Obviously, the gold duping and spamming has been a big thorn in the side to The Elder Scrolls Online community, players and developers alike. While work to adjust the issue is currently underway, there's still a great deal of cogs in the Elder Scrolls Online machine that need to be addressed, and a new blog post from Zenimax has identified which squeaky wheels will get the grease, and when.
As written, "we're working every day to reduce gold farming and botting, which detract from the gameplay experience for everyone...We're also continuing to fix bugs as we find them and as players report them to us. In a world as large as ESO's, with endless variations of gameplay by players, it is impossible for QA to identify all bugs before launch, but we're working hard to find and close them quickly."
The post went on: "The first update contains much more than just Craglorn, our first Adventure Zone. It also contains lots of tweaks and bug fixes above and beyond what we've been doing on the live servers."
Get to the point you say? OK, here's a summary of what's coming in Update 1:
- Craglorn, the first Adventure Zone, specifically created for groups of Veteran Rank 1 and above characters
- Trials, which are 12-player "raid"-type instances for Veteran Rank characters, featuring completion time leaderboards
- Death recap: you can now see who killed you and what ability they were using. This is invaluable information in dungeons, PvP, and Craglorn
- Underdog bonuses in Cyrodiil-you'll get more Alliance Points and XP while fighting for an alliance with a lower population in your campaign
- Animation tweaks and polish
- Combat ability balance changes and fixes
- Class ability tweaks and updates
- Content bug fixes, especially edge cases where quests could become de-synced
Changes coming in future updates was also mentioned. Here's what's currently in development:
- A system that allows grouped players to see each other even when they're in different phases
- A justice system-steal from and kill NPCs and deal with the consequences if you are caught
- Migration of European Megaserver to our European datacenter.
- Field of View (FOV) adjustment
- Armor dyeing and tinting
- Two new Veteran Dungeons: Crypt of Hearts and City of Ash
- New region of Craglorn with a new Trial (the Serpent)
- Increased ability to pick up items in the world
- Thieves Guild and Dark Brotherhood storyline and quests.
- Spellcrafting, Horse Racing
- Dragonstar Arena-similar to Trials, but built for a group of four
- Improvements to fishing and crafting system
- Improved Looking for Group system
- Better NPC facial animations
- Guild functionality updates: guild store interface updates, customizable guild insignias, tabards, and guild ranks, and Guild Kiosks-guild stores open to everyone that are available to the highest-bidding guild.
- Auto-leveling dungeons that level to your group leader
- Awards when you repeat dungeons
- Imperial City PvP dungeon
Update 1 will hit the live servers as soon as testing is completed on PTS. Stay tuned for news about the exact date you'll be able to play it.
