Any improvements to "the grind"?

One of the things that I loved about ESO was all the regular story content. There was a lot of theme reuse but it was still fun. You also got really great character advancement and loot doing the story content, and they did a good job of making you feel like your character was the hero rather than just another cog. Where it failed, however, is that while you're doing a thing, there are twenty other people doing the exact same thing. This totally ruins it for me. This is where SotA wins in a big way with it's private instances... but there's very little story content.

 

Are you saying there are active plans to have all new storyline-type quests in Episode 2, akin to if not similar to the Titan and/or Oracle quests in E1?

 

There's supposed to be a continuation of the storyline in episode 2.

 

big difference with handholding(linear progression, 90% of which is follow story and kill a few extra... 1000 mobs to get the next lvl for the next main/story quest, man bless unleashed is so fun~...<_<), and non-linear(current eso format, go anywhere design).
finding out if you can handle a zone, dungeon, etc is part of the fun, sharing it with friends, comparing spots, running from dragons, liches, and unicorns when youve nearly been one shot, "ill try again after x stats go up, learn more skills and/or tweak gear some, maybe change strategy or playstyle", the journey of firguring out what you want to do is way better than being told how you must do everything(cough bot14 cough)

 

Yeah, instead of trickling out the story as they create the scenes for it like they did in E1, the plan is to get all the scenes in first, then add the E2 main quests in once the scenes are complete. Though, given the small staff, that is still going to be a while.

I'm tempted to ask during the next AskADev to see if Chris is willing to address the speed st which E2 is being implemented. I know the devs are doing the best they can, but I think the fact that we're looking at approximately 5-7 years per episode is concerning. Is there going to be a much of a market for a twenty year old game around the time E5 is under way? I mean, if SotA had been the hit WoW or UO were, then probably. But that's not where we are. Plus, if the game had been that successful, the team would probably have grown considerably, and speed would be less of an issue.

 

Ah, I was wondering about you, DalTX. I noticed you stopped asking questions.

I’m glad to see you are ok. I can understand how you feel, I love the game, and I love doing the quests, but, there aren’t many quests left for me to do, other than the ones I’m not high enough to do. And grinding can get kinda boring.

 

Just to clarify: I didn't ask for a hand holding experience, that's precisely why I used the term "linear-ish".

There must be a backbone with increasing rewards and difficulty.

I can grind by myself pretty much anywhere I want, but for the average player they're stuck with mind-numbing CP. If they try to grind their way up, they'll probably do 10-20% of the CP XP.

So there's insanely boring mode and insanely slow mode.

On the exploration side of things, I think the OP made it clear that once he knew the scenes and monsters, their interest was gone.

 

Could you change the word "knew" to the word "conquered"?

For example, I first discovered Deep Ravenswood fairly early in the game, and couldn't survive the mob scenes in the corners to (literally) save my life, not even the zombie horde much less the Ferocious Red Spiders. I spent countless hours building up to get strong enough to survive those groups. Those 3 fights are basically too easy for me now - I barely even lose any hit points. The thug and rogue/swashbuckler group scenes at the corners of Twins Foothills are good examples as well - those took me awhile to get strong enough to beat. The Hardened Elves and Skeletons in Crag Foothills were also quite tough - when I was doing the Titan quests I basically had to run from all of them because they were too tough. Now I plow through them without hardly any HP loss. The Kobold Expeditionary Camp is a pretty easy place to plow through hordes of kobolds and amass gold. The Naughty Brats in East Sanctus Forest are underrated as well.

My "interest" in a scene is "gone" once the monsters are too easy for me.

What I'm HOPING is "clear" in my post is that while I feel like the progressions to tiers 2, 3, 4 and 5 are actually excellent, there is opportunity to improve the progressions from tier 5 to tiers 6, 7 and 8.

Did that help or did I just confuse the situation further?

 

I feel the same about the T1-5 progression. It was engaging and well paced. The scenes you described are like the backbone I mentioned in earlier posts. There is a natural progression in which you aim to transition to the "next" scene so grind is meaningful.

This kind of flow is then broken because the next difficulty level is Ravensmoor / Tartarus / Rise and the gap is huge.
Basically you're stuck with group play if you don't want to play another couple of months in easier scenes. Being stuck grinding easier scenes for a long time will easily lead to frustration.

So there's the exploration with group play. On paper it sounds awesome.
In reality it's go and kill a bigger mob with bigger health bar. No progression whatsoever, it's a one night stand. Unless you're looking for a specific drop, you won't come back often. Killing the big bad guy doesn't yield as much XP as sleeping on your keyboard while grinding any CP. The financial rewards are laughable as well.

Currently the game has a handful of meta XP spots and that's it. We're grinding for grind's sake. There's no elusive new scene with tough mobs that has rare useful loot. The next scene / difficulty is very similar if not identical to the one you're playing. The only difference is higher XP income.

On a bottom line, I think The Breach is a big missed opportunity to make such interesting progression. The named mini bosses should have rare, combinable, powerful drops in their loot table, so getting strong and gathering a party to raid the scene would be meaningful.

 

I've been stuck in that particular gap for a couple years now. My time is valuable, and there's other games so much more fun than the time spend making my numbers go up, so I can unlock the next zone. There's only so many times I can go through Spectral Mines in a loop, and maintain my sanity.

Maybe once they've gone back to the well once too many times on the double (quadruple) XP, they'll make the double (quadruple) XP gains "permanent" (because everyone gets addicted to the higher rate), resetting the notion of "double" again.

... maybe once it gets up to 128X, I can go in, kill one thing, and finally unlock the higher level zones. At the moment, the new zones they release tend to be for a subsection of a subsection of a subsection of the gaming population at large.

 

Unfortunately, that's all there is. Everything in every game involves some form of grinding.
Just wanted to flesh that out a bit for you.

 

So chess and Monopoly involve grinding too, I guess.

In my view, if you think every game involves grinding you haven't played many games or have become too used to the conventional MMO style of game play.

The reason certain games aren't grindy is because they're about the process and not about the end reward. You play a lot of moves in Monopoly to get the properties and build the hotels, but getting to that point isn't grinding, because the process is the game. Getting all the properties and hotels and putting all the other players out of commission isn't the game, its the end of the game.

Many single player RPGs aren't grinding because they're designed to be about the process, too: they're about the experience of immersion. You enjoy being in the world. The game gives everything to you slow and thats the point; but it gives you a lot else to do and it isn't grinding because you enjoy the process.

The issue that makes standard MMOs grindy is they're more about the reward than the process. Part of the reason is because many players ask for everything to be as convenient and easy as possible and the devs give it to them. As a result, the process becomes boring, rather than fun, and a boring process leads it to be a mindless chore.

Thats why the game is grindy.

 

Absolutely untrue. In every other game, I simply play through the story.

 

I grind hard in chess, but since all my chars are perma-death it ends relatively quickly. Hopefully they update it with a revive mod so I can grind in peace and not worry about losing my progress.

 

Chess needs some buffs you can get by spending cash

 

There's a big difference between your character leveling up while playing through quests/story and just mind numbingly killing the same mobs over and over.