Official Discussion Thread for "Ask Us Anything: Variety Pack 14"

ZOS_GinaBruno

This is the official discussion thread for the blog article Ask Us Anything: Variety Pack 14. We hope you enjoyed this AuA, and be sure to let us know if you have questions you'd like answered!

xramirez535b14_ESO

I love the answer to the guild stores question! In GW2 it was a cool feature at first that you can easily obtain anything you wanted from the Trading Post however It made some things pretty trivial to obtain. Why put in the hard work that could possibly be fun if you can buy it at the auction house? Sure its ultimately up to the player to decide to take the easy route but for some reason it negatively impacted my outlook on the game as a whole.

Enkshar

Only that instead of having rate items highly available in auction houses you have them on Zone chat, so in the end, its just the same. U only get what u really need by asking on zone chat- Guild store are usually filled with useless stuff and u have to spend a great amount of time to find something that may be worth it due to the lack of searching tools.

Hope they do a really good rework of them, at least with regards searching tools and filters, and please please please add a input text filter!!!!

Mkrowten

"Most maintenance periods will last for no more than a few hours."

I guess except for today that's been over 5 hours.

ninjajucerb14_ESO

I'd like to know about the achievements section of the game. A lot of the achievements are a big mystery to the majority of players, for example, under crafting, the achievements list a "crafting bag" collection scheme.

Now, Being nearly v10, and having been raising every crafting skill line (minus cloth) to 50, in addition to have also gotten the easy provisioning and alchemy, I have never seen a crafting bag. Its not the hirelings that give them afaik, so where exactly does this come from?

I only ask as crafting has always been a huge puller for gamers in MMO's and the Elder Scroll Series.

Would also like to know if Spellcrafting will be added at some point as making your own spells was quite fun.

don.sony2013pub19_ESO

Could we discuss the possibility of implementing some sort of Battleground area/system where people in similar level ranges can battle over territory or a keep?

Right now even though you can go to Cyrodill at level 10 it is pointless and quite disappointing.

TheBull

Skill lines, skill line, skill lines, fix them.

WhimsyDragon

Guild trading worked well for me initially, though now that the first month has passed, there are a number of inactive guild members and sales have been very slow. I've started vendoring all my loot, because I've been stuck at my quota for store listings. Hoping for more solutions in the future--though I do agree that perhaps not a full-fledged AH across the entire server.

TheBull

Are there any thoughts of adding voice and more advanced grouping systems to Cyrodill?

kirnmalidus

ninjajucerb14_ESO wrote: »

Would also like to know if Spellcrafting will be added at some point as making your own spells was quite fun.

They have announced that spellcrafting is coming in the not-too-distant future.

Griffus

When are you all going to do some more massive outreach against botters?
90% of the zone chat is now Bots spamming websites. There are clear large bands of bots walking the maps of Tamriel which could not be misconstrued for anything other than farming bots, refining bots, etc. I think anyone who advertises a gold farming website should instantly be banned. with a 0 tolerance system similar to other MMO's.

BBillage

xramirez535b14_ESO wrote: »

I love the answer to the guild stores question! In GW2 it was a cool feature at first that you can easily obtain anything you wanted from the Trading Post however It made some things pretty trivial to obtain. Why put in the hard work that could possibly be fun if you can buy it at the auction house? Sure its ultimately up to the player to decide to take the easy route but for some reason it negatively impacted my outlook on the game as a whole.

sure, until every piece of in house furniture that's' searched is empty already or just has motif crafting, ( bone, copper), items that can be obtained from a NPC merchant, oh lets not forget the everywhere anywhere lock picks that are found everywhere anywhere.

I used to be excited when I was in a new map and or town and seen all the houses with those wonderful house furniture pieces in them, a potential treasure trove of possibilities.

Now I just keep my head down and hope the quest reward for completion will be worth it and move on, not even going into none questing houses, because of repeated attempts to keep a positive outlook on that maybe this desk will have something wonderful, I know it will be just be a LOCK PICK

Don't get me wrong I LOVE THIS GAME as a whole, just having my dreams crushed By a Gold Seller Siege is heartbreaking, but I'll live.

Reading back over this. It sounds just like something a gold seller would say... Bah I got my two cents in Happy Looting !!!

LTC_Eddy

So, how do I keep my "group" buddy from disappearing and only having a little chevron to follow/ I can usually fix with a log in log out but that sucks in group melee. By the time we log back in, the buddy is dead.

Ojustaboo

Mkrowten wrote: »

"Most maintenance periods will last for no more than a few hours."

I guess except for today that's been over 5 hours.

Someone needs to look up the definition of "most" in a dictionary

Ojustaboo

don.sony2013pub19_ESO wrote: »

Could we discuss the possibility of implementing some sort of Battleground area/system where people in similar level ranges can battle over territory or a keep?

Right now even though you can go to Cyrodill at level 10 it is pointless and quite disappointing.

I wonder if this is campaign related.

I'm on the EU server in the Bloodthorn campaign and PvP every week for at least one night, sometimes 2 or 3.

I have done since level 10, and usually there's just 2 or 3 other guild mates with me and we always have a great time. Look at the map, see what's under attack and go pay a visit.

I'm only level 33 now and spent over 4 hrs in there last night and had the most fun I've had in ages.

I personally don't care if they have battle arenas as long as they are kept far away from Cyrodiil, I hate battle arenas, if people suddenly stop playing in the current way and go to arenas instead, that would be the end of my ESO PvP days.

Xnemesis

Well it would be cool to see a nice light, medium, and heavy variant for glass, stalhrim, and amber armor and weapon types. They could make the stalhrim armor ancient Skaal motif, the glass could be Buoyant Armigers motif, and amber could be Dumag gro-Bonk's Motiff. Just a thought but lore wise I believe that all fits together its just a matter of making the time lines fit together to not destroy any lore. I know Dumag gro-bonk is the only one who could create amber armor but to make it fit in our timeline they could make it so its learned from an ancestor of his. Do you all plan on adding these later down the road?

Skelfish

I thought this AMA was pretty informative. I didn't know there were only 2 designated taunts in the whole game. That makes he complaints people have about taunts/agro make more sense to me, and seem a little less whiny when I read stuff on the forums.

I think it's pretty cool that group dungeons will be getting instanced loot in chests. Seems like there's a split between people who go back though dungeons to find all the chests their group missed to blaze through the dungeon, or there's the group that takes it slower to find the chests/bookshelves/stuff and has to decide between them who gets to open the next chest.

Will the instanced loot effect people who do dungeons who disqualify themselves for the LFG Tool by being too high level? Will these people not get loot, or will it be like normal chests and have leveled loot for the area it's in?
I don't really like to run dungeons, so I've been waiting until I'm in the next area, or 2 areas ahead before running the dungeons I missed. How will this affect me?

More about these bot trains and teleporting bots...I am under the impression that they use some specific API exploits to teleport to nodes and roam around like they do (even in high level areas while wearing prison cloths). If this is true, shouldn't Zenimax be looking at their API to patch these exploits along with uber-bans and bot killing?

Audigy

I liked the explanation of the taunts, especially the part "you don't have to tank all".
I hope many players will see that and realize that we tanks are not holding hands all the time in a dungeon

While we should send our questions to the email posted, I still post mine here.

"ESO is currently doing all the rendering (players, objects...) on one single core / thread of our CPUs. This is a huge bottleneck, especially for weaker CPU´s like of AMD. Do the Dev´s have any plans to improve this, either by supporting a low level API like Mantle or / and enabling the rendering process across all available cores?"

Thank you!

m12d12_ESO

Some of the jargon on ESO loose me. What does this mean?? "Right now, bots are farming public dungeon bosses and ninja porting to gathering nodes."

Rosamond

What's your purpose in making guild stores for guild members only? Why not make them for everyone? – sliyerking

Our goal is to make the economy more player-based, but not to have a system that allows you to find anything at any time because there are so many players involved on a megaserver. With extremely large communities, low-percentage drops can become highly available in auction houses. It ends up harming the “gear chase” portion of the game.

---

After reading this, I am on the fast track out of this game. As a crafter, I want the option to sell my wares to the public and not to my guildees. Now I learn that ESO's plan is to deliberately limit my ability to sell crafted items. I have also learned from this that if you don't want to join a guild, if that is your play style, too bad. You aren't allowed to sell things unless you join a guild. So much for your promise to allow people to play the game as they choose.

This game is boring, boring, boring. I spent 80% of my time in front of the banker because there isn't any reasonable amount of storage if you like to craft items. Perhaps your plan there is to make me throw away items I can use to craft with so I get it down to the allowed 100 slots. What type of *** is that?

Speaking of which, I see a lot of complaining about the spamming in the chat channel. Much more offensive is the chat that gets through. A lot of it is lewd, disgusting and vulgar. Personally I prefer the gold spammers to the kinds of things players type in the chat channel.

I have stayed with the game hoping it would improve, but obviously it is not going to.

Tawn

So tired of the Jute Exploiters.
So tired of not having an AH so that I can get things like Dwarven Oil.

Will I bother to sub after my free time runs out in 2 days? That's the top question I am asking now.

VinnOmniusVeritas

m12d12_ESO wrote: »

Some of the jargon on ESO loose me. What does this mean?? "Right now, bots are farming public dungeon bosses and ninja porting to gathering nodes."

"Bots" is a shorter term for "robots" and refers to in-game characters who are not controlled by a single player but instead by programs/scripts written by exploiters. They are programmed to kill bosses as soon as the boss spawns (in a dungeon you can see them huddled around a spawn point) or programmed to teleport from resource node to resource node (ore/wood/plants) without having to walk/ride between them as normal characters would have to.

VinnOmniusVeritas

Skelfish wrote: »

... I didn't know there were only 2 designated taunts in the whole game. That makes he complaints people have about taunts/agro make more sense to me, and seem a little less whiny when I read stuff on the forums.

Actually I still find them (the posts and their authors) to be just as whiny because they are trying to use ESO taunts, which aren't meant to gather ALL the bad guys around the tank in a nice convenient ring, as if they were taunts from that "other" MMO. Using new techniques based on new designs seems to elude these meatshields.

Zaddik90289b16_ESO

Right now, bots are farming public dungeon bosses and ninja porting to gathering nodes. Where are you on this issue? – Alphashado

We currently find bots that are farming and remove them from the game as quickly as possible. We’re always looking at other methods to discourage and reduce the amount of botting. However, the issue is tricky because we don’t want to hurt normal players by changing the gameplay or implementing draconian measures. So the methods we use have to be well-considered and involve many people.


Or they just dont ban bots because they pay 13 € a month too :disagree:

Tidelurker

Rosamond wrote: »

As a crafter, I want the option to sell my wares to the public and not to my guildees. Now I learn that ESO's plan is to deliberately limit my ability to sell crafted items. I have also learned from this that if you don't want to join a guild, if that is your play style, too bad. You aren't allowed to sell things unless you join a guild. So much for your promise to allow people to play the game as they choose.

You do still have the option to sell your items to the public through the zone chat. That isn't the same sort of convenience that an auction house is with search tools and sales going on while you're offline, sure, but the trade-off is that your effort put into crafting and research actually matters.

There's going to be others on your megaserver who have the same ore more motifs/traits/recipes/glyphs/potions than you. However, to those in your guild, on your friends list, or just around you in the gaming world... you're not simply a cheap and convenient shortcut to what they need, but perhaps the only player there to provide it.

It sounds like you're not having a good experience with ESO, and on the note of zone chat I can agree (though I think most MMOs suffer this in their most outspoken players). Perhaps another game would be more enjoyable for your tastes, and there's nothing wrong with that if so. In the chance you do decide to stay (or just in case someone with similar thoughts read this), I suggest you:

• think of items in high demand to sell in zone chat (helmets and shoulders with traits seem quite valuable for crafters at a lower level)
• either turn zone chat off, vigilantly watch for people who ask for help on that channel, or even take your own initiative to contribute thoughtful conversation
• save up for a horse and feed it for increased bag space
• create an alternate character or two to split up your professions and items

Gator_ESO

What's your purpose in making guild stores for guild members only? Why not make them for everyone? – sliyerking

Our goal is to make the economy more player-based, but not to have a system that allows you to find anything at any time because there are so many players involved on a megaserver. With extremely large communities, low-percentage drops can become highly available in auction houses. It ends up harming the “gear chase” portion of the game.

I don't buy this at all.

If you don't want 'low-percentage drops' to overwhelm the megaserver-wide store - then make them B.O.P. - as every other game has done in order to avoid this.

How exactly does it end up harming the 'gear chase' portion of the game? I don't understand this at all. If something is rare - then the price will reflect it. If it is uber-rare - then make it B.O.P.

With no auction house available, you're going to lose players, plain and simple. Not everyone has the patience to gather resources or wait for an unpredictable amount of time to gather up the required materials needed to improve items up to the max level.

I get it - zone chat can perform this function - but come on - this is 2014; yelling out into a crowd in order to find/sell something such as crafting materials is just silly.

My guess is that this is something the developers just didn't want to tackle and manage. I have no idea what goes into an auction house type of system, but every other MMO has done it, so it can't really be that hard. Unless ESO - in an effort to create a 'megaserver' - has somehow backed themselves into a technological corner. Maybe they can't do it - because of this design. Maybe they thought this would deter gold-sellers somehow. I don't really know - but I'd rather hear that than the answers that I've been given so far.

This my two cents - and it is just as valuable or valueless as your two cents!

yizudien

Hello Devs,

Quick question: With the 15 man group stuff coming, will there be a way for people to see the DPS and Healing of each member in a group? Depending on the intensity of the challenge and duration it is helpful to know who is contributing vs who may be afking and moving with the group.

If nothing exists, not sure how hard this would be with the way you set the code up, would it be possible for the user to enable a log file that logs all damage done with in a reasonable area around the avatar? Then the users could develop their own Group DPS and or Healing programs.

omimace

Lol stop asking for wow and go play it, this is eso and it great most the wining here is invalid. Not making something easy that all,

Blackrim

Will NPC have strikingly unique Voices?

Blackrim

Gator_ESO wrote: »

What's your purpose in making guild stores for guild members only? Why not make them for everyone? – sliyerking

Our goal is to make the economy more player-based, but not to have a system that allows you to find anything at any time because there are so many players involved on a megaserver. With extremely large communities, low-percentage drops can become highly available in auction houses. It ends up harming the “gear chase” portion of the game.

I don't buy this at all.

If you don't want 'low-percentage drops' to overwhelm the megaserver-wide store - then make them B.O.P. - as every other game has done in order to avoid this.

How exactly does it end up harming the 'gear chase' portion of the game? I don't understand this at all. If something is rare - then the price will reflect it. If it is uber-rare - then make it B.O.P.

With no auction house available, you're going to lose players, plain and simple. Not everyone has the patience to gather resources or wait for an unpredictable amount of time to gather up the required materials needed to improve items up to the max level.

I get it - zone chat can perform this function - but come on - this is 2014; yelling out into a crowd in order to find/sell something such as crafting materials is just silly.

My guess is that this is something the developers just didn't want to tackle and manage. I have no idea what goes into an auction house type of system, but every other MMO has done it, so it can't really be that hard. Unless ESO - in an effort to create a 'megaserver' - has somehow backed themselves into a technological corner. Maybe they can't do it - because of this design. Maybe they thought this would deter gold-sellers somehow. I don't really know - but I'd rather hear that the answers that I've been given so far.

This my two cents - and it is just as valuable or valueless as your two cents!

This is not world of warcraft this is Elder Scrolls, they have not created an auction house do to the simple fact you don't get the gear you want immediately in-game. You explore and find it, just like I and all the others whom have played have done.

Blackrim

Skyrim's Saturation:



Elder Scrolls Online Saturation: http://gamegpu.ru/images/remote/http--www.gamegpu.ru-images-stories-Test_GPU-MMO-The_Elder_Scrolls_Online-cach-hd_1.jpg

i'm kind of curious on what would happen if you adjusted the saturation of the game to become more darker to gain the feel of a elder scrolls game such as skyrim. Sharpening the games area? distance? I don't know but there is something that is different about skyrim's saturation and Elder Scrolls Online's. It may be the contrast actually. Is this possible to change slowly overtime?