There are plenty hardcore mmorpg's, I love this one because I can play casually and relax.
I don't feel obligated to play, I don't even raid, it's perfect as it is.
You geeks that want it harder, try playing naked, that should help you...

Talking about budget is not our role. Somehow when someone asks for new houses, and such nobody ask him "Who will pay for this? There won't be enough interst in it to pay off!", yeah right. This is just a miserable try of cutting this topic - this is not our role to determine is it profitable or not. It's also false that there is not enough interest in this topic, somehow it is discussed almost all the time on the forums and opinions are pretty much split in a half.

It seems that people who are against it just don't have any other arguments in this matter, just blind assumptions, things out of topic and fear.

BlueRaven wrote: »

Not.
Asking.
For.
Numbers.

(3rd time I have said it.)

What you are asking for is something on the scale of “Classic WoW” but aimed at just a small subset of the current eso player base.

So what gets cut? I am guessing it’s going to be the general size of future overland content? Cut the length of future stories? Maybe not as many delves? All of that together may pay for the added cost of the alternate set of future vet servers.

Maybe there can be a new revenue source? Doubling eso+ could pay for it. But then what is the value of eso+ to the common player at that point, most people don’t even do dungeons.
Maybe it can be a separate sub, but how many people will buy it? Hmmmm…

Black wood came out with three public dungeons which seems like an extravagance that could be cut, but I suppose that is not casual content so it will be protected…

And then what happens?

“I am a new player, but I am very casual and not very good at video games. But my friend plays so I will give it a shot. Do I join a vet server where they are on but the play style is not to my liking? Do I play on the “normal” server where they don’t have a character and ask them to join me?” - One Tamriel was supposed to bring everyone together. Vet servers just separate them again.

This whole thing is not very realistic from a budget standpoint.

What you are writing is pure conjuncture. Fact is neither of us know about anything that you are writing about.
You ask what would get cut? Fact is neither of us can answer that, we dont even know if anything would be cut and if it could be made a future chapter feature for a chapter which has as of now no feature planned. You talk about revenue sources. Fact is neither of us can accurately talk about that. You talk about extra public dungeons but neither of us knows as what kind of content Zos sees them. You are talking about separate servers. We dont even know if there would be separate servers or instances instead. You are creating facts where there are none. You demand answers none of us can give. And then you talk about how realistic it is when you have absolutely no idea about that. Im just not gonna bother anymore.

Mayrael wrote: »

Talking about budget is not our role. Somehow when someone asks for new houses, and such nobody ask him "Who will pay for this? There won't be enough interst in it to pay off!", yeah right. This is just a miserable try of cutting this topic - this is not our role to determine is it profitable or not. It's also false that there is not enough interest in this topic, somehow it is discussed almost all the time on the forums and opinions are pretty much split in a half.

It seems that people who are against it just don't have any other arguments in this matter, just blind assumptions, things out of topic and fear.

People buying the houses, pay for those houses in real world money. Plus zoo gets revenue from the crown furniture sales.

Luke_Flamesword wrote: »

For me obvious is fact that higher overland difficulty for all player never will happen in ESO, so I don't understand why with every topic about difficulty there is so much drama about how much some players don't want it. We know it and get it and noone (or almost noone) wants to take from you easy overland. Why are you so egoistic about your approach. There are many players who wants easy and hard difficulty, so why only one of this group should be privileged? For god's sake we talk even about very, very easy solutions to implement like special buff or debuff for players working like Battle Spirit in Cyrodiil, so it's easy and almost ready to implement solution. I'm so desperate in needing any engagment in overland that I can take this debuff without any rewards for this - just for fun, when I make quests.

There's been plenty of talk about the solutions, and they all have problems. I am open for a difficulty slider, but the thing is, I don't think it's quite as easy as you seem to think it is. It's a simple concept, but game design is not that simple. Just look at the battle spirit thing you brought up, it's broken again and messed up Cyro for everyone playing ranged builds.

Adding a difficulty slider means adding yet another mechanical layer to the game, and that opens up the doors for even more stuff to go wrong. And ESO does not have a reputation for being stable platform you can just plug and play new features on. If ZOS implements one I wont mind, but I will not encourage them to add one either, because it will not actually solve anything. And it wont make these threads go away, it will just change their contents.

Like I've said before, just calling for harder difficulty in general s not constructive, there's way too many variables involved for that to mean anything. Besides, what is difficulty anyway? Increasing the health (or nerfing your damage) will not make things harder, it will just make things take more time. Increasing incoming damage will make things harder, in the sense that there are more opportunities for you to screw up, but if you know how to dodge/block/shield against burst, you will still know how to do it, even with some sort of difficulty nerf applied to you. You might need to do it more often, and pace the fight bit slower to maintain you resources, but it would not be harder as such. Anyone who fights world bosses solo, or does veteran dungeons solo knows this.

ESO combat is not about attrition, it's about pacing, maneuvering, LOS, and maintaining your resources, while guarding against burst. You can't make that inherently harder by upping the opponents health pool, that will just make things last longer. You can't increase their damage beyond certain point, since that would turn every attack into one shot. Look at player health pools and compare them to boss health. The dynamic of ESO combat is based on the idea that you take constant low level damage, that you have to counter with HOTs, while watching out for those burst moves that can kill you in 2 or 3 blows. If you fail to block or dodge or shield or interrupt those, you must burst heal, maybe maneuver and use LOS while regaining some resources and then re-engaging.

To make combat harder, in a meaningful way would require smarter AI, more complex mechanics involved(with more opportunities to fail to defend against those bursts), or gimmicky things that blindside you. Look at Veteran Solo Arenas (I can only talk about Maelstrom, since I haven't done any content that came with Markarth). The content that is touted as the hardest solo challenge in the game. You get endless threads off people asking for advice on how to beat them. And the general consensus has always been that it will get easier over time. Once you learn the mechanics, once you memorize the spawn points, once you get a routine build up, it will become easy. Eventually routine in fact.

And that's the key here, once you learn how the game works, how the mechanics function, what are the gimmicky gotcha moves, the game will become easy. And a simple debuff that nerfs your character will not take that away from you. If you can solo dungeons, especially veteran dungeons, I fail to see how a simple nerf to damage dealt and increase in damage received would make overland content more rewarding from a challenge point of view.

So let's look at some specifics shall we - Say you nerf the damage you deal by half, effectively doubling the mobs health.And lets say you take 50% more damage from them. So an attack, that does 2000 damage to you, now deals 3000. Okay... Will that make things actually harder? Or will it mean that the fight will last 4 seconds instead of 2? If you can nuke a boss in 10 seconds without the nerf, then will it really make that much of an actual difference, that nuking the boss will now take 15 seconds?

Lets say you amp it up a bit, so that mobs have 10 times the health, and you take like 4 times the damage. An attack that would've dealt 2000 now hits for 8000. You will definitely be blocking and dodging more often under those rules. But if you know how to do that, and can manage your resources, you'll be fine. The fight will now last lot longer since you will be spending lot more time on the defensive and managing your resources, and you deal lot less damage. So a mob that took you 2 seconds to kill will now take half a minute. Kewl. That boss you nuked in 10 seconds will 5 take minutes to kill, yay. But it will still be the same exact fight, it will just be drawn out, and take heaps of time longer. I don't know about you, but that sounds tedious to me, not harder. I mean, we already have people who solo dragons. I don't, haven't even tried. Good lord just imagine how long that must take. My time is way too valuable to spend on something like that.

Imagine this, you go to a delve and come upon a large room. You can see 5 mobs in the room. You engage the closest, making sure you wont aggro the others, since eating those 8k blows from multiple foes at the same time is not a good idea. So you engage one of then and start hacking at it. After 20 seconds of struggle you manage to kill the first one, and move towards the next. Then at that moment, another player, who has not opted into the harder difficulty, comes storming into the room and nukes the other 3 mobs, and then finished the one you were fighting before you even got it to 50% health, loots the corpses and rushes onto the next room to nuke all the mobs in there too. Is that really the gaming experience you are looking for? Variable difficulties just do not work well in a shared gaming space.

It is for reasons like these that I do not see the point of a difficulty slider. If you want to challenge yourself, there are things you can do that with. Making questing harder is perfectly valid thing to yearn for, but I just don't see how you could implement that within the framework of the game, and make it feel satisfying. What you'd need were veteran versions of the zones, but... Yeah, I just don't see that happening, neither from technical or financial points of view.

And if a veteran mode of some sort is added to the game, you can bet your... Well what ever it is you consider to be really valuable, that the forums would then be flooded with demands for better rewards for the added difficulty. Without the extra reward, most players will play on the standard setting. Which then again rises the question: Is veteran mode actually worth the financial cost it requires to implement? Just look at veteran vs. normal dungeons. Which one do people grind? Why do so may players, who are obviously veterans, prefer to do normals instead of veteran dungeons? The simple truth is that vet dungeons aren't worth the extra trouble as far as rewards are concerned. People rush to the end because they do not want to waste their time.

If you do add meaningfully better rewards for the harder difficulty, it will then become the new default difficulty, and that will lead to an uprising within the player base, and that is the last thing ZOS will want to have on their hands. If you don't add those rewards, no one will play it.

So... to sum it up. It isn't as easy as some people think. There are lot of ancillary issues to consider in addition to technical ones, and someone will still have to design it, code it, implement it and test it. And that costs money. Fair amount of money. And then there is the stability of the game itself to keep in mind. I mean, as I am writing this the game died on EU-PC server once again. People can't even login on the damn thing. Worrying about optional difficulty sliders is not a priority for the game right now. Having it run stable would be nice for a starter. And even if you do get the slider, it wont really change anything, and am yet to see single convincing argument on how it will make things actually better. Like if mobs have 50% more health and hit 20% harder, it will not lead to a harder grittier gaming experience. It will juts make things even more tedious and make you spend more time in combat. That's all.

At the end of the day, ESO combat is dependent on player experience, and it's something you will always have, no matter how many new characters you roll. You will never get that noob rush again once you graduated to veteran tier. It might not be your cup of tea, but within the framework of the game, the only real option for that truly harder combat is in PVP. Everything else is just memorizing the mechanics and developing a routine. The more you do, the easier it gets. I'm not taking anything away from people who do those super leet PVE achievements. Those things are hard, as hard as they come. But they too are something that gets easier the more you do them. And once you do conquer them, there's no way to forget that knowledge. You've memorized the way it plays and developed the necessary muscle memory to deal with it.

To keep things consistently challenging, what you need is unpredictable opponents, and for that you need better AI. And at this point in time, you need fight actual people to get smarter foes. Them's the breaks.

Mayrael wrote: »

It's also false that there is not enough interest in this topic, somehow it is discussed almost all the time on the forums and opinions are pretty much split in a half.

Not according to this poll:
26% for all the yes combined, 67% no.

https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/567984/its-time-to-make-this-game-more-challenging/p1

Sarousse wrote: »

Create a char. stay naked. Don't put champ points. equip the starter wseapon.

just light attack. Don't heal, don't dodge, don't block. Jump into 7-8 mobs packs.

You will just destroy them.

This is eso right now. And I'm clearly tired of this.

Not sure if that was sarcasm, but if not, why are you still playing?

Mayrael wrote: »

SilverBride wrote: »

Mayrael wrote: »

It's also false that there is not enough interest in this topic, somehow it is discussed almost all the time on the forums and opinions are pretty much split in a half.

Not according to this poll:
26% for all the yes combined, 67% no.

https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/567984/its-time-to-make-this-game-more-challenging/p1

Yes because it was stupid poll with exaggerated options and no mention about OPTIONAL difficulty.

There are still only 26% who want the game to be more challenging and who would be utilizing the harder content, optional or otherwise. That is not enough support to justify it.

amm7sb14_ESO wrote: »

How does getting a purple drop of the overland zone set on a vet overland instance equal "getting vet drops without doing vet content"?

I never mentioned overland zone set drops and neither did they. They requested that the story quest bosses be veteran level, be repeatable, and drop loot appropriate for their difficulty.

That is what this is really about.

I wonder how many people would do veteran dungeons if they didn't drop monster helmets? I certainly would not. Vet dungeon is just a temporary instance that ceases to exist as soon as everyone leaves it.
Devs could add extra instances of zones, but they would be deserted by majority, so what's the point of keeping them? Even those who want them will probabply feel lonely playing in ghost towns.