Nefas wrote: »

Introduction

However, it is no surprise at all why once large numbers of people attain what they want (PvE skins for example), there is a sharp drop in retention or interest for the Trials they got it from which can have interesting effects in that demographic or at least for the next group of people wanting to tackle that content. Certainly some people stick around regardless of the lack of reward, perhaps they've forged their own values, copium or sense of achievement through other things such as scorepushing, teaching people or deriving satisfaction from resulting social interactions.

Nefas wrote: »

I ultimately find that current discussions are completely irrelevant with people fighting over scraps and with some points being put forward as completely fallacious (whether you're arguing that replayability of content is intrinsically tied in with a sense of accomplishment on alternative characters or that players are silly for not realizing the ultimate reward is "fun" anyway, it's all understandable or perhaps valid to a degree) to the point emotion is clearly ruling over thought although in some cases, a difference of culture (console players tend to equate title/skin/achievement to player skill/status moreso than their PC counterparts) may explain some things too.

Nefas wrote: »

Introduction

The recent conversations surrounding the Account-wide achievements/titles on both the forums and other mediums have certainly caused some disconnected disagreement between the varying opinions regarding the upcoming changes

Regardless of the opinions (I personally lean towards account-wide achievements/titles being more positive than negative), I ultimately find that current discussions are completely irrelevant with people fighting over scraps and with some points being put forward as completely fallacious (whether you're arguing that replayability of content is intrinsically tied in with a sense of accomplishment on alternative characters or that players are silly for not realizing the ultimate reward is "fun" anyway, it's all understandable or perhaps valid to a degree) to the point emotion is clearly ruling over thought although in some cases, a difference of culture (console players tend to equate title/skin/achievement to player skill/status moreso than their PC counterparts) may explain some things too.

What should be focused on here is why people are passionate/upset about the titles. Simply put, it's one of the very few things that people perceive to have as far as endgame "rewards" go which is rather sad and should be the focal point of all future discussions when it comes to, well, the entire reward system across the board or lack thereof. In a sense, people shouldn't be mad that account-wide titles are happening but mad at the fact that's pretty much all they "had". Indeed, this isn't just isolated to "endgame" players but ALL ESO players regardless of the game activity they partake in.

In this post, I'd like to present an overview of ESO's reward structure and how the severe lack of satisfaction/rewards has contributed to not only a part of the endgame minority's backlash over titles, the powderkeg that was the Respec Scrolls fiasco on social media and a large part of the lack of growth or interest in specific ingame activities. You are more than free to disagree with me/others or attack my stance, but do please keep the thread civil as I'd prefer to not have it locked, thank you!

What, Where and Why are the Rewards?

The degree of a dopamine rush is quite different between collecting a pet just by porting to a new zone or dungeon and collecting a pet by completing content. The same can be said for any kind of reward whether it's a mount (Godslayer, Planesbreaker, Ebon Dwemer Wolf) or personality (Worm Wizard, Beast) or skins. In short, when players think of rewards they often think of collectibles such as skins, titles, the achievement points, mounts, personalities and whatever that can be collected through not only a sense or reality of progression but from the actual content they buy or play.

With this being said, such rewards have become quite scarce in recent years with skins having the equivalent or superior version of it in the Crown Store and the sheer amount of Mounts locked behind what is essentially gambling on the Crown Store alongside the personalities/skins/emotes/other collectibles.

The consistency of rewards has also suffered. Perhaps it's body markings this time instead of a skin. Perhaps instead of a Hoarver pet it's a memento that is simply another unused addition to the vast collection of mementos you sometimes barely use or perhaps it's the amount of Transmute Crystals (as of Update 28-33, you get 1 Crystal from Battlegrounds as opposed to 10 Crystals from a Random Normal or 10 Crystals from organizing a total of 12 people for a Trial versus doing two basegame Hard Modes with up to 3 others for 10 Crystals/4 Undaunted Keys) you can get. Maybe in one Trial trifecta, you don't even get a mount, you get a memento. Or if you do get a mount, you don't get a skin. No matter what, there is a clear lack of consistency when it comes rewards in the game whether we want to talk about quality, mode or availability. The nature of this consistency can overlap with player behavior such as many players treating Battlegrounds objective matches as Deathmatches because of the perception of a lack of worthwhile rewards even if you do win.

This inconsistency is compounded by the lack of what players perceive to be rewards, which in juxtaposition to the overwhelming presence of what players desire being located in the Crown Store, not only contribute to Crown Store fatigue (much like combat balance fatigue) but also a sense of bitterness and dejection that can manifest in tangible form as there are no other alternatives besides dealing with an abysmal gambling rate, encouragement of a certain # of purchases or an extremely grindy alternative that's artificially capped to encourage consumer behavior towards purchase.

No sane player should call for an end to the microtransactions of the Crown Store as it's clear the proceeds help support the game in both a corporate and financial sense however it is troubling when compared to other games (as an example, FFXIV has over 200 earnable mounts) The Elder Scrolls Online falls rather short of fulfilling the players' sense of achievement in rewards. I would also like to mention here that this is not a zero-sum game where the Crown Store mounts HAVE to go away or that ingame mounts/collectibles be better, that certain players should only be able to earn/buy things, or vice versa, my argument is ultimately that there should be a healthy balance between the base game and its microtransactions store rather than what we have now.

It is of further note that no sane player or content creator I've talked to or observed throughout the 8 years I've been playing since beta has also said "yes, there's enough rewards in this game, we don't need any more rewards, we don't want to earn mounts, we don't want to earn costumes/polymorphs, we don't want to earn skins, we don't want to earn pets, we don't want to see any new incentives for overland/PvP/PvE/BGs/Trials, etc."

When players call for more rewards to be added to the game, they often do so from the limited perspective of their demographic. Casual players want rewards that are not only earnable but accessible. Endgame players bemoan they want rewards that are not only earnable but encourage them to keep sticking around. Most players regardless of demographic or playstyle clearly understand that there is something wrong or at bare minimum amiss when it comes to what they can work towards or gain. I believe it's time we stop isolating the discussion of rewards to any specific group of players but rather open up all future discussions of rewards to all players at all levels/tiers.

But what kind of rewards do players want or maybe in some instances, actually need?

The Nature of Incentives, Rewards and Players

There is unfortunately a terrible complexity and difficulty in the determining of rewards particularly on the dev-end. Which players get what? How do players get what? When do players get what? What will affect the ingame economy, etc?

Much like the proposed compromise of a "gilded title" system put forth by many players, this system objectively changes nothing whatsoever about the incentives of replaying or picking up the content apart from being a short-term solution to appease people. Skins, cosmetics or other "one time" rewards are also not the greatest in terms of retaining either interest or communities although they can certainly act as initial catalysts or motivators in encouraging people to start progressing through the content. It is clear that the presence of desirable rewards can act as incentives as evident by many players still wanting to buy/play Fang Lair runs (released in 2018) to this very day along with a few other similar examples.

However, it is no surprise at all why once large numbers of people attain what they want (PvE skins for example), there is a sharp drop in retention or interest for the Trials they got it from which can have interesting effects in that demographic or at least for the next group of people wanting to tackle that content. Certainly some people stick around regardless of the lack of reward, perhaps they've forged their own values, copium or sense of achievement through other things such as scorepushing, teaching people or deriving satisfaction from resulting social interactions. This applies to PvP as well where after many years of performance degradation and lack of content, the incentives for players fell for players who wanted to pick up or stay on PvP. The few PvP incentives and dysfunctional reward system (a dye for Grand Overlord, how gaining AP works arguably does not encourage actually doing the activity of PvP and so forth) simply leads to it being something supported only by the attractiveness of the combat system (which is dubious for PvP since the combat needs to work for it to be attractive) and again, social interaction.

There is however an eventual hard limit to how much players can incentivize for themselves and their communities within the game. We've seen this happen particularly with PvE/PvP where despite trying to incentivize through ingame prizes, events or whatnot the turnouts by the end of this long process can be remarkably small. Once you complete the content and whatever comes with it, your behavior changes into a cyclical one which has increasingly been encouraged since 2017 (Curated Sets, the philosophy of the game's direction, how the game mechanics are implemented and so on) and which also conveniently encourages some of that same consumer behavior as mentioned above.

This brings us to Perennial Rewards which are, in theory, the flexible parts of a reward system in The Elder Scrolls Online. Why do you do Random Normals on each character? Why do you go to Cyrodiil to farm just enough AP to get Tier 1? Why do you farm specific dungeons or go to specific places and stay there for hours on end? Why did a bunch of PvP'ers also do Veteran Craglorn Trials in 2015 and stuck with doing Trials after? In the case of those PvP'ers in 2015 (who would later become Mechanically Challenged on PC/NA), gold Sun jewelry that was tradeable to other players outside of the group/Trial could be sold. In short, Transmute Crystals, motif collection, furnishing plans and so forth that act as either personal or economic incentives definitely encourage you to do such activities.

There is certainly a limit to one-time rewards like skins and titles but perennial rewards in whatever form it may be could be something that the devs could explore further alongside rigid rewards. Yet, just like regular rewards, there is a huge absence of these kinds of rewards as well in at least the activities that are the least popular with most ESO players. As an experiment, come up with an idea of a reward or reward system for perhaps a leaderboard or an activity, anything at all... and the result is sadly that no matter what you come up with, it's a terrific idea because in such a vast void anything will stand out as excellent because there is pretty much nothing else.

Lastly we need to approach the more dangerous and (in my opinion) unsustainable territory of rewards in the form of Item Sets. Item Sets are a huge part of this game (as of Update 32, at least in ESOU's database, there's over 520 entries for Item Sets alone). It's clear that player expectations and the dev-end response to meet those expectations grew exponentially over the years. What rewards do players expect from Dungeons now that there are no longer "good" cosmetics/collectibles? Item sets. Why should players buy our next DLC/Chapter? Item sets. Both players and devs have dug themselves into this hole over the years with these Item Sets and it's a rather vicious cycle which I suspect will meet its limit at one point in the future.

Is There A Solution?

As far as the issue of Item Sets as rewards go, offering better collectibles or grinde-able rewards in whatever form in place of item sets until further Item Set audits/combat balancing can resolve the myriad of item sets that see barely any use by many players would be a start but this is such a complicated matter that I certainly don't envy whoever needs to solve it.

As for everything else, we just need a start to this discussion in the form of this issue being raised more frequently until there's a firm response. It's important in my opinion as we steadily approach the 10th anniversary of ESO's release that players start asking themselves and also ask the devs if there ever will be a consistent, ESO-unique reward system (satisfying for every player of every activity) much like there has been an ESO-unique system for pretty much everything so far from combat to account management because as it is currently I would certainly argue that the current reward system is incredibly weak or completely missing in many parts of the game.

Amottica wrote: »

what does a class representative do? I am guessing tutor new players or something.