The minimum changes required to make competitive TOT more interesting to more players

Largomets

It's no secret or surprise that the horrible ranking system is disincentivizing play. The people actually playing choose to stop once they have a higher score, and the people not playing give it a try, are turned off by the terrible system, and quit. While obviously one would hope ZOS would balance the broken decks and prioritize skill to RNG, there's actually some ranked changes that can happen outside of this that would curb some of those problems in the competitive play area while also fixing the frustrations that 100% of players have with the ranking system.

1) The higher ranked player should always goes second. Since ZOS refuses to balance the game and decks, having the "going second disadvantage" as the higher ranked player will weed out more of the RNG farmers and put people actually good at the game more consistently on top, and also as the pool normalizes towards skilled players, those players will have more fun in their games since the RNG spammers will be rightfully pushed out of their MMR bracket. Any RNG spammer who chances into a few wins will find themselves going second most of the time until they fall down, and since they're relaying on RNG decks that give a heavy player 1 advantage, they're inflating their win ratio by trying to catch a "going first" streak using cheese tactics. This goes away if they start going second, and skilled players can win despite going second as long as they aren't up against an RNG cheese farmer picking Alessia and patron spamming or the like.

2) Throw out the current point system. Instead, each player has a variable "point value" assigned to them based on where they are in the rankings. Combine these two points of each player into "the pot," and divide it in half. Half the number of the pot's points are given to the winner, and the equal number are subtracted from the loser. So if you have a top seed player with 150 points, and a lower tier player worth 50 points, the pot is 200 points. Whoever wins the game gets +100 and whoever loses the game gets - 100. This will make it so that the lower player still has more to gain in the situation, but the higher ranked player still has something to gain and less to lose. This will prevent the good players from sitting out once they are happy with their score.

3) Win streaks should come with additional bonuses to reward skilled players and have a timer expiration. These would not be leaderboard points, but extra win coffers to signify you're on a combo streak, but if you log out or quit for more than X time, you lose your streak. Call it 1 hour between games so people can take breaks. This will keep top players playing even after they're "happy" with their LB spot. There could also be prestige items locked into the win streak coffers so people would actually want to keep playing. For example, similar to the trial trifecta mounts, if there were fragments for a specific cosmetic like a mount etc. that rewarded only the best ToT players, more players would be drawn to the game.

4) Season wins should come with more meaningful prizes. The polymorph from vAS+2 is a perfect example. Rare AND TRADEABLE, so the trial players that want to farm this very rare drop can do so by playing end game content, but also they can sell it to players who do not want to play trials at end game levels. This is an "everyone wins" system that should be in the game more often, including season coffers. 100k gold just isn't a good enough reward to keep players consistently playing all month long.

notyuu

While these suggestions are rather nice they do not address the underlying issue that for an overwhelming majority of the player base ToT is boring, uninteresting and overall a miserable time, so while your suggestion might bring in a few new players very few of them would stick around once they got the reward they wanted, or more likely see the insurmountable wall needed to get said rewards and just not bother.

In other words if you wanna bring in more players to ToT you'd need to change it so much that it's no longer ToT.

LPapirius

Putting a mini game like ToT into ESO never made any sense to me. The dev time would have been much better utilized improving the actual game or fixing some of the many bugs in ESO. In my opinion ToT is ZOS taking ESO in a direction nobody wanted it to go.

tomfant

I'm joining the chorus: ToT feels totally misplaced in this game. There is nothing that can fix that for me.

spartaxoxo

Tales of Tribute is a response to players requesting for years to have some kind of card game (and other mini-games) in taverns. And mini-games are a fairly normal part of an MMO.

Anyway, I like these ideas. One of the biggest things that takes me out of playing ToT as often is the horrible matchmaking and paltry prizes. I think something like this could help.

I'd also add that they should unnerf the regular reward boxes. They nerfed them because people got them too quickly from NPCs when it launched, but then they also fixed all those issues with the NPCs. The current boxes don't feel like they are worth the significant time investment of the activity.

sayswhoto

Higher ranked player going second is a good idea. It has a sportsman-like theme to it which I feel could fit ToT well. I could also see top ranking players just taking turns using first-turn advantageous strategies against each other though.