The infamous "combat team" who completely disregard their forum and never post anything is going to take the stage? Hope they borrow Wheelers fire suits when they do.

Before I had played the game I read about the massive fights. As an old fan of FPS I instantly imagined the battle taking place in a city. And yes I am eagerly awaiting for the launch of the Imperial City. The scale should be such that you feel like an adventurer *Indiana Jones * while exploring its every nook and cranny.

Tamriel Foundry has coverage of the summit adding more info. Interesting reading so I add it here.

http://tamrielfoundry.com/2014/10/eso-guild-summit/

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

AoE caps is something that can (and likely will) be discussed with our gameplay team, which is scheduled for tomorrow.

I hope so and I hope they realise the importance of their answer because half of my PvP guild is waiting and tbh if something is not done about the blob spamming unblockable ability then they will be moving on.

Also we want to see action now as this was being discussed by the so called "combat team" 6 weeks ago.

Copy pasted from Tamriel Foundry. If this breaks some copyright stuff pls let me know. Hell I am green noob in these things. Seriously I think they are ok with this.

AvA Questions

Can resources be made more strategically valuable?

They have discussed this internally in terms of having the resources have a bigger impact on the strength of the keeps that they are associated with.

Will Emperorship ever be a reflection of true “leadership” rather than pure rankings?

This was discussed pre-launch, but the best call for launch ended up being to go with the leaderboard based option.

Separating siege items in Cyrodiil from the potion/food quickslot menu?

Brian will bring it up with the UI folks.

Possibility of increasing the radius of defense ticks?

This varies on a keep-by-keep basis based on where the resources are next to them. The areas would need to be “re-painted” which could be problematic if the larger areas collide with the defense areas of the resource nodes.

Forward Camps, their role in Cyrodiil, how they are being changed?

They are nerfing them first, and possibly removing them later.

Alliance Point progression and their role in character development. How will AvA contribute to character depth, additional skills, gear in the future.

Basically, there are no plans currently to expand the role of AP and AvA progression.

What is the incentive to owning all the Imperial City districts, are there large end bosses of the districts or in the sewers?

There’s not a huge incentive to owning the IC districts at the moment other than having access to the respawn point. They are looking into options of how to better reward the alliance that controls each district. Access to crafting set stations and other amenities might be access gated.

Player motivation for participating in the Imperial City vs. Cyrodiil proper? What rewards are there for players? What about alliance ranks after 24?

They are looking into expanding the alliance skill lines to include additional abilities as well as possible alliance rank dependent tiers of gear, but there is some concern that this approach would be too elitist favoring hardcore PvPers too much.

Will they add new ways to level up quickly to PvP?

XP has been tweaked up for player kills to 4x monster kills, the daily kill quest was changed because of the way players were gaming the system. All of the experience you can gain within the Imperial City is set to a high multiplier.

Do siege weapons work in the IC/Sewers?

No, these are for mainland Cyrodiil only.

Exploitation, emperor farming, lag, disconnects, and crashes in Cyrodiil have frustrated a lot of players into quitting the game. How are you working to address these issues and handle them quickly as they emerge in the future?

A lot of time when we (ZOS) see those behaviors they try to take private (not public) action to correct them. Hopefully improved channels of communication with player groups can help identify these problems faster in the future.

Possibility of dynamic population locks to try to keep the three sides more even?

They have talked about doing some stuff like that but no plans are currently in place.

Improving the single-player PvP experience, ganking supply lines, checking out quest hubs, dungeons, etc.. How do you plan to address this, and how do you see the Imperial City affecting this.

There aren’t any specific plans to add single-player only content at this time, but hopefully they can address that player group in the future.


Champion System and Future Veteran Experience

At this point Paul Sage took over assisted by Maria Aliprando to discuss the future roll of veteran systems and advancement with the new Champion System.

The Champion System

We can’t just put the Champion System on top of the current advancement system. -Paul Sage

ZOS has to balance making players stronger with providing an ample challenge to players. This means a complete re-balance of game and ability mechanics is necessary. Current granularity of stats does not fit well with the addition of small percentage bonuses. Adding a 1% bonus on top of a base level of 40 isn’t meaningful to the player. Simply adding points to soft-capped abilities would be bad.

Benefits of the Current Systems

Helps to prevent “bad builds”
Freedom of how to play – allows players to go over limits

Problems with the Current System

Trade-offs are not pronounced
Too easy to hit soft caps
Balance is harder

Solutions:

All your character’s stats, attributes, and damage values will be multiplied by 10 (for example, a Health of 2,500 would become a Health of 25,000). This will allow small percentage bonuses to realize a visible impact on your character’s stat lines.
Soft caps are being removed entirely.
Impose some limits – for example, Armor (Physical resistance) caps out at 50% mitigation. On live right now, this would equate to roughly 3,000 armor.
Each source of benefit to a certain stat has it’s own caps. For example, buffs, equipment, traits, and more will each have their own independent maxima to contributing towards the overall limit.
Once these changes are in place, the numbers in abilities, items, enchantments, weapons, etc… will all need to be changed.
Compute rate limits (DPS and damage prevention)
Adjust NPC and monster stats and abilities

What does this mean?

You’ll have to make commitments to be the best in a particular area.
More varied builds, better interdependence between builds.
Some abilities will have to change, i.e. armor buffs won’t stack
Itemization will be much more important.
The dynamics of combat will change, particularly at max-level.

System Rebalance Questions

How will the de-composition of stat caps vary by class which have access to different ranges of buff abilities?

The composition of the cap composition will not change by class, so it will not be possible for everyone to max out everything. Certain classes may have a slight advantage at reaching the theoretical maximum in certain areas.

When might we see this?

“When it’s ready”. It’s too hard to put a firm date on this right now given the scope of these changes.

How will more casual players react to the scope of these changes?

We hope that the way these changes are constructed will make character construction feel more meaningful and significant, so some things will be different, for example light armor wearers will probably feel a bit more squishy in the new system, but by the same token heavy armor will feel more significant. The changes are making trade-offs more meaningful.

What kind of challenges will this system involve for educating players on where their stats are coming from and helping them understand how the new system works without having to show them a PowerPoint presentation?

The reality is that most players don’t really care too much, and they simply trust that their stats are adding naturally. This will actually be a fairly natural system since the caps in place prevent you from ever getting “too much” of a certain stat.

Champion System

Maria Aliprando took over diving into the details of the champion system, a new account-wide system that allows your characters to evolve and progress past level 50. You spend champion points in nine constellations. All characters on your account get the benefits you have earned, but your points can be spent on a per-character basis.

Champion experience is earned through regular XP, so it’s very transparent and the system makes sense.
Earned veteran ranks will convert into champion XP, but there will be a maximum on the amount that will be allowed to convert.
All characters on your account get the benefits you have earned.
You will be able to respec your choices regarding how you spend the champion points.
Update 5 will reduce the passive stat boosts from veteran ranks, but grant attribute and skill points for the player to choose how to spend.

The champion system will be introduced, and at first both the Champion and Veteran systems will co-exist for a short time, with the ultimate goal of replacing Veteran entirely. In update 5, Veteran Ranks will be converted from VP to XP, so experience points will be the currency for character advancement throughout.

You will spend your champion points in any of 9 constellations:

Health (Warrior, Lord, and Lady)
Magicka (Mage, Ritual, and Atronach)
Stamina (Tower, Lover, and Thief)

Each time you spend a champion point, the constellation “rotates” and you must spend your next champion point in a tree belonging to the next type. This doesn’t force you into a particular gameplay style, however, as there are nodes relevant to every possible playstyle in each of the three constellation branches.

Each constellation has certain passive bonuses that you will unlock once you have invested a threshold number of points into that constellation. For example, putting 10+ points into the Atronach constellation gives you an additional bonus named “Merchant’s Favor”. If you spend 100 points in The Lord constellation you earn Last Stand, which grants increased ultimate when you fall below 20% Health. There are special passive unlocks at 10, 20, 30, 50, and 100 point investments.

The bonuses themselves are minor in isolation, but collectively will make a significant difference to your character. For example, Stout in the Warrior tree reduces the duration which the player is stunned.

Each individual Champion bonus can have up to 700 champion points applied to it:

We envision it will take you about an hour to earn a champion point – Paul Sage

A big concern of the champion system is to prevent it from creating a huge separation between players who have earned a lot of champion points and those who have not, both in terms of power and in terms of potential.

Champion points are more meaningful in the beginning of the system – the value of each champion point degrades as you invest further into a specific skill. For example, the first point you spend in Light Armor gives you a +1.0% bonus to armor, but the 40th point only gives you +0.1%.
This encourages players to diversify their points towards the beginning of earning Champion points.
This prevents players who come late to the system from being irrecoverably far behind veteran players.
There is a new system, called Enlightenment, which boosts the experience earned towards a champion point. Your account accumulates Enlightenment as long as you have a level 50 character. This prevents there from being a penalty from playing low-level alts. Your level 50 main will earn Enlightment during that time. Additionally, this will help out players who don’t have as many hours per day to play ESO. Taking time away from doing XP granting activities to craft, roleplay, or just hang out won’t penalize you too much because you will earn Enlightenment during that time helping you get your next champion points more quickly. Seems like it functions similarly to “rested XP” in other games.

Champion System Questions

How do you plan to handle content gating using the new system and how players will know which tier of endgame content is appropriate for them?

The details of this are still being brainstormed, but some ideas that might happen include some sort of “champion rating”, increased character levels, or some other sort of indication to the player as to what they should be working on.

With this paradigm shift to a more horizontal based progression system, what are the implications for Cadwell’s gold/silver as well as the vertical progression structure which currently exists in veteran dungeons and trials?

We (ZOS) are leaning heavily towards getting rid of the barrier between gold/silver content and giving the player the choice at 50 to tackle that content in any order they choose. As for veteran dungeons, these will be able to be scaled to your party’s desired level. In terms of trails, we’ll be sticking with a vertical progression model in terms of trial difficulty and itemization, but trying to keep an easier on-ramp for players wanting to get started.

What is your stance on the visibility of champion levels, do you want a character’s champion progress to be public knowledge?

We’re playing with different sets of iconography to represent a character’s Champion achievement visually within the UI. There’s a lot of potential also for Champion Ratings as a composite statistic based both on their champion rating as well as the attribute levels of an enemy.

What, trials easier?!

Ok, Serpent is nice juicy hard, but common, can the other two be easier?

SAGE, put some power in the first trials instead!

Brother_Numsie wrote: »

We (ZOS) are leaning heavily towards getting rid of the barrier between gold/silver content and giving the player the choice at 50 to tackle that content in any order they choose.

Once we choose are we locked into only that faction until complete or can we jump between the two at our leisure?

Also big thanks to Atropos at Tamriel Foundry for keeping the community informed, awesome job.

"In any order they choose" indicates that you won't be locked into anything.

I am willing to give Brian Wheeler the benefit of a doubt. I think he truly loves the PVP world of Cyrodiil and he has good reason to be proud. The game can be tremendously fun when the server, the game and the players are on their best behavior.

Unfortunately, the server crashes and lag are destroying the game. ZOS needs to hire some consultants who specialize in this area and have them diagnose the problems and assist with implementing fixes.

The game itself, particularly the class imbalances and hordes of gameplay, skill and combat problems are destroying the game, too. The inability of the gameplay/combat team to act quickly and effectively is certainly not helping matters. Top level management at ZOS needs t o light a fire under the backsides of this team and maybe even expand the number of people on this team because the current team is simply not getting the job done.

Then you have a noticeable number of players who are destroying the game. They will do anything they can to cheat, exploit or otherwise ruin the game any way possible in order to get ahead. ZOS refuses to take any actions against them so they do what they want with impunity. ZOS needs to start publicly posting a daily or weekly list of players who were banned and they need to provide the reasons why they were banned. This will serve as a warning to other players intentionally doing the same things. Those players can either change their behavior immediately or have their names added to the ban list.

I think I keep posting my questions in the wrong forums. Wish there was an official thread we could discuss the Guild Summit in *hint*hint*

sean.plackerb14_ESO wrote: »

6 new 8 hour Buffs from the Divines – these are similar to Mundus Stone buffs, but temporary. They are AoE beneficial, so if you have a buff it will affect all your nearby allies as well.

Hopefully not yet another mechanic that promotes and rewards blobbing, more trains and brainless AoE spam. Definitely sounds like it reading those lines. Hopefully I'm wrong.

We're already heavily punished for spreading out in PvP, due to limited targets on AoE, due to synergies and buffs requiring us to stand on top of each other. Please don't add more mechanics that forces us to play packed like sardines. It's not only boring PvP (subjectively speaking), but seeing 24 animation spammers on the same tiny spot also creates lag and headaches.

Brother_Numsie wrote: »

This question has to do with AvA, promise.

As described Imperial City seems instanced (better word: separated) from the rest of Cyrodiil. Will what we do in Cyrodiil (capturing keeps, holding resources, ganking killing enemy players) have any effect on the Imperial City? Vice versa?

Did you read it?

According to them holding your home keeps allows opening of the Imperial City. Also those in the IC count toward total Cyrodiil population therefore leaving the potential for keep loss/emperor etc.

So not to be a negative Nancy but basically nothing(of actual real consequence) is being done in Cyrodiil beside adding the imperial city.

I am sure this will fix the server crashes, lag, exploits, abuses, shield stacking, health not going down, invisible vamps/swarm, zergs, population imbalances, client crashes, trolls...and about 20 other issues that have never been acknowledged. I love it when the way to address problems is to "A lot of time when we (ZOS) see those behaviors (issues) they try to take private (not public) action to correct them"...also known as the Ostrish marketing tactic

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

AoE caps is something that can (and likely will) be discussed with our gameplay team, which is scheduled for tomorrow.

Thanks for the update. I wasn't planning to start freaking out until after tomorrow, but I also had expected it during the PvP section. Happy to hear I was wrong!

AoE should not be upped in any fashion. we started with unlimited and what happened? people left in droves form the insanity of small groups farming the *** out of 100 man armies.

the only people crying about the AoE caps are either new (to this game or MMOs in general) or are the ones who abused it so badly that no one wanted to play this pvp.

we are STILL plagued with problems of spammed 5-hit AoEs and the groups who melt people with it capped. we FINALLY just saw the end of the mindless bolt-stun sorcs that could level entire armies of foes. no game has ever successfully implemented unlimited AoE and been fun (and STAYED fun) in large scale pvp.

this issue needs to die already...but of course the heads of the big guilds are mostly the AP farmers who abuse these sort of tactics (coupled with oils, swarms, pulsars, etc) and they're the ones representing us?

it will be an absolute shame to see this game get catered to those people when the market and the longevity of the game is wildly more dependent on the casuals, part timers, and small guilded friend groups. i say this as a player IN a LARGE PvP guild who has been gaming in MMOs for more than 2 decades who spends almost every (sad) waking hour on this game atm. the restrictions are not breaking this game for anyone but a measly few and their removal will only allow these small powerful groups the ability to wipe others and farm AP faster. which sounds great from a nearsighted perspective but i'm still fighting to see this game last...

Of all the changes, I would just be happy if they were able to address the issue of AOE zerging. It's complete BS as it stands now, there is no fun in it for anyone else. The players doing this are going to drive away the currently existing people and make it too inaccessible to the new players coming through. This needs to be addressed as one of the top priority issues. As it stands I cannot say I'm having much fun when people use this strategy, not because we lose to it (I lose fights all the time and still have fun), but because it jams up the visibility and because there is no actual play.