Should ZOS focus more on cosmetics or combat and performance?

Chrisilis

I think both cosmetics and performance are important and I want both. . PvE ESO is quite visually stunning, even now, ten years in the game is beautiful and players outfits, skins, mounts, pets etc is part of that. Housing is one of the best parts of the game imo, cosmetic resources dedicated to housing is server well spent.

That being said, I'd be more than willing to sacrifice cosmetics in PvP for the sake of performance. If Cyro ran smoother w/out the flashy lights/skill styles etc. I wouldn't mind seeing cosmetics disabled there to make room for higher pop cap and less glitch/freeze/lag/kick/repeat. Or in battlegrounds, the small map size goes all Technicolor rainbow and bang freeze glitch kicked dead. Good times.

It seems to me the game could be cleaned up a lot. Like armour sets, there might be hundreds of sets no one uses, delete em to make room for new. Little things like that, maybe merge a Cyro queue or two or have only a single IC queue, or 8v8 group battlegrounds. Unused or severely underutilized content might be retired to make way for new cosmetics and improved performance.

Muizer

JeroenB wrote: »

Sorry, I don't quite understand what you intend to say with this.

Based on the rest of your reply it seems you did

Rungar

i imagine zos will be focusing alot on pvp since the game is begining its sunset phase which means much reduced new pve content as those teams are likely moving to the new project for the most part. Not necessarily a bad thing to squeeze out the last few dollars. Hopefully their new project is close and a fantasy based game.

licenturion

I prefer graphical updates to base game stuff and cosmetics and new gameplay systems.

In all those years playing, I never experienced any performance issues I read about. And I play on max settings with all bells and whistles. Even during the geiser onslaught last year during the anniversary everything went pretty smooth for me, even with a lot of people there. Also no issues in battlegrounds.

I don’t play Cyrodiil (apart from PvE events) so I most performance issues are probably there. But that is only a tiny portion of the whole game.

LPapirius

reazea wrote: »

I almost wonder if this poll could be reworded to "do you prefer ZOS focuses on casual solo play or competitive group play"

The casual community is getting all the attention now days while the competitive group players are getting almost nothing. And the PvP community has gotten nothing but neglect. The vengence campaign is a distraction from actually fixing the issues with cyrodiil PvP and going in a completely different direction.

I guess we'll find out more in April with their announcement, but if they had good news for us they wouldn't be holding it back.

I have deliberately stayed out of this discussion for the most part so that others can have their discussions without me throwing in my opinions on each and every comment, which tends to derail threads and gives mods a dubious excuse to delete comments and close down threads. Plus the back and forth just isn't productive.

@reazea got pretty close to matching my thinking. I chose not to phrase the poll as "do you prefer ZOS focuses on casual solo play or competitive group play" for a few reasons.

The casual solo players don't have performance issues. They aren't participating in any content where performance issues crop up. Their APM tends to be very low and the servers can easily keep up with the calculations required to do solo questing. So everything seems fine to the solo questing crowd who treat ESO like every other Elder Scrolls game.

Whereas ESO is an Elder Scrolls themed MMO game, not Elder Scrolls with friends game. ESO was not designed to be a strictly solo questing game with or without friends. ESO was designed to have Cyrodiil PvP and vet trials be the end game content, and that's where performance issues are a virtual guarantee for years now. Competitive group players are plagued with performance issues. The servers can't keep up with high APM players in a group and it causes very significant performance issues.

So @reazea did, for the most part, mirror my poll questions by using a different phrasing. The problem is if I'd phrased the poll how @reazea did this poll would have devolved into yet another war erupting between people who think ESO should be a strictly casual solo questing game vs. those who, like me, see ESO as a game designed primarily for competitive group play.

In the first few years ZOS did a great job of keeping the main focus of the game designers. Over the last 5 plus years or so ZOS has essentially ignored the needs of the competitive group players. U35 was the last straw for most of us, and most of the competitive players left the game, just as the streamers and content creators said they would.

The end result is that the casual solo questing player is just fine and dandy with the state of the game. While at the same time the competitive group players get plagued with performance and balance issues.

This is why the majority of the competitive group players are of the mind that ZOS doesn't have anyone on any of their teams that regularly participates in competitive group play, be it PvP or end game trials. And in a way, who can blame them. Who'd want to work on a game all day then go home and play in sweaty PvP or end game trial? With that said though, this is what ZOS should require of some of their staff or they'll never know what's going on with the competitive group activities in their game. Maybe the solution is for ZOS to actually pay a small group of people to spend 20 hours/week in Cyrodiil and vet trials, which seems highly unlikely to ever happen.

ESO started out as a competitive group play focused game, and that's how it should have remained. I fear the vengence "experiment" is going to end up being the only available mode in Cyrodiil using the guise of increasing performance, and be the end of the best PvP ever created in any game. Any game manufacturer can make template based PvP work. ZOS has something truly special with Cyrodiil PvP as it was circa 2018 and it deserves the investments necessary to keep it running in tip top form.

Rungar

its likely because the fix is to greatly reduce apm and serverside calculations and some players wont want to accept that. Theyve known what the problem was for many years i imagine. Unforutunately it cant be resolved without limiting the combat system. Are you sure you want improvements? lol.

AvalonRanger

I vote both. But recently, I don't have good impression against reward item design of GP
or endeavor. It feels like cheep party costume or just failed design.

JustLovely

We'd all like to see both, but ZOS appears to have heavily favored cosmetics over performance a number of years ago, and that is hugely unfortunate. I think the player population reflects this diverting from the original intent of the game designers as well. I think we'd see a much higher player population if ZOS would have listened to the U35 feedback. It's been downhill since U35 and now this year we see a huge decrease in new content production and ZOS changing up their entire schedule of releases. Maybe it's just a coincidence, but it doesn't seem like it to me.

Two_Ears

I quit GW2 since the release of its last xpac on August 2024. The game had become a visual puke of garbage and had lost all of its immersion. So far i really enjoy ESO art style and direction. The cosmetics are not too crazy, over the top, plush toys. I like it and I hope ESO polishes the game ballance, mechanics and retention than pointless cosmetics.

flaxegg

Two_Ears wrote: »

IThe cosmetics are not too crazy, over the top, plush toys. I like it and I hope ESO polishes the game ballance, mechanics and retention than pointless cosmetics.

I forgot that you can literally turn your mount into a plush toy in GW2 haha. Say what you want about ESO's flashy mounts, it has nothing on GW2. And then there's FF14 where 70% of players are running around in jean shorts and t-shirts while the NPCs are dressed in more thematic clothing, creating this strange contrast that takes some getting used to. No hate if that's what you're into, but it certainly creates a different vibe from what ESO currently has going on.

ImmortalCX

Neither. Both. They should focus on progression.

Make is a long and rewarding path from A to B to ... Z.

Saying "focus on PvP" means "make the system better so more people will play" therefore PvPers will have more competition, shorter queue times, etc. But what is the progression in PvP? Its mostly just a farming activity. I think progression in PvP is a lost cause. If they offered gear based progression, it would get out of hand quickly and become even less desirable activity.

Progression in PvE could be salvaged. If they came up with progression checklists, increasing levels of difficulty, timers, seasonal achievements, new tiers of gear, etc, they could make it better.

The problem is that cosmetics can be a great carrot to motivate progression, but best rewards are in the cash shop. So to improve progression they would have to nerf the cash shop.

tldr; Progression is what makes a MMO worth playing. PvE (dlc dungeons/trials) offers best avenues for progression, but they would need to tune the content to be more progressive. PvP will never be anything more than a farming activity. A cash shop hurts vertical progression because the best rewards are purchaseable and can't be used as a giant carrot at the end of PvE content. If rare cosmetics are used as a carrot to entice playing the content, and improved appearance of graphics are used to retain players, that is how you do it. So improve cosmetic rewards and nerf the cash shop.

kargen27

loosej wrote: »

I'd just like to say to the people who claim that there's a forced-choice bias here that I think they are wrong.

It is literally impossible to put an equal amount of effort in both. Depending how precise you measure, one will always come out on top.

It's like requesting a hot dog with equal amounts ketchup and mustard. Having them actually equal is impossible, what you're asking for is "close enough".

But "close enough" for you won't be the same for someone else, which means that "the focus should be split equal" is a subjective goal, not an objective one.

So, given that either cosmetics or performance will always receive more effort, I think it's fair to ask which one players would prefer and not include a "equal/other" option.

You are assuming they need be equal. The time and resources needed to debug the game are much more than those needed to add cosmetics because of the complexity and amount of code for the game. To many people on one project isn't any better than not enough people on one project. We as players not being privy to the details of the budget have no idea at all, not even enough to make a guess, on whether or not one area is being underfunded or lacks resources.

JeroenB

LPapirius wrote: »

The casual solo players don't have performance issues.

I honestly have no idea how to engage constructively following a statement like this.

Unless you're using some really specific, limited-scope definition of "performance", that statement is just blatantly untrue, even given some allowance for rhetoric hyperbole.

Setting aside plenty of subjective experiences in solo PvE combat (e.g. delayed mob death timing with a companion active), there are objectively whole game systems that have been intentionally hobbled by the devs due to game performance limitations. Think of outdated housing furnishing limits and the newly reduced guild trader limits. Those are "performance" issues, even if you personally don't care about companions or housing or trading.

spartaxoxo

JeroenB wrote: »

LPapirius wrote: »

The casual solo players don't have performance issues.

I honestly have no idea how to engage constructively following a statement like this.

Unless you're using some really specific, limited-scope definition of "performance", that statement is just blatantly untrue, even given some allowance for rhetoric hyperbole.

Setting aside plenty of subjective experiences in solo PvE combat (e.g. delayed mob death timing with a companion active), there are objectively whole game systems that have been intentionally hobbled by the devs due to game performance limitations. Think of outdated housing furnishing limits and the newly reduced guild trader limits. Those are "performance" issues, even if you personally don't care about companions or housing or trading.

Yeah, also, I've had lightning staff heavy attacks fail to launch in overland before. It's especially noticable when I'm using to have the companion change target as I'm actually paying attention for once. I've also had bash not work on a world boss.

It's less impactful because everything in Overland is just much easier than harder content. But, it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

katanagirl1

ImmortalCX wrote: »

Neither. Both. They should focus on progression.

Make is a long and rewarding path from A to B to ... Z.

Saying "focus on PvP" means "make the system better so more people will play" therefore PvPers will have more competition, shorter queue times, etc. But what is the progression in PvP? Its mostly just a farming activity. I think progression in PvP is a lost cause. If they offered gear based progression, it would get out of hand quickly and become even less desirable activity.

Progression in PvE could be salvaged. If they came up with progression checklists, increasing levels of difficulty, timers, seasonal achievements, new tiers of gear, etc, they could make it better.

The problem is that cosmetics can be a great carrot to motivate progression, but best rewards are in the cash shop. So to improve progression they would have to nerf the cash shop.

tldr; Progression is what makes a MMO worth playing. PvE (dlc dungeons/trials) offers best avenues for progression, but they would need to tune the content to be more progressive. PvP will never be anything more than a farming activity. A cash shop hurts vertical progression because the best rewards are purchaseable and can't be used as a giant carrot at the end of PvE content. If rare cosmetics are used as a carrot to entice playing the content, and improved appearance of graphics are used to retain players, that is how you do it. So improve cosmetic rewards and nerf the cash shop.

I disagree about PvP. Combat is ever-changing there. No two battles are exactly the same. I am constantly tweaking things in my builds to improve my game performance.

It is the ultimate experience in progression.

MorallyBipolar

Is this a trick question?

Of course performance matters more than anything else.

Sleep

i personally don't really care about cosmetics

Frayton

Just fix the existing game. What good are cosmetics when you can't even look at them long enough before you lag out or crash?

CatoUnchained

LPapirius wrote: »

Over the last 5 years or so nearly everyone on my friends list has left the game. Almost all of them cite the same reason.

Specifically, the steady decline in performance and combat balance, while at the same time ZOS producing so much unnecessary and unneeded cosmetic things like style colors, skill styles, and other strictly cosmetic things that don't improve any of the games core mechanics and functioning.

Where do you stand on this issue? What should ZOS be focusing on more, cosmetics or combat, balance and performance?

Over the years ZOS has stated that they have different teams working on these different issues, but clearly what we are getting are very few to no performance improvements while at the same time being bombarded with a seemingly unlimited number of cosmetic options that don't help the games performance. Why hasn't ZOS hired a few more people to focus on the core game mechanics to improve performance, lag, and disconnecting issues?

So why doesn't ZOS hire more people to work on performance and balance issues to balance out this discrepancy?

A good example of this trend over the last 5 plus years is Cyrodiil and vet trials that are virtually unplayable due to lag and other random issues. Cyrodiil has seen nothing in terms of performance improvements or any kind of attention to make the zone more popular and more fun. Meanwhile we've gotten 30-50 style colors and who knows how many skill styles, like the ram to harvest blacksmithing nodes from the last golden pursuit. Don't all these random cosmetic things negatively impact performance in the long run?

Another example is how out of balance ball groups are in Cyrodiil. For years people have been begging for heal and shield stacking to be limited to reign in the undeniable power creep of ball groups in Cyrodiil. How many updates have we had now that have given ZOS a good opportunity to balance free pull sets like Rushing Agony?

Sure, ZOS should be able to do both these things given they're a AAA rated game with a very significant resource pool to pull from, but they've clearly prioritized cosmetics over performance. What we've gotten over the last 5 years or more has been essentially only cosmetic additions to the game with nothing done to improve the games performance, disconnecting and lag issues. Why have performance issues taken a back seat for so long? And do you want to see this primary focus on cosmetics by ZOS to be the continuing trend?

Thank you for posting this poll. ZOS, in my view, has taken the game in the wrong direction with all the cosmetic stuff and lost track of their end game activities like vet trials and Cyrodiil PvP.

Cosmetics are meaningless without a reliably functioning game. Have to at least be able to stay connected to the server and all that.

SaffronCitrusflower

Servadei wrote: »

Just fix the existing game. What good are cosmetics when you can't even look at them long enough before you lag out or crash?

^This.

Just fix the problems that a handful of sets are causing, do something about cross healing in groups and see where things stand and adjust from there.

reazea

LPapirius wrote: »

reazea wrote: »

I almost wonder if this poll could be reworded to "do you prefer ZOS focuses on casual solo play or competitive group play"

The casual community is getting all the attention now days while the competitive group players are getting almost nothing. And the PvP community has gotten nothing but neglect. The vengence campaign is a distraction from actually fixing the issues with cyrodiil PvP and going in a completely different direction.

I guess we'll find out more in April with their announcement, but if they had good news for us they wouldn't be holding it back.

I have deliberately stayed out of this discussion for the most part so that others can have their discussions without me throwing in my opinions on each and every comment, which tends to derail threads and gives mods a dubious excuse to delete comments and close down threads. Plus the back and forth just isn't productive.

@reazea got pretty close to matching my thinking. I chose not to phrase the poll as "do you prefer ZOS focuses on casual solo play or competitive group play" for a few reasons.

The casual solo players don't have performance issues. They aren't participating in any content where performance issues crop up. Their APM tends to be very low and the servers can easily keep up with the calculations required to do solo questing. So everything seems fine to the solo questing crowd who treat ESO like every other Elder Scrolls game.

Whereas ESO is an Elder Scrolls themed MMO game, not Elder Scrolls with friends game. ESO was not designed to be a strictly solo questing game with or without friends. ESO was designed to have Cyrodiil PvP and vet trials be the end game content, and that's where performance issues are a virtual guarantee for years now. Competitive group players are plagued with performance issues. The servers can't keep up with high APM players in a group and it causes very significant performance issues.

So @reazea did, for the most part, mirror my poll questions by using a different phrasing. The problem is if I'd phrased the poll how @reazea did this poll would have devolved into yet another war erupting between people who think ESO should be a strictly casual solo questing game vs. those who, like me, see ESO as a game designed primarily for competitive group play.

In the first few years ZOS did a great job of keeping the main focus of the game designers. Over the last 5 plus years or so ZOS has essentially ignored the needs of the competitive group players. U35 was the last straw for most of us, and most of the competitive players left the game, just as the streamers and content creators said they would.

The end result is that the casual solo questing player is just fine and dandy with the state of the game. While at the same time the competitive group players get plagued with performance and balance issues.

This is why the majority of the competitive group players are of the mind that ZOS doesn't have anyone on any of their teams that regularly participates in competitive group play, be it PvP or end game trials. And in a way, who can blame them. Who'd want to work on a game all day then go home and play in sweaty PvP or end game trial? With that said though, this is what ZOS should require of some of their staff or they'll never know what's going on with the competitive group activities in their game. Maybe the solution is for ZOS to actually pay a small group of people to spend 20 hours/week in Cyrodiil and vet trials, which seems highly unlikely to ever happen.

ESO started out as a competitive group play focused game, and that's how it should have remained. I fear the vengence "experiment" is going to end up being the only available mode in Cyrodiil using the guise of increasing performance, and be the end of the best PvP ever created in any game. Any game manufacturer can make template based PvP work. ZOS has something truly special with Cyrodiil PvP as it was circa 2018 and it deserves the investments necessary to keep it running in tip top form.

Thanks for the mention and the clarification.

I fear the ship may have sailed on improving Cyrodiil as we know it, but I'd love to be wrong about that. If ZOS was interested in improving Cyodiil they'd find the time to at leas tweak RoA and try limiting heal and shield stacking before committing to the template only version of Cyrodiil. ....and their total radio silence on the many posts where this is pointed out speaks for itself I fear.

Rungar

This is what they needed.. condition stacking. Oldie but a goodie!

https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/547467/new-idea-condtion-stacking[url][/url]

Kappachi

Kind of a loaded question the way the OP is phrased. Any dev should of course focus more on gameplay elements/combat/performance/etc. But I feel like they've been doing a good job with that, my only concern is overland difficulty but they addressed that and said they'd fix it. I've liked the combat changes that made weaving less core to the experience for instance while still giving it a benefit if you do go for it. Vet content feels very well balanced still, etc.

And no, ToT/companions do not fit into "cosmetics" category, companions are directly involved in combat & have their own unique and special abilities and ToT itself is a fully featured game mode that gives good rewards for playing.

reazea

Kappachi wrote: »

Kind of a loaded question the way the OP is phrased. Any dev should of course focus more on gameplay elements/combat/performance/etc. But I feel like they've been doing a good job with that, my only concern is overland difficulty but they addressed that and said they'd fix it. I've liked the combat changes that made weaving less core to the experience for instance while still giving it a benefit if you do go for it. Vet content feels very well balanced still, etc.

And no, ToT/companions do not fit into "cosmetics" category, companions are directly involved in combat & have their own unique and special abilities and ToT itself is a fully featured game mode that gives good rewards for playing.

In my view companions are more like pets. They certainly aren't needed in an MMO where there are thousands of others you can group with to complete content. Plus, PvE content is so easy a companion isn't going to help much. We can just blow everything down with sub par builds as it is. And ToT is a card game. Nobody invests $5,000 into a computer to play card games. And housing is strictly cosmetics in every way.

All these things detract from the core of the game and the bloat negatively impacts performance. So the OP has some pretty good points in my view. End game content with groups of high APM players suffer enormously with performance issues. It's a really big problem. As the OP pointed out, casual players don't have performance issues for the most part. Certainly not in comparison to what it's like in Cyrodiil or vet trials.

James-Wayne

SerafinaWaterstar wrote: »

Want both. But disagree with you saying:

Cyrodiil and vet trials that are virtually unplayable due to lag and other random issues.

Cyrodiil is in one of the best states it has been in the last 5 years (PSEU) - lag greatly reduced, dc’s reduced, it’s actually fun to play at the moment (ball groups notwithstanding).

Same with trials.

I disagree. Lag is very real in 2025 and has never gone back to 2014 levels.

barney2525

I don't understand the question.

Is there only One person who handles both these things?

Do the people who work on improving combat have anything at all to do with the people who work on cosmetics?

tomofhyrule

barney2525 wrote: »

I don't understand the question.

Is there only One person who handles both these things?

Do the people who work on improving combat have anything at all to do with the people who work on cosmetics?

It’s a false dichotomy.

The OP is essentially saying “should ZOS spend its budget in PvP, or on ‘cosmetics’ (which they’re also lumping other casual game systems into, so they really are using cosmetics to mean “not PvP”)

While it is true there is at the highest levels a finite amount of budget, they do need to realize that the world of “PvP” versus “not PvP” also has very different numbers of players, so it makes the most business sense to spend more where they have more players.

It is also true that they are currently (like, right now, as soon as the servers come back up) testing a no-frills version of Cyrodiil to actively see what steps they can take to improve performance.

Now, I’ll admit PvP has been neglected. But they did do something recently (the BG changes may not have been popular, but it was something). They have also acknowledged Rush of Agony in a forum thread last month. The current tests essentially will make is so people can’t really be the godmode ball groups as they are now, so we’ll see if that works too.

But let’s face it: if they turn off 90% of the population by shutting off literally all funding except PvP, I don’t think thats going to give you the game you want. More likely that’ll just end the game completely.

Vylaera

You're posing a false question here. It's not like the art team could fix whatever it is you're complaining about. They were hired to make art because that's what they know how to do. The combat team was hired to design and balance combat because that's what they know how to do. If you brought all the artists into the combat room, they'd be wasting time doing nothing because that's not what they went to school to learn how to do; they went to school to do art and their job at ZOS is to make art.

All of these sorts of polls and questions and demands speak to a fundamental ignorance of how developing a project works, and other such people who are also ignorant of how development works are emboldened to complain more about a problem that doesn't even exist. It is sad that people who have never created a texture or a model or created a quest or a spell in Skyrim's Creation Kit can indignantly post about how ZOS doesn't care about the game

Vylaera

To answer your question, it's due to a multitude of reasons not limited to server replacement taking so long due to covid disrupting global supply chains, and the issues with performance having much more to do with 16 year old game engine code which was written by people who haven't worked for zenimax for 10+ years, trying to reverse engineer the game to improve that spaghetti code without breaking the rest of the game (which is why seemingly unrelated things get broken sometimes when combat or other systems are updated or changed) (and as a side note is probably why class change tokens weren't a thing and why we're getting *********** instead), and because labor laws exist so that the people working on the game aren't forced to sit in their office for 16 hours a day crunching over a particular bug, and now that microsoft is in charge, if ZOS has become anything like 343i/halo studios, MS hires temporary contract workers that get replaced as soon as they've gotten comfortable with working on the game, which then compounds all these problems to a much worse extent, though I don't know if this contracting problem is the case with zenimax as it is with other MS first party studios

edit: oopsie didn't realize that wasn't official info yet

CatoUnchained

Performance has not been that great in the new campaign during big fights. Stuck in combat bug is much better, but we still have severe lag and rubberbanding resulting in bar swap and using doors being a problem.

And I noticed severe lag spikes while just doing standard endeavors yesterday as well.