About nerfing grind-spots

Tankqull · July 2015

Sacadon wrote: »

A pattern to ZOS nerfing seems consistent to me.

1) Nerf grinding in areas that have potential to negativel affect quests
2) Nerf extreme situations where XP gains allow completion of a veteran rank <= 1hr

All of the past nerfs follow this pattern except for Craglorn.

Anyone recall or remember nerfs that are inconsistent with this?

all xp nerfs done to public dungeons, generally xp on craglorn surface mobs, general nerf of boss XP, reduction of expedition xp (WTF?!?)

Mighty_oakk · July 2015

Grinding will always be a part of mmo's and should always be the quickest way to level.

That being said it shouldnt be 5xs faster then questing.

Ideally there shouldn't be 'grind spots'. Grinding any one area should give roughly the same xp as the next.

Bromburak · July 2015

Lunerdog wrote: »

Having just completed Cadwells Gold for the FOURTH time, I guess you could say I'm all quested out, untill theres new quest content I'd rather stab my wanger with a barbed fork than repeat anymore quests.

The thing I'll say about the very heavy handed nerfing to Craglorn xp is this, all the grinders were in Craglorn, out of the way, ie not bothering anyone who was questing through Cadwells, but now the grinders are spread all over the game.

You cannot compare old craglorn version with regular grinding spots today. It was fixed for a reason.
Craglorn was a zerg of players power leveling together and I understand some of them because during that time the Vet content was pretty bad and almost everyone had to play with a stupid stick and light armor.

You don't want to make Cadwell for a 5th time don't you?
Btw. did you read the quests 4 times, never skipped anything?
This is like watching a movie or reading a book 4 times in a row.

Its common sense that others want options instead doing the same thing again and again.
It always should be a players choice to quest or to grind, mandatory barriers make no sense, thats the worst that can happen to an MMO.

Atlaz · July 2015

This isn't maple story and it shouldn't be like maple story.

StrykerTheElite · July 2015

questing would be fine if it was better, most of problem about questing that its alot of running around. That is annoying.

You want questing be main fine but give me quest that A that has lot parts to that is close so show progession and leveling up fast so feels like I am getting something done.

make where if kill this for quest that you uber bonus for killing when you have quest for vs killing him with no quest. right now I find questing annoying I rather find mob and lvl so I can do pvp at max lvl.

MrGhosty · July 2015

smokes wrote: »

emkv93b16_ESO wrote: »

Hi.
Over time, people have found some pretty good grind-spots, and Zenimax has been very efficient nerfing them.
Why they do it, is a bit unclear for me. Are we leveling too fast that way? You want us to go through the quests?

because why spend hundreds of man hours developing quest content, paying actors to do voice overs for those quests, write hundreds of pages of lore into books that can be found all over the world and then let players skip all that content and the core RPG elements of the levelling process by allowing people to level by killing the same mobs repeatedly in a cave.

because that the elder scrolls everybody loves right - everyone has fond memories of grinding mobs in a cave in skyrim to level up right? in oblivion? in morrowind? yea, those were all super grindy games, so obviously zenimax wants to continue that tradition of making the grind mandatory.

seriously, i wonder what universe you grinders come from, you're the scourge of any decent mmorpg simply because you lack any self control and must have it all right now by grinding mobs, so you can sit atop your throne of corpses through numerical supremacy instead of skill.

your playstyle is unhealthy, your attitude is unhealthy and any game designer would be absolutely bonkers to tailor their endgame content to you and your wanton destruction of any RPG elements they would add through exploitation of any given process for the maximum combat gains possible.

and you want it to be a legitimate playstyle... sure, if you want a game to shrivel up and die within a much shorter lifespan than any game has the potential for. grinders kill franchises, especially if allowed to get too far ahead of the average levelling curve.

Seems a bit confrontational there fella. Let's look at your points.

Do you grind in Skyrim? No because playing the game through the quests gives you massive boons as they don't have to balance for multiple players so your analogy doesn't really work.

Second, there are many people (myself included) who have already completed the content, in some cases completed it a few times and even the best stories are going to get stale if you're repeatedly going through that content. In my personal case, in order to save some content knowing we were going through a drought period I haven't completed the EP faction yet, I prefer to complete the zone first on the correct character before going back through at vet levels. As I said I want to have some new content, I'm not going to rush one player through it simply to then repeat those same quests ad infinitum.

You don't like grinding and that's okay, but that doesn't mean it's not a legit playstyle because you don't like it. I don't think any reasonable player who wants to grind wants or expects the grind to be more effective than questing they just want it to work and with some of the recent changes that is hard to do.

There were exploits that allowed more points than were intended and those got fixed, which i wholly support. When you reach a certain point and need to grind out a few levels or just want to avoid the questing process together once you hit veteran levels there aren't enough places to do it without conflicting with questing players or other grinders. If you get too many people in one spot the viability of that grind drops to almost nil but if you're questing you still get the same amount of XP no matter if there are people everywhere in the same spot.

Getting back to your Skyrim analogy, that game encouraged players to leave the "main quest" path and just go exploring where they were rewarded with items, interesting settings, etc. If you consider that they essentially catered to multiple playstyles it is no different than THIS es game catering to the known playstyles of MMOs.