[[Backstory, skip if you know already: the "Rapid Maneuver" (aka "Rapids" or "Zoomies") active skill in the "Assault" PvP skill line grants 30 seconds of "Major Gallop" to you & your group. This was a vital skill for PvE-ers, especially new characters, as it makes a horse worth having immediately, rather than only after weeks of feeding it. Initially, it required level 3 in Assault, a level you had as soon as you opened the skill line, either by doing the introductory Cyrodiil quest, or by claiming Alliance Points as a daily reward (so you never even needed to enter PvP areas!). Either way you opened the skill line would grant 3 skillpoints, so you got the Rapids essentially for free.
In a recent update, it was changed from level 3 to level 5, swapping for the "Vigor" skill that "was used more often", meaning that everyone had to grind every character for a couple of hours to get it back, rather than just to get the skill for free. For people with the max 18 characters, this was too much toxic PvP grind so I never did it, and instead started work on levelling the alts to 50 and getting them the speed ring, 18 times. I'd only got it twice before they thankfully made it so you could craft the ring from the stickerbook, but I've still only got 12 of them up to 50.
In the coming update, Major Gallop is probably moving from Rapid Maneuver to a level-3 passive ("Continuous Attack"), so it will not only be free again, it will also always be active. Once again, Horses will be worth riding even for level-10 characters. Downside is, you can't share it with your group any more, so those below level 10 are out of luck.]]
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As an indie game dev myself, ZOS' game design team have my immense respect. All change is painful, especially if you've invested heavily in a meta build that becomes "broken", but every item in every single patch notes since beta has always made sense to me, with a solid rationale, at least from my perspective as a PvEing game-dev. They seem to strive to reduce the "grindiness" of the grind at every turn (a very minor example: I noticed in the beta that ESO has a lower number of pick-hits on a resource to mine it, and so a lower "time-to-mine-a-resource", than any other game I could find... and then later they let you halve it with champion points!)
The
only time since 2014 that I've felt they really put a foot wrong was this skill-swap. Their fix, acknowledging the universal importance of Major Gallop, is great out-of-the-box thinking that stops them from needing to take Vigor away from people again, and like much of ESO, it's kinda spoiling us
The loss of group-share feels a worthy trade-off for permanence, and means that console players get the same "takes up no slots" advantage as PC players got from the addon that auto-slotted it when mounted.
But I'd
really love to see an interview or read a retrospective about any game design lessons that were learned there. All the
best design lessons are learned when things get interesting
If any of you streamers are interviewing ZOS designers, please do ask this question, as I suspect their answer will be valuable to all game designers out there. And heck, to all game players: we all have a vested interest in game design!
My suspicion is that the main takeaway would be
"datamining metrics and analytics can be really deceptive".
If one group-buffing skill is used more often each day than another, it seems like the playerbase would be overjoyed if the two skills were swapped so the "more popular" skill was made easier to get, right? Especially if the popular spell is a healing spell? Everyone loves heals!
But that simple metric wouldn't show that one spell was a combat skill, used every 8 seconds in every combat by a few thousand players; and the other was the only skill from that tree used by hundreds of thousands, but only maybe once per day on average.
I can think of a number of other metrics they might've looked at, that would all give the same "Rapids isn't as important a skill as Vigor" message, while missing the "Rapids is the
only skill in the Assault skill line that the majority of the playerbase cares about at all." Like, there might've been a metric showing how many of the people who had the skill, had it slotted. But that metric would be broken on PC at least, with that addon to auto-slot Rapids when you're mounted. So there are many using Rapids without having it permanently slotted.
But this is just my wild guess at what cool game design lessons might be learned. I'd really love to hear the real skinny!