VaranisArano wrote: »

Outside of perhaps giving players the option to enable a "hard mode" for themselves, you aren't going to see overland difficulty get much harder. There are two major reasons: the success of the year-long story arc and the failure of Craglorn.

1. The year-long story arc is ZOS' big marketing push for new players, letting brand new players just right into the thick of the content they just bought. So while the Chapter and DLC zone do have greater variety of enemy difficulty than, say, the old starter zones, its never going to be too difficult. Since DLC zones like Markarth are the climax of the story arc being sold to newish players, again, it can't be too difficult for solo or inexperienced players.

2. Craglorn, the old adventure zone, remains the only overland zone with challenging quests designed for groups. Of course ZOS has the stats for how popular it is with players, but the cancellation of Murkmire as an adventure zone and rerelease as a normal DLC gives us an idea of what ZOS expects to sell to most players.

I don't think Craglorn failed. There are still people there doing stuff all the time. It might have been better received had been released a little later in the cycle. Early on yes it was tough cause nobody had golded out trial sets to blow through stuff, but I wouldn't say failed.

hafgood wrote: »

What exactly makes a player a veteran player?

How do you define what this?

It has to do with experience level, but how much experience is unclear. When the game was new, before One Tamriel, once you finished your faction's zones you then got quests to do the others. These zones were higher level though, and were considered veteran level. So a level 50 was considered a veteran player. (There were no champion points back then.)

Now that we have champion points, I don't know if only those who have 810 are considered veterans, or 160 CP since that's the level for better gear, or if it's the years of experience that matter more.

BXR_Lonestar wrote: »

I would go so far as to say that they need to tone down the difficulty of world-events like Harrowstorms and Dragons in Elsewyr once those area populations hit a certain point, as newer players playing through that content are going to find it difficult to take on those world events with fewer players available and looking to complete it.

This is an excellent idea.

Viem wrote: »

All i am aksing is to have enemies in the wild that will have that much hp and armor that will force a player of 160cp+ to move out of a red circle and/or and red cone... For the love of whatever. Why do you fight that idea so much...

What is it about the current status of enemies that you find so appealing, so as to engage in an arguement of keeping everything at it is...? I would like to read a comment explain just that.

Overland content is for everyone. This includes new players who would struggle in the environment you are proposing. The majority of overland mobs only exist to fill in the world, and it isn't meant for the player to interact with all of them. And yes, it is appealing to keep the mobs just as they are so everyone can easily fight them when they need to. No one wants to spend extra hours fighting mobs that are not associated with their quests or objectives, or just to reach a resource node. Especially vet level mobs.

You also said in a previous post that you want to be able to fight these mobs so you have something to do while in queue other than stand in town waiting, and you don't find the overland mobs challenging enough to keep your interest. Well they aren't there to entertain vet level players while they wait in queue. Go quest, or craft, or do writs, or fight World Bosses or Harrowstorms or Dragons while you wait. Or even watch TV. But it is not reasonable, or fair, to hurt the majority of the playerbase because you want something to do while waiting in queue.

Veinblood1965 wrote: »

If anything can't the ZONE main quest line scale to your level and amount of CP points? I don't mean scale so much you die fifteen times but make it a little challenging please!

With the introduction of Morrowind, all content in Elder Scrolls Online now scales with the player: quests, monsters, world bosses, and rewards. So we already have this. The overland mobs seem weak because they are meant to be weaker mobs. Not every mob should be a challenge or where would the distinction be?

hafgood wrote: »

Daemons_Bane wrote: »

Imo, vets are the ones who've been here at least a few years

If that's the definition of a vet then you are barking up the wrong tree. I know multi year players that can't fight their way out of a wet paper bag.

So you are saying it's how good a player is that makes them a vet, rather than level or experience? I tend to disagree because you are going to find good and bad players of all experience and levels.

Only way you get harder enemies (I agree either it needs slightly tuned up or at the very least mechanics can't be ignored entirely in dungeons) is with a gear cap raise.

Now I can only image the outcry if suddenly all this gear people have farmed over 7 years is worthless and out done by a green that is CP 210 or something.

Ravensilver wrote: »

I'm one of those despised 'casual' players. Why? Because I have a life. I have a company that I run. I have a family. I have house and cats and friends and obligations and hobbies. And somewhere in there, I also play ESO.

Here you are making a direct implication regarding non-casual players that they have no life. Since when did you become a judge of what is life for anyone... This quote is also when you start to make things personal. But, hold on a bit because later on you make things even more personal...

Ravensilver wrote: »

And I avoid most overland enemies, unless they're in the way of a chest or a node.

That's exactly my point : you can keep ignoring them like you do... What i don't understand is why you care about the level of an enemy since you ignore it anyway...

Ravensilver wrote: »

You see... I come here, into this game, to get *away* from all those challenges that I face in real life daily.

But because you seem not to have enough challenges in *your* life, you are now *demanding* that I, and others like me, bow down to *your* idea of what the game should be like.

Here you are implying that my life is not challenging enough so i am searching for challenge in gaming.You are also taking things even more personal by insinuating that not only do i not have a life and potentially offending any hardcore players, like you mentioned earlier ( the quote is above), but it is not even a challenging one. For your information company-*woman* i consider saving lives in the Aegean while protecting my national boarders and the unified borders of the E.U. quite challenging.

Ravensilver wrote: »

I think you should go have a cup of tea, take some *very* deep breaths and rethink what you just wrote. You are starting to be very agressive and offensive, simply because not everyone bows down to your idea of what the game is supposed to be like. You may want to take a step back and rethink your arguments. Don't start getting personal, it's not the way to get other people to consider your arguments.

Now this is where things get very interesting... Not only did you engage first in an aggresive approach to the dialogue -as it's clear from your quotes above- while making indirect remarks about me and my life (making it clearly quite personal), not excluding the life of any so-called hardcore player, you now try to take into the role of a victim of aggression all the while suggesting me to "not get things personal"...
Are you serious? You are twisting reality and distorting the arguements in the dialog so that you can portray me as an agressor and a self-centered egoist, turning this into ad hominem attack to maybe sway the "audience"...

Keep it up... You are already building an audience for yourself-i guess that's the objective here for you.

[snip]

[Edited post to remove Baiting]

ivelbob wrote: »

When the game is difficult (like Dark Souls-like games) and some players ask for an optional Easy mode, arguing that it doesn't impact others' experience, Difficulty Lovers say "no, even the option would compromise the artistic vision of the devs." But when ESO's overland content is easy, Difficulty Lovers are clamoring for an optional Hard mode and better rewards - so that's how it is.

You know I was thinking the same thing. The thing about "challenging content" in any game is that it's only challenging the 1st few times you engage with it, for the most part for most players.

After that you've learned the movesets and what to do when to do it and then the game is just as easy as before, especially if you're getting better gear that makes you even more powerful.

Which means the very same people who are clamoring for this will have figured out within a week how to cheese the content and reap all the high rewards for themselves.

Which leads me to believe this is the real reason why this is desired and why they refuse to challenge themselves unless they are rewarded for it. "I'm looking for a challenge, but I need better rewards to be incentivized to do it!"

Then one has to ask, is it really about the challenge? I solo normal dungeons with crappy rewards all the time because I'm not doing it for the loot and conquering said content is the reward.

Daemons_Bane wrote: »

Vayln_Ninetails wrote: »

Daemons_Bane wrote: »

Have you remembered to consider that quite a lot of the players, maybe even the majority, like overland/delves to be casual.?

Since when did casual mean being able to kill something in 3 hits?

Being able to kill a quest boss in 3 hits sounds pretty casual..

Well as minimum HP for quest bosses is 120K health, Interesting to know how?
Now back before getting nerfed poison injection was able to kill standard overland mobs reliable because its execute phase so this will not work on an 120-250 health mini boss.

Not that I disagree with you, far from, an perfect solution I say is an standard bworld boss, 1.5 M health and their damage, but you have an npc partner who keep the boss from resetting.
Now this will be a bit brutal for new players so why put them in new zones

Overland difficulty is fine as it is. Without rehashing what had been said my lots of posters already, overland and the main quests should cater for all players including beginners.

I couldn’t personally think of anything worse than having to spend loads of time battling mobs when I’m questing, exploring, farming. We have world bosses in zones that can provide a challenge in zones for people who are looking for that. Craglorn highlighted what a disaster it was amping up difficulty overland, as did the waste ground of old pre One Tamriel veteran zones.

Not everyone wants ‘challenge’ from a game. And I still see loads of people dying in zones. It’s not a walk in the park for everyone.

Taleof2Cities wrote: »

Jeremy wrote: »

Olauron wrote: »

Jeremy wrote: »

Olauron wrote: »

Jeremy wrote: »

SilverBride wrote: »

Jeremy wrote: »

what if you have different people attacking the same enemy with different levels of gear on? How would the mob scale?

We already have different people of different levels fighting side by side against the same enemy, so how does the mob scale now?

The mobs don't, the players do. Everyone is scaled to 160 CP, unless of course you're higher than that or level 50.

Then there is no problem to scale players to 160 CP (in overland) taking into account their CP and gear.

Jeremy wrote: »

That's why an optional Veteran Zone where the mobs are scaled to what ever the current max CP value is would be ideal IMHO. If you're content with the current difficulty that's fine and you could just stay in the regular zones, the same way people choose whether or not to do normal or veteran dungeons.

It will not be ideal, because most players asking for vet want extra rewards, not the difficulty.
Ideal would be reducing the maximum power of player character to something like 15k dps. But most "I want difficulty" people don't want this solution even in overland, let alone all content.

I don't understand what you are saying.

That post I was responding to was talking about scaling mobs (not players) in relation to a player's gear. That is a problem because you can't do that on a multiplayer game where there is more than one player attacking the same enemy. How would you scale it? Based on which player's gear or level? It's just not feasible.

As to optional Veteran Zones, it would be ideal for me and those of us who would like to see Veteran Zones. You get getter rewards in Veteran Dungeons too, and Veteran Trials. Do you see having those in the game as a problem also?

Your solution to reduce DPS to 15k wouldn't have much effect for me. I play as very defensive/tank character and don't have 15k DPS anyway. haha

You can scale players based on their CP and gear the same way players are scaled based on the pre-50 level (just the direction of the scale is the opposite). Attributes and other characteristics of pre-50 player characters are increased as a result of scaling. The same way attributes and other characteristics of post-160CP player characters can be decreased as a result of scaling. The same way attributes and other characteristics of characters with colored gear and full sets can be decreased to white non-set values as a result of scaling.

As for the veteran group content, I don't see a problem in its existence. I see a problem of "we need rewards as the incentives to do this content". My take on this is the following: if a player needs rewards (or more rewards) to do some content, he doesn't deserve any rewards at all and even current rewards should be taken from him.

There were no different rewards for different difficulties in Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim. In fact, higher difficulties in games done right have less rewards, as lowering resources (income) is one of the tools to increase difficulty.

But scaling players down would defeat the purpose of CP. The whole point of an RPG is for players to level up and grow so they can take on greater challenges.

I can't speak to Morrowind, Oblivion or Skyrim. But in most games the more difficult the content the better the rewards. I don't see a problem with that. It doesn't make any sense to me to reward players with less for doing more. And you said yourself you don't see a problem with veteran dungeons and trials. So why not Veteran Zones as well?

I still don't see why players want more challenging content ... when they refuse to participate in the challenging content that already exists in the game.

You don't understand why players would want to have more fun while doing quests and exploring? It doesn't have to be super hard. But there should be an option for players to make it at least challenging enough to where it's interesting and fun and requires you to actually use your abilities and react to enemy attacks instead of just mindlessly mowing over everything like a lawnmower.

No one is saying there isn't challenging content on this game. That's beside the point. But players shouldn't have to resort to doing arenas or soloing group content every time they want to have some decent combat. There needs to be that option for the landscape content as well, especially considering that's the vast bulk of this game's content.

SilverBride wrote: »

Viem wrote: »

All the people in here, sometimes even me, speed through this area as if the enemies are "invisible" or "trivial" or not challenging (whay do you know, huh...). They even run around while 3 or 4 enemies are chasing them, sometimes even hitting them...

But yes, please tell me again how overland difficulty is fine, or how the enemies are not considered as a nuissance, or how they are just here "to make the world feel alive, like an eye-candy"... Or better yet tell me that i simply want to destroy a casual's experience of the gane...

Of course they are trivial. They aren't supposed to be anything more than that. Like it or not, a large part of overland mobs are here just to fill in the world. Making them harder is only going to make people avoid them even more, because they want to do their quest, or get where they are going, not fight a mob just because it exists. Especially a hard one.

You are the only person I have ever seen in any game who is upset because other players run past insignificant mobs. I have tried to understand it but I don't think I ever will.

People run past mobs because they're just nuisances. If the combat was more rewarding and fun people would be more likely to participate in it. In any case: for those who just want to run from point A to point B as fast as possible they could stay in the normal zones. But for those of us who would like a more interesting and fun questing experience where traveling across the landscape actually becomes more than just a trivial exercise we can move to the optional Veteran Zones.

Everyone wins. Everyone is happy.