Greetings,

Recently my imagination has been getting the best of me - observing the obscure over the top armor/weapons in computer games.

I've imagine that "self-defeating" looking 'armor has a story... of some backend departmental group of 'developers' spewing litanies from the almighty tome of 'demographics' or some evil concept artist who managed to imbibe his manager with "thislooksgreat" tonic. I even imagine the colluding programmers probably have a lair, practice dark rituals, Pokémon voodoo dolls, and statistical sheets pinned on walls forming strange symbols. This is just my way of making sense of the overly silly being allowed through my monitor.

These dark images that appear on my screen often include: self-decapitating pauldrons, and odd groin tassets (lower waist flipper flapper metal plates) that probably vex animators. Maybe if they actually stuck with a real, anatomical friendly armor templates they wouldn't have issues with clipping or accidental avatar dismemberment. Though, I guess if they are portraying a masochists theme, it may be fitting....and funny.

Really though, I hope TESO does not go this route. I hope they provide variations of looks, but without convoluted stats or visuals. Thus far, the art depictions of heavy armor look too much alike with each other and simply look like a demographic token...... ninjas in shiny meshes with angry eye slits of doom.... plus a touch of fancy embellishments because everyone at "yey level" should look like a king!

I really don't like the idea of everyone running around in plate 'looking' armor. This zaps some ambition right there. I want to be the guy in the battle field that looks different than everyone else, but for a reason, that this weapon here really does eat souls, and you might want to bring some friends before trying to solo me. Realm rank kind of helps this, but once enough people reach a certain medium it will again return to being lack luster. Items are probably the simpler fix - for the power hungry (probably the 70% playing) and help add more value to character identity. I think random drop chance in the world for these powerful items are the best implementation. However, due to the qq population... we can't have that... it will hurt other peoples feelings who've worked harder than you.... pfff

Half the fun with any of the classical RPG's was getting a questionably overpowered weapon and relishing in the mayhem you could cause with it. You could do this in all of the more recent elder scrolls games, that made these solo play games even more fun. Now you want to get rid of that and focus on balance because it’s a mmo. Okay, but you are taking some of the allure out of the genre......

If I had it my way, I would make some items truly powerful in an mmo, and really hard to get. They would be the only things with glowy effects on them, and people would know exactly what the hell it was and probably run. I figure this would increase player ambition and make qq'ers rage quit (the whole less than 5% of the player base).

Anymore, it feels like gaming companies model their balancing schema like our country, enforcing equality to the detriment of ambition.

I hope Zenimax steers the ESO ship away from what sounds like a mass collective identity game to a hero centric selfish afair. WAR failed partly due to this, imho.



"The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of Socialism is the equal sharing of miseries." - Winston Churchill