Just some observations I’ll offer as someone who has played on all three factions, doing pretty much everything from going at it alone to zerging with the best of them. At its core, I believe the PvP potential in this game isn’t as far off as people often make it out to be and with a little TLC from the developers would make it something that most of us who are here – and many who have left – would legitimately enjoy logging into.
I won’t touch on balance issues, mostly because I assume the ZoS team has already pretty much finalized what we are going to get on the PTS (next month?), so I’ll probably just wait until then to offer my thoughts. Besides, the point of this post is how to make Cyrodiil a fun place to be without messing up PvE or making a radical change to ZoS’s systems (though I will make one exception at the end of my post for a long-term suggestion for the overall health of the game).
Firstly, I would recommend watching videos by
@Alcast ,
@FENGRUSH, and
@Etaniel (I do not want my post being taken down due to profinity in these videos so I won't link them, but they are easy to find on these peoples youtube homepages) who views are largely in accordance to my own. I think it’s *very* telling when so many people who play every night nod their head in agreement about fundamental issues. Alcast and FENGRUSH’s are lengthy, I don’t care, listen to them anyway. The TL;DR syndrome has gotten us into the mess we are in. TL;DR quite frankly needs to take a back seat to thoughtful analysis. I especially urge everyone at ZoS, in particular
@ZOS_BrianWheeler @ZOS_MattFiror and
@ZOS_RichLambert to watch Etaniel’s 7-minute video. If they are not moved after watching the beautiful Cyrodiil map languish and go to waste, then that is 1000% proof PvP will remain stagnant and stale.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNH6kVKeAfE
Anyway, my suggestions and why:
Add tangible incentives to actually use the entire map of Cyrodiil.
I will tell you right now,
nothing you do to the scoring system will motivate me to get on my horse and claim Bloodmayne Farm for the Ebonheart Pact. Nothing. It’s boring. I get naught out of it. I have better things to do with my time just to get zerged down just for another purple Ring of Fury and 5 wall repair kits in 23 days. To get me to go somewhere other than Alessia bridge, ZoS is going to have to do more than putting down a random flag some place just so I can waste 1 million AP on a training Marksman’s Restoration staff and armor that’s not impenetrable.
Something like this might:
- Supply wagons traveling in-between each enemy keep. Let me loot columbine, mats, fun stuff.
- The Alyied Wells are a nice idea, however 10 minutes is not worth the bother for such a small bonus to a stat I don’t really care about.
- Strategic resources in random places on the map. If I liberate them, I get some raw mats. These count on scoreboard and have minor Alliance wide combat effects.
- Put control flags throughout Cyrodiil. These also have minor Alliance wide combat effects (maybe in proportion to how much home territory flags an Alliance controls). I get a small utility buff for flipping it.
- NPCs encampments / supply dumps. Put a boss NPC here (that’s actually mildly threatening). Make this give the God of War AP buff bonus (the same one for defeating delve NPC bosses).
- In random spawning spots over Cyrodiil are ancient relics of the Dwemer/Alyieds/Akaviri that function as either consumables and deployables and, get this, collectibles, skins, stuff to hang in my house that I can sell to PVE players. One of these is a “dwemer ground oil”. I absolutely will go out of my way to get these.
- Have things (resources, NPCs, daedric stuff, the usual fantasy plot items, etc) away from the Emperor ring that are harvestable at marked and known locations that players can go get and bring back to the Alliance base. I get a small pocket share of this stuff and AP for doing this. Have flags at these. The more an Alliance controls, the sturdier their castle walls are, the stronger their NPC are, and more effective their siege is.
In short, ZoS
needs to use the wonderful and detailed map they already made!. Augment it in such a way that I have a (selfish) reason to go somewhere other than following the fights within the Emperor Keep ring. Take a lesson from the First Person Shooter games who figured out 20 years ago how to motivate players to visit every part of the map.
Also, please stop restricting stuff like skins, achievements, and house loot to PVE. People who like PvP also like this stuff and would love the opportunity to get some of this from PvPing. Also it’s a good way to motivate new players to give PvP a chance.
We have said this since April 2014 and
nothing has changed. Talk to the people who actually made the beautiful map of Cyrodiil and how only 10% of it gets used and see how they feel about that if you are not willing to listen to us.
Stop pretending the scoring mechanics and parameters of campaign rules are going to spread us out to other campaigns.
IC gated campaigns, keep resources worth a lot of points, elimination of buff campaigns, etc., all these measures were adopted and yet many of us flock to that one pop locked campaign. Is it really a mystery as to why? I want to jump in and quickly find fights and there is AP to be had by dumping oils on the AD potatoing to the Alessia Bridge. Go ahead and ask EP not to nightcap Haderus again. I’m sure the 576th time you ask nicely will be the charm. Even when people and guilds move around to try and avoid the pop-locked “lag” server, the pop-locked “lag” server eventually moves with them. Can we please acknowledge that for better or worse, a large portion of the PvP community chooses to play the pop-locked “lag” server for various reasons?
So instead of wasting time with highly dubious decisions like making the Aleswell Farm resource
worth more points than the Elder Scroll of Mnem in an Elder Scrolls game [!], please refer to the point immediately preceding this one to make the map more engaging such that the pop-locked server isn’t always so laggy.
Personal Opinion: Most of you probably disagree with me, but the population cap is too small. Yes, I said it. Large map + small population = we need to concentrate in order to have meaningful fights. Also my guild feels compelled to respond to Arrius under attack because there isn’t anything else being attacked and there isn’t a strong friendly presence aside from us. Shrinking the population caps has been paradoxically counter-productive. Go ahead and disagree. You tell me to spread out and all I find is empty map space. So, nope, going to head to the only swords on the map.
Campaign Rewards:
ZoS isn’t even trying here. Really, still Rings of Fury that everyone already got 9 months ago? I make more gold just from undaunted plunderer in one night running trials than
an entire 30 day campaign cycle AND there is still gear to be had in Trials that I want (as do my 11 trial mates that I can trade). Oh, I can get cool skins, achievements, titles. When we say, “ZoS doesn’t care about PvP,” this is why. There is no excuse for such a disparity of neglect.
“It’s broken and we know it, but we’ll fix it in 6 months without even testing it.”
I do not know how ZoS convinced itself this was an efficient business model, but it is beyond stupid and totally counterproductive. It just leads to untested overreactions that shift the pendulum too far. Can you say destro ultimate? Go listen to Wrobel’s interview on ESO live after the Orsinium patch and how he conceded that a “stam” patch was needed and coming. Boy did it come. And then some. Blacksmiths all over Tamriel were overburdened with orders for 2H swords from the roly-poly Dawnbreaker+Viper+Velidreth horde that invaded Cyrodiil. He and his team had spent the past 6 months addressing the magicka-stamina imbalance – meanwhile now all trials DPS are back to magicka! I don’t blame Eric for having to chase his proverbial tail, this is clearly a decision made by his bosses who have deluded themselves that balance patches every
year [!] is somehow conducive to each class feeling competitive and fun. It’s not.
@ZOS_RichLambert if I were a cynical person, which I am not, how would you convince me after seeing your flawless vMA run on youtube with your sorcerer (congrats), that you have no issues with the one balance patch a year model because you are not trying to solo open world PvP on your magicka DK?
End the RNG gear nightmare
Please consider Armor & Weapon Trait adjustment (again). You tried and before and missed. I know we are a diverse community with lots of ideas, but sharpened and divines/impen rule the rest. A great deal of the RNG frustrations in ZoS’s current system that has an entire run hinging on getting
one specific weapon with a specific trait. This goes beyond training and prosperous. The others are mostly too niche, too inefficient, or too situational to make me genuinely excited to try something new. If you are going to rely on random boxes and RNG, the traits have to be at least decent otherwise we will want to throw our computer out the window. Do you have any idea how frustrating it is to blow 1,000,000 AP to come away with reinforced light boots and a charged restoration staff that are flat out uncompetitive in a PvP environment?
I personally would limit the number of straight percent increases. With everything quantifiable, it becomes too easy to figure out the obvious “best-in-slot.”
I Just made General, what did I get?
Nothing but a title. I get more out of your game finishing your DLC that takes little more than a week than a rank that has taken people more than a year of consistent playing. It looks like you are hesitant to add any PvP skills (a mistake IMHO, but I digress), but you ought to give us
something to reward progressing our Alliance War heroes … or are we operating under the false assumption that PvPers don’t care about stuff like that? Why does a Grand Warlord have to buy an alliance themed horse from the Crown Store? Don’t you think that player has done enough for the game and invested enough time to it to reward her something cool and thematically appropriate? Other stuff you could do that is not strictly increasing our power might be a Squire assistant to help carry siege, camps, repair kits, etc., a nice big shiny to place in our home, a scepter collectible (please allow us to use these in Cyrodiil), or perhaps access to a special “King’s Reward Chest” to
pick stuff for personal use or that can be sold to other players.
Long term project. Please get started: Fundamentally CHANGE to the CP system.
I don’t mind end game progression. But there is way too much power in that CP system, so much power that you actually took it out of the base game at launch under the assumption we’d get it back (which IMHO has had very adverse balance issues, but that is another topic). And I hate the fact that there are two different game systems in play with CP and non CP. You have a hard time even balancing one of them, are you serious that you can do both even though they are under entirely different rule sets? No way.
The mistake IMHO is it’s just a pure percentage unimaginative power gain. And a large one at that. 25% bonus to stuff…wow, how many newer players have just said “forget this” seeing that grind. Instead of +X% damage and -Y% resource cost, I think the CP system should be a way to customize our characters by picking stuff that either augments our abilities or allows us to do interesting things beyond the scope of our skill-lines. This would make such that you aren’t strictly more powerful the more CPs you get (yeah balance!), rather your character is more versatile and unique (yeah build variety!). Stuff like:
- Ranges abilities can shoot/cast further
- Faster speed & less stamina consumption
- Your Breath of Life hits an additional target
- You generate ultimate faster
- Your Molten Whip now is a stamina based ability
- You are an Ice master, your fire/shock effects are weaker but Ice is stronger and does X.
- The medium armor Athletics passive applies to you in Light Armor
- Your potions last a little longer.
- Your synergies are 10% more effective
So a little power, yes, but this is subtle stuff that allows us to personalize our characters more. Personally speaking I would be much more interested in becoming an Ice Master than just taking out my calculator to see whether or not this generic +damage star is mathematically better than this other generic +damage star.
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Just by doing the above, I would be *much* more interested in PvPing every night. I understand the CP thing is a pipe dream, but I could tolerate the balance issues better than I currently do if there was something to do on the map besides go to the Alessia Bridge, your RNG reward system did not give me high blood pressure, and If there was something busted like proc sets, I knew ZoS would implement gradual measures to find a happy medium rather than the crazy pendulum shifts we get every 6 months or so.
I know ZoS looks at its metrics and see that what, just the same 400 people play on NA every night, which is why we haven’t even had someone come onto these PvP forums to say: “Hey, here is what we have in mind for the future.” It’s a shame.
I will remind everyone that at launch, when reviewers were criticizing ESO, it was PvP that was singled out for praise. There was a time when more than 400 of us played nightly. Just from a single post here from April 2014:
https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/88049/do-you-think-there-should-be-an-aoe-cap/p1 thousands of people actually spent the time to vote about a PvP topic!
I will admit that One Tamreiel has made the PvE side of this game a lot more interesting and enjoyable. Why, oh why, can’t ZoS put forth a commensurate effort for PvP?
The map is already made, now implement mechanical reasons to motivate us to use it!