The general ESO population has increased since One Tamriel and recently I've seen more new players in PVP, but I wonder if the skill gap for new players just starting in Cyrodiil is so much bigger now that nobody is going to have the kind of experience I had when I started, or whatever it was like the first time you tried PVP and got hooked. I see a lot of comments from PVE players who have tried PVP once or twice and felt like it was impossible.
When I started playing ESO during Psijic beta, for months I played this game pretty much as if it were Skyrim, just wandering around exploring the world. Zero plans to try PVP or even level any character all the way to max. Didn't even use wayshrines because I don't fast travel in Skyrim.
Then one day they asked everyone to go to Cyrodiil to participate in filming a big battle video for a trailer. Mind was blown. Suddenly I was in this massive sandbox world that turned out to be more fun than the rest of the game.
They told us all to make our way to some sort of siege battle going on at Chalman keep. Looked at the map and it seemed incredibly far - I believe I spawned somewhere near Brindle, walked up a nearby mountain and suddenly there was a stampede of 30 enemy players on horses running right at me. (I thought they must have been super rich guys to afford a horse.) An epic chase ensued and they followed me all over that mountain for a while. Finally killed me, but it was so cool, felt like an exciting adventure, more fun than the PVE areas.
I made it to Chalman and it was like an insane war zone with all kinds of explosions and magic spells flying everywhere. That whole day I stayed in Cyrodiil and had so much fun all over the map. Even in the little delves and towns you could find enemy players doing quests, ganking or people who came to gank the gankers etc.
Not even sure exactly what the appeal is, but 4 years later I'm still hooked on the PVP in this game. When I started, almost nobody had a clue. Obviously there were no youtube videos or website info during beta. There were guild groups, and some min/max players of course, and AD dominated the map for several months, but there were not a lot of people playing and most were around the same skill level.
Then finally ESO launched and it was fun as hell. So many new players everywhere - ten different campaigns, epic battles raging all over the map 24/7, even weeknights. And for at least a couple months still rather few people had a clue how to play this game. I mean if you figured out how to block you were so pro! If you had martial knowledge and warlock jewelry or whatever the various meta sets were back then, you were almost like a god. (And let's not even talk about vampire magicka DKs)
At this point the PVP population began to dwindle down to a fraction of what it had been. Some quit because they didn't want to play light armor magicka build. Others hated getting killed by vampire magicka DKs or didn't like the idea of rolling a new character and doing the veteran rank grind all over again etc. There was also a patch around this time that resulted in frame rate issues and crashes. And some people started to figure out stronger builds and group tactics. There were suddenly a number of big guild groups like MoonDie that would roll over everybody and heal in a tight zerg ball, just parked at Arrius mine all day farming AP off randoms. But still new players would join from time to time and figure out how to play within a few weeks or so.
Many patches later, now in 2017 you can finally roll viable stamina or magicka version of any class, light, medium or heavy armor all viable, and there are a lot of creative and interesting builds that would not have been possible with softcaps. There are also some amazing players, a lot of really good players and overall average skill level is much higher. And there are super strong ball groups, but on NA PC they seem to be roughly balanced between AD, DC and EP factions.
Is the skill gap too high? PVP population (including Battlegrounds) needs to grow massively if we want to have more than one main campaign, battles raging 24/7 all over the map and especially need tons of players queueing up around the clock for the BG match making.
What do you think? I know there are PVE players who do a lot of group PVE and trials etc, and then do their guild group PVP night or whatever and already know how to stack on crown etc, but how about all the solo players just hopping into some campaign for the first time? Especially all the people who will buy Morrowind because they are long time Elder Scrolls fans.
How do we get more new players hooked? For example, I'm sure I'd hate it for a while, but do we need to buff siege weapons or something? Some way for new players to feel like they are getting some kills? Or do we need a PVP tutorial arena?
