ESO, Gaffney, Anomaly Farming, and "endgame"

d_20 · June 2014

Here is what Wildstar dev Gaffney said

If there is a fun thing to do that is inefficient and a horribly boring thing like smacking yourself in the face with a shovel next to it that gives more XP, players will do more XP. They'll try the fun thing once or twice but then go, 'No, I can't help it. I need to hit level 50. I want my end goal more than I want my journey.' So it's very easy to have the journey trivialized.

link: http://massively.joystiq.com/2014/06/02/wildstars-gaffney-achievement-is-the-love-of-watching-bars-gr/

I think this link here proves what he is saying, at least in the case of ESO:

Here is a comment I wrote in another thread:

I don't understand why some people insist on blaming gamers for poor design choices "gamers are whiny, blah, blah, blah."

This is what "endgame" is now (see video link below showing anomaly grinding) and where the vast majority of VR players are. If you are VR1, don't talk about it like you know what it's all about, yet. Let's see where you are in your thoughts by the time you are VR5 or 6 and you've seen how empty your world zones are compared to what you seen in the video. Is it the fault of gamers or game designers?

This is exactly what a lot of people do hour after hour instead of playing all the quest content. Why?

So who is to blame for this? Gamers? Developers? No one? Game is working as intended?

ElirionLoth · June 2014

I'm VR5, almost VR6, and haven't participated in this. I'm still taking my time, doing the quests with friends, crafting, leveling alts, and having fun. If you want to smack yourself in the face to get to endgame, skip half the content, then complain about not having enough content then go for it. Just don't expect sympathy when you come whining about it. Developers can't be responsible for everything you do. There are lots of ways to have fun in this game and many others. If you choose to skip them then that is your fault.

Innkwell · June 2014

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvK8fua6O64

This guy nails it.

I Played EQ2 and never really got into Wow, so this video was very interesting in relation to your questions.

Enjoy.

NorseGod · June 2014

I quit because I was left behind.

I didn't join in on the leveling exploits present during early access because I wanted to play the game fully. However, most people went straight to the pvp zone and did the bounty quest over and over until VR10. The xp from mobs were also nerfed.

Then the duping. People duped gold and legendary crafting mats. I did not. They unbanned these players. I didn't want to compete with that.

Yeah, I ran into 2 bugs the whole time playing (1-VR3). Not sure what people are doing to run into so many bugs they are reporting, but then again, I just play the game normally and not try to do shady crap like bugging boss fights etc., then whine when I can't do it anymore.

Yep, left behind. The later zones felt empty and nobody to group with for group dungeons.

d_20 · June 2014

Originally posted by ElirionLoth
I'm VR5, almost VR6, and haven't participated in this. I'm still taking my time, doing the quests with friends, crafting, leveling alts, and having fun. If you want to smack yourself in the face to get to endgame, skip half the content, then complain about not having enough content then go for it. Just don't expect sympathy when you come whining about it. Developers can't be responsible for everything you do. There are lots of ways to have fun in this game and many others. If you choose to skip them then that is your fault.

I think the ESO dev's design philosophy had people like you and NorseGod in mind. If there are enough players like you who will keep subscribing to support the game, then ESO will be golden.

My guess is that most of the people in the video farming will be gone in a month's time. You may say "good riddance." They will go on like "content locusts" to other games. A lot of those players may have also been attracted to ESO because of pvp. Part of the marketing angle was that ESO was drawing inspiration from DAoC. PvPers like to get to max level and spend most of their time in AvA. If there are enough people around to make that fun, they will stay. If not, they will also be gone.

My concern is that ESO is such a beautiful world with so much great content, it would be a terrible waste if this game doesn't make it to the greatness it has potential for. I believe gamer psychology was not well understood and accounted for in designing this game.

The best thing that could happen is for the devs to admit there are some design problems and to find a way to fix them. If they can communicate what they intend to do about it and listen to the better feedback available from the community on their forums, to their players both current and departed, they can still make this a great game. MMORPGs are communities after all. ESO is quite divided. That doesn't help the game at all.

You can say "good riddance whiners" or you can say "how can we make this game fun and rewarding for the different player types who will be interested in what ESO has to offer."

Scot · June 2014

Firstly is there a problem? Tell me the MMO with the perfect end game that shows what TESO should be like? Every MMO has serious end game issues.

Secondly what can be done to fix it? TESO has a vision of PvE and PvP, you can't just keep adding things and expect that vision to not get distorted. To end up in fact like every other MMO out there. Dailies, PvP scenarios, arenas, how is that any less of a grind than what TESO has now?

Extra chings!, kerchings! and achievements do not automatically equal good gameplay. As we have seen so many times before, more is not necessarily better.

They are trying to add things like the adventure zone which give players something extra to do while not distorting gameplay. It can easily be argued that Craglorn is already distorting gameplay, this is a slippery path which is very difficult to recover from once you go down it too far.

Distopia · June 2014

This is what boggles my mind about gamers and their "opinions" today. On one hand you have all these people complaining about games today allowing people to rush through to end game in a matter of days or hours in the last two cases, on the other you have all these people complaining about a long grind to endgame. Yet then we wonder why Devs seem to have no idea what it is that we as a community are asking for. We don't want long grinds, but we don't want to be done in a couple days. Which is it?

Voiidiin · June 2014

So i left ESO for WildStar, and i am glad i did this, sad but happy i made the transition. I was not a fan of WS and there are some glaring issues i have with it still, but i tell you one thing, the game has End Game as its focus.

Not once in WS have i felt like i was grinding content, i cannot say the same for ESO, in fact after around VR3 all i felt was grind, i felt like i went back to my level 79 in Lineage 2 (you who got to cap in L2 know WTF i am talking about).

Zenimax made it clear they would make ESO the way they wanted to and that players who did not fall in line with this could very well leave. Well look whats happening, not a very good strategy for an MMO. If this was a single player game then they could make this choice and profit from it, but its not and retaining subs is the name of the MMO/Sub game.

I hate to say it but if there is not a resurgence of new players or returning players re-subbing then as all those nay-sayers said, this game will go F2P soon.

Zenimax's Hubris and arrogance is pretty much killing the player base, some very bad design choices were made and unless they backtrack and change things... well i digress.

I enjoyed ESO until i hot the trudgemill of VR levels, i refused to use any of the exploits even though literally hundreds of my guildmates used them and were never reprimanded. Because of the exploits, and the very slow response that Zeni had to resolving them, there is a derth of players who were shit on by the devs.

Best of luck to those of you who enjoy the game i do not begrudge you one bit, i hope that maybe someday down the line i can revisit ESO, but for now i am gonna stay away.

gwei1984 · June 2014

This may be the most interesting thread in here for a few weeks...thx for that OP

I see this problem, too. A guild mate of mine is running these anomalies to grind xp, but I (v5) completely refuse them cause I think its not worth my time to do something which is not fun in a game. So I rather go out with a group and do the dungeons and quests in craglorn.

When I asked him, why he was doing this, his answer was "I need to get to V12 asap!"

Then I would ask him "why do you need to go to v12 asap?"....and actually he didnt really have an answer to this. There is not a single dungeon/delve/pvp/trial-feature in ESO which needs you to be at a particular level. There are no hard level restrictions. So why would i need to go to V12asap, if I can do everything i want at v8 also? Why do people always see max level as the ultimate goal to get? I think one point could be, that MMOs in the last years tended to restrict their content to the max level. ESO doesnt do that, but people still seem to be that narrow minded.

I was doing v5 dungeons at v2. now im doing v10 dungeons at v5. people run trials with v8....there is no point in grinding this shi...

So Gaffney is absolutely right in his statement. But I dont think you can say that its entirely the fault of developers. Player will always search for short cuts. And there is this little thing I try to teach my son. Its called self-responsibility. Developers are not always to blame for all your own decisions.

Gamers they do this in WS, too. People in WS are starting to level afk in battlegrounds because its faster than questing and there is no afk-votekick in place. There is no easy solution in my eyes other than restricting your game to a single progression way. Do you really want devs to go that way?

ohioastro · June 2014

MMO gamers have developed reflexes from years of habit. Let's say that there are six caves, all different, and one of them has an item that is slightly better than the other five. You can guarantee, as the Sun rises and sets, that MMO players will be stacked up at that one cave and that the other five will be empty. There is an almost religious devotion to efficiency.

One way out is to cap the effective yields early - so that you can just sit back and enjoy the story, environment, and so on. But players then get terribly upset that their character is not progressing. If there is a long term solution, it's to give players achievements etc. - but not meaningful extra power - by sinking extra time into things.

In the particular case of ESO, this is an argument for dramatically flattening the PvP power curve - so that a VR12 is no stronger than a VR1 - thereby making min/maxing less important. The issue: players simply wouldn't believe it even if it was true; they'd grind all the way until the dial stops turning, complaining the whole time. I wish I knew the answer.

CrazKanuk · June 2014

Originally posted by Scot
Firstly is there a problem? Tell me the MMO with the perfect end game that shows what TESO should be like? Every MMO has serious end game issues.

Secondly what can be done to fix it? TESO has a vision of PvE and PvP, you can't just keep adding things and expect that vision to not get distorted. To end up in fact like every other MMO out there. Dailies, PvP scenarios, arenas, how is that any less of a grind than what TESO has now?

Extra chings!, kerchings! and achievements do not automatically equal good gameplay. As we have seen so many times before, more is not necessarily better.

They are trying to add things like the adventure zone which give players something extra to do while not distorting gameplay. It can easily be argued that Craglorn is already distorting gameplay, this is a slippery path which is very difficult to recover from once you go down it too far.

I agree. I actually think there is great balance here. If you want to "whack yourself in the face with a shovel" you can obviously do that, and there are people who went through the content very quickly. However, if you actually progress through the content, there is a LOT of content. So I think there is a good balance that allows you to progress regardless of how fast or slowly you want to do that.

Iselin · June 2014

First of all, I never pay much attention to nostalgic discussions about how the MMO landscape used to be pre-2004 because I know that the MMO players were a different and much smaller niche group back then. MMOs are mainstream now and have a much larger and diverse user base many of whom cut their teeth on a totally different gaming environment.

Heck, that initial late 90's early 2000's MMO crowd grew up without cell phones, or IM. Most of us did not play FPS games nor any other twitch-based genres on a regular basis: we prefered slower-paced RPGs and MMORPGs were the hottest thing since sliced bread for us.

Now there are a variety of different types of MMO players that are there for umpteen different reasons. Some care about nothing but "end game"... some are there to "beat the game" as quickly as humanly possible... some want their PVP in short 10-minute doses... somewhere in that crowd, the original MMOers still play. i suspect they're the ones who like to ride slowly and smell the roses.

Gaffney is talking about one particular type of gamer... probably the type that is Wildstar's target audience. Yes they're still there in ESO--although many of those who want to achieve goals quickly are already gone from ESO and are probably in Wildstar for the next little while-- but there are a lot of players who don't really want to do anom farming.

I tried it for about half an hour one day and promptly left that and got into a group of 4 who wanted to follow the quest lines in Craglorn overland and into public dungeons,,, now THAT was fun and kept me entertained for about 4-5 hours on a Sunday afternoon. I find the pace of grinding groups - be they anomaly farmers or dolmen and world boss farmers in other areas-- too fast paced. It feels to me like I either have to have ADHD or at least simulate it with too many coffees or Red Bulls... to each their own.

Grunim · June 2014

I've noticed a tendency for some people to view player behavior in absolutes. I'm happy that Craglorn was made available for any player who reached any veteran rank. I was VR1 when Craglorn opened and I gained a few veteran levels within the first week of Craglorn's introduction. Doing this enabled me to better handle the beefed up mobs in Cyrodiil as well as have a little breathing room as I play solo while questing in my first veteran alliance.

Could I have continued on and made it to max level by now by farming in Craglorn? Yes I could have, but I haven't nor have many other folks. SOME players actually choose to mix up their activities and neither grind to max level ASAP nor do they necessarily take months or years to reach max level.

I'm having a ton of fun with this game and I still enjoy the regular veteran areas and Cyrodiil in addition to Craglorn.

NorseGod · June 2014

Originally posted by gwei1984

Gamers they do this in WS, too. People in WS are starting to level afk in battlegrounds because its faster than questing and there is no afk-votekick in place. There is no easy solution in my eyes other than restricting your game to a single progression way. Do you really want devs to go that way?

And they will all be maxed level before they fix this. And you will be left behind the majority of players you started with. The same reason I quit ESO, not including dupes.

I think I'm done with games, but I guess if I do start another game from launch, I'll be like all the rest of the shitheads and exploit and dupe to max level and gear. Because if you don't, you're PUNISHED with long grinds ALONE.

artemisentr4 · June 2014

Originally posted by Iselin
First of all, I never pay much attention to nostalgic discussions about how the MMO landscape used to be pre-2004 because I know that the MMO players were a different and much smaller niche group back then. MMOs are mainstream now and have a much larger and diverse user base many of whom cut their teeth on a totally different gaming environment.

Heck, that initial late 90's early 2000's MMO crowd grew up without cell phones, or IM. Most of us did not play FPS games nor any other twitch-based genres on a regular basis: we prefered slower-paced RPGs and MMORPGs were the hottest thing since sliced bread for us.

Now there are a variety of different types of MMO players that are there for umpteen different reasons. Some care about nothing but "end game"... some are there to "beat the game" as quickly as humanly possible... some want their PVP in short 10-minute doses... somewhere in that crowd, the original MMOers still play. i suspect they're the ones who like to ride slowly and smell the roses.

Gaffney is talking about one particular type of gamer... probably the type that is Wildstar's target audience. Yes they're still there in ESO--although many of those who want to achieve goals quickly are already gone from ESO and are probably in Wildstar for the next little while-- but there are a lot of players who don't really want to do anom farming.

I tried it for about half an hour one day and promptly left that and got into a group of 4 who wanted to follow the quest lines in Craglorn overland and into public dungeons,,, now THAT was fun and kept me entertained for about 4-5 hours on a Sunday afternoon. I find the pace of grinding groups - be they anomaly farmers or dolmen and world boss farmers in other areas-- too fast paced. It feels to me like I either have to have ADHD or at least simulate it with too many coffees or Red Bulls... to each their own.

Nice post. I can definitely relate to everything you wrote. It's probably why I am still having fun in ESO and plan to continue for quite a while.

someforumguy · June 2014

Originally posted by gwei1984

Gamers they do this in WS, too. People in WS are starting to level afk in battlegrounds because its faster than questing and there is no afk-votekick in place. There is no easy solution in my eyes other than restricting your game to a single progression way. Do you really want devs to go that way?

This is possible? I can understand that a freshly released MMO has issues that need to be fixed. But the thing you are describing is one of those more obvious pitfalls that any MMO developer should try to avoid. There have been too many examples of this kind of exploit already.

This kind of problem has been solved many times already. One is an afk timer that prevents you from gaining xp if you are not active with your character. Autokick afk people after a set time and replace it with the next in que or something. This can all be automated without much problem. I would even add a small cooldown after that, if you want to go afk during pvp, here take some extra time

Stupid themeparks with their stupid 'endgame'

SonOfValmar · June 2014

Elder Scrolls Online is a game designed to make you quest. After questing from 1-50, I don't want to open up 2 more faction worth of quests that need doing for me to continue leveling. That is bad design, and the reason people just decide to farm is because they want to be done with leveling. Especially after finishing the main story. People want to reach an end point after the journey and have a new adventure open up. Elder Scrolls Online wants you to go through the same experience 3 times before reaching new adventures.

The best thing you can do for gamers is to give them options, differing paths towards similar goals. This way people can find what they enjoy (and perhaps even their favorite shortcuts) on towards the eventual new adventures at max level. WildStar followed this thought in its development; however, Elder Scrolls Online forgot to include that philosophy in their game, this is why you end up with so many bitter Veteran Rank players and those who just get bored of doing endless quests.

Gamers are usually trying to find the best way for themselves to enjoy a product, while developers desire to shape a specific response from gamers. I would say the burden of this topic falls on the developers alone.

d_20 · June 2014

A lot of well considered and thoughtfully written posts in this thread. Thanks, guys.

I'm subbed for another month. I will look forward to seeing how ZoS develops this game. I hope to hear more about how AvA and Cyrodiil figure in future plans.

adam_nox · June 2014

Gaffney is dead wrong. The problem is that MMO's are designed so that the fun part is getting new stuff rather than enjoying quality content... because there is virtually none in ANY mmo ever.

If there weren't competition influenced by character progress, and content was good, people would take their time savoring what is available rather than trying to get past it quickly.

The fact that he thinks this way is imo dire for Wildstar.

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ESO, Gaffney, Anomaly Farming, and "endgame"

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