Opinion: Glitches, gameplay, and ragequits, oh my!

Phazzle

read with images @ ESO Traveler

Yo! I see a lot of unrest on the ESOforums, but don’t worry your pretty little skullcaps! It’s gonna be ok! Here are a few things that you can rest easy about:

Glitches

“I’m payin’ $15 a month and they can’t even release a game that doesn’t glitch up every fifteen minutes.”

Dude, I get it. Yesterday I was in the middle of the Ravenscroft quest line fighting a gargoyle, and just when I was about to kill him I got that glitch that makes everything on the screen untargetable. Arrgh! It sucks, and boy is it frustrating, but it is not something to quit the game over.

As a veteran MMOer I can tell you that glitches are just the nature of the beast, especially after release. They will get better. Early on, WoW was full of glitches. One glitch cropped up when a raid boss gave players a disease that persisted outside of the raid and everyone was dropping dead in town. They fixed it, and WoW is still around. Give them a bit to work the kinks out, and accept the fact that the game will never be perfect.


Antisocial players and grouping problems

“Grouping sucks. This is a single player game that is tryin’ to be an MMO!”

Grouping is fine. I have had no technical problem grouping with people. The problem is that most people don’t seem to want to group. The game is very satisfying single-player so that is what most players do. That said, if you can’t find groups, then you need to go out and make them. The megaserver gives you access to players everywhere so even if only 1% of players want to do something it is still a significant portion of the community.

This means being a leader and putting together a serious guild. The game needs more leaders and less followers. To paraphrase Gandhi, “Be the change that you want to see in Tamriel.”


Pay to play

“Monthly fees are lame. They’re just trying to get money out of you.”

Yeah, Bethesda is in it for the money. They didn’t just make this game for you out of the kindness of their hearts! Pay to play is the best financial model for an MMO. A consistent flow of cash means that they can hire enough talented people to continue to release content and fix bugs.

Free to play games are not really free anyway. They have hidden costs. Take Dungeons and Dragons Online, for instance. It is free to play, as long as you only want to experience 10% of the content and don’t mind using real cash to buy hirelings and potions!

50 cents a day is a small price to pay for a good game. Think of it this way. If you could pay 50 cents to go to an arcade and play all day, would you do it?


Still feel like ragequitting? Do it in style.

Maybe this game isn’t for you. There’s no shame in walking away if you are not satisfied. If you do ragequit, make a statement. Take the time to sit down and write a real, handwritten, letter to Bethesda. Let them know, unequivocally that you are not satisfied with the game. That will really get their attention. If you are gonna QQ, you might as well QQ an ocean and not a pond.
See you in Tamriel…maybe.

nicholaspingasb16_ESO

for 15 dollars a month, every 1-2 months there should be a Dragonborn/Shivering Isles size update, with the same level of quality and the same amount of content. After all, Dragonborn is only $20 on steam right now.

But there won't be.

Pay to play has ABYSMAL value for your dollar. Something like craglorn was being worked on for a couple of months before the game launched, and that won't be anywhere near the quality that DLC like Dragonborn was. So basically, we're looking at 1 major zone that is worse than a normal Elder Scrolls DLC, every 3-4 months.

For the $60 I will pay during those four months, I should be getting another game the size of Skyrim or Oblivion. I realize that is an unreasonable expectation, but if they want to take money from me, than I had damn well better be getting the equivalent of what I could buy with that money somewhere else.

If the sub fee was $8, I could understand a Craglorn-size DLC every 3-4 months. But at $15, it is impossible for them to keep up with what they SHOULD be releasing if they want people to get value for their money.

I recognize that there are some costs for server upkeep, and that there is also inherent value in the endgame and social aspects of any MMO. However, those additional features don't at all give you enough to justify a $15 sub fee. Especially when you consider that the single player TES games are better mechanically in most ways, because they don't have to worry about an economy or server lag.

Phazzle

You're right. That is a lot to expect. Their major competitor WoW does not release patches nearly that often.

skyprowerb14_ESO

Except ESO is actually far better than either Skyrim or Oblivion in terms of its mechanics. The combat's much more interesting and requires some actual thought as to what skills or actions you want to take, there's a lot more skills to toy with and less overlap between them (overlap being the major problem with skills in Morrowind), so on and so forth. Online is ironically the most enjoyable game in the series since Morrowind to me, and I have little doubt that it's because it was handled by a different team of people than the main games.

Not to mention that, as the devs have stated, once you unlock all the veteran content, you have an enormous amount of stuff to explore, see and do in ESO. And since it's not tied down to just one province, there's more variety in area design, which is important to keep player interest. I started a new file in Skyrim and played it daily between the last beta test and the early access, and for my guess, I'd say that the entirety of Glenumbra is about the size of a hold or two, and has far more content to boot. Then when you consider that Glenumbra is only one zone out of the five that make up one alliance out of three... you see where I'm going with this. Not to mention the fact that since so many quests have choices that permanently affect their outcome, there's tons of replayability there.

I get incredibly confused whenever people say that Online is generally inferior compared to the single-player Elder Scrolls games, because from a game design standpoint that's simply not the case. I'm not saying that Online is the pinnacle of TES and that Skyrim was a bad game, not at all - I like Skyrim a lot. But I'm not blind to the problems it has; it was painfully shallow in a lot of major ways. The reason I was so impressed with Online during the last beta test was because of how much of an improvement it was in comparison.

I mean, sure, there's certain ways that the game is less "free" or open than other TES games. You can't go into town and frenzy every NPC in sight to create a localized riot, like you could in Oblivion, but that's obviously because the game is an MMO. Similarly, you can't go to any zone in your alliance right from the get-go (without getting slaughtered by enemies, I mean), but that's also better for the game, because it provides a much more meaningful sense of progression. I've never liked the way Oblivion and Skyrim try to use scale-to-player-level systems, since there's never any sense of improving or growing stronger. Getting to Veteran Rank 1, then going back to Glenumbra and helping some new players out with a Dark Anchor was incredibly satisfying, and I'd never be able to get that feeling in Skyrim because everything scales to your level.

EDIT: And, er, this was directed at Nick, not you, Phazzle.

nicholaspingasb16_ESO

skyprowerb14_ESO wrote: »

Except ESO is actually far better than either Skyrim or Oblivion in terms of its mechanics. The combat's much more interesting and requires some actual thought as to what skills or actions you want to take, there's a lot more skills to toy with and less overlap between them (overlap being the major problem with skills in Morrowind), so on and so forth. Online is ironically the most enjoyable game in the series since Morrowind to me, and I have little doubt that it's because it was handled by a different team of people than the main games.

Not to mention that, as the devs have stated, once you unlock all the veteran content, you have an enormous amount of stuff to explore, see and do in ESO. And since it's not tied down to just one province, there's more variety in area design, which is important to keep player interest. I started a new file in Skyrim and played it daily between the last beta test and the early access, and for my guess, I'd say that the entirety of Glenumbra is about the size of a hold or two, and has far more content to boot. Then when you consider that Glenumbra is only one zone out of the five that make up one alliance out of three... you see where I'm going with this. Not to mention the fact that since so many quests have choices that permanently affect their outcome, there's tons of replayability there.

I get incredibly confused whenever people say that Online is generally inferior compared to the single-player Elder Scrolls games, because from a game design standpoint that's simply not the case. I'm not saying that Online is the pinnacle of TES and that Skyrim was a bad game, not at all - I like Skyrim a lot. But I'm not blind to the problems it has; it was painfully shallow in a lot of major ways. The reason I was so impressed with Online during the last beta test was because of how much of an improvement it was in comparison.

I mean, sure, there's certain ways that the game is less "free" or open than other TES games. You can't go into town and frenzy every NPC in sight to create a localized riot, like you could in Oblivion, but that's obviously because the game is an MMO. Similarly, you can't go to any zone in your alliance right from the get-go (without getting slaughtered by enemies, I mean), but that's also better for the game, because it provides a much more meaningful sense of progression. I've never liked the way Oblivion and Skyrim try to use scale-to-player-level systems, since there's never any sense of improving or growing stronger. Getting to Veteran Rank 1, then going back to Glenumbra and helping some new players out with a Dark Anchor was incredibly satisfying, and I'd never be able to get that feeling in Skyrim because everything scales to your level.

EDIT: And, er, this was directed at Nick, not you, Phazzle.

The sense of progression in skyrim came from the new spells and shouts you learned, the perks you got (to a lesser extent) and most importantly the gear you crafted/found. Every time I got a new type of armor (for example, going from leather to elven) I felt the same sense of accomplishment that I get from leveling in another game. The shouts took effort to get, requiring a long delve into a dungeon to obtain, and a dragon soul to unlock. Each time I did any of the aforementioned things, I was able to do crazy new stuff like summoning daedra, riding dragons, sending people flying from the walls of a castle, or just looking more badass in a full suit of ebony. All of it made me feel like I was getting more and more awesome as the game went on.

As for the combat, ESO does have more complex combat. however, it feels very floaty, and the fact that enemies broadcast every attack they make results in it feeling sluggish. I never once had a moment where I was surprised in ESO's combat. No enemy ever pulled out a massive spell that sent me flying 10 meters backwards. I was never run through by a lowly bandit because I wasn't paying attention to my health bar. ESO failed to captivate me in this way.