So I want to back track a bit on what I thought before. I've made it pretty far pugging so that is good, 1 boss from the trial. Some bosses are much harder than others but are lower in the chain, dungeon fights were easier than argents I think. Skirmishes are nuts, they need some tuning or this will be dead content quick. My biggest gripe now is the faction. I do not want to grind this place after I do the trial but I am.only 2000 faction. That is nuts of alot more to grind to get the 10k.

Day 3 of the Night Market, and I just couldn't get interested enough to do it. Even though it's Friday night and the chances of finding a group are far (in theory) better, the idea of slogging through trash mobs and doing ghost runs and working through my stack of crown repair kits was just not enticing. So I didn't log back in this evening at all.

I heard literally nothing good in my guild chats today about NM (4 active guilds) while I was out clearing some surveys while having my morning coffee. The best I heard was some variants on "maybe it won't be as terrible over the weekend with more people" and that's not a ringing endorsement of the brand-new content.

Whoever decided to present this as "content for everyone" and downplay the actual grouping requirements - as well as whoever else signed off on that messaging - has not helped your initiative to be more transparent and engaged with the playerbase. I watched the livestreams. I read the previews. I would not have wasted several hours in the Night Market with pick-up zerg groups and death-running solo quests if I'd actually understood that you all were releasing alternate Trial-level content.

Alright guys… feedback post number 5. This post will focus on my experiences today as someone cataloguing quests on a thief build, as a member of a midgame guild group, and as the leader of a mostly pug group.

I started with doing the daring races on my stage 4 vampire nightblade. The Parch one I had already done and that one’s straightforward to me but the other two took me a bit to figure out. I struggled most with Sorrow’s Friend’s as I couldn’t remember where all 5 nodes were at the same time… and also didn’t know if it was 5 that I needed. My suggestion here would be to include in the pop-up that there’s 5 void tears to close.

As for questing, nightblade is soooo useful!!! Vampire wasn’t even necessary. I used it a few times but nightblade’s cloak is more than enough. I was really struggling with the IT’S NOT A MAGICKA POTION quest because I didn’t realize the potion is in ONE of the areas… I checked the wrong two areas for so long…

Whilst I was questing, I also followed around a midgame guild group I was in vc with. Despite how Absolutely Terrible my thief build is, I felt pretty safe (I mostly stayed at range during bosses and invisible around trash).

As that group started to crumble away, a friend of mine logged on. We duoed some of the trash as tank + dps (me tanking, them a corpseburster necro dd) and it was fun and smooth. Then we started picking up random people we came across (group of 4 now)… and the aforementioned group I was a part of earlier in the day came and saved us at a boss. We combined groups, added some friends, and had a good time killing bosses.

But then suddenly… people. Another large group came through and joined our fight. I was, admittedly, mildly scared because I’m intimidated by people I recognize the name of but haven’t really talked to. And I recognized some of the names. Some from this forum… others… scorepushers. In this moment was an interesting feeling of solidarity where midgamers, endgamers, and scorepushers were all engaged in a fight together and let me tell you… it was beautiful. This is a feeling I only really have had on the PTS.

As the original group finished disbanding, I re-formed with me, my friend, one person we picked up randomly, that persons friend and my friend’s friend… and then we ran into the aforementioned group of people I find intimidating. I felt a bit bad chasing them around because I didn’t want to annoy them but one of them told us in /say where they were going next so we could keep up and that dispelled that worry of mine. Overall, this metagrouping combination did lead to fights going quicker than I had seen before but not to the point of mechanic irrelevancy. It was perfect as a meeting of the groups situation. The other group left, and on we kept chugging along.

From here, we joined up with a member of my guild and started killing some bosses & skirmishes. I later made a group finder listing, which filled very fast and had very friendly people. I didn’t specify any specific boss, just where we were and our next goal and people stuck around.

One point of feedback is that these “pugs” seemed rather confused. Not everyone knew what Night Market was, what keys were, what relics are… people didn’t know how to get to the south Parch bosses because all the paths on the map are blocked… sometimes people went in the wrong area and were confused as to why no one was there (feedback someone else had mentioned in a chat was to make the doors look more like the area they represent). I’m directionally challenged so that’d help me too. I’m having to remember the districts by color but then looking at the skirmish timers, two of them are red… and inside Sorrow’s Friend is purple so it’s hard to remember that it’s blue. But I also have weird color connotations to content.

Anyway, we then ran into ANOTHER large group of people. And we had some fun in /say talking to each other about the amount of damage we were collectively dealing to the bosses, someone from the other group told us which boss they were going to next and we followed. It felt like we were a force of nature, ravaging all the bosses in our path. But again, a time of solidarity and passing friendship. We lost them in a district, perhaps they went off to do other things, and we continued on by ourselves until it was time for most of us to go to bed.

The major takeaway I have from today is just how enjoyable it can be to run into organized groups. Especially with tabardless guild repping and people talking to each other outside of group chat. Soft grouping absolutely does happen between groups of people and I also manually sent invites out to people who were alone as I saw them (if I had room). But as a solo player, I only saw a few other people doing their own thing (and the group I knew about and the location of because I was in vc with them).

Shout out to everyone I ran into today and thank you for making it such a fun experience .

P.S. I think having the overland loot is actually straight-up worse than not having any loot at all. It’s clogging inventory space so bad. And clogged inventory means people might not even pick up important items like the splinters, not realizing they need those.

I hope that we never, ever see another “limited-time, group content-based event zone” again.

I’ve been playing since launch day in 2014 and this is, by far, the worst content idea I have ever played. I mainly solo content in ESO, even dungeons, overland content, and world bosses. I do not want to feel forced to group because I cannot solo content. The Night Market is basically an open world veteran trial, and it is largely not solo-able.

I already understand that the Night Market will return probably a few more times, but I hope that this “event zone” idea does not ever happen again or become a new content idea, because it is just plain awful. I do not mean to be so negative, but again, I have been playing since launch day and subscribed ever since launch day for over 10 years now and this is just terrible in every way.

Being forced to group in a game that most people play because of all the solo content is just wrong. The hype for the new event zone will die within a week or two, and then it will be a ghost town and nearly impossible to get groups together for those that are trying to “finish” the zone and achievements.

I also strongly detest these “limited time events” that just create FOMO and many players are unable to play and then just miss out on this content, which is very upsetting for completionists. There are a dozen more reasons, but again I do not want to be too negative, and I do appreciate the time that the developers spent to try out this idea, but I hope it never happens again. It leaves an awful taste in the mouth.

Estin wrote: »

I am back to give more feedback, this time for the dungeons and the trial.
For the trial, I found it really fun. It only took the group I found 2 tries, but I liked the flow of the fight. I was fortunately blessed with people who knew mostly what to do, and that is going to be the key phrase here. I'd imagine if I got into the trial again with people who didn't know what to do, it will be really chaotic. It's on par with a regular vet trial around 2018-2020, so it's not too difficult, but I can see that it requires a lot of coordination. But like with any trial, people should come prepared. I wouldn't change anything about the mechanics for this trial even if I don't fully understand the orb passing mechanic, but outside that, it flows really well when people know what to do. It's also interesting for this dungeon to need 3 tanks and 9 DD with. I suspect healers aren't too happy about that. The would no doubt be helpful in execute, but there isn't too much incoming damage and DDs with self heals will be more than enough to get through it. My only feedback I would give is to make the grapple poles easier to target, mostly on the purple side. After passing/picking up the orb from the purple side, you can go back to the large island directly in front, and then there is a pole high up on the island immediately to the left, but it was too inconsistent with being able to target it. I usually had to run up the ramp on the larger island first to be able to target it, but outside that, I felt everything was designed really well.

Having attempted to complete it for ten hours yesterday, it sounds like you were carried.
Red side is the grapple side, not purple.

The last attempt we did, was the only attempt we got a boss dead, and then the others became enraged and wiped group.

Competent leader, everyone over champ 2k, all knew mechanics (new guys generally took a couple of runs). Except rage.

Balancing tanks and bombs, this is the hardest content I've had to do in the game.

Soarora wrote: »

Alright guys… feedback post number 5. This post will focus on my experiences today as someone cataloguing quests on a thief build, as a member of a midgame guild group, and as the leader of a mostly pug group.

I started with doing the daring races on my stage 4 vampire nightblade. The Parch one I had already done and that one’s straightforward to me but the other two took me a bit to figure out. I struggled most with Sorrow’s Friend’s as I couldn’t remember where all 5 nodes were at the same time… and also didn’t know if it was 5 that I needed. My suggestion here would be to include in the pop-up that there’s 5 void tears to close.

As for questing, nightblade is soooo useful!!! Vampire wasn’t even necessary. I used it a few times but nightblade’s cloak is more than enough. I was really struggling with the IT’S NOT A MAGICKA POTION quest because I didn’t realize the potion is in ONE of the areas… I checked the wrong two areas for so long…

Whilst I was questing, I also followed around a midgame guild group I was in vc with. Despite how Absolutely Terrible my thief build is, I felt pretty safe (I mostly stayed at range during bosses and invisible around trash).

As that group started to crumble away, a friend of mine logged on. We duoed some of the trash as tank + dps (me tanking, them a corpseburster necro dd) and it was fun and smooth. Then we started picking up random people we came across (group of 4 now)… and the aforementioned group I was a part of earlier in the day came and saved us at a boss. We combined groups, added some friends, and had a good time killing bosses.

But then suddenly… people. Another large group came through and joined our fight. I was, admittedly, mildly scared because I’m intimidated by people I recognize the name of but haven’t really talked to. And I recognized some of the names. Some from this forum… others… scorepushers. In this moment was an interesting feeling of solidarity where midgamers, endgamers, and scorepushers were all engaged in a fight together and let me tell you… it was beautiful. This is a feeling I only really have had on the PTS.

As the original group finished disbanding, I re-formed with me, my friend, one person we picked up randomly, that persons friend and my friend’s friend… and then we ran into the aforementioned group of people I find intimidating. I felt a bit bad chasing them around because I didn’t want to annoy them but one of them told us in /say where they were going next so we could keep up and that dispelled that worry of mine. Overall, this metagrouping combination did lead to fights going quicker than I had seen before but not to the point of mechanic irrelevancy. It was perfect as a meeting of the groups situation. The other group left, and on we kept chugging along.

From here, we joined up with a member of my guild and started killing some bosses & skirmishes. I later made a group finder listing, which filled very fast and had very friendly people. I didn’t specify any specific boss, just where we were and our next goal and people stuck around.

One point of feedback is that these “pugs” seemed rather confused. Not everyone knew what Night Market was, what keys were, what relics are… people didn’t know how to get to the south Parch bosses because all the paths on the map are blocked… sometimes people went in the wrong area and were confused as to why no one was there (feedback someone else had mentioned in a chat was to make the doors look more like the area they represent). I’m directionally challenged so that’d help me too. I’m having to remember the districts by color but then looking at the skirmish timers, two of them are red… and inside Sorrow’s Friend is purple so it’s hard to remember that it’s blue. But I also have weird color connotations to content.

Anyway, we then ran into ANOTHER large group of people. And we had some fun in /say talking to each other about the amount of damage we were collectively dealing to the bosses, someone from the other group told us which boss they were going to next and we followed. It felt like we were a force of nature, ravaging all the bosses in our path. But again, a time of solidarity and passing friendship. We lost them in a district, perhaps they went off to do other things, and we continued on by ourselves until it was time for most of us to go to bed.

The major takeaway I have from today is just how enjoyable it can be to run into organized groups. Especially with tabardless guild repping and people talking to each other outside of group chat. Soft grouping absolutely does happen between groups of people and I also manually sent invites out to people who were alone as I saw them (if I had room). But as a solo player, I only saw a few other people doing their own thing (and the group I knew about and the location of because I was in vc with them).

Shout out to everyone I ran into today and thank you for making it such a fun experience .

P.S. I think having the overland loot is actually straight-up worse than not having any loot at all. It’s clogging inventory space so bad. And clogged inventory means people might not even pick up important items like the splinters, not realizing they need those.

Genuine question: so you are happy just to run around in a group killing things without much purpose beyond killing things? As it does not sound like you are doing dailies or getting <bits> for other stuff.

Where is everyone in Night Market???? I've been in there for the last 2 hours (sneaking around) and have not seen 1 single other person. I've also been checking group finder and nothing.
I was on last night with a group and other players were joining us. Is it really completely dead tonight?

NIGHT MARKET REWARD REVIEW

Firstly, I love the night market and this event however the current rewards are bad mainly because OLD motifs are already low in value and not worth much. The merchant vendors don’t offer enough rewards to validate farming more than 10k favour (which is super easy to get). I think there needs to be NEW furnishings and plans for each faction centred around each faction rather than reuse older furnishings… it’s rather disappointing for a NEW event

I believe that the main if not the only real issue lies with the rewards.

Calamitous bosses drop a small amount of trade bars and have a chance at motif most of which are worthless (dungeon motifs dropping ruin the economy though and make dungeon farm less relevant and that’s mostly the only reason to replay dungeons, same goes for all other motifs tbh, so I dislike motif drops) and that’s it, other bosses and trash enemies don’t have any rewards at all. There needs to be something meaningful, that will make farming them feel worthwhile, some guaranteed reward, be it trade bars or just an amount of gold, or mats or whatever, desirable but not too expensive, and smaller chances for better drops. Trash can just drop gold mb, or offer a chance at lowest tier boss drops.

Similarly favor needs more value too, it would in turn add more meaning to all sources of favor. Currently there is absolutely no reason to farm favor, 10k is easy to get in several days and the only rewards are monster shoulders and some furniture that is the same for all factions which is pretty worthless. Favor merchant should have a lot more rewards, especially something desirable, all requiring a certain amount of favor, cap of favor should be raised accordingly. Make part of the rewards faction-locked but those have to be valued carefully, so factions don’t end up a clear best choice.

Having a zone built around grouping up with others and having so many quests that cannot be shared is really frustrating.

I am standing next to a friend who has Argent Eradication, Brazen Eradication, and Representing the Faction. He cannot share any of those quests to me. I have the Keen Mind quest, and I cannot share it to him. We tried sharing quests in the Starlit Plaza, in the Parch, and in Vvardenfel. It is SO FRUSTRATING to have group content and not be able share the "sharable" group quests.

UPDATE: While still in a group with the friend with 3 faction quests, another of our friends logged on and joined the group for testing.. Friend with 3 quests was able to share 2 of their 3 to ANOTHER friend. Talk about ABSOLUTELY ENRAGING (at ZoS).

ZoS, please see @code65536 's comment here: https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/comment/8469834/#Comment_8469834 with coming across something similar and how he had to jump through hoops that took many minutes in order to fix it.

Haha spent hundreds of thousands on parts of the tonic recipe, to find out that the ingredient required are from all three factions too, which sell for as much as the tonic fragment, haaaaaaahahahaha.

If you don't have guild mates that are actually your friends, on other factions, just buy the premade tonics I guess.

Also you can do like 5 or 6 faction dailies if you get shares, so pop before you hand them in, and the daily to kill loadsa enemies. Hahahahjjabfjeidn

I wanted to report that me and a few guild mates are not getting credit under gold pursuits when it comes to solving oddities like the spider game, the boulder puzzle and the light puzzle. It's very finicky when it does give credit or not. It's nothing consistent and this is including people who are actively on the switches

SerafinaWaterstar wrote: »

Soarora wrote: »

Alright guys… feedback post number 5. This post will focus on my experiences today as someone cataloguing quests on a thief build, as a member of a midgame guild group, and as the leader of a mostly pug group.

[x]

Genuine question: so you are happy just to run around in a group killing things without much purpose beyond killing things? As it does not sound like you are doing dailies or getting <bits> for other stuff.

We were doing the plaza dailies but yes, I already have the relics so my focus was on getting my buddy their splinters and generally having a good time killing things. I wish the rewards were better to really give more of a reason to kill things beyond enjoyment and helping people but if I like the content, I will enjoy just running it without purpose beyond enjoyment. There’s dungeon hard modes I run on occasion purely because I like doing them.

The fact you need raids for the outside content. But the 3rd tier bosses only 4 man is very strange.

karmaharma wrote: »

I was excited for Night Market, but what a disappointment it turned out to be.

Solo play is pretty much impossible. Adhoc small groups are pretty much non-existent and even if you find one the difficulty level is too high for uncoordinated small adhoc groups.

For those of us that are more casual players, or who have difficulty scheduling time to play with groups, Night Market offers nothing.

Group Finder has been my go-to for this. It's been pretty easy to hop into random groups and tear up the map with randos. At least on PSNA

Apollosipod wrote: »

karmaharma wrote: »

I was excited for Night Market, but what a disappointment it turned out to be.

Solo play is pretty much impossible. Adhoc small groups are pretty much non-existent and even if you find one the difficulty level is too high for uncoordinated small adhoc groups.

For those of us that are more casual players, or who have difficulty scheduling time to play with groups, Night Market offers nothing.

Group Finder has been my go-to for this. It's been pretty easy to hop into random groups and tear up the map with randos. At least on PSNA

Same for me on PCNA.