elder scrolls online

[dragon]

was wondering if anyone picked it and what their thoughts of it so far.

[Borgholio]

I haven't played it, but most reviews I've read are basically "meh".

[White Haven]

I played it in beta and was thoroughly unimpressed by it, all told. Not horrible, just...sub-par.

On another note, you have a shift key, USE IT, for fuck's sake!

[Lord Revan]

I've not played it either but most reviews I've heard are basically "typical MMO, nothing new to see here"

[Mr Bean]

I've not played it either but most reviews I've heard are basically "typical MMO, nothing new to see here"

Let me sum things up for you then.

It's like Oblivion except on the Consoles and without any patches. Also a mod has been installed to make everything take ten times longer than it should. Also the enemies re-spawn and it's got very buggy co-op multiplayer running. That's Elder Scrolls Online.

PVP can be titled beat down online because pvp was notoriously ignored during Beta and there are five class/race combinations that faceroll every other class/combo out there either because of insane burst dps, full player lockdowns , total defense or super ranged attacks. Also the accidental side effect of making one of the sides the Racist Elves is that they get stomped hard in realm pvp.

[TheFeniX]

PVP can be titled beat down online because pvp was notoriously ignored during Beta and there are five class/race combinations that faceroll every other class/combo out there either because of insane burst dps, full player lockdowns , total defense or super ranged attacks. Also the accidental side effect of making one of the sides the Racist Elves is that they get stomped hard in realm pvp.

Details please. Links appreciated because I can't find anything. I fucking love reading about shitty PvP systems and "roflstomp" combinations ever since I found out I stumbled into one in pre-CU Galaxies with a Bounty Hunter/Pistoleer (I thought I was just that good at PvP).

[Mr Bean]

PVP can be titled beat down online because pvp was notoriously ignored during Beta and there are five class/race combinations that faceroll every other class/combo out there either because of insane burst dps, full player lockdowns , total defense or super ranged attacks. Also the accidental side effect of making one of the sides the Racist Elves is that they get stomped hard in realm pvp.

Details please. Links appreciated because I can't find anything. I fucking love reading about shitty PvP systems and "roflstomp" combinations ever since I found out I stumbled into one in pre-CU Galaxies with a Bounty Hunter/Pistoleer (I thought I was just that good at PvP).

Sad to say most of it went with the Beta Forums. But the basics are that Sorcerors can chain together enough slows, roots and stuns to make combat impossible for ranged combat but that's okay because a well set up Knight can eat everything a Sorc can do damage wise for breakfast which is fine since Nightlbades can burst both Knights and Sorcs to death.

And then there are Templar which had two broken builds lost during beta and are currently looking for the next flavor of the month build to return them to top tier status. At one point before statcking debuffs level was reduced a Templar had enough Dots to launch four attacks then run knowing unless the player was another Templar they would die from the ticks with no further action required but that was six months ago.

[bilateralrope]

If you ignore the bugs, does ESO have enough going for it that it can remain a subscription MMO ?

Or is it just a matter of time before it drops the subscription ?
Just like every other MMO I've heard of that launched in the past few years.

[Zwinmar]

Meh. Played the beta for a few hours, standard MMO. Nothing to see here, move along. Will most likely go FTP shortly.

[TheFeniX]

Sad to say most of it went with the Beta Forums. But the basics are that Sorcerors can chain together enough slows, roots and stuns to make combat impossible for ranged combat but that's okay because a well set up Knight can eat everything a Sorc can do damage wise for breakfast which is fine since Nightlbades can burst both Knights and Sorcs to death.

And then there are Templar which had two broken builds lost during beta and are currently looking for the next flavor of the month build to return them to top tier status. At one point before statcking debuffs level was reduced a Templar had enough Dots to launch four attacks then run knowing unless the player was another Templar they would die from the ticks with no further action required but that was six months ago.

Is this all the OP in larger engagements? I like the ridiculously over-the-top shit like Imperial Agents killing you in 3-4 GCDs, Cruisers in STO taking on 4-5 ships and killing them all in protracted battles, or 3 Imperials dieing to 1 BH/Pistoleer and there's nothing they can do about it.

Has anyone posted any videos of this? I can't find anything, but the old World of Roguecraft videos had me in stitches. Did you ever see any Starcraft 2 replays after Blizzard introduced Warhounds? "I have 3 Warhounds. I see you have 10 Stalkers. It would be a shame if anything were to happen to them......."

I love "WTF were the developers thinking?" moments in competitive play. PvE works to what with Reckoning Bombs and other such nonsense.

PS: Sorry to hijack.

[Darth Quorthon]

I gave it a try during the beta, and I couldn't get into it. At first I just chalked it up to being a beta, since I can never really get into a beta knowing there's going to be a data wipe. I thought the gameplay was vaguely similar to Skyrim, and I thought the combat was kind of fun, but beyond that, I read some things I didn't like about the endgame and PvP, so I decided to just leave it alone. In the end it didn't seem to be offering anything above and beyond what Guild Wars 2 was already providing, and that's f2p. If it goes f2p I'll probably give it a go. Guess I'll just stick with the Diablo 3 expansion for now.

[bilateralrope]

GW2 isn't f2p, as you still need to purchase it. I've seen some people call it buy to play.

ESO also fails in quest design:

So, The Elder Scrolls Online had a major patch overnight to bring the game up to version 1.03. For thousands of players (including me), the patch updater is badly broken and wrecks the game installation. There's a posted fix for it; it's called an "Error 209" problem. But the fix isn't working for lots of players (including me). So for the players for whom the simpler fix isn't working, the devs are dropping back to "reinstall the game!" as their fallback position. Why yes, I am being serious.

Fortunately, I have CDs to spare myself a 30GB download. Mostly.


So, in honor of ESO's first great screw-up, I thought I'd make fun of the developer of one of the game's quests for a few minutes.

The quest we're going to talk about is called The Dungeon Delvers. And it's hysterically badly designed. As a matter of fact, it's so poorly designed that it should be forever preserved as a case study into bad MMO level design. Here's how it works:

• For those that know Elder Scrolls lore, the dungeon is a Dwemer ruin populated entirely by Dwemer "spiders".
• The level itself is split into three large circular rooms connected in series by corridors. Call them Room 1, Room 2, and Room 3. The entry door spits you out into a corridor leading to Room 1.
• Before you reach Room 1, you are stopped by an NPC that hands you a Macguffin and explains that the Macguffin will allow you to take control of a damaged spider, but "it might take a few tries." The NPC advises you to take the Macguffin into Room 1 and try it out.
• Inside Room 1 are spawn points for about eight spiders, each with a spawn rate of about once per minute. As a result, the room spawns about eight spiders per minute.
• It takes about four tries for the Macguffin to successfully take control of a damaged spider. So you whack one a few times and try the Macguffin until it works. If it doesn't work, it kills the spider. If it does work, you get a little spider pet. The game directs you to Room 2.
• In Room 2, you again find the NPC, who now advises you that some of the machinery in Room 2 needs repairing and for that you need repair parts. The spiders were originally Dwemer repair bots, so she advises you to go back to Room 1, kill a few more spiders, then use the Macguffin which will now tell your spider to salvage the dead spider for parts. Come back when you've done this to five spiders.
• So you return to Room 1 with the same eight spiders, whack them a few times, then apply the Macguffin. If you do it right, a counter goes up telling you that you've succeeded. You keep doing this until the counter reaches five.
• Then you go back to Room 2 with your pet spider in tow. The rest of the quest is irrelevant to my discussion.

By now, the experienced among you realize what the problem is and are laughing about it. For the rest, I will explain.

There are eight spider spawn points, which will spawn about eight spiders per minute total. To complete the quest, you need to damage something between nine and 14 spiders depending on your reflexes and your diligence to the quest instructions. So, if you were in the level by yourself, you would spend three to four minutes in Room 1 to complete the two steps necessary, plus a minute or so for reading instructions and travel time.

But you're not by yourself, are you?

So yeah, Room 1 is complete and utter chaos. Remember: for the first step, you have to damage the spider, then apply the Macguffin. If you kill the spider, you have to try again! Meanwhile for the second step, those players just want to kill the spiders. Therefore, at any given moment, there can be upwards of a dozen or more people in Room 1, all falling on any spider that is crazy enough to spawn and often obliterating it in a fraction of a second. If anyone manages to apply the Macguffin, it's a miracle. It would be funny as hell if it weren't so stupid:

• You've got people just coming into the room for the first time who haven't read the instructions properly and are smashing any spider they see and wondering why the quest doesn't work;
• then you've got people who did read the instructions who are trying to be fairly gentle with a spider so they can Macguffin it, wondering why there's a dozen people in here smashing any spider stupid enough to show its face, not even close to understanding why, and getting frustrated;
• then you've got people who did somehow manage to get step one completed who are only motivated to smash spiders as fast as they appear and getting frustrated because before they can get their hit in, someone else has already obliterated it and claimed credit for the kill; and,
• you've got a few people who have figured all this out and are just smashing spiders as fast as they can just to grief groups two and three.
• Finally, a lore book points you at this very same dungeon(!) as a source of a treasure chest, so you've got not a few randoms wandering through and killing spiders just 'cause they're in the way.

It's unbelievable, hysterical chaos. It's almost EVE-like in its grandeur.

There's no equivalent of "local" in ESO: just one chat channel for the entire zone. But it's actually pretty easy to imagine the rage this room promotes all over the world. And if a group enters Room 1 together? Forget about it. How did I myself get through it? As I keep mentioning, I live in California. So I waited until late one night and came in and cleared the thing while everyone else was asleep.

So yeah, in the theme park that is this part of Elder Scrolls Online, I expect this little ride is going to have an "out of order" sign slapped on its front door before too long while the level designer gets a talking to from his team lead and gets the job of rearranging this mess.

And my reinstall is now 93% complete. That was diverting.

People at one stage of the quest are being forced to grief people doing the earlier part of the quest.

Speaking of GW2, I'm not sure if it's even possible to screw up a quest like this in it. Open world quests don't exist, leaving only instancing or dynamic events. Instancing solves the problem by keeping everyone separate, dynamic events solve it by keeping everyone at the same stage of the event.

[TheFeniX]

I was reading this and immediately thinking: "That quest design seem to have awfully high griefing poten..."

you've got a few people who have figured all this out and are just smashing spiders as fast as they can just to grief groups two and three.

"tial..."
It reminds me of a quest giver in Rift which was a bottle-neck for lowbies to get to the first (pre-faction capital) city. One Defiant, on a PvE server, could one shot the quest giver. So even when other high-level players came to handle the griefer, he could wait to spawn until the NPC did and kill him before a single-person could turn in the quest and get the bread-crumb pickup. That NPCs outside of contested areas are flagged on a PvE server is some old school thinking.

I'm not a huge fan of "tagging" either way. It's a duct-tape solution for a non-existent problem.

[TheFeniX]

Speaking of game breaking bugs:

When you make an MMO, you will eventually learn a hard lesson about how a single bug can derail your entire game. Right now, that’s exactly what’s happening with The Elder Scrolls Online.

Players are rolling around in legendary gear with billions of gold in the bank thanks to a relatively easy-to-execute duplication bug (a dupe) that can even be done by accident.

While it wouldn’t help anyone to go through a step-by-step process as to how the dupe is actually performed, the end result is that players are able to duplicate stacks of materials in their inventory. The excess materials can be sold to vendors for cash, and then instantly replenished with the dupe bug once more.

Obviously, this is wreaking havoc on the game as now money and items are relatively worthless with so much gold flooding the economy. Zenimax will likely have to take enormous steps to roll back the game or specific accounts to undo the damage, and that could take an exceptionally long time.

Players have found fault with Zenimax’s reaction to the dupe, or rather, lack of reaction. The company reportedly didn’t take action until after the dupe had been posted all over YouTube, and now beta testers are piping up to say that a few of them actually reported the dupe bug during their test play, but Zenimax never responded:

“”Tthe first time I reported it was during the beta stress-test weekend starting Friday the 7th of February,” one player says. “Wasn’t the only time I reported it and it was infuriating that no-one at Zenimax responded to follow up on such a serious issue. I should add that I used /bug and feedback that first time, I didn’t bring it up on the forums until people started abusing it in the live game.”

The accusation is that Zenimax simply ignored warnings from its own players, and didn’t take action until the dupe threatened to overrun the game.

The problems with the bug are far, far reaching. It’s not simply a matter of just banning players that used the dupe, which might be hard to track as is. Rather, people now have fantastic gear because they were able to buy incredibly cheap crafting materials due to other people using the dupe. Technically they’ve done nothing wrong, yet they’ve massively benefited from the situation, and they too are now unbalancing the game.

The dupe doesn’t have to destroy TESO, and I’m sure it won’t. Zenimax will likely work tirelessly to try and repair the damage, though how exactly they should do that is up for debate. A common suggestion is the implementation of entirely new crafting materials, which would make the duped ones worthless, though that would only solve some of the problems with the dupe, and the effects on the game’s economy might be long lasting regardless.

Hopefully Zenimax will put forth a plan to fix things soon, so stay tuned for that. And if you’re a current player? Resist the urge to become a profiteer.

Emphasis mine. Wow. Just wow.

[bilateralrope]

If I was playing I'd want to know how to do this bug so that I don't do it accidentally and then get caught up in the bans that should follow.

And I thought that the bug that had people accidentally logging onto the wrong account was a bad one.

[Borgholio]

Guild banks. Depositing and withdrawing items very quickly will cause the dupes. They have disabled the guild banks until they figure out how to repair the damage to the economy, but it might be too late at this point.

[TheFeniX]

If I was playing I'd want to know how to do this bug so that I don't do it accidentally and then get caught up in the bans that should follow.

That's only the surface issue: the economy has to be wrecked right now. If high-level and hard to find mats are now plentiful and cheap, all that is going to lead to a massive flood of cheap endgame gear (or whatever) hitting the market. Further, if a guildy gives you a bunch of duped mats without your knowledge, is it really your fault if you used them? The only saving grace is it won't be as bad as the D3 dupe bug because AFAIK there is no real money exchange in ESO.

[bilateralrope]

Fixing the economy is possible. Just have some new recipes that suck up the excess materials/gold. It won't be quick, but it will work while reducing the supply. Question is if the players will remain until then.

Making new crafting materials won't solve anything.

Guild banks. Depositing and withdrawing items very quickly will cause the dupes.

This bug suggests they screwed up the backend database implementation. This isn't failing to learn from other MMOs like they did with the spider quest. It's them failing at basic database implementation.

That or when you move items around, the client updates before the server confirms that the move has happened*. Then, when the client says to move an item that doesn't exist, the server creates the item instead of giving the client an error.
Which means it's only going to get worse once people start altering the client because the server makes the mistake of trusting the client.

*I wonder if this bug can destroy items in some circumstances.

[Borgholio]

*I wonder if this bug can destroy items in some circumstances.

Haven't heard of that, but one video on youtube showing the dupe did indeed show a fair number of "Requested item is not there" errors in the process. It seems that the a player could click faster than the server could process. So yeah, very basic and very stupid...especially since the bug was reported since early Beta.

[TheFeniX]

Fixing the economy is possible. Just have some new recipes that suck up the excess materials/gold. It won't be quick, but it will work while reducing the supply. Question is if the players will remain until then.

You'll end up creating a group of haves and have-nots, like what SWTOR did with PvP "progression" in the early life of the game. The PvP grind was already more brutal than anything else I had ever seen, but players who won on lotto bags could end up with competitive gear very early. They then gutted PvP rewards (both gold and experience) and modified the bag system, making an even larger gap between already established players and new players.

WoW had some similar issues to this in early cata, but neither SWTOR nor WoW's issues were nearly as far reaching. You're basically creating a class of super-wealthy players/guilds while everyone else is stuck with the funds and drop rates the game thinks you should have. And considering the amount of time this bug has been exploited for, and that they haven't taken any direct action yet to clean anything up, laundering funds across characters, accounts, and guilds has likely already taken place on a large scale.

[bilateralrope]

Fixing the economy is possible. Just have some new recipes that suck up the excess materials/gold. It won't be quick, but it will work while reducing the supply. Question is if the players will remain until then.

You'll end up creating a group of haves and have-nots,

True. But that's still better than leaving the stockpiles around and having a worse divide caused by low prices making gathering less profitable for new players.

Given the scale of the matter, and how much it would have pushed the price of everything down, I wonder if there is anyone who hasn't benefited from it.