Well 2017 is coming to an end in ESO. It wasn't a great time for the game. They stepped in it bigtime with Morrowind making such a mess of the combat system that many of their most important players, who were basically highly effective unpaid PR for them, actually left game right after being flown is by ZOS to preview the new content. PR disaster followed by the actual fallout in the player base from the changes which included a serious die-off of the raiding community, and a lot of singed whiskers in the casual community from the lack of eso plus playability and the extra $40 demanded. This all lead to very poor summer numbers (even for summer numbers) and despite the enjoyability of Clockwork city in the fall it did not seem to bring back the players that Wrothgar had last year. The retread Halloween and Christmas events were also less than enthusiastically embraced though the crown drop event seems to have gotten good play. So all in all 2017 went for ZOS about like for the NFL. In light of that here is my 2018 wishlist / new years resolution for ZOS.

1) Fix heavy attack scaling and animations. I have harped on this since Morrowind beta. Heavy attacks are now basically the way resources are managed in ESO. This makes their scaling and animation very important. They do not scale in an either an intuitive or a rational way though and the animation duration is significantly different than the attack duration. I cover this in depth with a 100ms breakdown in this thread.

I do actually think ZOS will address this, this year as they cryptically addressed some heavy attack fixes in their year ahead talky talk. This is vital as their whole combat and resource management system is basically broken now with heavy attack scaling being off.

2) Cheat engine must be taken more seriously and dealt with. It has become a little of a joke in the PVP community that so and so is getting a cheat engine time out. It is like cheating in nascar where if your not cheating your not trying. That is not healthy. I also think that is is causing secondary issues with ZOS using PC as it's beta platform but getting less than useful results when it comes to scaling and balance decisions because much of their data is based on folks that are juicing.

3) Divergence between the ceiling and floor DPS wise has continued and is at truly amazing levels. I am now told that the top guys are well over 60k. My raid guilds all folded at Morrowind and I haven't cared much but mine is around 20k with my old gear and rotation (not the BIS either way anymore but still very tight timing wise) in 4 man stuff and I frequently got PUGS in the dailies event who were more than happy to illustrate less than 5k. In any case, divergence has clearly been on the rise all year and that is probably part of why the raid scene is so much less populated. The issue seems to be some combination of class / resource imbalance, group buffs being too powerful, difficulty of rotation timings and scaling of ideal builds, and CE use. I'm really not connected enough anymore to be able to put an exact finger on the magnitude of all the factors in this but the overall problem of divergence is clearly greater.

4) PVP long load screens. Seriously, we all know that you can get a long load screen bug where you start to string these 5 min load screens together one after the other. It has been 3 years. You have to figure out what is causing this and fix it. I should note that lag in general seems much better than in the past. This might all just be because a certain red guild who seemed to be running some lag inducing DDOS like software has quit for the time being though.

5) Allow skills and resources to scale differently in PVP otherwise you really will never balance anything and will just alternate between pissing off PVP and PVE players.

6) PVP reward structure is a mess. Since PVE combat sucks I have been spending more time in PVP. The rewarding of significant AP for captures has really made things more dynamic and objectives focused. That being said, don't ever get caught defending as, not only will you not get much AP, but you will probably never get any. Your guild will defend and wipe the enemy.... Onsies and twosies will continue to be killed every few min so that you will not get the tick. Transitus will be open so that every pug in your alliance will show up. You will leave and do something else because ain't nobody got time to wait 15 min to share a tiny tick with the whole alliance. Somebody might get the tick in a half hour or maybe a whole different enemy shows up and gets a big offensive tick. Who really knows. D ticks should be ticks that happen when the death happens, should only scale off enemy deaths (though it is amusing to get credit for your own first wipe) and should probably also include some credit for destroyed siege equipment. Right now D ticks, are irrationally calculated, hard and uncertain to actually get, and small.

On the subject of AP distribution. If you don't want alliance A and B to become one big purple alliance and beat up on yellow it is stupid too just make it against the "rules." Nobody follows the rules, people do what benefits them. If you want 3 way balance you have to both make it more rewarding for an alliance to have the most stuff and also more rewarding to kill a player or capture stuff from the alliance with the most stuff. I'm sure if you really think about it you can figure out a multiplier based on the amount of stuff your alliance currently has to add to AP gain and another multiplier based on the amount of stuff the alliance of the player you are killing or the keep you are taking to multiply. The goal should be to have more stuff than other alliances and to take as much of it as you can from whoever currently has the most stuff.

You should also know that your current calculator for campaign points is stupid. Evaluation every forever and the same points for a resource as a keep. Also, why should I, an individual player really care? In 30 days some alliance will win and get slightly better rewards. It makes little rational sense to care about this since most of the points will be rewarded when I am asleep or at work.

The PVP reward structure is, on the whole, not really very good at fostering the objective based all vs all alliance war that it is supposed to foster.

7) 2 capturable cities behind the gates deep in yellow territory zero in red or blue = yellow looses every campaign. F-U ZOS for that crap.

8) The 2017 trials have gained a reputation for being rather a mess. The guys I do know still raiding are not impressed when it comes to mechanics design, glitiching/broken mechanics, scaling, and stability. It may be a good thing that less folks are playing endgame content as I hear it is less than impressive and has also had long stretches of time where you could bug it out pretty easily. You might want to fix this... or not. I feel like in a year where 2 new trials and some hard dungeons were introduced this stuff has never mattered less.

9) I'm hoping for a morrowind type chapter that doesn't come with combat changes so loathsome that I have to boycot it. (I'm also hoping that for $40 it is much larger than Morrowind was.)

10) I'm hoping for a repeat of how much fun and how interesting looking clockwork city was.

11) I'm hoping that rather than making new trials they spruce up the mechanics, scaling and items in the current one so that I actually want the stuff and find the gameplay to get it compelling.

12) I am hoping for 4 man dungeons not so long and difficult that nobody ever wants to do them.

13) I am hoping for bigger item limits on houses, lots of storage that I can buy with writ vouchers from the new housing storage, quick change armor dummies, and hopefully some new houses that don't suck (That tiny repetitive priory interior, yuck).

14) Lastly, fire Wrobel.