With regards to the personality…

I would go as far as to say that if there’s a limitation on time to change it to use the equipped weapon (or even just 2H and hide the equipped weapon) for U49, then don’t release it yet until that’s been changed. I would rather see the team take more time to polish this personality than have it released and potentially never “fixed”.

(Also keeping in mind the amount of time it took to “fix” the Merciless Resolve glow that so many players hated)

Were you able to find the Tamriel Tome within the game's UI?

Yes.

Did you find the information in the Page 0 overview helpful?

The idea of the news page is good, but the information could be more concrete, and the layout looks cut off and unintended. I'm on an ultrawide monitor, and I can scroll to the bottom to read it all, but the text is cut off right at the end of the text, and it looks buggy and is inconvenient to read.

How did you feel about the various Challenges on offer? This includes both Weekly and Seasonal Challenges.

I already know the weekly ones are not visible at the moment, so skipping those: Login and jubilee are a good idea; those are accessible to all. Jubilee is always popular, so that's good, and I've seen feedback on here worrying about the login being devalued in favour of chores, so I think this is a good thought if this system is really meant for consolidating all the different reward and task systems.
The Night Market is a very bad idea though. It's become abundantly clear that this activity is in fact not meant for everyone but only for a fraction of players. Many of us cannot solo it and don't have the time/schedule/opportunities needed to group up. What one thinks of that on its own is one topic, but specifically when it comes to being able to complete tasks for claiming the rewards of the battle pass that one has paid for, this means many players are locked out of possible rewards after they've already paid because they liked the promotion and the rewards. Or alternatively, if they know the tasks involve the Night Market and have seen the Night Market before making their decision, it's a reason not to purchase the battle pass for that season. I'm not sure that's intended from a business perspective either. In any case, if such tasks are supposed to be part of the pass, this needs to be clearly communicated so that players don't spend money on a battle pass they're unable to complete.

Were you able to use the Re-Roll currency?

No, I didn't find the function. (I play on a PS5 controller in case that makes a difference for the UI.)

Was the experience of earning, claiming, and spending Tome Points clear?

No. I find the sections confusing, didn't understand the point of the first and second page and what is necessary for what, and only later saw there was a hidden third page that was locked behind earning a lot of points, which I think is a terrible idea.
Also, does that page unlock after one has accumulated that amount total, even if one spends in the meantime, or does one need to have that amount of currency currently in the account? E.g. if I buy something for 500 right away, do those 500 still count towards the unlock, or should one wait with any purchases before one has it all together to "buy" the page unlock?
In any case, I don't like that system. If one spends on the first two pages and only later sees there's something one really wants on the third, it feels like wasted time, and if time then runs out, that's just more FOMO. Which might be the intended effect to make one purchase the premium pass, but even with infinite time it's unpleasant, and the next season is already around the corner. Please reconsider this and opt for transparency instead so we can make informed decisions and truly buy what we want with our currency right away.

Edit to add: The claiming of currency should either happen automatically like with endeavours or get an automatic notice taking you to the claiming screen like with the Golden Pursuits; otherwise it can be hidden and forgotten way too easily when one's in the middle of something or has forgotten some tasks, or for players who aren't familiar with the system. This is all the more imperative because the battle pass is paid for with real money.

Did anything not function during your testing?

The known issues and the re-roll.

Do you have any other general feedback?

The UI and graphical presentation need work, and the transparency is lacking. It also should probably get a clearer explanation somewhere. I've followed the news and hang out on the PTS forum and still found it confusing; I think a truly casual player who only logs into the game without outside sources will just be overwhelmed.

EDIT to add (because I just thought of that):
So buyers of the premium passes are supposed to complete the battle pass at their leisure. But what about those seasonal tasks that leave? I got login, jubilee festival and night market. Two out of three of those are going away after the season. And I can't tell if I'm supposed to be able to reroll or not, but at least there was no option. How is that accounted for?

Vylaera wrote: »

The front page of the tome looks kinda weird. Like it's improperly sized. Half the screen is just the blurred background.

I think the first page is supposed to show as if you are opening the book, down low as that is how you would open a book to look at it.... it does look very odd when the book suddenly goes to the right thou, why not just keep it in same location.

tomofhyrule wrote: »

Another note about the personality regarding this comment from before:

tomofhyrule wrote: »

Also on a sidenote for personalities, there are a few older ones that contain some animations in their idle loops that are not triggerable based on emotes (things like Heroic's thinking pose where they character scratches their chin or their arms crossed pose where they shift their weight backwards casually, or Furious's knuckle cracking variation). Can these small idles be retrofitted to be alternate emotes for those respective personalities to replace things like the /huh, /armscrossed, or /knuckles in their respective personalities?

This new one also does have a few non-triggerable idles


Again, all personalities with random idles should just have them set as triggerable by some emote or even one of the /idle2(or 3 or 4 or 5) animations so we can activate it on demand for screenshots.

As to the prop weapon, I can see that it is currently not set up for replacing with the active weapon and that would require extra programming to get that. If I may suggest that it would be nice in this specific case to possibly try it and retrofit it once that is done?

While not being able to replace the weapon with our own is disappointing, this seems like a fix that could easily be implemented and would definitely give the personality more value to me. The personality is really nice looking, but having the idles be non-triggerable makes it something I'd likely never use.

GatheredMyst wrote: »

[*] Were you able to find the Tamriel Tome within the game's UI?
Yes. It's prominently listed in the top navigation. Hard to miss.

[*] Did you find the information in the Page 0 overview helpful?
Yes, but it looks like someone pasted it in via paint. The text is too big and doesn't orient correctly. It's not a very professional presentation.

[*] How did you feel about the various Challenges on offer?
Seemed alright, though the user interface needs some serious work. Everything looks too small, from the bars to the text, and the window takes up more screen space that really seems necessary. Moving between challenges and the Tome interface shouldn't close one window and open another.

[*] This includes both Weekly and Seasonal Challenges.
I could only see the Seasonal Challenges for some reason. Not sure why.

[*] Were you able to use the Re-Roll currency?
No.

[*] Was the experience of earning, claiming, and spending Tome Points clear?
Yes, though the icons were fuzzy for some reason?

[*] Did anything not function during your testing?
The actual functionality seemed fine as I was poking through it. Most of my concerns will be listed below.

[*] Do you have any other general feedback?

There's a few things that really need to be addressed with the tome system in regards to presentation and the devs stated goal of not introducing FOMO to the system:

1. The interface needs some work. It feels like a first draft. There isn't a lot of detail in the iconography, and some of the graphic design appears low rez for whatever reason.
2. There is no reason that people shouldn't be able to view all the pages of the tome from the get-go. Right now, the interface suggests that you "Unlock a certain amount to VIEW a later page", but every battle pass i've ever played has always allowed you to VIEW the rewards, you just had to spend a certain amount on the previous pages to EARN the later page rewards.
3. Most importantly out of everything: The devs stated that they do not want this system to be FOMO, and that you can bypass the FOMO nature of the Tome by purchasing it. What happens to the rewards when the time expires and you don't buy it, though? Do they disappear into the aether if you haven't earned them? Let's say that someone takes a break from the game and comes back, sees someone with a cool outfit, and wants to earn it. Are they effectively SOL? Those rewards are never to be seen or heard from again? If the devs really want this to not be a FOMO system, the rewards should rotate into something like the Gold Coast Bazaar after say... a year's time. Otherwise, most of the future reward tracks for the game will last for a brief period of time and disappear, gutting a large part of the end-game for players who aren't around to participate in a flash moment of gameplay.

They should really look to fallout 76 for the way their pass is. Easy to read. Big pictures where you can also preview the item. You know what everything costs. Also, the biggestost desirable items such as new weapon types and important resource collectors are later available at faction reputation vendors at a later time for a common currency, their version of trade bars.

The interface is just not good. It looks very much like a first pass. Hopefully this is just a preview version and the real one will be much better. But knowing Zos...

The part where you cannot view the all the pages is just not ok. You want trust to buy this battle pass when it already feels like I have a gun to my head. I truly believe that if the battle pass is a abysmal failure, there won't be a third year of transition to the next thing or a reversal to chapters. So I think Zos needs to fire on all cylinders to get this right. It needs to be open and transparent. It needs to default to being almost too generous. You really gotta sell this to players, so make it amazing. Better than the industry standard.

Just to emphasize what other folks have said here...

Challenges Unclear: Weekly challenges didn't even appear for me. I wonder if it's because my EU characters are all very low level?

Difficult-to-Use Previews: Having the previews automatically pop up instead of manually selecting them was counterintuitive compared to how it works anywhere else in the game. Not being able to preview the contents of packages (like the furnishing pack) was a serious issue, in my opinion. I don't want to spend my points on something if I can't see what it actually contains.

Monster Hunter Personality: This is what would have gotten me to buy the premium tome, but I have no interest in the personality in its current state.
1. Disappointing that the weapon displayed is pre-determined, though I understand that it isn't viable to fix that now.
2. I don't like that the blade is angled so that the character could easily cut their own neck.
3. I don't like that the weapon clips with any two-handed weapon you may have equipped.
4. I don't like that animations were made for when the player is sneaking, but sneaking causes the prop to vanish!

I think tomofhyrule's suggestions above might mitigate the above issues enough that I would consider buying this. I'm a sucker for personalities. But the implementation of the prop weapon is so specific and so clunky that it would be an eyesore, especially in the context of my "character fantasy."

Were you able to find the Tamriel Tome within the game's UI?
Yes.

Did you find the information in the Page 0 overview helpful?
That's nice.

How did you feel about the various Challenges on offer?
This includes both Weekly and Seasonal Challenges.
At first glance I like the challenges. "Collect alchemy ingredients, high demand for nightshade" is cool. More varied than endeavors. Can be too restrictive sometimes, but with rerolls it should be ok.

Were you able to use the Re-Roll currency?
I re-rolled some.
However, there are two problems:

• it is not very obvious how to get more rerolls, tooltip should contain more info;
• I checked Help for that info and it is written "You may reroll these challenges freely five times each week and pay gold to purchase additional rerolls past that". But purchasing with gold either doesn't work or I didn't find where to buy it.

Was the experience of earning, claiming, and spending Tome Points clear?
It is clear, but very uncomfortable and annoying.
Endeavors were very nice when you just play - and then hey, you got some seals! I even had some weekly done without checking what's on list, because I did enough dailies or collected mats.
But with challenges you have to check list, remember it, pay attention to all activities from there, and then return and claim. Repeat. Repeat again. Repeat again.
And you can forget to check them at all...
So instead of feeling rewarded for actually playing the game you feel punished for not treating challenge list as main thing in game.
Would be much better if there was no need for manually claiming, as for endeavors. It has some reasons in pursuits (as there can be items going to character's inventory), but this is account-wide currency!
Or at least tome icon should have some marker showing you have something to claim, as crown store have for daily login rewards or crates icon shows you have crate to open.

Also it is not obvious if extra doings will be counted or lost. At first glance it gives the impression that extra progress will be lost. I checked, it isn't. Not losing extra progress should be more clear. Maybe something like progress bar in pursuits would fit better?

As for rewards part of tome, I like fast preview and hold-to-claim is ok.

Did anything not function during your testing?
Rerolling for gold. "Walk" in preview of monster slayer animation.

Do you have any other general feedback?
Why there are checkbox squares and 0/6 in one screen? Make it either checkboxes or numbers everywhere. New UI is ugly enough, don't make it even worse.

And yes, monster slayer personality have to use or hide our weapon.

Honestly my first impression is that it's a needlessly complicated re-working of endeavours and/or golden pursuits and if it wasn't for the necessity of re-branding it because otherwise it's too obvious that we're now being charged for (parts of) something we previously got for free I'd say you should just revert to that system, which was much clearer and had a consistent UI.

Having said that I do like that there's some colour in the UI and an interesting font on the front page (sadly only the front page). After the recent efforts to strip the rest of the game's UI back to bleak grey and flat primary colours with no shading that was a nice surprise. It's a shame it doesn't carry over to the challenge menu, which for some reason is in an entirely different style and looks disconnected from the tome and the rest of the game.

The UI overall seems inconsistent to me. Finding the icon was easy, but the first page looks like a book so I expected to use the usual book navigation, instead there's a huge 'continue to Tome' button, implying this page is not infact part of the tome, but once you click that it changes to a navigation menu, which does include that first page alongside the ones with items on. I didn't see the buttons at the top at first, so it took me a bit of poking around to find the challenges, I expected that to be one of the pages, alongside the intro and the rewards, not a seperate menu in an entirely different style. I'm not sure why this needs yet another menu in a different place with a different format instead of being part of the tome or using an existing format like the golden pursuits and endeavours or the quest log. As I said before it makes the whole thing look messy and inconsistent, like several different addons glued together. (If it was an addon I'd uninstall and look for one where the creators had talked to each other and agreed on a format.)

I did not understand at first how to claim tome points. The daily login challenge was ticked and I assume that like endeavours and golden pursuits that meant it had fully completed and the points had been awarded, except obviously the rewards page showed I had no points. Apparently I had to confirm it first which seems like an unnecessary step, but I assume it's designed to drive "engagement" with the system by requiring us to look at the menu as often as possible.

On that note a way to go directly into the challenge list would be useful (ideally by making it a page within the tome) since it's going to take a lot of challenges to unlock even 1 reward so we'll be looking at that menu far more often.

I couldn't try out rerolling challenges because for some reason there were no weekly challenges. (Which also means I can't comment on what they require.)

Danikat wrote: »

Having read through other people's feedback I agree that there's no point in hiding pages behind unlocking a certain number of points and everything in a tome should be visible from the start.

No sane person is going to pay to upgrade it without knowing what they're getting and expecting them to runs absolutely counter to your alleged 'no FOMO' stance. But also as other people have pointed out all it will do is drive players to use 3rd party sites to find the info you're unncessarily hiding from them. I guess it's good for the owners of those fan sites who now have a very easy way to guarentee a traffic spike each month, but it's terrible UI design.

twisttop138 wrote: »

The interface is just not good. It looks very much like a first pass. Hopefully this is just a preview version and the real one will be much better. But knowing Zos...

I know they've said they're going to stop doing this at some point in the future but given it's on the PTS I think it's best to assume this is the UI that will be going into the game.

Hard to believe this is how they want to present their new system which the entire game is riding on, but I guess it's what they were able to pull together with the time and staff they have.

I think you're dead on. Regardless of what they say, this isn't like a combat change. Someone, apparently, spent a bunch of time and money creating this. So I'm sure it won't change, but making people search out info you refuse to share seems underhanded and needlessly frustrating. I would think that with battle pass being viewed so negatively by gamers and not a good sign of game health, that they'd wanna be as transparent as possible.

Were you able to find the Tamriel Tome within the game's UI?
Yes, though you might make a quick tutorial which lights up and points an arrow up to the top left.

Did you find the information in the Page 0 overview helpful?
Not really helpful but it is nice to have.

How did you feel about the various Challenges on offer?
Unlike many of the others, I like that it was varied to suit multiple play styles which I think people forget is a thing.
This includes both Weekly and Seasonal Challenges.
Were you able to use the Re-Roll currency?
Yes. I was curious as to how many of those we will have per week or per season.

Was the experience of earning, claiming, and spending Tome Points clear?
Yes. No issues.
Did anything not function during your testing?
The transmogs did not show up when I chose to view the item for the season, unless that is intentional. Some of the items I had to buy it just to verify what it looked like/ or use.
Do you have any other general feedback?
Many of the other suggestions up above were just fine. You guys did a horrible job of presenting the information in the direct or whatever you called it. I had no idea it was just a way to streamline the dailies, event tickets, and other rewards into a different vehicle and then include some more materials at a price. Or at the bare minimum explain in better detail of what Tomes were. Your direct was almost as bad as WoW's was where they stated "We have emails saying this is great!"

Hello Zos!

Were you able to find the Tamriel Tome within the game's UI?
Yes, thank you.

Did you find the information in the Page 0 overview helpful?
Yes, thanks.

How did you feel about the various Challenges on offer?
No weekly challenges visible/available. For the seasonal ones, they are tedious chores. 5000 Faction Favours is out of question due to extreme difficulty of that "trial". Please add more, at least 10 to choose from. Only 3 is you forcing us to do chores. We do not want this.

This includes both Weekly and Seasonal Challenges.
No weekly visible. Will update when available.

Were you able to use the Re-Roll currency?
Not working.

Was the experience of earning, claiming, and spending Tome Points clear?
Impossible to earn Tome points because the weekly challenges were not available.

Did anything not function during your testing?
Weekly missing, re-roll not working.

Do you have any other general feedback?
Dear ZOS, please improve the type, quality, and variety of rewards. Assuming that "Premium" means rewards for those who buy the subscription, like I was planning to do, and the "Season" lasts 3 months, these rewards on offer are not interesting at all. There are many senior players like me (CP3600) We do not need to work days and days to spend tomes to get 25,000 gold, or to get 9 luminous inks. This is not even serious.
Senior players like me have tons of gold and tons of everything. And again, there are female players like me, and really, I have been repeating this for years, please offer female-oriented items, like special furniture pieces (cute, not gory), or costumes, or new hair styles (girly), or furniture recipes (cute, not gory). The axe with some red light around? Nothing special. And why can we only buy the items once? What if I want to buy more alliance scrolls, because I do not need the rest?
I had planned to buy the premium tome subscription, but now that I have seen the rewards, I am not going to, unless you seriously upgrade the quality and choice. As it is now, there is nothing that I am interested in.

Patch notes today:

Furnishing bundles within the Tome rewards have been updated to display the full names of their contents.

Thank you!! This is great.

Also I want to highlight this from above:

The Monster Slayer personality is one of the major selling points of the Premium version of the Tome, and the first one we're seeing there (especially since we can't preview the entire tome right now, so we can't even see the other things on offer like the mount). As it currently functions, it is essentially unusable... and that will drastically reduce the number of sales of this Tome's premium version.

Can the team at least consider the two quick modifications below to make it much more appealing (and potentially able to sell).

tomofhyrule wrote: »

We know that there's no mechanism to have the personality fully replace the prop for your actual weapons (but this would be a great use case to start working on that...), but there are still a few quick fixes they could do to better sell it.
And yes, I am using "sell" here, since the personality is one of the big selling points for people to get the premium tome instead of the basic one.

What could quickly be done:

1. Have the personality hide back weapons when active. This technology already exists on polymorphs (like the Minotaur or Iron Atronach), costumes (like the Treasure Hunter), and outfit styles (like the High Rock Spellsword chest). If this personality just hid back weapons, that would take care of the prop sword clipping into staves and 2H weapons.
2. Copy the default idle loop to be triggerable with /idle2. If players can trigger the animation with an emote (including the idles), that means we can use the prop replacement glitch feature to at least see out characters using their proper weapon. Sure, they don't have it while walking and it takes a bit of setup, but just being able to see our characters standing around with the proper weapon would be great.
   (I also wouldn't mind if the other idles in that loop shown here would end up becoming /idle3 and /crouch as well)

Those fixes hopefully would still be something that could be done in time for release, and would really help to make this more attractive to a lot of people.

If, in the future, the devs were able to get the personality to use the outfitted weapon, that would be perfect though.