General:Thieves Guild Deep Dive: Grouping Tool Improvements

Originally published February 14, 2016. The original article can be found here.

With the upcoming Thieves Guild DLC game pack, we've updated the Grouping Tool to make it easier and faster to get into a group. We've also added a bunch of exciting new features including bonus experience and bonus items for completing a random dungeon using the Grouping Tool, and the ability to invite players from any alliance to join you in a dungeon!

When you open the Grouping Tool, you'll find that we've consolidated the role selection and activity type so the information you want is in a central location. The role icons are larger, and we've added mouseover tooltips to describe what they do. After you join a group, you'll see role icons next to each player character's health bar so it's clear which role everyone will be taking. We've also eliminated the confusion of whether you're doing a Normal or Veteran dungeon by placing the difficulty selector in the Group tab instead of the Dungeon Finder tab.

The first time you complete a random Normal or Veteran dungeon each day using the Grouping Tool, you'll get a reward cache with a blue-quality set piece from the Thieves Guild DLC game pack, in addition to a big chunk of experience. This daily bonus can only be earned once per day. Both Normal and Veteran modes provide the exact same reward; we wanted you to play the way you want and be rewarded for it.

Love running dungeons in ESO? This system was designed for you. After gaining the daily bonus rewards, you can still earn rewards for additional dungeon runs! Each dungeon after the first run will provide a green-quality set piece from Thieves Guild and a smaller experience bonus. These changes will significantly improve the leveling pace overall if you choose to only run dungeons. It's great for players who want to focus on healing or defensive playstyles, or in cases where you've already done all of ESO's quests, allows you to level up your character in a different way.

Another addition we made for the Grouping Tool was allowing you to use it with a wider variety of players in a wider variety of situations. You can now invite players of any alliance into your party and queue for a dungeon. As you can already be in a guild consisting of all three alliances, adding this feature was at the top of our list. That said, there are some necessary restrictions in place, the main one being that cross-alliance play is currently only available for 4-player dungeons through the Grouping Tool. If a member of your party from another alliance joins the queue for Cyrodiil, for example, they will be kicked from the party. This way, you don't accidentally end up in a PvP dungeon. Trust us - we tried it and no bosses ever got killed.

An additional feature we added was allowing you to use the Grouping Tool with a pre-made group. The benefits here is that all group members will be teleported directly to the dungeon, and everyone will be eligible for random dungeon rewards too. You'll still have to queue with a proper group composition (1 healer, 1 tank, and 2 DPS) but the queue will pop immediately and you can go right in. This change is a nice quality of life improvement, especially for cross-alliance guild groups and allows you and your friends to earn the daily rewards together.

Lastly, we've worked hard to address bugs and improve the backend to make queue times faster. As more players will now be queuing for a random dungeon to gain rewards, it will help reduce the queue times for those who have been waiting for a specific dungeon. The addition of the Alliance War tab will also aid in forming groups faster as it only requires 8 players instead of 12. Cyrodiil is designed around having a group of players to siege keeps with, but running around in a group of allies is also fun; we want to make it easier to team up and find some action.

Offering exciting new rewards and cross-alliance grouping are big steps forward for the Grouping Tool, but we're not done! In the future, we're looking into adding a vote/kick system, and a ready check to make sure everyone who joins the party is at their keyboard and ready to rock.

We hope you enjoyed our first deep-dive article, and be on the lookout for our next one focusing on another feature in the upcoming Thieves Guild base game patch.