Umm, ever played Oblivion or Skyrim? I'm guessing you haven't or you would have known the hundreds of caves in those games are all pretty much the same. TESO is no different.
Like Chieftain, like indian.
The Elder Scrolls Online
- Thread starter Anomander Rake
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There's also typically not a ton of variation between caves and caverns within any relatively small geographic region. Tamriel isn't that large, nor is Skyrim. The entirety of the ESO gameworld is about 2/3 the size of real world London, if I recall correctly. So, the variation that we do see, brought about by different life inhabiting a cavern or different geological features nearby, is about right.
But that gets to the crux of bringing real caves and caverns into the debate about repetitive appearances. This is not a real world region; it's a video game. Therefore, engaging and attractive content takes a slight precedence to realism even in a franchise that stands upon building a believable world. Lucky for us, there are Dwemer ruins, a few styles of crypt (Cyrodiilic, Dunmner, and Nord at least) and Ayleid ruins to complement the caverns and caves -- which actually do have some variation in color and layout at least.
Let's examine the caves and caverns alone. So far I've seen foliage filled caves, some with a strange purple hue with crystals, the typical dingy brown generic caves, the darker red-brown of kwama egg mines, and I've seen one related to the Hist that's an interesting yellow with a unique wall texture that reminded me of a tree dungeon in the Shivering Isles. Let's take the most boring of all: the plain dingy brown. The one cave that is actually zoned into with that appearance (that I saw) has a few twists. Most notable, a giant ribcage juts from a wall and beneath is is a whirlpool. Jump into the whirlpool, and you're pulled to another layer of cavern with a slightly different visual style and a boss.
Altogether, both sides of this topic are correct. The caves and caverns could bear a little more variation, and I bet that in the Skyrim adventure zone we'll see at least a couple of the ice caverns native to that region. There is variation, and I suspect there will be more later since there's room for it without breaking the setting. Bear in mind too that I have yet to explore the Covenant and Dominion lands. For I all know, both can have bland, repetitive dungeons that render my whole opinion moot in those places.
edit: I should add that Glenumbra has a beautiful transition from a dungeon-beneath-the-castle appearance to an Ayleid and crystal style. They clearly put more effort into that one than both Spindleclutch and the semi-broken Fungal Grotto.
There is a big drama thread on the closed beta forums over the most recent Emperorship. Some backstory first. AD has dominated Cyrodil for the 2+ months I have been in closed beta. When the first wave of beta testers got invited, they all went AD so that means AD has more VR10 players as well as a large population than the other two factions. At no time has my character in EP ever had any AvA buffs. I rolled an alt in AD and he has perma buffs from AvA.
Since AD has dominated Cyrodil for a long time, apparently some of them figured out how the Emperorship could be gamed/exploited. If you believe what some of them are saying in the big drama thread, what they did was done to prove a point that they claim they have submitted feedback to Zenimax on numerous times. So what did they do?
The campaigns and leaderboards had reset so some EP AvA raid leaders organized a big EP effort to finally gain the Emperorship for EP. These guys led 6+ hours of keep taking and were at the top of the leaderboards. When it became evident that EP would soon be able to claim enough territory to claim Emperorship, some AD players coordinated with one of the more famous/infamous EP PVPers and allowed the EP player to kill them over and over and over again. The EP player did not take part in the taking of any keeps. In a relatively short period of time, the EP player was wracking up nonstop player kills that allowed him to easily become #1 on the leaderboard. When EP finally won, he was awarded Emperor instead of the people who actually took all the keeps.
The AD players said they allowed the EP player to farm them to prove the point that player kills should follow the rule of diminishing returns. The reason the EP player was able to become Emperor is because he got 100% points every time he kept killing the same AD players over and over. There was overwhelming agreement about this on the forums. AFAIK no official comment from Zenimax yet.
I'm digging like hell because I could have sworn I saw a developer quote that said there are diminishing returns. It may have been on the beta boards, in which case I certainly won't find it. That explains what I saw the other day in the Auriel's Bow campaign during the stress test. Apparently some people from PTS decided to make their point well known.
At this juncture, I think it may be safe to say that diminishing returns for killing the same players isn't enough. When guilds coordinate to control a campaign (say, to govern guild stores at keeps), we'll see entire raid groups intentionally succumbing to an individual player. That complicates matters. On the one hand, if they implement a universal cooldown for player kill AP rewards that doesn't regard who is killed then there's no way for guilds to govern campaigns to suit the player economy strategy (which is frankly stupid, btw). If they don't implement that then the emperorship is moot.
Either way, they're going to have to bend on something, so it will be interesting to see whether they go Brad McQuaid (edit: ie, "Vision" for the reference-impaired) and sacrifice economy for mechanics features or go Raph Koster and throw everybody under the bus for the sake of the player economy (ie, "Sims in space", casuals and scams control the economy).
It's safe to say that if they don't preserve the emperorship then the leaderboards will be meaningless too, and that totally fubars their whole PvP scheme to nothing but a zerg v zerg clusterfuck. Being at the top of the leaderboard should be a reward for playing well or having a coordinated effort behind you in a guild that *works* to help get you there. It shouldn't just mean that a couple of guilds decided to get together and play grabass for a few hours.
Tuco
I got Tuco'd!
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Yeah, diminishing returns on point-gaining acts are a no brainer.
The other goofy thing about the way emperorship is done is that typically raid leaders in large, siege-sized forces get the least points/exp/loot because they are usually at the rear and are either staring at a map, trying to communicate in multiple channels on multiple VOIP servers, typing shit madly in tells/guild chat/ raid chat/zone chat or panicking with their face in their hands.
Sometimes things are calm or repetitive enough that raids basically lead themselves and you can just clump together and say, "Follow me to X location", but that's a rare privilege when you're fighting a good enemy.
Supposedly if you select Campaign A as your home campaign, your alts in the other two factions will be prevented by the game from joining that campaign. I can't confirm if it is working or not since we only have one campaign at a time on PTS so everyone is allowed to join it.
Raid leaders with decent followers will have the quest benefits I mentioned before, and pickup raid leaders are so busy kicking people who log out in group or disconnect and don't come back while advertising slots and sending invites that they can spend a lot of time hitting up the mission boards while gaining kill credit from their raid. I've spent most of my time in ESO leading pickup raids in Cyrodiil, and I hit #3 on the emp board the session before last, #9 (I think) for the leaderboard, and most of that was just turning in "Kill 20 Enemy Players" while handling invites and spamming "Take the god damn resources, youlovely people".
(edit: felt bad for posting such a thought, but really... a few hours of leading suicide leeches is enough to damage sanity -- leaders need tools)
My actual words may have been slightly more polite than that, but I might as well type what I was thinking after watching zergs lose pushes a hundred times because they couldn't figure out how to slow down enemy reinforcements. I swear, you could give half the players in the stress test a game with fancy graphics where all they do is suicide off a cliff over and over, and they'd pay a sub fee for it.
edit: Not to talk trash or be rude, but I exaggerate not.
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edit2: Actually, I should add more to this so it's clear I'm really not being rude. As it is, the reward for leading is good. Your troops should be in the field, in a disciplined unit, so the leader is the only one with time to constantly turn in quests. But the problem is that the majority of Cyrodiil players will not be part of disciplined PvP guilds; they'll be at most taking a few friends and filling a raid with pickups. Those raids are in turn filled with people who look at the raid leader, scoff, and go, "Why should I listen to this guy/gal?" They then ignore group chat, die over and over, and leech kills from the group. If rewards are added for leadership, then on top of not playing as part of a team, people will argue over who gets to lead and pull crap like failing to pass it back to the raid's organizer when they DC and come back while failing to keep invites current.
Leadership should mean more extra work than extra reward to keep the kids and... "Kids at heart" (to be nice about it) from acting out.
There's already a shift+click group rally point. ZOS should get rid of the semi-subdued red rings and replace it with an arrow similar to quests but larger and colored for the faction (red for Pact, blue for Covenant, gold for Dominion), and then have the server break off ten gold or some other small reward when the objective nearest the party waypoint is captured. That way, people have incentive to follow the leader but it's still just boring enough that they don't fight about it. The Skyrim players could jump into Cyrodiil and intuitively fall in line without having to be told anything and without having to read. (Last edit: Marketing could call it "Player-designated quests". Why not?)
If PTS were not well-organized players not suffering from pickup syndrome, then I imagine they'd be asking for this. One sprite change and one branch statement controlled reward shouldn't take much work for ZOS to implement, but it would have a huge impact toward improving the quality of play in Cyrodiil. It should be that the occasional totally incompetent group is frustrating, and not that the rare competent group is a joy.
I just submitted an app to PRX. When you change your mind, hit me up and we can do a dungeon crawl.
Derpa
Trakanon Raider
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Elder Scrolls Online | Michael Bitton | ESO's Addon Conundrum | MMORPG
What are people's thoughts on this?
What are people's thoughts on this?
Cinge
Ahn'Qiraj Raider
- 7,382
- 2,449
In my opinion if its info broadcasted publicly then I want the option of seeing it and customizing how it looks to fit my taste. If there is mods developers don't want available to general public(ie not counting cheats/bots/haxs etc) then hide the info those mods need, otherwise everything is fair game.
The default UI/info for teso is very bad imo. It's way too minimal. I have no clue who is who half the time, who's taking damage, what buffs are up, what debuffs are on me, timers on my skills etc.
The default UI/info for teso is very bad imo. It's way too minimal. I have no clue who is who half the time, who's taking damage, what buffs are up, what debuffs are on me, timers on my skills etc.
Simple: Either everything but health will be hidden from the addon API where enemy players are concerned or we'll be forced to cheat with PvP bots in order to remain competitive.
Also, with server load balancing, networking issues, broken quests, broken magicka and stamina regen, and combat impact tweaks all on their plate, along with Tamriel Foundry pretending that the bot cheat is legit, ZOS is probably trying real hard to pretend this isn't happening.
If they squash that and add diminishing AP returns for killing enemy players, with a cooldown timer so rewards return to normal after a while without kills, then I'll be impressed by their relationship with the playerbase. If they don't, then I'll anticipate this game dying one day to the tune of tears about ancient bugs that ZOS just ignores. Not to be cynical, but we've seen that kind of thing before, right?
Derpa
Trakanon Raider
- 2,013
- 665
nametags, buffs, and debuffs are the only truly needed UI changes needed, imo. SCT, spell names, enemy cast bars are also pretty standard.
Yeah, but it's pretty much a binary between jaded and fanboi. Going halfway just seems weird, so the only balance is to switch between them with as much honesty as possible.
Unless you're writing for a magazine. In that case, you carefully keep track of the community and feed its praise and concerns back to it. People love to be told they're right.
There are entirely too many people with opinions about this that haven't the slightest idea of what FTC even does. People have called it a "macro" that auto interrupts people and some moron said something about others reading the skills he has slotted on his bar... neither of those being a function of the add-on, obviously.
I have a feeling ZeniMax will cave though. The API will get neutered so that add-ons can't read player info. That's fine though, that information is nearly negligible while actually fighting someone.
Flipmode
EQOA Refugee
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Since I haven't been following this game that closely, are their plans to release more classes then the 4? I realize that any class can skill up any weapon and what not, just curious if ZO has released info on future plans to the beta folks.
I'm not usually a PVP person but the cryodil vids did look fun. I'll admit. The PVE was nothing special but I wasn't bothered by it either. The game looked on ultra. Only some occasional lag on sat/sun night. And ran into a few bugged quests. If I had to rate the game overall I'd give it a 6/10.
I'm not usually a PVP person but the cryodil vids did look fun. I'll admit. The PVE was nothing special but I wasn't bothered by it either. The game looked on ultra. Only some occasional lag on sat/sun night. And ran into a few bugged quests. If I had to rate the game overall I'd give it a 6/10.