Please Zenimax, open your PTS for the next updates

Angelyne · May 2014

Please, pretty please, dont give keys to
just a few handfull number of streamers who only want to rise up their viewers
just a few ppl who sell that on forums/facebook
just a few ppl who dont care of that game and are just waiting the next MMO

Open it to everyone who have a subscription, everyone who are ready to test it and report bugs, everyone who write addons and play that game daily.

Please ?

ZOS_JessicaFolsom · May 2014

We will be, @Angelyne.

Bangstin · May 2014

I don't know. How would the current pts people be able abuse the oversights and bugs in live anymore if those gets fixed/reported already on pts?

bugulu · May 2014

They are opening it. http://www.tesoelite.com/2014/05/pts-opening/#ixzz32zwgUT6h

Angelyne · May 2014

Cool ! TY Jessica

If i can make 2 other wish = EU localisation (please ? *puppy cat eyes* )
And fix Caltrops/Siphon exploit in Cyrodiil.

please ? (maybe that will work twice !

)

Turelus · May 2014

ZOS_JessicaFolsom wrote: »

We will be, @Angelyne.

This is fantastic news, I much prefer games to have an open test server and environment where players can test features and give structured feedback before deployment.
@ZOS_JessicaFolsom would it be possible to have a forums section where the development teams could post pinned topics about new features/changes for player testing and feedback?
This link is the current section of the EVE Online forums where developers are doing that ready for their next release. Yes you will get a bunch of off topic posts and morons screaming about changes without feedback but you will also have a place the teams working on the game can go and look and read the posts by people who invested real time, effort and thought into the testing (and the game has players dedicated enough to do that).

FunkyBudda · May 2014

ZOS_JessicaFolsom wrote: »

We will be, @Angelyne.

good, I guess better late than never.

I hope Zenimax learned their lesson with Craglorn patch that those that they gave the keys to end up not reporting certain exploits and end up benefiting for themselves (e.g. Kardala farming). These exploits tend to further divide the player base (casual vs hardcore) and create a huge gap in VR levels that's already a grind (yes, even with the new exp change).

What's even worst is that Zenimax is not punishing the exploiters (those that hit VR12 less than one day is pretty obvious) by letting them keep the VR exp they gained is just another slap to the face for players that play the game normally without exploits. I dont understand the logics in not going after these exploiters, but if u judge how they have done with the bots, I guess it was expected.

steveb16_ESO46 · May 2014

This is great. But the flip side is;

Zen have to listen to what is reported, act on it when appropriate and test again before going live.

PF1901 · May 2014

steveb16_ESO46 wrote: »

This is great. But the flip side is;

Zen have to listen to what is reported, act on it when appropriate and test again before going live.

Should be normal procedure independently of opening testing phase to a wider audience. No?

steveb16_ESO46 · May 2014

You'd have thought so.

PF1901 · May 2014

steveb16_ESO46 wrote: »

You'd have thought so.

temjiu · May 2014

Much Appreciated Jessica. Big thanks to all of you who have been working incessantly to respond to customer concerns and to the dev's who have been doing their best to respond to the requests from a design perspective.

Big step forward. And after reading the Thread on VR, i may end up re-subbing. we'll see what they say in their info release on that

LonePirate · May 2014

I have heard from a few PTS testers that ZOS often ignores issues reported by them unless the issue is a massive one. Apparently ZOS pays as much attention to the bugs logged by the PTS crew as it pays to the bugs we all log within the game.

I have learned that if you want a problem fixed, you need to get a topic about pushed to the top of the ESO Reddit forum. Strange but true.

One Two · May 2014

Angelyne wrote: »

Cool ! TY Jessica

If i can make 2 other wish = EU localisation (please ? *puppy cat eyes* )
And fix Caltrops/Siphon exploit in Cyrodiil.

please ? (maybe that will work twice ! )

Just in cyrodiil right? hahaha

terence.caroneb17_ESO · May 2014

FunkyBudda wrote: »

ZOS_JessicaFolsom wrote: »

We will be, @Angelyne.

good, I guess better late than never.

I hope Zenimax learned their lesson with Craglorn patch that those that they gave the keys to end up not reporting certain exploits and end up benefiting for themselves (e.g. Kardala farming). These exploits tend to further divide the player base (casual vs hardcore) and create a huge gap in VR levels that's already a grind (yes, even with the new exp change).

What's even worst is that Zenimax is not punishing the exploiters (those that hit VR12 less than one day is pretty obvious) by letting them keep the VR exp they gained is just another slap to the face for players that play the game normally without exploits. I dont understand the logics in not going after these exploiters, but if u judge how they have done with the bots, I guess it was expected.

I agree with the PTS tester part, those guys, the ones who played PTS before it becomes public, should be banned from PTS. Cause obviously, if they open the PTS, it's because those guys didn't get any job done (or they didnt listen to them, but that would be soooo unprofessionnal and ironic I can't imagine it's that).

But punishing people for playing Craglorn as it was on its launch (and still is with the red diamonds) ? No. Zenimax is responsible for putting out content made for farming. You think they never played their own content patch ? Cause a boss who drops blues and violets every time and give good xp, that you can reactivate with gems, is not an error, it's a choice. If you don't agree you've never been to kardala before they disabled it.

This dungeon, and most of craglorn in fact, is a farm fest. And it was fun, not the kind of farm people do running from a red diamond to another, it was just a dungeon with 3-4 bosses giving good xp, and one who was so easy people just started to only kill and resurrect him (again you resurrect him with a game mechanic, gems, not an exploit).

So basically, all I say is, ok PTS testers should be punished, but not people who played Craglorn for what it was and still is, a farm fest.

Noobie · May 2014

the thing with PTS i believe is that they have a small number of people in it. If you open it too the public lots of people will test it and you will actually see game performance issues before patching to the live, and also 1000 emails a day from players on bugs would be annoying if you worked at ZoS.

NerfEverything · May 2014

About time! The current PTS players are not doing their job. How do you accidentally add a 1.5sec GLOBAL cooldown to a class skill by accident?

And the whole Kardala farming [snip] was discovered on PTS, kept under wraps, and then exploited like crazy as soon as craglorn went live.

[Moderator Note: Edited per our rules on Cursing & Profanity]

FunkyBudda · May 2014

terence.caroneb17_ESO wrote: »

FunkyBudda wrote: »

ZOS_JessicaFolsom wrote: »

We will be, @Angelyne.

good, I guess better late than never.

I hope Zenimax learned their lesson with Craglorn patch that those that they gave the keys to end up not reporting certain exploits and end up benefiting for themselves (e.g. Kardala farming). These exploits tend to further divide the player base (casual vs hardcore) and create a huge gap in VR levels that's already a grind (yes, even with the new exp change).

What's even worst is that Zenimax is not punishing the exploiters (those that hit VR12 less than one day is pretty obvious) by letting them keep the VR exp they gained is just another slap to the face for players that play the game normally without exploits. I dont understand the logics in not going after these exploiters, but if u judge how they have done with the bots, I guess it was expected.

I agree with the PTS tester part, those guys, the ones who played PTS before it becomes public, should be banned from PTS. Cause obviously, if they open the PTS, it's because those guys didn't get any job done (or they didnt listen to them, but that would be soooo unprofessionnal and ironic I can't imagine it's that).

But punishing people for playing Craglorn as it was on its launch (and still is with the red diamonds) ? No. Zenimax is responsible for putting out content made for farming. You think they never played their own content patch ? Cause a boss who drops blues and violets every time and give good xp, that you can reactivate with gems, is not an error, it's a choice. If you don't agree you've never been to kardala before they disabled it.

This dungeon, and most of craglorn in fact, is a farm fest. And it was fun, not the kind of farm people do running from a red diamond to another, it was just a dungeon with 3-4 bosses giving good xp, and one who was so easy people just started to only kill and resurrect him (again you resurrect him with a game mechanic, gems, not an exploit).

So basically, all I say is, ok PTS testers should be punished, but not people who played Craglorn for what it was and still is, a farm fest.

I meant to say the same thing but in the heat of the moment didnt clarify. I agree with you 100% that for the small amount of PTS keys they handed out, they should know fairly easily if those players benefited from the Kardala farming exploit. Unless the bug was reported, then that's a different story. The exploiters should be punished, no questions asked.

Maotti · May 2014

Downloading the PTS now, apparently there are many people doing it right now, it's a slow download.

Moiskormoimi · May 2014

FunkyBudda wrote: »

ZOS_JessicaFolsom wrote: »

We will be, @Angelyne.

good, I guess better late than never.

I hope Zenimax learned their lesson with Craglorn patch that those that they gave the keys to end up not reporting certain exploits and end up benefiting for themselves (e.g. Kardala farming). These exploits tend to further divide the player base (casual vs hardcore) and create a huge gap in VR levels that's already a grind (yes, even with the new exp change).

What's even worst is that Zenimax is not punishing the exploiters (those that hit VR12 less than one day is pretty obvious) by letting them keep the VR exp they gained is just another slap to the face for players that play the game normally without exploits. I dont understand the logics in not going after these exploiters, but if u judge how they have done with the bots, I guess it was expected.

Actually, a lot were reported. There was a lot of ignoring issues. You won't see that because those issues are discussed and reported in the The Psijic Order forum that isn't currently available to the public.

Solid · May 2014

terence.caroneb17_ESO wrote: »

FunkyBudda wrote: »

ZOS_JessicaFolsom wrote: »

We will be, @Angelyne.

good, I guess better late than never.

I hope Zenimax learned their lesson with Craglorn patch that those that they gave the keys to end up not reporting certain exploits and end up benefiting for themselves (e.g. Kardala farming). These exploits tend to further divide the player base (casual vs hardcore) and create a huge gap in VR levels that's already a grind (yes, even with the new exp change).

What's even worst is that Zenimax is not punishing the exploiters (those that hit VR12 less than one day is pretty obvious) by letting them keep the VR exp they gained is just another slap to the face for players that play the game normally without exploits. I dont understand the logics in not going after these exploiters, but if u judge how they have done with the bots, I guess it was expected.

I agree with the PTS tester part, those guys, the ones who played PTS before it becomes public, should be banned from PTS. Cause obviously, if they open the PTS, it's because those guys didn't get any job done (or they didnt listen to them, but that would be soooo unprofessionnal and ironic I can't imagine it's that).

But punishing people for playing Craglorn as it was on its launch (and still is with the red diamonds) ? No. Zenimax is responsible for putting out content made for farming. You think they never played their own content patch ? Cause a boss who drops blues and violets every time and give good xp, that you can reactivate with gems, is not an error, it's a choice. If you don't agree you've never been to kardala before they disabled it.

This dungeon, and most of craglorn in fact, is a farm fest. And it was fun, not the kind of farm people do running from a red diamond to another, it was just a dungeon with 3-4 bosses giving good xp, and one who was so easy people just started to only kill and resurrect him (again you resurrect him with a game mechanic, gems, not an exploit).

So basically, all I say is, ok PTS testers should be punished, but not people who played Craglorn for what it was and still is, a farm fest.

This is exactly how it is, there is a difference between an exploit and farming. The game mechanics were not circumnavigated as is with an exploit they were just repeated over and over which is why its called farming and i don't see how anyone can be banned for this. It does not breach any rules of conduct or anything else for that matter.

heitor · May 2014

amber_picchiottino_ESO wrote: »

FunkyBudda wrote: »

ZOS_JessicaFolsom wrote: »

We will be, @Angelyne.

good, I guess better late than never.

I hope Zenimax learned their lesson with Craglorn patch that those that they gave the keys to end up not reporting certain exploits and end up benefiting for themselves (e.g. Kardala farming). These exploits tend to further divide the player base (casual vs hardcore) and create a huge gap in VR levels that's already a grind (yes, even with the new exp change).

What's even worst is that Zenimax is not punishing the exploiters (those that hit VR12 less than one day is pretty obvious) by letting them keep the VR exp they gained is just another slap to the face for players that play the game normally without exploits. I dont understand the logics in not going after these exploiters, but if u judge how they have done with the bots, I guess it was expected.

Actually, a lot were reported. There was a lot of ignoring issues. You won't see that because those issues are discussed and reported in the The Psijic Order forum that isn't currently available to the public.

I thought Psijic Order didn´t existed already, I didn´t heard about them for hundreds of years. Do you have sure the Psijic Order still exists?

SirAndy · May 2014

I'm afraid y'all be somewhat disappointed ...

Maotti · May 2014

SirAndy wrote: »

I'm afraid y'all be somewhat disappointed ...

How so?

DewiMorgan · May 2014

FunkyBudda wrote: »

good, I guess better late than never.

I hope Zenimax learned their lesson waah waah waah

Sheesh, we get good news and people still find a way to grind their axes over it. Yes, we all know exactly why they're opening it up: 10k volunteers, and only a few percent of them actually testing, made for very poor testing of a system that requires a group of 12 players at once to do a run; and that will just get worse as time goes on.

LonePirate wrote: »

I have heard from a few PTS testers that ZOS often ignores issues reported by them unless the issue is a massive one. Apparently ZOS pays as much attention to the bugs logged by the PTS crew as it pays to the bugs we all log within the game.

I have learned that if you want a problem fixed, you need to get a topic about pushed to the top of the ESO Reddit forum. Strange but true.

As an MMO coder myself (just an indie MMO, but still...) I can tell you that bug reports are never, ever ignored in an MMO. However, bugs are prioritised. There's a triage process, where the bugs that get coder time allocated first, have the highest score in some combination of:
- how serious the impact is on those affected (the first field on the bug report form!);
- who's area of expertise it falls into (all other fields on the bug report form);
- how easily reproducible it is (this is about the most critical trait!);
- how easy it is to fix;
- how many people are affected;
- how public facing it is.

Yes, you can probably "hack" this stat by pushing your pet bugs on reddit to make it look like more are affected, and to make it look like more of a potential egg-facer, so that the social-network guys pester management to fix that bug out of order, to the annoyance of the coders who know that one is #57 on the list, not #1... but that does everyone a disservice.

There's not one easy metric to rank priority by: something that's a 30 second fix but only affects a few people might get priority over something that affects thousands but isn't easily reproducible and could take days to track down let alone fix.

And if the level designers are not as snowed under as the coders, then a minor issue that falls into the level designer's domain (eg making "floating" nodes be on the ground in the last patch) might get fixed before far more serious bugs that need to be handled by a coder. Different coders have different specialties, different areas of the codebase they are familiar with, so will get different bugs assigned to them. UI-guy Jim might be handling far lower-importance UI bugs than Quest-code John's bugs, and Jim might have his fixed before John does, but that doesn't mean that the quest-related bugs have a lower priority in the bug list.

But to claim that bug reports are "ignored"? Doesn't happen.

Personally, I really would love to see a public facing bugtracker; or the ability at least to view your own bug reports. This is likely to cause a LOT of whining as people see their pet bugs ranked as #500 on the list; but it'll also shut a lot of the whiners up, when they see which items are ranked higher. And it'd encourage people to post reproduction steps for those marked "could not reproduce - maybe 3rd party add-on bug?".

driosketch · May 2014

Maotti_Nor wrote: »

Downloading the PTS now, apparently there are many people doing it right now, it's a slow download.

If you can download it now, and are interested in testing on the PTS, yes by all means start downloading sooner than later.

Maotti_Nor wrote: »

SirAndy wrote: »

I'm afraid y'all be somewhat disappointed ...

How so?

@Maotti_Nor‌ , the answer to that question depends on what your expectations are of how the PTS is.

For one, there are no special testing tools on the PTS. It's basically just like submitting /bugs on live. Expect the response time to fixes to be about the same. Templates are a time saver, if they have them, but also limited. And you may find yourself locked into a testing area.

Maotti · May 2014

That's fine by me actually.

SirAndy · May 2014

Maotti_Nor wrote: »

SirAndy wrote: »

I'm afraid y'all be somewhat disappointed ...

How so?

@Maotti_Nor
I've been on the PTS for 8+ months now and during all that time, there have been two issues that have made it a rather frustrating experience.

1.
I have reported well over 1000 bug and feedback reports. The majority of which have been ignored by ZOS. Bugs i reported on the PTS as early as October of last year made it into the LIVE game and are in fact still there today.

2.
Many times the patches we got to test on PTS were not the same that made it onto the beta servers. They would have us test a patch and then use a completely different patch for the beta weekends (supposedly with new bug fixes included). So most of the beta weekends ran on code that was never tested on PTS.

Unless ZOS has a sudden change of heart, i doubt the procedures for the PTS will change.
Opening up the PTS and making it public is the right move, but i'm afraid a lot of people will be disappointed when they realize that what they're testing won't be the same that will be pushed to LIVE.

Case in point: Launch
About 2 weeks before the launch we got another patch on PTS that was supposed to be the version for the launch on LIVE. We spent two weeks testing it and reporting bugs.
Unfortunately, that patch never made it to LIVE and the game launched with a version we had never tested. The patch we had on PTS just sat there and was never deployed.

Case in point: Craglorn
We got to test Craglorn on the PTS some 3 weeks ago. We never got any of the bugfixes for 1.1.2 on the PTS. In fact, we were locked into Craglorn and couldn't even leave the zone (except with a hack of sorts).
And then the version of Craglorn that was pushed to LIVE with 1.1.2 is actually different than what we tested on the PTS!
Again, the LIVE patch 1.1.2 was *never* on the PTS for testing.

driosketch · May 2014

SirAndy wrote: »

In fact, we were locked into Craglorn and couldn't even leave the zone (except with a hack of sorts).

If by hack you mean taking the wagon back to your faction, and then walking places to activate way shrines. I'm actually surprised how many didn't know that.

True, you couldn't way shrine back by default as none of the other way shrines were active. And you couldn't get a template into the PvP campaign it seemed. And to get to the vet zones you would have needed to do all the main quests from the first one. But technically we weren't locked there, and that's before you consider our previous characters that were still saved.

SirAndy · May 2014

driosketch wrote: »

SirAndy wrote: »

In fact, we were locked into Craglorn and couldn't even leave the zone (except with a hack of sorts).

If by hack you mean taking the wagon back to your faction, and then walking places to activate way shrines. I'm actually surprised how many didn't know that.

True, you couldn't way shrine back by default as none of the other way shrines were active. And you couldn't get a template into the PvP campaign it seemed. And to get to the vet zones you would have needed to do all the main quests from the first one. But technically we weren't locked there, and that's before you consider our previous characters that were still saved.

Well, it wasn't at all obvious how to get back to your alliance zone and even if you did, as you mentioned, none of the wayshrines were discovered so one would have to run through all the zones again and to get to any of the VR zones you would have to complete the main quest again.
For all practical purposes, we were locked into Craglorn.

Yes, my old characters were still there, with the exception of my main which was in Cyrodiil when the PTS went offline (remember that farewell party at the imperial city?

) and somehow wouldn't load after Craglorn was copied to the PTS.

Instant crash every time i tried to load that character.

NordJitsu · May 2014

After seeing this thread I hope they open it everyone but you @Angelyne‌ .

Its really offensive for you to assume that PTS testers were all uncaring, exploiters, incompetent, ect.

There's a lot of really dedicated and hard working people who spent months and months testing a much buggier and less complete version of this game for FREE and got very little recognition from anyone for doing so. We put up with countless more frustrations than the people who've complained about launch issues can imagine and the added frustration of seeing reported bugs go through to the live game or feedback get ignored (only to become a huge issue on the live game.)

You owe them a thank you because without them (well us) the game wouldn't be nearly as good/polished as it is today.