YandereGirlfriend wrote: »

Indeed.

I'm also not sure where this myth that the casual 3-weeks-until-they-dip expansion tourist player provides more revenue to ZOS than a long-term subscribed player came from. Most subbed players that I know tend to gravitate toward more difficult content (whether that is in PvE or PvP) simply because they've been playing for so long they've done everything else. They're also the ones that are buying the Crown packs and buying flashy outfits and houses for their characters.

In my eyes, alienating these long-term subbed players and going all-in on the newbie churn model appears to be quite a dicey business proposition.

In any business client retention and loyalty is a very important metric. Not fan of this "Fast Fashion" approach to MMO games for sure.

YandereGirlfriend wrote: »

Indeed.

I'm also not sure where this myth that the casual 3-weeks-until-they-dip expansion tourist player provides more revenue to ZOS than a long-term subscribed player came from. Most subbed players that I know tend to gravitate toward more difficult content (whether that is in PvE or PvP) simply because they've been playing for so long they've done everything else. They're also the ones that are buying the Crown packs and buying flashy outfits and houses for their characters.

In my eyes, alienating these long-term subbed players and going all-in on the newbie churn model appears to be quite a dicey business proposition.

IMHO the "engame" community complains the loudest and according to game statistics (archievments) only contributes to a small percentage of the population. I can unserstand that ZOS is concentrating on the other 99%.

Testing on PTS reveals an even sadder truth- they did not make ESO easier.

What they in fact did is turn up the difficulty to an uncomfortable degree. Its going to pressure upcoming players more than anyone else.

xylena_lazarow wrote: »

kingsforged wrote: »

When ESO is so "accessible" that every player can button mash faceroll their way across all content, you'll have no game left.

This update does nothing to help the player who stumbles into competitive PvP or Vet dungeons doing 5k dps with one button spam. If their one button was light attack, they're doing even less damage. Casual builds like Lightning HA dps got nuked into dust. Casual Templars who enjoyed spamming Jabs lost at least a third of their damage. Casual players who learned to use DoTs now see huge nerfs for their efforts to play better. This update helps no one.

That's why I said this bit

This update doesn't even seem to bring that to the table, just creating problems for the sake of problems, but that seems to be the end goal.

They're TRYING to dumb the game down, they're just not good at it

JustAGoodPlayer wrote: »

Do not people use buff sets to MAX their DPS more and skip content to make it easier for them ? ))

If so ... )) I think you understand what i am talking about )))

Who killed community the most than ? )))

I have no idea what this is supposed to mean...

People use builds to do better? Well, yeah... that's the genre

Should ZoS balance sets better so there's more variety? Absolutely.

Matteo11 wrote: »

Testing on PTS reveals an even sadder truth- they did not make ESO easier.

What they in fact did is turn up the difficulty to an uncomfortable degree. Its going to pressure upcoming players more than anyone else.

What they did was make combat much simpler and almost obnoxiously straightforward while making it much less intuitive and much more difficult to improve.

It's very much the perspective of a high performer looking at what makes combat still retain difficulty for them (managing a complex rotation) and assuming that's also the big challenge at the lower end (where rotations aren't even much of a thing).

In reality, the lower end gets to midrange and then gets to high end by learning how to integrate high damage, low duration DoTs on their backbar and ingraining light attacks into their muscle memory. The LAs and backbar DoTs were the damage cushion that you could rely on to produce meaningful damage while you learned to keep within milliseconds of the gcd pace. It was a much more natural progression, as even poor LA weaving or integrating 1-2 skills on the backbar produced meaningful results. Without an in-game tutorial, it's still pretty inscrutable, but once you start to catch on there's a clear path forward.

With the changes, both backbar damage and LAs feel inconsequential, yet are doubly essential to producing meaningful damage. Only now, it's gotta be a full backbar rotation from the get-go and your LA weave has to be near perfect, otherwise you see virtually no improvement. And that's making the assumption that you know why you'd LA weave or rotate through a backbar even though it doesn't do immediate appreciable damage. It's like you have to already have a high level dps knowledge and understanding of damage production to... learn how to do a high level of dps.

They've made rotations braindead simple but taken away the incentive to do them. They've essentially removed LA damage. Both of those used to be highly visible ways to improve your overall damage output. The only thing left, mechanically, that will improve damage is staying within milliseconds of the GCD, which is both extremely difficult and largely invisible as an important combat mechanic.