Dreariest event in ESO

Mattymoo92 · October 26

So it’s now nearly been 2 weeks and we are still on phase one (arguably the worst phase)
Tomorrow is update 48, at this rate we won’t actually get to access its content till early/mid November. Which on paper is fine if the event itself actually felt rewarding and less of a drag.
Is there any chance they will mess with the numbers for phase 2? Because if it takes another 2 weeks to get through I personally feel that would be too long.

Mattymoo92 · October 26

@ZOS_Kevin I dare you to ask them to mess with the numbers in phase 2 🤣

johnjetau · October 26

I've given up. This event is so tedious.

I got my mount so I'm happy.

lillybit · October 26

Think what it's like for consoles - our update isn't til 12th Nov so in all likelihood we'll beat PC to finish phase 2 and you'll probably be finished with the event before we can even start phase 3.

Tying an event to an update and telling us it's a "race" between servers is one of their worst decisions ever, beaten only by the awful content pass concept!

rothan117 · October 26

I am down to going and doing one crafting quest for a gold box and done with it for the day. And after yesterday's "gold box" reward that consisted of nothing but common crafting mats and an unknown blacksmithing survey, I am seriously wondering why I even bother with doing anything at all for the "gold boxes".

tomofhyrule · October 26

Mattymoo92 wrote: »

So it’s now nearly been 2 weeks and we are still on phase one (arguably the worst phase)
Tomorrow is update 48, at this rate we won’t actually get to access its content till early/mid November. Which on paper is fine if the event itself actually felt rewarding and less of a drag.
Is there any chance they will mess with the numbers for phase 2? Because if it takes another 2 weeks to get through I personally feel that would be too long.

That's the design that it will take that long.

They want each phase to end around the same time for all servers (plus/minus a day or two), and consoles can't get to phase 3 until they get U48 mid November. That means it's pretty well expected that we won't finish phase 2 until mid November.

SilverBride · October 26

I don't know how we can be expected to do multiple repeatable quests to bring down the wall with the Witches festival running at the same time. I do 3 dailies for the gold coffers and that's it.

I really worry about what phase 2 bring.

Charon_on_Vacation · October 26

Mattymoo92 wrote: »

So it’s now nearly been 2 weeks and we are still on phase one (arguably the worst phase)
Tomorrow is update 48, at this rate we won’t actually get to access its content till early/mid November. Which on paper is fine if the event itself actually felt rewarding and less of a drag.
Is there any chance they will mess with the numbers for phase 2? Because if it takes another 2 weeks to get through I personally feel that would be too long.

they will constantly adjust the numbers to fit what they have planned.
don't worry, will make almost no difference how much the community participates.

Horace-Wimp · October 26

Wouldn't it be funny if time ran out on the Writhing Wall event and it wasn't finished? LOL!

Syldras · October 26

SilverBride wrote: »

I really worry about what phase 2 bring.

Even more crafting dailies. Several dolmens active at once. A new world boss, but not before November 12 (not exactly sure how that works since phase 2 should be over already at that date if progress remains on the current level).

tomofhyrule · October 26

Syldras wrote: »

SilverBride wrote: »

I really worry about what phase 2 bring.

Even more crafting dailies. Several dolmens active at once. A new world boss, but not before November 12 (not exactly sure how that works since phase 2 should be over already at that date if progress remains on the current level).

The new WB will come when we have both Phase 2 and U48, so PC would be expected to have him spawn as Phase 2 starts as expected. Console would have to wait.

Also, considering Phase 3 is not included in the U47 patch, there's no way that any server would be allowed to reach phase 3 until Console gets the U48 patch in mid-November, and they'll move the goalposts as necessary to make it so.

Syldras · October 26

tomofhyrule wrote: »

The new WB will come when we have both Phase 2 and U48, so PC would be expected to have him spawn as Phase 2 starts as expected. Console would have to wait.

I really don't get why, as that thing was already there.

Mattymoo92 · October 26

[

tomofhyrule wrote: »

Mattymoo92 wrote: »

So it’s now nearly been 2 weeks and we are still on phase one (arguably the worst phase)
Tomorrow is update 48, at this rate we won’t actually get to access its content till early/mid November. Which on paper is fine if the event itself actually felt rewarding and less of a drag.
Is there any chance they will mess with the numbers for phase 2? Because if it takes another 2 weeks to get through I personally feel that would be too long.

That's the design that it will take that long.

They want each phase to end around the same time for all servers (plus/minus a day or two), and consoles can't get to phase 3 until they get U48 mid November. That means it's pretty well expected that we won't finish phase 2 until mid November.

Yes I am aware that’s the design… I’m just pointing out that I, along with many people, think it’s a bad design. If you make a long event (which I’m fine with) make it fun with at LEAST the same rewards as previous celebration events. Or host it earlier, no one is saying it wasn’t meant to be that way.

Mattymoo92 · October 26

tomofhyrule wrote: »

Mattymoo92 wrote: »

So it’s now nearly been 2 weeks and we are still on phase one (arguably the worst phase)
Tomorrow is update 48, at this rate we won’t actually get to access its content till early/mid November. Which on paper is fine if the event itself actually felt rewarding and less of a drag.
Is there any chance they will mess with the numbers for phase 2? Because if it takes another 2 weeks to get through I personally feel that would be too long.

That's the design that it will take that long.

They want each phase to end around the same time for all servers (plus/minus a day or two), and consoles can't get to phase 3 until they get U48 mid November. That means it's pretty well expected that we won't finish phase 2 until mid November.

To follow up with an actual example, remember when they had to extend Anniversary by 2 weeks I believe? I was thrilled! Because it’s an event that actually rewards the player for any tedium.

Gabriel_H · October 26

lillybit wrote: »

Think what it's like for consoles - our update isn't til 12th Nov so in all likelihood we'll beat PC to finish phase 2 and you'll probably be finished with the event before we can even start phase 3.

Tying an event to an update and telling us it's a "race" between servers is one of their worst decisions ever, beaten only by the awful content pass concept!

Phase 2 is already in game. It will activate without a patch. U48 will add Phase 3 but it won't be active. So for PC it will be just sat there waiting P2 to end. Whereas console will get U48 as P2 ends.

RebornV3x · October 26

Horace-Wimp wrote: »

Wouldn't it be funny if time ran out on the Writhing Wall event and it wasn't finished? LOL!

In the back of my mind I kinda wish this would happen the wall never comes down so we never get content we paid for which would be funny in a dark way. Sadly it would eventually come down either to randoms doing the occasional quest and ZOS wouldn't allow there event to fail.

Dock01 · October 26

johnjetau wrote: »

I've given up. This event is so tedious.

I got my mount so I'm happy.

ya

SilverBride · October 26

What is phase 2? The same quests we have now along with a new World Boss? Or will there be more?

Danikat · October 26

RebornV3x wrote: »

Horace-Wimp wrote: »

Wouldn't it be funny if time ran out on the Writhing Wall event and it wasn't finished? LOL!

In the back of my mind I kinda wish this would happen the wall never comes down so we never get content we paid for which would be funny in a dark way. Sadly it would eventually come down either to randoms doing the occasional quest and ZOS wouldn't allow there event to fail.

There's no way we could realistically fail to bring the wall down. The actual event doesn't have a time limit or any conditions where it can fail.

The golden pursuit has an end date, and the event adverts have end dates on them (which are apparently different on each server, and not related to their progress) but that might just be because ZOS can't put those things in the game without an end date. The quests and the siege camps will stay in the game until phase 3 starts, then that runs for 7 days and after that the second part of the island is unlocked.

Hypothetically if literally no one did anything to progress the event it would stall, but that will never happen. Even if it was just people stumbling across the camps when they're active it would slowly chip away at progress until it completed. Same with the dungeon in phase 3 - people who played it on the PTS said it was simple enough that any group can succeed, so the only way it could fail is if literally no one went in and that would never happen.

And all of that is before we get to the fact that ZOS have admitted to changing the participation requirements twice already to keep us on their schedule. If everyone did completely stop doing anything which contributes to the event they'd fake it and let everyone believe other people were still playing it.

moderatelyfatman · October 27

Horace-Wimp wrote: »

Wouldn't it be funny if time ran out on the Writhing Wall event and it wasn't finished? LOL!

Wouldn't it be funny if the PC-NA and PC-EU events didn't pop during the primetime for those regions.
(I mean, it's not like there's a population of over billion people in the Asia-Pacific region who also play this game).

BretonMage · October 27

SilverBride wrote: »

What is phase 2? The same quests we have now along with a new World Boss? Or will there be more?

Jessica outlines it in the second half of her post here: https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/comment/8381311/#Comment_8381311

Danikat wrote: »

There's no way we could realistically fail to bring the wall down. The actual event doesn't have a time limit or any conditions where it can fail.

Even so, it would be hilarious if we finally got to visit Eastern Solstice.. in 2027.

agelonestar · October 27

I’m beginning to suspect that ZoS made the event this bad so it would go on forever.

2026 Season Pass: Solstice (Again) !

jle30303 · October 27

The trouble for me is:

Apparently, progress was actually nerfed, early on - things like 8% getting reset to 1.5% and so on.

This suggests that they did not want people getting their Writhing Wall to 100% too early.

BUT, they failed to take account of the following things:

(1) THere are Golden Pursuits, and Achievements, which require the same thing to be done many times over. 40 Siege Camps, 20 resources, 15 vitrified fragments, 20 crafting (the latter being easily hit in 4 days, because you can do 6 per day and crafting barely takes a couple of minutes). And there's the in-game Achievement for 30 Siege Camp quests, which looks like it's NOT going to go away at the end of the event.

(2) Once people hit those above numbers... of course, progress is going to slow down, quite considerably. Give people a reachable target with visible, per-account or per-character incremental progress, and they will do it. BUT, if the task is repetitive and boring, they will then stop afterwards. The "global" counter does not have the same thing since incremental progress is too small on a per person per completion basis.

(3) AND, the tasks are indeed repetitive and boring. Especially the "farm stuff in the base game"... when the stuff you need to get is heavily over-farmed, and a lot of the monsters don't even drop it. I'll add this here; EVERY SINGLE ELIGIBLE MOB should have dropped a minimum 1 piece of Quest Coupon, whatever that Quest Coupon is - creature fat, golden sap, undead essence, lightweight fur, vitreous soul fragment - because, when there are this many players around, mobs often die so fast that it's difficult to even get a hit in on them. If you *combine* this with having to kill 40 mobs before you actually find your first Quest Coupon - and this quest being not a 1x daily, but a 6x daily, which creates real boredom of repetition of itself - you have a major recipe for player frustration, and THEY WILL STOP DOING THE THING.

(4) If you want people to keep doing the thing, you have to keep *rewarding* them for it. And, in this case, it means not packing all the decent rewards only into the once per day GOLD boxes: there has to be a much better chance of the relevant rewards turning up in the REPEATABLE BLUE boxes too. When the reward is just "1 piece of an outfit you've long ago maxed in the sticker book", it is not worth doing the blue boxes.

So, the early jump-start in progress was just that: a jump-start, of a process that was bound to inevitably slow down once people had hit all the "personal targets" for repeatable things. Once I completed my Golden Pursuits I stopped doing more than 1 siege camp per day, 1 resource farming quest and 1 vitrified soul farming quest. Other people will have done the same, or even stopped doing it entirely.

Combine this with:

(5) Running it concurrently with another event - the Witches Festival - which also takes real time in the real world. Players simply do not have that much extra real time in the real world: they have lives, salaries, jobs, families, commitments, other mundane things to do.

The result has been a massive slowdown in the progress on the Writhing Wall. Yesterday evening, when I logged in, I saw there was supposedly 1 day left on this phase, but the Wall was only at 85.1% - and this was on PC/EU. It had not yet reached 80% on PC/NA. There is no way that the last 15% (EU) or 21% (NA) is going to be completed in one day.

So, what's going to happen?

Do we have to continue phase 1 until it is finally done, even with progress having slowed down? Do we not get phase 2 until progress hits 100% - whether on all servers, or our personal server, or at least on one server?

Or do we advance to phase 2 *anyway* even though none of the servers reached 100%? This provides a discouragement, because it means giving the reward without having put in the effort. It means that next time, there's less incentive to actually reach 100% on a counter.

However, because of the early progress nerf, we HAVE already put in the effort: we SHOULD have already reached 100%, at the original progress rate, and have been denied by the nerf which artificially slowed it down. This, again, discourages players.

Once it was originally seen that we were going to reach 100% before the planned date, this should have been ACCEPTED. And an in-game excuse made, for why the Meridian Lens was going to have to wait till the date, even though it was now ready ("Okay, we've got the Lens, we've got the supplies, now we just need to get the men in position for the assault"). Rather than progress artificially slowed down, and this process over-done so that we didn't hit the target at all.

And, given the dates of events and the inevitable overlap with the Witches Festival, this should have been accounted for, and a slowdown in progress expected.

Last of all, they should have improved the drop rate of all the Quest Coupons to a minimum of one per monster, and given a better chance of the good rewards in the blue boxes as well as the gold boxes.

This is why there is player dissatisfaction with this event.

magnusthorek · October 27

This event was so, so tedious I'm almost missed GW2 endlessly repeatable meta events

Lucasl402 · October 27

I learned my lesson during the 10yr. anniversary grind. No more of that for me, thank you.

Dalsinthus · October 27

jle30303 wrote: »

The trouble for me is:

Apparently, progress was actually nerfed, early on - things like 8% getting reset to 1.5% and so on.

This suggests that they did not want people getting their Writhing Wall to 100% too early.

BUT, they failed to take account of the following things:

(1) THere are Golden Pursuits, and Achievements, which require the same thing to be done many times over. 40 Siege Camps, 20 resources, 15 vitrified fragments, 20 crafting (the latter being easily hit in 4 days, because you can do 6 per day and crafting barely takes a couple of minutes). And there's the in-game Achievement for 30 Siege Camp quests, which looks like it's NOT going to go away at the end of the event.

(2) Once people hit those above numbers... of course, progress is going to slow down, quite considerably. Give people a reachable target with visible, per-account or per-character incremental progress, and they will do it. BUT, if the task is repetitive and boring, they will then stop afterwards. The "global" counter does not have the same thing since incremental progress is too small on a per person per completion basis.

(3) AND, the tasks are indeed repetitive and boring. Especially the "farm stuff in the base game"... when the stuff you need to get is heavily over-farmed, and a lot of the monsters don't even drop it. I'll add this here; EVERY SINGLE ELIGIBLE MOB should have dropped a minimum 1 piece of Quest Coupon, whatever that Quest Coupon is - creature fat, golden sap, undead essence, lightweight fur, vitreous soul fragment - because, when there are this many players around, mobs often die so fast that it's difficult to even get a hit in on them. If you *combine* this with having to kill 40 mobs before you actually find your first Quest Coupon - and this quest being not a 1x daily, but a 6x daily, which creates real boredom of repetition of itself - you have a major recipe for player frustration, and THEY WILL STOP DOING THE THING.

(4) If you want people to keep doing the thing, you have to keep *rewarding* them for it. And, in this case, it means not packing all the decent rewards only into the once per day GOLD boxes: there has to be a much better chance of the relevant rewards turning up in the REPEATABLE BLUE boxes too. When the reward is just "1 piece of an outfit you've long ago maxed in the sticker book", it is not worth doing the blue boxes.

So, the early jump-start in progress was just that: a jump-start, of a process that was bound to inevitably slow down once people had hit all the "personal targets" for repeatable things. Once I completed my Golden Pursuits I stopped doing more than 1 siege camp per day, 1 resource farming quest and 1 vitrified soul farming quest. Other people will have done the same, or even stopped doing it entirely.

Combine this with:

(5) Running it concurrently with another event - the Witches Festival - which also takes real time in the real world. Players simply do not have that much extra real time in the real world: they have lives, salaries, jobs, families, commitments, other mundane things to do.

The result has been a massive slowdown in the progress on the Writhing Wall. Yesterday evening, when I logged in, I saw there was supposedly 1 day left on this phase, but the Wall was only at 85.1% - and this was on PC/EU. It had not yet reached 80% on PC/NA. There is no way that the last 15% (EU) or 21% (NA) is going to be completed in one day.

So, what's going to happen?

Do we have to continue phase 1 until it is finally done, even with progress having slowed down? Do we not get phase 2 until progress hits 100% - whether on all servers, or our personal server, or at least on one server?

Or do we advance to phase 2 *anyway* even though none of the servers reached 100%? This provides a discouragement, because it means giving the reward without having put in the effort. It means that next time, there's less incentive to actually reach 100% on a counter.

However, because of the early progress nerf, we HAVE already put in the effort: we SHOULD have already reached 100%, at the original progress rate, and have been denied by the nerf which artificially slowed it down. This, again, discourages players.

Once it was originally seen that we were going to reach 100% before the planned date, this should have been ACCEPTED. And an in-game excuse made, for why the Meridian Lens was going to have to wait till the date, even though it was now ready ("Okay, we've got the Lens, we've got the supplies, now we just need to get the men in position for the assault"). Rather than progress artificially slowed down, and this process over-done so that we didn't hit the target at all.

And, given the dates of events and the inevitable overlap with the Witches Festival, this should have been accounted for, and a slowdown in progress expected.

Last of all, they should have improved the drop rate of all the Quest Coupons to a minimum of one per monster, and given a better chance of the good rewards in the blue boxes as well as the gold boxes.

This is why there is player dissatisfaction with this event.

This post nails it. The only thing that I'll add is that there are good rewards available from this event (https://eso-hub.com/en/events/writhing-wall-event) but they are far too distributed across Twitch Drops, the golden pursuit, delve boss drops, phases of the event, etc. The result contributes to the problem raised in point 4 above - farming blue boxes is not worth the time or effort.

BXR_Lonestar · October 27

SilverBride wrote: »

I don't know how we can be expected to do multiple repeatable quests to bring down the wall with the Witches festival running at the same time. I do 3 dailies for the gold coffers and that's it.

I really worry about what phase 2 bring.

This. This whole event was such a poorly planned and designed event, namely because:

1. Rewards are not good enough to keep players engaged. Not just that, but the drop rates are so low that doing the event is a source of frustration;

2. It's bad design to have us do a community event to "unlock" content that we paid for with the season pass. That kind of setup creates player apathy, and you can see it in the zone chatter.

3. The rewards are not great and the drop rates are poor, so there is no incentive to grind. The big "Carrot" so to speak for grinding is getting a house in Coldharbor that many have already purchased for crying out loud! The drop rates for blue prints and motiffs are so poor, presumably so we don't get everything all at once and hence, we keep grinding, but it is having the opposite effect.

4. The content is just not very engaging. Sit at wayshrine, watch for incursions, and zerg it down. Speaking of which, it is NOT AT ALL helpful that there is a display glitch as to which incursion is actually active...

Some adjustments that should be made:

1. Increase the drop rates of the treasures that you can cash in for gold, in particular, the purple skulls that sell for 5k. Why? Because we should be getting more for our effort than just zone armor drops, most of which we have by now.

2. Drop the # of vitrified souls we need to complete the 1 quest from 15 to 5. That virtually guarantees that we need just 1 incursion to complete the quest, not multiple.

3. Put crafting satchels into the loot table as a reward. If we're not getting motiffs, a great house, a highly desirable mount, etc. for our efforts, at least let us get much-desired crafting mats easily! Include rare trait gems too, like those needed to make swift, infused, and triune jewelry.

I'm sure people can think of some other suggestions for improvements. Thats all I got for now.

wolfie1.0. · October 27

lillybit wrote: »

Think what it's like for consoles - our update isn't til 12th Nov so in all likelihood we'll beat PC to finish phase 2 and you'll probably be finished with the event before we can even start phase 3.

Tying an event to an update and telling us it's a "race" between servers is one of their worst decisions ever, beaten only by the awful content pass concept!

PC-NA has 20% to go for phase1. I doubt phase 2 will go all that fast.

Factor in that the season pass sale is gone and was done at the worst time... the wind has gone out of the event, and they probably will have to force PC-NA into phase 3.

lillybit · October 27

Gabriel_H wrote: »

lillybit wrote: »

Think what it's like for consoles - our update isn't til 12th Nov so in all likelihood we'll beat PC to finish phase 2 and you'll probably be finished with the event before we can even start phase 3.

Tying an event to an update and telling us it's a "race" between servers is one of their worst decisions ever, beaten only by the awful content pass concept!

Phase 2 is already in game. It will activate without a patch. U48 will add Phase 3 but it won't be active. So for PC it will be just sat there waiting P2 to end. Whereas console will get U48 as P2 ends.

Console will get U48 on 12th November regardless of when P2 ends. Xbox are already on to 2 so there's a high chance that it'll be done before then. They already more or less said on a stream they expect there to be a gap - they said the event page will change to a timer for P3.

My point was that it kinda makes a mockery of the race they've been hyping up all year when there's a head start built in

Rogue_Coyote · October 27

Day one got the mount. Day 8 or 9 still phase 1.
Raid lead bought Solstice cause of sale, can't get monomyth cause event boss is in place of boss that drops leads.
Really kinda poorly planned event overall, and I normally like eso events.

WhiteCoatSyndrome · October 27

I gave up on doing all the crafting dailies over the weekend; between the tedium and the number of other once-a-day chores the game has now, it’s not worth the time even for the XP.

Dear ZOS, in the future please refrain from having more than one event at the same time.