"the North American and European megaservers will first be hosted in North America. This gives us a more efficient way to address any platform issues that may arise at launch. After the initial launch phase is over, we will move the European megaserver to the European datacenter – but this will be a seamless migration for users, without additional downloads, logins or action required."
ZOS figured that there is no noticable disadvantage to having European players play on the US servers
ffffffffffffffffffffffffffff
Here's hoping said migration is both prompt and actual. Won't help me much if they migrate the servers after I've put the game aside for a while.
By their wording, it sounds like they have the datacenters already. My guess is we'll see the transfer happen once they're satisfied that any launch issues are taken care of, which will hopefully only be a couple weeks or so. We'll see how launch goes, though.
If 17k gold is "a lot" (even if it's only in the beginning), and the horse costs $5, this is a "alarms going off" situation (to me).
It implies they they don't value the players time (to earn gold to buy the horse). If it takes me six hours of "money focused" playing to get 17k to buy the horse (and I'd wager it's more than that), but I can earn $5 of disposable income during a regular work shift... What's being said? I'll even take into account that playing a game is orders of magnitude more fun than working. Let's just say that 1 hour of work is worth 3 hours of video games.
To me, it reads a little like this: "Just give us your money for your first mount. Seriously. Who want's to grind that much gold? Just buy it, guy." Then there's the "We gave it to all the CE buyers", so you've got dude who just bought the normal game running around trying to farm up the gold, while the thousands of CE players are riding around. From a business perspective, this is brilliant. They're going to make a bundle off selling the horse in the shop.
Because they've priced it out of reality in the game.
You're paying $X to save 17k gold, essentially. Granted, it's only one time. But that... That seems dubious, to me.
I'm not saying it's a "DOOM AND GLOOM!" thing.
I'm just saying, "Huh. Can we... Can we talk about this?"
And the starter horse is crap, apparently.
People are saying you should flat out ignore it in favour of the next horse which costs 42,000.
Can you buy one for double the cash value of the starter horse ?
It should go without saying that I would buy a unicorn on Day 1 for £10. I don't even need a speed buff. Just lots of space.
Saying the starter horse is crap is just not true. First of all, if 17k gold is not that easy to come by, then 42k is considerably less so. Second of all, the only difference in the starter horse and the light horse that everybody's going on about is 10% base speed. It's marginal.
Obviously it means the 42k horse is always going to be better, because each one can only be levelled up X number of times and its base stats are higher, but that's only really going to matter once you have enough money to easily buy the 42k one.
Whoops, stepped into the ESO subreddit this morning. Is it just me or are things being blown up waaaay more than they should be at this point?
Do people not realize this is a result of Zenimax listening to players and not technically a sign of terrible things to come? Here's how this went down: IE was announced, people upset about having to pay more for a race/horse. Horse specifically being the unbalance. Not everyone wants to pay $20 extra to get horse since they may not want the Imperial race. Zenimax doesn't want to give everyone a free horse, so what solution do they come up with? Offer just the horse for cheaper than having to buy the IE.
It's pretty logical. Is it the correct decision? Maybe, maybe not. But so far Zenimax has shown pretty good responsiveness with listening to player feedback, I would much rather give them the benefit of the doubt that they're doing this with somewhat decent intentions rather than this is just the gateway to OP weapons you can buy for real money.
Is it possible it will go that way? Sure, but so far nobody can assume that it is. All they did was take the CE upgrade they already told us all would be available (which is VERY common practice now: having CE upgrades after launch) and broke it apart for those that only want the one part of it. This announcement didn't actually add anything to their "store" that we didn't already know about.
+2
mojojoeoA block off the park, living the dream.Registered Userregular
im stuck at requesting login.... always times out!
Chief Wiggum: "Ladies, please. All our founding fathers, astronauts, and World Series heroes have been either drunk or on cocaine."
This whole mess seems to just be a snowball of them having CE in the first place (and from the sound of it they'd be fools not to have one, people seem more than happy enough to pay extra for trinkets).
Does your CE have worthless in-game bonuses? Unhappy CE owners. Worthwhile ones? Unhappy standard owners. Make the bonuses available in-game in a way that won't make CE owners feel like they wasted their money? Ermagerd cash shop madness.
The way you get happy CE owners in a way that's better and less disturbing to your players is to have the in-game bonuses be purely cosmetic like pets(and even mounts IF in game they still have to pay for mount training), but more specifically you give people actual hard goods that are worth paying extra for. A big fat ass high quality art book is the thing you can never go wrong with in a CE. Statues are okay, cloth maps are cool, etc.
Saying the starter horse is crap is just not true.
The Common Horse is not as good as the other options. Is ~20k gp worth 15% less of your walking around time?
You can boost one stat of your horse's by one once every 24 hours. So after 10 days (real time), it'll have stats equal to one of the better horses, but its cap is still 10 lower. Presumably, you'll have saved up ~50k before those 10 (real time) days are up.
10% more base speed is a 67% increase over 15%. That's pretty significant.
No, but for a lot of people hard goods are worthless. I don't give a crap about art books, soundtracks, cloth maps, postcards, cards and other stuff. Statuettes, maybe, but those tend to run CEs so expensive I'd never actually spring for it.
And the cosmetic stuff runs the risk of rubbing standard users wrong, again, for being restricted from ever again having access to it.
The way you get happy CE owners in a way that's better and less disturbing to your players is to have the in-game bonuses be purely cosmetic like pets(and even mounts IF in game they still have to pay for mount training), but more specifically you give people actual hard goods that are worth paying extra for. A big fat ass high quality art book is the thing you can never go wrong with in a CE. Statues are okay, cloth maps are cool, etc.
It never ever has to be about in-game items.
Absolutely false. ...well, no, I like statues.
But I like in-game rewards better. Mounts, exclusive races, etc. That's why I buy CEs.
Weird. They changed a ton of the tutorial things. No more picking a weapon out of a huge pile, I was just given a sword. I didn't end up in the same place with the Dark Elf lady, instead of that I ended up in a harbor like area -- Davon's Watch. I... think I picked the same alliance as before? The "fluff chests" are respawning a lot faster, too- I actually got some stuff this time.
People don't care if you can pay for cosmetic horses. WoW players by and large didn't care when Blizz started selling mounts for $20 a pop in the store. Why? Because the people buying them didn't get to forego earning the right to ride the mount in game. You had to pay the gold cost of mount training regardless of where your mount itself came from.
Saying the starter horse is crap is just not true.
The Common Horse is not as good as the other options. Is ~20k gp worth 15% less of your walking around time?
You can boost one stat of your horse's by one once every 24 hours. So after 10 days (real time), it'll have stats equal to one of the better horses, but its cap is still 10 lower. Presumably, you'll have saved up ~50k before those 10 (real time) days are up.
10% more base speed is a 67% increase over 15%. That's pretty significant.
For people buying the CE it's a difference of 42.7k gold. One guy up thread said at level 10 he had like 1500 gold. I have no idea how many hours you need to put into the game to get 42.7k gold, but that's not just the gold itself, it's the opportunity cost of whatever else you could have done with that gold.
Using the 10 day thing doesn't work much because you're assuming A) People are going to play enough every day to save up 10% of the expensive horse's cost per day, and B ) People are going to be willing to wait it out to get a slightly faster horse that has a higher cap. I would expect the vast majority of people to buy either buy the CE, buy the freebie standalone, or buy the in game cheaper horse and then buy the more expensive one later when they have plenty of free gold.
At the end of the day, IMO their mistake just came from not having your riding in game tied to paying for training ala WoW. If they did that they could've made the coolest looking CE mount in all of history and nobody would've cared, because buying it would've been purely cosmetic rather than actually skipping content in exchange for cash.
The way you get happy CE owners in a way that's better and less disturbing to your players is to have the in-game bonuses be purely cosmetic like pets(and even mounts IF in game they still have to pay for mount training), but more specifically you give people actual hard goods that are worth paying extra for. A big fat ass high quality art book is the thing you can never go wrong with in a CE. Statues are okay, cloth maps are cool, etc.
It never ever has to be about in-game items.
Absolutely false. ...well, no, I like statues.
But I like in-game rewards better. Mounts, exclusive races, etc. That's why I buy CEs.
...and also for Darth Malgus statues.
You just agreed with me. You like statues, aka hard goods and they drive your CE purchases. You like in game rewards like mounts, but you didn't specify that you need those mounts to let you pay cash to forego content. I'd imagine most MMOs you've ever bought a CE for that gave you a mount just let you ride the mount after you had already paid in game for the training. And name me one MMO that gave you an exclusive race for its CE? I've played nearly every AAA MMO since the mid 90s and I don't remember one until ESO. That's not to say it hasn't happened, but I don't remember it.
For people buying the CE it's a difference of 42.7k gold. One guy up thread said at level 10 he had like 1500 gold. I have no idea how many hours you need to put into the game to get 42.7k gold, but that's not just the gold itself, it's the opportunity cost of whatever else you could have done with that gold.
Whoa, slow down there. The CE horse is equivalent to the 17.2k horse, NOT the 42.7k horse. The CE horse will never be as good as the 42.7k horse, so no, it's not a difference of that magnitude. When you get to endgame, the CE horse won't even matter. Does it matter early game? Is it technically like paying for 17.2k gold right out of the gate? Yeah, I'll give you that, but a month into the game and nobody will even be using the mount.
This is not a mistake. Not having to pay for a horse and getting it right away is exactly what I wanted.
That's fine. Some of us just don't think paying RL cash for in game gold to buy your horse straight from level 1 is a thing that game devs should be allowing players to do, more specifically in a subscription modelled MMO that claimed it was going to have a services only cash shop.
I bought the CE for me and my wife, almost exclusively for the convenience of the horse. As I said before, this is not some principled stance. I'm not even willing to vote against it with my wallet. It doesn't at all mean I'm happy with their choice to do so. This for me is basically a "Well you're obviously designing your game for it to be a pain in the ass to get your first horse, but I can pay a few shekels to skip that pain in the ass so I guess I'll do it, but only because the rest of your game is good and interesting enough to overcome my distaste."
+1
L Ron HowardThe duckMinnesotaRegistered Userregular
This is the whole fucking sparkle pony discussion all over again.
I still don't know why anyone cares what anyone else does with their money.
I bought the CE for me and my wife, almost exclusively for the convenience of the horse. As I said before, this is not some principled stance. I'm not even willing to vote against it with my wallet. It doesn't at all mean I'm happy with their choice to do so. This for me is basically a "Well you're obviously designing your game for it to be a pain in the ass to get your first horse, but I can pay a few shekels to skip that pain in the ass so I guess I'll do it, but only because the rest of your game is good and interesting enough to overcome my distaste."
I agree with this, I'd rather they just avoided the whole situation by not having the horse there in the first place. But really, it's too late to take that back so they're doing what they can to make it more accessible to others, by making the horse cheaper.
On the other hand, a 15-25% speed increase isn't really all that much. I think some of this rage is coming from people who are used to mounts that have more significant bonuses. I know you can upgrade the horse, but you're still not at WoW's slowest mounts speeds. I think many will be disappointed at the difference the horse actually makes.
0
Dr_KeenbeanDumb as a buttPlanet Express ShipRegistered Userregular
Groan.
I only regret them announcing cash shop ponies because now that's all I'll get to read about for the next few weeks.
Saying the starter horse is crap is just not true. First of all, if 17k gold is not that easy to come by, then 42k is considerably less so. Second of all, the only difference in the starter horse and the light horse that everybody's going on about is 10% base speed. It's marginal.
Obviously it means the 42k horse is always going to be better, because each one can only be levelled up X number of times and its base stats are higher, but that's only really going to matter once you have enough money to easily buy the 42k one.
I meant 'crap' compared to the other horses, not in it's own right.
This is the whole fucking sparkle pony discussion all over again.
I still don't know why anyone cares what anyone else does with their money.
Man, I totally want a sparkle pony in TESO.
Licensed MLP mounts.
I, personally, would want nothing to do with that garbage, but it would be like inventing a money printer.
TESO isn't quite high fantasy enough for Crayola colored pegasi, but if it was, I would put down $20 so that xXxSephirothGrimDeathxXx could ride a powder blue pegaus that crapped rainbows.
This is the whole fucking sparkle pony discussion all over again.
I still don't know why anyone cares what anyone else does with their money.
Man, I totally want a sparkle pony in TESO.
Licensed MLP mounts.
I, personally, would want nothing to do with that garbage, but it would be like inventing a money printer.
TESO isn't quite high fantasy enough for Crayola colored pegasi, but if it was, I would put down $20 so that xXxSephirothGrimDeathxXx could ride a powder blue pegaus that crapped rainbows.
This is the whole fucking sparkle pony discussion all over again.
I still don't know why anyone cares what anyone else does with their money.
You'd already realize this had you read the rest of the posts in the thread, but nobody cares what others do with their money. If this was a cosmetic only thing like WoW's cash shop mounts where you had to buy the training in game and the mount was just a skin, you'd have a point.
But it's not. This is them saying "You pay us cash for in game gold equal to the cost of a horse from level 1 and you get to forego having to walk for the first X levels." People who don't pay are not worried about how you spend your money, they're irritated that a $60 game with a $15 monthly sub is "harder" for them out of the gate if they don't pay the bonus "horse at level 1 tax".
Like I said, my enjoyment of the game overcomes my distaste for what they've done so I'm rolling with it, but I'm still going to let my opinion be heard.
"Get a mount early by paying cash" is the same as "Exp boost" in terms of cash shop type stuff, and for most people, they want none of that in their monthly sub game. Hell, many people in this very thread said all along things like "I'd rather pay a monthly sub if it means the game won't have cash shop stuff that is in-game benefits."
Joshmvii on
+2
Dr_KeenbeanDumb as a buttPlanet Express ShipRegistered Userregular
"Get a mount early by paying cash" is the same as "Exp boost" in terms of cash shop type stuff...
I'm not sure I agree with this. If I pop an XP Boost, I'll go sit some place where I can soak a ton of XP. With a mount, all I'm doing is looking awesome on a horse.
That +15% travel speed does not directly equate to +15% XP.
Notice I put textual air quotes around harder for that specific reason. Substitute "less convenient" for the word harder and the exact same point stands. People are being given the chance to pay cash to skip doing content in a way that will take more hours to do without paying. Period.
"Get a mount early by paying cash" is the same as "Exp boost" in terms of cash shop type stuff...
I'm not sure I agree with this. If I pop an XP Boost, I'll go sit some place where I can soak a ton of XP. With a mount, all I'm doing is looking awesome on a horse.
That +15% travel speed does not directly equate to +15% XP.
I didn't say an exp boost and a movement speed boost equate to the same benefit of time. I said they're the same in terms of cash shop stuff, as in they both equate to paying cash to remove some of the time you would otherwise have to be spending playing the game.
Posts
http://elderscrollsonline.com/en/news/post/2014/03/14/eso-road-ahead
Quote
"the North American and European megaservers will first be hosted in North America. This gives us a more efficient way to address any platform issues that may arise at launch. After the initial launch phase is over, we will move the European megaserver to the European datacenter – but this will be a seamless migration for users, without additional downloads, logins or action required."
Good on them for thinking ahead about release though. A little lag today, for no crashes tonight.
By their wording, it sounds like they have the datacenters already. My guess is we'll see the transfer happen once they're satisfied that any launch issues are taken care of, which will hopefully only be a couple weeks or so. We'll see how launch goes, though.
And the starter horse is crap, apparently.
People are saying you should flat out ignore it in favour of the next horse which costs 42,000.
Can you buy one for double the cash value of the starter horse ?
It should go without saying that I would buy a unicorn on Day 1 for £10. I don't even need a speed buff. Just lots of space.
Obviously it means the 42k horse is always going to be better, because each one can only be levelled up X number of times and its base stats are higher, but that's only really going to matter once you have enough money to easily buy the 42k one.
Do people not realize this is a result of Zenimax listening to players and not technically a sign of terrible things to come? Here's how this went down: IE was announced, people upset about having to pay more for a race/horse. Horse specifically being the unbalance. Not everyone wants to pay $20 extra to get horse since they may not want the Imperial race. Zenimax doesn't want to give everyone a free horse, so what solution do they come up with? Offer just the horse for cheaper than having to buy the IE.
It's pretty logical. Is it the correct decision? Maybe, maybe not. But so far Zenimax has shown pretty good responsiveness with listening to player feedback, I would much rather give them the benefit of the doubt that they're doing this with somewhat decent intentions rather than this is just the gateway to OP weapons you can buy for real money.
Is it possible it will go that way? Sure, but so far nobody can assume that it is. All they did was take the CE upgrade they already told us all would be available (which is VERY common practice now: having CE upgrades after launch) and broke it apart for those that only want the one part of it. This announcement didn't actually add anything to their "store" that we didn't already know about.
Does your CE have worthless in-game bonuses? Unhappy CE owners. Worthwhile ones? Unhappy standard owners. Make the bonuses available in-game in a way that won't make CE owners feel like they wasted their money? Ermagerd cash shop madness.
It never ever has to be about in-game items.
You can boost one stat of your horse's by one once every 24 hours. So after 10 days (real time), it'll have stats equal to one of the better horses, but its cap is still 10 lower. Presumably, you'll have saved up ~50k before those 10 (real time) days are up.
10% more base speed is a 67% increase over 15%. That's pretty significant.
Penny Arcade Rockstar Social Club / This is why I despise cyclists
And the cosmetic stuff runs the risk of rubbing standard users wrong, again, for being restricted from ever again having access to it.
But I like in-game rewards better. Mounts, exclusive races, etc. That's why I buy CEs.
...and also for Darth Malgus statues.
Penny Arcade Rockstar Social Club / This is why I despise cyclists
All in all it's a much better experience so far.
THAT'S the rub.
For people buying the CE it's a difference of 42.7k gold. One guy up thread said at level 10 he had like 1500 gold. I have no idea how many hours you need to put into the game to get 42.7k gold, but that's not just the gold itself, it's the opportunity cost of whatever else you could have done with that gold.
Using the 10 day thing doesn't work much because you're assuming A) People are going to play enough every day to save up 10% of the expensive horse's cost per day, and B ) People are going to be willing to wait it out to get a slightly faster horse that has a higher cap. I would expect the vast majority of people to buy either buy the CE, buy the freebie standalone, or buy the in game cheaper horse and then buy the more expensive one later when they have plenty of free gold.
At the end of the day, IMO their mistake just came from not having your riding in game tied to paying for training ala WoW. If they did that they could've made the coolest looking CE mount in all of history and nobody would've cared, because buying it would've been purely cosmetic rather than actually skipping content in exchange for cash.
You just agreed with me. You like statues, aka hard goods and they drive your CE purchases. You like in game rewards like mounts, but you didn't specify that you need those mounts to let you pay cash to forego content. I'd imagine most MMOs you've ever bought a CE for that gave you a mount just let you ride the mount after you had already paid in game for the training. And name me one MMO that gave you an exclusive race for its CE? I've played nearly every AAA MMO since the mid 90s and I don't remember one until ESO. That's not to say it hasn't happened, but I don't remember it.
Penny Arcade Rockstar Social Club / This is why I despise cyclists
Whoa, slow down there. The CE horse is equivalent to the 17.2k horse, NOT the 42.7k horse. The CE horse will never be as good as the 42.7k horse, so no, it's not a difference of that magnitude. When you get to endgame, the CE horse won't even matter. Does it matter early game? Is it technically like paying for 17.2k gold right out of the gate? Yeah, I'll give you that, but a month into the game and nobody will even be using the mount.
That's fine. Some of us just don't think paying RL cash for in game gold to buy your horse straight from level 1 is a thing that game devs should be allowing players to do, more specifically in a subscription modelled MMO that claimed it was going to have a services only cash shop.
I bought the CE for me and my wife, almost exclusively for the convenience of the horse. As I said before, this is not some principled stance. I'm not even willing to vote against it with my wallet. It doesn't at all mean I'm happy with their choice to do so. This for me is basically a "Well you're obviously designing your game for it to be a pain in the ass to get your first horse, but I can pay a few shekels to skip that pain in the ass so I guess I'll do it, but only because the rest of your game is good and interesting enough to overcome my distaste."
I still don't know why anyone cares what anyone else does with their money.
I agree with this, I'd rather they just avoided the whole situation by not having the horse there in the first place. But really, it's too late to take that back so they're doing what they can to make it more accessible to others, by making the horse cheaper.
On the other hand, a 15-25% speed increase isn't really all that much. I think some of this rage is coming from people who are used to mounts that have more significant bonuses. I know you can upgrade the horse, but you're still not at WoW's slowest mounts speeds. I think many will be disappointed at the difference the horse actually makes.
I only regret them announcing cash shop ponies because now that's all I'll get to read about for the next few weeks.
3DS: 1650-8480-6786
Switch: SW-0653-8208-4705
I meant 'crap' compared to the other horses, not in it's own right.
Penny Arcade Rockstar Social Club / This is why I despise cyclists
I had to reinstall.
Annoyingly, it's taken far longer to do the extracting and patching, than it did to actually download 22gb again.
For the record, I would also buy a sparkle pony.
You! Out! *snaps fingers*
Licensed MLP mounts.
I, personally, would want nothing to do with that garbage, but it would be like inventing a money printer.
3DS: 1650-8480-6786
Switch: SW-0653-8208-4705
Penny Arcade Rockstar Social Club / This is why I despise cyclists
Powder blue ?
Urgh.
I want brilliant white. Or silver.
You'd already realize this had you read the rest of the posts in the thread, but nobody cares what others do with their money. If this was a cosmetic only thing like WoW's cash shop mounts where you had to buy the training in game and the mount was just a skin, you'd have a point.
But it's not. This is them saying "You pay us cash for in game gold equal to the cost of a horse from level 1 and you get to forego having to walk for the first X levels." People who don't pay are not worried about how you spend your money, they're irritated that a $60 game with a $15 monthly sub is "harder" for them out of the gate if they don't pay the bonus "horse at level 1 tax".
Like I said, my enjoyment of the game overcomes my distaste for what they've done so I'm rolling with it, but I'm still going to let my opinion be heard.
"Get a mount early by paying cash" is the same as "Exp boost" in terms of cash shop type stuff, and for most people, they want none of that in their monthly sub game. Hell, many people in this very thread said all along things like "I'd rather pay a monthly sub if it means the game won't have cash shop stuff that is in-game benefits."
3DS: 1650-8480-6786
Switch: SW-0653-8208-4705
That +15% travel speed does not directly equate to +15% XP.
Penny Arcade Rockstar Social Club / This is why I despise cyclists
This is the perfect time to say this:
"That's like... Your opinion, man."
All you had to do is delete the program data folder in the install folder. but reinstalling should get it too.
I think my game then downloaded 200k.
Notice I put textual air quotes around harder for that specific reason. Substitute "less convenient" for the word harder and the exact same point stands. People are being given the chance to pay cash to skip doing content in a way that will take more hours to do without paying. Period.
I didn't say an exp boost and a movement speed boost equate to the same benefit of time. I said they're the same in terms of cash shop stuff, as in they both equate to paying cash to remove some of the time you would otherwise have to be spending playing the game.