coop500 wrote: »

SneaK wrote: »

coop500 wrote: »

luc76985 wrote: »

Taarente wrote: »

I understand what this is trying to address, but I do have some concerns about the direction and its wider impact.

First, who is this actually aimed at?
Is this intended for a very small percentage of highly optimised players, a broader mid-tier audience, or most of the playerbase? It’s not clear which group this is meant to serve, and without that clarity it’s hard to see how the design can land well.

Second, any form of this risks increasing elitism.
Even if unintentionally, difficulty labels and visible distinctions tend to create social pressure and comparison in a shared world. That rarely ends well in an MMO, especially one that has worked hard to remain accessible.

The naming also feels problematic.
Titles like these don’t just describe difficulty — they signal status. That can easily come across as ego-boosting rather than descriptive, which again feeds into division rather than choice.

It’s also worth noting that genuinely punishing content already exists.
Veteran dungeons, trials, hard modes, arenas, Infinite Archive, and PvP already provide places for players who want to push limits. If the goal is to offer more challenge, expanding or deepening those spaces feels more coherent than redefining overland.

Overland content has a specific role in ESO.
It’s where story, exploration, atmosphere, and world-building live. For many players it’s intentionally a safe, welcoming space — somewhere to exist in the world without pressure. Changing that risks undermining one of the game’s core strengths.

Finally, there’s a tension with the “play your way” message.
In practice, the game already strongly rewards “damage, damage, damage.” Introducing optional difficulty on top of that doesn’t really broaden playstyles — it just asks some players to opt into more friction while the same dominant approach continues to shape shared spaces.

I’m not opposed to challenge — far from it — but I worry that this approach adds complexity and social friction without clearly solving a real problem. It feels like something that could be looked back on and thought, it might have been better to leave overland as it was.

Fully agree. I am pretty skeptical that this will do anything constructive for the playerbase but I'm willing to wait and see (because what choice do we have).

I agree with this concern too. I think a few changes ZOS has done/is doing with this year feels like it's going to pit casual players against elites and vice versa. The community has, in my experience, already become more toxic than it ever was a few years ago, and stuff like this, implemented in this way, is going to make it worse.

Solutions are difficult to formulate that don't bring their own issues, but I do believe the pitting against each other thing should be considered.

Feel like this is a red herring, “elite” players aren’t going to come in droves to play hard overland for XP and gold they don’t need. The system they are putting out offers nothing outside of a more efficient grinding mechanism. There is zero risk in participating in it and the rewards are purely XP/gold grinds.

In short, people will play it, because why not, but it adds no value to the game other than more efficient grinding.

Totally missing the point of what I was talking about, both me and the two players I responded to.
We weren't talking about rewards, we were talking about attitude and status, plus with the current setup of someone on easy mode able to barge in and wipe someone's boss fight who's playing on a harder mode, robbing them of that difficult experience.

The concern here is going both ways, both sides causing hardache and stirring bitterness towards the other.

I will agree with an aspect of what you're saying though in the sense of how I personally still believe the best solution is different instances, instead of players on different difficulties playing together. Casual folks won't be totally abandoned, there's going to be plenty of experienced players still chilling on Adventure Mode to help with World Bosses and the like.

No I didn’t miss it. I don’t see there being some elitist mentality of harder overland, it’s casual by nature. The example you provided is something that I don’t see happening enough to be a concern. Most the people in harder overland will be there simply for grinding, having a normal difficulty player killing the boss for them only gets them gold and XP faster.

The entire proposition from ZOS is bad, it’s going to have minimal impact on most players and adds next to zero content.

AlexanderDeLarge wrote: »

I understand the concern about dividing the community in principle, but it’s difficult to take that concern seriously given how veteran overland requests have been treated over the past several years. Many of us have repeatedly been labeled a “vocal minority” and told to isolate ourselves in instanced veteran content or to play something else entirely.

After five-ten years of being told you don’t belong in a MMORPG, it’s hard not to roll your eyes when the same people suddenly express concern about “splitting the community”.

This is what I refer to as Schrödinger’s Overland: we’re simultaneously told that veteran overland players are a vocal minority who wouldn’t meaningfully use the feature, yet also warned that introducing separate overland phases would somehow kill the normal one. Something isn’t adding up.

I agree, it defo feels silly to have this 'doomer' mentality if vets were allowed to have a different instance. IMO I think the system will be DOA if it's NOT separate instances, because otherwise it's just not intuitive and is even abuse-able.

Plus guilds still exist if newer players still need help with WBs.

coop500 wrote: »

Overall there does seem to be a bit of miscommunication with some of the later posts.

When I speak of splitting the community, I don't mean physically. I personally think there SHOULD be different instances.

When I speak of splitting the community, I mean in an emotional, community sense, creating a much more 'us vs them' ideal.

I kind of agree with you here. But this is a problem I really only run into here on the forums and other socials like reddit. Maybe I'm lucky, but many years in ESO have been filled with fun, great people and a helpful community. Even in the past year when I decided to take vet and hm trials and dungeons serious and try to progress my skills, I was met with the same. It took a bit of trial and error finding the right fit but was never met with git gud or called a scrub. Just patience if I was open to learning. It's when I get on the forums where I see this us vs them mentality. We're casual and we bring the money, so you endgame players are 1% of the population and shouldn't be listened to, or MMOs mean grouping. This is the wrong attitude. Without everyone, this game fails. There is no single group anyway. Hm raiders also do solo quests, housing etc. I have in my prog group a solo, housing living, story focused, knitting grandma who also does a beastly amount of DPS. So I think in game, these concerns are mild at best. There's no way to differentiate someone on higher difficulty, as far as I know. No way to lord it over others beyond easily ignorable words.

As for this whole challenge difficulty settings. I've definitely supported it, though all I'd like to make harder is quest bosses, the rewards don't matter and they seem to be far to small to worry about. It's a big game, so someone on challenge who's having a problem with a busy zone can choose to go somewhere else if annoyed at kill stealing. Something already dealt with in game afaik. As for xp farming, this is a nothing burger. If I want someone to help me farm xp by being on easy mode and I'm on vestige, that's really no one's business. Oh no, I might cap out my already increasingly useless CP levels faster. The humanity.

I think this is just another way for Zos to have us focus on grinding old content in the package of a win for providing a much requested feature. Time will tell how popular it'll be.

AlexanderDeLarge wrote: »

I understand the concern about dividing the community in principle, but it’s difficult to take that concern seriously given how veteran overland requests have been treated over the past several years. Many of us have repeatedly been labeled a “vocal minority” and told to isolate ourselves in instanced veteran content or to play something else entirely.

After five-ten years of being told you don’t belong in a MMORPG, it’s hard not to roll your eyes when the same people suddenly express concern about “splitting the community”.

This is what I refer to as Schrödinger’s Overland: we’re simultaneously told that veteran overland players are a vocal minority who wouldn’t meaningfully use the feature, yet also warned that introducing separate overland phases would somehow kill the normal one. Something isn’t adding up.

That was a point I raised years ago in that feedback thread. If we did instancing, and say a zone had 10 instances, but when hard mode overland comes in, there are still 10 instances, with 9 for casual and 1 for hard mode (dynamically changing based on population numbers), the people in the 9 casual instances wouldn't notice anything, aside from afk people at bankers being in a different instance of content, identical to if they were doing dungeons/trials/pvp/logging off. That mindset of being told we're not a big enough group to cater to, but also being big enough to ruin the game for others if we are, is odd, even all these years later.

Taarente wrote: »

I understand what this is trying to address, but I do have some concerns about the direction and its wider impact.

First, who is this actually aimed at?
Is this intended for a very small percentage of highly optimised players, a broader mid-tier audience, or most of the playerbase? It’s not clear which group this is meant to serve, and without that clarity it’s hard to see how the design can land well.

---

It’s also worth noting that genuinely punishing content already exists.
Veteran dungeons, trials, hard modes, arenas, Infinite Archive, and PvP already provide places for players who want to push limits. If the goal is to offer more challenge, expanding or deepening those spaces feels more coherent than redefining overland.

Overland content has a specific role in ESO.
It’s where story, exploration, atmosphere, and world-building live. For many players it’s intentionally a safe, welcoming space — somewhere to exist in the world without pressure. Changing that risks undermining one of the game’s core strengths.

---

This is aimed at people like me, who want to engage in THE WORLD OF TAMRIEL but want to also engage ESO on a technical level, either having learned and enjoyed the gameplay or who want to challenge themselves to improve. When we're told in a quest that an end of the world level threat is on hand, we want that to be reflected in the gameplay. The damage adjustments help to some end, enemies need to be alive long enough to act to be a threat, and their attacks need to do enough damage to justify paying attention to them, but I stand by the fact that enemies need better abilities and need to use them more frequently, with the addition of enemies being different from one another, like mages doing more damage than knights but knights being more durable than mages.

But here's the fun part, going back to my bolded text. When I started playing ESO back at launch, I was a quester. Started AD, and didn't even join a guild until I was in Reapers March, collecting leather for my next set of armor. I enjoy exploring the world, questing, and finding things. But when the armies of oblivion are no less threatening than some shambling zombies from a starter zone, it feels boring. Like all enemies are the same grey goo, just molded into different shapes.

I don't want to be told to just go back to my corner and run in circles. I've done dungeons, they're the only reason I still log in weekly, to do dungeons with friends. I, strongly dislike, the arenas. Vateshran is especially numbing, run past mobs, pull levels, exc. Questing is a different activity than Dungeons. It's like having an actual swimming pool vs a wave pool or infinity pool. Sometimes, I just want to swim, not in the same spot mindlessly, not with the repetitive loop that all dungeons eventually become. I stopped questing after Elsweyr because it was boring, every zone since is fresh content for me, I want to enjoy it, but when I tired doing the Skyrim questline and THE MAIN STORY BOSS taunted me about "You may ask ME a question, and I shall ask YOU one in return." My first thought was, "how many arrows can I fit in your face?" No threat, no menace, because I know in the end, he'll monologue, I'll hit the synergy key, and he'll explode.

Questing is not Dungeons, it is a different kind of content. I want to Quest in a meaningful way, like how in my modded Skyrim I need to seek shelter from blizzards, not for hard core cred, but because it makes me engage with the world more than fast traveling everywhere did. To that end, ZOS offering Solo and Solo Story Mode dungeons is the exact same as a harder overland, it opens up the content to a wider range of players, because NOTHING about overland mandates it be super easy with no options. Every other piece of PVE content in the game offers choice, and it is good that overland finally offers it. Giving people an option in overland doesn't risk undermining that any more than offering people solo/causal dungeons does.

Signposting another thread I noticed has been spun-up:

https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/688497/challenge-difficulty-will-never-work-as-designed

albertberku wrote: »

flyingparchment wrote: »

so i'm really curious why it's being brought up as something that should never happen.

The moment i heard the difficulty changes in the overland, i instantly thought about that this change will be discussed or even introduced at some point. It is same idea like leaderboards, and PvP K/D screens. ESO has been a MMO that is mainly catered to the casual players, and has its massive success due to this one single fact, that every player can feel like they are achieving something in the game, even most casual players. If you were to introduce a visual indication between players in the same overland zone with different difficulty settings selected, you will diminish the sense of more casual players' sense of achievement. It will be same environment where you are the less smart kid in the classroom, and your friends having higher grades then you. It will shift the overland content to a competitive environment and have an impact on the joy of other more casual players, and their feelings of achievement.

Most players prefer to play solo and be left alone. Therefore I highly doubt anyone would care about what difficulty others play on.

Don't do anything to divide the player base, Zones are already Ghost Towns as it is

Here is the thing, I do not care for high difficulties, I enjoy one-shotting enemies, it shows that the effort I put in to farm perfected trial sets to not feel week had paid off but If I am fighting a World Boss and require assistance I don't want someone on the highest difficult lending a hand as all that would be doing is wasting time.

First, we are making a choice to make sure players are not separated by difficulty.

This means one of the biggest problems of the overland difficulty will not be solved at all. Let's say I am battling a story boss on higher difficulty, and some player comes by and nukes him in 0.5 seconds as is the current situation.

I don't mind it when people are grouping, but random people shouldn't just barge in on my fights. Same goes for Delves, Public Dungeons, etc.

At launch, we will start with additional experience and gold rewards only

Personally, I don't need any additional incentive. But XP is pretty much useless after a certain point. There's absolutely nothing exciting in getting another point of CP. Even more so once you are over 1800-ish. And let's not forget the 3600 CP veteran players.

All I'm saying here is CP and XP need a hard rework. The current system is too blocking for the new players (Welcome to ESO, we need you to grind like a madman until you hit 1800 CP until you can play endgame content with us! See ya in a few months!) and absolutely useless for the veteran ones.

And there's an overflow of gold in the game already so I'm not too optimistic about this either. We're looking at another wave of inflation (depending on how popular this feature becomes).