The (seemingly contradictory) Declaration of War on Sustain
The Pay-to-Win argument
By drastically crippling the other classes while simultaneously releasing a new class with all these abilities and great sustain, you appear to be engaging in the same type of bad business strategy DCUO did with Quantum. While we do not have class change tokens here, you are still releasing new content, which you are terming as an ‘expansion’, which has to be purchased separately.
So in effect what appears to be occurring is players are being forced to buy the new Warden class if they wish to stay relevant to group play, or remain competitive. For those players who choose not to do that, it appears all classes except for the powerful Magic Sorc, are being made ineffective, to the point of actually destroying the way those classes play. This is incredibly unfair to a great many of your players who have spent years developing their characters class and enjoy the way those classes play. It also seems that those P2W conspiracy theorists may be proven correct, because this does actually come across as P2W. EDIT: To be clear I'm not saying it is or isn't P2W, but that it's starting to appear as if it may in fact be that way with this update, and this is something you (ZOS) should be concerned about.
Many of us were excited to play Morrowind and the new Warden class.
Then you hit the community with these changes that drastically affect our characters, possibly completely breaking them. You declare war on sustain, and yet simultaneously introduce a new class that has great sustain and its very own engine guardian-like pet. It is therefore coming across as though the real reason you are doing this is to force everyone to buy Morrowind and play the new Warden; which is basically travelling down a road DCUO travelled years ago almost completely ending that game and seeing the loss of almost the entire community of long-term players.
Edited for clarification
Attackopsn wrote: »I really like what you wrote! I think that even though I disagree with some of it, I can appreciate the detail and background put into it. I personally don't think Warden will be a similar situation to the death of DCUO, but I do believe there were more negatives than positives shown with 3.0. I personally believe the CP changes were good. In pvp there are plenty of builds sustaining far better than they should for not investing into sustain. I can currently sustain on a non-redguard stam dk in pvp using heavy and no black rose just weaving heavies between some of my abilities without any need for cost reduction glyphs or recovery set bonuses. I would agree that is a problem. In pve, we can look at maw. They designed Rakkhat to take longer than 12 minutes, and yes, that was quite a few updates ago, but now many top groups kill him in 4-5 minutes tops on Hard Mode completely skipping Lunar Phase (losing some of the most unique mechanics seen in the game), and finish the entire trial in at least under 25 minutes. By removing the cost reduction cp, many players will need to reduce their damage to sustain high dps in long fights.
This is where I personally draw my line, because I really did think the cp changes were interesting and possibly positive for the game. I have invested over 300 days played into this game and the last thing I want is for it this game to go in a bad direction.
I believe that it is very difficult to tell if changes affected a game positively when you make too many at once. It's going to be very hard to see if some of these decisions were even good because they didn't just take away cost reduction from cp, they then nerfed battle roar, helping hands, major mending etc.
Instead of doing a massive wave of changes, maybe doing more frequent patches with smaller changes would be more effective because you could actually receive specific feedback on how that change affected the game.
I they just wanted a complete Tabula Rasa
Cause of Drastic Changes - PvP directly affecting PvE
You speak about ‘infinite sustain’… Who exactly uses infinite sustain? What exact percentage of your players use infinite sustain?
I regard myself as an average player. I love both PvE and PvP. I mostly PvE with friends, but occasionally like to jump into Cyrodiil or Imperial City and have a bit of fun. I have 12 character slots, yet not one of my characters is able to create an ‘infinite sustain’. I believe that the mass majority of your community of players are like me, average players not running the absolute most ‘optimal builds’, and not using what you term as infinite sustain.
So it appears the whole reason for these drastic changes seems to stem from a small percentage of players who are able to create builds with what you term ‘infinite sustain’. I’ve tried to establish an exact figure on what percentage of players actually do this, but can only see references to an elite 1% of PvP specific players.
So, it seems you’re proposing to make these drastic class changes to nerf the top 1% of PvP players. With all respect this seems completely insane. What about the other 99% of your customer base who are now being nerfed into the ground? Why would any company ever hurt 99% of its customers to target 1%? This honestly makes no sense at all.
Actually those figures might not even be correct. If the changes are targeting the elite 1% of PvP specific players, that means you are hurting the other 99% of average PvP players, AND 100% of PvE players. I don’t even know how this all calculates and what the exact figures are but it is appearing you want to penalise 199% of your customer base just to target an elite 1%?
Do you honestly think this strategy will work? If they are elite players, they will always just find a new way of doing things. Meanwhile you are stripping the very joy out of the hearts of the mass majority of your customer base.
Over the last couple of years I’ve listened and watched as debate has raged about PvP affecting PvE, and how continual fixes and patches to the Champion System are caused by PvP, yet everyone in PvE are continually penalised by these changes. To be honest, it has never really bothered me, I have just changed things around and adapted. However, this time things are very different. The changes being made are so drastic that they not only directly affect every player in the game, whether PvE or PvP, but even affect classes and a race so badly that they will actually cripple them.
Honestly, it makes no logical sense (as a business) why you would continually do this. You are directly hurting a huge aspect of your customer base by continually penalising PvE because of things occurring in PvP.
The solution to this cause and effect seems quite simple and has been suggested a great many times by many players in many threads over the last 3 years: treat PvE and PvP differently!
It’s the most simplest solution you could possibly make, its been advised by a majority of your player base, yet you consistently close your ears while you strive to develop a Champion Point system that will be great for both areas.; though you never actually achieve this, it’s just a perpetual failing cycle of changes upon changes, all the while negatively affecting PvE.
As a business the majority of your customers have told you what they want time and time again, yet you are not listening, just making the same mistakes over and over. According to some this could be termed as insanity from the misquoted saying “Doing something over and over and expecting different results is the very definition of insanity”. Of course whoever said that (not Einstein) was probably talking about scientific experimentation, and while it is of course not a correct definition of legal insanity, within a system of testing, it does at least amount to foolishness and a waste of time.
The reason it is a waste of time is because you are trying to achieve one system of CP for two entirely different styles of play, two entirely different scenarios that are not alike and are affected by very different multiple components and criteria. You are attempting to climb mount Everest when all you need to do as a team is to walk up a small hill.
Possible Solutions:
It appears the simplest and most sensible solution would be to either:
A.) Create two separate systems of CP, one for PvP and one for PvE (which would obviously require much more of your time and may not be achievable before Morrowind release)
B.) Temporarily remove CP from any form of PvP, allowing you the time to come up with a new CP system especially for PvP including Battlegrounds.
C.) Entirely remove CP from any form of PvP and have it as a reward system for PvE content only.
If you made the decision to explore these simple solutions, you would altogether have less problems and a much happier customer base. You have already made the decision to have non-CP campaigns, and to release battlegrounds without CP so these suggestions are not a stretch. All of these ideas would be far better than destroying the current system for PvE and creating such disharmony and uncertainty within the game for the next few months.
ZOS Please Reconsider these Changes
ZOS I think it’s now clear after just a few days and the melt down both on the forums and in game that the majority of players here are STRONGLY against most of these changes and do not see them as a suitable fix to the problems that already exist (PvP problems).
Whatever happened to “play as you want”. We can’t play as we want if you have crippled our classes and dictate the way they are to now be used. That is ‘play as we dictate’ NOT ‘play as you want’.
There is indeed a lesson to be learned from the past experience of DCUO. Please do not follow in that path. ESO had already lost players, including myself for a few months. It’s been great to be back, and it was great to feel everyone’s excitement over Morrowind. It would be wonderful to return the community to that state of excitement instead of the negative emotional state of uncertainty that has been created by these drastic and ill-timed changes.
The reason players are less likely to ‘adapt’ to drastic changes is that you just stripped them of all they enjoyed about their characters and the game. It’s basic psychology… when you take away peoples enjoyment, stripping them of what they love, feeding them disapointment and sadness, they’ll leave. All relationships work that way, including the relationship between a consumer and a product, or a customer and a company.
Please reconsider some of these drastic changes before they hit live and we lose more players that actually add something to the community. Please reconsider and take immediate action now, reversing some of these drastic proposals before we lose more players within this storm of uncertainty.
Merlin13KAGL wrote: »Two things:
- Asking ZoS to read your post does not increase the likelihood your post does/does not get read by ZoS.
- Tagging the @name of every Mod you can think of does not increase the odds of your post getting read or you getting a specialized response.
There's not some magical response counter that forces them to act once someone's triggered their name X number of times.
Write your post. Write your responses. Leave the extra crap that has zero effect on anything else at the door.
Asking ZoS to read your post does not increase the likelihood your post does/does not get read by ZoS.
...
Write your post.
and this part's for everyoneTagging the @name of every Mod you can think of does not increase the odds of your post getting read or you getting a specialized response.
...
Write your responses.
Leave the extra crap that has zero effect on anything else at the door.
Merlin13KAGL wrote: »This part's for youAsking ZoS to read your post does not increase the likelihood your post does/does not get read by ZoS.
...
Write your post.
This part's for people replying (if it applies)and this part's for everyoneTagging the @name of every Mod you can think of does not increase the odds of your post getting read or you getting a specialized response.
...
Write your responses.Leave the extra crap that has zero effect on anything else at the door.
How ever spot-on your thread may be, passive-aggressive, facebook style, read/copy/respond-or-this-happens titles cause your message to be taken less seriously, not more.
It's quite clear it's for ZoS and the community - your in their forum.