Gaming – The Mind of David Krider

To ESO or Not to ESO

Back at the first of the year, I “retired” from the Elder Scrolls Online. I let my ESO+ subscription lapse, and simply stopped playing. There were many reasons.

First, I really felt like the game was dying. The monthly user counts were as low as they had been in 7 years. People were complaining about the changes in the game in on their forums and on Reddit. There were many performance problems, crashes, and disconnects. There was a 9-month ongoing thread on their forums about it. Even if you weren’t affected (I wasn’t), you couldn’t play through a whole trial without several people dropping, and having to wait for them to rejoin. This was causing trial prog groups to give up, because you couldn’t satisfy the time requirement part of the trifecta. Also, ZOS canceled the American half of their big 10 year anniversary tour, after having had the one in Amsterdam, and they were being jerks about how streamers were covering them. Even though it came out a few weeks after I quit, the collective atmosphere around the game was such that the most prominent ESO streamer, NefasQS, quit as well, and made a whole video about why.

Second, running vet trials was pretty stressful. Thanks to the Oakensoul ring (for heavy attack builds) and the Arcanist class, I was able to put characters together to run vet content, and farm endgame gear. I got all geared up on 2 DPS characters, a tank, and a healer. But vet trials are 2 hours of sustained clicking, with very little break. I felt that it was hurting my health. It’s far too much to get into here, but I feel that part of my health problems stem from holding stress in my gut, and I started to realize that I was clenched and barely breathing for most of those 2 hours. Vet trials require everyone to be paying attention, or you will wipe the group. It also requires all the DPS you can manage, all the time, or you will wipe the group. And, most of the time, when the group wipes, you know who caused it. So there’s a lot of pressure to perform, and there’s a surprising amount of skill involved in playing the game at that level.

Third, I was running with a casual guild a couple times a week, and it felt like I wasn’t really clicking with the leader. One evening, I volunteered for a 4-man dungeon that the leader wanted to run, and even though I was vocal about wanting to the dungeon, she ignored me and chose someone else to run who chimed in well after I did. It hurt my feelings. It was done in a way with plausible deniability, as only people who spend a lot of time on Discord can appreciate, but I had enough history to contextualize it, and I just couldn’t not see it as personal. She just didn’t want me to run with her. I mean, everyone is allowed to do what they want, but if I’m honest, it hurt my feelings quite a bit. Also, the guild leader had allowed another guild to merge with hers, and I didn’t really care for the people who had joined. Altogether, it was just another piece of the puzzle that was deflating my interest in playing.

Fourth, I had managed to knock out most of the achievements in the game, except the PVP stuff. The only major areas I had left to do were running the Infinite Archive and playing Tales of Tribute. IA is pure ESO combat, and I think ESO’s combat is the least likable thing about the game. And ToT is a card game. I didn’t start playing an MMORPG to play a digital form of Dominion. I hate any game that you can spend a bunch of time working on, and then lose suddenly. I didn’t want to do either of those things, so what was left?

So I quit.

I also retired from Fallout 76 at the same time, for the health reason. The FOMO about needing to log in every day and do the things that get you the rewards was anxiety inducing.

But then after several weeks, I got bored, and started playing 76 again.

Then 76 released a fantastic update that I have been loving.

And now ESO has announced an update which sounds like it will also be awesome.

So now I’m considering picking up ESO again, and the question is: To ESO or not to ESO?

First, I like the depth of the game. While I love the combat in 76, it’s very shallow. You can do everything there is to do in a day in the game in about an hour. That’s more like 3 hours in ESO, and that’s just one character. In ESO, you can have 20, while 76 is limited to 5. 76’s main quests will take at most a couple weeks to do. ESO’s takes at least months, if not years. There’s just a lot more to do in ESO.

Second, I like the look of the game. 76’s runs poorly on the PS5. The textures are mushy, the draw distance is clipped, and it rarely feels smooth. And it crashes. A lot. I mean, a lot. ESO runs flawlessly at 4K@60FPS in ultra mode on my modest PC, and it’s beautiful.

Third, I miss doing group content with real humans playing mechanics. I’ve become friends with many people in 76 through doing its one raid, but that’s really just cheesing the first (and maybe last) stage(s) (out of 5), and there’s really not much to talk about. So most of the time, people are just blathering on about nothing in comms, and I have nothing to add. ESO’s trials require comms, and talking about what’s going on, in order to get through them. I guess it’s all pretty impersonal, but on console, in 76, it’s REALLY impersonal. At least in ESO, there’s more camaraderie, and longer times in doing the content lead to closer relationships than in 76.

Fourth, this new update will make it easier to do damage, which will make all content easier. So trials should be less stressful, and Infinite Archive should be less tedious and grindy.

Unfortunately, that still leaves the “problem” of Tales of Tribute, and the fact that they “hid” a mythic lead behind doing it.

There’s also the issue of PVP. I’ve tried serious PVP with one of the big PVP guilds, and it was interesting. We were always getting beat, but I would do more if the game engine was more fair. Mechanically, PVP is in terrible shape in this game. It leads to nothing but gimmicks. I know — and ZOS knows — what the problem is, and they’re going to have to make a lot of people very mad to fix it, so the future is not great. Additionally, socially, the pressure brings out even more cringey behavior in guild comms, and there’s probably nothing to be done about that. So PVP is a negative regardless.

I don’t know what the answer is. At least, not yet.

Bethesda’s Roadmap

I found this 10-month-old interview with Todd Howard, the president of Bethesda. As usual, there’s a lot of talk, but little of substance. Look, I get it. Given his position, he can’t be very specific, or gamers will hound him until his dying day about something he said that didn’t work out the way they wanted. But if you listen between the lines, he says something that lines up with where I think this is all going.

Given my previous and salty experience of buying the advance-availability digital deluxe version of Starfield, and then refunding it because of the nightmarish inventory management, I just went and looked at the Steam chart for Starfield.

Ouch. That seems low. So I went and looked at Skyrim too, for comparison.

Like, ouch, man. The 12-year-old Skyrim has almost ten times as many players as Starfield. Maybe this is an unfair comparison, as Skyrim has twice as many players than Elder Scrolls Online and three times as many as Fallout 76, so Skyrim is sort of a juggernaut of video games. But still. Dang.

I found another video (which I won’t bother linking), lamenting the lack of updates to Starfield since launch while the player numbers languish. He complains that the potential of the game isn’t being realized. However, the “potential” of this game is being worked on, just not in the way he’s looking for it.

When Fallout 4 released, the settlement building aspect was widely criticized as not making much sense in the context of a single-player game. You could build up all the settlements in the game, and create supply routes between them, so that you could pool all your building materials together, and then… the people of those settlements would… help you fight random encounters all over the map? Really? All those hours of effort for this benefit? It was a really good subsystem, but that was the weird part. It made you question why a great, in-game building tool had such an obviously significant development effort put into it, when the in-game utilization of it was so weak. When they eventually released Fallout 76 on the same engine, it suddenly made perfect sense.

Well, they’re doing the same thing with Starfield. It’s well understood through some online leaks of recruiting posts that the studio is working on another “untitled” MMORPG, but it seems patently obvious (at least to me, given previous history) that this will be based on Starfield. So the lack of updates with Starfield has to be understood in this context.

They are surely coordinating the direction of the inevitable single player game expansions with the work going on with the MMO version of the game. In the same way that they timed the big Fallout 76 Ghoulification update to land with the TV show, I believe they’re holding things back waiting on other teams. Don’t forget that they promised to port it to Playstation, and now people are noting that this is being hinted in the Creation store, so that’s coming, and what better way to hype that re-launch on a new platform than with the forthcoming Shattered Worlds update? And after that, the next big update will probably land with the reveal of their new MMO based on the property.

The Inevitable Monetization of Subclassing

The well-known Elder Scrolls Online streamer, Alcast, has a writeup about the forthcoming ESO subclassing feature here: https://alcasthq.com/eso-how-to-prepare-for-subclassing/. He points out that you have to level a skill line to 50 on a class in order to unlock it for use in subclassing, then you have to re-level it to 50 as a subclass line, at half the normal rate of advancement. However, at least that subclass skill line is shared among your other characters.

When they announced this feature was going to be free for base game, I was surprised. Given previous history, I expected this to cost 1500 or 2000 Crowns per character. Now the monetization angle becomes clear. I think they’ll offer instant subclass skill leveling in the Crown store, and the only question becomes will it be 1500 or 2000 Crowns, and will that be for all 3 skill lines as a class, or per individual skill line? My first guess was going to be 1500 per skill line, but on further reflection, I think it will probably be 3000.

Now we wait to see…

Elder Scrolls Online Subclassing

Well this is actually exciting. Over and over, I see suggestions of how to fix “pain points” in ESO and Fallout 76 go unheeded for years and years, and then something gets announced that is better than any of the things people have suggested. I can’t think of an example off the top, but it’s happened several times. I think we’ve just seen another.

For years and years, people have complained that they wanted to be able to change a character’s class, like you can their race. Being a full-stack developer for decades, their reaction always felt like the class was a high-order property of the character, which was tied into too many things to ever change.

Well they’ve just announced “subclassing.” A character is defined by 3 skill class lines, but subclassing will allow you to swap out 2 of those lines for lines from any of the other 6 classes (but not both from the same one). To me, this is even better. This is much more interesting than just changing classes.

The best part is that it’s free for all players as a base-game feature. It won’t cost $15 per toon in the monetization shop, which, given prior history, is what I would have guessed if no one had told me otherwise. (That’s what the “race change token” costs.)

At this point, people are worried about 2 things with this change: that class identity will be wiped out, and that there will be significant power creep. First, yes. Class identity is basically going to be a thing of the past. No one is really going to care what class a toon is. It will only matter as far as there are a very limited number of class-specific sets which will still be class locked, but no one uses them anyway.

Second, oh, my, yes! There is going to be power creep. The subclassing feature is already live in the PTS server, and people are already posting dummy parses.

They’ve already pointed out that some of the hoped-for things won’t come true, like how the sorcerer’s Daedric Prey — which boosts all pet damage by 45% — will only apply to sorcerer pets, so it’s not going to boost the warden bear or the necro blast bones. However, that being said, it looks like we’ll be able to make builds capable of more than current god-tier level (~130K) with this system, without needing to be a sweaty try-hard at light attack weaving and animation cancelling. (Which the purists say are different things, but I can’t figure out the difference. Maybe this is why I suck at it.) This isn’t some perfect weaving build that requires 10-millisecond timing for 200 button presses in a row without missing. More than half of this guy’s damage on the parse came from the arcanist’s beam, which is an easy thing to manage.

Oh, dang. Hyperioxes is one of the current prominent ESO streamers. He’s getting 131K with a heavy attack build, which is nothing but holding down the attack button and occasionally pressing a skill button. I can get 93K with this kind of build currently, but it absolutely maxes out around 98K if you manage to land a lot of crits. So this is a big upgrade. I mean… that’s almost 50% more, for the sake of replacing one skill line, and using one of the new mythics. This is veteran trial hard mode DPS numbers in the easiest build configuration possible. (OK, to be fair, the new mythic he’s using will require light attack weaving in order to restore resources, but the exact timing won’t be an issue for the build, and that’s the hard part.)

The oakensoul ring and the arcanist class opened up the vet trial scene to a lot more people in the game, including me. I think this move is intended to give people a shot at running hard modes and trifectas who wouldn’t have stood a chance before. There was a 4-man prog group in my main guild of people who were all awesome at the game, and they got stuck in their runthrough of the dungeon trifectas. When that happened, I knew then that I was never going to get on in that scene because I’m not even as good as them. If ZOS doesn’t nerf this too much — and the studio lead has been clear that they’re happy with how these DPS numbers are testing internally — this is going to open the end-game content to another strata of people. Maybe I’ll finally be able to manage a perfect Veteshran Hollows run; who knows!

Of course, everyone who was really good at weaving is hating all of this, and I love that part too. I’m bitter that I can’t do it well, even after all these years, and those that gatekeep the game over it can suck it. I’ll take the achievements anyway, thank you very much.

I retired from ESO back in December. I’m thinking I may un-retire when all of this lands. It seems like it’s going to be a blast.

Windows Bluetooth Power Saving

I just “upgraded” my gaming PC to the latest big Windows patch, and wouldn’t you know it? They turned this infernal setting back on.

Because of this, I have to get up, and remove a USB device, and plug it back in to wake up my Bluetooth mouse. WHILE I’M SITTING HERE USING IT! On what planet does this make any sense!?

Before I figured it out, this is the same problem that almost made me return the computer a week after I bought it.

What moron at Microsoft is responsible for this? Wait. Don’t tell me. Because I think I’d drive to Seattle, and kick them in the balls.

What’s Going on with Xbox?

It’s simple: The PC gaming market is “scavenging” Microsoft’s own console market. Why buy a console when another $100 can get a PC that would play games about as well, and still be a general purpose computer? Don’t get me wrong, I love my Playstation for not being a general purpose PC. I love the ability to just put it to sleep and then fire it up again and continue from where I was. I love never having to deal with flaky drivers, constant updates, or cheaters. But I “get” that most people in the market for a single “computing device” that can play AAA games would opt for a PC.

Additionally, I think it’s another subtle data point that proves my hypothesis that more and more people are choosing Apple hardware when it’s their money, and therefore not spending in the Microsoft ecosystem. Microsoft loves to tout how, decade after decade, Windows accounts for a crazy-high percentage of the market, but personal experience proves that this doesn’t hold up with people. For years, I’ve argued that if you could subtract corporate purchases from the equation, the situation would look very, very different. Finally, from Extremetech, which draws from this archived article from the Seattle Times, I’ve stumbled on a report that proves my theory.

This chart says it all: From 2004 to 2012, Microsoft’s share of the consumer computing market has plummeted from 95% to 20%. For 20 years, Microsoft enjoyed an almost complete monopoly of consumer computing — and yet today, it is a minority stake holder, languishing behind Google’s 42% and Apple’s 24%. This report at CNET says gaming PC’s are selling at about parity with consoles, and we know that Xbox sales are 1/5th of Playstation, so the bottom line is that the AAA-gaming world is coming down to gaming PC’s and… Playstation.

Steam and the State of Mac Gaming

I have an M3-based MacBook Pro. Before that I had a MBP with an nVidia GPU. Before that I had a MBP with an AMD GPU. All 3 have been bad at running any games not 1) specifically written for a Mac or 2) not ancient PC games that a Raspberry Pi could run. I fired up Steam on my Mac, and was asked to do a survey. Yes! By all means, I would love my Mac to be counted as a computer running Steam. Here is the marketshare of the results by operating system.

Even Linux is only at 2%, and that includes the supposedly wildly-successful Steam Deck! After all of these years, and the alleged advances in Proton over various implementations of Wine, I would have thought there would be better penetration after 25-30 years.

The Mac fares even worse. I have a few actual Mac games, and they play great. I even have a couple of Steel Series game controllers that work well with them. But visually and conceptually, they’re no more advanced than a Nintendo Switch game, and the Switch is a glorified tablet. When you click through to games in the App Store, there are some AAA titles there, but 1) they’re really old now, and 2) I already have them on other platforms, and I don’t want to buy them again.

This is just sad to me. Various reports are painting a picture that Microsoft is letting Xbox be scavenged by PC, and people are worried they’re going to get out of the hardware game. So gaming is boiling down to PC’s running Windows, Playstation, and Switch. And phones, I guess, if you want to count mobile. I wish there was increasing competition in the space after all this time. I like my Playstation just great, but I don’t want Sony thinking they can just do whatever they want because they have no competition in the “real” gaming segment.

Thank You, Vault Dwellers!

And what would a Summer be without grabbing a fishing pole and heading down to your favorite radioactive watering hole? No need to worry about finding out because fishing is coming to the wasteland this Summer and is angling to reel-in our esteemed adventurers, collectors and traveling trawlers alike.

It all starts at a mysterious location where players encounter a fisherman who has decided to set up camp and share their love for fishing to one and all… or so it seems. This strange merchant will sell our players everything they need to catch any of the slimy, scaled swimmers found in all bodies of water across Appalachia. Sharpen those hooks! We’ll be eating well!

Source: Thank You, Vault Dwellers!

Adding fishing to Fallout 76…

Of all the awful things in ESO, fishing is the awfullest. Of course they would add it to Fallout 76.

Studio Director’s Letter: 2025 & Beyond – The Elder Scrolls Online

ZeniMax Online Studios’ Studio Director Matt Firor talks about another big year for The Elder Scrolls Online and some of the even bigger changes coming to the game in 2025 and beyond.

…

We need to seriously address Cyrodiil performance. Our (ambitious) goal is to return it to the concurrency levels we supported in 2014. So, we will be experimenting with a Cyrodiil campaign where all classes will have PvP-specific (and more performant) skills that replace the standard player skills with the expectation that we can support more players per campaign

Source: Studio Director’s Letter: 2025 & Beyond – The Elder Scrolls Online

Hmm… Well would you just look at that? Who could have identified that core problem? Oh! Me!

The biggest problem with the game seems to be the PVP part. PVE and PVP are completely different games, but they both use the same skills and gear, and both “halves” of the game suffer for it, despite the innumerable tweaks and hacks they try to use to help the situation. I don’t think there’s a future for this game without making a cleaner break between the two modes than currently exists.

Source:Fine, I’ll Make My Own Forums | The Mind of David Krider,

Combat in ESO is a mix of HUNDREDS of variables on your character, a lot of which are being intermixed with everyone you’re fighting WITH, and everything you’re fighting AGAINST. Calculated and resolved EVERY SECOND. Every set, every skill, and every mythic in the game is another thing to add into an equation that’s got to be THOUSANDS of conditions long, with scores of tiny little if-then corner-case scenarios.

Every new addition to the game has added another 3 zone sets, a couple more craftable sets, dungeon sets, trial sets, mythics, and now scribed skills with — as they brag — 8,000 different combinations of effects. It’s become a runaway problem as they try to squeeze more “monetization” out of the expansions. It’s no wonder PVP performance keeps getting worse.

It’s already bad enough in trials. You can see the game choke on everything that’s happening for 12 people at times. In Cyrodill, you might be talking about 50 people in a large battle, and it’s worse. They’ve got to make a significant separation between the two modes.

To be sure, it will make the current PVP lovers — who have mastered the dozens of things you need to stack and all the play style tricks you need to employ to make bombing or ball grouping work — insane with fury. The question is whether or not it will bring more casuals into the mix than sweats who quit.

Fine, I’ll Make My Own Forums

With Hookers and Blow

I was “actioned” on the Elder Scrolls Online forums.

Again.

What was snipped?

The simple truth of the matter is that this is a 10-year-old game, and the architecture just won’t allow them to do things like crossplay or class changes. You have to at least “protect” for those things up front. These things will NEVER happen now. It’s not that they’re impossible. It’s that they’re not cost effective. This is a game in maintenance mode. It has a tiny community that reacts negatively to any and all changes. All we’re going to get going forward is more cookie cutter content, and set/skill tweaks that people will flock to the interwebs to complain about.

Take it or leave it, I guess.

This — this right here — has been my whole experience on the ESO forums:

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve suggested something, and the immediate response is that everything is perfect the way it is, and nothing should change:

Everything is great, nothing is wrong, and yet the player counts are at 7-year lows. To support my highlighted comment in what was snipped above, I present the graph of average online player count from Steam. And while many people have argued with me on the forums about the validity of these numbers, I understand statistics just fine, and this is representative of the state of the game, regardless of Windows version (Steam vs. Epic) or platform (PC vs Xbox vs PS). The number of active players is half what it was just back in the spring.

And, oh!, would you look at that? ZOS had planned two big 10th-anniversary in-person events, one in Amsterdam (which happened), and one in the US, which is now canceled. Nefas (one of the top ESO streamers) thinks ZOS is broke. Given the trends in activity, how could not conclude this?

No More In-Person Celebration Event for You!

The forums are awash with people complaining about literally everything now. PVP is in utter shambles (and I’m just all broken up about that). Queue times are disastrous, and there’s only room for about 2% of the online population to play. Years-long problems are not getting fixed. The “stuck in combat” bug, the annoyance of the “flappy bird,” the fact that they won’t revert the hybridization changes — even though everyone agrees that it changed the game fundamentally for the worse — hiding mythic leads behind crappy parts of the game, terrible drop rates for literally everything… The list goes on and on. The forums have been revealed as a giant honeypot to allay complaints, let people vent, and keep them playing. And if you say something they don’t like, they can and will find a rule to accuse you of breaking, and censor you for it.

The biggest problem with the game seems to be the PVP part. PVE and PVP are completely different games, but they both use the same skills and gear, and both “halves” of the game suffer for it, despite the innumerable tweaks and hacks they try to use to help the situation. I don’t think there’s a future for this game without making a cleaner break between the two modes than currently exists.

The forums are exhausting, so I’ve decided that those jerks can enjoy their circle without me any more. I’m trying to kill my account, but of course, none of their support systems makes any sense. I created a ticket, and the link to look at it is 404. I’ve questioned the guy who actioned me twice, and sent email about the ticket twice, and got no responses. Finally, I created a new forum thread — knowing it was against TOS to talk about being actioned in any way — and someone else finally at least verified that my ticket exists and is in the right place. That’s something I guess.

ZOS is working on a new game based on a new IP now, and it really seems like they’re putting minimal effort into ESO now. All we’re getting is cookie-cutter content with new zones, new sets, new companions, new Tales of Tribute decks, new skill styles, etc. You can’t float a game like this on subscriptions alone, and the offerings in the Crown store seem more and more flashy, more and more desperate. The game seems to be on its last legs.

The big question to me is whether Microsoft would spin this IP out to someone who would want to try to breathe new life into it. There are two big problems with this. One is that every change is unpopular with a vocal portion the player base, making significant changes difficult without risking financial impact. They can’t afford to lose a big chunk of people at this point. The other is that The Elder Scrolls is a massive franchise, involving many games and platforms, which would seem to make negotiations about this particular piece of the portfolio tricky. Where would this kind of move put the long-delayed-yet-ultimately-inevitable TES VI?

“We’re cancelling our NA anniversary event. Here, have a nice coloring contest instead.”

And my contribution: