ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

We're currently looking at a few more hours of downtime for today's maintenance. In the meantime, here's a fun new note to whet your appetite:

• If you contribute to killing a boss in a Cyrodiil delve, you will now be granted a 60-minute AP buff which increases your AP gains by 20%.
  • Note: While this buff will be visible in areas outside of Cyrodiil, it will only be active while in Cyrodiil.

Attorneyatlawl wrote: »

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

We're currently looking at a few more hours of downtime for today's maintenance. In the meantime, here's a fun new note to whet your appetite:

• If you contribute to killing a boss in a Cyrodiil delve, you will now be granted a 60-minute AP buff which increases your AP gains by 20%.
  • Note: While this buff will be visible in areas outside of Cyrodiil, it will only be active while in Cyrodiil.

Incoming complaints about "being forced to pve" inside of Cyrodiil, even though you already have to kill off NPC's to take keeps in the first place and the actual PVP is with players in those areas, just as it will be in delves when people go to get their AP buffs . This is actually a clever mechanism to encourage people to go into them more, and naturally spread people out a little more to help the server load as a result since it's unlikely in a group of 50 people that everyone's buff is due to expire at the exact same time .

What's next to surprise me in a good way by the ESO team? The user interface is going to be fixed? Like this: http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/160517/blast-from-the-past-tuesday-eso-2-0-is-good-lets-make-it-better ?!

Nifty2g wrote: »

@ZOS_GinaBruno Please confirm if EXP Potions will be available, all these boosts to Cyrodill and no love to PvE

PvE players need love too Gina

Attorneyatlawl wrote: »

The champion system's great and adds a nice progression as you play over time. It's added a lot to the game by giving a reason to care about playing through content that doesn't give you great gear anymore since you still gain experience points, or that you might otherwise not care to bother with because you could do another specific thing and get better drops. The problem is having RMT be the defining factor of your character progress, rather than gameplay. VR14 is an easy mark to reach in a month's time, and everyone's on a level playing field in doing so. XP potions in the mix? You either plunk down cash or you may as well not bother: you'll always be an ever-growing amount further behind.

If you take XP potions and put them into the equation that you must buy with cold hard cash to progress at the base tier of XP gain for anything you do in the game (and let's get real, when a severely beneficial buy-to-win item like a 50-60%+ XP boost comes into play in a long-term progression system, you aren't choosing whether to pay up or not to have "convenience". You're choosing whether to smell the roses or be competitive at the baseline that everyone else is using.), it becomes essentially impossible to ever catch up due to the disparity in rewards you get for playing as a result if you aren't using them. That makes it the baseline, and you take a large penalty if you don't pay up constantly.

If two guys are good players, and generally play an average of 3-4 hours a day as "softcore" competitors ie those who want to do as well as possible but don't have the time to sit there all day, unless the guy not paying up constantly for boosters plays an extra couple of hours a day, he will continually and perpetually fall further and further behind as time goes on due to that 60% gap. Using the 4 hour number, paying through the official RMT cash shop system would make the person not coughing it up have to play for around 6.5 (six and a half) hours just to make the same progress. That brings it from instead of playing a moderate amount and having a level playing field based on skill, to "who is both willing to pay for a constant XP boost with cash and is skilled" instead. Similar to those cutesy little mobile games with multiplayer that sell achievement unlocks and currency, the game integrity is out the window completely. It goes from "he played to earn that" to "That's pretty neat... assuming he didn't just pay to get it easily".

Some people then posit that simply having started playing earlier is the same as just having bought the power with money, another disingenuous argument that doesn't reflect reality whatsoever. No one can control when some random person decides they want to take up playing game X, Y, or Z. The "joining late" thing is the same in any game you play, be it an FPS where you simply don't know the maps and sight lines until you've played a long time, to an RTS where you won't be skilled in the meta without playing a long time to catch up to speed.

Leveling systems are fine and well-accepted in MMORPG's, and "soft resets" are pretty frequently made in them (for example WOW's expansions add hard levels making all of the gear previously earned basically irrelevant as it's all replaced or equaled with quest greens as you level to the new cap. ESO has done this arguably three times already in the year it's been live, between adding VR12, then VR14, and then the champion system itself while only back-crediting a very low amount for existing players (70 points, or around one endgame-leveled character, regardless of how long they'd had it, how many they had, or how much they'd done in-game previously).


The fact of the matter is that the kind of player who would want to get up to speed on a game coming in later after launch is going to already research the best ways to do so and will find they can hit level 50 inside of 20 hours rather readily, and then go through Cadwell's Almanac for extra skill points and xp plus champ xp, knowing they will end up with enough skill points for their builds anyways as they have read up on the facts. This player will spend perhaps an additional 60 to 70 hours of gameplay including earning undaunted line xp for the 6% health, magicka, and stamina passive, to reach vr14, saving their pledge gold keys to use when they reach vr14 to get chances at max rank shoulder items. Then they will leap into trials, pvp, vDSA, and other stuff on a strong footing, buying some crafted gear to fill in until they get the things they want.

The kind of player that thinks giving everyone buy to win xp potions that help skilled players advance even faster who are already playing, will act as a catch up mechanism... well, to be blunt, they probably don't really know or care what it takes to get up to the higher tiers of gameplay in the first place. The 'mursion quester everyone runs to defend (not intended as a bad term, but rather as a label for completionists and lore hounds )? He certainly doesn't care, he's already out-leveling the zones he's trying to complete and play fully.

If they go with this whole pay to win thing, they may as well have just kept the subscription requirement, which left everyone level on the in-game field of what they can do and was up-front with the fees. I don't think anyone had much problem with that or has in any game. Selling character power near-directly? Yeah, that's disliked enough there's a term for it and a commonly-known acronym: P2W. And those games get avoided by new players like the plague for good reason, leaving the existing playerbase withering and dying as people seek a better game rather than buying every new booster the company maintaining it dishes out. Life's not fair, of course; but that doesn't make selling an artificial gap-booster and progression gain not earned by gameplay okay.

What you write here directly affects the corporate risk-gain analysis and research. Saying you're happy to pay up to add a broken system to ESO is a jumbo green light sign to add to their numbers and determinations. Humorously enough, the solution players should be looking for isn't to leave the EXP in-game at the roughly-25%-of-what-it-was level and then clamor to pay real cash to get to a whopping 37.5%-of-what-it-was level (by adding half of that 25% to your play). It's to demand for the nerfs to be reverted to where it was, and instead deliver actual content to pay for worth our while such as zones/stories, new aesthetics, horizontal progression setups, additional dungeons, etc.

How anyone's happy to have ZOS swing the gameplay down to 1/4th the previous progression speeds and then ask you to buy regularly-paid RMT potions to make it a little less painful again rather than fixing what they've broken, is a mystery of the human mind that I'm sure psychologists and market analysts in the future will have a field day with when designing new ways to monetize their software.

Nifty2g wrote: »

@ZOS_GinaBruno Please confirm if EXP Potions will be available, all these boosts to Cyrodill and no love to PvE

PvE players need love too Gina

Nifty2g wrote: »

@ZOS_GinaBruno Please confirm if EXP Potions will be available, all these boosts to Cyrodill and no love to PvE

PvE players need love too Gina

technohic wrote: »

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

We're currently looking at a few more hours of downtime for today's maintenance. In the meantime, here's a fun new note to whet your appetite:

• If you contribute to killing a boss in a Cyrodiil delve, you will now be granted a 60-minute AP buff which increases your AP gains by 20%.
  • Note: While this buff will be visible in areas outside of Cyrodiil, it will only be active while in Cyrodiil.

Why are you encouraging PvE in Cyrodiil?
[Moderator Note: Edited quote to match moderated version]

Holycannoli wrote: »

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

We're currently looking at a few more hours of downtime for today's maintenance. In the meantime, here's a fun new note to whet your appetite:

• If you contribute to killing a boss in a Cyrodiil delve, you will now be granted a 60-minute AP buff which increases your AP gains by 20%.
  • Note: While this buff will be visible in areas outside of Cyrodiil, it will only be active while in Cyrodiil.

Umm I'm not sure what to say about this. I don't think I like it. We have the upcoming imperial city to combine our PvE with PvP, I don't want PvP battles going on in the delves all the time. "Gankers" will probably be salivating at this though.

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

We're currently looking at a few more hours of downtime for today's maintenance. In the meantime, here's a fun new note to whet your appetite:

• If you contribute to killing a boss in a Cyrodiil delve, you will now be granted a 60-minute AP buff which increases your AP gains by 20%.
  • Note: While this buff will be visible in areas outside of Cyrodiil, it will only be active while in Cyrodiil.