The content is considerably more difficult than the VR10-VR12 content from the spring and early summer of 2014 before the big nerf.

couriersix wrote: »

It's VERY difficult. It feels like if you don't have an organized group of a tank, healer, and two decent DPS then you will struggle a lot since enemies do so much damage. Dying is pretty punishing, since it separates you from your group and can make it difficult to regroup, especially since sometimes people are sent across to different wayshrines.

No rezzing?

couriersix wrote: »

twisttop138 wrote: »

No rezzing?

Players can rez other players, but when an entire group dies then you have to manually rez at the nearest wayshrine and sometimes this can send you to a different wayshrine. I've also found that most people tend to rez at a wayshrine before they let someone rez them.

Oh ok I see. My bad. I'm on console so I can only rely on the excellent job you guys do.

In the difficulty front. Are we thinking it's too hard? Finn said in a thread that you would have a very hard time solo and have to follow other players if you didn't want to group. More things that need groups isn't necessarily a bad thing. Especially if the trinity is required.

twisttop138 wrote: »

couriersix wrote: »

It's VERY difficult. It feels like if you don't have an organized group of a tank, healer, and two decent DPS then you will struggle a lot since enemies do so much damage. Dying is pretty punishing, since it separates you from your group and can make it difficult to regroup, especially since sometimes people are sent across to different wayshrines.

No rezzing?

I rezzed other players and was rezzed. Honestly I think it’s just taking players by surprise. I don’t think anybody is used to having to rez players outside of vet dungeons and trials. Hell, I was rezzing peoples companions lol.

Also, I’m not used to having to use stealth and really, really not wanting to get seen lol. Getting ported out if I die is making me use all my skills. I like it.

Very Difficult, I was trying to find other people fighting and wasn't having much luck. There is no way to even kill anything solo, when a giant tick has a health line of 650k and you are being attacked by 3 or 4 of them, let alone all the other enemies, it's impossible. This is going to alienate a lot of people who are unable to get in game during peak hours. they will feel they won't be to participate in the event zone.
I understand wanting more challenging content, but this is extreme. I'm trying out the new dragonnight skill line and i'm not staying alive long enough to really see what it's all about.

You've done an appallingly bad job of communicating to the player.

Okay, story time: I enter the Night Market, and I see the trial icon. @ZOS_stileanima described it as a mini-trial, and it's been 8 years since the previous mini-trial, so that sounds like something I want to check out!

Oh wait, I need a key to enter. How do I get the key? I have no idea. Well, there's a readable nearby, and it says something about getting the key from bosses. What bosses? Where?

Ok, let's do the quest and explore. I pick the Glittering faction because they're the first ones I saw, I go through the quest, and it sends me to do some busywork in the Parch. While in the Parch, I see the icon for a dungeon instance. Oh, this must be one of the instances that @ZOS_Finn mentioned in his attempt to assuage our concerns about the lack of dungeon DLCs this year.

But I can't reach it. I encounter a wall and it says that I need something called Windglass. What's a Windglass and how do I get it?

Alright, we keep going, and eventually, I notice the F5 next to Night Market and press that and get a tree diagram that shows that access to the mini-trial requires killing 3 intermediate bosses (which I assume are the 3 "dungeons"), and that they in turn require keys from Argent bosses. By the way, for some people, the F5 key was unbound and they had to manually rebind it.

So next we kill a couple of Argent bosses in a district, which "unlocks" the dungeon boss, but we still can't reach it. Still need Windglass, whatever that is.

Finally, someone pointed out the achievements entry, which finally explains that the Windglass requires collecting a lot of splinters from various sources. Alright, so the boss tree UI is extremely misleading because the real requirement is apparently grinding the place to get splinters.

Oh, and the splinters aren't even guaranteed drops from the bosses. Someone in my group got 5 splinters in the district that we were in, while I got just 2.

At this point, it doesn't looks like we'll be entering any of the "dungeons" any time soon, and certainly not the mini-trial. It's a lot of grind just to reach the headline content. And the salt in the wound is that none of this is clearly laid out for players.

How do you feel about the distribution of rewards during this event zone?

Well, I LOVE that you get a house for completing the intro quest. Beyond that... Well, I have yet to see any distribution of rewards other than two reward coffers. One of them was a blue coffer called a Curated coffer but gave me something I already had instead of something I did not have. The golden coffer just gave me a piece of gear I did not have and nothing special. It could have been a lot better than a single piece of armor I did not care about, especially if it is a golden coffer.


How have you found the difficulty of the Night Market? Please provide any additional context to the difficulty ratings below.

WAY WAY WAY Too difficult. You see.... I found myself trying alone at first and died within one second of entering with my Companion, tank Isobel. Alright.. You did say get a helper. So I found a group of three in there and still died within one second of entering. I tried another character that had a little bit of "save yourself" and does more damage. I kept dying every minute or so. I also tried sneaking around to avoid combat. That went very poorly. This is not fun as it stands. I truly wish you had not made this zone more difficult like this. I think that it is going to keep many people away who do not want harder content like this. This would have been the PERFECT place to try the adjusted difficulty options for people so that you are not forced to play on a hard difficulty.


How did you enjoy the Event Zone? As this is a new event type, we would like to get any positives and negatives.

So far.... I do not like it very much.

Positive: The intro quest was super easy to follow and very informative to a point -- at least to the point of choosing a faction based on what they tell you.

Negative: I had to switch characters, if you recall. It thought my second character had not chosen a faction and attempting to complete the intro quest on a second character results in the quest not being able to be completed. It just tells you to speak to the Curator but doing so does not finish off the quest on the alt. Further, I kept getting messages that I had not chosen a faction. And finally, the quest that was given by the faction leader to my main was not obtainable on my alt. I could not complete it on my main character so I am at a loss as to what to do now.

Positive: I like that you can choose a faction. That makes it more interesting.

Negative: Factions are account-wide. I want to test all three factions and see what the true differences are. I cannot do that if it is account-wide. Also, it would be nice to be able to play different characters in different factions, like you do with your character Alliances.

Positive: You can buy things with faction points.

Negative: You cannot see how many faction points you have. Further, I still cannot figure out how to gain faction points other than by doing the one-time daily quest that was offered.

Positive: The random drop of faction points I found for killing an enemy was really cool. I really liked that.

Negative: None concerning that. This is only a positive.


Did you try the different activities? If so, did you like them? Please let us know whatever you think worked and what missed the mark.

What different activities? I could not find any to try. Your help article thing mentions "activities" but I am at a complete loss as to where to go and what to do for those "activities".


How do you like the new Patrons?

They all seem the same for the most part.


Did anything not function to your expectations?

Intro quest - Failure to complete on alt (see positives and negatives for info).

Difficulty level - Extreme side of difficult (see positives and negatives for info).

Faction Points - Missing a counter.

Faction Choice - Account-wide and needs to be character-bound only.

Reward Coffers for quests - Terrible rewards and makes it not worth doing them.

Activities - Zero sign of any "activities" in there.


Do you have any other general feedback?
I want to like this zone. It has great potential. But right now.... I just cannot like it as it stands now.

Couple of specific pain points on top of the broader criticisms above, I may edit this with more as we continue looking:

• Oasis Revival is way too long. It would be great if it was able to be prematurely cancelled
• The roaming Calamitous bosses could use an icon to say when they've been engaged, similar to dragons and dolmens/harrowstorms
• Exarch Molonach can target a companion during his hunt phase, which is really annoying
• The UI as a whole is very unintuitive and can probably be all fit on to one screen?
• A timed public event that is not up all the time in a limited time event zone seems ... weird
• Some of the Brazen bosses seem to take a really long time to spawn in
• The Calamitous boss getting involved with the Skirmish or other bosses can get a bit tedious, especially with how bullet-spongey these guys are. I appreciate it's an achievement to do so, and that's fine, but that then implies it shouldn't be the normal way to do it, and currently there's no real avoiding it unless you just have a whole bunch of people to get through things quickly

I'm going to go with "very difficult," but whether or not "too difficult" is appropriate is an open question. Solo players are going to get melted and stealthing through seems to be well nigh impossible except during the short time after rezzing, where they get melted again as soon as that effect wears off. Even Hoarvors chew my face off, so there aree some serious challenges for solo players.

Rezzing itself is a bit of an issue and I think you'll see a lot of complaints about players being separated because of it. There's no spending a soul gem to rez on the spot, so it's either wait on someone else to rez you or rez at a centralized district location and get chewed up trying to get back to where you were.

I'm kind of puzzling over choosing one of the factions for the duration of the current season. It's an account-wide choice, but the only differences that I was able to suss out were that each faction has its own 2-piece set and a few furnishings which are unique to the faction (banners and whatnot). As far as the account-wide faction choice, I don't have any firm opinions on it, but suspect that it's there to prevent some of the "playing all sides" issues that alts can create.

Picky grammar issue: for the Glittering Goad set's tooltip, there's an extra "of" in there which made me have to read it a couple or three times to figure out what the 2-piece effect was.

The UI for the night market could use some improvements.

- the tree tells me nothing, at a glance. just showing the images is pretty bad usability.
- i should see without having to read a long textblock on the boss, where I need to go.
- so I would like to see 3 labeled columns with the districts and at least the name of the bosses and achievements
- and a clear indication if I still need to get something - without needing to hover over it.

also, similar to other UI in the game I would like to see the 2 screens tabbed with icons at the top to switch (like achievements, inventory)

Answering: How do you feel about the distribution of rewards during this event zone?

Having had a look at the achievements and faction merchants, i'm going to go ahead and assume that the set of shoulders, dyes, momentos, furniture, etc, is the primary rewards for the new content.

Outside of the shoulder pieces (and one accompaniment), there are no discernable cosmetic rewards (Outfits, Set Motifs, etc) earnable as part of the Night Market, either from achievements, or the faction vendors.

To be as direct as I can: The Season Pass CANNOT be the only method, or even the primary method, of earning cosmetic rewards for the game moving forward.

This is an RPG, not ARC Raiders. Having a variety of desirable, earned items is incredibly important for the overall health and fun of the game. It gives something to chase without a price tag, and makes people feel like they are engaging with the content of the game and not a paid system of the game.

Now, I get that you have to monetize something, but I really don't think that sacrificing the game's earnable rewards is the way to go here. The Battle Pass is another monetization method on top of your Crown Store and Subscription, which includes Crown Crates. If the data mines are to be believed, we're still getting outfit sets as part of the Crown Crates moving forward.

The translation, if this trajectory remains the same moving forward, is that ZOS will be triple dipping their monetization: Subscription, Lockboxes, AND Battle Passes, and all at the expense of one of the most desired reward systems in MMORPG's: Cosmetics and Fashion.

That is not OK. Not even slightly.

If one thing needs to suffer be cause of this, it's going to have to be the Crown Store. Take an outfit out of your Lootboxes and put them in the Season Pass instead. Take the motif styles out of the Crown Crates and put them in the Season Pass instead. Don't take the earnable fashion items out of the game.

If you continue to do so, you're asking for a lot of anger from the playerbase, and diminishing of the overall value of the actual content that you're releasing.

I also will not be participating in the Seasons moving forward if this is the case. I know my guild is in the same bucket. They can't post here, so i'm posting for them.

Thanks for listening to my feedback.

So, additional assorted thoughts about the Night Market...

What was the lesson from Bastion Nymic and Writhing Fortress? If you ask me, I would say, "Forcing people to grind just to engage in the headline content is a bad idea." Looking at Night Market, though, I'm don't think that lesson was learned. At all.

The Night Market is ostensibly a group zone, so why is it so group-unfriendly? Some quests are not shareable. Quest progress is not shared with the group. Why were basic details like that overlooked for group content?

The Duneripper roaming boss was interesting and certainly a novel way to go about it. Kudos! But it seemed kinda buggy too. After defeating it inside, we were trapped in a seemingly endless loop of animations of our characters being pulled into the ground (to leave the duneripper), and it looks a very long time for us to actually be ejected, one at a time. I'll post a video of this later.

The Skirmish in the Parch is buggy and we could not complete it. It seemed like that there was maybe an add that got stuck underground? The encounter got stuck and could no longer progress.

One of the bosses that we killed was Exarch Molonach. His mechanics are a combination of the first boss of Stone Garden and the final boss of March of Sacrifices.

• So, first, there is a problem with companions on this boss; specifically, the shades during the hunt phase can target companions. There was a random player there with a companion out, and one of the shades chased after their companion, but since the companion doesn't know how to do the mechanic, it just stood there tanking the shade instead of leading it to the trap, which prevented that phase from ending until we finally got the companion's owner to do something about their companion.
• The fact that the companion was able to tank the shade illustrates the next problem: the mechanics, while they exist, don't actually challenge players. In the dungeon, letting the shade catch you is a death sentence even for tanks. Here, a companion was just standing there tanking it. If this had been the actual dungeon, the shade would've killed the companion and solved the companion problem.
• Problems like this are kind of unavoidable for this format of content. Make the the mechanics matter, and you alienate a large majority of players, but right now, the mechanics being recycled and not mattering means that these encounters are just not interesting for veteran dungeon runners. In dungeons, you can solve this problem with normal/veteran/HM difficulties, but you can't do that here and, well, you see now why I am skeptical of the Night Market replacing actual dungeon content.
• It seems like your solution here is to just make all the bosses big beefy damage sponges that also dish out lots of damage, which is basically exactly like the Solstice siege camps. For me, it just meant that the Night Market as a whole felt like a tedious slog (but not difficult, since we had a tank), and for many other players... well, you can see the other feedback in this thread. And again, this is yet another exhibit for why proper dungeon instances with selectable difficulty and assigned roles is the gold standard for content in this game.

As I mentioned in the first post, details about the Night Market are not well-telegraphed to the player, and the UI is a showcase of poor discoverability. First, the F5 to open the Night Market UI is not something that a lot of people notice, but the worst specimen of poor discoverability is the "View Scoreboard" in that bottom strip. Not only did it take me and everyone else I was with a good long while before we finally noticed it, but I've myself used that bottom UI strip as an entry point for features in addons, and I've lost count of the number of times I've gotten the "oh, I never noticed that was there" from users.

Speaking of "View Scoreboard", that's a strange place to place the status of the Skirmish encounters. And speaking of Skirmish encounters, it wasn't clear to us that it's a special event that happens only once in a while. We went to the skirmish location in one of the districts to try to get the splinter there. We saw a bunch of tra--er, base pop, which we killed. And then they respawned. And we killed them again, and we thought that the Skirmish was just supposed to be wave after wave of trash, and eventually, someone noticed that View Scoreboard, which brought up the Skirmish status UI, at which point we realized that the trash waves wasn't actually the real Skirmish and that the real thing wouldn't happen for another hour or so (at least according to the UI--in reality, it, the timer given in the UI turned out to be completely wrong, which I assume is a bug).

In any case, after slogging through boring damage sponge encounters, getting only some splinters due to the RNG nature of their drops, then encountering the bugged Parch Skirmish, we looked at what we had accomplished in about 2 hours, saw that we were nowhere close to even accessing one of the "dungeons" (not even talking about the trial any more), we said "eff this" and quit. It was grindy, uninteresting, and it seems like nothing was learned from the failures of Bastion Nymics and the Writhing Wall event.

At the very least, you need to add a way to access the instanced content for PTS testing, kind of like how you enable all hard modes on a trial for PTS, because I doubt many people will want to grind through all of Night Market just to test those instances. But really, I'm just sad that instead of getting dungeons this year, we are getting this. Sigh.

ZOS_Kevin wrote: »

istribution of rewards during this event zone?
[*] How have you found the difficulty of the Night Market? Please provide any additional context to the difficulty ratings below.

• Easy
• Well-balanced
• Difficult
• Too difficult

I love it. I'm just two trash packs in, but I loved the fact the opponents didn't just melt after making a mean face at them and I actually had to pay attention to what I was doing. It looks like the overland parts could be fun solo and there is opportunity to play ungrouped among others.

I hope overland hard mode is similar to this. It reminds me of the original Crag, but a little easier so far.

[*] Do you have any other general feedback?

Hold the line on difficulty. Players will need to go over a bit of a hump to learn things they have never had to before, but it will open the door to a new world of gameplay for them.

Maybe there's a way to change it, but I see the faction lock being problematic if players make the wrong choice and can't group with their friends later. I don't have enough experience in the zone to know how practical this concern is.

I'm the kind of player who loved ESO when it was more challenging. I miss the original vet dungeons. I miss the original vet gold overland difficulty. I miss the original crag and vMA before power creep ruined it. Please stay on this course. Look at what other B2P Live service games are offering. There is a market for interesting combat if you do it right.

coop500 wrote: »

Personally I feel this may be a little too difficult for the average player. My builds aren't perfect meta, but they're not garbage either, and even when teaming up with other players, we get wrecked. I shudder bringing my less experienced friends into this.

I like seeing more difficult stuff, but this is a liiiittle too much I think for the average playerbase.

It becomes considerably easier if you have a tank in your group.

So you require the rarest member of ESO: a good tank lol.