All great answers and replies so far.

Id make mobs and players scale mathematically in the same fashion.

First of all, no swap bars mechanic!
Instead, regular MMO skillbar with 4-10 skills depending on the character level.

Second, no Stamina/Magicka dichotomy.
Stamina is used for running, jumping, light and heavy attacking and some combat skills. If Stamina is low, cost of skills is increased. For purely combat skills instead of Magicka and Stamina another separate power source is used, like Focus or something. All skills could cost all these three power sources at the same time. Like, Twin Slashes costs X Focus and Y Stamina, or DK's Lava Whip costs X Magicka, Y Focus and Z Stamina, or Sorcerer's Summon Familiar X Magicka and Y Focus miss till summoned creature is alive. Stamina cost is small enough to make the whole thing playable without allowing to stupidly spam skills. It kinda works like limiter for a player, which force him to think before act. Anyway, current system I find annoying and blunt as hell.

TheBonesXXX wrote: »

Personally I always wanted an Elder Scrolls, online. Not what we have now, Id scrap the classes, trials, battlegrounds, instanced zones, and terrible separate pve from pvp silliness.

Id also can mega servers, classic PvP and PvE servers are more than appropriate.

All the best features from Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim would be in the game. To include their superior combat systems, current combat system isnt as good as the original, tab target/assist will always be inferior to free aim.

Id expand housing to be more like Asherons Call and ArcheAge, their housing systems were better.

Essentially, this would have been Elder Scrolls, online and any Elder Scrolls continuation would have been update compatible for better features.

This game is a medicore single player game and a below average MMO. Eq 2 did this style much better and it released in 2004. The only ground breaking here was combat and that has been ruined by homogenized

Vanos444 wrote: »

I would go for...
* Classless based system
* Flying
* inspect ppl gear
* Bikini/Revealing armor and clothes
* Spear weapon skill line
* UE4
* Cutscenes
* Unique race personality and animation ( similar to wow and FFXIV)
* In game rare mounts ( not cash shop )
* wPvP on the current zone ( not just cyrodiil)( similar to wow)

This. This is what would make ESO the best MMO on the planet. If only ZO$ had done this. And no Megaserver BS. They should've made shards and named them after Daedric Princes and the Divines! Take notes, ZO$! You can still make this right. Make a new game if you have to!

I would make it mandatory at lvl 50 to choose whether your character will be PvP or PvE. No switching back.

Easily_Lost wrote: »

The only change I would make are with the classes:
Templar - Specialize in Healing.
Sorcerer - Specialize in Destruction Magicka.
Dragonknight - Tanking.
Nightblade - Stealth.
Necromancer - Evil Magicka.
Warden - Jack of all trades, master of none. Would heal some but not as much as a Templar. Would not do as much damage as a Sorcerer, or drangonkinght.

Dissagree completely. I hate gimmicks and being locked into that.

Templar- crit dot class

Sorcerer- the higher its opponents health the more damage it does class

Dragon knight - the dot class thats LAs and HAs do more damage

Nightblade - the crit direct damage class

Warden - stronger all around skills no real modifiers

Necromaner - passive execute on all abilities. The lower your opponents health gets the more damaging your abilities become.

These themes are much more fair and strong/unique in their own ways. Stealth or tanky should not be a class but a way 1 plays this game. Use similar themes for tanking and healing that way there less defacto class/roles and more flavor

Overland would be a much more dangerous place, with roaming bosses that you had to avoid or kill to survive. Nights would be dark like IRL and strong vampires would ambush you in dark back alleys for example when you when to the outlaw refuge. Also the outlaw refuge entrance would not be sewer grate in the middle of the city with a giant outlaw symbol painting on it; but an inconspicuously looking secret wall in an inconspicuously looking house.

If you got caught by guards you would have to pay large fine or be thrown to jail (and actually go through the process to break free a la Skyrim). While in jail you could talk to secret outlaw contacts starting thieves/dark brotherhood quests. And pickpocketing should give much higher yield: higher stakes, greater rewards.

Heh. ZOS is never going to use Unreal Engine for a game like Elder Scrolls Online. Thank Uncle Sheo, too.

Nighttime that can be dark and scary

Crafting that takes skill and more discipline

Overworld that is much more challenging

More easter eggs

Pvp guild wars and more reasons to take or defend non strategic locations

Weather that plays more of a factor

A 4th difficulty to dungeons and trials. Normal, vet, vet hm and vet hm +. Maybe a dungeon/trial where every boss has its own hm.

TheBonesXXX wrote: »

Personally I always wanted an Elder Scrolls, online. Not what we have now, Id scrap the classes, trials, battlegrounds, instanced zones, and terrible separate pve from pvp silliness.

Id also can mega servers, classic PvP and PvE servers are more than appropriate.

All the best features from Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim would be in the game. To include their superior combat systems, current combat system isnt as good as the original, tab target/assist will always be inferior to free aim.

Id expand housing to be more like Asherons Call and ArcheAge, their housing systems were better.

Essentially, this would have been Elder Scrolls, online and any Elder Scrolls continuation would have been update compatible for better features.

My main gripe is the lack of Veteran Zones to quest and explore in. If they would add that, I'd be largely content with the game. Sure - there are things I would like to see change. But that's my main complaint currently. Well, that and the performance issues in zergodil. Though I could easily live without Zergodil. Not being able to have more fun while exploring and questing is a more serious issue for me.

Thank you all for the replies so far.

I'd demonetize the content, but return to mandatory paid subscriptions (albeit slightly cheaper than they are). There are major reasons for this

1. the community was far far better and less toxic when it wasn't F2P. you could see the shift.. when we were in Beta 2 and 3 zone chat was cancerous. it was like stonefalls zone chat is now. The second we went early access the level of maturity and friendliness was there from the onset of the game. It remained right up until the F2P hammer swung, and then the toxicity returned.

2. hypothetically lets say we still had a million players, if we went to say a full $9.99 a month subscription base, there's an immediate ten million a month in ZOS's pocket. Yes some people will kick a stink and leave which will be expected, but theres a larger proportion who are existing ESO Plus who will pay less now ongoing. really rough numbers here, but;

lets say 25% kicked up a stink and decided they didn't want to pay a sub, there's still 7.5 mill a month to work with. of that 7 mill i would hire a team of possibly a dozen devs working on bugfixes (80K pcm for that team), and a further two dozen working on new content (160k pcm) DLC's, etc , then you have your specialists working on things like Lore, visual designers, middle management, internal legal personnel, copyrighters etc.. lets say another Mill a month for staffing costs there. Wages is always the biggest part of any business expenditure so lets cap it at 2 Mill a month. That would cover 300 employees specifically on the ESO project at lets say roughly 80K a year salary (average/mean, obviously salary would be scaled differently at diff levels). Also I'd want to see in that team, at least 4 permanent GM's per MegaServer cluster, 6hrs a day shift (lets say team of 20 globally inc relief staff). A global announce/welcome as well when you sign in to say 'Hi welcome, your GM online is currently ZOS-InsertEpicNameHere'.

At this point i would remove the Crown Store. yes its cancerous monetization based on FOMO that doesn't need to be there. DLC's would be paid for in the monthly sub (Chapters can also have their dev costs offset on the cost of the Chapter). That leaves only cosmetics and P2W items. The content itself i propose a shift in the way its developed.

Reskinned mounts, costumes etc.. outsource the business (Zeni already outsourced customer support to Ireland so this shouldn't be a strange concept). These are fairly simple tasks that don't have to be done internally (or on American wages for that matter), Allocate maybe another quarter mill a month for this (and that's being generous) on basis of KPI targets associated with content production. I would suggest also that an internal editor be developed to allow the community to easily develop their own skins, mounts etc (kind of like how old FPS's would come with their own level editors, like UT). Obviously you can't let people apply those in game - but what if it was a call for submissions in each calendar month? Community developed (but ZOS reviewed and posted) vanity items, that would essentially be... free? Crown store goes, and it gets replaced with that's essentially a heavily moderated Deviantart for ESO.

Or rather than selling premium content through the crown store, introduce them as incentives for actual completion. Finish vMA? You get a Mount. Finish the Psijic Skill line (before the age of 50..), you get a mount!, Finish top of the leaderboard in PvP, get Emp and get a special Mount! He gets a mount, she gets a mount.. you all get a mount! Incentivise actually playing the game rather than creating FOMO. There is actually now value in the monthly sub..

This still leaves us with 4.25 million monthly in the kitty..

3. Then, we get onto the actual Infrastructure. THREE Megaserver Farms. Keep US, Keep EU, but add AsiaPac to the mix, centralised in Singapore. Now this is going to be very very ballpark - none of us actually know whats in ZOS's DC's but im guessing the actual infrastructure is clustered propietary Unix of some form.. Hypothetically though, if you have 750k players worldwide (lets spread them evenly between each 'MegaServer') - 250K a pop. And you want to support lets say 35% of those as concurrent connections.. so 87.5K at a time. These numbers are ballpark (just going off the last time i bought similar gear)

Backbone - 100gbps - 20K pcm
Redundant Backbone - 100gbps - 20K pcm (SD-WAN backchannel for global Server Sync/backup)
Rackspace in Colocation DC (Climate Control / UPS Included) - $3000 pcm

16 x Cisco UCS Chassis loaded with 4 x B200 or similar blades - $4 Million (Dual Xeon's/512GB RAM per blade/SSD x 64)
2 x APC 45RU Netshelter Racks - $5000
4 x Fabric Interconnects - $120K
1 x Core Switch (9600 Series Chassis or similar) - $250K
1 x EMC VNX FC SAN Array (5300 or similar, SAS) per location - 1.5 Million
1 x Decent Firewall (Fortigate or similar) - $200K
1 x Centralised EMC Avamar Array in Baltimore for Backup of all - $2 Million

OK so running all that up (not including Software/Maintenance i.e. Solaris support) - $20,225,000 in capital equipment costs outright. Since leasing seems to be the norm, lets say 5% rate over a 36 month term, this is $589,895 a month in capital operating costs + 43K for DC colo and links. TOTAL - $632,895 pcm. Haven't factored in any load balancers/WAN acceleration but that still shouldn't make a huge dent.

Now that still leaves 3.6 Million a month (43 Mill a year EBITDA) in Zeni's pockets to do with as they please. Fund up other projects, pay shareholders massive returns, or fund more intellectual property theft legal cases.. If that's not enough for the capacity, scale it up some more. Even replicating that infrastructure twice over there's still 3 mill in the kitty.

And this is all before we get started on how to change the actual game...

Separate and balance pve and pvp on their own servers. (This megaserver crap ain't getting the job done.)

Add a RP server with lore friendly names.

Run class and racial changes through a lore master. Stop destroying lore by changing racial passives.

Stop freaking rebalancing the skills, classes, passives etc. all the time. Not fun.

Stop homogenizing the classes and races. Might as well give us just one to play.

Single player

More or less nothing.
Because it would ultimately upset some portion of the playerbase and stop being ESO.

Performance is a redundant suggestion.

Perhaps the only thing is change is marry the weapon and class skill lines slightly. As long as those are separate they will always feel like "skills that aren't part of your class but you have to use".

Weapon skills that act different bedyaee your a holy archer instead of a dark archer makes sense to me.

I like having a class. I like having stuff no one else can do. Full sandbox skills just means a best will be mathed out and become the ironic expected build despite the game telling you to build however you want.