Dueling in ESO: The Violent Nature of Tamriel and The Unintended and Unresolved Consequences

In concept, I understand the need for dueling. Dueling is the only way to truly test one's build for PVP before taking it into combat. Sure the DPS test dummies are nice for posting DPS numbers, but the fact remains, those numbers only represent PVE/DPS values. And, since dummies don't fight back, you can test a tank or healer builds.

So from that point of view, the introduction of dueling to The Elder Scrolls Online allowed the broader test of all classes and PVP builds; but, it came at a price; a price that everyone in Tamriel has been paying since the One Tamriel patch dropped. Essentially, what dueling did was bring PVP out of Cyrodiil and into all Tamriel. 

When dueling was released as a part of the One Tamriel patch back in the fall of 2016 it introduced some major issues to the play-ability of the game. The first major issue is that anyone could duel anybody else, anywhere, at anytime and multiple duels could be happening simultaneously at the exact same location. For whatever reason, probably ease of access to easy targets, people chose to duel at way shrines, in major towns, inside and around the Undaunted Enclaves and other locations that required people to travel to for turning in quests, sell/deconstruct their hard earned gear or just pop over to town to rest from their exhausting adventuring.

By allowing dueling in and around major hubs of activity non-dueling players get hit with "Unusually Long Load Times", which is actually not so unusual these days. Quest and pledge givers can take a literal minute or two to load in and not be a black silhouette. Game crashes and locks are still rampant and some major cities, <cough> Elden Root <cough>, and these same cities are so laggy and crash-prone, that they are not the hub they were before One Tamriel.

Dueling also opened the game to bullies. High level characters played by small penis'd people who need to make others feel small to feel good about themselves, picking on new characters (who don't know any better) using the dueling feature as their weapon of choice for their bullying tactics. This is such a problem that Zenimax had to include an auto-decline all duels option for players just trying to quest.

The problems introduced with Dueling are so easy to fix, but Zenimax has not listened to our cries to make it stop. Instead they push forward like they can't hear our tears of frustration falling like Niagara. But let me put on my "Mr. Fix It Hat" and offer some viable suggestions to solve our never-ending saga of dueling woes.

First and foremost, make Dueling an illegal activity, like it is and was (for the most part) in the real world. If a any NPC witnesses a duel, each party responsible will get 2000g bounty and an invincible guard will appear and attack the duelers. This would definitely push dueling outside of towns and into remote locations which would limit the impact on the rest of the players in the game.

Second, see that image above, of what looks like a dueling arena? Yeah, build one of those in each of the lands of Tamriel; a place, an arena if you will, specifically for dueling to take place, legally. Make it open for everyone to go watch if they want to. Make it so the "Invite Duel" option is only available in these locations. Just keep it away from major cities. Zenimax gave us a similar feature in Summerset with the "Colosseum of the Old Ways", and even gave us an achievement for dueling there. Give us these types of locations across all of Tamriel and the unintended consequences of dueling, mentioned above, will go away.

Third, with the introduction of Battlegrounds, why is dueling still needed? Why can't there be 1v1 Battleground Map, that looks like the arena mentioned above, and that when two people agree to duel, are they are loaded into?

Again, I see the value of dueling, but I think it can be done in a way that it minimizes the impact on the rest of us denizens of Tamriel. That's my two cents, which when inflation is factored in, isn't worth a whole lot, but I feel better getting it out.

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The Elder Scrolls Online: The Daunting Task of Shopping Guild Stores

One of my biggest personal issues with the overall user experience in the game is not being able to search stuff in guild traders, you know, recipes, set armor items and motifs etc. I know that crashes, glitches and other problems with the games have a much more significant impact to the gaming experience in Tamriel, but not having an ability to search for specific things I need by just typing in Ring of the Red Mountain instead of having to scroll through 16 pages of rings would be a huge improvement to the user experience in the game.

This is especially if you are looking for a Silken Ring Swords Motif... just filtering for Purple in motifs still leaves you with 10+ pages to look through, only to find that the guild trader doesn't have it. The incredibly long list of items in a guild store, pages and pages and pages of things you have scroll through to find what you are looking for is a daunting task; one I generally hate undertaking.

Hence my use of of the above gif... the complete overwhelming nature of of finding anything specific in a guild store is far too daunting of a task.

Let's be honest, we can search the crown store through the housing interface's purchase tab to find a chair, not just any chair, but an Breton Pew, Windowed and we don't have to scroll through all the chairs across all the different types of furnishing (praxis, plans, blueprints nor Dining, Parlor, etc.) but after three years we still can't search the guild traders? I mean housing is only a year and half old, guild traders came into existence a short time after the game launched.

I realize that Zenimax makes money, as in REAL COLD HARD CASH, off people buying crowns and using those crowns to purchase furnishings (and other crown store items), but seriously, can't Zenimax just copy and paste the search code from the Crown Store Furnishing interface and apply it to the guild trader interface?

Is it really that hard?

Wait... I just realized what I asked and how what I asked relates to who I asked it of.

Of course it is hard for Zenimax.

First; they don't have any incentive to develop it. They get gold in the form of tax with each sale in a guild store, but gold really means nothing to them since, unless you are bot farmer, has no real world monetary value.

Second; they have proven time and again that whatever they touch breaks everything else in the game. So if they were to develop this search capability in guild stores, it would likely make it so anyone who did damage in PVP would produce a message that the player is sending too many messages, kick them out of the game and crash them to the home screen, remove all player's character's an ability to weapon swap, change the stats of training gear to proc a 100% chance of 1000% weapon damage for any damage is delivered and give us all 17 minutes of "Unusually Long Load Time" screens with every 18th step a character takes.

Third; Zenimax has made it their mission since before Summerset to not make anything easy.

I want to talk about that last point a little bit more because it is an important point. See, Zenimax reads peoples comments regarding the game being boring and not enough new content to keep us busy between releases; this is about player engagement. But rather than work to deliver more value added content, deeper content, what they choose to do it read those player's comments and see them as things were too easy. And while some things remain easy in the game; grinding levels = easy, leveling alchemy/provisioning = easy, etc., but they their idea of more content is to make it harder to complete many basic things in the game.

Let's look at some examples. First, jewelry crafting research. They have made the jewelry crafting line without a skill bonus in Lapidary for increasing the number of items you can research at one time. This means you can only research one necklace or ring at a time, not a ring and a necklace at the same time, like you can Metallurgy Skill in the blacksmith skill line.

But with only 18 traits to research in Jewelry it's not that bad right?

It could take you four months to research all the traits in Jewelry without purchasing reduction scrolls from the crown store, or having an Orc as your master craftsman or having ESO plus with it's bonuses.

This isn't adding more content, or making it harder, it's just adding time to an already arduous time-consuming task; and this get more frustrating for those of us who were already Master Crafters before Summerset dropped.

Now let's look at another example; quests. Zenimax's idea of more content is making quests that require you to travel from one place to another and back and forth doing nothing but talking and conveying messages between two or more NPCs. The game was already a joke due to the lazy nature of NPCs in this game and this back and forth adding load times in a patch that was plagued with broken load screen. A problem we initially experienced in Morrowind.

<Quest>

NPC Farmer: "Run over there and talk to my pig, he'll tell you."

NPC Pig: "Yup, the farmer is right. Now go the bar back in town and talk to the drunk at the table."

NPC Drunk: "Yup, I agree. Now tell that farmer I agreed."

NPC Farmer: "See, I told you. And here is 100g, 3k experience and a green ancestor silk hat."

</Quest>

They took this to an extreme with Summerset. The quests to max out the Psijic skill line, the "A Book and its Cover" quest/no-a-quest/achievement and bouncing and loading to and from the same locations repeatedly. The achievements and housing items that come with the achievements that require player to enter the same three delves and destroy the "new dolmens" called Geysers, over and over and over again for 30 days to get it done.

This are not what players meant by more content. This is not the depth users were asking for. These are mundane, and frankly, boring filler and fluff. The same boring filler that players complained about with Morrowind and even more so with Clockwork City. Repetitive, rinse and repeat game fodder.

Don't get me wrong, the main story line of each of the above mentioned releases was fantastic. Good story telling. Epic adventuring. It was all the shallow side quests. Each release failed to match the quality of the side quests of the base game, not that all side quests of the base game are gold... they aren't, but there are some that were much more fulfilling than others.

Within a couple of days most of the people I gamed with had completed the main story, roughly 8 to 16 hours of game play. Within a week, most everyone I game with had the Psijic skill-line maxed out. Within two weeks, everyone had their Jewelry crafting to 50. Within a month everyone has their Summerset dailies and achievements done. Everyone seriously looking to complete their motifs has done so. After a month, of game play the only thing remaining with Summerset is researching Jewelry traits.. and the game is as boring as it was the day before Summerset dropped.

Okay, I have to admit that wasn't a fair statement. The game wasn't as boring as the day before Summerset dropped.

It is more boring than the day before Summerset dropped, because the day before Summerset dropped, we were excited for Summerset and we don't have that now. We get to deal with bugs, crashes, bot farmers and an extended free play period because the game we paid for, a game that many of us continue to pay for (with Chapters we plaid for now becoming DLC, ESO Plus and Crown Store purchases) is free for anyone with a Gamepass subscription through Xbox.

Now that's some bullshit. 

No, you see, Zenimax doesn't want to make any part of the game more usable, convenient or, dare I say, easy. They don't want that because if it takes an hour and half to find a Minotaur Chest motif, well in Zenimax's eyes, that just "content" to fill the hours while we wait for them to toil away at fixing the stuff they broke and wait for them continue to develop another release filled with repetitive quests, bugs, glitches, crashes and other drivel to keep us busy for a few weeks this fall. All before the next round of unbearable boredom sets in and we get to take another repetitious ride of frustration and disappointment.  

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