Hello,

Lots of MMORPGs are out and they are all crap, in my opinion.

Why is that? Well... they're all too easy to play. I rarely feel any sense of challenge or difficulty in quite a lot of MMORPGs recently and dating back to 2006 when i started playing them.

When I say too easy, what do I really mean by that? I will elaborate:

1. Killing monsters out in the world for whatever gain, whether it's for quests, farming some mats, general beast bashing - all are incredibly easy to kill. Killing may take less than 30 seconds. Killing a bear is the same as killing a wolf except the bear might have 50HP more than the wolf.

2. Leveling up is too easy for the sole purpose of getting players up to the last level as quick as possible to experience tail end of game content such as dungeons, scenarios, arena style PVP - whatever it is, the journey there is often short lived in either open world quests, dungeons, or instanced PVP.

3. Professions are either too easy or too hard to level up and thus making it too easy for a player to gain lots of gold very quickly, allowing them to gain new gears from other players while leveling up - making their leveling experience more easier than it already is. Too hard would be that it simply takes a whole gaming session in itself to just level professions, disallowing you from leveling your character as all you are consuming your time on is massive amounts of mats grinding for example in the same zone you leveled in 10 levels ago.

4. The 4th and final reason is probably the one that every MMORPG gamer is sick of the most. This is constant patching of new content every few months which prevents players from being able to settle down with their achievements and progression with their character because we are always on a travelator like a mouse - constantly running to consume the latest content so that we might enjoy 1 week of superiority amongst our enemies to then have to redo all that again on another patch of content, or expansion. While this is done, constant nerfs and buffs to classes keep occuring, changing the way your class or character played on any part of the game before the changes.

So how can these be fixed? I will specify:

1. Simply don't make the monsters too easy to kill. Give them proper AI, make them attack as hard as a player would and make them use evasive skills to avoid your attacks and give variety to the fight other than them just standing there in a stationary position performing 1 lousy hit attack on you. Give them equal HP or more than you, and give them tough enough armor points so that the fight does not last 30 seconds or less. In return give the player the experience points in relation to how hard the monster was to kill.

2. Don't make zones with level caps and minimum level requirements. Just do the same thing for questing at the quest level. For example, the first zone you start the game in, also has level 80 players because they are questing in that zone doing level 80 quests relative to the storyline they are following. If you just segment off zones between low and high levels, then the zone you played in before is effectively obsolete and there is no reason for you to ever revisit the place. Just have different levels of quests in various zones, and stop thinking of high and low level zones as a design philosophy. This will stop players power leveling through content to 50% of 1 zone and finding that they are high level enough to just abandon it all and move to the next, and it will space out the population much more in the world realistically. Players will end up playing where they want to because they like it there, not because it's just the latest content patch with the latest grind quests for new gear. It will also make players choose their own path to the end game and will allow them to meet and greet with new players and see through content on a longer but more pleasant gaming experience.

3. Quite simply, have enough quests in zones where the player is situated so that they have more than enough time to realistically cap their profession to the resources in that zone before they finish all the content. This will allow players to move onto the next areas with a profession level ready to consume resources there without having to trace back to where they were. Too many MMORPGs come out with next to no quests or content to work towards. I remember SWTOR, I completed Tatooine in just 4 hours of gameplay. Rubbish.

4. Very simple again. Don't release new content patches every 2 months. Release 1 every 6 months. Release 1 expansion every 2 years, not 1. Do not resort to expansion launching every damn christmas because you know every player will buy it. Most importantly, when new expansions and content patches come, don't buff or nerf any classes, weapons, abilities what so ever. You should really be making the game 100% perfect and then launching it - not doing what every other game does which is release it with broken classes and no design has gone into how they play against environments or players and then you constantly tweak stuff on the fly. All you do is annoy players and give others an unfair advantage. Make them how they should be from day 1 at launch and leave them alone, forever. Do not under any circumstances please the mass playerbase by trying to give them all what they want. Lots of players want very unreasonable things and unfair advantages. These players are casuals and like their bitesize gaming sessions and are not interested in a time commitment game but MMORPGs are suppost to be time consuming and commitment type of games of epic challenge and journeys to make it to the top. That's why we want to play them.

So.... so far I have seen highlights of being able to PVP your way to the highest level and ignoring the open world questing experience, and that the journey up to level 50 will be a boring drag of solo play that pretty much becomes obsolete, in other words there's no reason to ever revisit the areas you completed prior to gaining that level.

The features I want are ones that a gamer should want. Something to give me reason to keep going back to everyday in terms of gameplay and being immersed in the world with my other friends and strangers in Tamriel. Not features that just have us consume content to get gear and to then sit around waiting for more content to keep consuming. I can tell from the fancy website and the podcast videos with the way the devs answer things and are dressed - they appear very devious to me and do not have Elder Scrolls' best interests at heart.

But of course, if you can - prove me wrong. That goes out to Zenimax, not just other players. I challenge you as the Jarl of My Bedroom in My House On Planet Earthrim, to prove me wrong. I do not think you will succeed.

you say mmo's are no fun cause they are easy yet being easy is something all games have become.

Skyrim on the hardest difficulty is not easy.

Skyrim is not an MMO. If TESO is going to have the level of master / highest level of difficulty of Skyrim across the board in all environments - then yes, the game will be fantastic and bring back the epic challenge to MMORPG gaming, in my opinion. Also read the rest, don't just pick on my 1st line and assume the rest is junk. I tend to avoid posting crap, I want to be a valued member of any community not a useless one.

sad but true

recently I find myself playing more and more minesweeper, because using your brains and having a losing rate around 80% is what keeps you going


but hey: I remember some statements that you'll find yourself killed in ESO very often

I hope it won't be easy. There's a sweet spot between boring easy and frustratingly difficult. I hope they hit that. There's been somewhat of a resurgence in difficult games of late. Like Dark Souls and XCOM.

of course it is easy.
it just takes you longer to kill your enemies.

I'm basically after that kind of difficulty in an MMORPG. That and developers and publishing companies to stop catering their games to the mass market for money and giving players all the eye candy they want, even if it means ruining the integrity and lifespan of the game.

If Zenimax can comment, that would be fantastic. I'm really interested to know what exactly on these issues is Zenimax going to actually do to break the trend of crap and easy to play MMO gaming.

We really do not need another MMO on the market that does the same thing as the others with a different franchise name slapped on the box.

edit reason: cut this out (If they are not going to cater the game for the commited player who wants to think and have an epic struggle - then I see no reason to play it.). Unfair statement due to the game not being out yet and no response from Zenimax as of yet.

1. I can't argue with your solution, making enemies more difficult and in turn increasing the reward for experience.

What does this have to do with TESO? If I recall correctly, your experience gain will be larger if you complete battles with higher efficiency, this is more than other MMOs have ever done. Usually the only incentive to defeat a monster is to get the quest over with. In TESO, the better you are killing that monster for the quest, the more you're receiving. If this game is anything like Tera, it could have BAMs (Bad ass monsters), and it wouldn't all be about easy encounters. If you want a challenge, pull more mobs. In Tera, I found myself puling up to 20 mobs in the lower levels for the challenge. The option is there for you to make your fights harder yourself, if you don't have the creativity to do it, the problem falls on you, not the dev.


2. Again, what does this have to do with TESO? The quests will be dynamic, interesting encounters, not anything like that standard MMO questing experience. It's also yet another thing you yourself can control. In the past few MMOs I've played, none of them were worthy enough for me to even reach endgame, and I stayed at the low levels, and created new alts. No one is forcing you to get to endgame, and different people have different tastes.

Your suggestion and solution for this is rather interesting, but how would you change monsters, mining nodes, plants, and soul gem levels etc. for those that are at higher levels? At the same time, doesn't this conflict with your 1st concern? If you want a harder challenge, can't you go to higher level zones and quest there for the challenge? By messing with the 2nd suggesting, you're hurting the 1st. The most important one is this: how will you change monster levels? This is a MMO, everyone around you can see the same things - you can't have level 80 monsters mixed in with level 1 monsters. You can't remove levels either, as that completely negates hard work and a sense of progression.


3. Valid concern, I don't like crafting getting in the way of the economy, and there should be a nice balance. Don't necessarily agree with your suggestion as a fix, but it's still a valid concern. We don't know enough about TESO yet to know if it will have such a problem.


4. There's several things wrong with what you've suggested: Namely, if content is released every 6 months, one could buy subscription for one month, finish the content, and not pay however much a month they would have for those other 5 months. People will feel like they need to rush through the content, and will resort to one of your earlier concerns.

Again, you sound like you know nothing of TESO - there will be little to no need for the devs to mess with classes/skill trees/abilities after except for maybe initial tweaking. There are going to be hundreds of ways to make your own character, rather than the 8 classes + 3 specialization trees for each you have in each MMO. Each class will have access to 15+ skill trees, rather than 3. There will be more focus on what you want to create, and not what the best build is. In that case, there's less and less need for devs to try and balance things.

TL;DR version: You sound like you haven't spent a single minute researching about this game, as most of these concerns have already been addressed by ZOS. At the same time, its not even in Beta, so how could you suggest fixes to things that probably won't exist?