I guess a lot of people probably forgot that after the Craglorn update more than 1 year the end game was PvP. There were nothing new in the game. If it wasnt PvP I would definitely quit.

I'm noticing several responses that fit into dialectic patterns:

1. "If the only content was PvE content, I would run out of things to do."
2. "Exploring the world keeps me occupied."

1. "A game needs a competitive aspect, or I see it as a waste of time."
2. "I have zero interest in PvP or competing against other players."

1. "An MMO needs an end-game to hold players' interest."
2. "I just want to play Skyrim with my friends."

I think the clustering of these responses, which are often diametrically opposed to each other, reflects first-and-foremost the classic categories of MMO players (found here).

We have:

- People who are essentially playing Skyrim online, and not doing veteran or PvP content
- People who are focused on PvP
- People who are focused on veteran/"end-game" PvE content
- Social players who just want to connect with their friends

I realize these Venn diagrams overlap, and some people move among the four groups, but those are the four core constituencies.

I know where I fit in. I'm a PvE only player who'd rather quit the game than PvP, and who has only casual interest in "end-game" content. In terms of Bartle's taxonomy, I'm primarily an "Explorer," with a secondary interest in Achievement. That means I fit into the first group primarily, with some dabbling in the third.

I also prefer cooperative boardgames like Pandemic over competitive ones. Competition doesn't drive my gameplay at all. And I enjoy city-building games and sandbox games far more than first-person shooters. I've spent as much time building my settlements in Fallout 4 as I have running quests. Hence why I liked Homestead so much .

In addition, I have limited playtime. Generally an hour a day, a few days a week. Since I also play alt's, and enjoy crafting, this means that there is plenty of content to hold my attention without me having to touch PvP or veteran content. There's always something interesting for me to do, some goal to work toward, or some engaging task.

Clearly several other posters in this thread are the same, and it's equally clear that a significant number of others posting here find this approach virtually incomprehensible. How do we build a game where both groups are satisfied, or is such a thing possible? If not, will anyone build a game that really is a PvE-only themepark?

Rainwhisper wrote: »

Uriel_Nocturne wrote: »

For me? Absolutely.

I started playing MMORPG's when there was zero PvP in ANY of them. I'm here for the PvE (though not so much logging in any more that often), and the PvE alone keeps me in all of the MMORPG's that I play.

I don't PvP at all in ANY of my MMO's.

Purely IMO, I don't believe that PvP of any sort should have ever been introduced to MMORPG's.

Why aren't we friends in-game?

We probably should be.

To answer you OP,

The game would have died on the PC side, long before the console versions came out if there was no PvP. The trials in this game aren't hard enough to keep hardcore PvE'ers progressing, interested and farming for gear.

The only reason it's even viable today is because many other MMO's with PvP aren't off the ground yet. Once some of those start to happen, you'll see a rapid decline into a vast waste land of nothing but NPC's in a zone for hours and no one left to interact with. It'll become harder and harder to retain or obtain new people to do trials and even dungeons with.

I used to be a hardcore PvE raider. Did it for many years. But after you start to learn the in's and out's of PvP, and get over the fact of dying a lot while you learn? It's way more exciting and compelling to kill an enemy. It takes way more skill, and your opponent isn't learned to a point you know exactly what it's going to do and when.

Oh and my last point? I came to this game strictly FOR the PvP. I played in beta and was hooked the minute I saw siege equipment being used to take down a keep wall. That gave a realism that no other game I know of has. Unless you count DAoC, but I didn't stay with that one long enough to see it.

Rohamad_Ali wrote: »

Lord of the Rings is a huge title . Big PVE community . They avoided PVP to make player vs monster characters instead , thinking their gigantic following and the amount of roleplayers would hold the title for years . Now that's a name brand bigger then any other in fantasy ...

They couldn't of been more wrong . Within two years massive boredom and closing of servers despite consistent and large PVE updates . Food for thought . Lesson learned is don't underestimate the amount of PVP players out there . It's more then then a lot of people think .

It's hard to make money from a game system that it's basically balanced around killing a thinking enemy.

To provide the fair balance, you lose out on direct changes you can give a tangible value to but they forget most of the streamers these days are looking for conflict situations. That's why most of twitch is playing dota, battlegrounds, mobas, etc. People want interesting encounters and this urge for content is cheaply made via PvP.

PvP brings in huge marketing for zero effort. I'm surprised more MMOs don't go PvP-only.

DaveMoeDee wrote: »

hmsdragonfly wrote: »

DaveMoeDee wrote: »

hmsdragonfly wrote: »

Coop Skyrim, while will be amazing, won't last long. There's no incentive for people to sub, they will just buy the game, play through, and move to other games...

Not if they:

1. Keep releasing DLC for years
2. Store progress online, making characters and progress persistent

There is little incentive to sub right now anyway, unless we are talking about crafting bags. If that is the incentive, then they can just make inventory management suck like it does here.

If they are also going to milk the whales with cosmetics, they need everything online and persistent.

hmsdragonfly wrote: »

...
You can find better lore elsewhere: Mass Effect, Warhammer, TES single player games, Fallout etc
...

This comment misses the main appeal of ESO. You can't separate the 'TES single player games'. It is the same world and they are developing the same lore. That is the #1 attraction of ESO. Fleshing out Tamriel further. TES single player games can't have better lore because it is the same lore.

That is why it makes so much sense to have all this PvE DLC. It is full of lore. Adding PvP, coop, and large group play are all nice game modes to add to an Elder Scrolls game, but I for one have no interest in spending a cent on such things. What I appreciate is having persistent characters and the world's state stored online in a way that I can't tweak with console commands. I will play all DLC because it is more of Tamriel.

Of course we are talking about the crafting bag. This is why I said everything is tied in together: If it's just about completing quests, there's very little use of alchemy, provisioning, or any of the trade skills, because you don't need any of them to play through the content. There's no need for theorycrafting and making effective builds. Crafters have no work, there's no point in becoming a crafter. As a result, even if the inventory sucks even more, the craftbag is useless, so, there's no reason to sub. If people don't sub and buy stuffs from crownstore, ZOS simply can't generate enough money to maintain the server and develop new content at the same time, they will have to cut down the cost, so on the brightest scenario, the quality of the new content will be greatly affected. The darkest scenario: the devs will stop developing content all together and the game will be in life support mode.

Yes, ESO's lore is great, it's why I buy this game in the first place, I will also play all DLCs because it is more of Tamriel. I am a TES fan. However, if there's nothing else beside the lore and the questing, I won't sub, and after finishing the storyline I will praise the game and then simply stop playing it, go back to my other games. A dead MMO doesn't generate profit, without profit, the game will go into life support mode and there won't be any further content development.

I think you don't understand how people like me play. I don't do anything competitive. I go with a guild in PvP now and then, but mostly for leveling or for hanging out. I do not min-max at all. I don't do trials, or even many vet dungeons. I have ~520 CP and 5 characters so far at max (only one former v16), so I have played a decent amount. Yet I do all crafting. I have major inventory problems.

You have a major disconnect in your comment "Crafters have no work, there's no point in becoming a crafter." I am not looking for work. My main is max is all 6, finished all research ages ago, and I have few other max level crafters in each craft. My main tries to learn all motifs, though I don't care what my gear looks like. I actually do periodically sub to move mats into crafting bags. I subbed one month for DB for that very reason, and one month during the anniversary where mats were raining down (where I also knocked out most of the remaining DB achievements).

You also miss something in your cost of business calculus. If there are a lot of people like me, they make a lot of revenue when DLC drops, but I don't tax the servers because I don't do much in between DLC (or events) and I don't PvP (which is taxing on infrastructure). People who only PvP are bigger headaches for infrastructure, while also having no interest in many of the DLC. Subbing can also be pointless if they aren't looting mats. So PvP players can more easily stick around as freeloaders compared to the players eagerly awaiting the continuation of the narrative. People like me also don't care about balance. Heck, part of the fun of the game is trying each class. ZOS doesn't have to waste dev time responding to my subjective complaints because I don't make such complaints.

There are a lot of players like this who are active and I'd argue there may be more than anyone realizes cause these are the players who keep playing regardless of changes that seem to upset niche groups

I would never have touched the game if they hadn´t advertised it´s endgame as open world 3 faction pvp similar to daoc.

Appleblade wrote: »

PathwayM wrote: »

#ESOshouldbePvPonly

Totally read that as PvPony.

That's a much different game.

That's what I was going for

Minno wrote: »

Rohamad_Ali wrote: »

Lord of the Rings is a huge title . Big PVE community . They avoided PVP to make player vs monster characters instead , thinking their gigantic following and the amount of roleplayers would hold the title for years . Now that's a name brand bigger then any other in fantasy ...

They couldn't of been more wrong . Within two years massive boredom and closing of servers despite consistent and large PVE updates . Food for thought . Lesson learned is don't underestimate the amount of PVP players out there . It's more then then a lot of people think .

It's hard to make money from a game system that it's basically balanced around killing a thinking enemy.

To provide the fair balance, you lose out on direct changes you can give a tangible value to but they forget most of the streamers these days are looking for conflict situations. That's why most of twitch is playing dota, battlegrounds, mobas, etc. People want interesting encounters and this urge for content is cheaply made via PvP.

PvP brings in huge marketing for zero effort. I'm surprised more MMOs don't go PvP-only.

The reason why is because they know a pvp mmo only would fail hard and fast. I don't pvp at all what so ever but I do believe that having pvp in a game is very healthy for an mmo (been playin em a long time). Where ZOS goes wrong is trying to balance both without seperation. Every other mmo has "balanced" the two seperately because they learned the hard way that you have to. Someone at ZOS is just too stubborn to see why yet.

It's not fair to either side to have to deal with buffs/nerfs because of the other.

ofSunhold wrote: »

@CyrusArya wrote: »

Rainwhisper wrote: »

Clearly several other posters in this thread are the same, and it's equally clear that a significant number of others posting here find this approach virtually incomprehensible. How do we build a game where both groups are satisfied, or is such a thing possible? If not, will anyone build a game that really is a PvE-only themepark?

It's very, very simple. Don't concern yourself with things that don't concern you, and learn to accept that if you don't play all content you won't get all the rewards. Full stop.

I feel like those three sentences are the correct answer to about 10 percent of the threads on this forum.

applause

Just 10?? Unless you count the other 80 as troll threads (leaving 10% decent threads) then you may be right.

ofSunhold wrote: »

@CyrusArya wrote: »

Rainwhisper wrote: »

Clearly several other posters in this thread are the same, and it's equally clear that a significant number of others posting here find this approach virtually incomprehensible. How do we build a game where both groups are satisfied, or is such a thing possible? If not, will anyone build a game that really is a PvE-only themepark?

It's very, very simple. Don't concern yourself with things that don't concern you, and learn to accept that if you don't play all content you won't get all the rewards. Full stop.

I feel like those three sentences are the correct answer to about 10 percent of the threads on this forum.

applause

That's true, to a point.

The problem, and I believe the source of the rift between the PvE and PvP populace is that they -do- concern one another. As I've mentioned before, so long as the two systems (PvE and PvP) intersect they're going to drag on one another. Changes to the way skills function in order to balance PvP will affect how characters play in PvE and vice versa.

I think the recent changes to resource sustainability have really frustrated a lot of people, and the reason for these changes is perceived to be largely a result of too much sustain in PvP settings, leading to PvE players having to completely rejigger their builds.

The result is that now you've got these threads where frustrated people are asking, "Do we even need this?"

If you want to build a game where both groups are satisfied, you have to build a game where the systems don't intersect; a game where skills and gear behave differently in PvP than they do in PvE and that changes to one system won't affect the other. But even that has problems. For one, it's double the work for the dev team. Two, it makes life rough for the people who enjoy a little of both.

Would ESO have been Viable without PvP?

ESO has PvP?

All kidding aside, I now a lot of people who don't bother with PvP, and i'm fairly sure there are more PvE players than PvP players, so yes I would say it would be a viable game without PvP, in fact, for me and people who only PvE here it would probably be a better game, because the game's constantly being balanced around how classes interact with other classes in PvP, and most of the time detrimentally for PvE players.

ESO originally was created as a PvE game, PvP was an afterthought to appeal to the usual % of players who only PvP and care very little about content, lore, or questing.

Where ZoS went wrong "like all MMO's" The started catering to the PvP'ers and started balancing the game in an attempt to make every class exactly the same so PvP would not be overly in faver of one class having an advantage over another.
This always kills the PvE part of the game, and for solo and casual players makes it difficult to finish quest, and miss out on dungeons and other contents​ in game.

We have seen throughout the years how PvP is a plague that will always ruin a good PvE MMO with to much balancing that effects the entire game system.

PvP should always be a stand alone separation from "normal" game play, in this way they can adjust the PvP part of the game without effecting the main game.

Unfortunately almost every MMO uses the same coding system wide, so nerfing a class will effect the PvE as well as PvP. What use to be an awesome group, gets killed off... What use to be the Holy Trinity becomes two of everything to compensate for the nerfed classes...

This becomes time consuming trying to get a good group together to do a good dungeons run... And that throws the working class, and those that play for fun due to IRL time restrictions out of a lot of the game content.

Personally​ my husband and I do PvP now and then, but mostly are big on questing and exploring... We are fortunate than we have each other and can mini-group so we do not have to solo or beg to get in a group... We tend to hybrid our characters to off set each other to make it where we cover the basic to get by... Tank/DPS & Healer/DPS...

Ballancing a game for PvP will always be an ugly subject.
Both sides of the fence will have good points as to nerf, and leaving original character stats alone.

Simple answer is to separate the game...
Reality is all is going to boil down to codings, and server resourse.... Time = money, bottom lines, and appealing to as much of the masses to buy into the game.

Speaking of which..... See you all in Morrowind =^,.,^=