rfennell_ESO wrote: »

The whole debate misses the real problem imo.

ZOS never uses a chisel, it's always the sledgehammer.

Truer words have never been written.

Also dissenters act like we are asking to trash the whole thing. A little goes a long way when it comes to fans.

Tasear wrote: »

Business wise I just don't they could at this point back out of it at least for 2 more years. To them they did give bosmers stealth but missed contation of that in lore that makes them better theives. This is my assumption on current situation.

I think though if bosmers really were more conhevise in their desires for changes that don't overlap with khajitt then might have a chance at change, but right now I see it as too big of risk. This is just my assumption.

Business wise, they lost all support from me. I am no longer subed, I am not purchasing any more crowns, and I may or may not purchase Elsweyr, dependin on my wife's take on that. If she plays a Necromancer at launch, so will I. Else, I'll just wait.

They gutted my main. I have lost most of my interest for the game. Making players so disgruntled with the game that they will stop playing it, or at least stop investing in it, is not a good business decision. And I did invest quite a lot in the past. Would still if I had any reason to do so.

However, acknowledging a mistake and making up for it, that goes a LONG way in reedeeming a company in the eyes of their customers.

Sylvermynx wrote: »

I actually never expected the devs to comment on this. Initially I was shocked after 50 or so pages that they hadn't acknowledged this thread

To be fair, it is a small handful of people repeating the same message, and bumping a thread. What is there to say? Everyone else has moved on. The only reason why this thread is still alive is to keep the people that want to talk about it in one place, otherwise another thread will pop up and it will begin again, but with added salt due to the thread lock.

I mean, I get it. I still hate the last major Warden nerf, and left the game for a couple months because of that. Currently, I'm subbed to another game as well, but will pop back in to check out the Necro class to see if that draws me back for a while. For myself, the milk has been soured, as I've (like you guys) seen that there are a lot of changes that get rolled out that simply don't make sense.

They listen to $$$, not threads like this. If this was on anyone's radar, like the Warden nerf, it would have been mentioned somewhere, by anyone, but it hasn't. They've simply moved on.

Uryel wrote: »

Just occured to me yesterday... Better late than never... but they really, really have no idea how to balance anything. Look at that.

This is essentially the same passive racial trait, for different races. Only difference is the resist it is focused on, and the ressource it improves.

Argonians : Gain Immunity to the diseased status effect / Increases Max Health by 1000 and Disease Resistance by 2310

Bosmers : Gain immunity to the poisoned effect / Increases your Max Stamina by 2000 and Poison Resistance by 2310

(note that, lore-wise, if you keep only one resist per race, argonians and bosmers should be switched)

Dunmers : Gain immunity to the burning status effect / Increases Max Health by 600 and Flame Resistance by 2310

Nords : Gain immunity to the Chilled status effect / Increases your Max Health by 1000 and Cold Resistance by 2310

So, how balanced is that ? This is the same passive, with the same amount of one resist being buffed, the same immunity effect to one type of effect being buffed, but the amount of ressource being buffed varies greatly from race to race. One gets +2000 (I suppose it's to make up for the terrible racial passive that has no use in PvE whatsoever ), one gets 600, others get 1000. And then, you have the Imperials and Redguards, which get +2000 to some ressource, but without any immunity or resist.

That's not balanced at all. And don't even start me on how the lore was *** when Bosmers became guards and Altmers began regenerating stamina with something called SPELL recharge.

@Uryel Can we please stop throwing around wrong numbers? It's making us look like idiots who have no idea of balance and what is actually going on ingame. Dunmer DO NOT GET 600 HEALTH! Their passive just reads "Increases your Flame Resistance by 2310. Gain immunity to the burning status effect."

You also have to view these passives as a whole. Argonians have a much stronger potion passive than the Bosmer regeneration because they also have 1000 magicka on it. In ZOS' mind the healing done is also worth more, so yeah, it's "balanced" under their assumptions, just differently distributed over the three passives.
I can't check Nord passives but I believe it was 2000 or 1500 health and not 1000. I just remember that Orcs and Argonians have less health than Imperials, but I don't know about Nords.

And no, if you have to get rid of one resistance, it doesn't matter which one you remove from Argonians because the lore clearly states that they are immune to both and you will always be in conflict with it one way or another. Skyrim set a precedent for the poison resistance removal, so that's what ZOS went with. In general they seem to get most of their racial balance ideas from Skyrim.

My very first ESO character was a Bosmer nightblade. The choice to play a Bosmer nightblade, as opposed to something else, used to mean something both for my chosen play-style and the role I wanted to play in the broader story of ESO. Reading this thread, it's obvious how many people recognize that the changes to the Bosmer break lore. Playing any TES game other than ESO, it's also obvious. It seems like no one at ZOS actually played TES other than maybe Skyrim or plays ESO, though.

So, my question is does ZOS understands how to balance:

• play as you want
  with
• every race has a unique flavor?

Part of the problem is that we don't have individual D&D or D20 type player stats (rather than 'attributes') and instead have a system that rewards shoving everything into one resource and allows you to reset attributes as needed. The reason why this matters is because of how 'racial' differences work IRL (I'm going to use nationality instead of race just to avoid stirring the pot too much, but even with traditionally designated racial groups it'd work the same way):

• First, how big are the differences? The average height of adult Canadian men is 175.1 cm and of adult American men is 175.5 cm. There just isn't that much of a difference to begin with.
• Second, if the variation within a group is greater than the variation between groups, the difference is essentially meaningless. It's only when the variation between groups is greater that variation within them that we seem to have a racial trait. That little .4cm difference between Canadians and Americans is nothing when compared to the ~36 cm range between the first and 99th percentiles within each population.
• Third, there may be other factors that better explain differences. In the case of Canadian and American heights, gender correlates much more than nationality. Even then, however, the difference in heights between 50th percentile men and women (~13cm in Canada and ~14cm in the United States) is still much less than the height variation within genders (~36 cm for men and ~33cm for women in the US, ~36cm for men and ~35 cm for women in Canada). So, even though gender does a better job explaining difference, we have plenty of short guys and tall women, enough to make those averages still more-or-less meaningless.

So why does this matter to ESO? Because there is essentially zero variation within races (most of which comes from gear, consumables, and class-based skills). That means that the there is no possibility of playing a clumsy Khajit, a physically weak Orc, a magically attuned Nord, or a beefy Altmer— even though our real-life experience (and ton of examples from the game and the lore) insist that must be possible.

We cannot play as we want; we can only play as we want within the constraints that ZOS provides. If race provided a starting point but we also had individual stats that allowed greater variation within than between races, we'd have a situation where each race would still have a unique flavor but you could also play as you wanted to. Because we don't have individual stats, ZOS has tried to make every race capable of playing both stamina and magicka versions of every class. Sure we can play as we want as far as combat roles, but all it has done is wipe out one of the only viable sources of identity.

Yes, IRL, supposed racial differences are usually complete BS, but in a game without stats what are we left with when that identity is stripped away? Is it now all about class and gear?

And what if ZOS were to wield the nerfhammer to strip away class identity? What then?

TokenIntellect wrote: »

My very first ESO character was a Bosmer nightblade. The choice to play a Bosmer nightblade, as opposed to something else, used to mean something both for my chosen play-style and the role I wanted to play in the broader story of ESO. Reading this thread, it's obvious how many people recognize that the changes to the Bosmer break lore. Playing any TES game other than ESO, it's also obvious. It seems like no one at ZOS actually played TES other than maybe Skyrim or plays ESO, though.

So, my question is does ZOS understands how to balance:

• play as you want
  with
• every race has a unique flavor?

Part of the problem is that we don't have individual D&D or D20 type player stats (rather than 'attributes') and instead have a system that rewards shoving everything into one resource and allows you to reset attributes as needed. The reason why this matters is because of how 'racial' differences work IRL (I'm going to use nationality instead of race just to avoid stirring the pot too much, but even with traditionally designated racial groups it'd work the same way):

• First, how big are the differences? The average height of adult Canadian men is 175.1 cm and of adult American men is 175.5 cm. There just isn't that much of a difference to begin with.
• Second, if the variation within a group is greater than the variation between groups, the difference is essentially meaningless. It's only when the variation between groups is greater that variation within them that we seem to have a racial trait. That little .4cm difference between Canadians and Americans is nothing when compared to the ~36 cm range between the first and 99th percentiles within each population.
• Third, there may be other factors that better explain differences. In the case of Canadian and American heights, gender correlates much more than nationality. Even then, however, the difference in heights between 50th percentile men and women (~13cm in Canada and ~14cm in the United States) is still much less than the height variation within genders (~36 cm for men and ~33cm for women in the US, ~36cm for men and ~35 cm for women in Canada). So, even though gender does a better job explaining difference, we have plenty of short guys and tall women, enough to make those averages still more-or-less meaningless.

So why does this matter to ESO? Because there is essentially zero variation within races (most of which comes from gear, consumables, and class-based skills). That means that the there is no possibility of playing a clumsy Khajit, a physically weak Orc, a magically attuned Nord, or a beefy Altmer— even though our real-life experience (and ton of examples from the game and the lore) insist that must be possible.

We cannot play as we want; we can only play as we want within the constraints that ZOS provides. If race provided a starting point but we also had individual stats that allowed greater variation within than between races, we'd have a situation where each race would still have a unique flavor but you could also play as you wanted to. Because we don't have individual stats, ZOS has tried to make every race capable of playing both stamina and magicka versions of every class. Sure we can play as we want as far as combat roles, but all it has done is wipe out one of the only viable sources of identity.

Yes, IRL, supposed racial differences are usually complete BS, but in a game without stats what are we left with when that identity is stripped away? Is it now all about class and gear?

And what if ZOS were to wield the nerfhammer to strip away class identity? What then?

@TokenIntellect I really like your idea. In an alternate reality where ESO works differently, I'd say racial passives should give you a boost to certain stat rolls. That still lets you be a magical Orc if you roll well, but the odds of you being good at the stereo type are increased, making racial choice not meaningless. If I ever run a tabletop RPG set in the TES universe, that's probably how I'd make stat rolls.

Unfortunately I feel that this just can't really work for the type of game that ESO is. Looking at Morrowind, the only attributes that translate somehow are Strength (weapon damage, health, stamina, carry capacity), Endurance (stamina, health, stam regen, sprint cost), Agility (stamina, weapon crit, dodge, sneak and breakfree cost), Willpower (spell crit, spellresist) and Intelligence (magicka, magicka regen, spell damage).
Personality, Speed and Luck just don't translate into any stat at all. Speed could be a new stat of course, but ESO currently only makes use of it in the Orc and Bosmer passives as well as swift trait and certain niche gear sets or medium armor bonus. All of these are rare large static buffs though, unlike regeneration, crit or damage, so all characters generally run at the same speed. You could count Luck as your crit chance of course but I'd say the way Willpower and Agility are more important for that and make the distinction between stam and mag better.
That being said, there are still stats completely missing, like physical resist, health regen and penetration and crit damage. We'd have to move to a completely new attribute system with things like Versatility and Dexterity if we'd want to make it work in ESO. That's not really easy to implement and also not very transparent to new players. Because of that and because RNG sucks and people would just create new characters until they got "a good one", a system like that could never work for ESO.

That being said, races need to represent the stereotype as they wouldn't be racial passives anymore otherwise. They would be "choose your destiny" and your race choice wouldn't matter. I personally don't like it if race choices don't matter.
It's good that we are allowed to play whatever we want still and that the game even allows interesting options for offmeta picks sometimes, namely Breton stamblades getting to cloak often or Redguard tanks getting cheaper shield ults with stamina sustain.

Jaraal wrote: »

If they are set on "Play as you want" homgenization instead of arbitrary flat rates of fixed stats, they should give us sliders at character creation, so we can choose how we want to make our characters. Make sliders for magicka, stamina, penetration, various resistances, dodge chance, stealth radius, stealth detection, etc. and have it scale up with level. Like this:


Plus Magicka...........0 - - - -[]- - - - - - - - - - - - - - 2000
Plus Stamina...........0 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -[] 2000
Stealth Radius.........0 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -[] 3m
Stealth Detection.....0 []- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 3m
Poison Resistance...0 - - - - - - - - - -[]- - - - - - - - - Immune
Spell Penetration.....0 -[]- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 2000


and so forth....... and just give you 3 full slides worth of choice. So if you want to play a Bosmer (or Khajiit, Altmer, Dunmer, etc) thief, you can...... at the cost of perhaps not being the best PvPer or whatever. And then have a respec option like you do for CP, attributes, and skill points. Or even sell racial passive reset tokens in the crown store if they want to monetize it. If you can respec it, then no one would ever be able to complain about their racial passives again.


You can totally reset everything else about your character, so why not inherent passives as well?

As much as I like the freedom of that proposal, I don't think this is the way to go. Racial choice should be meaningful in more ways than just purely cosmetic. Bretons, Imperials and Nord are so close to each other appearancewise that it doesn't even make sense to keep them separate in character creation apart from the alliance if their stat choices are the same.
Maybe if we take races as the baseline for stats and add/subtract from those stats on your system. But then again, people would say X is BiS and take X for this build/role. Ultimately it probably comes down to content difficulty. Racial balance wouldn't be an issue if a magicka Orc could be just as useful for vet content, then there would be no need for someone to say "you are not BiS because your race sucks". Too bad that it would also mean that content becomes more/too casual...
Balancing an MMO is hard.

Jaraal wrote: »

Ratzkifal wrote: »

Racial choice should be meaningful in more ways than just purely cosmetic.

I absolutely agree, but since ZOS has decided that traditional racial roles (ie: Bosmer being universally known for being stealthy) are no longer important, then make them all unimportant, and let the player decide the racial role for their character. Why should one or two races have their core values dismissed, but the rest left intact? Doesn't seem very balanced to me.

Under that premise I agree with you fully. I am just not ready to accept that premise as reality and trend for the future yet.

Jaraal wrote: »

Ratzkifal wrote: »

Jaraal wrote: »

Ratzkifal wrote: »

Racial choice should be meaningful in more ways than just purely cosmetic.

I absolutely agree, but since ZOS has decided that traditional racial roles (ie: Bosmer being universally known for being stealthy) are no longer important, then make them all unimportant, and let the player decide the racial role for their character. Why should one or two races have their core values dismissed, but the rest left intact? Doesn't seem very balanced to me.

Under that premise I agree with you fully. I am just not ready to accept that premise as reality and trend for the future yet.

And the other thing that stands out about this: Why does one race have a passive that only works in PvP? Why don't all the other races have PvP only racial passives? It's like someone has something against Bosmer PvE players, specifically. And yet, no one will step forward to explain the reasoning behind such drastic and one-sided changes.

I think that is what really irks me the most. The whole hunters passive does not make a lot of sense until you put it into a PvP environment. For PvE it provides so little benefit it may as well not exist.

Jaraal wrote: »

A_Silverius wrote: »

Zathras wrote: »

Sylvermynx wrote: »

I actually never expected the devs to comment on this. Initially I was shocked after 50 or so pages that they hadn't acknowledged this thread

To be fair, it is a small handful of people repeating the same message, and bumping a thread. What is there to say? Everyone else has moved on. The only reason why this thread is still alive is to keep the people that want to talk about it in one place, otherwise another thread will pop up and it will begin again, but with added salt due to the thread lock.

They listen to $$$, not threads like this. If this was on anyone's radar, like the Warden nerf, it would have been mentioned somewhere, by anyone, but it hasn't. They've simply moved on.

Just want to drop in and say that I'm one of those people who check this thread daily but not a regular poster here.

And we appreciate the support! Some of us may be verbose and garrulous, but these changes affect a large percentage of players, even though only few of us are doing most of the talking.

I prefer erudite and loquacious.

Small interjection but I called it:

max_only wrote: »

For every quitter there are 10 furries and their significant other signing up hyped about Khajiit land.

https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/473590/elswyr-2019-which-platform-for-a-casual-couple/p1

I wouldn't be opposed to having a racial passive for each race that only mattered in pvp as long as they felt appropriate. But having what is assumed to be at least 1 or 0.5 set piece bonuses worth of racial passive in the set piece calculation be only beneficial (and as we know it isn't in stealth vs stealth situations) in PvP is wasted potential.

In a play-the-way-you-want game, the boni granted by different sources should tied differently strong to specilization.
Race choice is the first choice you make in the game. After that, ideally you should still have all options for playstyle available to you or at least have chosen a general direction. The next choices are gear weight and weapon type, which narrow down your options to a specific role. And lastly you choose your sets, which largely determine the content that you will be doing.
A detection bonus is so specific to PvP that every player who wishes to play on a race with a detection bonus is making the choice to either PvP or not PvP and sacrifice a 0.5 - 1 item set bonus for no good reason.
It's obviously not the end of the world and it's possible ZOS calculated the bonus as 0 to prevent this unfairness, but it still feels kind of wrong if only one race gets this treatment. A new player is certainly not making the choice to PvP or not at character creation, so if the passive serves no purpose in PvE (and is agains the lore!) it should not be part of the racial passives at all and make room for something more useful.

I think the best way to do passives is - make a list of 12 or so;
2 magicka (max or regen), 2 stamina (max or regen), 2 weapon crit, 2 spell crit, 2 dmg resist (phys & spell), 2 miscellaneous (stealth & speed)

And, everyone gets to pick any combination of 3 or 4.

Or something along those lines.

max_only wrote: »

There are always good ideas about decoupling the passives from the race. Min maxers will always choose the same 3 or four and we’d be back to the beginning that some passives are just plain useless.p

Buty we wouldn't be stuck with them.



Allright, I'm a bit late, but I was indeed wrong. Checked the values ingame, and yep, the wiki is off. Again. And I can't even set it right, I can't be rsed creating an account and can't edit as anonymous user.

Nords get +1000 HP, Imperials +2000, and Dunmers get shafted with 0 bonus ressource, just the resists.

Even taking the whole racials into account, I don't like that. It doesn't FEEL balanced. Maybe it is, but it doesn't feel that way. Like Raz would say, I smell something and it's not moon sugar biscuits.