State of the Game Address

ZOS_MattFiror

As it’s now two and a half weeks since we officially launched on April 4, I think it’s a good time to bring everyone up to date on The Elder Scrolls Online service, maintenance windows, and what we’re doing to add content, make the game better, and address some issues that are near and dear to the community.

First and foremost, please know that we are doing everything we can to combat the gold spammers and bots – especially ones that “camp” dungeon bosses – that you see in game. I play the game every day; I see them too, and yes, they drive me crazy. We have had a daily running battle with them ever since the game launched – moving them from global chat, to in-game email, to creating bogus guilds and inviting players – and we continue to take measures to keep them away from players, even when it isn’t always apparent that we are. Most of the battle has been on the back end of the game – we regularly ban accounts involved in spam and bot activity – our teams are working on better systems to identify those accounts and characters that are doing black market activities, and we’re also working on some game feature refinement to make it harder for them to acquire gold in the first place. Fighting black market activity like gold selling spam and farming bots is a marathon, not a sprint, but we will do whatever we can to reduce their impact on the game.

The scope of the black market activity accounts for up to 85% of Customer Service emails/calls. Because of this huge influx of contact relating to this one issue, our CS team has been slower to react to other problems than planned – our sincere apologies if you have been held up for a long period of time waiting for CS to respond to you. Again, our goal is to keep this activity away from you so you don’t have to contact Customer Service in the first place.

Also very visible was last week’s gold “duping” (duplication) bug – where players could manipulate stacks of items in their inventory to create copies. We fixed the problem and banned the accounts of the worst offenders And yes, we erroneously caught up some legitimate accounts in that ban, for which we apologize – all erroneously banned accounts were reinstated within about 8 hours. Contrary to some reports, exploitation of this bug did not result in destabilizing the ESO economy in any way. We did turn off guild banks to limit the spread of the problem, but that was only until we put up a new version of the game that fixed the exploit later that evening.

All of these fixes have resulted in several more maintenance periods than we planned for – we know that everyone wants to play the game and hates downtime – but please be aware that every time we take down the servers for maintenance, it is either to fix a problem or put up an update that makes the game better. We are working on shortening the length of maintenances, this will get better over time.

So, here’s the list of our more prominent fixes since launch, as well as info about ongoing support that we’re doing for ESO:

• Fixed the bug where a small percentage of players lost their expansion bank slots.
• Fixed quest-blocking bugs, especially ones in Coldharbour, that prevented players from completing either a main quest step, or the Coldharbour zone.
• Fixed many other quest bugs not related to the above where items/NPCs didn’t spawn properly.
• Fixed the Greenshade (Aldmeri Dominion zone) problem, which caused the zone to crash every few hours. This one was fixed on 4/4, but was a problem during early access.
• Fixed two dupe issues: the above one involving stacked items, and another (on a much smaller scale) involving crafting hireling emails.
• Put many back-end fixes and procedures in place to block black market gold farmer activity.

We still have much to do – there still other quest problems on our fix list, most of them involving the situation where they become “de-synched” from the zone and don’t spawn their items or NPCs properly. We are in process of putting up our first major update to the game on our Play Test Server (PTS), which includes many updates to the game, including class and weapon ability tweaks, content fixes, and updates to almost all game systems. It also contains our new end-game Adventure Zone, Craglorn, with Veteran content aimed at 4 and 12-man groups. So stay tuned for PTS patch notes for all the other fixes that we’ve been working on. This is a major update to the game, so it will be on PTS for at least a week or 10 days for testing before we take it live.

We’re working on fixing problems, we’re combatting black market gold farmers, and we have a hefty new patch coming shortly. ESO is already an awesome game, and it will only get better from here. Thanks for your patience and support, and I’ll see you in Tamriel. - Matt

TGEK

This game needs open world pvp.

and lol @ there being no one on these forums. What a farce.

keondre.branchcub18_ESO

forums dead, economy dead, company dead, game soon to be dead.

Voodoo

thanks for the update! ..and no it does not need world pvp ...I think a zone the size of 2 TES games combined is large enough.

CaptainAqua

"Fixed quest-blocking bugs, especially ones in Coldharbour, that prevented players from completing either a main quest step, or the Coldharbour zone."

Except many of these are still not fixed... I got the Messages Across Tamriel quest last night and I cannot interact with the NPC, same issue as people have been having for nearly two weeks. I am unable to begin the Coldharbour zone to begin with. Put in a support ticket and I got a blank email response saying to send a reply if I need further help or they will assume my problem is resolved. Yet every time I attempt to send a reply, the delivery fails on your end.

Froggmann5

This game has SOOO much potential! Please listen to your players even more so in the coming weeks! This State of the Game Address is exactly what we would want and need every so often, communicating with your community is key here!

Hakuichi

keondre.branchcub18_ESO wrote: »

forums dead, economy dead, company dead, game soon to be dead.

Sounds like you have never been in game if you think its dead, or the economy.

TGEK

keondre.branchcub18_ESO wrote: »

forums dead, economy dead, company dead, game soon to be dead.

Forums being dead is the biggest shock to me. I would love to see how many subs they have, and how many they are going to lose when the 1 month is up.

The game won't die, but it will definitely go F2P within 12-18 months.

aisriyth_ESO

Glad to see a sotg, good changes, i've noticed a lot of fixes too. Can't wait to see where this game goes!

1111scornneb18_ESO

thx for the report And NO we dont need open world pvp....! go to cyrodill--

Glog

Thanks for the update ZOS.

Stanucz

Thanks, Matt. Great to hear from you again!

Willow

Thank you for the update. Keep this type of communication coming. We would rather see you all present than no dialogue.

TerraDewBerry

Nice job! This state of the game update was very much needed, and much appreciated.

Pangnirtung

Thanks for the effort. I cancelled my renewing subscription after too many crashes and infinite loading screens along with quests that didn't spawn like they were supposed to.

Flame me all you want but when you pay for something you have a reasonable expectation of performance. The crashes are just as frequent and the loading of zones, especially in Cyrodiil are worse than ever for me.

Harbingers

Interesting....

I hope this includes Veteran Dungeon fixes and Broken Passives!

williamcurrier_ESO

Thanks for posting an update. Are these things upcoming or already in?

I would just like to say a couple things. One of the biggest issues I have with the game(besides gold sellers, bots, campers and broken stuff) is the inventory. To me it feels like a free to play game that is limiting you so that you have to buy. Yes we can buy with in game gold and that is nice. However at this point after upgrading bank 3-4 times and every characters inventory 2-3 times I would much rather just pay some real cash and open the space up. There are so many crafting materials that my bank is always full and I spend 30m or so logging on alts grabbing items, logging back on other characters to put more in etc etc. I realize it is a gold sink but I think its a bad choice. It creates discomfort and un-fun waste of gaming time. I notice a lot of things in game are like GW2 Weapon swapping to get more moves, Original guild framework(multiple guilds have a serious lack of guild bank control) I would like to see you grab one more thing from GW2 and that being craft materials go into a complete different place than your bank. A "Material Bank".

Anyhow one of my main hesitations when logging in to play is I know my characters inventory is full and I know all the hassle I am going to have to go through to get him clear and playable again.
Thanks for listening(if you are)

Wolfborn

Thanks for the communication Matt. I just ask one small thing that will go along way to let us customers know that you are doing things not just behind the scenes but in our faces...Hire in game GM's. EQ did it and it worked wonders.

Let us see a in game GM come in remove a bots from a spawn etc

joanjett

Thank you for the update. Great game so far, keep up the good work!

slamjeez

I'm thinking about coming back later maybe as well. Current state not so engaging as I thought at the start. Barely got to level 30.
Still think we need close up 1v1 2v2 3v3 ARENA PvP.
Cyrodiil PvP for people with average PC is a horrible experience and it is so time consuming. I always have walk more than I fight. Ridiculous, just because I did not want to pay +15 euros.
Mind boggling.

tc62b14_ESO

Thanks for this, I was waiting for some kind of communication. This helps a lot.

tpanisiakb16_ESO

While it's nice to hear of this, I worry it's very little very late.

I don't know how you can tell me the economy wasn't affected due to the rampant duping problem, but screenshots and videos and even in-game conversations tell otherwise. I only hope that in the next several months any remnants of this has been completely dissipated.

I am, however, happy to hear the botters *** you off, too. Nothing infuriates me more than walking into a public dungeon and seeing the amount of lifeless, samey characters insta-gibbing the boss spawn. It's very bothersome. What's also as bad is the amount of people in the said dungeon, botters or not. I would love to see a massive reduction on the amount of players able to be in the same location. The game is a very poor MMO to begin with since it's frustrating playing with other people --- why not go the extra step and just allow people the option to do public dungeons alone? Barring the stuff in Cyrodiil, of course.

Craglorn sounds fun, although I am the only person to ever have moved over to this game from my guild. The events of the last couple of weeks has certainly killed any attempt at moving people over and out of their comfort niche. That said, it seems like Craglorn, while interesting to say the least, is going to be skipped over by a great many people in the same situation as myself. As this game is, as Angry Joe ever so eloquently put it, "Most unsocial PvE MMO game ever." it's been rather hard to find myself in PvE-centered guilds. I have yet to make any meaningful connections and I feel it's certainly a large part of the game design. While I've made many friends due to tanking dungeons, I have yet to ever be messaged by them again. Why? I feel they just don't know who the hell I am on their friends list because my tank name is different than my account name which shows up on rosters and friends lists. This all said, I know I'm not going to be able to have any meaningful progress into Craglorn or Trials. Is there anything on the back burner which is still going to keep people like me interested at end game? Or is there an expectation (and viability) to PUG?

Anyway, I wish this game all the luck. I want so desperately to love it, but currently everything that it offers and everything that I'm enjoying can be procured from Skyrim, Oblivion and Morrowind; sans botters, dupers, and gold-spammers.

rordogg

I'm glad to see the changes but theirs one thing I really think should be at the top of the list and thats the phasing. Currently I'm unable to go back and help my friends in previous zones cause I can't even get in the same phase as them. Now I know in the first 1-50 having high levels go back and power level their friends through content isn't something ideal. But my bigger concern that I think will arise here shortly is what happens in the veteran areas? I'm gonna have both vet zones completed by the time my friend gets to them and therefore if it works like i've seen currently I won't even be able to go back and help him play through or join him. I'm sure I can't be the only one thinking this. Please work on the phasing. I absolutely love the game but I'm sure ya'll have seen the massive complaints and reviews and youtube videos of people showing just how terrible the phasing is.

Kevinmon

Thanks for the update.

Kiwi

limit the amount of characters an account can make per day, that way the spammers will be forced to wait

Leiloni

TGEK wrote: »

keondre.branchcub18_ESO wrote: »

forums dead, economy dead, company dead, game soon to be dead.

Forums being dead is the biggest shock to me.

I usually spend quite a lot of time on forums for a game I'm really into, but ESO's forums have never appealed to me since I first saw them back in September. I have transferred my time to Reddit as the format works well and a lot of people post interesting topics. I would however support these forums if they did a revamp to the format and hopefully more players would follow.

Also I found this thread via Reddit. Js!

Gadamlub14_ESO

do whatever you must to combat the bots and gold sellers, i just kindly ask that you DO NOT put bogus copyright claims upon them to get, for example, their advertizements removed from youtube.

doing such things will only temporarily remove the vid as they can and will get it reinstated because your copyright claim, had no grounds. ontop of that, it puts YOU in an even worse light than the gold spammers and bots you are trying to get rid of.

please, do deal with them, but do so Legitimately.

Manchu8990

I am encouraged to read that you are "working" on the bots unfortunately, I have to see to believe. It has been my experience that the amount of dungeon campers has increased, contrary to your statement here. At first it was two or three campers, now I find at least 8 and I am not counting the roamers that are programmed to walk an area cleaning up the trash mobs where the occasional crystals can be had... Here is a thought, have an admin monitor said dungeons and when they suspect a farmer immobilize it, you are sure to get a support email if it is a real person... I can assure you that without much effort you will be able to tell which ones are botting.... Good luck I have until May 4 to decide to continue my sub...

nimrod1984b16_ESO

Will the Vampire Bug in which u lose all Vampire passives after u die be fixed aswell? Pretty annoying to RELOG after every DEATH in PvP to get the passives to work again...

AAAAAND
Will the EU Megaserver finally be moved to the EU with the content update. or is it still "launching perdiod" after one month in by then for u guys and your marketing ppl tell us again that latency in your game magicly doesn´t matter?

2 real big issues, 1 for all and one for us EU ppl which is probably HALF of your playerbase if not even more...

btw i do love that u try to combat bots etc

Gadamlub14_ESO

nimrod1984b16_ESO wrote: »

Will the Vampire Bug in which u lose all Vampire passives after u die be fixed aswell? Pretty annoying to RELOG after every DEATH in PvP to get the passives to work again...

they are swamped currently. this is the first ive heard of that bug, so it'd likely be one of the last things they start to work on, after quest breaking, bots spammers, other glitches and exploits ect...

marion.coleman83_ESO

Thanks for the update. I sincerely hope that you guys make do on your statement. I really, really, hope that you guys overhaul the WW's.. Please, Please do something with that skill line, animations, "Ultimate" issues, ect.. But major props to you guys at attacking those *** botters and gold spammers..