Other than what the OP said about VR levels going away (they shouldn't, after everyone has spent their lives and life-savings getting them; though if you just called them levels 51-64 that's fine with me), I agree with the points. I have played a LOT of MMO's, and I have never seen anything close to the level of incompetence in the running of this game. They hire very nice and sweet moderators to cover for the fact that they are doing nothing at all substantively, thus placating the masses on the cheap. It's a tragedy, because the game looks great. However, it reminds me of the old Jaguar XKE's: they looked super, but if they can't get you to the grocery store without a breakdown they just aren't worth owning. Mark Cuban, if you are out there, please buy this game for peanuts and turn it into something with at least a modicum of competence . . . .

Lifsteinn wrote: »

The one thing they could tell us: Is it a waste or not to level up from vet1 to vet14?

This would be nice, currently I'm levelling alts to vr1 but only 3 more to go...

There is no XP problem. The problem is just like every other game grinders believe they should grind mobs for a day or two and be max level.

I have done 3 toons full to gold and ALWAYS hit 14 well before the end. Thats the way the game was laid out, and it was laid out well. Yes after a couple, it is a Little repetitive but hey, all games are until some one can make an AI MMO.

Suck it up, quit your crying, and live with the fact that champion points are not to be meant to be maxed in a month. After all, thats what your really wanting, stop disguising it.

Keep up the good work stick to the original mapped out character XP path ZOS.

There has been little comment in regards to the user interface issues, either, with about the same amount said in 12 months as there was on Veteran XP in the course of two. I do agree the leveling curve isn't well balanced right now. Grinding will get you there in a reasonable amount of time, but the other leveling methods including points of interest thru quests, world bosses, dolmens, and public dungeons are too unrewarding in comparison and should be brought up towards grinding's XP earnings .

I'm not exactly a fan of leveling having done it so many times in ESO, but I still view the user interface as a larger problem since once you're done leveling, those issues don't matter much per toon afterwards. Not having real buff and debuff tracking for effects applied to or by your character (addons are not provided most of this information and instead rely on guesstimates based on when you pressed a button), guild nametags like you see people's titles now (or even actual nameplates optionally that are in world for friendly players and show an alliance and race based title for enemy players in Cyrodiil, going away with distance or sneaking), or being able to see what damaged you in a combat log, are all larger impacts on gameplay over the life of your characters. Having to run off to change Mundus stones in the wild several times a night as I move between pvp, trials, and vet dsa? More irritating too. Having third person camera issues until the 1.6 patch not so long ago that made it uncomfortable to play compared to beta because of the constricted max zoom distance was as well, but to their credit it has now gotten a proper options panel with the essential adjustments you can personalize.

Addons do not address any of these examples as they are not permitted to by the API functionality the game provides. While relying on addons for relatively basic RPG functionality is far from ideal, things like these should at least be allowed by the API until optional versions can be provided in game. I've recently seem things as simple as someone not knowing why they were dying in Arx Cornium even though they used combat log addons, because they couldn't see what damaged them, just that they took a lot of damage. Turns out amidst fifty fireballs on the screen, they didn't see the tiny, almost transparent, uncooked howl effect from Lamia monsters near them, and even with addons got no useful info to improve their play with since all they saw was having taken 14k damage in one "hit" line, no monster or ability specified. The next pull I watched carefully and figured it out... but only because I already knew what abilities the monsters use, and therefore what to look for. Now take the vastly more complex, and unexplained by in game information mechanics and basic systems in the combat, or even another level and into Cyrodiil, and you can start to see the scale of this issue.

Personally, as much as I hate leveling alts, I am much more impacted by other game issues on a long term basis . Leveling? Yeah, it's not fun to me, but after 25 hours grinding or 40 questing as I grind, it never affects me again on that character. Meanwhile, quality of life concerns and info unavailable even with maintaining a fleet of addons, has on every character from launch to now around 13 months later. A long abandoned addon lets me move key binds between my alts, but could break at any patch and there's no in game way to keep a character's settings the same as another's. The same is true of add on settings, with a handful of authors thankfully providing their own profile support (Srendarr timers as an example lets you keep the same settings on multiple characters).

I don't want to hijack the thread, but there are, in my opinion, bigger fish in the sea to be fixed that aren't just during the brief time spent leveling (unless you only play the game for a month or so, in which case the leveling timeframe is a much larger portion of what you play ). This too is a problem which should be addressed, don't get me wrong, though. I just am not so sure I'd agree that it's as big of one as described, if you ask me. We've gone from too much questing required, to the questing being too easy and still the only fast way of leveling, to grinding being the best. None of these were good systems, and where we are now isn't, either. Pvp XP for leveling has continued to be unfeasible due to its low speed since launch as well. I feel that everything should be brought upwards towards the "best" mark, and the Cadwell's Silver requirement removed for access to the second veteran faction areas. Pvp, questing , dungeons, and grinding ALL should be good ways to level.

Zheg wrote: »

To our friends at ZOS, since you post on (sometimes ridiculous) threads, but have refused to weigh in on the following which all deal with various problems tied to XP and the veteran levels, my hope is that if it’s all condensed into one place you’ll be more inclined to finally give us a glimpse into why nothing has been done yet. Personally, I’ve started at least one of those threads, commented across the forums, and provided feedback during our guild sessions with one of the community managers (for which we’re incredibly grateful to be a part of). The communication on this stuff is abysmal, and you’re usually much better at it, so you leave me scratching my head. From what I can gather, here is a summary of the plethora of issues the game is currently grappling with in regards to XP. It should be a safe assumption that the community as a whole is very happy with the 1-50 experience, and less than happy with the v1-v14 experience (though there are subsets that don’t follow that trend).

1. A supermajority of ZOS’ resources are dedicated to console work, and will be for weeks to come. Veteran ranks will be removed (probably on the timescale of months) eventually, but I would assume ZOS thinks the current problems can be ignored for another few months when vet ranks are gone entirely. Players are unhappy because we still want to level our mains and alts, and we’re stuck with the current situation for the foreseeable future.
2. ZOS hasn’t said ANYTHING on experience issues in over 2 months, not even acknowledgement/refusal. I wish I was exaggerating here, but I scour the dev tracker and there’s nadda. This ends up leading to speculation/bad info, forum fights, and players being jaded seeing you ignore these topics but replying to threads that are sometimes pointless fluff. Frankly, the nasty atmosphere on the forums that you’re seeing whenever the conversation shifts to XP is because you’ve let this snowball for so long.
3. Since vet levels are being done away with, right now it just feels like players are wasting their time leveling alts so they can be a spare healer/tank if needed.
4. Not being at V14 often means you will be tremendously underperforming in pvp, trials, dsa, whatever you consider endgame. You likely aren’t going to waste legendary mats upgrading your gear before v14. You likely aren’t going to waste money buying set pieces until you’re at the highest level available for that set (in many cases that’s v14). Therefore, many players feel obligated to grind through vet levels before they can get to the good stuff, and as is evidenced by the exodus of players the first time around (and now starting the second?), players get bored/burnt out before they ever reach the gooey center.
5. There is a wide berth between leveling options in terms of effectiveness. Grinding regular mobs takes the cake by far, but has been relegated to a few (increasingly crowded) spots in cadwell gold zones and certain cyrodiil delves. The XP/hour you get from questing is paltry for the effort, and seems to drag on and on. The XP/hour you get during pvp is even worse – and this is AFTER they very slightly buffed the XP about a month ago. The XP/hour you get in vet dungeons has been nerfed across the board from pre-1.6, and the time it takes to complete the dungeons has been increased. Of the four general leveling options (grinding, questing, vet dungeons, pvp – in this order), they’re really nowhere near the same baseline.
6. The XP you’d get in relation to your vet level progression bar was much better pre-1.6 than post-1.6. Who had the bright idea to make it this way, and if it wasn’t intentional, why has it been left like this for 2+ months?
7. Doing all dolmens and WB in every silver and gold zone used to award about 3 full vet levels pre-1.6, and awards about 0.5 vet levels post-1.6. There hasn’t been any explanation from ZOS on why this happened, and why it’s been left this way.
8. Many players can’t understand why ZOS is ok with vet leveling taking longer post-1.6 than pre-1.6, given that you’ve pretty much admitted vet levels were a failure since you’re removing them. You realized there were significant problems with that system, and yet you’re going to make it WORSE in the last 6 or so months of its life? Why?
9. Dolmens don’t award completion xp (except those in the Rift). This is a known bug by ZOS – I saw Gina’s response in that thread, but it’s been this way for months.
10. Many quest rewards don’t feel like they were worth the time to actually do the quest.
11. For people leveling alts, the current vet situation is enough to induce a feeling of rocking themselves in corner while softly crying. Doing all of those quests multiple times, or just flat out grinding mobs for 14 million XP. For people leveling new characters, it’s taking them months to do something post-1.6 that used to take me a ~ week pre-1.6 thanks to craglorn (no exploits).
12. Craglorn is a hot mess. The zone was structured to take a character from v10 to v14. In my experience, as an estimate, doing all quests and map completion for both lower and upper craglorn would net you maybe a full vet level, not four. You raised the level cap twice, when it was a horrible idea to do so, and now you don’t have dedicated content meant to steer a player through those additional levels. Frankly, once you finish silver and gold, you grind, or you stretch out the time in cyrodiil. You hotnerfed the zone in a weekend, why has it taken 2 months for you to even begin to make fixes to the XP there? The zone is meant for group content, yet a regular mob awards significantly more XP than a difficult group boss. Completing the entire upper craglorn questline, which requires lower to be finished, awards you 5k XP. That’s right, after spending hours doing the quests (not including the time you spend finding other players to group with you), you get the same XP you’d get if you were to go kill 10 regular mobs. If you can’t see a problem here, I have grave concerns on your capacity to manage this game.
13. For players that have been around for a while, many of us were able to finish the vet grind in a weekend just by killing craglorn bosses (without exploits). Now that timeframe is bloated to many weeks just to have a new character. You can make the argument that players don’t need alts, but to that I’d say alts help keep player interest in the game and helps with re-playability. I’d also say that given all of the racial and meta changes that ZOS has handed down, you frequently hear “just re-roll and stop complaining”. Well, re-rolling no longer takes a week, it takes months.
14. The problems with vet levels are what caused many players to leave the game the first time around. You garnered a lot of good will after making the game BTP and attracted returning players and new players. Now these players are running into the same (worse, actually) problems with vet leveling that caused the first exodus. ZOS, do you realize how frustrating it is for those of us that love the game and want it to succeed to sit by and watch you repeat the same mistakes over and over?
15. Some players seem to have wildly varying experiences while completing silver and gold zones. Some claim they are halfway through gold and v12 without any additional grinding. Others claim they are significantly under-leveled at the same point. There may indeed be bugs floating around in terms of XP rewards, or problems that were introduced when you changed the XP system to be 1 million per level, but we can’t make any headway on this because you refuse to even join the conversation. What this turns into is players turning on each other because they know their own experiences, and can’t logically explain why someone else somehow got millions more XP doing the same thing they did.

To summarize the wall of text, ZOS, your communication on all of this has been atrocious, and I’m not saying that lightly. This is the reason there are so many threads on the same topic. The main complaint from many players isn’t that they want instant V14, but that they don’t see a valid reason for making the grind take LONGER than it used to when we know ZOS is removing vet levels in a few months. It’s an obvious waste of time at that point, and players realize it.

ZOS, here is the now neglected developer’s discussion you opened up 2 months ago.
http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/155999/champion-system-and-xp-feedback

ZOS, here is an incomplete (and that says a LOT…) list of some of the recent threads since 1.6 that deal with the XP problems, and have gone unanswered. We’re not talking a couple, and we’re not talking about a problem that recently popped up. The list is a pretty stark example of how poor communication on this has been. I KNOW you’re reading these threads because Gina is a machine and always has her ear to the ground, but if for whatever reason you don’t have permission to comment on this stuff, hopefully this is enough evidence that you SHOULD be allowed to comment on this. Furthermore, it should be pretty obvious that you need to do SOMETHING to address this, and not in 5 months after console is released and you're ready to remove vet levels.

http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/155832/vet-xp-is-broken-now-math-included
http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/162675/i-cant-do-it-i-cant-level-anymore-please-remove-the-veteran-ranks-now-instead-of-waiting
http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/163887/v1-v14-climb-is-too-much/p1
http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/161459/the-veteran-grind-is-way-too-tedious
http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/162881/leveling-through-vet-ranks-and-the-case-with-removing-them
http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/157694/vet-exp-nerf-zos-illogic-examined
http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/150697/vet-levels
http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/111031/vet-level-took-my-motivation-out-back-and-beat-it-to-death-with-an-aluminum-baseball-bat
http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/163464/vet-level-and-horse-training
http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/142988/xp-change-for-vet-levels
http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/165416/vet-levels-are-ridiculous
http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/165493/should-vet-leveling-be-faster-since-they-are-getting-rid-of-it-entirely
http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/150525/veteran-ranks-on-console-prepare-for-bad-reviews-round-2
http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/155318/xp-disparity-and-how-zos-can-address-it
http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/162764/gaining-veteran-xp-per-alliance
http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/168525/xp-as-vet-is-horrible-zos-is-making-sure-we-spend-every-waking-moment-in-attempts-to-level-to-v14
http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/168451/regarding-this-morning-s-hotfix

I completely agree with this thread!!! They have obviously said FU?? the customer, we are going to do it our way whether they like it or not or they might have their hands tied and cant.. Its because of this crap that I dont have a V14 character! >.< Could be that they decided to kill XP in vet zones to make it take much longer to get to the end with their sad lack of end game content!

Bottom line is that they should have NEVER released this game so damn early. ESO needed at the very least another year or more so that they could fix bugs, fix the damn UI, & add good end game content!!! What we got was an alpha game at the start and its still in beta as far as I'm concerned.

Sorry ZOS, I realize that I might have come across harshly but I care what happens to this game!

Attorneyatlawl wrote: »

Personally, as much as I hate leveling alts, I am much more impacted by other game issues on a long term basis . Leveling? Yeah, it's not fun to me, but after 25 hours grinding or 40 questing as I grind, it never affects me again on that character. Meanwhile, quality of life concerns and info unavailable even with maintaining a fleet of addons, has on every character from launch to now around 13 months later. A long abandoned addon lets me move key binds between my alts, but could break at any patch and there's no in game way to keep a character's settings the same as another's. The same is true of add on settings, with a handful of authors thankfully providing their own profile support (Srendarr timers as an example lets you keep the same settings on multiple characters).

I don't want to hijack the thread, but there are, in my opinion, bigger fish in the sea to be fixed that aren't just during the brief time spent leveling (unless you only play the game for a month or so, in which case the leveling timeframe is a much larger portion of what you play ). This too is a problem which should be addressed, don't get me wrong, though. I just am not so sure I'd agree that it's as big of one as described, if you ask me.

This XP issue is a major player retention issue, and as a result is one of the biggest problems going on right now imo.

I don't expect to get handed v14 on a silver platter, but the length of time leveling is ridiculous. I guess doing a public dungeon, which took about 40 minutes, for 5k experience was what made me say enough is enough. I'm burning out and I'm sure many other semi-casual players like me are doing the same. Added to the problem is that every skill I care about is maxxed out and there is nothing left in character progression except CP, and I still have the entirety of cadwells gold to go through.

Saltypretzels wrote: »

Attorneyatlawl wrote: »

Personally, as much as I hate leveling alts, I am much more impacted by other game issues on a long term basis . Leveling? Yeah, it's not fun to me, but after 25 hours grinding or 40 questing as I grind, it never affects me again on that character. Meanwhile, quality of life concerns and info unavailable even with maintaining a fleet of addons, has on every character from launch to now around 13 months later. A long abandoned addon lets me move key binds between my alts, but could break at any patch and there's no in game way to keep a character's settings the same as another's. The same is true of add on settings, with a handful of authors thankfully providing their own profile support (Srendarr timers as an example lets you keep the same settings on multiple characters).

I don't want to hijack the thread, but there are, in my opinion, bigger fish in the sea to be fixed that aren't just during the brief time spent leveling (unless you only play the game for a month or so, in which case the leveling timeframe is a much larger portion of what you play ). This too is a problem which should be addressed, don't get me wrong, though. I just am not so sure I'd agree that it's as big of one as described, if you ask me.

This XP issue is a major player retention issue, and as a result is one of the biggest problems going on right now imo.

I don't expect to get handed v14 on a silver platter, but the length of time leveling is ridiculous. I guess doing a public dungeon, which took about 40 minutes, for 5k experience was what made me say enough is enough. I'm burning out and I'm sure many other semi-casual players like me are doing the same. Added to the problem is that every skill I care about is maxxed out and there is nothing left in character progression except CP, and I still have the entirety of cadwells gold to go through.

All of these issues are important. The biggest one for me is how ZoS is/has been behaving as a whole. It's like they put on scripted shows and well worded open ended vague responses to important issues here and there to give us selective glimpses into the works, but for the most part it feels like whatever is happening is done behind a curtain. It feels like they are stalling (yet again) for console launch to be the next big thing. This is just me, but I just don't approach this production with much faith or confidence (any more), but rather, have my foot halfway out of the door wondering when things will implode or what they will do next to grab money and what I will be playing next.

Functions in the game can be fixed. Company structure, practices, and corp culture, not so much.

PS: I don't know if you all noticed... but they might be taking away good grind spots but overall they are turning the whole game into a grind. Gear with random traits, low drop rates, etc.

I have one vr who is almost level 8 on the NA server and no vr on EU. The whole game is indeed feeling more and more like a grind instead of fun.

Really great post and a good summary on xp issues !

Problem is :

The most raging part is how fast a moderator can be to erase/change some comments, and how slow they are to answer question directly asked to them (when they answer it).
The contrast is way too harsh. It's almost insulting.

Nhoxxx wrote: »

The most raging part is how fast a moderator can be to erase/change some comments, and how slow they are to answer question directly asked to them (when they answer it).
The contrast is way too harsh. It's almost insulting.

Totally agree, gives me very little faith in this company.

Because this veterangrind is an issue. And not a small one either, and they won't even acknowledge it.

People have left before because of the VR grind and people do it especially now. I know of several who flat out left the game when they got to VR1. And they said they'll never play this game again.

I 100% agree with the OP. He made some fair points that I think ZOS should really pay attention too. I just started this game when B2P was releases and now I'm veteran level 2. I'm finding it discouraging having completed the first veteran zone story line only to be given 1 measly level. The majority the mobs I'm facing are like 5 levels above me constantly. I thought quests were supposed to be a guaranteed way to max out. I've got no complaints that I cant hit v 14 in one day but this is ridiculous. I'm also one of those players that likes to take their time and this is not quite my pace.

I've just started the Vet grind and ... it sucks. The game immediately takes a dramatic shift from a very fun and rewarding experience in terms of character progression to one that feels very slow and boring while also recycling content. Quite frankly, I am surprised that ZOS refuses to even comment on the situation and I am quickly losing interest in the game unfortunately. I realize that they're planning to do away with vet levels all together but allowing the current situation to languish without even a single comment isn't a good short term solution.