The problem withe the assumption fromt he OP is that all Glass armour will have to look the same. They could introduce multiple styles of glass amour while still having it be distinguishable as glass amour. Just as WoW has a great deal of plate, chain, leather or cloth.

If the concern is with the stats of the items then I have little to no doubt you will have some form of attribute system in TESO either in place on the items (likely) or through enchantments (to either augment additional attributes or to stand alone).

The largest problem as has been mentioned is that whilst WoW has an enourmous amount of armour very few are actually useful at any given time if the player is playing in the current expansion, which leads to most armour being little more than appearance fodder or vendor fodder. I would like to see varying styles visually so people can find a look they like (and visual customisation is important in MMOs for a great many), while having meaningful equipment rather than weekly gear changes because item A has 5% better stats.

The answer to that question was actually given in the very post you're responding to.

Was it not clear enough for you to understand it, or was it just blatant disrespect for opinions other than your own that lead you to ignore it?

It goes with the lore to have the standard Orc, Nord or Elven gear. But it does not make it where the more advanced gear they can have something special or different but it should not be from some other MMO it should be unique to the ESO world.

lol, his reason was because the guy likes to roleplay and wants his armor to wear down over time and the other guy thinks screwing with everyone elses enjoyment/convienance by adding a stupid effect for a few peoples "immersion" (where's the realism in that anyway? make it deterioriate over the course of years then). Sorry but that's dumb.

You seem to be operating under the falsifiable assumption that your own preference is somehow "intelligent".

Role playing means adding realism to the game. So for your armor to decay or need repair adds to that realism but I don't know if adding stuff like this will be possible in a MMO.

Gear farming after transmogrification was implemented really was quite fun, yes. However I'd more like to see ESO go the route of using accessories (they won't, but still) than entire new tiers of gear. But then again we won't even get dyes (at launch atleast), so who knows which route they'll go.

Your continued "troll-posts" does you no good, I assure you.

Whatever you say, hombre. Gear breaking permanently over time is a fantastic idea and I am clearly wrong that it would totally piss off the majority just to immerse the minority.

So we've gone from:

"I think this idea is dumb lol"
to
"this idea would (supposedly) piss of the majority" a.k.a. "the majority thinks this is dumb lol"

What we have not established, yet, is why the idea is dumb. Let alone why it is "dumber" than gear lasting forever.

name anything (except electronic or organic) that can only be mend a specific number of times.

Some things just don't need to be explained. As far as this matter goes "it would be unfun" is pretty much as far as you need to take the idea. You really think the majority would enjoy losing their Sword of Beasting +3 after a month or two of wear and tear because some small population of goofuseses want an extra layer of "realism" or whatever you want to attribute to it? Go ahead, poll that up and see how it goes.

Some realism is best left for the real world.

The bit marked in red by me. I sincerly hope this is not going to be the case in TESO. If a MMO needs two seperate stats for pvp and pve then its already failing at one major game mechanic some place within the game. There should be no seperation to pve and pvp equipment, they should all be the same.

Well personally I'd say that a system like that is simply unfair ,( I wouldn't go as far as to call it dumb) from my experience tanks have to repair armor sets on a much more regular basis than dps or healers so it's a system that pretty well penalizes tanks , I'm all for immersion and realism but where do you draw the line? in medieval times it could take a knight several hours with the help of one or more squires to dress in a full set of plate armor? should we add that to the game too for 'immersion'?

They have said there will be items to buy for the PvP currency, though there has been no stat mentioned for PvP specifically (hopefully there won't be), and it has been mentioned that the best gear will be found throughout the differing playstyles (crafting, PvP, PvE), to encourage players to try different aspects of the game.

If it takes a 'knight' several ingame hours (most stuff is done faster ingame than is realistic, making food takes 30mins not 3 seconds) so about 30 seconds ish to get his gear on, I guess having a squire would be a neat trade off.

Whilst I can appreciate there are people who enjoy the mechanic of breaking weapons, it is not a mechanic that is favoured by many players in the western market (and even most in the eastern market are far from happy about it, though they tolerate it a great deal more). It serves only to really add another form of grind into the game in the form of reaquiring items, beneficial to crafters or those who can most effectively lock down content. Most players are unhappy about raiding each week for 4hrs, and yet you cannot see why having something that would have players lose untold hours of gear aquisition / upgrading vanish (thus forcing them to repeat the grind they had to undertake to get to that point).

As has been said there is the introduction of realism to enhance a game experience, and there is the introduction of realism for the sake of realism, this is the latter and would not benefit the game in the western MMO market.

This could be handled in a more dynamic manner. Your weapon can break but it doesn't stay that way permanently. It can also still be usable in the broken form. Just reduce effectiveness by 50% or something until it is repaired. Then include the ability to damage your opponents gear in battle with Enemy AI and other players as a tactic. Have weapons such as swordbreakers included that their only real function is to damage your opponents weapons. Just work out the balance issues and I could see this being a really interesting addition. Duel wielding a sword breaker and a sword for instance could introduce a new type of character. Not a tank or DPSer or Healer but what is essentially a crippler. Makes you keep a backup weapon as well. Adds to the economy. Just do not make it super easy to break your opponents weapons and or armor.

Oka-hay.. in chronological order, then.

How about we do this the other way around? You could try to explain how combat gear is not affected by http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatigue_(material), and how you fix a broken sword made of folded steel (while retaining the original properties, obviously).


Ah, okay. "It is a bad idea to inconvenience players in a game, because it is unfun for them."

Well damn man. If only you had shared this piece of wisdom before the guys over at Zenimax started designing all sorts of dungeons to hide gear in, with all those monsters inconveniencing you while you look for it. Spawning all gear in chests in the starter zones would have been so much more convenient for players and devs both.

Wait, actually.. why put it in boxes - those need to be opened. My bad.


That is an excellent point, thank you for bringing it up. It leads a bit further down the rabbit hole of game design. In sand-box games (which would be most likely to feature this kind of gear detoriation), you do not encounter classic trinity-based gameplay as regularly.
Of course there are characters built to fight on the front lines (who will suffer more armor wear), while others do ranged combat. But the ranged combat division has its own drawbacks, such as: archers shooting arrows which have to be crafted, spells consuming reagents that have to be collected or bought.

It ends up being a fairly level playing field, if you also take into consideration that gear has less impact overall, and competitive equipment is much easier to come by than in a themepark/trinity environment.

What you are describing is a bad implementation of a good mechanic. It becomes obvious when you use the term "another grind", while sand-box mechanics (in the most narrow definition) only have one type of grind to begin with: Material acquisition.
Alternately, you can try to acquire currency and buy what you need from players who enjoy material acquisition and crafting.

To address the concrete example of raiding for 4 hours a week to re-acquire gear: Sounds like a themepark nightmare to me? If we port this example to the sand-box environment of early Ultima Online..

4 peaceful hours of mining ore: Would have provided me with enough iron to forge an absurd amount of weapons. And I mean so many that I can not even give you a good estimation. 100? 200? I don't know. In any case enough to play like a clown and last for much longer than a week under a full loot ruleset.

4 uninterrupted hours of dungeon crawling: Would have broken the back of a stable full of pack horses. I could've bought a house with that gold. Twice. Before selling the magic items.

Of course the charm was in things not being that easy, with people competing over these resources.

Now to bring all this into an ESO context: Would such a mechanic be viable? Yes, absolutely. It is a question of adjusting resource acqusition for players in such a way that a healthy economy is possible, without drifting off into "grind" territory.
However, you have to be willing to let go of some themepark aspects, such as the Grande Sword of Dragon Doom and Gloom only dropping 1/12 times you defeat "Ugglug the Fearsome", and it being the only way for a Dragon Knight to push enough DPS to kill "Afrabhart the Awesome" before he goes into enraged mode.

Some things just don't mix.

Already been confirmed that there will be no PvP stats on items in the game. You can get items FROM PvP, but you will never see PvP stats on them though.

A sword can only be sharpened so often and stress from wear and tear lead to the blade having to be reforged (that makes it not the same weapon as it is not a simple mending). Damage to armor can make it lose it's ability to protect and can't be patched and maintain it's defensive capabilities. Bows wear out and become useless. Pretty much everything can wear out

Great so your going to need to carry two sets of everything just to play the game. One set for PvP and one set for PvE.

No you are not. You WON'T have separate PVP and PVE gear.

actually you want to have that.

there are no PvP or PvE stats, but as a dps or healer you will need a bit more survivability in PvP while as a tank you may want do inflict more damage or have more magicka for CC then in PvE.

They have already stipulated there will be unlimited ammunition for bows.

That would be an opinion, you believe it to be a good mechanic, and in the context of a sandbox it most certainly is. However this isn't a sandbox, the sandbox like features are relatively limited. Sandbox games, thus far, have not fared well in the modern MMO age (with EvE being the only one to reallly thrive, but is still by the masses considered niche).

You took my example of raiding literally, whereas it was meant to give an example as to the level of time the target audience considers too much grind, this is not the time of Ultima, EQ etc. the choices are far vaster and people feel their time more valuable, wanting a game they can get in play and get out without inconviniences. I can see them introducing item decay as done in other MMOs (in their single player titles too) where durability reaches 0 and the item becomes unuseable until repaired (and there will be those who would complain about this).

Whereas I agree it would be possible to implement such a feature it would not benefit the game to introduce such a mechanic that will annoy far more than it makes happy. If you cannot see that in the current market you are allowing your personal bias to cloud your vision.

(By the way before you think I am against it, I really wouldn't care either way, I can see the advantages and enjoy many crafting systems, but I don't think that my view is the only one and what I can tolerate in an MMO I am aware most won't).

Well, I like WoW's huge variety of armor and weapon styles, but I've never cared for the PvP/Raiding/PvE gear. Collecting these different gear types is a huge time/gold sink. For example, PvP gear is purchased with conquest points, which can only be obtained through long hours of grinding in battlegrounds, but one must have this gear to be effective at any form of PvP combat. It's even worse if one has a lot of alts to outfit. For those of us who enjoy world PvP but aren't very fond of battlegrounds, acquiring the necessary gear is a major chore. I much prefer having only one type of gear in this regard.