Time Wasted Training Mounts, QOL improvement

AlnilamE · February 2020

Hellvlad wrote: »

I can understand the grinding fro the first time to improve your mount. Heck it takes about 6 months to get all the traits researched for your crafter.
Fine
However.. who thought it was a good idea that such a grind had to be Character based? Why not make it account wide?

*looks at riding lessons sold on the crown store*

Oh.. silly me and my player friendly ideas.

I love all these theories of how ZOS designed their game around the Crown store 2+ years before there was a crown store.

Either way, having leveled 13 characters without ever feeling the need to buy a riding lesson from the store, I think it's just people being impatient.

As someone else said, the game is not designed around extreme fringe behaviour. And there's always Rapid Maneuvres.

Hellvlad · February 2020

AlnilamE wrote: »

I love all these theories of how ZOS designed their game around the Crown store 2+ years before there was a crown store.

Well, the current game has not much in common with what it was at release anyway. Lots of changes were introduced. This is not a "theory". It's just a mere fact that for ZOS it would be going against their own business interests to make such a change in the current context, with riding lessons sold at the crown store.

LoneStar2911 · February 2020

vesselwiththepestle wrote: »

I create a character and let it just stand there at a horse trainer for one or two months before I actually start playing anything with that character

^ THIS.

I usually do the same thing. I can hardly stand being slow. It really stinks creating a new character just to shelve it for ~2 months while I level its mount.

It's terrible to have to train mounts so slow. It's time for a change.

Nestor · February 2020

If there is a Crown Store solution to a QOL issue, then the QOL will not improve in the game.

anitajoneb17_ESO · February 2020

Hellvlad wrote: »

Oh.. silly me and my player friendly ideas.

The counterpart of being "player-friendly" is, perhaps, for us to try and be "company-friendly". Which means, among other things, keeping an open mind as to how it works and under what constraints.

Game companies rely on investors. Because they need to borrow money from them to finance the 3+ years of development required before they actually can sell a penny's worth of content. Investors look primarily at two things : the cash sales (that's game sales, chapter sales, crown store sales and ESO+ sales), and the audience. Since investors are looking at the future, they focus on stable audience figures, and that's daily logins. Each and everyone of us who log in on a regular basis, and preferably daily, translates directly into a financial asset appearing on ZOS balance sheets and financial data, increasing their market value, the attractivity of the shares and the trust of potential investors for the future.
There are countless mechanics in ESO that are directly designed to make login daily : login rewards, daily quests, events and even tickets, scheduled appearances of NPC (golden vendors), mount training, crafting assistants, etc etc... because daily logins are crucial to ZOS and the financial health of the company, current and future.

None of those designs are actual "game-designs". They're not meant to give an artistic sense of progression, they're not meant to mimic "time and effort", they're not meant to increase stakes, none of this. They're all made to monetize and retain players for monetization purposes.

Now you can call this "bad capitalistic cash grab and manipulation"... or understand that this is how you get to play a fairly entertaining game at a very reasonable cost with new content for years and years. And you're free to think it's very bad, but in this case, you could also stop playing - or suggest a different way ZOS could and should try to make money.

NeillMcAttack · February 2020

I can attest to the fact that 3 of my IRL friends never even gave the game a fair shot due to the extreme tedium of mount training.
Getting rid of this system would undoubtedly help ease the thick barrier for entry for new players, and even incentivize existing players to make more toons and spend more “time on screen”!

I remember explaining to my brother that he should start his mount training right away after I purchased him one. He asked way he could only purchase one upgrade, at which point I explained it was time locked, and he could max it for 6 months worth of logging in every day.

You see this is one of the first systems new players are introduced to. It kind of sets a president in their mind where they ask themselves, what other bollocks is this game gating so artificially!! And they happily never even consider turning the game on again.

ZOS, if you are out there, players save tons of gold anyway as there is very little to spend it on. Let these players actually feel their time in game is worth, let them hit that button til their satchel is empty, let them feel the actual in game effort paying off early in their time in Tamriel. With something as rewarding as a faster horse, or more carry capacity, I promise you, you will retain more new starters!!!

Brandathorbel · February 2020

twev wrote: »

'Everybody' wants to get their character to end game stats without having to play the game, and then claims it's 'unfair' to make them learn the same stuff on their 16 characters, too....

Why play the game at all?

Maybe ESO should let a player create an end game 'toon right from the start and skip all that tedious 'character development' stuff, right?
Cut out the boring parts, just get right to max level skills all at once?

::smh::
I don't even....

this has nothing to do with endgame. This is just a useless grind for no real reason. And if you believe this has to do with endgame then you have to admit that the training books you buy are pay to win.

having a grind that makes sense, i am ok, but this is just stupid

idk · February 2020

Hellvlad wrote: »

I can understand the grinding fro the first time to improve your mount. Heck it takes about 6 months to get all the traits researched for your crafter.
Fine
However.. who thought it was a good idea that such a grind had to be Character based? Why not make it account wide?

*looks at riding lessons sold on the crown store*

Oh.. silly me and my player friendly ideas.

It used to be mount based. It seems like a brilliant idea that it be character-based instead of mount based. Zos added the crown store training when they changed it to character-based form mount-based.

That being said you even mention why Zos will not change such a trivial task as they offer us the faster method you pointed out.

IAmBones · February 2020

Oliviander wrote: »

Ah guys 180 days thats not that long
(at least if you are nearly 60 years old like me)

In the moment i am learnig all traits on all 18 chars
(9 finished - 4 nearly -5 more than halfway through)
thats the real challenge.

I'm a fan of some long term goals in the game
like collecting Eidetic Memory (2 bugged missing before update)
or collecting all furnishing plans (24 missing)

I AM NEARLY 60...and I agree with you. While you can currently BUY your way to this goal, the current amount is limited to those who have more money than sense. I have 17 toons, they all have max mount skills. My crafter has 100% Food/Drink recipes, moving to maybe Motifs next or some other crafting, almost done with monster sets. It's these little tasks that keep me going. I have 12 Level 50's with 1045 CP. I started June 2018, I am over 5000 hours in. I am retired (disabled) I enjoy my time in this game.. a lot of good people.

xF1REFL1x · February 2020

LOL... it's faster to run for the first half of leveling. Sad that they make the simple things in this game a grind. There is enough time spent logging in and out to switch gear from one character to another without having to to do mounts, restart, loading screens, etc... I wouldn't have time for anything else if I played the way they seem to accept as normal.

TheShadowScout · February 2020

ZarkingFrued wrote: »

It takes a long time to train all of your mounts currently....

Working as intended.

Since that particular vexation is supposed to make you break down and buy the darn overpriced crown store riding lessons.

And they won't change that, and because of that they also won't give any sort of "account wide riding" because they -already- sell the shortcut for those with more cash then patience.

ZarkingFrued wrote: »

Maybe allow direct character swap from the in game settings menu so you don't hit so many load screens.

Won't work with the game system, since it -has- to do it like this, unload the currently "in use" character data, then load the new character data, including the region that character currently is in... etc.

The one thing that would be neat was if riding trainings "stacked" if unused, for those who cannot log in daily but play more on the weekends... but alas, that too won't happen because of crown store riding lessons.

Why are we even talking about this? Just to vent frustration that people have to be -patient- sometimes? Sheesh...

deepseamk20b14_ESO · February 2020

Start out with max speed and stamina and just buy inventory space that increases in cost like other bag space.

Freaking game has been out for what 6 years now and we still have to take 180 days just to max our mounts out if we start a new character?

Just like port costs, absolutely useless.

Finedaible · February 2020

Nestor wrote: »

If there is a Crown Store solution to a QOL issue, then the QOL will not improve in the game.

^And this is the core problem with ESO in my opinion.

They will not improve the enjoyment or game-play quality while they are only interested in monetizing every aspect of it. The only reason they have finally started taking steps to improving performance after all these years is because their engine is outdated and the problems with it and their servers have become too large to ignore for the future of their cash machine.

It's one thing to have a subscription for a game, but to tack on Macro-transactions (let's be honest, at those crown prices they are definitely NOT "micro"...) on top of that sub with no substantial discount for subscribers is pretty controversial and greedy in my book. Subscribers to ESO+ only get a discount on maybe 1 insignificant item per month and it's usually a returning, limited-time offer or a statuette nobody gives a hoot about. Every update and event introduces more and more character-bound, un-sellable, inventory-fodder items to fill up F2P players inventories so they will either quit or finally subscribe to the craft bag. The greediest move yet is offering the absolute best cosmetic rewards through gamble crates with no alternative method of obtaining them via game-play, taking away any incentive to achieve in-game rewards. Sure, events have been offering some mounts and some pets, but crown store always has the best stuff and they will never be obtainable via game-play. The worst is, some people (*cough* whales *cough*) are so accustomed to being shilled like this that they actually defend such amoral practices. It's no surprise they allowed people to unofficially "sell crowns for gold" without even bothering to make official trading features to support such an exchange of goods for crowns. One can easily scam players under the pretense of selling crowns for gold without ever delivering because there are no features in place for this, yet it is allowed...

Dusk_Coven · February 2020

NeillMcAttack wrote: »

I remember explaining to my brother that he should start his mount training right away after I purchased him one. He asked way he could only purchase one upgrade, at which point I explained it was time locked, and he could max it for 6 months worth of logging in every day.

You see this is one of the first systems new players are introduced to. It kind of sets a president in their mind where they ask themselves, what other bollocks is this game gating so artificially!! And they happily never even consider turning the game on again.

A totally new player probably wouldn't have the funds to mount-train too much anyway. This QoL improvement is for more established players who just want to zoom to where they are with their other toons.
It's similar to wanting to power level. Or in SWTOR and FFXIV, buying items from the cash shop to zoom your level to near-max level right away.

Donny_Vito · February 2020

Nestor wrote: »

If there is a Crown Store solution to a QOL issue, then the QOL will not improve in the game.

Yep, so true. I just spend a 100 or so gems when making a new character to buy some speed scrolls. If I want more, I'll buy more. I don't see this changing at all and I don't like going slow, so I just try to mitigate the cost as much as possible by using gems if I can.

anitajoneb17_ESO · February 2020

TheShadowScout wrote: »

Since that particular vexation is supposed to make you break down and buy the darn overpriced crown store riding lessons.

No.
This particular "vexation" as you call it (it's only annoying with the 2nd character, with the 1st one you are exploring/discovering the game world, which is beautiful, and you don't even realize how "slow" you are moving around), anyway, this particular "vexation" as you call it isn't primarily meant to drive us to the crown store. It's primarily meant to have us login every day. Players who log in every day are a precious asset to an MMO, which translates directly into a financial asset.
If you want to bypass this, you can pay cash - that also translate into a financial asset.
It's either/or, it makes sense and it's not some silly mind manipulation.

mayasunrising · February 2020

Oliviander wrote: »

I'm a fan of some long term goals in the game
like collecting Eidetic Memory (2 bugged missing before update)
or collecting all furnishing plans (24 missing)

I completely agree. This is a persistent world game. You are not supposed to be able to get all the things in a second. It's bad enough you can level skills to max with one kill.

anitajoneb17_ESO · February 2020

deepseamk20b14_ESO wrote: »

Start out with max speed and stamina and just buy inventory space that increases in cost like other bag space.

Freaking game has been out for what 6 years now and we still have to take 180 days just to max our mounts out if we start a new character?

Just like port costs, absolutely useless.

Port costs aren't useless. They're a gold sink. If you want to bypass them, you have to make some contacts / friends / join a guild, which makes sense in an MMO and plays a huge role in player retention.
Besides, a world where we could jump anywhere without limitations would feel very small.

driosketch · February 2020

ZarkingFrued wrote: »

Logging in and out of all 18 characters every day is not even an option for me.

Look, I don't mean to tell you your business. I have 18 characters myself, but I added them 1-3 at a time, and that means at most I was logging in to 1-3 characters just for horse training. As someone who has done full training 20+ times on one account, I hope you thought long and hard about your class and alliance distribution.

Hellvlad · February 2020

anitajoneb17_ESO wrote: »

Hellvlad wrote: »

Oh.. silly me and my player friendly ideas.

The counterpart of being "player-friendly" is, perhaps, for us to try and be "company-friendly". Which means, among other things, keeping an open mind as to how it works and under what constraints.

Game companies rely on investors. Because they need to borrow money from them to finance the 3+ years of development required before they actually can sell a penny's worth of content. Investors look primarily at two things : the cash sales (that's game sales, chapter sales, crown store sales and ESO+ sales), and the audience. Since investors are looking at the future, they focus on stable audience figures, and that's daily logins. Each and everyone of us who log in on a regular basis, and preferably daily, translates directly into a financial asset appearing on ZOS balance sheets and financial data, increasing their market value, the attractivity of the shares and the trust of potential investors for the future.
There are countless mechanics in ESO that are directly designed to make login daily : login rewards, daily quests, events and even tickets, scheduled appearances of NPC (golden vendors), mount training, crafting assistants, etc etc... because daily logins are crucial to ZOS and the financial health of the company, current and future.

None of those designs are actual "game-designs". They're not meant to give an artistic sense of progression, they're not meant to mimic "time and effort", they're not meant to increase stakes, none of this. They're all made to monetize and retain players for monetization purposes.

Now you can call this "bad capitalistic cash grab and manipulation"... or understand that this is how you get to play a fairly entertaining game at a very reasonable cost with new content for years and years. And you're free to think it's very bad, but in this case, you could also stop playing - or suggest a different way ZOS could and should try to make money.

I consider that buying a game full price + paying for the yearly chapters full price + a monthly sub is really more than "company friendly " enough. I am able to get thousands of hours of fun from solo games I'm just paying the first part (meaning the game itself )( Skyrim, Grim Dawn, Diablo2 ...) or even better not paying them at all and just support the game with some cosmetic purchases ( Warframe, Path of Exile) No one forced ZOS into this aggressive business model. Nothing justifies this. And the financials reports have proven multiple times, that the game would be in net benefit even without the crown store. The only difference, is that game publishers don't just want money, they want all the money possible. That's fair, as this is how it works, but it's certainly not up to us to be "company friendly" .

HelixUnited · February 2020

id be happy if they done it so you can train in stacks of 10, since the mount train crown store i think is a stack of 10, let me buy 10 training in one go at the stables to, or even max out the speed in one if one character has maxed out, so you have to get at least one toon fully mount trained first

anitajoneb17_ESO · February 2020

Hellvlad wrote: »

I consider that buying a game full price + paying for the yearly chapters full price + a monthly sub is really more than "company friendly " enough. I am able to get thousands of hours of fun from solo games I'm just paying the first part (meaning the game itself )( Skyrim, Grim Dawn, Diablo2 ...) or even better not paying them at all and just support the game with some cosmetic purchases ( Warframe, Path of Exile) No one forced ZOS into this aggressive business model. Nothing justifies this. And the financials reports have proven multiple times, that the game would be in net benefit even without the crown store. The only difference, is that game publishers don't just want money, they want all the money possible. That's fair, as this is how it works, but it's certainly not up to us to be "company friendly" .

1/ If you consider that paying what you pay discharges you from any other "obligation" to the game provider, it's fine (and it's the way it's meant to be). But it wasn't my point. My point was that, beyond direct sales, ZOS also needs to ensure that people log into the game and do some stuff on a regular, ideally daily basis, because that's as much an asset to then as what you've paid upfront.

2/ The F2P models that you mention are another proof that audience/playerbase/logins are just as important, if not even more important, than upfront purchases for a company that intends to run the game as a service, over a long time.

3/ You can't compare Skyrim and ESO. Skyrim has no server, no maintenance and no extension/development costs.

4/ What financial reports are you talking about ? I'd be very curious to know where you saw true financial data about ZOS/ESO and how you come to the conclusion that they're making margin far above whatever you consider "necessary".

5/ And again, I wasn't talking revenue here, I was talking investor trust here, and that's far more based on audeince (i.e. daily logins) than on direct sales.

Jaraal · February 2020

twev wrote: »

'Everybody' wants to get their character to end game stats without having to play the game, and then claims it's 'unfair' to make them learn the same stuff on their 16 characters, too....

Why play the game at all?

Maybe ESO should let a player create an end game 'toon right from the start and skip all that tedious 'character development' stuff, right?
Cut out the boring parts, just get right to max level skills all at once?

You can do that on the test server.... it's pretty fun!

ZarkingFrued · February 2020

Lmfao I'm dead

Banana · February 2020

Account wide everything please

ZarkingFrued · February 2020

It's just mount speed dudes, no one is asking for max level characters. Mount speed, and only because the load screens are insane. If the load screens were fine, I wouldn't have mentioned it. I apologise for making a reasonable suggestion on the ESO forum.

ZarkingFrued · February 2020

twev wrote: »

'Everybody' wants to get their character to end game stats without having to play the game, and then claims it's 'unfair' to make them learn the same stuff on their 16 characters, too....

Why play the game at all?

Maybe ESO should let a player create an end game 'toon right from the start and skip all that tedious 'character development' stuff, right?
Cut out the boring parts, just get right to max level skills all at once?

::smh::
I don't even....

Why are you talking about something entirely different from what was asked for in this thread? It takes an absurd amount of load screens on this rapidly deteriorating game to train your mounts. No one is doing it every day, and it's just another thing to push players away. I have been through the grind of this game, no one is asking for free levels, you can literally just BUY THE MOUNT SPEED WITH CASH, and you're complaining that someone would suggest an easier option for players to train alts mount speed in game WITH in game gold? OOkaaayyyyyyyy

DaveMoeDee · February 2020

AlnilamE wrote: »

Hellvlad wrote: »

I can understand the grinding fro the first time to improve your mount. Heck it takes about 6 months to get all the traits researched for your crafter.
Fine
However.. who thought it was a good idea that such a grind had to be Character based? Why not make it account wide?

*looks at riding lessons sold on the crown store*

Oh.. silly me and my player friendly ideas.

I love all these theories of how ZOS designed their game around the Crown store 2+ years before there was a crown store.

Either way, having leveled 13 characters without ever feeling the need to buy a riding lesson from the store, I think it's just people being impatient.

As someone else said, the game is not designed around extreme fringe behaviour. And there's always Rapid Maneuvres.

Yeah, the ahistorical comments are always disappointing.

The reason why the game was designed with horse training taking 50 days was to keep players logging on. It feels a bit heavy-handed to me though when you could go to Cyrodiil on level 10. If you started playing a month after launch, you would go into Cyrodiil after a week with a speed mount with maybe 17 speed and watch people with 40+ speeds fly around. I remember at launch Sorcs would leave the mounts in the dust because no one was fully leveled up yet.

DMuehlhausen · February 2020

ZarkingFrued wrote: »

It takes a long time to train all of your mounts currently. Logging in and out of all 18 characters every day is not even an option for me. It would be nice to have an option to train all of your mounts for your characters on any character. Maybe allow direct character swap from the in game settings menu so you don't hit so many load screens.

Why do you need 18 characters? Don't say bag / bank space. Be a sub and it's not a problem. there is absolutely no need for that many characters. There are 3 roles so you really need 4 max. Tank, Healer, Melee, and ranged damage dealer. Yeah I get people want to play as many as possible, but if you are going to play or have that many you should complain about stuff that takes a lot of time, cause obviously it's going to.

Before you ask, I have 3 level 50, and then a couple name holding characters and I only play 1 of the 3.

Kiralyn2000 · February 2020

NeillMcAttack wrote: »

I can attest to the fact that 3 of my IRL friends never even gave the game a fair shot due to the extreme tedium of mount training.

Maybe they're not cut out to be MMO players, then? It isn't a genre of game where you can expect to just blast through it in a month and be "done". You're expected to play for months/years. Of course, there'll be some things that are meant to take time.

---
Similar topic - saw a thread on the Star Trek Online forums recently. Dude posts how he came back to the game after a long break, and it was already ruined. Why? Because, among the dozens of new things he hadn't seen/done/played before, there was a minor little side-game called Endeavors. It gives you some small tasks each day (kill X mobs of type Y; do X damage with weapon type Y; win X credits at Dabo; Do dungeon X; etc) you can complete for loot & Endeavor XP. As you gain XP, you can get little boosts like a lesser form of ESO's constellations. And why did this "ruin" his return to the game? Because he couldn't grind it out in a week - it would take time to max out. Seriously? Tons of new features & content, and he's throwing a fit because he can't max out some minigame instantly? /facepalm