Gythral wrote: »

amm7sb14_ESO wrote: »

If you have to pull out math and spreadsheets regarding a video game, I'm automatically tuned out.

LOL, guess playing EvE is out for you then

furiouslog wrote: »

TLDR: Disgruntled vet player whines about CP 2.0 using a lot of math and a fancy Excel chart.

Introduction

Hey all, I just wanted to share a little chart I made to show why I think that the way that the CP were translated from 1.0 to 2.0 have upset some veteran players. I don’t think I’ve explained the underlying thought process adequately to date given the push back, so here is one last try to articulate what I see as the inequity. I'm also trying to address expected criticism based on the positions I've already heard. Warning, this is long, but it takes a while to explain it fully. To understand the chart below, let’s look at some assumptions and methods (everything can be changed to suit your own assumptions, but I’m not going to do it myself, feel free to grab this methodology and do it for your circumstances):

Assumptions

1. I calculated the “Farm Rate” for XP in the game by looking at my total hours played on all toons, and then figuring out the total XP earned, and dividing them. I have 12 toons. If you do this yourself, it takes about 2.8M XP to get to level 50 (depending on which update you were in when it happened, and it’s still imprecise due to XP leveling calculations), so you take that for each toon you have, and then all CP XP is on top of that. If you want an alternative to try to parse out time leveling new toons, you can just subtract the time spent getting to 50. On my best day, it took about 20 hours to get to 50 while doing dolmens, quest-unlocking some trees and buying others, and efficiently maximizing skill points. Anyway, after all of that, my personal CP Farm Rate is about 101K XP her hour played. That includes all buffs applied, enlightenment, as well as time spent doing stuff that earned no XP like housing, making a contest video, human lawn darts, coaching, parsing, parsing, parsing, more parsing, etc. I’ve logged over 6000 hours across all toons over nearly 7 years, with most of them on my main, and most of them in the past two years. When I am specifically earning XP, I pop a scroll or a potion, and I do big pushes in farm areas during XP buffed events. I’m sure it’s possible to get better than that in an optimized situation, but you’re not a tourist in the game at that point like I was. Consider my rate a representative mix of buffed XP farming, general questing, and silly time.

2. There are a finite number of quests in the game, and they earn a certain amount of XP to complete. Even though one necessarily would not want to do all of the quests, it’s reasonable to assume that if you still have content to complete in the game, and like the game, that all incomplete content represents an opportunity for entertainment. There are, based on current public data, 2173 original quests in the game, all offering varied levels of XP as a reward. The average quest awards 7485 XP (unbuffed). You also get XP for clearing areas, and discovering map points. Totaling all of this up, if you deliberately went through and did every quest in the game just once, and found every map area, you’d earn an estimated 30M XP (unbuffed). To account for the enjoyment of repeating quests (dungeons and dailies in particular), I multiplied that XP by a factor of 4 and assumed that all of that additional XP farmed was fundamentally entertaining (you exclusive PVPers and console transients will definitely disagree). I’m referring to this period of discovery and content completion as the “Honeymoon Phase”. During this period, I’m assuming that we play ESO for about 15 hours per week. Your mileage may vary. As a benchmark, the average US citizen spends about 5 hours of leisure time per day, including everything that they might do (TV, sports/exercise, music, reading, chatting with friends, other hobbies, etc). TV, reading, and socializing make up 3-4 of those averaged hours.

3. Once you complete content and have repeated quests enough that you are satisfied, and if you still want to play, the remainder of the time spent is purely on achieving the objective of getting to an optimized endgame spec. This is basically the extra time and hours spent required to farm XP and the appropriate gear needed to get to the current proposed target of 1170 CP and gear out our toons. Because it’s perceived as a precursor for endgame, we continue our playing time at 15 hours per week because we are focused on the goal, sometimes focusing on XP, sometimes farming gear, and sometimes doing something for fun. This period is called the “Optimizing Phase”. This is mostly the “grind” that we experience.

4. The 1170 CP 2.0 benchmark as the optimization floor for endgame is based on the video analysis of CP 2.0 posted by skinnycheeks, as well as a nod to the other people on this forum with whom I have debated who have taken a position on where the new min/max performance floor resides. It’s also the number that some score-pushing guilds I know are now throwing around. Can you go into a veteran trial with less? Yes, but you still have room to grow before you are “settled”. FWIW, I personally think it’s too low. I’m at 1310 and I don’t feel “settled”. I have to make trade-offs in the blue tree and have to grind some more to close gaps in passives due to those trade-offs, but it would have been impossible to get the same maxed stats under CP 1.0. I know this. We have to draw the line somewhere, so I took the lowest floor that appeared equivalent to 810 in CP 1.0, an issue on which most people seemed to agree.

5. There is a point in the game I perceive wherein players shift from this optimization phase and move on to a more casual approach, basically logging in just for scheduled events that they like, or to do newly released content. It’s not super realistic, but for the purposes of the analysis, and given that a lot of veteran players are upset about the changes, I’d say that they are beyond the point of wanting to optimize, but still desire to optimize and play more hours per week to do so. Using the Farm Rate, that comes to 2800 hours played, at which point they basically have “player fatigue”. So, I’m stipulating that if you are a hardcore player with a variety of in-game interests that is still reading this forum, you’re probably willing to put a total of 2800 hours in to get to where you want to be in the game. Again, your mileage may vary, especially if you don’t do a lot of crafting/housing. Once you hit this point, if you still play, you are actively playing at about 5 hours per week, whether its for trials, dungeon achievements, events, or PVP stuff. I’m calling this the Casual Stage, where you play purely as a function of choice and because it’s fun. I imagine that this would shift around a lot for different players. The range of time people spend in ESO in my guild who are at this casual stage where they are not working on character improvement at all is typically between 2-12 hours per week.

6. A caveat: I know new content will be released over the time period. This analysis is a cartoon depiction of reality because of that, and all prior content time spent being entertained is compressed in the first period of time for both players, which is not realistic. However, because I applied my Farm Rate over the course of the game, and because I played since beta at different levels of engagement at different times, it’s representative of an actual consumer journey with all changes and sporadic content releases included, averaged over time. Reality is a lot more bumpy (check Steamcharts for details). I acknowledge that with new content, there will be future XP earning opportunities that also provide new entertainment. If you want to get into those details, take any major chapter release, count up quests, figure out the XP, and apply a factor that you think is fair for repeatable entertainment value. That amount is reasonable to adjust from the Optimization Phase, but I assure you that it is not as significant as the remainder of time. Also, you have to pay a premium for that content in the short term, so it gets complicated to account for trade-offs.

Methods

What I did, using those assumptions, is calculate how long, given the Farm Rate, that it will take for a player to get to 1800, and what that would probably look like in a simulated reality. I have two hypothetical players to compare, basically the same exact person but under different circumstances:

1. The Veteran Player hit 810 on March 7, 2021. I back calculated the number of hours it would take to achieve that position, and then applied the 15 hours per week to calculate their start date. They start Match 8th with 810 CP earned.
2. The New Player hit 50 and just enters the CP phase on March 7, 2021, and starts March 8th with 0 CP earned.
3. Given the assumptions about the fatigue point, and because new players who are engaged and want to do endgame are trying to catch up, they continue to push CP at 15 hours per week after hitting 1170, until they reach the natural fatigue point that the Veteran Player hit of 2800 hours, because they are basically the same person just with different circumstances – the Vet Player had more in the tank, so does the New Player. Once they hit that natural fatigue point, they move to 5 hours per week. This is necessarily arbitrary because the reality is personal to each player, but again, I chose what seemed to be a logical point to clearly illustrate the issue. Timing and knots can change with different assumptions, but the pattern will be the same.

Chart

https://imgur.com/wvhsZeF



Findings

Some observations from the chart (Y-axis is CP, X-axis is Time):

1.By the time the Vet Player exhausted all new content and went through repetitions, they were 1 year and 4 months into the game, and hit about 590 CP. The new player spends the same amount of time, but is at 840 CP. The New Player can get to a higher CP than the Vet Player was able to do at 810 without ever entering the Optimization phase.
2.The calendar time for the Vet Player to get to the current Endgame Spec is 3 years and 7 months after start of play, with 2 years and 3 months spent purely optimizing to get there. The New Player spends 2 years and 4 months from start, with one year of pure time spent in Optimization. The Vet Player spent about 63% of their time basically grinding. The New Player spent 42% of their time grinding, with 1 year and 3 months less calendar time grinding.
3.If the New Player has equal tolerance for grinding time as the Vet Player, the New Player will eventually overtake the Vet Player in CP about 3 years after they start playing, and then they will basically be about the same after that.
4.Everything else being equal, if you play for 15 hours per week no matter what, the Veteran Player will hit 1800 7 years and 9 months after they started playing the game, on May 8, 2025. The New Player will hit 1800 6 years and 5 months after the start, on September 4, 2026, about 1 year and 4 months later than the Veteran Player.

Analysis, Counterpoints, and Conclusions

Where I think that the disconnect in the perception of fairness in this circumstance happens between players is in the relative perception of the grinding time. I know personally that I spent a lot of time farming gear because of stat changes and such (*cough* vMA). I accept that as a condition of frequent changes made for balancing and to keep the game dynamic, but frankly, I don’t enjoy much of that time and changes are way too frequent. I spent all of that time because I am competitive and it was a necessary evil to achieve my game goals. The fun time is spent in challenging dungeons and trials getting achievements, designing new housing, or horsing around in Cyrodiil. The rest of the time was basically playing a slot machine that takes between 5-60 minutes to stop spinning. Part of what mitigated the cost of the time I spent doing any grinding was this thought in the back of my mind: “Well, at least I’m still earning CP. That will pay off some day.” That made doing something insane (like having to level DW on my magplar to get a higher parse) just as much less annoying a week ago as it does today. Some people who play don’t make that assumption because they have a different mental model due to the influence of other MMO game designs that are must worse about messing with their players. Those people are not me. I’m just not going to accept the that point as a given, because you cannot retroactively change how I’ve always thought about it.

To those of you who are empathetic to the New Player: I hear you, and I think that the new system is way better for them, which is a good thing. I also think that CP 2.0 is actually well designed, (but they really should add two more slots to the Green Tree IMO – that would pretty much fix my current issues with it). The rest of it is really good and the intent of trade-offs is broadly fair and well applied. We could get persnickety about it, but at a high level, it’s a decent upgrade. It also gets the New Player to a viable endgame point (not optimized), without ever leaving the Honeymoon phase. That is ideal. By Mid-2024, this model shows that they are about at parity with the Vet Player, which is good, but the Vet Player spent considerably more effort and enjoyed the game less to get there, which is bad. As such, I have two core objections to ZOS's implementation:

1. My objection to the way CP 2.0 was rolled out is that any Veteran Player who was trying to reach their goal of finishing the grind to 810, and then focus only on the things that are enjoyable to them personally, is now forced to spend nearly another year of time, playing at their standard “honeymoon” rate of 15 hours per week, before they get back to that point where they feel like they can settle down and just work on optimizing their toon(s) and having fun doing the things that they want to do, rather than the things they have to do. I think that’s not fair, and it’s a massive time penalty to competitive veteran players. If you are not competitive, you probably don’t have an issue and don’t get the fuss, but then this post does not represent you at all and is irrelevant. That’s fine, you do you, but don’t assume that I feel the same way or can be coached in that direction. When I go out shopping or whatever, if a person pulls up in a car in the lane next to me at a stop light, that person and I are about to have a race.

2. My other objection is that unless I make ESO a second job, both of my kids will probably graduate college before I hit 1800. And 3600? Yeesh. That’s a me thing though, it’s not a fairness thing. Everyone is in the same boat, if you look at the chart. Who knows if the game will even be around by then?

I’m sure that there will be some disagreement with my interpretation, some of which will be based on assumptions. I’m not married to my assumptions, and I’m willing to admit that my foundational data could be flawed (I got a lot of it from gathering stuff from UESP and tried to be careful and accurate) – if you disagree and want to show where I'm off base, go ahead and pull out a spreadsheet and go for it with your own data and post it. I probably won’t disagree, because if you feel your assumptions are valid and based in reasonable data then there is no reason to disagree, we are just different. If I made a mistake in gathering my source data, I’ll thank you for pointing it out, and I’m happy to make a revision.

I am confident that some of you will reference prior VR/CP cap issues as justification for the current course of action. As I have stated multiple times in the past couple of weeks in various threads, doing a bad thing in the past does not justify doing a bad thing today. It’s a spurious, illogical, and completely unconvincing position. If you are merely saying it to say that it was unfair before, I agree with you, it’s just a lot harder to fix. I’ve played since beta. I get it. I just didn’t care about it as much then as I do now, because I had not discovered the joys of endgame at that point, and ESO life was a lot simpler when I was playing casually and ignorant of how these details directly affected my experience and investment of time.

The thing that’s just really upsetting me in particular about this is that I really love the game. I love the lore, the stories, the voice acting. Even the combat, as much of a frustrating time sink as it’s been, was also challenging and satisfying when I started improving. I’m just way past the point of fatigue, and even though I don’t want to lose touch with all of the friends I’ve made, and the guild I helped to build, there’s a point where I have to wonder if all of the personal resources that I’ve put into ESO are worth it and will continue to be worth it. The developers are basically stewarding my primary source of entertainment, into which I have invested both time and money with highly variable rates of return. I wish they were better about that. I wish I felt like they cared about it that way. I get it, it’s a business. I am a customer for that business, so I feel like I and people like me are owed consideration, but maybe we’re just not their target customers. Knowing what I know now, I probably would not have put so much time into the game or gotten so invested. I am still waiting to see if I get over it. As @VaranisArano posted in his 5 Stages of Patch Note Grief, I should be at Acceptance now. I’m stuck in Bargaining, I guess.

So here’s where I stop articulating the point. This is my best and last attempt at trying to objectively communicate the underlying mental model that is leading to this apparently broad perception of unfairness, and I hope ZOS takes it as constructive feedback that is important enough to address with action. I doubt it, though. I literally have nothing else to say on the matter as it is clear to my mind, and will consign any future consumer feedback, positive or negative, to the ticketing system and the appropriate review outlets, because honestly, that's where I get traction. Discussions on this forum appear to be too easily dismissed.. Unless any of you find some flaw in my underlying data, take it or leave it as you see fit. Even you still don’t agree, maybe at least you’ll appreciate my effort to improve the dialogue by sharing an alternative view of the mentality behind the discontent. Thanks for reading.

Reverb wrote: »

You’ve not touched at all on what bothers me about
It. It’s the lack of moderate changes. CP 2.0 was introduced at the same time a bunch of combat, racial, and set changes went live. Why do they think we should all be happy to spend hours to completely redo the build for every character so frequently?!

More importantly, Why is Zeni allergic to doing one major change at a time?

Ratzkifal wrote: »

I don't think there is a point to raising the cap if people are being dragged along with it. At that point we could have just stayed at the old cap. Part of the motivation for the CP overhaul was that veteran players had nothing to work towards anymore. The 1800 threshold is a bit much, I agree, especially since it's vertical progression and not horizontal progression, but we don't need to bump someone who is already at 1800 today up to 3600, otherwise what was the point? It certainly doesn't give me any "catch-up" vibes anymore either.

My comment about no-CP PvP... well, I don't get what people's issues are with no-CP. Especially now with the increased base values, no-CP and CP should be closer together than before. It's more fair because it is less about how much time you've spent every day and more about how good you actually are, siege does actual damage because mitigation is lower - you probably don't care about my reasons.
I really only mean well with that advice, it has been given to low CP players for years after all. It just hurts that formerly high CP players are now low CP players again, but it is the truth of the matter, and that is due to the 1800 threshold, not the lack of "compensation".

Katahdin wrote: »

There are parts of the CP2.0 that Im not liking either, such as you are only limited to slot 4 things per category when we used to be able to get multiple things by putting points in.

Jeremy wrote: »

As an example: I was probably the only one - or at least one of very few - who actually played a health regen/mist form build. In all of my time of doing battlegrounds since Greymoor was released I did not see one other person use it. Not a single one. So the very last thing it was was rampant.