I'm not sure what the default keybinding is (my personal control scheme is heavily modified) but there's an Interact with Player prompt that shows up in the lower center of your screen when you hover your cursor over another player when you're within ~5 meters of them. You hold that key down, a menu pops up with a bunch of options; the one that looks like most browsers' Refresh button is for trading items -- it's like two arrows chasing each other in a circular shape.

Welcome to ESO!

Yeah, you need to be in proximity to a player to trade, and the items from dungeons lock after two hours from pickup; items not eligible for trade simply do not show up in the trade interface.

For me (as a fellow controller user on PC) assigning the Interact with Player button to be HOLD Left Bumper (Xbox) works very well, since I can reliably do it while controlling both thumbsticks during combat or whatever. It's the same button you use to revive a fallen ally, if you're familiar with that; works at about the same range, too.

And there are different chat channels. /zone chat is the "everyone in this instance, no matter the distance" channel, but many people just spam this channel with nonsense so lots of players turn it off entirely. /say will show up to anyone in the immediate area (not sure how large a radius, but it's not that big; town size perhaps) and you have a better chance of people seeing stuff written here since fewer people turn it off. /yell works similarly, but has a larger radius and shows up in red letters; but again people abuse this channel for dumb BS sometimes, so many players disable it. /group is the channel specifically meant for, you guessed it, groups; but it's super common for people to simply not acknowledge you at all in random groups even if they see what you type, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Failing all those channels, you can try /whisper ing players by their @names (I'm not sure if /whisper works with character names, since I never go by those). It sends them a direct (private) message. So for example you'd just type "/whisper @GreenHere" in the chat, hit enter, then proceed to attempt to message them. You can also use just /w for short. If you type a message and it doesn't go through, the player is either appearing offline, truly offline, or has blocked you; so it can be a good idea to just send a quick period or something to someone before typing out a full message that may be wasted.


You'll see players have different animations for things like looking at their map, digging through their bags, shopping in the Crown Store, etc. I can't say definitively, but I'm ~90% sure that when you see someone looking at a scroll/map that they're actually looking at the Map (as in finding a place to fast travel to) since digging through inventory has its own animation. If that "looking at the map" animation is shared with another menu, I'm not aware of it.

People do sometimes trade things after dungeon runs, but it's the exception more than the rule ever since the Sets Collections feature came out. Most folks aren't really looking for items too often anymore, it seems; and if they are they're in chat letting everyone know. Like I said above, most of the time you're lucky to get even one person that tosses a "tyfg" (thank you for group) in the chat at the end, let alone have any kind of interaction. If you're looking for socializing or (reliable) item trading or anything along those lines, you'd do well to find a friendly guild to run with. It really can make the whole ESO experience a lot better!



Sorry for wall of text. I'm wordy. :P

Happy to help! I remember my early days in ESO, and were it not for helpful strangers on the internet I would have had a much harder time with things. I'm glad I can pay it forward, so to speak.

If you find yourself struggling for DPS, there's a lot of good info to find out there. One avenue a lot of folks who struggle end up finding success with is super-simple Heavy Attack builds; note that a lot of what people call HA builds are not at all simple, though. The super simple ones where you only are worried about like 3 or 4 skills are they type I'm referring to.

Glad to hear you got a target dummy and (I assume) Combat Metrics to set you on the right track. Those are both instrumental tools to "gitting gud" so it's super cool that someone helped you out with that early on.


Just so you know, don't feel shunned or like you should hide away until you're all leveled up, though. There are a lot of players who are more than happy to run with newer or lower-power players. In fact if you browse the forum a bit, you'll see quite a few disgruntled folks who are tired of feeling rushed by veterans who want to do things at a pace that makes them uncomfortable. If you can find and hook up with players who want a more normal pace/experience, you're basically good to go for that sort of group content right now; most group dungeons are super doable on Normal right from the start.

Furthermore, as a low level player you're particularly valuable in the Random Dungeon queue, because the way ESO selects Dungeons for random groups is based on the lowest player's level, as outlined here. (UESP is the best source for all things Elder Scrolls, btw! Lots of questions can be answered by poking around there.) Note that you can manually go into any dungeon you like at any level; those "minimum level" requirements only apply to when the game is finding random teammates for you in matchmaking.