IMO U46 created a monster that can't be controlled by any means. They couldn't balance classes before so they made multiclassing which can't be balanced at all. They will just kill on skill line after the other.

I'm one of the players that actually enjoyed hybridization, where you could choose the better morph instead of the one that is fitting to your primary resource. So I'm not one of the people that yell "ESO already died before".

I never had a meta build but my damage was always decent, so I enjoyed group content like dungeons and even trials.
But now my character is so underperforming as pure class and will even get killed completely that I actually feel ashamed by joining a dungeon group and doing only 20-30% of the gorup damage maybe. This is the case on live now and it will even get worse when U47 goes live.

So no, I have no faith left at all.

I just do my daily overland stuff and logout after. I also furnished some houses that I liked to fill lately. They're full now. Not that they're finished as I would have liked them to be but I filled the maximum furnishing slots, so I'm done with that as well. So I see no point at farming some old missing furniture plans anymore. Because: Where should I use them anyway?

There's just no activity left that I feel having fun in doing.

kargen27 wrote: »

Tandor wrote: »

I share most of the sentiment expressed here, except that for me the decline started a little earlier, with U33 and the switch to account-wide achievements. These days I don't spend anything like the amount of time on the game as I used to.

yep, account wide achievements is what slowed me down. I don't pay attention to the test server and what might be going on there but I still look forward to any new drops when they finally go live on the main server. Just don't spend as much time with new content because once one character has done it they all have.

This was my "eh, don't care any more" patch too. Broke headcanon RP and unique alts.

Marto wrote: »

The ESO community is utterly incapable of accepting when something is too strong. With a mentality like this, any change that makes ESO into a better game will be seen negatively.

ESO has been dealing with a massive powercreep issue for years now. And the devs can't fix it. Not because they don't know how, but because the playerbase doesn't want it.

The simple fact is that players in ESO are too powerful.

Weapon damage is too high. Crit chance is too high. Ult generation is too high.
It's too easy to reach the resistance cap. Too easy to reach the crit cap. Too easy to reach 100% uptime on powerful buffs.

But the players are not able to accept this. They see any patch where their power goes up as a good patch, and any patch where it goes down as a bad patch.

ESO cannot become a good game if the players don't want it to.

While I agree that nerfing things is an inherent part of balance ( as well as buffing things if necessary ), I don't quite understand the 'It's the players fault' line.

Just read the patch notes : "Greetings! It has officially been an entire update with subclassing in the wild, and we’ve been closely monitoring all the fun and wacky antics unfold in its wake. We know there’s a lot of discussion over its impact in the game and how it could potentially change a lot of things moving forward (namely game balance), but we’re going to continue to watch as data comes in and solidify this brave new world! This patch will be relatively light with balance adjustments on classes, since we’re still discussing a lot of potential ways to move forward and waiting to see how behaviors, sentiment, and engagement change. This period is critical to ensure adjustments in the new subclassing era are done right for a positive play experience."

And also : " we’ll continue to lurk and watch over the discussions and experiences you get into, while we formulate on how to best deliver on improving the gameplay experience Tamriel has to offer."

I've bolded the parts I find most interesting, but overall I would summarize all of that as : we are incapable of anticipating the consequences of the changes we've brought, so you're gonna be beta testers for the next 6 months until we find a way to sort all of this. If able. Maybe.

Now I understand, you can't anticipate all consequences of changes you brought in a game, especialy a MMO. But you should try. Also, PTS and players feedback are tools you should use, rather than using the former almost only for bug tracking, and discarding almost entirely the later every time.

Otherwise, you end up in a situation like the current one : new content being released without apparently any care for balance, important balance problems arising, wild nerfs ensuing - but nerfs to gameplay players have enjoyed for more than a month now ! Not even talking about the 'we're monitoring things, expect new unexpected nerfs !'

When you introduce a new system, and one month later you're saying 'oh wait there's some broken things, let's nerf these !', honestly, I fuly understand players anger, and I think it is a legitimate emotion. And I think that in this situation, it's not the players unwillingness to accept changes / nerfs that is to blame, but the careless approach of ZOS.

Truly, when ZOS say that they are still monitoring things, gathering datas, waiting to see how things evolve, continue to lurk... I really have the sensation that they have no clue what to do, no idea where to go, no plan, no vision, nothing. It feels like they're just playing whack a mole, and the players are the moles.

Ooo ooo ooo, khajiit wants to play too. -ahem-

"This one finds all the changes lately to be the sign of a complete lack of even the least bit of understanding about how THINGS should BE on the part of the dev team. Khajiit is most apathetic toward the entire game because of this, and will gladly clobber any bald bottom who challenges him with a carefully crafted, passionate and well-thought out wall-of-text treatise on why this one has apathy towards this once-wonderful-but-currently-repulsive cash-grab of a game (which khajiit has spent over $10k dollars on over the past 10 years)!

Khajiit can hardly be bothered to log in anymore. This one only does so (every day) to do his dailies (on all 20 characters), a couple of missions to max out rapport on his various companions, decorate one of his 90 houses, and check on his guild sales. Otherwise, khajiit barely finds the urge to play anymore."

Did this one do it correctly? That was quite enjoyable - khajiit will engage in such shenanigans more often, to be sure!

My big wake-up call was when I sat down and realized that - even after getting hit with the “oops-your-storage-chests-are-deleted-since-you-deleted-a-character-below-level-10” bug that left me without my trial gear for over a month, or the “quest-states-all-over-the-world-are-wrong-and-you-can’t-do-any-more-quests-at-all-because-you-killed-20-Arcanists” bug that left questing literally unplayable for an entire patch cycle, or the PTS planemeld temp ban that cut me off from the game for 11 days - even after all of that, U46 was the closest I got to uninstalling.

[snip]. Subclassing.

I really found it interesting that, within a few hours of it leaking through the endgame raider Discords, players were able to call the OP setups and every problem with balance. And then even after 6 weeks of PTS… everything they said was right and it seemed the devs couldn’t fathom that people would stack passives. It really feels like the devs thought that the only things people would want to do with Subclassing were making an Elementalist or Zookeeper build. I still remember hearing from some of the StreamTeam people who tested an early build of Subclassing that they told the devs then that they didn’t like that pureclassing was seriously underpowered compared to Subclassing, and the dev response was essentially “people would willingly want to stay pure?”

The intro to the combat section in the U47 patch notes really reads like “hey, so we're still being shooketh at how Subclassing enabled an absurd amount of power creep and we haven't figured out how to fix that yet, so we need another patch cycle to figure out how to fix this mess.” And then the answer to that is… to nerf ulti gen because God forbid DKs have any sustain whatsoever?

Literally what is the combat team’s goal? I’m not expecting the combat devs to be pro players, or even play the game on their off time, but I feel like a base expectation of “the combat lead should know basic combat mechanics like ‘heavy attacks restore resources’” is not unreasonable. I get that they thing that spreadsheet balancing is the be-all-and-end-all, but… actual players are posting all over the PTS feedback threads with evidence and screenshots and logs on issues, and are wholesale ignored.
Maybe if you’re not an expert in the combat system (despite your title), listen to people who are?

The combat rollercoaster of “throw anything at the wall and see what sticks” is infuriating. The writing for zones has been going downhill (and let’s face it - a single-player RPG will always be a better single-player experience than ESO ever will, especially if it’s moddable). Really the only thing ESO is consistently knocking out of the park is Finn’s team - even the latest dungeons and trials (which are all full of obviously recycled assets) are unique and fun.
…it just sucks that to experience them, you have to Subclass, because finding a group is hard enough even if you’re not selfishly going in with severe self-nerfs and expecting the rest of the team to pick up your slack.

I know I’ve been in “log in, do endeavors, log off to play something fun” mode for a while now. My prog groups and my character stories are keeping me here, but it feels sometimes like ZOS is trying to even take away my characters’ individualities. U47 is a total wash, but let’s see if they finally get their act together for U48 now.
Beyond that? Well, I’m really hoping that U50 will have something big (read: new Class) that will make it so I can experience the world in a new way, instead of just “hey, we’re getting rid of anything you like about your characters in the first place.”

I'm having a good time.

Arrow312 wrote: »

IMO they put more effort into the crown store with all the cosmetic stuff than the "real" game.

It's not just your opinion.

Unfortunately ZOS keeps alienating every type of player.

One thing I’ve noticed is that whenever I make a pivot to keep playing the game, I always ended up getting disappointed and losing my favorite activities.

When I started ESO in 2015, I loved Cyrodiil and IC. I spent almost all of my time there. By the time 2017 rolled around, performance was at a point where I just couldn’t enjoy Cyrodiil during busy hours and population caps kept getting cut. I decided to pick up dueling and later BGs for performant PvP with quick fights/matchmaking.

Bad changes kept piling up until I basically quit PvP once Murkmire hit. I made a full pivot into endgame PvE. I really enjoyed dungeons, trials, and arenas for quite some time. At the time PvE wasn’t getting the poor changes that PvP kept getting.

Then there was 2022… hybridization, update 35, and strange balance decisions caused me to quit PvE as well.

These days I only play for a short period once every few months for casual PvP when there’s no other games to play. Even then though, it’s getting hard for ESO to even be my fallback game with these changes.

It’s been sad to see each community I was apart of dwindle. Cyrodiil used to have 5 or more campaigns with decent populations, the dueling scene used to feel pretty lively, and there were always familiar names on the PvE leaderboards.

Almost every one I knew is gone now. People in my guilds and friends lists haven’t logged on in years. When I log on I don’t recognize very many names at all.

I’ve been in several different communities over both Xbox NA and PC NA, and every single one of them has died due to ZOS’ decisions. It seems like even the casual PvErs have been alienated at this point too.

I just don’t get who ZOS is making changes for cause almost nobody is happy with the game and it continues to bleed players.

Why does this has to be an us versus them scenario? If you are enjoying subclassing then more power to you.

Some of us are affected by it in a very negative way. We are stating the reasons why we are unhappy with it, which is what people would want to know rather than just saying “we don’t like it, period.” Then we are ridiculed as if we are completely wrong and everyone is benefiting from it.

Just because your gameplay is not affected does not mean that others gameplay is not. If you only roleplay, or only trade, or only do casual questing then yes, you can enjoy subclassing and do whatever you wish. If you are in PvP or trials groups, then you cannot do whatever you wish. Everyone says differently, but that is not the case for many of us. Just because you can in your specific situation does not carry over to all players in all situations. Why is no one understanding this?

It's difficult to get excited over bungled launches/events/pursuits that are now, not only commonplace, but expected. And to have one's technical difficulties ignored/blame shifted until the inevitable day they have to own up. I've been playing for some time now. I've been around for some time now. The handwriting's on the wall, and people can claim it's hyperbole or drama all they like, but I'd wring what enjoyment I could out of the game and keep my money in my pocket if I were the average player.