The Elder Scrolls Online

[Rendakor]

Fortunately it's easier to dial-back cockstabby design decisions than blatant incompetence.

[amiable]

Fortunately it's easier to dial-back cockstabby design decisions than blatant incompetence.

ESO has plenty of cock-stabby design decisions, they are just buried under all the blatant incompetence.

[Draegan]

Grinding AAs for gear? The only cockstabbing in this game is raiding. The rest of the game is pretty casual in almost every way.

[Miasma]

They announced a Euro maintenance yesterday that was scheduled for their low pop time.  That's fine.  The euro maintenance window opened up and... all the NA players got kicked in late NA prime time.

They started shutting down the wrong megaserver before realizing what the fuck they were doing...

Grinding AAs for gear? The only cockstabbing in this game is raiding. The rest of the game is pretty casual in almost every way.

I am fairly good at MMOs, am VR12, have all purple gear, a legendary weapon and I can not do the content in the VR10 zone because three packs have a 50/50 chance of killing me.  Same with the bosses in 'solo' dungeons.  If a boss summons adds I'm totally fucked.

[Draegan]

I thought I was in the Wildstar thread when I made that reply. Sorry!

[Signe]

I thought I was in the Wildstar thread when I made that reply. Sorry!

You should ask someone to check your pupils, just in case....

[Nija]

Wildstar has so many bad design decisions I wouldn't be surprised if it shed subscribers faster than ESO.

It's also fun to watch these companies to make the same exact mistakes that we saw in UO, only 15 years later.

Enjoy your ESO firesuits, boys! I'm sure you'll figure out instahits before too long.

[Nebu]

Wildstar has so many bad design decisions I wouldn't be surprised if it shed subscribers faster than ESO.

They weren't obvious to me.  Care to elaborate?

[Draegan]

It's probably going to be some diatribe on how he can't do raids because 40 man. The game is incredibly well built, my one major issue with the game, from a design point of view, is the poorly designed classes. The combat system is a personal preference kind of thing and I don't really like it as a whole.

[Falconeer]

"Zenimax secretly added a 1.1 second Cooldown to all melee skill attacks. IF you use any melee skill attack you can not use another one until after 1.1 seconds. Before the patch it was .6 seconds between melee skill attacks."

This makes combat even less fun.
On top of that, it doesn't apply to magic, and magic is already overpowered.

[Nija]

Diatribe, hah! I wish I cared enough to put that much into this. I'll keep it short and sweet because everyone here is smart enough to read between the lines - no matter how poorly written. (it's poorly written, because I'm writing it.)

The game systems you interact with the most are in a very strange place between being a strict tab-target traditional MMO and an action-RPG/MMO thing. Being in the middle, there are pitfalls all over the place that you'll encounter. Some classes encounter more of them than others.

The difficulty. They can't maintain a healthy enough population with the current difficulty of the things people want to do in the game. Within the first, I'd guess, 2 months you'll see some crazy threads and devs come out saying that they'll start rebalancing or changing things or creating alternate paths that appeal to enough people to make this thing enough of a financial success to continue active post-launch development.

So it's going to be this strange to play thing that's going to change a lot in a short amount of time. Development time to fix things or add content will be spent altering existing content and adding additional bugs.

You'll have a player caste system quickly show up and second and third class citizens will develop in every guild.

Nobody (the greater "nobody" - first class citizens in their own world will be perfectly happy as the empire crumbles) will be happy and you'll see huge population problems at an ESO-pace. (or even faster.)

[Venkman]

Agree on the tab targeting; however, my limited experience felt more like GW2 with more obvious range/cone/ground targeting overlays. I didn't play long enough to see flaws, and avoided some of the classes that people complained about being stationary/slow.

But on the dificulty: would you say it's difficulty everyone will run into (i.e., Crushbone/Blackburrow: it sucked equally for all of us)? Or is it difficulty only certain players will run into (i.e., only if you try to level up in PvP whereas in PvE it's just relegated to group-only content)?

And yes, I'm furthering the WS derail in the ESO thread. It's a more interesting topic and I can't move the conversation

[Miasma]

There are a couple abilities that can give you soul gems or a buff if they kill your target.  There are level one critters that can be one-shot with any mild ability.  Yes, you could kill critters to get the bonuses because they didn't bother to differentiate between them and real mobs.

So they got around to trying to fix that, but in a terribly hacky way.  Now if your cursor is on any critter all your abilities go gray and can't be used.  This also means that if you are fighting a boss in a maggot filled crypt and a maggot crosses the path of your cursor, all your abilities stop working.  You can't even use healing spells if a spider/snake/squirrel walks across the path of your cursor.

Just incredible.  Instead of making changes to the two or three spells and adding an if-not-critter statement they wholesale disabled all abilities if your cursor is over a critter, which happens a fair bit, especially in dungeons.

[Lantyssa]

This is the game that keeps on giving.

[satael]

They just made critters meaningful content! 

[Hoax]

Can you kill the critters with ground target aoe? Is that now a part of raiding?

[Samprimary]

if a critter gets you stuck is the option to pay to kill yourself with the /stuck command greyed out?

[Miasma]

if a critter gets you stuck is the option to pay to kill yourself with the /stuck command greyed out?

You joke but three times over the weekend I was stuck after porting into a city because there is a bug where some vanity pets have collision detection turned on.  So if asshole with a pet ports to a city and just stands there the pet just stands under them, then you port in and since you are now standing inside the God damn pet you can't move because collision detection is turned on and any way you try to move the idiotic client thinks a crab/monkey/whatever is in your way.  I log out/in or port again so that I don't have to pay the /stuck fee.

You wind up with a stack of people flailing around on the exact same spot trying to move and no one can do anything but rotate.

[tazelbain]

Next thing you know you're gonna have to pay for your miracle patch.

[Lakov_Sanite]

There's a stuck 'fee'?

[Ingmar]

Supposedly to stop some botting exploit or something, yeah. I guess it isn't the worst implementation of /stuck ever (games that reset your fast travel timer to do it come to mind), but it's still a pretty obnoxious thing to do to a player who's already inclined to be pissed off due to getting stuck in your crappy geography or whatever.

[Sir T]

.... Critter armour!!

[Scold]

.... Critter armour!!

[Miasma]

Someone made a troll bait thread on the official forums titled "What would you like to see in the upcoming f2p system?".  Rather than just lock or delete it (which to their credit they rarely do) the mods changed the title to "What would you like to see if ESO goes f2p?".  Innocent edit by an easy going mod or deliberate attempt to test the waters in a round about way?  You decide!

Edit: Oh, and a new 'road ahead' update.
Edit2: I guess the mod changed it to 'if' and then the op changed it to 'if/when'.

[Miasma]

Odd story about layoffs.  I'm guessing they were hired in a rush at launch because they underestimated how many support tickets they would have to deal with (caused by bugs and bots).  Then so many people cancelled that they were no longer needed...

[Tannhauser]

Well, no one expected the game to crash and burn and OH WAIT this entire website did.

[Hoth]

Well, no one expected the game to crash and burn and OH WAIT this entire website did.

To be fair, crashing and burning is what's expected from every mmo according to f13. People can only be heartbroken this many times before they become cynics.

[Wizgar]

To be fair, crashing and burning is what's expected from every mmo according to...

...everyone who isn't actively working on one, and probably most of those who are if you could get their honest opinions.

[Draegan]

I had fun with the game for a few weeks. It's no where near sub worthy.

[Simond]

A post fit for most mmos.

[Paelos]

To be fair, crashing and burning is what's expected from every mmo according to f13. People can only be heartbroken this many times before they become cynics.

This was a unique scenario. This game was obviously a disaster from the word go. People around here may not like Wildstar, but you're going to find very few that think it is going to crash and burn like this TESO project.

[Soulflame]

You can unlock Animal Crossing in Wildstar.  That's incredible.  Bosses drop furniture.  GENIUS.

[Threash]

To be fair, crashing and burning is what's expected from every mmo according to f13. People can only be heartbroken this many times before they become cynics.

This was a unique scenario. This game was obviously a disaster from the word go. People around here may not like Wildstar, but you're going to find very few that think it is going to crash and burn like this TESO project.

I think wildstar will crash and burn if they stick to their focus on the hardcore/raider playerbase, but as long as they can admit they were wrong that is something they can easily change.  TESO was irredeemably fucked from the start and only some early hopes for the pvp got it any positive word of mouth at all.

[Venkman]

Well, no one expected the game to crash and burn and OH WAIT this entire website did.

To be fair, crashing and burning is what's expected from every mmo according to f13.

Nah. There's always going to be a handful of vigorous defenders that ensure we don't entirely dismiss all MMOs

What's different about TESO is that nobody defended it, thinking it had a shot "as long as they did X...". The best thing written was by a few who said it wasn't the worst experience they had for the few weeks they put in.

That's been the theme of this thread almost since the first day it was announced.

[Miasma]

I am almost tempted to believe the conspiracy theory that the PC launch was just a live beta for consoles.  I mean it is painfully obvious that a huge number of people have canceled because the veteran ranks suck but they have barely mentioned fixing it.  They are nerfing classes like there is no tomorrow but are "being very careful" about buffing classes that most everyone agrees need help.  There are obvious problems with their skill system.  There are core systems that just don't work or don't even exist.

It is really hard to believe that anyone could be this incompetent or out of touch...

All they would have to do to stop people from canceling and to bring some back is announce that "all veteran rank mobs health and attack stats have been cut in half".