Will the Imperial City ever be fixed and give players a chance to opt out of PVP for story?

Neonisys · May 2020

There's no reason any PVE content should be gated behing PVP in any way, PVP should be completely seperate in every single capacity. You should be able to do the PVE content in IC and Cyrodiil while completely bypassing the PVP elements, give us an option to opt out of pvp while doing this content. It's 2020 now and the game has matured, there's no need for these amateur decisions any more.

edges_endgame · May 2020

Please... Not again...

I don't mean to be lame or salty but you could have used the search function to get the answer to your post.

IC is a PVP related dlc. That's a given fact that has not been addressed by the devs. It's working as intended. If you don't like PvP, don't go there.

I don't like PvE, so I don't do trials and dungeons only if I have to.

Choices are given to us players by the devs, making them in my favor is a mature way of enjoying the game. Now about that lag...

VaranisArano · May 2020

There's nothing to "fix" about Imperial City being PvPvE content. That's precisely how it was designed and intended.

Now, I'm fine with an additional "story-mode" Imperial City as long as it removes ALL of the rewards and achievements. Those were designed to be gained with the risk of PVP. You don't get to "opt out" of intended risk without also "opting out" of the rewards. While we're at it, perhaps we can get a similarly reward-less "story mode" for dungeons and trials for people who dislike/can't do group content.

Sanctum74 · May 2020

There is nothing to fix, you have every other zone in the game to do pve.

NoodleESO · May 2020

if I have to grind out mats in pve to gold out my pvp gear then there should be an equal balance. Plus IC is one of the last enjoyable places to go for pvpers, we can't even duel in towns without someone saying they're reporting us just because.

Solariken · May 2020

VaranisArano wrote: »

There's nothing to "fix" about Imperial City being PvPvE content. That's precisely how it was designed and intended.

Now, I'm fine with an additional "story-mode" Imperial City as long as it removes ALL of the rewards and achievements. Those were designed to be gained with the risk of PVP. You don't get to "opt out" of intended risk without also "opting out" of the rewards. While we're at it, perhaps we can get a similarly reward-less "story mode" for dungeons and trials for people who dislike/can't do group content.

I understand this sentiment, but a PvE-only story mode is completely unnecessary. It's not even that long of a quest line.

OP just grab some buddies or hire a PvP veteran to protect you while you do the group event portions of the quests.

Izanagi.Xiiib16_ESO · May 2020

Neonisys wrote: »

There's no reason any PVE content should be gated behing PVP in any way, PVP should be completely seperate in every single capacity. You should be able to do the PVE content in IC and Cyrodiil while completely bypassing the PVP elements, give us an option to opt out of pvp while doing this content. It's 2020 now and the game has matured, there's no need for these amateur decisions any more.

You can pay for a guard if you want to avoid pvp im sure there's guilds who would help you out

Ackwalan · May 2020

There really isn't a lot of PvP going on in IC. Sure, if some ganker finds out you are doing the questline, he will be at every spot you go. But with a little skill' you won't see much PvP.

Mr_Walker · May 2020

I wouldn't be against this, probably the best story line in the game, you used to have to do it to get the repeatable dailies for the siegemaster costume, but with Greymoor they have apparently removed that requirement.

Kadoin · June 2020

Sure as soon as undaunted bonus is fixed so I don't have to pay a toll or regrind it on all my pvp characters.

alewis478b14_ESO · June 2020

They already sold this content. They need to work on the next DLC they can claim is an "expansion" for $40

Rahar · June 2020

No.

idk · June 2020

IC is not broken because it has PvP and PvE mixed together. Like all other DLC zones it was immensely popular in its early days and like all other DLC zones, it's popularity wanes some with time. But it is not broken.

Major_Lag · June 2020

idk wrote: »

IC is not broken because it has PvP and PvE mixed together. Like all other DLC zones it was immensely popular in its early days and like all other DLC zones, it's popularity wanes some with time. But it is not broken.

While it might not be "broken" in the technical sense (working as designed...?), there's something undeniably wrong with it that causes it to be widely disliked - and, as a result, largely empty most of the time, at least if we go by the population indicators on the campaign screen.

Even when there are "events" which draw significant population to IC, such as what we had last year, or now the Great Lead Hunt, historically those population increases are transient at best - and a couple weeks later, IC inevitably goes back to being a dead zone that it usually is.

Which, incidentally, is quite likely one of the main reasons why we haven't been seeing more threads like this one crop up on a regular basis.

Occasionally dying to an enemy player when doing the questline is one thing, but getting constantly steamrolled by raid sized farmgroups is a whole another level of PITA. Been there, done that.
The Arena and Nobles district quest objectives are especially tedious in the latter case, with Temple being a close runner-up.

I'd be fine with a "quester's immunity" being accessible in IC, as long as all of the following conditions applied while it is active:

a prominent visual effect is applied to distinguish the player as being immune,
can't attack (nor be attacked by) enemy players, this also includes no-damage debuffs such as Ele Drain,
can't heal/buff (nor be healed/buffed by) allies, nor attempt to rez them with soulgems or necro ulti,
can't be in a group with any non-immune player(s),
the immunity can only be toggled on/off at your alliance base in the sewers, with a hefty cooldown,
no telvar and item drops and no EXP from killed NPC enemies,
can't loot treasure chests (possibly except the ground-placed chests awarded from quest objectives?),
can't interact with repeatable daily quest objectives, and any NPC kills don't count towards completing those quests,
can't interact with any PvP objectives, such as district flags or their NPC guards,
can't use zone chat or say/yell chat.

Although to be fair, at that point there might instead be a separate PvE-only instance of IC with all rewards disabled, since that would be probably easier for ZOS to implement and would not affect the PvPers in any way.

And inb4 "but the PvEers are needed to provide fodder for the PvPers"... as a PvPer myself, I can attest to the fact that the average PvE quester provides next to no challenge to fight - they amount to barely more than a speed bump, just like all the NPC trash mobs scattered around the districts.
A lot of the questers can't even apply any effective pressure to the attacker, and sometimes they just try to run away without fighting back. That's not a fight - it's a one-sided massacre, which makes for some rather poor PvP.

manny254 · June 2020

Why would any self respecting PVP player not want this change?

If you are a real PVP player and you go into a PVP zone it should mean that you want to fight other players. The typical PVE player trying to quest has no intention of ability to fight. Any PVP player who gets satisfaction from killing a player like that is a joke.

I would love to go into IC or Cyro and know that all the other players actually want to PVP.

NoodleESO · June 2020

manny254 wrote: »

Why would any self respecting PVP player not want this change?

If you are a real PVP player and you go into a PVP zone it should mean that you want to fight other players. The typical PVE player trying to quest has no intention of ability to fight. Any PVP player who gets satisfaction from killing a player like that is a joke.

I would love to go into IC or Cyro and know that all the other players actually want to PVP.

I knew I'd see some wrong opinions on the forums today, you see if pve players get immunity, then the whole zone will be pop locked with immune pve'rs.

How long after that will it be before they want loot from mobs and then comes the bot trains after the zone dies out.

Bots that are immune

VaranisArano · June 2020

manny254 wrote: »

Why would any self respecting PVP player not want this change?

If you are a real PVP player and you go into a PVP zone it should mean that you want to fight other players. The typical PVE player trying to quest has no intention of ability to fight. Any PVP player who gets satisfaction from killing a player like that is a joke.

I would love to go into IC or Cyro and know that all the other players actually want to PVP.

The way I see it, everyone in Cyrodiil or Imperial City may not want to PVP, but they definitely DO want to be in a PVP-enabled zone. They willingly and deliberately queued up for those PvPvE zones. They decided whatever reward they entered the zone to acquire was worth the risk of PVP.

I'd love for everyone who queues up for a PVP-enabled zone to actually want to PVP, and conversely, for players who don't want PVP to happen to them to, you know, NOT queue up for a PVP-enabled zone that's bound to make them unhappy. I'll settle for what we do have: everyone who's in Cyrodiil and Imperial City wants to be there for one reason or another, or they wouldn't have queued up for obvious PVP-enabled zones. It's 100% on the player to decide whether or not to risk PVP happening in a PVP-enabled zone.

Dusk_Coven · June 2020

manny254 wrote: »

If you are a real PVP player and you go into a PVP zone it should mean that you want to fight other players.
… I would love to go into IC or Cyro and know that all the other players actually want to PVP.

Do even the PvPers in Cyrodiil want to PvP? Or are a lot of them actually win-trading with AP Boosting to literally make millions of AP. https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/532779/ap-boosting
You don't get to make millions without enough people to help you pump up the numbers.

The only real PvP going on is in Dueling because it's outside of the reward system that players want to exploit. And you can actually choose appropriate opponents to fight (or help people train).

Major_Lag · June 2020

Dusk_Coven wrote: »

manny254 wrote: »

If you are a real PVP player and you go into a PVP zone it should mean that you want to fight other players.
… I would love to go into IC or Cyro and know that all the other players actually want to PVP.

Do even the PvPers in Cyrodiil want to PvP? Or are a lot of them actually win-trading with AP Boosting to literally make millions of AP. https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/532779/ap-boosting
You don't get to make millions without enough people to help you pump up the numbers.

The only real PvP going on is in Dueling because it's outside of the reward system that players want to exploit. And you can actually choose appropriate opponents to fight (or help people train).

From what I saw in over a year of playing, although the AP boosting exploiters definitely exist, the scale of the problem is positively miniscule compared to the overall Cyro population.
At least that's the case in the main campaign, don't know about the others as I don't play in them.

Unless you are talking about Blackreach, in which case anything goes I guess - back when it was still a 7 day campaign, it was the place to farm emperor title, with all the AP farming and boosting it entails.
I don't know the specifics of the exploit, but the way I understand it works is that it requires a nearly empty campaign to pull it off successfully - since in a populated campaign, it's essentially impossible to prevent PUGs/randoms from eventually showing up in large numbers and crashing the party.

IMO the way emperor status is awarded is a very poor system - AP gain is only weakly correlated with actually aiding your faction, since by far the best ways to earn AP fast are: boosting/exploiting, zerging, leeching ticks, and RPing as a stonemason at quiet times (Bob the Builder???).
Even without any exploiting, if you know where and when to be, you can easily rake in tons of AP without needing to engage in much (or even any) PvP.

Essentially, the current system puts quantity way ahead of quality - as with enough time investment (and the help of a guild), it's perfectly possible to become emperor despite not having any actual PvP skills to save your butt in a 1v1 against a baked potato.

But honestly, I don't see any way that this could change in the foreseeable future.
To make it fair to everyone, it would have to be based on some kind of ranking system where each player's ranking can go both up and down - as opposed to "rankings" such as AR, BG MMR, or leaderboard AP gain, which are all just a measure of time played.

Maxdevil · June 2020

Imperial city is fine like that the only thing that could be reworked is the telvar bonus in the sewer and to add new rewards

manny254 · June 2020

NoodleESO wrote: »

manny254 wrote: »

Why would any self respecting PVP player not want this change?

If you are a real PVP player and you go into a PVP zone it should mean that you want to fight other players. The typical PVE player trying to quest has no intention of ability to fight. Any PVP player who gets satisfaction from killing a player like that is a joke.

I would love to go into IC or Cyro and know that all the other players actually want to PVP.

I knew I'd see some wrong opinions on the forums today, you see if pve players get immunity, then the whole zone will be pop locked with immune pve'rs.

How long after that will it be before they want loot from mobs and then comes the bot trains after the zone dies out.

Bots that are immune

Wanting to find other PVP players is wrong? Are you the type of person to cheer when you see a bunch of lowbies?

I never said anything about giving an immunity. I was agreeing with the first line of the OP.

NoodleESO · June 2020

manny254 wrote: »

NoodleESO wrote: »

manny254 wrote: »

Why would any self respecting PVP player not want this change?

If you are a real PVP player and you go into a PVP zone it should mean that you want to fight other players. The typical PVE player trying to quest has no intention of ability to fight. Any PVP player who gets satisfaction from killing a player like that is a joke.

I would love to go into IC or Cyro and know that all the other players actually want to PVP.

I knew I'd see some wrong opinions on the forums today, you see if pve players get immunity, then the whole zone will be pop locked with immune pve'rs.

How long after that will it be before they want loot from mobs and then comes the bot trains after the zone dies out.

Bots that are immune

Wanting to find other PVP players is wrong? Are you the type of person to cheer when you see a bunch of lowbies?

I never said anything about giving an immunity. I was agreeing with the first line of the OP.

I'd be lying if I told you I don't get a rush from wiping a group of 12 with only 2 people. Its got nothing to do with the level most of the time. Lowbies and vets refuse to gear up and learn the basics of pvp so they get wiped, this happens in Cyrodiil and Imperial City.

And that's what this is about. Players refusing to gear up and learn so they go on the forums and demand change.

Find me this "real PVP'er" you talk about who goes into a pvp zone and doesn't pvp lmao

dasrite · June 2020

no questing allowed in pvp areas

Kadoin · June 2020

Major_Lag wrote: »

While it might not be "broken" in the technical sense (working as designed...?), there's something undeniably wrong with it that causes it to be widely disliked - and, as a result, largely empty most of the time, at least if we go by the population indicators on the campaign screen.

That tends to happen when PvP balance is extremely bad, which is every patch after Summerset.

[snip] in a tank build barely taking any damage moving boss or trash mobs over to you to kill you and reaping benefits.

[edited for bashing/inappropriate content]

Mayrael · June 2020

For story? Ok. AP or Tell Vars? No way.

idk · June 2020

Major_Lag wrote: »

idk wrote: »

IC is not broken because it has PvP and PvE mixed together. Like all other DLC zones it was immensely popular in its early days and like all other DLC zones, it's popularity wanes some with time. But it is not broken.

While it might not be "broken" in the technical sense (working as designed...?), there's something undeniably wrong with it that causes it to be widely disliked - and, as a result, largely empty most of the time, at least if we go by the population indicators on the campaign screen.

What you describe here is the life of pretty much every DLC after a period of time. We move on to the next DLC. That does not mean it is broken, especially considering it becomes a lot more active during IC related events just as other DLC zones become more active when they are involved in an event. So it is not broken at all.

Major_Lag · June 2020

idk wrote: »

Major_Lag wrote: »

idk wrote: »

IC is not broken because it has PvP and PvE mixed together. Like all other DLC zones it was immensely popular in its early days and like all other DLC zones, it's popularity wanes some with time. But it is not broken.

While it might not be "broken" in the technical sense (working as designed...?), there's something undeniably wrong with it that causes it to be widely disliked - and, as a result, largely empty most of the time, at least if we go by the population indicators on the campaign screen.

What you describe here is the life of pretty much every DLC after a period of time. We move on to the next DLC. That does not mean it is broken, especially considering it becomes a lot more active during IC related events just as other DLC zones become more active when they are involved in an event. So it is not broken at all.

I don't agree with what you said as being the real reason. Consider the following:

IC is now part of the base game,
It becoming part of the base game did little to improve its popularity,
For comparison, Cyrodiil is (and was) part of the base game and it's still immensely popular, at least on PC.
Also, BG popularity improved considerably after BGs became base game.
Last but not least, PvP content is inherently not subject to the same kind of "burn out" as the (scripted, repetitive) PvE content does.

IC becoming crowded during IC-related events proves absolutely nothing - other than the fact that players like their lootboxes, or whatever other rewards the event drops. Which is just plain old human nature.

Case in point, the so-called "PvP week" of the 5th Anniversary event - a lot of PvEers showed up in Cyro for the town quest, even though some (many?) of them were using PvE gear and had no interest in any PvP, only in the lootboxes, some even going so far as to declare PvP a "detriment" to their "experience" of PvE farming the boxes.

In any case, outside of any related events, Cyro remains very popular whereas IC does not.
That is the case despite the fact that IC has (IMO) one of the best quest lines in the game, whereas Cyro only has some inconsequential fetchquests, so we can probably rule out any purely PvE reason for the difference in popularity between those zones.

IMO, IC is one of those half-baked ideas which sound good on paper but fail to work as intended in actual practice, due to the ever-so-pesky law of unintended consequences.
Everything breaks down somewhere around the premise of "(do PvE to) earn telvar from mobs and kill other players to grab their telvar too". Sounds nice in principle, but clearly it hasn't done IC's popularity much favor.

Nowadays we can also see a similar kind of design issue plaguing Cyrodiil: PvDooring undefended objectives is quite lucrative and has very few drawbacks, so naturally some groups do exactly that to farm AP without having to do any actual PvP most of the time.

karthrag_inak · June 2020

Neonisys wrote: »

There's no reason any PVE content should be gated behing PVP in any way, PVP should be completely seperate in every single capacity. You should be able to do the PVE content in IC and Cyrodiil while completely bypassing the PVP elements, give us an option to opt out of pvp while doing this content.

No.

geonsocal · June 2020

I'm sure other players appreciate you collecting up stones for them...you can feel good about that...helping your fellow eso travelers out...

Eifleber · June 2020

Wel .. there's 15.000 other quest in ESO, do the few in IC really matter that much?

Chilly-McFreeze · June 2020

Eifleber wrote: »

Wel .. there's 15.000 other quest in ESO, do the few in IC really matter that much?

According to some Quest Journal addon it's actually 2036 quests in total.