Does veteran leveling irk anyone else?

Spontaneous_Noms

This is probably going to dovetail into a bit of a rant, so I apologize in advance.

Let me preface this by saying that, on the whole, I genuinely like this game. Even after all the sensationalized coverage of it (from the people crying bloody murder over the dupe bugs to Angry Joe's review), I still come down in the pro-ESO crowd. I think the game tries to do some innovative things and, on the whole, does them reasonably well.

But I just can't shake the feeling that veteran leveling is exceptionally lazy. I get the core idea behind it: one person may only want to play one character, so instead of forcing them to level three different characters to experience all the quests or simply not do it, you allow them the opportunity to do it on one character. On the other hand, I really have to ask: who on earth thought it was a good idea to make it such a grind?

It probably took me about three days /played to finish everything up to and including Coldharbour. And now, about 616k of 912k required for VR3, I've doubled that time. Sure, you can chalk that up to me taking time out of questing to level crafting skills and I probably spent a good half day /played doing Cyrodiil, but I have precious little to show for it beyond a pair of skyshard achievements and maybe 7 or so skill points.

And now, as I look at how much content I've got to clear to reach the actual level cap and start to look into genuine endgame content, I'm frustrated. Not because the content is more difficult -- which it is, sometimes stupidly so -- but because there's so much of it. Not only do levels take extraordinarily long (an entire zone, or thereabouts), they take longer than they would have earlier thanks to the increased difficulty of individual mobs.

I realize that MMOs are all grinds in the endgame. I was a raid leader in Burning Crusade and played more of WoW than I'd ever care to admit in polite company: I'm plenty familiar with the grind. But there's grinding and then there's veteran leveling. This is the kind of nose-to-the-grindstone leveling that harkens back to farming Molten Core so you could get enough people with Waterlords rep to reliably clear the raid. It makes the old farming for Hearts of Darkness so you could actually have decent enough gear to go up against the Illidari Council look pretty standard. Basically, this game is expecting me to put in progression tier raiding grinds to... reach max level? Really?

Maybe I'm old and jaded in my middle 20's, and maybe I've turned into a casual without noticing it, but c'mon. I cannot be the only person who thinks this leveling system is bonkers. In the time it takes you to level from VR1 to VR10, you could level three new characters to VR1. Or you could, I don't know, make $2,000 working minimum wage jobs. After taxes. I can't believe I'm actually sitting here and saying an MMO is taking too much of my free time, but I genuinely can't justify the time this game expects me to put in just to reach max level.

I really do want to continue playing this game, and I want to be able to look back and say I was in on the ground floor with all the bugs and whatnot, but I just don't see a scenario where this game's grind doesn't kill it. Especially since the veteran content is exactly the same as what the players from other factions leveled through. It's not even unique quests.

Frail_Old_Man

I'd be fine with it if it'd take one(different) factions areas to get to level 60.
aka basically their 1-50 experience.
But as it is, 50-60 is a huge, altkilling timesink with increased difficulty.
The risk-reward factor is not even there for the 50-60 levels, the risk is always far, far greater than the reward.

LonePirate

I have heard people have been grouping with friends or guild mates and have been running sweeps of the skull bosses, Dark Anchors and dungeons to "quickly" level up their Veteran Ranks as that content offers the most XP and it lends itself very well to grouping. Some people have been getting 1-2M or more Veteran XP a night running those circuits.

Danneroth

What lonepirate said is true but you still get more xp from questing. Yes I agree that veteran leveling is a lot of work. The magic word being work. It gets to a point where I feel like I am done for the day with today's work. I do not think I have ever phrased it that way in a game before. I have played some really hardcore sandbox grind games and yet this feel more of a grind then those games which is really weird.

Kendaric

What really annoys me is that it somewhat hurts playing alts. I have alts in every faction and having to slog through all of their quests again just with increased difficulty gets old pretty fast.
Sure, you can and probably will take a few different decisions, but it's nothing you couldn't experience with a couple of alts. For me, there is little point in going through the vet levels at the moment.

Decimal

I agree with everything that is said here. I am on the pro-ESO side of the debate, but even I cannot stomach another 9 days /played to finish the 10 VR levels and try out Craiglorn.

Srugzal

deleted

Xnemesis

I am enjoying myself I went back and got my missing Skyshards/Lore books, did a thorough cleaning of my bank and bags, went back and cleared bugged quests, cleared all the skull and crossbones/anchors from old zones, and then went back to questing as normal. It was a nice chunk of skill points, exp, and achievements galore. Play because its a fun game and a great adventure. Once you arrive what more can you do but wait for Craiglorn or grind dungeons anyways? I would assume the quests in Craiglorn will get you much better experience than the other zones do so I'm just taking my time.

South_of_Heaven

It would make leveling on Vet much more interesting if there was one/all of these things:

- An extra way to customize/develop your character in veteran ranks since leveling is quite slow.
- An extra meaningful collectible at veteran ranks.
- A few random invasions from people of the other faction

Or something else that changed the experience even subtly.

Spontaneous_Noms

Xnemesis,

Craglorn, which you're apparently looking forward to, is VR11-12. If you want to experience that, you have to grind through probably close to 15 days /played. And then you have to find three other people to group with, because Craglorn is apparently group-oriented. And to actually get to the nearest thing this game has to raids, you have to clear VR12 and find 11 other people to group with.

Honestly? I'm not sure any game is worth putting that much time into just to get to the actual endgame content. Especially since two thirds of the time you're going to spend leveling is spent doing rehashed lowbie content, as if you're in a "heroic" version of a zone. You could probably get the Loremaster achievement in WoW in less time than it would take to actually level to VR10. And I strongly suspect, based on the fact that VR2 requires about twice as much experience as VR1, that leveling to VR12 is going to be an ordeal.

And like Sruzgal says, this kills the prospect of playing an alt. That means I'm never going to experience three of the four classes in any significant way, seeing as how there's zero incentive to redo these same zones at lower levels once I've already experienced the content. I was planning to level one character for every faction, but now I'm not even sure I can finish leveling one character to VR10. Three at max level may as well be a pipe dream.

I think it's also important to remember that the number of people who will actually do that are probably a minority of the community. ESO's probably not going to have a very large population of max level players simply because of the huge amounts of time required.

codyyoungnub18_ESO

Omg please don't ruin this Game, WoW and all the others are that way ->

Ever since mmos took out exp loss on death it has been a downward spiral. There are plenty of games that give you super fast leveling go play them stop trying to ruin something somewhat different.

There is already plenty of V10's out there holy crap not even out a month go look into wildstar please, anything but stop trying to WoWify everything. ( yes wanting max level in just a couple weeks is 100% wow mentality don't kid yourself you are what you are)

Xnemesis

Spontaneous_Noms wrote: »

Xnemesis,

Craglorn, which you're apparently looking forward to, is VR11-12. If you want to experience that, you have to grind through probably close to 15 days /played. And then you have to find three other people to group with, because Craglorn is apparently group-oriented. And to actually get to the nearest thing this game has to raids, you have to clear VR12 and find 11 other people to group with.

Honestly? I'm not sure any game is worth putting that much time into just to get to the actual endgame content. Especially since two thirds of the time you're going to spend leveling is spent doing rehashed lowbie content, as if you're in a "heroic" version of a zone. You could probably get the Loremaster achievement in WoW in less time than it would take to actually level to VR10. And I strongly suspect, based on the fact that VR2 requires about twice as much experience as VR1, that leveling to VR12 is going to be an ordeal.

And like Sruzgal says, this kills the prospect of playing an alt. That means I'm never going to experience three of the four classes in any significant way, seeing as how there's zero incentive to redo these same zones at lower levels once I've already experienced the content. I was planning to level one character for every faction, but now I'm not even sure I can finish leveling one character to VR10. Three at max level may as well be a pipe dream.

I think it's also important to remember that the number of people who will actually do that are probably a minority of the community. ESO's probably not going to have a very large population of max level players simply because of the huge amounts of time required.

Wrong trials are aimed at VR10 -12 you can walk into craiglorn at VR1 and quest throughout the zone as a group find skyshards, worldbosses, anchors, and pretty much anything else you would do in a normal zone. You can probably even take on some of the starting delves if you have a decent group. This was stated in an AMA.


Did you add more Veteran Ranks? There was a part in the video where the character was Veteran Rank 12! – Austin Parker

Craglorn and the Trials will range from Veteran Rank 11 to Veteran Rank 12, but you will be able to visit at Veteran Rank 1 or above


Read more on TESO Elite: http://www.tesoelite.com/2014/04/ama-craglorn/#ixzz2zpKtv1de

Minack

It's garbage. Expect more complaints as the average player gets to VR 3.

Fruity_Ninja

I was planning to level and complete 3 individual characters- one in each faction, so that I can experience the 3 quest lines. I also look forward to 3 different races and the RP that can be associated with that. This was always my plan from the start..

So to get my first/main/favourite character to VR10- that would involve me just repeating everything I've done on the other 2 characters? It seems pointless...unless there is a massive reward at the end, or it opens up something that is worth the time investment?

Kendaric

Fruity_Ninja wrote: »

I was planning to level and complete 3 individual characters- one in each faction, so that I can experience the 3 quest lines. I also look forward to 3 different races and the RP that can be associated with that. This was always my plan from the start..

So to get my first/main/favourite character to VR10- that would involve me just repeating everything I've done on the other 2 characters? It seems pointless...unless there is a massive reward at the end, or it opens up something that is worth the time investment?

Yes, you have to repeat every quest you've done on your alts (same situation for me). This makes it indeed rather pointless, especially as the veteran ranks are also extremely grindy and you can't really afford to skip quests, even if they don't fit with the character's RP.

JexTex

The Veteran ranks were not thought out very well...and are very anooying this needs to be addressed asap...I have sfriends already leaving the game because of the time involved just to hit v10...so they get can get rdy for endgame or pvp....veteran ranks should ened at 1 or 5 10 is to high and should have been held off for later expansions simple....

im really about to drop this game due to having to pve all the way to v10...the 1-50 was enough for me....yet im not even competitive in pvp due to folks alrdy being v10 and most exploiting to get their....

fix the game...this is a monthly sub based game where we are supposed to choose playstyle not be forced to quests those boring boring quests....some of us actually have a life and find things like questing very boring and unfun....it was cool when I was 10

Arnathis

Completely agree with the OP. What am I even getting for this headache zenimax has inflicted me with?

This game is forcing me to level in the other factions zones (which is laughable) in order to reach cap? Really? Regardless of the time it takes this design is lazy, I chose my faction for a reason, how can they in good conscience force me to go level through their zones? It amounts to nothing more than a cheesy time sink aimed at buying themselves time to release something meaningful at endgame ie; Craglorn.

My guess is that they knew they'd have nothing to offer players @ 50 upon release so they hastily threw in vet levels and sent us into already existing content with upgraded mobs because it was easier than designing a whole other system with substance (ie; lvl 50 only dungeons, world bosses, group quests that reward a unique currency to buy gear with etc.)

Look at how it's introduced. "Cadwell has given me an chance to see how events might have played out if I'd washed up on the shores of a different alliance after escaping Coldharbour." It was so rushed the grammar/spelling in the quest text wasn't even checked! And how about that explanation...Cadwell can magically mask you so the other alliances can't see who you really are! I mean how arbitrarily was that put together?

Believe me, I want this game to succeed, and the other core aspects of it I am enjoying, but these vet levels WILL kill it if the design stays intact. They aren't fun, the quests aren't fun, can I get a cut scene? more than 5 gold off a mini-boss? A piece of gear worth using? A mount? A title? A pet? A costume? Something? Anything? They make the prospect of rolling an alt too daunting to even think about especially since even rolling one on another faction won't get me new content to play through.

Xaei

I'm fine with veteran ranks as a concept itself, butit should be optional.

What I mean by that is that the normal sense of progression should stop at 50. There shouldn't be any v5 gear and everything, including raids etc should be open to you at 50.

Veteran ranks should be a different sense of progression, completely not nessecary but it would give you benefits, something there just for people who want more progression.

What that system would be I don't know, but it could be something like The Secret World's augment system, which basically lets you add small benefits unto your skills, and is designed to basically take years to max out so that you never run out of things to do.

GeeYouWhy

It's an excuse to keep the average (aka not hardcore) players paying a subscription fee as it will take them 4 to 6 months to actually hit max level and by then the max level will have been raised. They have basically solved the problem of players chewing through content faster than the devs can produce it by making it tediously slow and long.

Brodycanuck

Yes, I feel like the veteran ranks are not needed. I actually stopping playing my main because I felt relief when I got to lvl 50, only to realize if I wanted to lvl at a decent pace to V10 that I had to do even MORE questing...

Xaei

Brodycanuck wrote: »

Yes, I feel like the veteran ranks are not needed. I actually stopping playing my main because I felt relief when I got to lvl 50, only to realize if I wanted to lvl at a decent pace to V10 that I had to do even MORE questing...

But I think they are nice to have, something to allow you to keep progressing. But as I have said, they should not be a part of main progress in the game with their own tiers of gear and content like trials locked behind them, then its a grind.

Asava

I wouldn't mind the senseless quest grind if I could break it up with some dungeon crawls and get some sweet gear to wear. Oh thats right, you have to be VR3 to get more that one dungeon. Then you have to wait till VR5 to wear any items you got from BC, which is the only dungeon that you can complete sub VR5. So 10 dungeons and you're limited to 1 until you hit VR4/5.

Kazyn_Shadowpaw

It is not even a month into the game for ****s sake. A raid leader in "burning crusade?" Wow was sickeningly casual compared to the "good old days" of MMOs like the original everquest. Yet not even a month in someones reached near/or almost reached endgame and they are whining about how long it takes. It took MONTHS if not a YEAR to advance to max level in everquest. And even then, plenty still played very casually because it wasnt just the treadmill-to-the-end. I swear modern day mmos like Warcraft have totally erased the enjoyment factors of MMOs.

I for one am happy with what they did in ESO. If anything, they didnt go far enough.

Beryl

As a starter: I love questing. I wanted to see the other alliances and I love to explore the world.

With all that in mind, I would much prefer leveling 3 characters (different race, different background story) following unique quests rather than bore myself to death by doing completely different story lines on the same toon. Going through Cadwell's Silver and Gold feels like a grind and nothing else, there is no more Main story with the Prophet and no Mage/Fighters guilds. I feel like an alien there and the scaled mobs do not really make questing more interesting.

When I leveled from 1 to 50 I had a constant progress, I was earning more skills and the bosses felt increasingly more complex. When at vr1 I come to another faction's area I feel that the mobs and bosses are basic, silly, they just hit harder and make fights longer. There are no new tactical skills used by mobs, no qualitative improvement in their abilities. And I can do any quest in any veteran zone with the same success because the difference in level does not matter anymore. Gear upgrade is too small. I leveled from vr2 to vr6 with vr2 crafted light armour: completed Cadwell's Silver and almost all achievements in those 5 zones, did the first zone in my last alliance and traveled through all further zones killing random mobs of higher ranks. I never felt any need to upgrade my gear, it is boring. I can't even imaging bringing another character through all that, and I would never love an alt who skips achievements and just gains ranks by powerlevelling.

My verdict: Veteran ranks feel like a grind. There is no real progress to the character itself, only a possibility to wear some fancy gear at vr10. Further updates with increasing number of ranks will only make this grind less and less appealing for new players.

Update: After reading more posts above I want to stress that I am fine with the time it takes to get to vr10. I would prefer it too be much slower. What I am not fine with is how boring the veteran ranks feel compared to the initial 50 levels.

SexyVette07

Im still VR1 after almost a week, and I love it. Doing all the quests and enjoying the content will actually make it feel like I experienced the game and earned VR10 eventually. Honestly, I wish it took longer. The journey should feel epic...

I did go into a public dungeon to grind for a few hours last night, and I have to say, I was pretty pissed off about getting veteran XP for farming trash. In fact, I got more xp in a few hours farming than I had in the previous 4 days of doing quests. It really pissed me off! This totally defeats the purpose of forcing you to do the content to move up to the VR6 area.

IMO, vet xp for solo dungeon trash is *** and should be removed, but thats just my opinion. It undermines the whole veteran questing system. 4 man Veteran dungeons? Sure. But not grinding some BS public dungeon...

knaveofengland

game needs to be hard if players leave after the first month then I wave goodbye to them they wont be missed just mail me your stuff ,
all mmos have to be like this reason most people don't want to make a team and solo for thier own needs, I would say it needs the game setting changed from easy to medium to hard.
if the game is easy we finish game get bored and move on so that's bad like gw2 I completed game really taking me time . so got bored with gw1 that wasn't the case played for years.
so I would say give the game time its new , rome wasn't made in a day

CoUsT

Hmm... Now, Imagine that veteran ranks max level isn't 10 but it's 100. Now you have 50 levels per each alliance. Faster leveling, yay! Happy?

Btw they doubled XP from mobs in patch 1.1. Grind should be viable.

Also, the game shouldn't be fast. This isn't WoW, stop rushing to the end game and enjoy the game.

TotterTates

CoUsT wrote: »

Btw they doubled XP from mobs in patch 1.1. Grind should be viable.

Lol yay 84 VP per mob... >.>

Asava

Thank the maker!! That 84 VP will save me days when I need 1,916,000 VP for VR4!!!

Spontaneous_Noms

Responses from people like Kazyn are why it's so hard to have a civil discussion on message boards. Contrast that to the post by SexyVette07, which disagrees but presents reasons for doing so and avoids resorting to petty attacks. The former is someone who will invariably be dismissed out of hand (unless he gets the flame war he's obviously baiting for) and the latter is someone whose opinion will be respected, even if it isn't one I share.

@CoUsT:
My grievance is not simply that leveling is slow. I'm not even sure we can call it leveling; we're no longer collecting attributes, after all. But that's not the point -- the problem is that it's identical content to what the other factions would experience, just without guild quests and with more difficult mobs.

You compared it to WoW, so let's look at how WoW handles it. It's entirely possible to level to 58 on just one continent (and, in so doing, you probably won't even complete every zone). And since the Horde and Alliance experiences on those continents are completely different, you have four separate leveling experiences from 1 to 58. You don't finish the Forsaken quest line and then suddenly find yourself ported to Teldrassil so you can do the Night Elf quest line with slightly harder mobs. The constituent races of the factions involved don't even blend together until you hit 58 and go to Outland and begin doing the expansion content.

And in that content you're playing out a distinct plot for each faction. You may have the same nominal objective (kill Illidan, break the Wrathgate, poke Deathwing in the eye), but you're going to go about it in a rather different manner. We don't even see the involved factions start to share quest hubs in any significant way until Cataclysm (Deepholm and Mount Hyjal, if memory serves). And in the other three zones, you're typically going to experience very different plots. In fact, aside from overlaps from faction-neutral locations (primarily the Cartel-affiliated hubs), you almost always get a unique plot. Although, to be fair, those end-of-expansion grindfests (Quel'danas, Argent Crusade, Molten Front) tend to be identical.

Yeah, WoW has some pretty lazy quest design. There are about seven billion "go kill x of y guys of this type" quests, there's no real voice acting except in some pretty rare cases, the game has systematically ravaged its own lore (space goats!), and they really stopped trying to make the experience of leveling one of the Forsaken different from leveling an Orc.

But they never make you repeat content from the other faction wholesale.

That, more than anything else, is the problem. Yeah, it sucks that the grind to VR10 is obnoxiously long, but it sucks more than I'm grinding through content that lowbies of other factions already did. Why on earth is the savior of Nirn reduced to fetch quests on behalf of preening nobility of other factions? And why is some of that content liable to result in bizarre time paradoxes, like in the case of High Kinlady Estre? We don't even get a good justification for doing it. Cadwell's just like, "hey, this'll be cool" and then that's that. At no point do we get a reasonable explanation as to how he was able to get such utterly profound powers (is he Mephala or something?), nor do we get a compelling reason to do it beyond, "hey, this'll be cool."

Veteran level content is basically like playing the entire game over again (and then again) on heroic difficulty before you can actually be max rank. Let's not kid ourselves and pretend that this constitutes meaningful content. If that's fine by you, then I don't begrudge you the opportunity to enjoy those quests at higher difficulty than you would otherwise. But can we please stop pretending that this is somehow better than what other MMOs have done? Playing the game through three times to reach max level is really... bizarre.

l-wilson-1986b16_ESO

SexyVette07 wrote: »

Im still VR1 after almost a week, and I love it. Doing all the quests and enjoying the content will actually make it feel like I experienced the game and earned VR10 eventually. Honestly, I wish it took longer. The journey should feel epic...

I did go into a public dungeon to grind for a few hours last night, and I have to say, I was pretty pissed off about getting veteran XP for farming trash. In fact, I got more xp in a few hours farming than I had in the previous 4 days of doing quests. It really pissed me off! This totally defeats the purpose of forcing you to do the content to move up to the VR6 area.

IMO, vet xp for solo dungeon trash is *** and should be removed, but thats just my opinion. It undermines the whole veteran questing system. 4 man Veteran dungeons? Sure. But not grinding some BS public dungeon...

Sorry but I have to disagree, because players should never be forced to do anything. If a player wishes to grind to VR10 then they should be quite capable of doing so. I can imagine if a collective group of people are grinding in a public dungeon that it would be faster (if not eye poppingly boring) than questing, however soloing trash content in a vr5 dungeon only averages out at about 150k exp per hour vs 250k+ questing and killing according to my tests when completely soloing. You do get 2% per completion of a public dungeon which may skew the statistics but farming alone is unlikely to be faster than questing, particularly as you progress in veteran levels as the mobs scale proportionately faster than the player making them harder to defeat at each rank. And I assure you that some of the higher VR story quests are scaled so insanely you'll feel like a super hero for completing them.