Hello peoples!

There are many issues with ESO as I'm sure everyone can agree, even those of us who really enjoy the game. There's a lot of discussion, well-warranted, about class balance, but I rarely see actual game mechanics or other problems discussed. I think it's time to bring some attention back over to three of the more major ones.

Who the heck are you? What do you know! This is all whining you noob!

I'm "Please Don't Nerf Me" aka Attorneyatlawl, DPS'er in the first HelRa clear on US DC and second Archive DC US clear by a nice margin. I'm a major member of Mostly Harmless Guild, and I know the vast majority of people or am connected to them, who do high-end PVP and PVE in this game and was a first-pick hand-invited PTS player as well as V12 on live with a V9 alt coming up on 12 fast, fully geared out in high-end oranges (legitimately earned, I am extremely anti-cheat/exploit as I'm sure people can attest who have seen me in chats before!). Generally well-regarded as a friendly guy, or so I'm told...

Major issue #1: Community and lack of online feel

Running around in a town or major hub in ESO feels lifeless, and I never notice if I run by someone I know because I have no way to see them unless I tried spending five minutes hovering over everyone in a crowd of 50 people at the bank who all look like npc's standing still and looking basically the same. People rarely talk in anything but zone chat and you have no way to know where they are or notice if they're near you. Additionally there is no way for guilds to represent themselves as either (or both) a pride and prestige thing.

Literally if there were no overhead health bar options I wouldn't ever notice if someone was a player or an NPC except for them jumping or running over to a wayshrine. I can't tell what guilds tend to have people running around a lot in PVE or PVP because there are no tags and no way to know their guild without finding out through some other means like being in the same one and seeing them on the roster or guild chat, and you don't really feel a connection to the action or recognize people because there's no representation of their names readily available at a glance nor their guild affiliation(s).

How do we fix this? Why's it a problem?

I suggest fixing this by adding an option that can go above the healthbars for people who want them onscreen as a setting, and allowing people to choose which guild they want people to see them tagged with with a quick toggle button in their guild screen for those who use guild tags. I'd also like to see names available in the same fashion for a character. Right now there's a big disconnect between chatting with someone and ever noticing you're near them, no need for some giant jumbo glowing nameplates but a simple small text tag on the same scale as the already-well-done overhead health bars would do wonders. As to why it's a problem, I already have touched on that but this is an online game and having a social connection, feeling like there are other players around, etc. are all vital to keeping it healthy and fun. You can simply not enable them if you don't want this extra info but it certainly wouldn't clutter anything up for those who do. I'm sure someone will respond "But, you would have an advantage!!!" but then why do we allow options for people to get addons, or zoom to third-person, or have a health bar for example in the first place? Because on the whole it's not really that impactful and it's your choice whether to use them or not. Everyone would have access to these options evenly.

Major issue #2: Game info opaqueness

Tooltips often are inaccurate at best, and provide very little info about what the ability is affected by. Examples of this include nightblade class abilities that require melee crit to boost their critical hit chance, and others like the bow passive Long Shots say things like "With a bow equipped, bestows X% bow damage vs. distant enemies" but actually only affects bow attacks. Without a combat log tab or proper tooltips most players have no idea or way to know this stuff, and while I absolutely love to theorycraft and test, you shouldn't have to maintain a fleet of addons to simply actually play and find out for yourself how things work. Same thing for basics like seeing your individual resistances or how much they mitigate for you. What does 500 armor mean? What are you going to do, count pixels?

Finally, things like being able to see what buffs or debuffs you have on you/have applied to enemies yourself is critical for competitive play. Spell effects are too spammy and often look identical, and while you can keep track roughly on a target or two manually, in any real action like a raid or pvp it's completely unrealistic to do so for multiple debuffs on multiple targets. The addons available are inadequate and provide artificial timers based on when you cast an ability, that usually aren't in sync by margins of a second or more and are very limited as to what they can track that you have done with your character or had done to you.

Solutions...

Give us some better in-game options to see basic game information. Beef up the character sheet stating simple things like Armor: 1450 (27.5%) to represent how much mitigation it provides. Give us an option to dedicate a tab to a combat log so we can see what actually happened to our character and when. Give us the option to have buff indicators/debuff indicators. These don't have to be giant star-trek control panel things, just allow us to move a small panel where we want it that shows us buffs, and another small panel with debuffs where we want them. Let us turn on text labels for our health, magicka and stamina bar, addons have shown this done and it's very clean while providing a much easier at-a-glance info set and letting you focus more on playing rather than fighting the UI. Again, all as options, not required or forced on. Yes, addons do handle some of these things, but others cannot be done or done well and it's an aggravation to have to update 20 addons every patch off of third-party sites instead of having well-integrated and consistently-up-to-date in-game options. Allowing easier access to gameplay information helps make for a deeper game and bolsters the RPG elements, rather than frustrating people who want to dive in.

Major issue #3: Customization/game options

Give us some basics like an FOV slider for first and third person, camera zoom distance, not having to go download addons to simply move our health bar, and other quality of life improvements like a text search for guild stores by default. I know some of these things can be done with addons or are already mentioned as coming in the case of a first-person FOV slider at least, but most aren't, and as talked about above... addons are a hackish solution at best and dependent on a random addon developer's interest in the game not waning, plus never as well integrated as a native feature in addition to being an inconvenience/hassle for players to have to go get/update constantly. Little things like these would help the overall polish of the game so, so much and make it feel like a complete product rather than a half-finished interface and experience. This kind of thing is just outright missing, and really degrades the quality of ESO as a whole.

TL;dr

In short, the three major points are:

-Clarify game information with better interface options. -Beef up the actual online feel of the game with more community options to see and recognize players and their guilds. -Polish the preference-type options like a zoom distance slider for third-person, FOV slider, and simple things along those lines. Little things but big bang for the buck in terms of development effort/player satisfaction.

Thanks for reading everyone and I look forward to hearing your thoughts. Like this post? Please feel free to participate in the reddit discussion too here: http://redd.it/271juz