Merforum wrote: »

It is axiomatic that you incentivize what you want more of and disincentivize what you want less of.

And that's what they did. They wanted more people in the tank queue, but in normal not vet. So that queue times would go down. And that's what they got.

Quality of Vet Queue went up. Queue times down across the board. More dungeons being successfully completed.

They added join encounter in progress to address issue of speeding

Merforum wrote: »

seldomseenkd wrote: »

I agree. Random veterans need to yield significantly more transmutes per hour than random normals.

The trade offs as I see them are:

Separation of players who want to run normals for the quest/skillpoint and players who want the most transmutes/hour. Increased queue times for random normals but decreased queue times for the vet. queue.
Actively rewards effective players with more transmutes/hour than ineffective players.
Playerbase overall less tolerant of ineffective players resulting in more vote kicks.
Increase in the average skilllevel of the entire playerbase.
Players immediately dropping group the moment a vet. DLC dungeon pops.
Overall decrease in the number of players using the dungeon finder.

Thanks for you comment. The initial idea is

1. to reduce the amount of transmutes (and maybe other incentives) in normal random DF (maybe even remove transmutes as someone said since they only got put there after transmute station) enough to make it not worth the time for speedrunners

2. give a second or more ways to get those transmutes, with random BGs being perfect alternative place for giving those transmutes (and at the same time trying to increase the population)

3. also add some transmute rewards for pledges, trials and arenas, to further reduce the need to speedrun DF, more ways for free stuff, who can object

The benefit of these suggestions is to minimize the amount of work the devs would have to do to implement while maximizing the benefit. There is obviously a time vs rewards balance they would want to achieve, just a matter of testing a few scenarios.

I agree we need more options for getting transmutes. Funneling loads of players into the dungeon finder who don't really want to be there and just want it over with as fast as possible is fundamentally bad idea.

The best solutions I've read on the forums so far are as follows:

For dungeons:

Create a second queue for people who want to take their time doing dungeons. If a speedrunner joins this queue, chances are the other 3 are not speedrunners, and will vote to kick him. This queue will be extremely slow, as all speedrunners will join the speedrunning queue, and some non-speedrunners will also join it, as they might want to get carried. Meaning, you give the people the option to queue for dungeons with other... slowrunners? But the price they pay is that queue times may be longer.

For battlegrounds:

Need to be careful here. Any sort of guaranteed reward (be it increased AP, or more things you can sell to merchants for gold,) is very risky, as it makes it easy for bots to manipulate. So, the solution really is just to guarantee rewards for the winning team, give the second team a decent chance of getting good rewards, and extremely poor chances for the losing team.

For game modes (and this is my own suggestion,) please, please, please, have one solo deathmatch queue, one group deathmatch queue, and one group queue for a specific objective game mode, that rotates every 3 days or every week. This will give players the chance to run optimal builds and teams, and save the builds that work in their armory for the next time that specific game mode returns. This will make PvP guilds more popular, and further push the boundaries of theorycrafting and build diversity.

Merforum wrote: »

seldomseenkd wrote: »

Merforum wrote: »

seldomseenkd wrote: »

I agree. Random veterans need to yield significantly more transmutes per hour than random normals.

The trade offs as I see them are:

Separation of players who want to run normals for the quest/skillpoint and players who want the most transmutes/hour. Increased queue times for random normals but decreased queue times for the vet. queue.
Actively rewards effective players with more transmutes/hour than ineffective players.
Playerbase overall less tolerant of ineffective players resulting in more vote kicks.
Increase in the average skilllevel of the entire playerbase.
Players immediately dropping group the moment a vet. DLC dungeon pops.
Overall decrease in the number of players using the dungeon finder.

Thanks for you comment. The initial idea is

1. to reduce the amount of transmutes (and maybe other incentives) in normal random DF (maybe even remove transmutes as someone said since they only got put there after transmute station) enough to make it not worth the time for speedrunners

2. give a second or more ways to get those transmutes, with random BGs being perfect alternative place for giving those transmutes (and at the same time trying to increase the population)

3. also add some transmute rewards for pledges, trials and arenas, to further reduce the need to speedrun DF, more ways for free stuff, who can object

The benefit of these suggestions is to minimize the amount of work the devs would have to do to implement while maximizing the benefit. There is obviously a time vs rewards balance they would want to achieve, just a matter of testing a few scenarios.

I agree we need more options for getting transmutes. Funneling loads of players into the dungeon finder who don't really want to be there and just want it over with as fast as possible is fundamentally bad idea.

Exactly correct, it seems like they wanted to give a better way for PVEer to get transmutes with the transmutes station but made the normal dungeon finder queue reward of 10 TC too high. So all it did was bring the epidemic of speed runners. But like I say, we can speculate all we want about the causes of things. The simplest solution is for ZOS to just tweak the rewards and incentives here and there until they get the desired results. BTW even the results they want might be something different than people think, maybe speed runners IS what they want.

Just asking this to ask, but what if what we have IS ZOS'S desired result?

That is just another variant of "let's punish those people for not playing the way I want!".

Just split the Normal queue into two! There certainly seems to be enough people that complain about speedrunners all the time, just as there seem to be enough speedrunners to complain about.

Normal queue for newbies, slowbies, questies, book readers and crate looters.
Expert queue for people that want to feel the joy of being able to finish dungeons as fast as possible. Finding which trash packs to avoid, drag around the packs for total glorious mayhem and generally just trying to get to the "Joining encounter in progress" point as fast as possible. Ahh the joy!

Same rewards for both queues of course. Stop trying to use punishments to kill the fun for either gamer type.



And if you then complain about the queue times, just remember that you didn't want "those people" in your group anyway, and they certainly didn't want you!

Except ofc that the suggestion clearly results in less results for the same amount of work. Ie a punishment.

To not be considered a punishment the time/result ratio needs to remain the same regardless of what activity you perform to achieve the results.

As a side note, there are other reasons for doing dungeons fast than "to get over with it". You can still enjoy doing dungeons even if you want to do them fast. Doing it fast is a challenge all to itself that can be both fun and engaging.

seldomseenkd wrote: »

Disagree.

If you want your 10 carrots on a stick then you don't have any choice in how you play. You must do dungeons whether you like them or not. And some players clearly don't since they want to get it over and done with as soon as possible.

Surely multiple activities yielding transmutes is more in line with ESOs ethos of "playing how you want"?

It's already possible to just do a dungeon slowly with a friend or alone if people killing fast is such a bother

Regarding first point of OP.

As long as the option to pug veteran dlc dungeons exists, I am not inclined to support this proposal. What would happen is either people would try to force fake roles and general incompetence in dungeons they cannot complete (at least in a timely manner) to get some decent rewards or people would realise this is exactly what would happen, leading to dungeon finder desertifications, both on veteran and normal front.

No matter, people are always going to speedrun to farm for rewards that you have difficult time getting elsewhere and people will list themselves under fake roles to skip queue (because the queue system itself is rigid, not allowing for flexible role distribution, or rather, all 4 DDs for trivially easy content, which is fine for said content but it would fall in the face of more difficult content)

I believe there are better solutions.

1) One thing that should be implemented is that veteran dlc content should yield more rewards upon succesful completion. Not more exclusive rewards that would otherwise be unobtainable. Just more loot. More than just double the unique set item drop. Something like even more transmutes, undaunted keys (even outside of pledge days) and such. It would incentivize people to play random veteran dungeons or hard dungeons for the loot instead of having to penalize players by shifting already somewhat meager rewards into potentially much more difficult content. The increased time that veteran versions of the dungeons should reward more rewards. Why would you bother with transmutes with a chance of failure and longer time taken when you could do the same much faster, have easier time finding people to do a normal dungeon and basically not having a chance to "fail" the dungeon run. The good thing about veteran dungeons is that they are less boring because they are more challenging but the thing, a large majority of people don't care about the thrill of challenge, they just want rewards and get out.

2) Option to exclude long DLC dungeons when you're in full premade group without having to ask for pre-level 45 characters or players with eso+ and dlc's. That way DLC dungeons still do get get filler players. But in a full premade group, that said wouldn't be able to fill a group of any size because as we all know, the group size is limited 4 for dungeons.

3) ability to queue for your daily transmute dungeon solo. It should still be random so that you don't end up running half the Fungal Grotto 1 for fastest clears. Or not to keep random normal queues faster. When queuing solo, certain group gated mechanics like Direfrost Keep pads should be altered to allow player to proceed even when solo. You can still queue for a group if you're unsure about your capabilities, want a faster run or don't want to do everything yourself.

4) An intermediary dungeon difficulty is needed because let's face it, the difficulty curve between normal and veteran content is mind bogglingly steep. Especially when DLCs and their punishing mechanics are conserned. Normal difficulty is mind boringly boring, you just blaze through it even if you're semi-casual, whereas to the same player, veteran version of the same dungeon is just pain and suffering (especially if you don't have at least two already experienced players to carry you) because normal difficulty taught them nothing or just bad habits.

I do agree that the dungeon and BG finder do need improvements. Several improvements.

Regarding point two, I fully agree. Matchingmaking is deeply flawed right now and basically a deathmatch only right now. Better to go back to old system... with some better quantity of rewards to make pvp worthwhile. You hardly break even in expenditures in the value of AP when playing in BGs/Cyro (IC is about farming Tel Var which is profitable but it's actually better to farm vs PVE mobs than trying to find a player to kill carrying them)