Towards and Understanding of Diverging Player Performance and it's Effect on Content Scaling.

Table of Contents because yes, it is long.
Introduction
A little game history
Sources of divergence
-We keep you in the dark and feed you... propaganda
- The nerf machine
-Champion pointed heads.
- Go buff yourself or a friend
- Resource management
- Soft Capped in the head
- Two bars is better than one or the same
- RNJesus is dead stop praying
- ESmacrO
Conclusion - Explanation of why any of this matters
Suggestions for changes

Introduction
Having been in the game since beta I have noticed a dramatic divergence in player performance specifically in PVE since the days of 1.x. Though of the factors I believe behind this effect all rolls, heals, tank, and dps, I think that the difference is best illustrated by dps as dps is primarily concerned with an easily quantifiable damage per second output number whereas tank and heals are less easily quantifiable. I have identified a variety of factors that I believe have lead to this yawning gulf. These factors are, a continuing devotion to information asymmetry, the nerfing of most content, Champion points, the buff system, resource management changes, soft cap removal, bar swap changes, gearing, and macros. The resulting widening gulf in player performance I think is increasingly important in PVE as content has been increasingly divergent in it's difficulty. Much previously reasonably challenging content has been nerfed to the point that most 4 man content can be soloed whereas the vet version of the new trial is so challenging that I believe the current number of guilds to have completed it world wide is 6 and I don't believe any has done hard mode. In short, I, and most other players who play a few hours a day and are good but not elite, have really nothing to do that is remotely challenging but also completable save the soon to be nerfed VWGT and VICP dungeons and VMA which can be completed by us on some classes but not others and also cannot be run with friends so doesn't really count. Honestly, I think this is a problem. Partially one of lack of middle ground content, but also one of choices in game design that facilitate divergence such that content is much harder to scale. This post is about those game design choices as it is my contention that, with such great divergence between good and elite players in damage output, it is probably not possible to make content applicable to many players. I do not mean to imply that I think each of these changes or ongoing choices is bad. I think several are an improvement. As such I will conclude my diatribe with my thoughts on how to change things to lower divergence without getting rid of positive changes. I encourage my readers to likewise provide input.

A little game history
First let us talk about the past to frame the issue today. Until very near the end of 1.5, the last build of the original combat system, a typical poor, and clueless player you might find in zone for a pledge might to about 600 dps to the most elite players 1.6k on Dk, or 1.2k on anything else. That is to say, that the best players in the game were doing about 2.7x the damage of a very poor player who, nevertheless had the best BOE and crafted gear. Those poor players scaled up just about the 10x scaling and are now about at 6k dps with their heavy attacks and random skill firing or spam until your run out of mana casting followed by heavy attacks. Meanwhile, the most elite players, when buffed up in group, are at 40k. This is a much larger 6.7x multiplier between the worst and the best. Interestingly, this multiplier is not mostly a matter of most good players being that much better than the terrible one but is also a divergence from good to elite. I was that 1.2k NB in the past and now I am at 25k on NB and 23k on Templar. I used to do 75% of elite dps (irrelivant at that time because veil) and now do 63% though, I am ranged to their melee. The fact that, as will be seen, I am on the elite side of most of the divergence making changes and I am doing far more complicated and well timed rotations now then I was back in the day has not really helped me keep up. For the changes I think it is best to go in chronological order. We will start at the very beginning and then go through 1.6, the new combat system and CP, and the situation today where clearly ZOS is starting to see the problem and make some changes but simultaneously seems to lack understanding of the full panoply of changes and the ways in which they interact with each other to bring about the magnitude of issue now faced

We keep you in the dark and feed you... propaganda
Before there was free to play, before there were champion points, and probably as soon as the game ever went live there was a commitment to keeping the player base ignorant. Most MMO's communicate pretty well with the player base letting them know when gear is going to come and go, what they intend to make BIS, which builds are intended to do what, and what thinks they currently think are out of balance as well as how they intend to balance them. In these games, tools exist to determine group dps, test dummies exist for practicing skills, and tool tips are made as accurate as possible. ESO has always had the opposite approach. For whatever reason ESO works to deny players as much information as possible. Whether it be the constantly inaccurate tool tips, the set gear that doesn't do what it says, the surprise nerfs and buffs to gear, virtually anything having to do with the economy, or the lack of patch notes on most changes even up to 30% nerfs or buffs to skills eso has not been forthcoming. When the good people of this game made an add-on that actually gave group DPS ESO even made a point to promptly break it. Ditto with the magic NPC test dummy who they eventually found existed. The thing about all this ignorance is that it really only creates information asymmetry. The top guilds tend to figure out and keep secret what is actually going on. This gives them a huge advantage. I might add that this is the same economic principle behind a prohibition on insider trading. Information asymmetry creates a self perpetuating loop of haves and have-nots. Remember the block and walk instant stam regen bug that certain PVP guilds knew and used for 6 mos before anybody else. Quit it ESO, let people have the tools to see what is going on.

The nerf machine
I remember the days of 3 NPC mobs being somewhat challenging in vet areas. This was nerfed, world bosses have been nerfed, dungeons have been nerfed, quest bosses have even been nerfed. The effect of all this, aside from things not being so fun, is that nobody ever has to learn anything about the basic mechanics of the game in the process of playing the solo content. As a consequence of that, when they wander into something remotely difficult, like say VWGT, they cry and bleed all over the forums. And to some extent I can't help but agree with them as nothing in their past play experience has even hinted to them that they should not stand in red, should try to think of how to best optimize their skill selection, or should wear anything other the garbage they are rewarded for quests. A gulf in content has been created wherein almost all content has been made so easy you can light attack through it whereas the hardest stuff, VMA and VMOL are harder than any content before. There is no natural training progression as there was in the past with solo non vet --> solo vet --> craiglorn --> vet dungeons --> AA / HR --> SO. Content is terribly badly scaled today such that very little exists between stuff you can light attack through and stuff that most people do not have enough innate skill to ever complete. Not only has this completely obliterated any sort of natural training progression but it has left most endgame players little to do.


Champion pointed heads.
The first big change with 1.6 was Champion points. ZOS seemed to be the only one who did not see where this was going. With, according to PTS testing at that time, 40% of DPS being Champion point differences and with a massive 400k xp per point, and about 1,200 points before big dps contribution drop off, it was not hard to see how quickly players would diverge. Diverge players did quickly to the point that ZOS eventually had to scramble and drop a cap on CP barely 6 months in. That cap has somewhat reduced the problem but, clearly to the surprise of ZOS, despite their massive reduction in XP for CP gain for lower CP players, through the instituting of variable CP costs curved to current CP number, and also massive increase in available XP in new areas most of the player base was really still not catching up to cap. This seems to have lead to a bit of panicking on ZOS's part as evidenced by a second dramatic lowering of the CP cost curve, no increase in cap with new content, a free 40 CP to most players, and a free 160 CP to anybody who manages to get a vet character at all. The bottom line was that, in a game where the grind to max level was apparently so onerous that they decided to lower it ZOS instituted an entire Korean MMO style level system on top of that first one which was several orders of magnitude longer. I applaud ZOS for realizing the error though they are clearly still having to live with the fallout. Champ points continue to be a major cause of player divergence though this is obviously being actively addressed.

Go buff yourself or a friend
The second big change with 1.6 was the Major Minor system. Prior to 1.6 each skill did it's thing and there were not classes of skill, such as skills which grant major empower, who's major effect was the same as, and overrode other skills. Since 1.6 each dps, and really heals, regardless of what else they do has to keep their major power, and crit bonus's active as well as, if they are really into min, maxing, the minor as well. This usually amounts to two major's as the second becomes a minor and a lot of buffs don't have many compelling minor sources. In my case I usually get spell power from pots or a dk running igneous and spell crit from mage lights and the same pot. Other major and minor buffs also greatly come into play such as debuffing boss resistance and increasing crit damage. These must now be accounted for in a group. This has added complexity and complexity basically means player divergence.

Resource management
Another big 1.6 change was actually one I think we were all happy about in resource management. Prior to 1.6 we all had to run spell sym to keep our magica coming as we had low resources and basically had to use healers as battery packs. This took up a bar slot on almost everybody's bar (stam toons were relatively rare.) Similarly, everybody had to run magelight as it was a passive 10% dps buff which is strong. That was two bar slots gone for most folks. Now, spell sym is only useless for cross faction VD puggle grenades in PVP and magelight is also off the bars of many folks who use pots. Two more bar slots means more skills, more complexity, and more divergence.


Soft Capped in the head
Probably the last really big change in 1.6 was the elimination of soft caps on base player stats. Many of us advised against this and it resulted in some very strange things when done such as a trash drop green set becoming the BIS over any raid gear. Before that all serious players had their main stats soft capped and all the elite sets offered basically cap sidestepping effects such as an AOE DOT from Mephala's and Valken, and a heavy attack buff from Infallible. It was easy for developers to keep this sort of thing in line as, with the exception of Valken (which got out of hand precisely because proc chance could be multiplied by number of dots), most of these things were basically add on damage that could not really be multiplied in any way. When you could really maximize your key stats uncapped, add to them set proc buffs like scathing mage, group buffs like spell power cure, and then multiply those maximized numbers by things like the major spell power buff more divergence happened. I think my Mag NB runs at about 3.4k spell power and 41k magica fully buffed now and stam builds are usually over 4k in weapon damage.

Two bars is better than one or the same
I guess here is as good as any place to talk about bar swapping changes as I don't remember exactly when it all went down. Bar swap has always been a little hinky and still is as it just doesn't go off when a channeled skill is active (pots don't fire either much to my annoyance.) There were times, in the past, when bar swap had a 1.5 sec cast time as well. All of this meant that not many people spread their single target rotation across two bars until recently. Now this is relatively common and, in the right circumstances, bar swap can actually be used as an animation cancel for a truly no cost bar swap (more on this later.) The effect of bar swap changes cannot really be understated from a dps divergence standpoint because of how many more DOT's it allows. For best deployment it is often used in conjunction with a dressing room type add on to allow a player to have different skills on the bar quickly when arriving at a boss fight where the player desires a differing set of more single target skills then in trash mobs. I should note that this is the first place where I have mentioned the use on add ons as a divergence factor. Add ons such as DPS meters have always been used by good players but the use of dressing room type ones has increased in commonness dramatically since bar swap has been made more fluid allowing both bars to be better combined into what is effectively a single 10 slot bar.

RNJesus is dead stop praying
Gearing as been under rather constant change in way that has also fostered divergence. In the days of the first raids, AA and HR, the best armor dropped from those raids and only dropped in desirable traits. There was something of a cool down to this as jewelry and lower body peices only dropped from weekly coffers but the rest could be obtained with 100% chance of right traited drop from the boss of each trial. Consequently it really only took 20 or 30 completions to have a set of what you probably wanted with the exception that healers, who actually wanted the jewelry would need to do a few more. Things went down hill from here. Soon, with SO, traits were random. VDSA did one better with only about a 50% drop rate of a random traited weapon from the final boss. Surprisingly, the desirable healer and footman sets from VDSA were actually BOE and came in only one, often odd trait per piece but this is a massive aberration as most PVE gear would become BOP and random traited. The culmination of all this is probably the mess with VMA weapons with their remarkable power and approximate mean time to acquisition of several months of a run a day. The trend has been clear. Exponentially longer grinds for significantly better gear (Aether in the AA days was worth maybe 1/4th the dps increase of a VMA weapon and that was a 5 peice set not a single peice.) The VMA gear is to important, the content so difficult, and the weekly leaderboards so competitive, that the word on the street is that about half the leaderboard spots are now players paying other players to run their account for them. Given the number of really bad players I have run into with that very hard to obtain title hanging on them who have trouble even doing pledges and also the relative difficulty most guilds have finding trial worthy players I'll believe it. It reminds me of the days when a certain group of players used to take 150k gold a pop to wheelbarrow players through VDSA for a weekly though this is clearly more blatant as players are not being wheelbarrowed but actually having others use their account. I would say ZOS should really watch for this as it is not that hard to figure out with IP addresses but ZOS has never been much for that sort of thing. Not really very fair to players completing themselves and getting kicked off the leaderboard by the paid ringers though. To add to the generally exponentially harder gear grind imposed on players for their general gear is the significant number of special group buff sets which now exist and a group needs to maximize it's success. The first of these group buff sets were worm cult, ebon, and saviors though soft caps made only worm cult matter. Healing mage jewelry and masters resto staffs were added during the lower and upper craiglorn patches and some, though few still use them since they have not been updated. Since the last update worm and ebon both matter and to this is added at least spell power cure, and Alkosh. Soon the new Infallible will be added as well. That is a lot of group buff sets that now need to be pieced together to get a group to maximum effectiveness. Truly acquiring and coordinating BIS gear in ESO for an entire raid has never been harder and this has become a major source of divergence in player and raid performance.


ESmacrO
So, I gather that I have gotten in trouble with my comments on macros in the past. To put is simply, I think a lot of end game players, who are nevertheless very good players, and in most cases more skilled than me, use them on trials boss fights. I furthermore think that having a substantial number of people using them is pretty necessary for top times and also pretty helpful in getting MOL completes altogether. Though ESO does not prohibit macros this opinion nevertheless gets me in trouble for probably the same reason that saying pro athletes use steroids gets you in trouble though no rational person should believe that people are successfully competing with others using performance enhancing substances while not using them themselves. The simple fact is that, like cycling for doping, ESO is well designed for macros. First, ESO has a lot of differently timed DOT's that all require to be refreshed at just the right time to maximize dps. Say you run the new meta build, a stam dk, and take a look through the voluminous number of DOT's available through weapon lines as well as skill lines and pick out the following: Venomous claw (8.5sec), Noxious breath (8 sec), Poison Injection (10 sec), Barrage (8 sec), Acid spray (5 sec), Rending Slashed (9 sec), Rearming trap (6 sec plus 1.5 sec rearm), Igneous Weapons (30sec) and rapid strikes (.6 sec). How well do you really think you can optimize the casting of these given the wide variety of durations. The lowest common multiple, for you math nerds is 6120 seconds, by the way. Realistically, you will probably settle on a roughly 8 second rotation and simply give up 1 second of rending, 2 of injection, and have spray down for 3 seconds. You will try to keep up igneous on it's own but probably forget it a lot. By this reasoning you will give up a huge amount of dps to someone running a better optimized macro. I am currently fighting the giant PITA of writing a long, two bar, multiple timing optimizing, macro and beginning to practice using it as it is really not what I want to do but is clearly necessary to being competitive in this game. I have little doubt adding twisting path and perhaps shades would boost my NB's dps but they are not 8 seconds like my other DOT's and therefore hard to add get much out of without a macro.

Macros are not all managing off timed DOT's though. They are also about perfect timing on skill cooldowns. This is hugely beneficial to dps and a human amount of variance in that timing costs a great deal of dps. In this small window of time wherein I have known about the magic test dummy NPC before it is removed next week I have tested a little. Using the same rotation that I currently use on my NB but macro'd gains a 17% dps increase. Same skills, same rotation, and no missed weaves when I am not macroing but a 17% difference. The cost of just a human amount of timing variation from skill cast to skill cast is 17%. That is a mammoth amount of difference in practice. I have yet to test the addition of different skills of off timings and was amazed at the mere effect of optimized timing alone. My timing is, relatively speaking, very good on my weave. It is just that heavy attacks scale unevenly and generally poorly with charge duration that a small difference in timing is a large dps difference. You basically want to cast the next skill as soon as the cooldown for the last one is done but erring one way means no cast whereas the other means a surprisingly large dps loss.

Conclusion - Explanation of why any of this matters
Plainly, I favor a conscious plan to reverse some of the divergence in ESO player performance mostly because the scaling difficulty is now so absurdly stretched that I find myself challenged but completing 3 pieces of content (VICP, VWGT, and VMA), Unable to complete VMOL at all, and so strong in other content that I don't have any need for a full group. It is absurd that in such a large game only 3 tiny things are scaled anywhere near correct for my particular level and two of these are being nerfed. How do you develop content for players doing 12-40k dps? Yet, none of these players are actually clueless. The first would be a player with mix of purple and gold crafted gear of good and well chosen crafted sets who does their buffs, perhaps one dot, and an ok weave in a pug group without any group buffs. The second has BIS Maelstrom stuff, an uber stam dk build, a group with the right sets and buffs, and a very well put together macro. You simply can't scale stuff to that, the divergence is ridiculous. Here are the changes I propose:

Suggestions for changes
- Quit trying to hide everything, give test dummies, and let folks find out group dps. People will learn more if the information is not hidden and this will close the gap some.
- Buff up some middle ground content so people have some motivation to learn and players who know the basics aren't board out of their mind doing normal content.
- Arg, Champ points, do you know how many people won't even try the game or try it again because of the grind imposed by these things? Sure, were moving the right way but seriously, this system probably already killed this game. If you haven't already, fire the fool whose idea this was. At least then you will have one less fool. I wish I had a good fix for this but it was probably a fatal mistake and you are now just respirating a corpse. I have 900 points by the way so I'm not exactly crying for things I don't have.
- I would consider terminating DOT's and buffs when you swap bars. Running two bars deep on boss pulls with an add-on to quickly switch configurations from fight to fight is a substantial cause of divergence that could be removed without negatively effecting most players experience. Most players do not want to run two bars deep, they do because they need to to be competitive.
- Grinding because of poor RNG does not content make. You are far over now, and long have been, the line at which keeping one player in game by occupying him longer in his gear grind cost you more than one player leaving because of frustration. Realistically, you are probably at a point of at least 10 players lost for each kept.
- Nobody really wants to macro, you shouldn't design the game for it. You could make top players more effective than macros with a few simple changes. First, standardize DOT timings at say 6 or 8 seconds so that they can all be run in a rotation that a human instead of a machine can keep track of. Second, tweak the scaling of heavy attacks so it isn't a huge dps loss if the timing isn't perfect. The extra damage of the heavy attack charging longer should make up some of the loss from a delay in skill cast. Lastly, give each class an anti macro skill like sorcs have in shards. The skill must be a big boon to DPS but must be dynamically and unpredictably interacted with in a way a macro cannot. For NB's relentless focus seems like a good candidate as it already has a proc. I'm sure you can find something to mess with on Templar, and DK. Obviously some scaling on all this will be necessary since your changing durations and making a proc skill but I think that it is pretty important.

For all those still reading this never ending diatribe, thanks and let me know what you think.

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