When you ask for more repeatable content, what do you mean?

Tandor · February 18

SeaGtGruff wrote: »

Tandor wrote: »

I don't ask for more repeatable content, never have done. There's too much already.

Story and exploration, those are what the game should be about and they should be at the heart of new content which shouldn't simply take the form of putting old content into an additional system.

Take harvesting, for example. We already did it as part of exploration and crafting, now we have it as well for daily endeavours. Sometimes we have it as well for weekly endeavours, and additionally we now have it for golden pursuits. I haven't been on the PTS since it became a waste of time as nobody took any notice of the feedback, but I can imagine harvesting will feature in the new systems being introduced in U49. All in lieu of new content.

I think that's because they wanted the endeavors and pursuits to be types of activities that a lot of players would already be doing anyway, such that players would be completing some of the endeavors and pursuits without needing to go out of their way to do activities that they wouldn't normally be doing.

Obviously, the list of currently-available endeavors can't fulfill that goal for everyone, so there will be times when players need to deliberately engage in certain activities (such as a Heist or a Black Sacrament) which they wouldn't otherwise be doing if not for satisfying the goal of "3/3 daily endeavors completed."

But if the new system is going to let us reroll our choice of offered activities, then hopefully players will be able to focus more on what they prefer to be doing anyway rather than engaging in activities they dislike merely to satisfy a checklist.

I don't question your reasoning at all, I just want ZOS to add genuinely new content rather than spending all their time now adding new systems that are specifically designed to encourage you to do the things you're already doing. They can call that a new feature, but it's not new content.

Emeratis · February 18

Soarora wrote: »

Emeratis wrote: »

Soarora wrote: »

^ I actually have this problem in Skyrim too and it’s now to a point I can’t play the characters I have in lore because I get so stressed about quest order (I clearly have some problem with quest commitment due to wanting the roleplay to be as accurate as possible). I started a playthrough roleplaying as an aspect of Lorkhan (so it’s so far out there I can’t claim it as a lore character) and the last mod I played was daC0DA. I spent time stressing about “what if I want to play it again?” and convinced myself that if I want to, I can try uninstalling and reinstalling it again since its a mod.

Your mileage might vary but I have a similar problem in both games and what helped me in Skyrim was milestone savestates so if I wanted to go back to a certain point and take screenshots/explore that worldstate/tweak or change things I could. Obviously it's a little harder to do that in eso unfortunately.

My eso problem's slightly different. I have one vestige and she's involved in most storylines, but she often works together with my alts and sometimes they take a more main character role in that story and she's more a helper/side character. Similar paralysis at points and for my main since she's been my main since beta there are obviously quest locked locations I wish I could go back to due to reasons you said about outfits and changes and the fact when I first started eso my pc was a dinosaur that barely ran and now I have a very well specced computer. I'd love to redo some of my old screenshots that suffered from my old pc's specs visually.

I’m glad it’s not just me. I do the saving thing but I don’t think I’ve actually ever made use of them except for full resets without having to redo all the sliders. Downside for doing it by quest is losing all your build progress until you go back to newest save, so doing quests in the right order still matters.

That’s a cool way of organizing character lore! And yeah on the screenshots, especially if you wanted to edit both characters in together but can’t due to quality differences. I have screenshots from questing on the right character that pain me because they’re in completely wrong armor, there’s other players, the angles are bad, I didn’t have reshade… etc… etc…

Got me thinking about the cool Maormer ship battle that would be perfect for my Maormer… since I have yet to find a house that I want to convert into his boat (the proper boat house was too obviously Breton cruise ship for me to feel like I could convert it, but maybe…).

Exactlyyyyy, it's such a relief that someone else gets it! What's worse is I also used to keep detailed screenshots of the quest text and details because uesp is woefully lacking in most quest texts and choices and it helped when I was writing and organizing things to share with others but a few years ago my harddrive bricked and part of that data got corrupted which is the other reason I desperately want the option to replay to get my data back. Really hoping we get this feature down the line it just has a lot of utility and uses for people really into story and rp and could be a boon to the game.

I too am hyped for the naval battles and whatever the vault is but right now I am hard into the Night Market brainrot and which of my alts is in what faction and who's helping who and who's rivaling against who. It has so many exciting shakeups for my characters and unexpected alliances and I can't wait to dig in on live.

playsforfun · February 18

I would like delves to be like dungeons where you can choose difficulty & have rewards added to them maybe a daily or weekly quest giver, they have some really great content that goes to waste due to either the easy difficulty or other people camping bosses farming etc.

DoofusMax · February 18

I'm kind of OK with story quests and side quests not being repeatable. There are no decisions in those quests which result in a significantly different world state, so repeatability would mostly come down to being able to choose different dialogue or whether an NPC appears at the zone wrap party. Neither of those matter to me. I think the supply of existing repeatable content gets pretty stale after a while, though.

With four notable exceptions, just about everything is the target of a daily. Coldharbour has no dailies outside of daily crafting writs, Bolgrul only uses 15 of the 90 delves in the alliance zones, there are no public dungeon dailies in expansion zones, and there are no WB dailies in alliance zones. Urgarlag really needs a second Pledge Master; her dungeon rotation is up to about six weeks by now, but all dungeons have a pledge on some sort of a regular basis.

The newer stuff is being done one-at-a-time for reasons which probably make sense to ZOS, but there is an effort being made to introduce new group content into the game.

If I had to settle on a wish list, it would probably be those 81 unused delves, 96 unused World Bosses, and 22 unused public dungeons. I'm not sure where the Atoll of Immolation fits into all of that, but there's nothing for it, either.

Muizer · February 19

I want to take different characters through the same content, and have a different experience every time. That is, a replayable game.

I dislike the idea of content that is designed to be repeated on one character, whether that's because of drops or because dying it is the only way to learn how survive its unique challenges.

bmnoble · February 19

What I want more of is new quests, stories, adventures for my characters to go on.

As for repeatable content I want a reason to redo quest lines on other characters, different ways to do a quest and different quest outcomes.

If my choice is to do the same thing again with the same result, I would rather go do something new with my time, whether that is watching a movie, show I have not seen yet, read a book I haven't read yet or go play another game.

If all they are offering me is to do what I have already done over and over again, unless it is extremely enjoyable or offers one heck of a reward for my time, then I won't bother.

SeaGtGruff · February 19

Tandor wrote: »

SeaGtGruff wrote: »

Tandor wrote: »

I don't ask for more repeatable content, never have done. There's too much already.

Story and exploration, those are what the game should be about and they should be at the heart of new content which shouldn't simply take the form of putting old content into an additional system.

Take harvesting, for example. We already did it as part of exploration and crafting, now we have it as well for daily endeavours. Sometimes we have it as well for weekly endeavours, and additionally we now have it for golden pursuits. I haven't been on the PTS since it became a waste of time as nobody took any notice of the feedback, but I can imagine harvesting will feature in the new systems being introduced in U49. All in lieu of new content.

I think that's because they wanted the endeavors and pursuits to be types of activities that a lot of players would already be doing anyway, such that players would be completing some of the endeavors and pursuits without needing to go out of their way to do activities that they wouldn't normally be doing.

Obviously, the list of currently-available endeavors can't fulfill that goal for everyone, so there will be times when players need to deliberately engage in certain activities (such as a Heist or a Black Sacrament) which they wouldn't otherwise be doing if not for satisfying the goal of "3/3 daily endeavors completed."

But if the new system is going to let us reroll our choice of offered activities, then hopefully players will be able to focus more on what they prefer to be doing anyway rather than engaging in activities they dislike merely to satisfy a checklist.

I don't question your reasoning at all, I just want ZOS to add genuinely new content rather than spending all their time now adding new systems that are specifically designed to encourage you to do the things you're already doing. They can call that a new feature, but it's not new content.

And I don't disagree with that. I wasn't trying to suggest that endeavors and similar systems are an acceptable replacement for new content, although I also don't think they were meant to be taken as such. Rather, I think they were intended to offer us ways to earn rewards (or a currency that lets us buy said rewards in-game) without having to buy Crown Crates for a potential chance to get those rewards with a very low RNG success rate.

I think a better example of the pount you were making might be the Infinite Archive, which is great as far as giving us another source of currency that can be used to obtain rewards, leads, and other items which might be more difficult for some players to obtain otherwise-- but as a type of new content (gameplay activity), I was disappointed that it ended up being different than I'd been hoping for when I first heard about it. Basically, I was hoping for more of a random dungeon with infinite levels that involved actual exploration of rooms and mazelike corridors, as opposed to an infinite arena. I do think that what we got fits in well with the whole Hermaeus Mora connection, as far as how it throws random mobs and bosses which are reused from other content at us, but I would still like to see some kind of randomly-generated dungeon-- not necessarily infinite in nature, but at least something that involves more exploration and discovery.

For me, a game needs a healthy balance of one-and-done content that's unique and interesting enough to keep me wanting to discover new things about its world, but also have enough repeatable content that encourages me to stick around in the game rather than just moving on to the next "newest shiny game." I mean, I don't necessarily want to keep playing the same games over and over forever, but I also don't want to play an endless parade of new games which don't sink any hooks into me and keep me wanting to keep playing them.

SkaiFaith · February 19

XD judging by the votes right now, it seems my assumptions were wrong - always happy to learn

Still, some players would appreciate replayability of every content with the same character, just not as many as I'd have expected...

EDIT: by the way, I didn't mean that new content should be paused to concentrate on older content. I thought that zones and story quests were the focus for the majority, so that players would have preferred more "regular" DLC zones to be replayable an infinity of times, rather than the other type of repeatable content I listed in the other options which it seemed to me very few people participate in - and before someone shouts about there being a lot of players doing that content: I know, I'm not saying no one plays it, just that what I see is a little minority compared to players more interested in questing.

Lugaldu · February 19

Since housing is my true "endgame," I'd like to see repeatable content that you can do after finishing your houses, such as the often-suggested gardening, which could go hand in hand with crafting.
Currently, housing isn't truly repeatable; you complete a house, reach the furnishing slot limit, and then there's no real reason to return. Unless, of course, you want to destroy your build and start over. But even then, "repeatable" could rather mean being able to buy the same plot of land again. I would love to rebuild Moonsugar and Coldharbour, because I will definitely never demolish those builds.

peacenote · February 19

What's interesting about this poll is that I don't recall seeing a lot of players asking for "repeatable" content with that specific description. That said, I don't read every single post so I don't claim to speak for everyone. However, I have two observations.

1: It was not us, but the devs (via one of the yearly "state of ESO letters) that expressed a desire to provide more repeatable content to us. The context was that it takes so much effort and time to create hours and hours of questing content, but it's effectively non-repeatable content, in that people wouldn't necessarily want to play the quests over and over again, so from a dev efficiency standpoint it's not ideal. They wanted to shift the focus to providing us more content that can be repeated and enjoyed more than once (while still stating a commitment to continue to provide some questing content). I'm vastly paraphrasing from memory here, but that was the first time I personally heard the narrative of "repeatable." It was given to us as a goal, not something we asked for, per se. I think this might have aligned with the release of IA but I am not 100% sure.

2: Since AwA, many of us have pointed out that content has a lot less appeal for replayability, because there is less incentive to do the content again and no way to track progress. A portion of the community enjoyed pursuing achievements and revisiting stories on each character, and AwA made it much harder and less satisfying to do so. This, to me, is subtly different than talking about whether content is repeatable on the same character over and over again, because there are often different incentives for one over the other.

If I'm going to repeat content on the same character over and over, it needs to provide a different experience, different rewards, or follow the typical MMO RNG rules for doling out content, on the "right" side of infuriating so it doesn't feel so hopeless that I don't bother.
If I'm going to work through content on multiple characters, I'm often seeking to repeat the experience I had with my first character, so I want the content to be refreshed and provide me with the same progress trackers that I had the first time I played the character. Often, in that case, the reward is the progression so I care more about tracking than unique rewards.

I personally think ESO has a ton of suitable, repeatable content already, from repeatable quests to instanced content that has a decent variety of reasons as to why you'd go through it more than once on a single character. I don't want or need more. For me, I want to see ESO address the replayability issue they broke with AwA, and fix map progress visibility and difficult achievement tracking per character (though I don't think this needs to be or should be done through the achievement system, at this point). The primary reason I replay content a lot less than I used to is because I can't track the progress of my alts, and this is what I personally want to see addressed. Let me be able to see, in game, which of my alts haven't done speed modes or hard modes in dungeons and trials. I will repeat a dungeon run if I need a drop from it, but I used to replay them with all of my characters to pursue the achievements for all them. Big difference. Both in meaning and how it translates to where and how much time I spend in game.

Very honestly, it would upset me greatly if ZOS provided a way to restart content (reset stories or zones) on the same character or at the account level in lieu of or before providing progress tracking for multiple characters. I have less than zero desire to replay a story again on my same character and it would feel like rubbing salt in the wound to see the focus be on same character playthroughs when the additional character/alt playthrough experience is still so flawed. I'm picturing a situation where they create a reset for a quest series or a map that you can do for the character you are on, but based on how things are today, it would reset map progress for all the characters who may be at different points in their progress. This would be a complete nightmare and the ultimate nail in the coffin for people who are still trying to keep their characters unique.

CatoUnchained · February 19

Work on PvP.

Tandor · February 19

SkaiFaith wrote: »

XD judging by the votes right now, it seems my assumptions were wrong - always happy to learn

You've no idea how refreshing it is to see that approach, rather than the more common tendency for an original poster who's out on a limb criticising every subsequent poster and ending up asking the Mods to close the thread

!

Frayton · February 19

Repeatable to me means it's fun, so let me to do it again when it's over. That can be a quest, dungeon, trial, whatever.

Elvenheart · February 19

I love this talk about why some may want to only do one-time missions on a certain character but not repeat them on alts for lore/rp purposes. I’m like that too because I like to think of all of my characters inhabiting the same world. I first tried it with a mindset of each character being in their own dimension of Tamriel, like a multiverse, but I never really liked thinking of them as separated like that. And it just never made sense to have multiple characters do the exact same one-time quests in a single world that should have already been finished by the time my alt got there. But I finally came up with a mind trick that will allow me to redo quests on different characters if I feel like it. Since there are things like memory stones in lore, when I want to redo a quest I imagine my alt that’s doing the quest to be just reliving the experience that was actually experienced by my first character that did the quest via a technology like memory stones. It satisfies my mind enough that I can redo the quest if I choose to without feeling like it’s just messing everything up story wise. 😊

katanagirl1 · February 20

peacenote wrote: »

What's interesting about this poll is that I don't recall seeing a lot of players asking for "repeatable" content with that specific description. That said, I don't read every single post so I don't claim to speak for everyone. However, I have two observations.

1: It was not us, but the devs (via one of the yearly "state of ESO letters) that expressed a desire to provide more repeatable content to us. The context was that it takes so much effort and time to create hours and hours of questing content, but it's effectively non-repeatable content, in that people wouldn't necessarily want to play the quests over and over again, so from a dev efficiency standpoint it's not ideal. They wanted to shift the focus to providing us more content that can be repeated and enjoyed more than once (while still stating a commitment to continue to provide some questing content). I'm vastly paraphrasing from memory here, but that was the first time I personally heard the narrative of "repeatable." It was given to us as a goal, not something we asked for, per se. I think this might have aligned with the release of IA but I am not 100% sure.

2: Since AwA, many of us have pointed out that content has a lot less appeal for replayability, because there is less incentive to do the content again and no way to track progress. A portion of the community enjoyed pursuing achievements and revisiting stories on each character, and AwA made it much harder and less satisfying to do so. This, to me, is subtly different than talking about whether content is repeatable on the same character over and over again, because there are often different incentives for one over the other.
If I'm going to repeat content on the same character over and over, it needs to provide a different experience, different rewards, or follow the typical MMO RNG rules for doling out content, on the "right" side of infuriating so it doesn't feel so hopeless that I don't bother.

If I'm going to work through content on multiple characters, I'm often seeking to repeat the experience I had with my first character, so I want the content to be refreshed and provide me with the same progress trackers that I had the first time I played the character. Often, in that case, the reward is the progression so I care more about tracking than unique rewards.

I personally think ESO has a ton of suitable, repeatable content already, from repeatable quests to instanced content that has a decent variety of reasons as to why you'd go through it more than once on a single character. I don't want or need more. For me, I want to see ESO address the replayability issue they broke with AwA, and fix map progress visibility and difficult achievement tracking per character (though I don't think this needs to be or should be done through the achievement system, at this point). The primary reason I replay content a lot less than I used to is because I can't track the progress of my alts, and this is what I personally want to see addressed. Let me be able to see, in game, which of my alts haven't done speed modes or hard modes in dungeons and trials. I will repeat a dungeon run if I need a drop from it, but I used to replay them with all of my characters to pursue the achievements for all them. Big difference. Both in meaning and how it translates to where and how much time I spend in game.

Very honestly, it would upset me greatly if ZOS provided a way to restart content (reset stories or zones) on the same character or at the account level in lieu of or before providing progress tracking for multiple characters. I have less than zero desire to replay a story again on my same character and it would feel like rubbing salt in the wound to see the focus be on same character playthroughs when the additional character/alt playthrough experience is still so flawed. I'm picturing a situation where they create a reset for a quest series or a map that you can do for the character you are on, but based on how things are today, it would reset map progress for all the characters who may be at different points in their progress. This would be a complete nightmare and the ultimate nail in the coffin for people who are still trying to keep their characters unique.

I remember when point #1 happened, I also remember some voices on here actually saying they wanted more repeatable content, which in my opinion is dailies and we certainly have plenty of those already. We do them for motifs, then we have to do them again for furnishing plans, new content is drip-fed from them over years. Maybe those players were thinking the same as OP, but I fear the devs see repeatable content like I do and that is why we won’t be getting new zones anywhere in the foreseeable future.

AzuraFan · February 20

peacenote wrote: »

Very honestly, it would upset me greatly if ZOS provided a way to restart content (reset stories or zones) on the same character or at the account level in lieu of or before providing progress tracking for multiple characters.

Agree with all of your post. I love questing. AwA killed replayability for my alts, so much so that I play one character 99% of the time now. Before AwA, I created and played a lot of alts. Even on alts, it wasn't terribly interesting because nothing changed, but at least you got achievements for doing a zone story again, and you could easily track what each character had done, rather than having a lot of the map completed the moment you enter a zone.

I have zero desire to repeat the story content on my main.