memento, use it, taking a *SLICE*, see no progress on that achievement. Quite a few people have tried using it again, then using the now not tool mementos from previous years, again, seeing no progress. That's before even interacting with the impresario for the first time and being even aware of the cake slice furnishings added to the shop in addition to the cakes themselves. If the achievement was worded as "buy" and referred to impresario, it would have removed the unnecessary confusion. Consider now that there are also many players who aren't telepaths, moreover, not native English speakers, and the need for clarity becomes even more pronounced.

Endeavors - these have been specifically said to be things most people can get rewards for during normal gameplay, not something they bend over backwards on purpose. So lots of players don't check them the first thing upon login. Moreover, it has been stressed and discussed along and across that despite wildly varying difficulty (sell 20 items vs compete a trial), the rewards for all endeavors are same. So many people check them not at log-on, but at log-off to see if they have them done and if there's anything they can do quick and without too much effort. Often, two or even all three are already ticked off. This time, they offer DIFFERENT rewards, and that has not been even mentioned in-game. In fact, after the first day, there have been TWO, not one, elevated endeavors, so if someone accidentally completed two "normal" ones, they have no way to get both. Case in point, one person in one of my guilds has done a dolmen for a gold box, and crafted a set of training armor for someone asking for it within first 10 minutes after the reset, only to find out they got 2 endeavors (enchant 2 items and kill 10 humanoid daedra) ticked, and there being 2 other elevated endeavors that day (I think kill 4 people, and steal 10 items from environment), locking them out of one of these. Putting an announcement special endeavors onto the character selection screen (al-la event announcements, weekend battleground flair, etc) and into the announcements section of notifications in-game would have been, well, useful, nice, and easy enough.

hiyde wrote: »

Right here, on the launcher (or on the Steam Launch page, can't speak to consoles) they have unlimited space to update us on what's going on.

And they are putting updates in there about in-game 10th Anniversary events in between all the Amsterdam stuff. (but nothing about the 2-day extension, which is kinda important). I'd argue they could make even better use of that space so that people can find out (or at least get links to) everything they need to know without having to visit the myriad of other places ZOS posts updates.

Yeah it's on us to keep ourselves updated but it's just smart content management to use spaces like this for everything they want us to know.

There are better places to put updates, especially important ones -- and important ones should be in addition, not instead. They really should go EVERYWHERE. The places are the same usual places SOME updates already go to: character selection screen and announcements notification section in-game.

The reason why the launcher isn't a very (or at all) good place is also two-fold. One, it very often lags behind. It tends not to refresh for a few days if you keep the launcher open, not close it. Second, the visual section draws the attention away from the small text section (and it is really small text, less than half the size of the visual section subtitles). I also think many people just click through the launcher and don't pay much attention to its infoblocks unless it actually displays a pop-up like maintenance, but that's just my subjective impression.

ESO_player123 wrote: »

I'm not sure what is unclear about the confetti and the mount from the news post:
What’s in these wonderful boxes, you might ask? In the case of the Glorious Anniversary Jubilee Gift Boxes available once daily, they contain:

Crafting materials
A motif chapter, furnishing recipe, or style item
New: A tradeable outfit style page for the Earthbone Ayleid armor style
New: A fragment for the new Jubilee Steed mount (note that you need 25 total fragments to make the steed, so keep some Event Tickets ready if you want this one!)
1 to 10 Transmute Crystals
Desecrated Grave Soil, the Worm Cult style item

So, you get one confetti pack each day form the coffer. You know how many days the event lasts, how many days you missed, and that you need 25 packs total. So, a bit of subtraction and addition should give the answer.

Edit: agree about the grind, of course.

The unclear part is exactly the lack of the direct reference. Without reading the article first, just from the in-game information, nothing suggests that these fragments would be a necessarily two-parts deal. From previous experience with event setup, and the numbers comparison (20 days, 25 frags), the reasonable assumption is, they just drop from boxes. So a few days into the event, a player (who has acquired a rather large amount of event boxes across several characters) sees that he has a few of these fragments collected, NOT necessarily matching the number of days passed, nor noticing they all only came from gold boxes, nor that every gold box necessarily had a fragment, and quite possibly missing a fragment or two left on some character unnoticed or even unopened (e.g., log in, do daily writs, log out, next char, sort stuff later), and starts wondering about the drop rate. By that time, the article describing the event setup has already been displaced from the main elderscrollsonline.com page. So the player types "confetti" into the search box on the site, and gets only the Jester's Festival references.

As for the math, again, if you know the whole setup before the start, it's possible (but not really too easy unless you dedicate a huge part of your life and attention to ESO). The problems there are exactly that many players initially didn't know how it is set up; didn't really track which days they possibly missed; and even the actual number of days left, it pretty commonly being give or take one because time zones, the event starting/ending NOT on the reset time but a fraction of a day before and after (why?), and, however oddly, a LOT of people having issues mapping ordinals to quantitatives (the number of people getting either 19 or 21 based on the event running from April 4th to April 23rd is quite noticeable). Again, add to it missing a confetti pack or a couple in a wrong inventory -- and no easy way to check for it, and it gets even wilder.

... Not to mention that it would have been much more fun and noticeable if these packs actually caused confetti to shoot out on consumption or anything... But no, there's no effect whatsoever. They just invisibly increment a counter.

DonHardstyle

I agree, the jubilee has been a flop.
The style pages are cool, and its ok to have to grind for it. But the drop rate is way to low. I started farming for the worms staff, since that was my priority. It took me exactly 400 dolmens for it to drop. Luckily i had a week of from work. Otherwise this had been impossible for me. After those dolmens, inwas lucky to drop the helmer and sword within a hour afterwards. I realy wanted the other 2 adswell. But my dolmen adventure burned me out of eso and played something else instead.

Luckily, i was able to get boss loot every dolmen i did, so i got a huge amount of purple boxes. And thus allot of transmutes, motifs and mats. That did make the grind a bit better for me. But it was just to much.

Then the flop with pts came, people got banned cous zos screwed up. And rightfully getting huge awards for it. At first i was on the fence of the rewards. They seemed to big, but since they are still banned. I think its fair now. However. The majority of the playerbase now wishes they would have been banned aswell. This is not a great way to celebrate a anniversary.

Silaf

Well i had fun. I wish the style pages were at least sellable but the rest was good.

MasterSpatula

I may end up being alone on this one, but I think a major problem with this event is that the rewards for the boxes should have been weighted ever so slightly towards newer furniture plans and motifs. It certainly seems like, if anything, the rewards are instead weighted towards older stuff.

I've been vendoring purple Provisioning recipes that I already know on ten characters--often multiples of several recipes per day. Motifs from nine, eight, seven years ago are dropping like candy. Meanwhile, motifs and furniture plans from the last three years or so seem to be exceedingly rare. I think I've received two motif pages so far that I could actually use, while I have multiple mules filled with motifs I don't need and can't currently sell.

This means the stuff that most players actually need is largely holding its value, because most of the more recent stuff that actually does drop gets immediately eaten by the player who looted it. Meanwhile, the bulk of what drops is stuff the market is already saturated with, which means it doesn't move on traders even at half its TTC prices, which in turn makes selling it to help pay for stuff we actually need not that effective.

Just the tiniest little nudge to make newer stuff slightly more common than older stuff would have been a smart move, better for a satisfying celebration, and would have helped with the important task of curbing inflation--particularly since they completely failed to add anything at all to the boxes last year.

Anifaas

To me, this anniversary is emblematic of the development process in ESO. I am not surprised at all that it turned out like this. I really feel for those of you who have become frustrated after pouring so much of your time and effort into this event.

LikiLoki

Yesterday, a man asked me if there were all the cakes in our guildhall. He wanted to visit this house and take a bite out of every cake to get an achievement. He was somewhat disappointed when I explained the situation to him.

MreeBiPolar

DonHardstyle wrote: »

Then the flop with pts came, people got banned cous zos screwed up. And rightfully getting huge awards for it. At first i was on the fence of the rewards. They seemed to big, but since they are still banned. I think its fair now. However. The majority of the playerbase now wishes they would have been banned aswell. This is not a great way to celebrate a anniversary.

The "rewards" are not even "too big" if you pause and look at them. Granted, "Wow, 16 *THOUSANDS*" ... Seals of endeavor. Remember, that translates to "instead of us giving you some pre-selected pet or something, you can pick one top-tier thing from the seals store as compensation". Which are 16k seals. And which is compensation, not reward.

MasterSpatula wrote: »

I may end up being alone on this one, but I think a major problem with this event is that the rewards for the boxes should have been weighted ever so slightly towards newer furniture plans and motifs. It certainly seems like, if anything, the rewards are instead weighted towards older stuff. (snip)

You are not alone, but it's just a... Significantly more subjective, diverse and generally the event design related issue. I have specifically focused on the communication part. In hindsight, I shouldn't have even included the unique pages grind there. But it was kind of the elephant in the room that was too hard to ignore.