Official Discussion Thread for "Tamriel Tomes Season Zero Developer Update"

ZOS_Kevin · April 10

This is the official discussion thread for the web article "Tamriel Tomes Season Zero Developer Update"

"Last week, ESO opened the first page on the Tome of Dawn and Dusk with the launch of Season Zero. Since then, the development team has been paying close attention to the community’s reaction to the new reward system and has some information to share about Tamriel Tomes at the end of a Season."

T3vvy · April 10

autoclaimer looks goated.

acknowledging bugs and giving a time frame for a fix is awesome.

generally communication has been so good these past few months

Hamfast · April 10

"Roll-Over Cap

As the end of a Season transitions to the start of a new one, a maximum of 2,000 Tome Points roll over to the next Tamriel Tome. These Tome Points are available immediately and provide a head start into the new Season."

I was under the impression that, unlike the event tickets that had a limit of 12 tickets, this new currency did not have a limit. But now we hear only 2000 points carry forward to the next season... that items will be auto-purchased with anything beyond that 2000 point limit, regardless if we want them or not.

Why can't I hold on to the points until I see something I want if nothing for that season fits?

allochthons · April 10

We're planning to make a change to this in Update 50 before Season Zero ends, where Tome Points in excess of the roll-over cap are automatically converted to gold after the reward auto-claimer is complete.

THANK YOU.

Froil · April 10

Hamfast wrote: »

"Roll-Over Cap

I was under the impression that, unlike the event tickets that had a limit of 12 tickets, this new currency did not have a limit. But now we hear only 2000 points carry forward to the next season... that items will be auto-purchased with anything beyond that 2000 point limit, regardless if we want them or not.

Trade Bars are the new, limitless version of old Event Tickets; tome points are currency specifically spent in all Tamriel Times. Some pages in a tome may have trade bars as a reward.

As for the auto claimer, if you're, theoretically, over the limit of 2000 tome points but have enough for every non item thing in a tome, why would you care so much what you got or not?

Destai · April 10

In development, we discussed other ways to strike this balance of wide paths for progression and encouraging future Season play, such as implementing a hard cap on Tome Points that you can carry at any given time, but we believed that would feel considerably worse. We were already removing this for Event Tickets (now Trade Bars!) and thought it would reduce the fun of picking out the rewards you like most on a Tome.

It feels like way too much focus is being put on engagement incentives. If the content is fun and rewarding, people will do it. If you have to rely on pressure systems, then something's ultimately not as fun as it should be. It's a game, it should be fun.

And if you're so worried about engagement, then make the rewards more worthwhile. Pull from the vast inventory of crown crates and timed deals, put some of that in the tomes. Reduce things like crown poisons and other undesirables that many people don't want.

Now, to be fair, we did have some good rewards. My point is there's ways to encourage engagement that don't involve micromanaging people's income.

We've seen the sentiment and feedback on this, and we agree that we can make this better. We're planning to make a change to this in Update 50 before Season Zero ends, where Tome Points in excess of the roll-over cap are automatically converted to gold after the reward auto-claimer is complete. We believe this helps provide value to excess Tome Points in the transition to a new Season. We are still working to determine this ratio and will update you when we do.

I'm glad you guys are trying to make this better. I'm glad you're listening to the feedback. I truly am.

But I really feel like you guys are over complicating this whole thing. All you have to do is let them carryover. That's it. It's pretty bewildering that you guys are going through a whole development effort to make an auto-claimer and gold conversion system, instead of just having a more generous rollover. Has anyone over there entertained just increasing the rollover cap? What about having 4000 Tome Points carry over? That seems like a reasonable compromise.

FWIW, I think gold's better than just auto-buying a bunch of stuff I may not want. But it begs another question: what do you guys think I should be able to do with that gold?

There's limited options for gold-bought items. And what's there is relatively expensive, outside of furnishings. Gold's trivial for many of long term players, so small gold endowments aren't worthwhile. If we can't get something truly worthwhile with that gold (mounts, houses), then it feels insulting to our efforts. Then you as a studio have to decide between living with a resented system or spending dev cycles improving the system yet again.

With sharp eyes, you may have noticed that some non-English in-game help articles mentioned that you can reroll Weekly Challenges for gold.

We shouldn't need sharp eyes or a help menu to understanding basic UI functionality.

With a shift as big as Seasons and the new Tamriel Tomes system, we expect some things won’t land perfectly right away. We've already moved quickly on improvements driven by your feedback, while giving other changes time to settle and breathe as we refine them. You'll see much of what we talked about here roll out for testing within Update 50's PTS cycle. We’re excited to shape this together with all of you to make it the best it can be. Thank you, and we’ll see you in Tamriel!

Quite frankly there seems to be a conflict between what looks good as a game developer and what feels good as the gamer and consumer. It seems like the focus is on managing engagement and purchasing incentives at the expense of having a streamlined, player-friendly system.

Now you need numerous articles and infographics to explain this whole Tomes system. Then you need CMs to circle back and explain them. Then people misunderstood the system or didn't read the communications, and encountered issues. Then they need support tickets to shore up those issues. Now you're adding to that complexity with more information, more steps, more gotchas, more things to track. Systems shouldn't require this much effort to understand.

It's exhausting.

ZOS_Kevin · April 10

Hamfast wrote: »

I was under the impression that, unlike the event tickets that had a limit of 12 tickets, this new currency did not have a limit.

Just wanted to clarify here, that the currency that we noted would not have a cap were Trade Bars. Trade Bars were the replacement for event tickets, not Tome Points.

robwolf666 · April 10

Wait - did I read that correctly? During the auto-claim process, if everything is claimed in the free section of the Tome, it'll claim from the Premium Tome even if you don't have Premium?

allochthons · April 10

At Season's end, I would rather have non-expiring tome points than conversion into gold. That does seem a lot simpler. But gold is better than losing them.

I'm also glad the article covers so many of our pain points. Not everything is solved, but this makes clear to me that they are listening, and working to make Seasons better.

wolfie1.0. · April 10

First thank you for this article and the explanation. This helps a ton.

Regarding the auto-claimer, I appreciate how it functions and how it prioritizes targets. I do think that either an opt out or a method by which we can basically manually mark a reward as "i do not want" should be added.

My reasoning is simple here. There exists in the game some collectibles that some players just dont want to claim or earn. So a way to mark those as a "do not claim" with a confirmation page similar to the "DELETE" or "DESTROY" manual confirmations would be good.

Also, please add the ability to purchase premium tomes without having to have a saved payment method on file and/or the ability for us to gift these upgrades to other players.

allochthons · April 10

New Repeat Functionality for Weekly Challenges

We're also introducing new functionality for the repeatability of our Weekly Challenges in Update 50. After you have unlocked the bonus pages of the current Season's Tamriel Tome (for Season Zero, the final two unnumbered pages that unlock with 20,000 Tome Points earned), the next weekly reset grants you something new: you can complete all your Weekly Challenges twice as many times.

I don't understand this addition. I mean, I understand how it works. I don't understand why it would be available only AFTER you unlock the bonus pages. If you've unlocked the bonus pages, you have enough tome points already to buy everything. Why would it help to be able to complete Challenges more often, and earn more more points you can't use? (except to convert to gold. I do get that)

Wouldn't it make sense to add this functionality much earlier in the Season? After page 2 or 4?

I haven't looked at the tome points needed for Premium stuff. If this math works better in Premium, fair enough. I can see how it would be really helpful if you have multiple Premium Tomes going, and can double up on Challenges and their points.

DeathandDebauchery · April 10

"We've seen the sentiment and feedback on this, and we agree that we can make this better. We're planning to make a change to this in Update 50 before Season Zero ends, where Tome Points in excess of the roll-over cap are automatically converted to gold after the reward auto-claimer is complete. We believe this helps provide value to excess Tome Points in the transition to a new Season. We are still working to determine this ratio and will update you when we do."

This is 100% missing the key point of feedback that has been provided on this topic.

1) There is no reason to have all tome points not carry over to the next tome other then to drive FOMO purchasing. Please provide the player-friendly rationale of why tome points should not carry over that isn't "we want you to spend more money?" We either paid, or earned, those tome points. If we did not find something of value in this tome, we should be able to save it for something of value in the next tome. The auto-claimer is great, and should be opt-in, with no points expiring. That way if you know you are going to be away from game you can turn it on and not miss anything.

2)It is currently WAY too easy to open the caches without blaring sirens that many will go to waste. It also SHOULD NOT BE POSSIBLE for you to Open More Caches then there are Tome Points to SPEND on this tome. For example. If I have 14 caches, I should not be able to open all 14 if the sum total of all purchasable items in the tome is < 28,000 tome points. You acknowledge the problem in this thread and offer a 1 time refund, but you do not provide the solution. What is going to prevent this in the future? Players need to give feedback on this messaging and warning.

3) From a business perspective, it is terrible to have the only real perk of Premium + be 1 cosmetic and 2 extra tome caches when those spent tome points DO NOT carry over. Especially given that with ESO+ we will get 1 tome cache a month, so in a given season, we are already getting 6000 tome points via those monthly caches + 10 weeks of weeklys at approximately 1200 points per week. If you are absolutely INSISTENT on having tome caches NOT carry over, you need to dramatically consider improving the rewards for premium+ given its an extra $15 for basically a single cosmetic and largely useless tome caches. I regret buying Premium+ and likely will not do so again unless rewards are dramatically increased. Having a bunch of useless caches in que is not helpful to me. There needs to be a way to meaningfully spend excess tome points that is not some ludicrously low or high gold conversion - a trade bar conversion would be a MUCH smarter approach and would not negatively impact the game economy

DeathandDebauchery · April 10

Destai wrote: »

But I really feel like you guys are over complicating this whole thing. All you have to do is let them carryover. That's it. It's pretty bewildering that you guys are going through a whole development effort to make an auto-claimer and gold conversion system, instead of just having a more generous rollover.

This right here. The only rational explanation is money grab, and that is not player friendly.

Malyore · April 10

What if we don't want the extra mounts and collectibles added to our account with the auto-claim?

I have no desire to own almost any of the mounts that are designed for this game, and yet they get infinitely piled up in the collections menu. Does this take up server database space? If so, it's unfortunate that the system automatically adds unnecessary strain for something that some people do not want and will never utilize.

An option to convert collectibles into some form of currency would be nice.

tomfant · April 10

Can we please get an opt-out to the auto claimer. I don't buy certain things for a reason and I would hate if that auto claimer buys stuff that I don't want.

Deserrick · April 10

robwolf666 wrote: »

Wait - did I read that correctly? During the auto-claim process, if everything is claimed in the free section of the Tome, it'll claim from the Premium Tome even if you don't have Premium?

No. "If you don’t own the Premium Tome, it immediately goes to the free side instead."

YffresTrill · April 10

I agree with those who have been asking for an opt-out on the auto-claim.

I have thus far been buying everything (in the free tier) on each page so far because I figured the tome points would just disappear at the end of the season, but if they are being converted to gold, I would prefer to have a bit more gold (or whatever other currency) than to receive cosmetics I consider ugly and will never use.

TheRimOfTheSky · April 10

i watched this whole livestream and did not get my twitch drop crate

PoveusRonin · April 10

I still thought it was said in the beginning that we could work on a season after it passed if we purchased it. How does that work if you auto expire the points at the end of each season? Does this mean you just have to work even harder during season 2 for example to do season 2, season 1, and season 0 if you bought them but waited?

I agree with several comments above. It seems you are making the whole system overly complicated.

Ingenon · April 10

"And we've been impressed, almost scarily impressed, with the speed at which many of you have descended into the Gold Coast, Hew's Bane, and Wrothgar to lay waste to foes for the new Seasonal Challenge that came online this week."

Okay, maybe I should have taken more than one day to lay waste to 1000 foes ...

"End of Season Reward Auto-Claimer"

Glad you are doing this!

Destai · April 10

Given how critical my last post was, I did want to extend my support for some of the upcoming features.

Additional Rerolls for Gold

With sharp eyes, you may have noticed that some non-English in-game help articles mentioned that you can reroll Weekly Challenges for gold. This didn't make it into launch but will arrive with Update 50. Here's how it works:

You'll continue to earn five free Weekly Challenge rerolls every week, accumulating up to 12.
If you run out of these rerolls, you can obtain additional ones by spending gold. You can do this entirely within the Challenge Menu screen. These additional rerolls start at 500 gold and increase in cost up to a maximum of 10,000 gold. This cost will reset back to 500 gold every Tuesday after the weekly rollover.

Our goal is to provide additional ways to customize the experience for progressing the Tome, whether you reroll for Challenges that fit your playstyle more or you want to try for duplicate Challenges you can progress simultaneously.

I think this is great. If we have to be subjected to a gold refund, it's nice that the Tomes systems allows for some use of said gold.

UI Improvements

In Update 50, we also plan to deliver some of the first UI improvements for the Tamriel Tome. These are certainly not the last of them since we plan to discuss larger ideas and will read through your feedback to help inform the direction we take for the future.
You will be able to choose to claim all completed Challenges at once. (You can continue to claim individual Challenges as well).

Minor polish on how reward tooltips appear when viewing the Tome in quick preview mode.

Sorely needed, thank you.

decaffeinated · April 10

... but not the one improvement I need for accessibility reasons: when I have Tome Points to claim, take me DIRECTLY to the challenges page (if not the first reward to claim).
Being on Page 1 just to see a little counter spin (which is what makes me nauseous) is infuriating.

Golden Pursuits do this, it's definitely possible without a pinned Challenge. Why was it removed in favor of making sure I see a counter spin? It seems the accessibility team still doesn't understand the need for limited motion in the UI.

code65536 · April 10

Speaking of things to automatically claim, what about the points after completing a challenge?

This on-screen alert with manual claim is constantly interrupting what people are doing. And what's perplexing from my point of view is that you had a perfectly good way of handling this with Endeavors. The current behavior, IMHO, is a major UX regression.

And, no, "there's an addon for that" is not the right answer; something like this really should be base-game. At least give people an option in the settings somewhere.

madintheed · April 10

Why oh why are you making this so complicated. If you don't want us to hoard tome points just add a final bonus page with rewards that can be claimed infinitely. Could be anything from tri pots to any of the many many currencies already in game. Then I can choose to spend my points on what will be useful for me. I don't want you to auto claim stuff I've already chosen not to claim. That just makes me want to stop engaging with the whole tome as soon as I've claimed the last thing of interest. Which this season is page 4!

Destai · April 10

madintheed wrote: »

Why oh why are you making this so complicated. If you don't want us to hoard tome points just add a final bonus page with rewards that can be claimed infinitely. Could be anything from tri pots to any of the many many currencies already in game. Then I can choose to spend my points on what will be useful for me. I don't want you to auto claim stuff I've already chosen not to claim. That just makes me want to stop engaging with the whole tome as soon as I've claimed the last thing of interest. Which this season is page 4!

What a solid solution!

I was one of the people who unwittingly opened all of his caches. After this debacle came to light, I bought a lot of the other stuff I had no intention of buying. Some of them were useful, like IA currencies and trade bars. Some weren't. All that remains is the filler content like poisons and potions. I absolutely don't want to deal with them.

I'm keeping my tome levels at 2000, which means I'm not engaging the content any more. Were there no cap, or infinitely redeemable items like you suggested, I'd still be engaging the system.That's how it plays out when you manage engagement like they do. I guess we'll see how the next season is.

bobsontpm · April 10

To my surprise the Tomes are actually quite nice! The progress is smooth, there is plenty of re-rolls, you can keep tasks from week to week, the amount of points seems kind of balanced, the items from paid tier are nice, but doesn't introduce that much "I NEED THEM TOO MUCH" factor. It really removed a lot of FOMO from the daily rewards. The developers notes about auto-claimer, saving points between tomes, common progress on all bought premium ones (which makes sense to buy them and stash them for later! And gives incentive to buy them).

I see only three downsides to the whole thing, and they can be easily amended:
- the help section in game, which does not explain enough how the system works. Kind of the article explained all of this.
- the symbol for Tome Points is the same colour as the gold bars and it got me confused at first. Especially when they are present in small scale. Maybe better make tome points just white instead of goldeny-brown/yellow? I don't know. You will figure it out

- the claiming tome points: as suggested the auto claiming of tome points. Also the sound for getting a challenge done is very weak and easy to miss.

To all devs: great job!

Aashiana · April 10

In the section of this article titled "Tomes at the End of the Season" you describe the roll-over cap (which I agree should be removed, since other currencies like seals and crowns don't have it).

But you also describe the ability to refund tome point caches, which is especially relevant if our subscription date happened to result in a large number of caches. I had 11 (!), and I know a lot of you will be playing tiny violins, but there is no way you can use this many in one season. I didn't realize that they wouldn't roll over and opened all of them, so I would like to make use of the replacement of my tome point caches offered.

It says you can "contact Customer Support here" until April 30, but when I go there I can find no way to ask for it. None of the categories seem to apply, and there isn't an "other" category to use. Please let me know how specifically I can get my tome point caches refunded.

Other than this one-time refund, I do appreciate the conversion to gold option going forward, but I would PREFER conversion to tome bars or seals of endeavor, and I expect most players would.

shadoza · April 10

DeathandDebauchery wrote: »

Destai wrote: »

But I really feel like you guys are over complicating this whole thing. All you have to do is let them carryover. That's it. It's pretty bewildering that you guys are going through a whole development effort to make an auto-claimer and gold conversion system, instead of just having a more generous rollover.

This right here. The only rational explanation is money grab, and that is not player friendly.

I do not understand why players want the points to carry over. IF one can earn enough points to purchase everything in the book, why does anyone want extra points? As I see it, pages unlock by earning challenge points, so having extra points at the start of the challenge does not give you options to spend on more desired items at the last pages. By the time you reach the last pages, you have already earned enough new points to purchase everything again.
If the points were allowed to accumulate, later, players will complain that they have thousands of points and nothing to spend them on.

Will you explain your position regarding these statements?

ESO_player123 · April 10

shadoza wrote: »

DeathandDebauchery wrote: »

Destai wrote: »

But I really feel like you guys are over complicating this whole thing. All you have to do is let them carryover. That's it. It's pretty bewildering that you guys are going through a whole development effort to make an auto-claimer and gold conversion system, instead of just having a more generous rollover.

This right here. The only rational explanation is money grab, and that is not player friendly.

I do not understand why players want the points to carry over. IF one can earn enough points to purchase everything in the book, why does anyone want extra points? As I see it, pages unlock by earning challenge points, so having extra points at the start of the challenge does not give you options to spend on more desired items at the last pages. By the time you reach the last pages, you have already earned enough new points to purchase everything again.
If the points were allowed to accumulate, later, players will complain that they have thousands of points and nothing to spend them on.

Will you explain your position regarding these statements?

AFAIK the carried over points ARE counted towards unlocking the pages in the new season. So, if a player carries over, say, 10K points, and the total number required to unlock everything in the new season is 20K, they need to do only about half of the challenges they would need to do if they started with 0 points.

decaffeinated · April 10

ESO_player123 wrote: »

AFAIK the carried over points ARE counted towards unlocking the pages in the new season. So, if a player carries over, say, 10K points, and the total number required to unlock everything in the new season is 20K, they need to do only about half of the challenges they would need to do if they started with 0 points.

It seems that ZOS thinks we will stop playing if we have "too many" tome points. We might stop doing CHALLENGES, but most people don't play this game just to earn rewards.

Honestly, I'd love to stop having to grind stuff in Wrothgar/Gold Coast/Hew's Bane right now... but I need to get some points back into caches. I'd still play the game - just not the currently overpopulated zones.

Destai · April 10

shadoza wrote: »

DeathandDebauchery wrote: »

Destai wrote: »

But I really feel like you guys are over complicating this whole thing. All you have to do is let them carryover. That's it. It's pretty bewildering that you guys are going through a whole development effort to make an auto-claimer and gold conversion system, instead of just having a more generous rollover.

This right here. The only rational explanation is money grab, and that is not player friendly.

I do not understand why players want the points to carry over. IF one can earn enough points to purchase everything in the book, why does anyone want extra points? As I see it, pages unlock by earning challenge points, so having extra points at the start of the challenge does not give you options to spend on more desired items at the last pages. By the time you reach the last pages, you have already earned enough new points to purchase everything again.
If the points were allowed to accumulate, later, players will complain that they have thousands of points and nothing to spend them on.

Will you explain your position regarding these statements?

I want points to carry over because I earned them and want to spend them at my discretion. I don’t want to be compelled to spend them in ways I would not normally.

While I can exhaust them, I would like to have the option to buy a higher priority item when it inevitably arrives next season.

There’s more than enough content in these, they’ll get their money, the solution just needs to better respect player agency IMO.