Hi, thanks for reading my post. I want to start off by saying that I am a big fan of MMOs and have played a lot of them, including, but not limited to, Ultima Online, Everquest, Asheron's Call 2, Shadowbane, TERA Online, Neverwinter Nights, and of course, World of Warcraft. I believe that the formula for creating a fun and successful MMO has already been developed and has been around for quite some time now. There really isn't any need to completely reinvent the wheel so to speak. Obviously, game developers don't want to, and shouldn't, make clones of other games; but again, if the formula has already been worked out, why stray so far away from it? Anyway, after having played ESO since release, I believe that I have experienced enough of the game to talk about what the developers are doing right and what they are doing wrong. The items listed below are not in any particular order of importance; I listed them as they came to me.

Lack of incentives to do content
ESO has a LOT of PvE content, which is a good thing. However, a lot of that content lack proper incentives for completing it. I think a perfect example is the public dungeons that exist in each zone. Is there really any reason to enter those besides the skyshards? And once you have entered one and acquired the shard, is there a reason to go back...ever? The answer is no. That is a problem. I think the same thing can be said for dark anchors and world bosses. When someone in zone chat calls out that boss X is up or anchor Y just dropped, I honestly never feel a compelling reason to go and do that content. I believe that I would be more interested in doing the content if tantalizing incentives existed and I think the best incentive is LOOT.

Here is what I think should be done on this front. For dark anchors, if a player meaningfully participates from the beginning to the end, that player should be guaranteed loot from a chest. The loot should consist of items that would help that player do better against daedra and undead. This could be anything from enhancing the power and duration of fighters guild skills, or just straight up increasing the damage that player does to those types of monsters. For world bosses, I think that each world boss in a zone should drop a piece of a level appropriate 3 to 5 piece epic set. For the public dungeons (the torches) I think that the last boss should guard an ever growing stash of loot and crafting materials. What I mean by that is the amount of gold as well as the quality of the crafting materials should increase the longer the last boss is alive. Nothing outrageous. Perhaps the amount of gold can increase by 3% an hour and the chance of rare+ crafting materials dropping increases by 10% per hour and heck even throw in a racial motif. I believe that everything listed would give players really solid, tangible reasons to actually do all of the content more than once.

Artificial difficulty
I believe that a lot of the encounters in the vet dungeons are artificially difficult. I did a LOT of raiding in World of Warcraft (and yes, I know this isn't WoW, but hear me out) and I remember that the developers went through great pains to make the boss encounters feel unique and well scripted. I can't say the same about the boss encounters in ESO. It seems that the developers took a page from the Arenanet playbook and gave all of the bosses hard hitting AoE spells. In one dungeon I fought a giant two legged lizard that shot fire over the entire room, as the fight went on, there was just fire everywhere, in another dungeon I fought a gargoyle that does a massive AoE that causes the ceiling to cave in doing massive damage, in another, I fought a harvester type creature that sucked out my soul while covering the entire room with massive unavoidable AoEs. It really seems like every boss just does a massive, hard hitting AoE and that is all that makes them hard. Honestly, I think AoEs in this game are drastically overused, lazy, and illustrates a lack of creativity on the part of the developers.

Also, I think that the mobs in the vet zones are much too hard. My character is a level 9 vet dragonknight and I have problems fighting three vet level 4 mobs. A lot of the difficulty has to do with how hard caster NPCs hit. Armor seems to mean nothing to casters and there is no way to practically and meaningfully increase spell resistance. The difficulty of the vet mobs seems artificial because they are SIGNIFICANTLY harder than their normal counterparts, yet, my character isn't significantly stronger. There is an imbalance. I don't know what the solution to this would be.

Too many junk quests
The 1 – 50 leveling experience is filled with too many junk quests. I am talking about quests like, please help me find my boots, please help me find my hammer, please save my farm, please find my backpack, please help such and such see that I love him/her. I think that the questing in each zone should tightly focus on the main storyline of that particular zone. So, my solution would be to cut the miscellaneous side quests and increase the exp and rewards of the remaining quests accordingly. Focus on the storyline of that zone.

Too few skills to use at once
I think five is not enough. Six would be better considering all of the skills at our disposal and the variety of mobs encountered. Seven would probably be perfect.

The Veteran system
I honestly believe that the Veteran system is the worst thing I ever encountered in any MMO ever. The idea of allowing my Ebonheart Pact character to do content for DFC or AD just seems silly to me. I think that the overwhelming majority of players would have made at least one alt in one of the other alliances just for the fun of it, I know I was going to. I had planned on making a high elf Templar in the AD; but now, heck no. I am simply to worn out from having to do what seems like an endless number of quests for vet leveling. Forcing players to do more quests after 50 causes them to hate questing and see it as a grind that should be gotten through as quickly as possible which is why vets flocked to Craglorn to grind anomalies and burials. I personally believe that the vet system was a colossal mistake and should be gotten rid of or drastically altered. Because think about it, players don't go through 50 levels, they go through 62 levels, 12 of which take significantly more time that the other 50, why is that considered fun?

Honestly, this is what I would do: reduce the maximum vet level that players can reach to Vr 2. Any player that is higher than Vr 2 would have his or her vet rank reduced to Vr 2 and be compensated for each level above Vr 2 that they were when the change is implemented. All vet items would be reduced down to Vr 2. The maximum level of any boss in any vet dungeon (except for the ones in Craglorn) would be Vr 1 and the maximum level of Craglorn bosses would be Vr 2. I would cut the experience required to get from Vr 1 to Vr 2 by at least 30%. When players complete the main story quest line and speak with Cadwell, he would direct them to a Stargazer who would then take the player to Craglorn. No more doing the content of the other factions. Finally, the maximum vet level would be increased by 1 only when major content patches are released.

Lack of a mini map
I totally understand the desire to go with a minimalist approach in regards to the UI; however, it would be nice if the game had a built in mini map that I could toggle on and off. Not having one makes navigating around the world efficiently more complex than it should be. Again, don't reinvent the wheel.


Lack of a way to efficiently engage in trade with other players
I don't care if it is an auction house, a traveling trade caravan, trade outposts or what, there ARE better ways to go about engaging in player-to-player trade other than spamming zone chat. The lack of ANY option besides spamming zone trade is extremely amateurish. I honestly don't see why each capitol city for each alliance can't have an auction house or something. This really needs to be fixed.