Working on the snowball system. Brought in 3 Friends and my GF. Which I deem not overly bad

Just wanna say I think ESO is currently doing great, have made my third character recently and I can say there is a lot more people coming into and "Back" to the game, as the person who made this thread said. Either way, I will always love and play ESO.

The QuakeCon panel did a great job to show where this game will be going, and it's a fantastic direction. While most of what has been shown still has to be delivered, I have little doubt this game is in good hands and the business model works in everyone's best interest as well.
That said, this topic provides the opportunity to sum up my thoughts about ESO's current state as well, 6-7 months after release, and some areas that still could be worked on.

Taking a small break and coming back to a game often lets you see everything in a new light, the contrast highlighting both good and bad features you weren't really aware of before. Recently I took some time off from ESO to play Dark Souls 2 and improve my skill in other competitive games, and these are the thoughts I had when playing a new character in the Dominion area.

What sticks out unpleasantly in the otherwise smooth and wonderfully aesthetic gameplay are still the animations. I know there are several new combat animations on the way, especially those tied to a specific weapon type, and while I didn't have the chance to see them myself, I've only heard good things about them. But what doesn't really fit into the rest of the gameworld the most for me are general movement animations and idle stances. While running (not sprinting), your legs seem very springy without any significant weight, which doesn't give you the feeling of a real connection with the world around you. Although, I have to say this effect is mitigated for female characters, as their wider hips give the impression of more weight in the lower body half.
Idle animations while having a weapon drawn have two obvious problems for me. One is the visible hunch your character develops, the other is the general twitching about – which would become rather exausting in a realistic setting, and thus once again doesn't fit well into the more realistic gameworld.
Further, I'd really really like to see unique combat stances for axes, maces and swords, as were in Skyrim, but I understand this is not a priority.

My other two main gripes with the current game are itemization and the Enchanting profession, which intersect at some points. The problem I have with itemization, especially gear, is that it is rather worthless. The game throws gear at you wherever it can, and because even crafted gear has a new tier every two levels, even the stuff you make yourself has no real significance to you. And still, most repeatable activities in the game reward plain gear – often only of green quality. The most interesting items found in the world are set items with a unique look, such as the Ebon Armory and Hircine's Veneer. But those are so rare that I have yet to see anyone with them in the game. Update 5 will add unique helmets for some dungeons bosses, which is a good start IMO, but could be expanded to worldbosses as well, including unique weapons and other armor pieces.
Another problem with itemization are the loot tables. I see you are making an effort with the provisioning revamp for the looted ingredients to „make more sense“: bags of beans should only give you beans, and not a potato or a piece of meat. Similarly, I would like to see more sensical drops from monsters and humanoid enemies, to the point where I have to hunt a specific enemy type for a certain armor style. Maybe a troll shouldn't drop a battleaxe, but rather a larger amount of raw crafting ingredients? Maybe an Orc enemy should only drop orcish style armor, or a mage type enemy should have a higher chance to drop high quality enchanting glyphs?
My last point about current itemization is more of a wish than a complaint. Currently, there are several item pieces that are only available for NPCs – such as unique shields (which were previously supposed to be the veteran version of the according racial style, I believe), e.g. the ones Ordinators in Morrowind wear, and the Nedic style armors of the enemies in Shada's tear. Eventually I would like to see all of those available for players as well.

As for enchanting, I already made a lengthy post about it some time ago here.
What I didn't talk about though is the general lack of importance and variety of enchantments themselves. Most parts of your gear – 7 – only have one type of enchantment available to them, which is the increase of one of the 3 attributes. This is immensely disappointing for a magical craft. Even then, the magnitude is not that significant to impact your build a whole lot. This is especially true for armor pieces that have a diminished effectiveness for enchantments, such as belts. Why would I want to put a legendary rune on a belt for only about 3 dozen attribute points? If anything, I would have expected the pieces with a low armor rating to have better enchanting values to offset their initial disadvantage.
What bothers me the most though is the lack of importance for weapon enchantments. Afaik, everyone in PvP uses disease enchantments for the healing debuff – everywhere else it is inconsequential. This has also lead to a recent rather counterintuitive change to heavy attacks, which now restore magicka or stamina – when there is already an identical yet heavily underutilized mechanic in the game, in the form of absorb attribute enchanments. If these were worthwhile, it would also broaden the variety of builds, as you wouldn't have to wear a staff to replenish your magicka, which shoehorns all mages into rather similar builds.
Now, some ways to make weapon enchantments more relevant would be to either …
1. Remove the cooldown. Nothing else in the game except potions and some set effects has a cooldown. Could be changed to a trigger chance, though.
2. Effect all enemies when using an AoE attack, which means the cooldown would have to be removed first. The magnitude would still be rather low, but could effect your dps in AoE settings significantly.
3. Increase the magnitude. At the current 4 second cooldown, 53 frost/fire/shock damage with a vr14 legendary glyph is simply pitiful when your weapon damage alone caps somewhere around 200. Possibly scale with spell power or magicka, which would allow for some interesting builds.

So, that's it for now. These might sound petty to some, but it is what I noticed after coming back to ESO after some time off, and it shows how great the rest of the game is.

Edit: Two other points came to mind when I was playing just now. One is that I'm a bit disappointed by the Bosmer's portrayal in the game. They are simply too tiny. I understand you wanted to make them appear more distinct in comparison to the other races on the battlefield, but I feel part of their feral nature has been lost by reducing them to some kind of garden gnome. The other point is that, female Bosmer should be taller than the males. That's just their way. Yet, female Bosmer are apparently the tiniest creatures in the whole game.
The other point is - and I understand this as a general problem with lack of assets, which is always difficult to handly in large games - a lack of distinct music for different parts of Tamriel. While I was walking through Malabal Tor just now, it felt like I was put back to Stonefalls where I heard the same music for the first time during the beta weekends. This homogenizes the experience somewhat. So if you could introduce more zone-specific music in the future, that would be a huge addition to the already fantastic atmosphere of the game.

My patience took 6 months to run out of steam. I tried very best to keep the potential of Cyrodiil in mind, yet 1-button-spam-meta builds continue to be the only way to be viable (especially vampirism).

There will be no comeback for me. I genuinely applaud the rest of you who can still keep the amazing potential of the game in sight, I've given up the hope of ever seeing that potential realized.

Nerouyn wrote: »

Gix wrote: »

It's more like they take advantage that they have such robust (relatively speaking) modding tools and a strong modding community to allow themselves to move on to the next project.

I mean, making an Elder Scrolls Game takes Bethesda 4 years to make. That's a HUGE investment that doesn't really give them much profit after the initial release (+ expansions). It's one of the reasons why Bethesda also publishes games; because 1 game every 4 years isn't a "smart move" from a business standpoint. So they patch it up as best as they can before letting it go.

It's both a refreshing and a sad thing to do. On one hand you're abandoning one of your babies that you spent 4 years to make and, on the other, you get to work on something new. In their cases their new project is more likely another TES game but the visual kit and main concepts are different.

They take what they've learned and reapply them to a blank slate instead of trying to squeeze it in current (read: 4-years old) systems / mechanics.

I appreciate your taking the time to come up with and lay out this theory but we know for a fact that it's horribly wrong.

Skyrim's sales were phenomenal - grossing well over $600 million by the end of 2011, and it didn't stop selling then. As a private company can we put a definite number on their profits? No. But unless you want to suggest they spent in excess of $600 million making the game, then their profits were ungodly. I reckon even given the success of Oblivion, it's unlikely they spent more than $100 million on development.

They absolutely could have afforded to pay staff fix all of those bugs in an official patch - especially as I pointed out much of that work had already been done as part of the community mod. And it's not exactly best industry practice to leave your game riddled with known bugs.

People who make that much money - generally not idiots. So I think my theory is sound.

I wasn't arguing that Skyrim wasn't profitable. Of course they have the money to pay a staff to fix all the bugs but that wouldn't be profitable; so they don't.

People with the most money tend to be the most straight-forward.

ESO's business model motivates them to fix the bugs and continue improving on the game. Constant money.

"lordrichter wrote: »

The extremes of 10,000 and 10 million are too extreme. Anyone outside of the Veteran areas that pays attention, as I do, knows that there are more than 10,000 people actively playing the game. At the other extreme, if ESO had 10 million subscribers, people would be saying "the game is dead" but they would not be talking about ESO.

The extremes are kind of my point. If you were over on MMO-Champion, people were screaming WoW was dead when it dropped to 11 million. They wanted it to be dead\dying and nothing wasn't going to change that view.

At the same time, WoW has continued to bleed out subs since Cataclysm. Down to 6 million and even Blizzard saying they don't expect to generate any new subs, the same Pro-WoW group is saying "WoW is fine, nothing is wrong"

For those that love the game, no matter the sub numbers there will be a reason why it's "OK" and "doing fine" On the other end, if someone just has it in their head that ESO isn't the game for them, they will declare the game garbage. Neither the die hard fan boys or the die hard gloom and doomers are being realistic and honest.

not sure if ESO is making a comeback, but rather building up ahead of steam.
i left after my free month after launch just too many basic bugs that were ruining my enjoyment of the game.
fast forward 6months later i just came back 3weeks ago. and the game feels like it has seized the potential i saw in beta! everything is considerably more stable. weapon swap delay seems to be emlimnated completely i actually enjoy the fantastic combat systems! my achievements all register properly and i have my titles i worked for.
tons of content to enjoy! Craglorn is amazing and an endgame players wet dream! and if you want raiding game has that coverd too! not to mention all the great content yet to come justice systems/spell crafting/ thieves guild dark brother hood (better still be a thing!) and of course imperial city.
most importantly is threres is just tons of content and fun group pvp while far from perfect or balanced is just good general pvp fun.
funny to see the lack of objectivity on the forums from either side!
all i can say is after being burned by games like destiny,wow we as gamers are LUCKY to has ESO and developers like ZOS. atleast they dont lie to your face and expect you smile and ask for more lol.
to the op yes i agree for the most part but would argue its more of a build up then a comeback i dont think their subs were ever below 500k event when things were at their worst. just a hunch tho.