The Achilles Heel

The Struggle

Most mornings my posts flow freely from my fingers as I sit here typing away at my keyboard.  This morning however is not one of them.  For whatever reason I feel completely drained of anything that makes sense.  Over the weekend I spent quite a bit of it at a severe sleep debt, and I think for the most part I am still trying to recover from that.  When I am in doubt I turn to my RSS feed, but after thumbing through the pages I have yet to really get the inspiration to write anything either.  I am in a really weird place right now.  I am still very much loving Elder Scrolls Online, but I also feel like most of what I say about it is just repeating something I said earlier.  So instead I think this morning I will talk about the points that frustrate me.  I’ve been more or less accused of being a cheerleader for the game, or at the very least our podcast as “full of fanboys”.

The Achilles Heel

For as awesome as the game is there is one massive and glaring hole in the game.  It is simply too damned hard to group up with your friends.  This problem is multi-faceted, but revolves around a few variables.  Firstly content “trivializes” when you are five levels over the level of the actual mobs.  This means you get no experience, gold or any other form of loot from killing the monsters.  This also means that the experience that you gain from completing the quests is significantly reduced.  While I have said that content is still relatively challenging a good deal over level, that also means you are taking risk with zero reward.  This becomes a massive problem when a guild member happens to need a low level dungeon.  The first time someone completes an Elder Scrolls Dungeon it is pretty much a given that there will be wipes.  For the on level players this is really not a huge deal, but for the higher level players that have been drafted… it is pretty significant.

I feel like once I have gotten my 42,700 gold mount this will be less of an issue for me, but right now as it stands I am taking zero risks when it comes to my bank account.  I am a stones throw away from the mount, and right now just trying to build up enough of a cap to afford a repair if I need one after buying it.  By repair right now that means roughly 2000 gold each time I do it.  This is always the problem as players age through content, trying to keep enough money inflow to pay for the money going out.  Having mobs completely trivialize and stop being worth any loot is a big problem when I consistently out age the content of a given zone.  Bangkorai for example is a zone that seems to cap out mob level wise at 43.  I just dinged 43 last night and I have not even completely half of the content in the zone.  This means that my need to turn all the black dots white on my map will easily cause me to stop getting loot long before I finish the content.

For a game that already has significant problems with bots hanging out in dungeons and farming bosses over and over, this is a hard problem to solve.  My immediate suggestion would be to make the group-able level range something more like ten levels, rather than five.  Encounters ten levels under you can still a challenge especially in a dungeon setting.  That would also ensure that you gain loot the entire way through a zone, regardless of how much you manage to dawdle around.  I realize the whole trivialization thing is not going to be an issue once I enter the veteran levels, however that is setting up the same problem every MMO has ever had.  If the “real” game begins at 50, then why even have the pre-50 game.  I don’t necessarily believe this, but I am playing devils advocate here.  My problem is I happen to love the leveling game in every game I play, and the Elder Scrolls Online is no different.

Mixed Mode Grouping

Another huge problem the game has is that grouping is somewhat piecemeal as you level.  You are constantly flowing between quests that allow multiple players to complete them together, and quests that require you to solo them in a private instance.  Additionally the system is confused about players getting credit for things.  You can simply ride by someone fighting a the last mob in a quest chain and accidentally get a quest completed, but when it comes to anything that requires gathering… each and every party member has to get their own items.  This generally lends to frustration as you end up waiting around for respawns to allow the character that is lagging behind to complete that step in the quest chain before progressing to the next item.  It feels like this whole system could have been better thought out.  Duoing is a very common tactic for couples and friends leveling in a new game, and this game seems to support this extremely well at times, but really badly in a few cases.

Where this gets compounded is when a duo happens upon a solo instanced quest.  Inevitably one of the members will breeze through the content, and the other will struggle.  I’ve seen more than a few duos derailed by Doshia already in our guild, and I am sure as a whole it is probably even worse.  The game has very particular skill check moments, and this ends up locking a single player away behind that quest so that they cannot progress further in a given quest chain until they solo it.  What does the other half of the duo do at that point?  Do they twiddle their thumbs and wait around for them to complete it…  therefore putting more pressure on the member that isn’t quite able to grasp the fight as quickly?  Do they wander off and kill random stuff potentially causing them to get ahead in level.  These gates are awesome in theory, but hell on people trying to keep at the same level.

The Game Needs Mentoring

This game is in desperate need of mentoring.  I realize at this point I have banged this drum so damned many times that the skin on it is close to cracking from the abuse.  However I feel like every game is better off with a mentoring system.  For those not familiar with the concept, mentoring is a system that allows a high level player to drop their level to that of the player.  If you group a level 50 character with a 20 character, this functionally makes them both level 20 characters.  Scaling always makes it so that the mentored down character is “better than” their level, but it works better than not having it.  Generally speaking a mentored character receives loot as though they were at the level of the group and the difficulty is something similar to level as well.  This is a magic bullet, and has worked to make every game that has it better.

This was my key point of frustration with the game when I heard it did not exist.  It is never the right answer not to ship with both Bolstering, like you see in Cyrodil and mentoring.  I have a maxim that is getting tired at this point… but it is no less true today than it was when I first started posting about it.  Anything that gets in the way of you grouping with your friends is bad.  These games are social experiences, and as such should have every possible tool to allow friends to group freely together.  This game unfortunately has a ton of barriers between players.  Firstly there is the issue of level gaps and trivialization of content, that I have talked about here.  We also however have the frustration of not being able to group across faction, even for instanced content.

Globalization

Finally there is always the problem of region lockout, and while I can understand the logistical need to have both a North American and a European mega server… my hope is that at some point they will choose to merge them.  I should not be penalized for having lots of friends who do not happen to live in the United States.  What is happening in practice is that my European friends are simply accepting the fact that they will be having lag and rolling on our megaserver just to be able to participate with their friends.  The concept of a region lock needs to die in a fire.  In an era when we can communicate instantly across the entire damned planet, thinking of things in a country centric means just doesn’t fly anymore.  Please note that this is not specifically an Elder Scrolls Online problem, but a problem with each and every game system out there.  I am looking at you Sony and your players locked behind the ProSiebenStat.1 wall as well.

I have spent weeks talking about the things that the Elder Scrolls Online has done really right, so it is only fitting that I spend at least one day talking about the things that it has done “less right”.  I am hoping with time they fix some of these problems, especially the inability to group with people in a meaningful way once things have trivialized.  The answer that they would give us is that after level 10 we should be going out to Cyrodil… which is fine and good and an option I will probably start taking more often, but that is such a SMALL part of this game, that it just feels like a cop-out.  You have created this amazing world, and crafted a really fun dungeon experience.  Let me show it to my friends in a meaningful way, because right now I don’t want to run lower level content because it just isn’t fun trying to be the high level in a dungeon.  Adding mentoring would solve almost all of the problems I mentioned other than the region lockout.  Here is hoping that someday they add it in, before it is too late for the folks who were NOT in the initial leveling rush and will fall by the wayside as they realize they can’t do anything meaningful with their friends.

#ESO #ElderScrollsOnline #Mentoring