Player Housing!!!!

Things that I would definitely love to see;

[*] Player Housing
[*] Something related to the Imperial City in PVP
[*] Tall keeps, and more siege devices, similar to those shown in the theatrical trailer (PVP)
[*] Faster leveling (Alliance War and general character leveling) in PVP campaigns

This is feedback I submitted in-game shortly before launch. It is just as relevant today and these features are still sorely needed ! I really hope this is addressed in the program.

Please put back in/add the following UI features, for these reasons:

Nametags/plates: So we can tell who's who, and locate vendors or NPC's easily while playing. Essential for coordinated gameplay and improves community by allowing for guild pride, seeing what guilds have players out and about actively, and recognizing people you run across often in-game. Make them invisible like alliance indicators are for enemies in sneak/stealth, and fade with distance. For enemy players, show their alliance rank, race, and faction as a "name" rather than their character name. An example would be, "Pact Dunmer Corporal".

Combat log: Essential for catching bugs and understanding what is happening in the game while fighting. How are we supposed to even know what our abilities are meant to do when we have no numbers at all and are guessing on pixels in a tagless health bar? Please also add an option for showing the hitpoint numbers on health bars.

Scrolling combat text: Essential to tell what's happening in real-time... "Why did my mega-super attack only just chip that guy instead of smashing him?" It can be hard to pinpoint exact moments of a fight in a combat log after the fact, whereas this provides immediate feedback to the player for what's going on. Did I not even actually get the spell I intended to off? This disambiguates combat and reduces player confusion/frustration.

Minimap: It's annoying to have to constantly stop and open the big map to tell where things are and the landscape, rather than being able to glance at the corner of the screen and still be aware of the game world during a quick look. Frustration = annoyed customers = less favorability towards the game = lower player counts.

Buff/debuff icons: Please provide us with small icons that we can place where we want that indicate specific types of buffs or debuffs being active on us and our enemies. For self ones it would be great to be able to say tell the game "highlight this buff when it's active on me" for our abilities. These are essential to understand when our abilities are active, penalized, enhanced, etc. by ourselves or other players/NPC enemies. Again, less is not more: lacking this info is simply less.

_______________________

And later, I created a reddit topic that was well-received months after launch, with the following feedback and ideas for solutions:


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.
Editor's note in 2015: Third-person camera options eventually arrived, yay!

Thanks for reading everyone and I look forward to hearing your thoughts.
(Originally posted on reddit here by me: http://www.reddit.com/r/elderscrollsonline/comments/271juz/class_balance_is_always_an_issue_but_what_about/)

Let players sell items to other players via the existing npc merchants.

Detailed write up here: http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/122487/broken-economy-use-the-npc-merchants-to-sell-items-for-players

Replace BoP with a BoE model that limits equipability to specific achievements.

There have been quite a few posts recently asking for the removal of the BoP mechanic. This is one solution that opens up the market, but retains the requirement for players to actually do the content instead of just buying these items. Essentially everyone can buy everything, but can only equip what they earned.

In this model, the economy plays the role of countering unfair effects of the RNG, rewarding those who got blessed with better than average odds with gold and giving unfortunate souls the chance to counter act their lack of luck.

Detailed write up here: http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/158879/bop-vs-boe-achievement-based-equipability#latest

Dueling
Spellcrafting/Standard Elder Scrolls skill lines,
Non-static NPC AI (NPCs walking around from town to town, in and out of buildings, interacting with other NPCs, going about their lives)

Remove trials leaderboards notifications. C'mon, these are just terrible.

Instanced quest bosses.

Most quest bosses are inside houses or caves anyway. Instance those quest bosses, so that they are more special and provide a more immersive experience.

Fix the guild bank time outs.

One year into the game we still have to reload the guild bank roughly 50% of the time and we still get errors while depositing or withdrawing items. It's terribly frustrating.

• As the Dev team, you already communicate with the Addon Developers. Why can you not implement the obvious ones like Inventory Management or Master Merchant? It's already written and works to an extent. Pay them, give them credit, streamline it and put it in. As an Ex Developer, I know if the core work is done, it really isn't THAT much effort.
• As previously mentioned, please please please explain why the mail you get for an item sold does not include the item name.
• How big is the core development team for implementation of game mechanics
• How big is the Testing team in ZoS for ESO (excluding those that play obviously)

A visual indicator for critical hits.

Detailed write up here: http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/146280/should-there-be-a-visual-cue-for-critical-hits#latest

Small improvements to the combat UI, in particular auditive feedback if you skills can't fire.

See here: http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/136997/sources-of-frustration-in-eso-combat#latest

Put enchanting stations inside crafting locations. This will greatly reduce the frustration involved with crafting.

Add trophies and disguises to the collections system, so they don't clog up the inventory.

Disguises
Add the disguise to the collection system as a reward if we complete the quest without consuming the disguise (either by not using it or by not getting caught while wearing it).

Trophies
Trophies should be account-bound. Given that the dyes they unlock are account-bound anyway, I don't see the need to have character specific trophies.

For better immersion: Have mobs drop what they wear. Have a storm mage drop a robe and a lightning staff.