Official Discussion Thread for "ESO Developer Deep Dive - Item Sets, Part 1"

ZOS_Kevin

This is the official discussion thread for, "ESO Developer Deep Dive - Item Sets, Part 1"

"Learn about how ESO’s item sets are crafted with a new Q&A developer interview!"

Destai

Good interview. Have you decided the topic of the next one or two of these deep dives?

ZOS_Kevin

Destai wrote: »

Good interview. Have you decided the topic of the next one or two of these deep dives?

There is still another part to this interview, but I believe the next two after all parts of the Item Set interview will be between Delves and Public Dungeons and Stand-alone quests (non-zone story quests). Then from there, we will look at some of the suggestions from the previous topic thread and see what topics make sense to address next.

Izanagi.Xiiib16_ESO

@ZOS_Kevin perhaps 'Cyrodiil' or other such pvp topics with the upcoming Q4 patch?
I'm sure a number of players would love to hear how the performance rework is going and see the results and conclusion of the population tests last year that we're due an update on.

Djiku

Is part 2 going to talk about what you are going to do about set bloat? Right now it seems you are adding new sets every other update just because it's alwys been that way. It doesn't feel good to me. Many sets over the years didn't have me excited. They just felt like they had to be there.

Theist_VII

Whose questions were these?

When asked which topic we would like to see a Developer Deep Dive, from what I gathered on that thread, none of these questions were what we were looking for an answer to.

People just want to know when the 95% of sets in this game will finally be competitive options.

colossalvoids

Theist_VII wrote: »

Whose questions were these?

When asked which topic we would like to see a Developer Deep Dive, from what I gathered on that thread, none of these questions were what we were looking for an answer to.

People just want to know when the 95% of sets in this game will finally be competitive options.

I'm absolutely in questions after the read also, thought it would come through community pain points like bloat etc. but it was just a quick rundown on design.

Maitsukas

A bit of background about Deep Dives:

ZOS_Kevin wrote: »

For those unfamiliar with the developer deep dives, it's a blog series where ESO Dev Team members discuss various elements of ESO game design in detail. Players get to learn about our development process and philosophy and our dev team gets to nerd out a bit.

silky_soft

So we can customise skills now, scribing, when will we get to customise sets? I don't mind having to collect 100% of a set in the sticker book to unlock it. I already have to research every trait in order to reconstruct. Maybe even just collect 5 peices to combine into a rune that you use as the 5th bonus. Rest of the bonuses are made from rune parts collected throughout the world, you know like the useless materials for lower level gear?

Pelanora

What this interview told me, is sets are getting to pts after a very long and involved- and expensive- process and that's likely why zos doesnt want to unwind them very fast.

I think what's needed is a much earlier online sandpit, of some kind, providing a way for players to test new sets EARLIER.

Then we wouldn't get the sorc IA sets debacle, for example, and other sets arriving in game that cause chaos, although players point that out in pts.

But i think after the production effort to get to pts, noone wants to push 'pause'.

Lalothen

Copy/paste from another thread where we touched on this deep dive:

Lalothen wrote: »

Pelanora wrote: »

https://www.elderscrollsonline.com/en-us/news/post/66547

I see the problem.

There's so much investment before it's hitting PTS..... turning that bull around and getting it out of the china shop... is clearly just too hard (expensive).

They need to find a way to talk to players much much MUCH earlier.

Players who can test things a thousand times more in a week than zos ever can.

Yes, they absolutely should talk to the players earlier. The community is a huge untapped creative resource; something I have rapidly learned over the past few years as a worldbuilder. One of the best implementations in the last year for the game I work for, came from a member of our community. It was also tweaked over a period of a few months based on incoming data and a constant flow of constructive feedback from the community, and the result is a balanced implementation that pretty much everyone is happy with.

I'd also just like to highlight the following sentence from that deep dive on item sets:

Nadav: Class sets are typically harder to design than other types of item sets, as they need to be both mechanically and thematically tied to specific classes and skill lines, narrowing our design scope and limiting what type of abilities we can create for each set.

The point about mechanically & thematically tying sets to specific class & skill lines isn't being followed consistently, and frankly if a multi-disciplinary team can't come up with a bunch of viable ideas that are mechanically & thematically on-point for every single class & their associated skill lines, then I'd suggest they're not really in tune with the classes & how they play on the live servers, or paying enough attention to the creative goldmine that is the sets they've already produced - because class sets don't necessarily have to remake the wheel to be viewed positively by players.

The problem sets (and other problems, like the spreadsheet standardisation approach being using for Scribing) making their way through to Live could be avoided in the first instance if they bothered to solicit ideas from the community before going into the brainstorming & prototyping phase - but for whatever reason that doesn't happen, the result being we end up with silly, out-of-touch sets that have PTS testers facepalming from day one of testing (another pain point since PTS testers are seemingly not being listened to in numerous respects) right the way through to Live, at which point exactly the same issues raised in the PTS forum start being reiterated by disappointed/confused/angry players on the main Live forums.

xStaticx

Is the part 2 to this still coming out? It has been about 2 months since part 1 came out.