The EA design is not healthy for consumers.

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

ive thoroughly enjoyed the endless archive so far

usually a run for me peters out either if something bad happens in arc 3, havent made it through arc 4 yet

usually only takes around 2 hours to get to this point, but you can still like afk for breaks and as long as at least 1 of the 2 players in a group is still online even

I'm excited to try it. I'm a console player, so just a few more days of waiting. Hopefully it's worthwhile.

spartaxoxo wrote: »

The EA design is not healthy for consumers.

I couldn't agree more.

Destai wrote: »

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

Destai wrote: »

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

ive thoroughly enjoyed the endless archive so far

usually a run for me peters out either if something bad happens in arc 3, havent made it through arc 4 yet

usually only takes around 2 hours to get to this point, but you can still like afk for breaks and as long as at least 1 of the 2 players in a group is still online even

I'm excited to try it. I'm a console player, so just a few more days of waiting. Hopefully it's worthwhile.

its definitely worth it, at least to me, its like an arena, but feels a lot more variable than existing arenas, with the variety of enemies, variety of bosses, the unique and entertaining buffs, and after arc 1 the looming threat of a marauder lol

I need to do more arenas. I think I have done all of them together maybe 10 times at most. I’m curious about the nightblade and warden sets.

if you want to prioritize those sets, then you should run the archive on those classes, as it curates the set gear to your current class first

Dragonnord wrote: »

spartaxoxo wrote: »

The EA design is not healthy for consumers.

I'm a customer, and I'm really enjoying EA design, the difficulty, the rewards and so.
 

My statement is not about whether it's enjoyable or not. I'm sure that it's fun. It being fun, frankly exacerbates the issue that I'm speaking of.

The thing that is not healthy is players being punished for having a healthy relationship with gaming and being rewarded for excessive playtimes. It encourages you to play "Just a little bit more" because you can't save and you still have lives. And sitting in one place for too long is bad for your health.

If they are so concerned about the leaderboard, they should just remove you from leaderboard consideration. But the lack of save states is literally not healthy design.

spartaxoxo wrote: »

Dragonnord wrote: »

spartaxoxo wrote: »

The EA design is not healthy for consumers.

I'm a customer, and I'm really enjoying EA design, the difficulty, the rewards and so.
 

My statement is not about whether it's enjoyable or not. I'm sure that it's fun. It being fun, frankly exacerbates the issue that I'm speaking of.

The thing that is not healthy is players being punished for having a healthy relationship with gaming and being rewarded for excessive playtimes. It encourages you to play "Just a little bit more" because you can't save and you still have lives. And sitting in one place for too long is bad for your health.

If they are so concerned about the leaderboard, they should just remove you from leaderboard consideration. But the lack of save states is literally not healthy design.

for the majority of players, a run is going to be less than 2 hours, and theres nothing to say you cant get up and walk around and take a break

your character will stay logged in for at least 15 min before being booted, and if you are grouped with someone, your instance will not reset at all as long as at least 1 player in the group is still online

i choose to sit and play games for 14 hours on a weekend, but am i sitting down the entire time? no i get up walk around, i take time to make food, i just leave my character logged in

edit: removed double quote

I don't care about leaderboards.... I just want to see how far I can go without 3 threads holding me back. Let me die as much as I want lol.

Starting from Arc 1 again and going through all the mob cycles is boring.

The obsession with the Leaderboard hurts the content. It would have been fine to have an "Ironman" mode where you have to start from beginning every time and cannot stop and only have 3 lives and has a very competitive Leaderboard, etc. But a non-Leaderboard mode where you can jump to the Arc you want, come and go as you please, keep hammering away at a tough boss even if you die 100 times, and use Armory to easily switch up builds and try different approaches, would have made EA so much more robust and offered so much more to different kinds of players.

It is a real missed opportunity. It is so narrowly focused when it didn't need to be. And disappointing to hear they aim to keep it as niche as possible. Especially as they pull back on content, it would have been nice for the content they do add to have broad appeal.

spartaxoxo wrote: »

Dragonnord wrote: »

spartaxoxo wrote: »

The EA design is not healthy for consumers.

I'm a customer, and I'm really enjoying EA design, the difficulty, the rewards and so.
 

My statement is not about whether it's enjoyable or not. I'm sure that it's fun. It being fun, frankly exacerbates the issue that I'm speaking of.

The thing that is not healthy is players being punished for having a healthy relationship with gaming and being rewarded for excessive playtimes. It encourages you to play "Just a little bit more" because you can't save and you still have lives. And sitting in one place for too long is bad for your health.

If they are so concerned about the leaderboard, they should just remove you from leaderboard consideration. But the lack of save states is literally not healthy design.

How is that different than other aspects of the game that have unlimited play? The Cyrodiil campaigns are 30 days long and people that play day and night are going to beat you on the leaderboard and in getting Emporer.

Dagoth_Rac wrote: »

The obsession with the Leaderboard hurts the content. It would have been fine to have an "Ironman" mode where you have to start from beginning every time and cannot stop and only have 3 lives and has a very competitive Leaderboard, etc. But a non-Leaderboard mode where you can jump to the Arc you want, come and go as you please, keep hammering away at a tough boss even if you die 100 times, and use Armory to easily switch up builds and try different approaches, would have made EA so much more robust and offered so much more to different kinds of players.

It is a real missed opportunity. It is so narrowly focused when it didn't need to be. And disappointing to hear they aim to keep it as niche as possible. Especially as they pull back on content, it would have been nice for the content they do add to have broad appeal.

This would make it far too easy to farm Fortunes and the new gear sets, and completely trivialize the difficulty of the encounters. Besides, the leaderboard has no impact on gameplay, apart from rewards when it is the weekly; but this has been the case for Maelstrom Arena and Vateshran Hollows, and no one has complained about that content having leaderboards. . Being able to earn the same rewards without taking any of the risks (no limit on deaths, save points) is a bad idea; why run the more difficult version of the content when you can just do easy mode?

There is no "obsession with the leaderboard" -- it may be a point of pride to be atop the charts, but that's about it. It's not like being Emperor in a Cyrodiil campaign where there are unique rewards for reaching Emperorship.

What fails to get taken into account is that if new content is so easy that you can farm all of the possible rewards in a matter of days, you have no reason to go back in there afterwards. And then all of those players end up here and in other forums complaining about how the game is boring and there's nothing to do. Save points make the content easier. Infinite deaths make the content easier. Being able to use the Armory makes the content easier.

ZOS never advertised EA as being easy. They stated it would be available as part of the base game. Players took it upon themselves to make the assumption that since it was "base game content" it would be as easy, as, say, overland content, and that they'd be able to go into EA and complete the content with no need to invest time in guides, builds, practice, or preparation. This is not ZOS's fault. It is instead that of the players who expect the content to be designed to their skill level, instead of raising their skill level to match the content's difficulty.

Kudos to @skinnycheeks
Awesome job.

@ZOS_Finn i still don't get why no saves. You make 2 pressure plates distant from each other.
Both players climb on them, this triggers the save. Next time these two enter the dungeon they
are asked if they would like to restore progress and if both agree - they continue where they have left off.
And the game may allow several such saves. Or at least one - for simplicity. But it is great to get a save,
players are not robots, after all..
For solo player / player with Companion it is elementary as it does not require consent.

Would you please, consider adding the save opportunity in future?

Paralyse wrote: »

Dagoth_Rac wrote: »

The obsession with the Leaderboard hurts the content. It would have been fine to have an "Ironman" mode where you have to start from beginning every time and cannot stop and only have 3 lives and has a very competitive Leaderboard, etc. But a non-Leaderboard mode where you can jump to the Arc you want, come and go as you please, keep hammering away at a tough boss even if you die 100 times, and use Armory to easily switch up builds and try different approaches, would have made EA so much more robust and offered so much more to different kinds of players.

It is a real missed opportunity. It is so narrowly focused when it didn't need to be. And disappointing to hear they aim to keep it as niche as possible. Especially as they pull back on content, it would have been nice for the content they do add to have broad appeal.

This would make it far too easy to farm Fortunes and the new gear sets, and completely trivialize the difficulty of the encounters. Besides, the leaderboard has no impact on gameplay, apart from rewards when it is the weekly; but this has been the case for Maelstrom Arena and Vateshran Hollows, and no one has complained about that content having leaderboards. . Being able to earn the same rewards without taking any of the risks (no limit on deaths, save points) is a bad idea; why run the more difficult version of the content when you can just do easy mode?

Maelstrom and Vateshran have Normal and Veteran modes. They have unlimited deaths. They have save points. The rewards are completely the same for Normal and Veteran except for the final boss, and even then the perfected weapons are like 0.1% better. I am not asking for overland easy. If anything, I want more challenging content. I just don't want to spend hours getting there, only to run into a mechanic I don't understand and die 3x within 30 seconds, or get an emergency call from work and have to stop playing for 20 minutes, and now I have to spend hours again to get back to the part that is fun.

It is like if you had to clear normal MA a few times every time you wanted to play veteran MA. Or if a group going for a Trial hard mode had to clear the Trial on normal and then clear it on Veteran and only then could you play hard mode veteran. And if you died, you had to start all over with the trial on normal. It is just dumb design and, let's face it, intended to artificially increase hours played, not increase player enjoyment.

EA is content that slowly increases in difficulty. So it already has an endless number of difficulty levels. It is actually way better than the current Normal vs Veteran design. EA has the ability to provide every single player in ESO with content perfectly attuned to their skill level. But it refuses to give it to us. It locks it behind hours of dreary grind. And then only teases us with a brief amount of personally challenging content before we die and have to start all over again.

What a tremendous missed opportunity.

Dagoth_Rac wrote: »

EA is content that slowly increases in difficulty. So it already has an endless number of difficulty levels. It is actually way better than the current Normal vs Veteran design. EA has the ability to provide every single player in ESO with content perfectly attuned to their skill level. But it refuses to give it to us. It locks it behind hours of dreary grind. And then only teases us with a brief amount of personally challenging content before we die and have to start all over again.

What a tremendous missed opportunity.

How exactly is the game supposed to know what a given player's skill level is, and how are we measuring skill level? There are a wide variety of skills in the game - PvP, PvE, group content, solo content, arenas...

I think if there were one change along those lines I'd be most in agreement with, it would be to make the difficulty ramp up slightly less quickly -- I feel that there is too much of a difficulty jump between Arc 1 and Arc 2-Arc 3. .

However, if they "flatten the curve" by making the difficulty ramp up so slowly that you're able to get to arc 5, or arc 10, before you even have to be slightly concerned about a risk of death, that's just going to encourage people to farm the lowest arcs every day for Fortunes, and then they'll be able to earn all of the possible rewards very quickly; and then they'll end up back here talking about the lack of content and how bored they are and how they wish ZOS would give them something to do.

The game needs to have challenging and difficult content that requires effort to progress through. I, for one, would find EA incredibly boring if it had been designed in such a way that players of any skill level could progress through the content easily and with little or no risk involved. And I think other players would get bored with that pretty quickly, too -- if we're being honest, if you could get to Arc 8 or Arc 10 or Arc 20 without breaking a sweat, how many times would you want to go back in there? The challenge and risk is what makes the content engaging and gets players to go back in. It also gets players to actually work on improving their characters by learning about game skills, builds, sets, and mechanics that will benefit them in content outside of EA such as trials, vet dungeons, arenas, and even PvP.

I consider myself an "ok" player, not great, not terrible, but I can't get past Arc 3 yet, and I'm fine with that. It gives me a reason to improve my game skills and study up on what I'm doing right (and doing wrong) each time I've used up all of my Threads. Is it frustrating to be instakilled by Gothmau, or deal with buggy mechanics on Rakkhat or Yolnahkriin, or deal with other issues like my Sorc pets constantly dying/despawning for no reason? Yeah, it is. But on the other hand, I'd probably already be bored with it if I could just go in, one-shot everything, get loot, and leave. And that's what I think ZOS was trying to avoid.

Zodiarkslayer wrote: »

You are still doing nothing else for hours o hours, which is unhealthy behaviour on the social and psychological level.

I have a desk job IRL that requires me to sit for hours and hours (about 55-60 per week)

It may be psychologically and socially unhealthy, but it sure beats being homeless and unemployed.

Also stop with the 50 day wait to get items like the Maligraphic Mount now (and before the Gravegrasp Outfit style through IC seals). It doesn’t encourage long term engagement just makes it more annoying for people who want a cosmetic item to obtain it in the time space they are able to. 50 days is too long for starters, and also many people would rather simply earn collectibles for completing some kind of challenge, or progressing a certain amount

Earning a straightforward to get fragment once daily to get to 50 is not something that makes anyone satisfied.

As an example, the new Red Rook style costs a certain amount of tel var. That is good because it requires an amount of effort in IC, not a long period wait doing something simple.