5th Anniversary Event Feedback - the Good & the Bad

VaranisArano · May 2019

Congratulations on ESO' 5th Anniversary! I love this game and I'm happy to see it continue. Overall, I enjoyed the 5th Anniversary Event, but I've got some feedback to offer as well.

First off, I understand that its the 5th Anniversary so it has to be BIGGER, looooonger, and more *exciting* than any other Anniversary Event. Its pretty much a Marketing gimmick, so I expected this year to be more gimmicky than most, and it was.

Event Tickets
The Good: All we had to do to get our event tickets was eat cake. So someone who wanted to skip the dailies all together could still get the event tickets.
The Bad: The "Collect Tickets the first time you eat cake or Lose Them" mechanic is annoying and resulted in a lot of frustration. Losing tickets if you were at the 12 ticket cap is also frustrating.

Comment: After the issues we've had with getting event tickets from events since the start of the Indriks, I'm very pleased to see the Devs settling on a simple method of getting the tickets. However, there are two major issues with Event Tickets because of the intentional cap of 12 tickets. 1) Going over the limit of 12 tickets results in lost tickets, rather than a chance to buy an item, and then collect tickets. 2) Failing to claim tickets at the first opportunity also means lost tickets. Its not very user friendly...and unfortunately its punishing user error in a way that encourages players to buy Event Tickets from the Crown Store to make up for lost tickets. Its basically monetizing a system that the Devs designed in such a way that it is not forgiving of user error.

Rewards
The Good: The rewards were fantastic, as usual.

Flooding the market with motifs is great catch-up for newer players who haven't been accumulating motifs for 5 years. This gives a huge boost to crafters and people who like creating outfits.
Style pages dropped consistently, frequently enough that players had duplicates to sell or trade.
Good selection of other rewards in the boxes, especially the Summerset alchemy reagents.
The Impresario sold all the event exclusive style pages.

The Bad: the Worm Cult motif was extremely rare for an Anniversary-exclusive motif. (I got 3 WC pages out of 1,092 dailies)

Comment: I tracked my motif and style pages drops, and although 1,092 dailies is not actually statistically significant, I was very pleased with the drop rates. I got 178 motifs. I also got 100 style pages, ending the event with only 3 missing style pages (1 Tharn, 2 Sai Sahan). Obviously, players who got less style pages than I might have a very different opinion.

Rewards Vs. Effort
The Good: Week 1 & 5 were identical with past Anniversary events.

The Bad: The Reward Vs. Effort was very, very uneven during this event. Week 4 was the most time-consuming for the least amount of boxes.

Week 1
This was fine. Crafting Writs are very easy to do on multiple characters.

Week 2
The Good: I met a lot of helpful people in zone chat sharing WB quests.

The Bad: Players who aren't ESO+ members or don't own the DLC/Chapters got shafted, hard, only being able to do a max of 15 daily quests this week IF they got people to share the Undaunted quests with them. The choice of WB and Delves quests also excluded some quests that could have fit. Since "Close 3 Geysers" counted, why not count "Close 3 Dark Anchors for the Fighters Guild. Hew's Bane was left out because "Rye's Reacquisitions" didn't count. There were also some odd quests that DID count: The Slag Town and Blackfeather Court dailies in Clockwork City counted, which makes zero sense for the theme of the week.

Comment: If ZOS does another "WB & Delve" event, I'd like to see more thoughtfulness given to what quests count. Additionally, base-game-only players ought to have access through the Fighters Guild and Mages Guild quests.

Week 3
The Good: Cyrodiil is a base game zone designed for PVP, so it was nice to see PVP included in the Anniversary celebrating the entire game. Similarly since Battlegrounds in now base game, ZOS did well to add BG quests after the PTS.

The Bad: Once again, ZOS failed to prepare for the influx of players to Cyrodiil, resulting in clogged queues and creating new campaigns after there were issues, when this same problem occurs every Midyear Mayhem. and ought to be predictable. ZOS has also failed to carry through with some Cyrodiil infrastructure changes to reduce trolling: Resources had their doors removed to prevent load-locking deaths, but quest-giver buildings have not. Battleground queues are still creating matches that never start, forcing players to take a 20 minute deserter penalty.

Comment: As a PVEer turned PVPer, I'm a firm believer in the value of players being expected to play ALL of the game if they want ALL of the rewards and also that ALL of Cyrodiil is a PVP zone that everyone in it queued up willing for so they ought to expect PVP. That being said, I think ZOS needs to be consistent with quest giver buildings. Either make those builds no-combat zones (as in the quest giver buildings in IC) or remove the doors and make them obviously open for combat without load-locking (as in Cyrodiil Resources and most Cyrodiil quest-givers.).

Week 4
The Good: Its like a mini-Undaunted event + trials.

The Bad: Groupfinder is still broken for Dungeons. Of all the weeks, its the most time-consuming in return for very few boxes.

Comment: I realize that "technically" it wasn't necessary to use groupfinder to do the event, but seriously, its embarrassing that its still breaking during anytime with high demand. Groupfinder is an important part of the game's infrastructure that allows players to find groups without a guild or zone chat, or backfill players who leave without having to be in a guild. I find it unsatisfactory that your solution to Groupfinder breaking every time lots of players want to do dungeons is essentially "Form a group manually from guild or zone chat and travel manually to the Dungeon."

Week 5
The Good: This week really went back to the freedom of previous Anniversary events. Players can do whatever daily they want and get rewarded for it. That's awesome!
The Really Good: Hey, I'm not going to complain about the ESO+ trial weekend falling right on this weekend. That was an awesome chance for ALL players to do ALL of dailies, DLCs included!

Comment: Next year, this is how I'd like the entire event to go. Sure, it means players won't try out as much of the game, but freedom to play how we like and get rewarded for that is what really makes the anniversary event special for me.

Improvements for Future Events

Keep the simplicity of obtaining Tickets.
Change collecting Event Tickets so that players don't lose them if they are at the 12 ticket cap or don't collect them at their first opportunity.
Event Exclusive rewards like the Worm Cult Motif should not be incredibly rare.
If an event is limited to certain quests following a theme, be thoughtful about which quests count, and be mindful of base-game-only players.
Prepare Cyrodiil for an influx of players beforehand by adding new campaigns for both CP and No CP, and fix quest giver buildings to prevent deaths from load-locking, either removing the doors or making the inside buildings safe, to remain consistent with changes to Resource towers.
Game-breaking issues like Dungeon Groupfinder and Battlegrounds Groupfinder need to be fixed before doing events that involve those areas of the game - even if they aren't "technically" necessary to participate in the event.

Finally, while the 5th Anniversary was good, and certainly BIGGER, and loooooonger, and more *exciting* than every other Anniversary Event...

I really enjoyed the simple freedom in Week 5 to do whatever daily I wanted and get rewarded for it. That, to me, is what the Anniversary is all about: Playing this game I love and getting cool stuff.

To Everyone Else
What was Good and Bad about the 5th Anniversary Event for you?
What improvements would you suggest for next year?

Edaphon · May 2019

What was bad? We didn't get any statistics like last year!

https://www.elderscrollsonline.com/en-us/news/post/26349

ESO Turns Four!

In these four years, we've been proud to hit some big-time milestones, including 10 million players last year. That said, the ESO community has hit some pretty amazing milestones of their own. Check out these incredible in-game statistics from PC/Mac launch until today:

Total number of monsters killed: 15,881,472,493
Total number of players killed: 1,346,033,201
Total number of Soul Gems used: 1,183,836,570
Total number of quests completed: 2,064,266,404
Total number of items crafted: 7,415,834,454
Total number of achievements earned: 1,145,234,018

And, finally, here's some additional numbers that might surprise:

Most popular race: High Elf (14.98% of all characters)
Most popular Alliance: Ebonheart Pact (36.33% of all characters)
Most PvP Kills by Alliance: Ebonheart Pact (122,490,253 kills)
Highest unpaid bounty: 248,655,731 gold
Highest paid bounty: 362,324 gold

Starlock · May 2019

I mostly agree with this, with a few addendums.

Week 3

In another thread somewhere, I made a somewhat radical suggestion for the PvP week - reward boxes should only drop from actual PvP activities, including repeatable ones (up to the usual limit of 50 dailies per character). If the idea is to encourage players to try PvP, reward boxes shouldn't be dropping at all from what are essentially PvE quests.

Additionally, something that could be really special for the anniversary would be an anniversary-exclusive PvE Cyrodiil for the players who just want to do the PvE quests there. I don't know how easy it would be to implement this (I suspect it probably isn't) but many players, myself included, would be all over this especially given it would be limited time.

Queues and Game Stability

It sounds like players' experiences with this vary a lot. Personally, I had no problems with dungeon queues or getting into Cyrodiil the few times I dropped in there to run PvE quests (I can't speak to battlegrounds queues). This was playing XBOX NA server both during peak times and during off-peak times. I don't know what it means when some players have been having issues and others aren't, but it probably makes the solution more complicated.

BmcD73 · May 2019

Great summary. Totally agree

Farscape76 · May 2019

Very well stated OP
Thank you for taking the time to compile this.

Darkhorse1975 · May 2019

Great review! I am in total agreement! It would be nice if the style pages were account bankable.

Korah_Eaglecry · May 2019

Im just done with events and the ever increasing demand to grind them. I want to enjoy the game and the events should be celebrations of that. Instead theyre tedious, stressful and all around not fun anymore.

IzzyStardust · May 2019

The pledge and trial one was a nuisance; since you couldn’t get the box unless you did the pledge or a trial - but ONLY once a week, for the trials ones. Trials ones should have been every clear, not just weekly.

BretonMage · May 2019

Good: I liked being able to buy style pages with tickets. To me that was one of the real benefits of logging on regularly. I personally didn't love the styles themselves, but appreciated the ability to buy something that wasn't dependent on RNG. So sick of RNG.

Bad: The motif drop rate was not spectacular and I had characters which did not get any recipes/motifs at all on certain days. This did lead to some frustration.

Cpt_Teemo · May 2019

Would have rather had 3-4 weeks of all dailies counting than 1 week of individual dailies then 1 week of all dailies

kylewwefan · May 2019

I got the week 1 styles and that was it. Kind of bummed. There was so much stuff to do, I basically shut down and don’t do any of it. Overwhelming nonsense.

gronoxvx · May 2019

My recommendation is to not have it run for 5 weeks. It made it so much more of a grind and runs the risk of players burning out at a much faster rate than normal.

Jayne_Doe · May 2019

I agree that the WC pages were far too rare this time around. Motifs in general seemed to drop less often, though still with good regularity. I think that had to do with the Outfit Styles also being in the mix.

On XB NA, I already collected WC last year, so I wasn't specifically working to get them, but I only ended up with 2 WC pages to sell.

On PC NA, I didn't play much during last year's event, but I still got 3 or 4 pages. This year, I only got 1 page, which fortunately I didn't know. I had thought I would complete my collection this year, but I don't have the funds to pay the prices that will be charged for these based on how rare they were. I know I collected fewer boxes on PC than XB, but still, to only get 1, when I did 56 crafting writ dailies in weeks 1 and 5 (plus a fair number of WBs in week 2 and Undaunted dailies in week 3), is a bit ridiculous. Esp. when I got 3 or 4 last year only doing crafting dailies for less than half the event.

I also liked being able to eat cake for tickets, which meant I could completely skip Week 3. It did mean, however, that I had to consciously think - did I eat my cake yet today? Not a big deal, but I wonder if any players missed out simply because they forgot to eat their cake.

It was great to be encouraged to do different activities for this event, rather than just the crafting dailies I did during previous events. And, giving us a final week where all dailies counted and rewarded all style pages was welcome. I also agree that week 2 was inconsistent in what counted as a WB/delve daily.

On a personal note, for the second year in a row, I didn't get a single purple furnishing plan to drop (outside of the CW purple that dropped like candy last year). Got tons of blue ones, and a few purple provisioning recipes, but the purple furnishing plans remained elusive. I also didn't get a cipher, but I know those would have been extremely rare. I did get a good number of Clam Gall and Mother of Pearl, as well as Perfect Roe and Potent Nirn. Heck, I even got several zircon grains/platings, which are rarer than chromium. My best luck, however, was to get both Welkynar chests and staves to drop, saving me several hundred thousand gold. I'm all up-to-date on motif knowledge for several weeks!

azjuwelz · May 2019

Good: I like that this event encouraged me to try pledges and group dungeons for the first time, though I had a mixed experience trying to complete them. (Mostly due to random queue and being sub-CP160 grouped with other sub-CP160 with no real tanks or healers.)

I was also VERY happy about the timing of the ESO+ freebie. I only wish I could have stuffed even more into the craft bag while I had access!

And I managed to defeat all the wb's in Vardenfell with the shares, so that felt good.

Bad: The whining about the quest givers inside buildings in Cyrodil. I avoided them as soon as they became ambush spots and had fun doing other things in the area.

Pops_ND_Irish · May 2019

Thought the whole think was great. Maybe a little long but great

Evergnar · May 2019

In the future they should leave the rewards open and not locked behind specific content for this event.

It was good event though with legit rewards. Ending it with rewards from any content really made a difference.

anadandy · May 2019

Great write up. My only addition has to do with the event tickets and the cap.

I didn't want the berries for this evolution, and the only companion style I really wanted (as in willing to buy if I didn't get it) was Sai Sahan, which didn't drop until Week 4 - so I had two weeks of tickets I either had to just forgo, since I was at cap, or spend on things I didn't want. I ended up spending them - which I realize is fine - but felt like a waste, especially since I'd have liked to save them up for the rumored Second Legion outfit style.

I guess what I'm saying is, I don't understand the reasoning for the stingy event ticket cap. I know they want people to participate and not "stock up" but 12 seems too low when items cost 5/10 tickets each.

edit: spelling matters

Jayne_Doe · May 2019

Evergnar wrote: »

In the future they should leave the rewards open and not locked behind specific content for this event.

It was good event though with legit rewards. Ending it with rewards from any content really made a difference.

I believe this is exactly what they will do in future. This year's event was an anomaly - because of the 5-year anniversary, they wanted to do 5 weeks and came up with highlighting different activities in the game during each week.

I'm pretty sure they'll go back to the usual format for next year - 2 weeks of any daily dropping an anniversary box, which has a chance of dropping any of the event rewards.

Tavore1138 · May 2019

Starlock wrote: »

Week 3

In another thread somewhere, I made a somewhat radical suggestion for the PvP week - reward boxes should only drop from actual PvP activities, including repeatable ones (up to the usual limit of 50 dailies per character). If the idea is to encourage players to try PvP, reward boxes shouldn't be dropping at all from what are essentially PvE quests.

For me the only concerns apart from generally overloaded servers, crashes and roll backs in a couple of zones were the PvP problems for week 3 and to a lesser degree week 5.

If you are going to encourage players who do not normally play PvP into PvP areas then you need to try to avoid screwing up the serious campaigns in the way they did this time.

First the additional campaigns should have been available on day one - the overload was utterly predictable. Not being prepared was pretty shocking.

Second I agree with this poster that players should have been encouraged when in a PvP zone to actually play PvP to get their rewards. Doing the PvP dailies and even including an anniversary box with rewards for the worthy would have made so much more sense and would have lessened the genuine frustration of committed PvPers who saw their campaigns pop locked, their allies unable to get in and no-one actually playing PvP. I didn't approve of the teams that went out hunting PvE players and camping on NPCs but I'd be lying if I said I couldn't understand their sense of annoyance - I just think they had the wrong target.

Because the way it was implemented seemed almost to be trying to drive a wedge between PvP and PvE players. In a close campaign on Vivec EU I suspect it probably changed the results and an event should not do that unless it is by having MORE PvP not less.

I lay this squarely at the feet of ZoS here who cannot deny that this type of thing has been a problem in previous Midyear Mayhem events and this event was scoped to push even more people into PvP for rewards they could not get outside.

I'd like to think they will have learned lessons from this but I don't hold out much hope.

FlopsyPrince · May 2019

The low rates of yellow special event drops in Week 2 kept me from even bothering to try Week 3 and Week 4 events. I HATE being pushed into PvP as well, especially since I am lousy at it.

The drop rates for the event yellows ended up being better toward the end of Week 5 than it was at the start of the week.

The rate itself could have been lowered, but spread out more, along with some mechanism to make it much more likely to get a drop we didn't already have. That would have helped the feeling of progress and made the event feel like much less of a grind. (I mean the Prophet/Lyris/Abnur/Sai stuff, whatever it is properly called.)

I am glad it is done now, even if I didn't get all the purples I realized I could have gotten.

The feeling of too little dropping, especially in earlier weeks, left it with a worse taste than it should have had.

Remember, perception is as important as reality!

max_only · May 2019

I agree with this assessment. Especially that “load locking” griefing aka “pvloadscreen” needs to be changed to either, remove the door or make it like inside IC quest buildings.

Sylvermynx · May 2019

Eh, I got a lot of WC pages. I'd have to dig around to figure out what they were - but I don't even like them so don't care.

I got all the Companions motifs over week 1 and 5, and have MANY of all (except Cadwell) to give away on PC/NA if people want them.

Loved the double xp. Hated the number of people in the way everywhere *sigh* (yes, yes I do play this game solo and as single-player - I don't group with my mega ping, and.... really.... I'm a hermit....)

I honestly can't think of anything I wish was different. It all worked just fine for me.

Osteos · May 2019

Overall I am very pleased with the Anniversary Event.

I'm glad that they tied the tickets to eating the cake instead of the first box. I really felt like I was free to participate or not participate in whatever the weeks activities were. I logged in everyday but skipped getting boxes a lot. I do not feel like I missed out on anything.

Trading with friends I was able to complete all the companion styles and I still had a lot of duplicates that I have mailed to friends who weren't able to participate.

In all I think I learned about 50 new motif pages I got from Jubilee boxes. I was very excited to get the Welkynar Chest and Legs and the Huntsman Chest

I also bought a number of motifs, which I never do, because the prices are reasonable right now and I was one or two away from completing the motif.

I do not think how the boxes drop in Cyrodiil needs to change however. I do think people need to learn some self control. If you do not like doing something, do not do it. If you chose to do it anyway, accept the consequences of your actions.

SweepsAllClowns · May 2019

My EU account was stuck for the whole anniversary event so I missed everything, I'm extremely salted up and bitter! But no worries I'm able to buy the tickets with crowns and just in few minutes search and buy all the motifs from traders as soon as my game starts working again, I'm sure there's still plenty on the markets whenever I get back in the game again. I started on NA server and played for few weeks mostly pvp to level up 2 characters, I got some reward boxes, but tried to avoid thinking about all the missed tickets and rewards on EU server so didn't check too much what I got with my NA characters. Positive overall is that it couldn't have gone much worse for me, it was my third event missed in a row so I'm looking forward to keep my amazing streak going on!

Asha_11_ESO · May 2019

Overall I thoroughly enjoyed the event. Took advantage of the xp to level new characters. Went to town both weeks writs were up, and added around 200 motif chapters to my main crafter. Collected all the outfits, berries for the luminous indrik, and the indrik pet.

I think there could've been better balance of drop rates in correlation with the effort/time required to obtain each anniversary box/chance at outfit and motif drops. Having 15 characters able to collect 7 boxes from writs for a total of 105 boxes/chances at outfits, in a couple hours, is vastly different from the amount of boxes you can get in the same time from the other weeks' events.

FierceSam · May 2019

Hey all

I pretty much agree with Varanis.

Overall very engaging, I had a lot of fun, but I am glad it’s finally finished. 5 weeks is right on the limit and it feels like the event has been going on forever.

Good points
Lots of people playing and having fun.
Lots of cooperation, quest sharing, group forming
Lots of people trying different content for the first time (and lots of people helping them)
Felt like there was a lot going on in all the zones I went to
Free motifs, who doesn’t like that? This is what got me into collecting motifs last year. I really like the way ZOS use this to encourage more people to collect the newer motifs
I liked the way event tickets were tied to cake. About the simplest way they could be distributed
I liked the Anything Goes week 5 (although all I did was crafting so I wouldn’t want all the weeks like this)
Lots of trading. Last year’s anniversary was what got me into trading, this year I made a load of gold.
FINALLY FINISHED THE ORSINIUM CITY SOLICITOR ACHIEVEMENT (that only took 2 years and now I don’t need her the bloody orc is hounding me like Stuga)

Meh
Really not into the Indriks (although I now have both in my stable of unnecessary mounts)
Not really bothered by the Companions styles (although I got them all and Abnur Tharn’s daggers are boss)
Significant variation in the time taken per box over the different weeks
Significant variation in the number of quests/boxes available over the different weeks - very noticeable, but I don’t know if this actually matters

Doh! Should be improved
No warning message/practice to deal with someone eating cake with 12 tickets. Losing 2 tickets because of this is just poor game design
Companion styles listing. Why did I have to go to the Impressario to discover which Companion styles I had/hadn’t got?
Communication. Why wasn’t there an easy way to discover which quests qualified each week? Super unfriendly for newer players

Bad - things that actively discourage players from playing
DON’T put PvE into the PvP world.
Toxic PvP garbage - week 3 was genuinely not enjoyable. And PvP players wonder why Cyrodiil is so empty.
Players/characters under L45 can’t do Undaunted quests - so week 4 was a bit of a kick in the pants for them
Dungeon finder DOESN’T work at busy times
Battleground grouper DOESN’T work at any time
Too many Anniversary boxes with crawlers and scrib jelly. Clearly they were packed by Pacruti
Companion styles don’t stack and can’t be put into banks - a 100% pain for everyone

Mathius_Mordred · May 2019

Great summary and review OP, agree on all points and emphasise the following.

Fix the group finder, not just for the event but the whole time, it's embarrassing to bring new people to this game to then have it not work most of the prime time.

Fix the Battle Ground issues, perhaps related to the group finder issues, at the very least remove the bloody penalty

Allow style pages to go to your bank please, I have a shed load I am waiting to sell but they are taking up valuable inventory spaces

You knew that more people would go to Cyrodiil on week 3 but only enabled more servers after it was obvious nobody could get in, how on Earth could this not have been foreseen? Next time more servers in advance please.

Make it impossible to earn new tickets if you have the max of 12 already, either that or increase the number you can hold, we all know why you've done it this way but it leaves a bad taste in people's mouth if they make a mistake, which is easy to do when you're eating your cake every two hours. If people want to buy tickets they will, don't manipulate them into doing it.

Overall a fantastic event, loved it very much and I'm now sad it's gone, was really enjoying the XP boost, levelling to 810 from my 550 is going to take so much longer now. Looking forward to the next event. Thanks.

Coatmagic · May 2019

First box last day of event got a fabricated cherry tree recipe

Clearing a daily I had half finished for a while, died 4 times in a row and got 10 spider eggs in the anniversary box.
Ten. Spider. Eggs. -_-

xD

Uryel · May 2019

VaranisArano wrote: »

The Good: The rewards were fantastic, as usual

Indeed. Opening like 50 boxes a day and getting stuff like 10 alkahest and 2 rekutas was awesome

Maybe I'm just unlucky, but I had far better rewards from ordinary boxes than from anniversary ones. Even their sheer number didn't make up for how lame their content was. Sure, I got some 5 companions motifs. A few of them. Nothing special about them, especially Abnur Tharn's as we already have a costume that looks exactly the same, but that's a nice addition. Got a few furniture plans and the occasional motif, too.

But way more often than not, on my 50 crates a day, I had ONE thing worthy of interest, maybe 2. Best day of all was the last, when I had 4. The rewards from regular, you-can-get-them-even-without-event boxes were ALOT better. And that makes the whole event underwhelming.

To be fair, I had given up on the event for 2 weeks, when the event called for PvP and dungeons to get boxes. I merely looked at what my wife got and she was about as lucky as I was. Last week, did tons of crafting to open more boxes, same *** luck.

Next time, I probably won't even bother trying. Not worth my time.

Knootewoot · May 2019

Haenk · May 2019

Only did the crafting stuff (first and last week), with one character, still I'm very pleased with the outcome. Nothing really exceptionally expensive, but a lot of stuff in the 5-10k range.