Why there is no small combat changes in the biweekly cycle?

robpr · August 1

I'm just genuinely curious.
We have small patch every 2 weeks. Combat changes in those patches are very rare and consist mostly of bug fixes. We ESO don't make numerical tweaks also in those cycles?
ESO doesn't have any competitive ladders (yet) other than Emp switch so I don't see any reason we couldn't have more frequent tweaks. Changing numbers does not require much coding. Other games do this often.

Was there any reason given ever for this?

AcadianPaladin · August 1

I dread combat changes, having experienced over the years here that they generally do more harm than help. Do we really want more of them? I don't, thank you.

Sluggy · August 1

Based on their apparent lack of testing and issues with obvious bugs I'd say it probably is due to a lack of proper CD/CI workflow.

Stamicka · August 1

ZOS kind of has a long history of making ridiculous changes to skills. Often their tweaks result in skills becoming extremely powerful or completely useless. Usually they reserve these types of changes for a PTS so players can test it and give feedback (it’s often ignored unfortunately, but sometimes it stops disastrous changes).

Lately combat changes in general have been minimal compared to previous years. It seems like the developers are satisfied with the current state of combat because it hasn’t changed all that much for quite some time. It’s unfortunate.

robpr · August 1

I dont mean drastic changes like jabs, just simple % dmg/heal up or down kind of changes.

katanagirl1 · August 1

Please no.

Aurielle · August 1

Not sure why anyone would want this? Frequent tweaks to the numbers would be pretty frustrating to build around.

Maitsukas · August 1

That would probably be more annoying than U35, the endgame players having to adjust their setups every two weeks could make them stop playing overall.

Danikat · August 1

I think most people would like to be able to use a build for more than 2 weeks, instead of having to constantly change it because of "tweaks" to skills.

valenwood_vegan · August 1

This sounds like kinda a pvp thing to me? I think the main answer is because pvp doesn't seem to be a major priority.

And imo frequent changes to existing gear and skills generally aren't very necessary or very popular on the pve side. Both at the casual end where many just want to play and not have to change their builds around all the time... and the endgame end, where players may for example be working for weeks toward completing a trial trifecta and probably would not enjoy having to adjust to frequent changes that are happening more quickly than they can make progress.

There are also a lot of players who don't play consistently but rather show up for new content or rewards or a few brief "login tasks" and go back to something else (and in fact recent changes by zos seem to be geared toward this type of player in many ways), and I think this type of player would probably find having to keep track of frequent combat changes outside of the major patches to be a significant barrier to returning.

Newer players already have imo a pretty overwhelming amount to learn when putting their first build(s) together to get into difficult content, and lack the resources and knowledge to adjust to constant changes. I think it would be a huge obstacle for them. Imagine spending all this time on gathering resources and transmutes, crafting, asking questions, getting a build together, learning the rotation... finally you're ready to go into harder content... and then a week later something vital to the build gets changed and you have to start over.

Also related to the above, the game has seen a large reduction in content creators and there just aren't many of them left providing updated build guides at this point. Making changes even worse for the average player who just wants to play the game and not solve a weekly math problem.

A second answer would be that I think their dev team is already stretched too thin. It can already take quite some time to get important bug fixes rolled out and I'm not sure they have the resources to add frequent combat balancing to incremental patches.

A third answer would be that adding more changes to incremental patches would bypass the existing PTS testing process, preventing these changes from being adequately tested and increasing the potential for unforeseen balance issues and bugs to pop up. PTS is imperfect, but things could be worse without it... we had some serious bugs introduced earlier this year in "surprise" anniversary content that was not PTS tested.

All of that said, if zos would actually put in some work to separate pvp from pve, pvp combat could potentially be tweaked more regularly as needed, without affecting the rest of the game. Of course I don't think we're likely to see this happen.