hafgood wrote: »

I haven't read the whole discussion so apologies if I missed someone saying the obvious.

You all talk about an optional vet overland. Harder monsters, better rewards, etc (and rewards may just be increased xp).

What none of you have stopped to consider is FOMO - the fear of missing out.

Vet overland with increased rewards will be successful, at least for a few weeks. The majority of players will move to it, why? FOMO, they won't want to miss the extra rewards that are on offer, same as we do the events each year even though we don't need anything from them just in case we miss put on something if we don't.

Once they decide that getting killed by random mobs isn't their thing they will leave ESO, they won't return to easy mode, they will leave the game, and then the game will die.

Let's have this discussion in 6 months when we see how New World's is doing (incidentally its a PC only game which has no interest to me as I play on a PS5)

You have vet versions of dungeons, people didn't try it and left ESO as a result en mass
You have vet versions of trials, people didn't try it and left ESO as a result en mass
You have vet versions of Arena's, people didn't try it and left ESO as a result en mass
Overworld will be exactly the same. I think people are turning a mouse into an elephant to prove their own bias.

Ballermfrau wrote: »

There should never be a different instance. The world is too big. Everything would feel like a ghost town.

I'm all for nerfing e.g. my damage and armor. So boss fights in the main quest are fun. Could also be done in form of ring which gives major debuffs but increases xp gain or gives a chance to drop transmute crystals.

The Overland is already empty. Only beginners play in Overland. Old players complete new locations in a few days and never return there. If the overland is interesting, it won't look like a ghost town.

Ishtarknows wrote: »

Overland fighting teaches nothing about group content mechanics, so you'll have someone taking 10 minutes to light attack spam /heavy attack a world boss to death thinking they're great and that translates fine into group (harder) content. There needs to be something to allow players to prepare for more difficult content and questing isn't it.

The four man dungeons provide more than adequate training, as do the easier trials in normal mode.

Callosum wrote: »

A question.

Would it be take less dev time to put players who activated some kind of nerf scroll in the same overland instance rather than making optional vet overland intances for every zone? Point being that you change the players rather than the zone.

Could maybe be an way of implementing for testing purposes without having to put in tons of resources.

No one who could answer that question is going to post in this thread.

What Zenimax (Rich) said is that it is not so simple. He said that in response to a player who suggested it was simple to create an optional difficulty.

Further, he indicated that the data demonstrates that the huge majority of players are not interested in a challenging overland questing which essentially means that it is a very small portion of the game interested in a challenging overland. To finish this up he said the data does not lie. His words, not mine.

For @cptqrk

Good for you, it has been said, and conveniently glossed over or all out ignored that the developers have said no they do not think that it would be in the best interest of the game based on internal figures

Yes, we know that. I also think that there is no need to argue on this topic. Rich Lambert had his say. However, we are not here to argue the ZoS vet want. overland or not. We just want to say that there is a request for a more fun overland in the game and that this is a good idea. Also, when Rich said that farming is the goal of this game, now look at the changes in U32. I remember several topics where people complained about the terrible RNG and there were players who defended it (there are some now), saying that if you fix the RNG, then the content will become inoperative and that players who have collected everything will have no reason to launch normal content along with newbies. Is this a fix for casual players?

Please, the server instancing/mirroring/sharding what ever you want to call it, is a result of how large MMOs keep the servers stable. They are dynamic and ebb and flow via server population. A totally separate hard mode would remove the hard mode players from the regular ebb and flow and will split the server population, thus leading us to the next point

Why make us play the game you don’t want? The truth is that we don't play ... Yes, we complete quests and other achievements in less than one week and no longer return to the zone. Farming new motives or events at the location is more tiring than entertaining.

(So what is it? ZOS should cater to this idea because soo many people want it, but it's not enough people to want it to actually change the server population? Pick one, please)

I think I know more about the financial and analytical numbers behind ESO than the developers do!

(Right, you know all about how much money ZOS is making. You have more knowledge of what content is getting played than ZOS does. You have access to all the data, and all the other information that you would need to make a decision about what is best for the game. You do not. They do)

You know? Usually opponents are vet. overland are beginning to cite arguments of what is beneficial and what is not as evidence. However, no one owns any financial information to really prove something. This is completely pointless.

There are literally hundreds of thousands of people playing the new shiny MMO! If ZOS doesn't change the game to the way I want it, ESO is DEAD!

We just want to show you that there are many successful games with a lot of fun content and a fascinating world. There are many MMOs where pvp goes well with pve. The most popular games in the world are competitive! And all projects have a place for casual players. But for some reason they are trying to prove to us that eso can only be successful 90% of the content will be absurdly trivial. Nonsense.

The only clear explanation that I can give is that ZoS just saves and does not take risks. They chose a policy of attracting a large number of random players. They also admitted that they are targeting returning players and that the average game duration is 6 months. That is why overland content is designed for those people who play a little. This is why we have an aggressive event schedule that negatively affects server performance.
If Craglorn's main problem was difficulty, why didn't ZoS just nerf the difficulty as they continued to create Adventure Zones? Why did the ZoS abandon quest chains like they did in Morrowind? Why did ZoS come to the conclusion that how to reduce the number of mobs in the location?
Unfortunately, such an explanation is simply offensive. But what to do. It's very simple - most of the players simply do not have time to complete most of the content. Therefore, the game focuses more and more on those players who play little. Alas, such an explanation is simply offensive for us, but what can we do?
You say we have trials and dungeons. But why does ZoS read it as a completely excellent decision to release dlc without new arenas or trials?
You say that most of the eso players are casuals. But eso just doesn't appeal to people looking for gameplay or mmo. They see that this game is more like a visual novel and just give up on it. Of course there will be more casuals in the game.

Khami wrote: »

Players like me quit this game back in 2014/15 because of the "forced to group" difficulty of Cadwell's Silver/Gold/Craglorn. I did complete Cadwell's Gold the day before the nerf happened in July 2014 to the difficulty of what are now the vanilla zones.

It did not take them long to figure out people did not like the veteran system and slowly changed it to the champion system.

There are people who don't use ESO+ because they don't want the DLC dungeons to show up in a random queue. While I buy the story based zone dlcs, I've never bought a 2-dungeon pack, never plan on it.

To this day, I still hate Craglorn and is the only zone I don't have 100% completion on when it comes to world bosses and other group areas like Shada's Tear. When they changed Craglorn, I lost completions to some of what are now solo delves and can't access the boss to complete it being I've already done the quest for it. I remember tanking that delve back then.

Silver and Gold weren't that veteran overland. Already proved here that mobs at your level or rank have always been easy.

The problem with dlc dungeons is that the rewards for normal and vet are the same. It is very strange. And I sincerely don’t understand why people farm experience and crystals if they don’t want to play veteran content and cannot learn soloing normal dlc.

So, I play lotro (have done for years) and right now we have a progression server that has the option to set the difficulty of the open world from "Normal" through 9 progressively harder levels. Difficulty levels 4 through to 9 sees the mobs getting various buffs that, if you are not careful can wipe you very quickly. The only reward, apart from enjoying the slower pace and higher difficulty are two sets of titles earned at levels 50 and 130. We won't see level 130 on the server for at least 4+ years, so it rewards persistence if nothing else. The server also has a -40% rewarded xp debuff that slows down normal levelling progression (though there are ways to hit the current lvl cap in a matter of hours if you spend enough).

Why is this server popular at the moment? It's a new server and so it comes with all the fun that goes with a fresh start, the chance to make new friends etc.

Applying it to existing communities and offering rewards where advantage can be had over newer players who don't have the gear would just reward those players with 900+ cp in trials gear so they can farm to their hearts content. No, it's not a good idea.

I can't wait to team up with 16 other players so we can finally try to take on that Pony Guar in Vvardenfell!

I'd sign up for this.

Callosum wrote: »

A question.

Would it be take less dev time to put players who activated some kind of nerf scroll in the same overland instance rather than making optional vet overland intances for every zone? Point being that you change the players rather than the zone.

Could maybe be an way of implementing for testing purposes without having to put in tons of resources.

Yes. It would. But these people will not accept a separate instance, and most of them also want entirely new mechanics too which would require a total overhaul of the game.

spartaxoxo wrote: »

AlexanderDeLarge wrote: »

There are all sorts of people who believe all sorts of things but I'd bet my life's savings that if you sat the average player in front of my computer while logged into my account and they were ending combat encounters before enemy NPCs could perform their scripted actions, the overwhelming majority would say it sucks.

And you would lose that bet when it comes to this game. This game has drawn a large casual audience that consistently prefers and mostly uses easy content. That is the majority usage of this game, which is also a fact. The devs have observed the behavior of the entire playerbase and saw that this game is vast majority casual that don't want to do hard content and has tailored their game accordingly.

That's also a fact.

The fact is that 90% of casual players play little. Therefore, overland is not only a triavial difficulty, but there is no content. ZoS sees that most of the content, even lightweight content, is not completed, and therefore has not made any attempt to improve the ovreland. If this explanation suits you.