Disclaimer

I want to apologize in advance that this is a huge thread with lots of details and potential for either loving or hating it. While I know that some things are hard to implement, some others shouldn't be.

I also want to point out that there might be a few spoilers here and there, that said I try to keep them minimal.

The intention of the thread

I do play ESO now since Beta - very casually by the way. I take things slow and explore a lot, I don't want to be the first VR 14 or biggest bad ass in the zone. To me ESO is about having a good time, either alone or with others.

During my journey I saw many things change while others didn't get much attention from the Devs.
By making this thread I do hope to maybe get a message across to people that play ESO but also to those that make the game. A message that is basically a "what If this would be".

Harborage Potential

Playing through the main story your harborage will grow. More and more NPCs start to live there. At my current state of the game those are three.

Over time you start to develop a relationship to them but also other chars that you meet during your play through. Cadwell for instance.

Unfortunately is the whole purpose of these chars limited to our little adventures that we do in story mode, like going to Coldharbour.

Personally I would love to see those NPCs as potential followers after finishing the main story or already while doing it as far lore allows it. SWTOR has a similar system in place, over time you acquire more and more NPCs which you can take with you (one at a time).

Since I play a healing char, having Lyris tank for me and my summons would be great. It would also enhance the whole atmosphere a lot as lets face it, our summons don't really say much and I remember how fun it was at Skyrim where our followers were even able to have conversations with us.

These chars could then also wear items, have a specific skill line and their own personal story that you can solve.

The whole system could also be expanded, new NPCs could be met and offered a spot at the harborage or our "new home" to fight on our side.

Housing

Talking about having a new home,

to not have housing is still a bit like a shock to me. Its been1997 when I started with MMOs and they always had a housing system. Some had better systems than others, but the possibilities to store your items, use crafting tables, were in most of them.

I fully understand that a very complex housing system takes a lot of time, we would need different sizes, upgradable rooms, maybe even a garden or a small dungeon to trap specific things, have rooms for our followers, maybe even a room for kids, the husband ...
But to not even offer us a chest at the Harborage, a crafting table and the access to the fast traveling system is really something that shouldn't happen in an MMO that
is now almost a year old.

Our harborage is already there, with a bit of love it could serve as a "home" until a real housing system is ready to go.


As for the housing system itself, SWG but also Ultima have wonderful systems. While Ultimas is probably not possible on a Megaserver (every house had a unique spot in the landscape), the SWG system could work as it offered a few limitations, yet a lot of freedom.

SWG created real cities for players, cities that could have a tax system, specific buildings like hospitals etc. Players were also able to have shop keepers there, those then worked like the guild vendors now just that the requirement to be in a guild to use them didn't exist.

Every house itself could get a specific layout designed by the player himself, based on the games progress. Someone just beginning would have a pretty empty house, I like to compare it to hotel rooms at the start of my career - they just had a bed and nothing else
As further a player progresses, these buildings could be upgraded with special craft items that require quests, achievements ... to unlock. Similar to the dye system now. Crafting should take some time, you wont be able to build a new desk in 10 seconds. It could take days for big furniture or room upgrades.

While I am against being able to build castles, that option might could come at a later time for guilds - that said it would always be a potential conflict zone, as small guilds wouldn't be able to build a castle, therefore I would stick with only player houses.

What does this button do?

While wandering through Tamriel, I often come to places which don't make sense to me. Like earlier today when I was at the backyard of a church and there a white werewolf was laying dead on the ground.
To me a very curious person, this situation needs to be checked and explored. Sadly there is no possible way of doing it. I couldn't read a note, I couldn't examine the body - nothing!

I would like to have something in the game that lets us examine such situations, like a button that we can click and then our Char analyses everything about that situation. It could check why the wolf died, it could improve its knowledge about werewolf anatomy and maybe even start a new quest to track down its murderer / discover a plot.

What I would like to see is a knowledge tab for our Chars. That knowledge would grow as we progress in the game and use our "research" button on new enemies, read lore books, discover strange situations ...

As further we go with our knowledge, new abilities on a specific skill line could be unlocked, granting us a passive that lets us kill werewolf's faster (now that we know their weak spots), gather more wood, ore, or even learn new spells / crafts ...

The system isn't new, Ultima used a similar but very simple one. Without knowing about bears and their anatomy, someone couldn't kill them / only with huge problems. It would be wonderful if our progress in the game would actually be reflected in our chars knowledge.

Killing the thousands Deadra must be different to killing the first.

Loot Risk - Reward

I just came out of a story mode dungeon, as rewards I had a new motif (yay) but not even one item that was worth being equipped. Needless to say that I still wear a lot of items almost 10 levels beyond my char level!

During the story mode adventure I killed several big guys, one was so big that it took about 3 minutes to kill him and it was very close! To my disappointment, this was also the NPC that didn't offer me any loot. I am not sure about the reasoning behind that?

To me, killing big guys in story mode should give exceptional loot. We are only there once in our entire gaming time, so why do they not give us anything back for our efforts?

In my opinion, playing through the story mode should offer the best rewards at the time of our level.

Everything that you only do once in an MMO, must be worth a special reward based on our own "work" in that quest, dungeon etc.

NPC loot & environments

Killing an NPC at ESO is strange to say the least.

Quite often do they not drop anything and if they do its absolutely nothing related to them.
If I kill a guy with sword and shield, then how can he drop a staff? This doesn't make any sense at all.
Just like casters drop iron gauntlets...

What I would like to see is a system that alters the drops of NPCs, so that what we see / fight is what we loot. This also applies to animals, why do so many wolfs not have any fur? Why are plants so rare, even though the fields are full of them - just that we cant interact with those.

If we go into a cave, why are there no bats, no spiders? Why is it always bandits or deadra? Its so one sighted, but in reality also bandits in a cave will have to fight spiders or bats and have their own conflicts at times. I miss the interaction and breathing world where every move you make is a new adventure and not one that has already been performed by you a countless of times.

Adventures & world events

From time to time a cloud appears and a few minions spawn that we can kill. When I first encountered this, I thought wow this is cool and will happen a lot now and maybe huge armies will appear someday. Sadly, this was never the case.

These little events are so rare that experiencing one is extremely seldom, just as seldom as ankers. Its been many weeks since I was able to take part in an anker event and they are always at the same spot too so that people farm them with their high level chars. Besides that, those events don't scale, so that these Deadra attacks are often way too easy.

How fun would it be if those events would actually serve a purpose and scale to the people that take part in them? An NPC could ask you for help, you then enter a specific zone that only you can see and those who also accepted the request.

From now on the zone is scaled to the amount of players in it and you have to fight off the evil that comes through the portals / has taken over the property of the NPC or kidnapped its kids and you must rescue them before the Deadra cook them up for dinner ...

See them as little scenarios with objectives and very hard minions. No matter if someone is the only person in the zone or if there are 50 players, its always equally challenging due the scaling.

There are so many possibilities and they wouldn't disturb those who want to solo either, as these zones are not visible to them if they don't grab the "quest" and even if a Deadra army takes over Stormhaven, they could still quest peacefully as their zone is not affected.

Standing with NPCs

Over time our Chars come into contact with many NPCs, some always sell us things, others buy our rotten armor and we do quests for them. Sadly, none of these actions actually changes anything with our standing to them.

The NPC still behaves in the same way to us after we saved her family, rescued the dog, the grandmother and killed the stupid Don Juan who tried to tell the husband about their "adventure". How great would it be if our actions would actually influence our relationships with each NPC.

Daggerfall was brilliant there, every move you made influenced your standing. Did you help one person, could you annoy another and choices that you did actually influenced the outcome of your quests, story and charisma.

Some NPCs might started hating you, so they didn't sell you things anymore, another might not let you use the bank in her town or you are completely blacklisted for a specific area and a kill on sight target.

These consequences, relationships with NPCs are non existent at ESO. You can refuse to do a quest and the husband would still be alive, as no other shady bandit took over your quest and 5 months later the NPC still offers you the same quest and you have to wonder why.

In my opinion ESO needs to be more dynamic, more of a choice and not so bound to fixed scripts and scenarios.
What we do in Tamriel must matter, refusing to help a lady in danger must reflect to our reputation, either positive or negative. Stealing from the rich, giving it to the poor must grant a different effect than stealing from the poor and giving it to the rich etc.

I can highly recommend Daggerfall here, that game made it all right and one wrong step had severe consequences.

Scaling

As mentioned above, I just did a story mode dungeon.

I loved it!

Besides the lack of loot it still gave me a real challenge for the the first time in weeks. I did face several boss mobs and had to use my dodge roll and healing spells or Ultimate. Abilities which are almost never used while questing were now the only chance to survive.

Therefore I would love to see the same system in place outside of the story mode, with an option to turn it off for those less "good" in the game.

Lets face it, there is no fun in the current situation. You approach minions which are several level below you, they die in an instant and you didn't really test your own skills. As mentioned, while questing I only use two buttons as nothing else is required. During story mode I used at least 8 and its so much more fun that way.

I also want to see more boss mobs outside of the story mode, mobs which are not a walk in the park but have a special purpose. Some could protect treasure, others might have captured an NPC that will become our friend, again others hide a secret ... The Skull zones are a start but they are to spare and too often to easy even alone.

Make questing a real adventure and not a walk through. Give us the chance to test our skills right from level one onward if we so desire.

Performance

I think I am not alone when I say that the performance of ESO is as poor at times as of Warhammer and AOC.

Warhammer never got fixed and the servers had to close down last year. AOC is still around and the Devs worked hard but it took them a long time as well.

Would it be possible to just release an update that only focuses on performance? An update that resolves the mystery of poor CPU usage, that fixes the stuttering in towns, the walk animations and delays in casting.

An update that improves the server performance so that lags are less often especially at prime. Playing on the US Megaserver is light, while Europe is shadow and I don't know why.
The difference is so big, why is that? At EU I see people almost teleporting at times, this never happened at the NA server.

Our FPS drops in towns to half of what we have outside, this shouldn't happen. Our GPU´s are bored while they wait for our CPUs work order, while the CPU is hardly utilized. Cant the rendering be split to multiple cores?

I believe I speak for many when I say that it would be great if you could dedicate one update purely for performance tweaks. Let us know that you at least work on these things, give us some insight why we have those issues and what you do about solving them.
Whenever I had an issue your tech support like Gary was very helpful, so this is not the issue here. Its about the Devs, not the support.
Invite a Dev to ESOLive, someone who is able to explain what the limitations of your engine are and if we can expect future improvements.

ESO is a great game already, with a few tweaks here and there it will become even better, just don't let ESO suffer under the same wrong priorities like with EA´s / Mythics Warhammer where never anyone cared about poor optimization and performance.



That's it for now. As said, just some random ideas that I collected while playing through the game. I left pvp aside for now, as I first want to see 1.6 in action before I make a similar post about that as well.

Cheers!