Please rethink making overland content harder

WolfCombatPet

This is what is currently happening if I want something as simple as finding the new Ayleid furniture recipes:

I really enjoyed world boss quests, but the game is dead lately. I can spam zone chat and all of my guilds, but no one wants to do West Weald world boss quests.
If I find another player sharing their quest, it's still only two of us. World bosses take so long to kill with only two players. It's just not worth it.
The only other option is picking urns/containers. That's... really boring for me.
With the state of ESO being as dead as it is lately, we clearly need a third option to find furniture recipes.

Taking all of this into account, if the game is dead enough that we can't find a simple group of 3-4 players to take down world bosses... I am skeptical about making more overland content that might require multiple players.

I do hope that ESO makes announcements soon about what is planned for this "harder" content because right now the situation seems rather bleak.

Keeping us not knowing is only adding to player anxiety. For now, I've canceled my sub and am off playing other MMOs. It feels like I'm the last person still trying to group up to do world bosses. At this point, I've given up as I have no one to play with.

I play 9PM-midnight Pacific.

I hope devs take feedback on how bad the state of the game is and make appropriate changes. Like adapting so players have single-player combat gameplay options to obtain furniture recipes.
OR having furniture recipes drop from dungeon bosses. The queues might be forever, but it's better than the overland problem of never getting a group at all.

Imza

I agree - the public dungeon bosses are getting harder too - I play during "night hours" so no-one is around to group with me and it takes a very long time to do some of those public dungeon bosses

Ugrak

There's a good chance this thread may be locked with directions to keep overland difficulty discussion in the pinned megathread, but your issue seems to not be the overland difficulty itself, and more that the game population is insufficient at times for the MMO concept to remain workable.

It just goes to illustrate from another angle how a one-size-fits-all approach to difficulty doesn't work. Ideally, I'd just have world difficulty and complexity tuned high, while making various levels of supportive power available for players who wanted it to be easier, whether due to skill issues or mere convenience.

For the low end of the difficulty scale, I wouldn't mind straight up immortality and CC-immunity being made available. Or that damage done becomes a fixed percentage of enemy health, regardless of the size of the health pool, so that DPS races will invariably be won. And that any companion used by a player with this setting active will have the power level of a city guard.

The biggest challenge is probably how to implement such a thing without simply paving the way for the bots.

One approach could perhaps to just place powerup sigils like in the solo arenas at the boss/event locations for players to use if they feel like it.

ChaoticWings3

I should just mention that we don't know yet how overland difficulty is planned to be implemented and how hard it would actually be. Until we have more information we can only speculate so nothing is truly set in stone. Personally on my end I would prefer the overland at times to be a bit harder (like have story bosses have about the same amount of health as the first cycle boss in the infinite archive so I don't kill them in 5 seconds like I have been. The amount of build up to a major let down battle makes me feel like I entered an episode of One Punch Man. I really shouldn't be forced to light attack......every.....5.....seconds to keep an all powerful entity alive to be slightly perceived as a threat to the world) but I don't want to have overland content be completely changed for everyone at the same time. I sometimes just like to chill and relax with the game and being able to not worry about combat while during surveys tends to be fairly relaxing when I'm doing the task.

The best way I can see something implemented for overland content is by using a shrine to issue a buff/debuff system that alters the scaling algorithm for your current character. It honestly can work similarly to how the infinite archive gets harder over time. Probably have a difficulty between 1 to 5. 1 being pretty much what we have now and 5 either being around the 1st arc or 2nd arc difficulty of the infinite archive but now spread across the overland. 2 through 4 will be a middle ground if 5 is too hard and 1 is too easy. Think like around the level of craglorn at level 3 (again speculation). I would then say having an increase drop rate of gold, higher tier loot, and maybe some collectibles from doing the harder levels of difficulty would be a good incentive to trying out or possibly staying with the higher difficulty.

That is kind of what I wish would happen within reason. Realistically the difficulty I envision for the toughest level may be made easier. I don't think the developers want to have the content be so hard that it would push newer players away. If they did implement an all around difficulty increase I would say it wouldn't go higher then what craglorn is now which I think is a pretty decent difficulty level.

Again all we have at the moment is speculation until there is more clarification. Which unfortunately probably means we won't know until April.

ZOS_Icy

Greetings,

With there already being a thread opened on this subject here, we're going to go ahead and close this one down.

Thank you for understanding.