Destai wrote: »

ZOS_Kevin wrote: »

Also wanted to follow up here. Thank you for the feedback on the AUA. We are taking this feedback to the team to see how we can improve these in the future. The goal with these is to provide a pipeline for communication. Especially with recent changes to leadership, we felt it was important to have an AUA that covered a wide mount of topics. But we are taking in the feedback to improve these in the future along with some of the commentary about the game to share with our team for continued improvements.

And you guys can say "things are in the works" all you want, but that's not being believed by a lot of folks. It's just frustrating to see that at this point. It seems like you guys prefer to deal with that frustration, rather than managing sentiment if/when plans change. Even though the community's largely united in saying, "tell us your plans earlier, we're ok if plans change"; it seems like you're unwilling to do that.

Also, there were a number of hardball questions that really needed to be answered but weren't. I asked quite a few myself - like what did you guys learn from U35. Of course, no answer. If you guys are gonna post in blogs about how you learn from your mistakes, then you need to be prepared to openly discuss them. You will gain credibility if you do.

I want to highlight this because it merits repeating.

@ZOS_Kevin, I would like to reiterate the point that when the team says "we're working on improving communication", what the players are actually desperate for, is open dialogue with the player base and the dev team regarding updates and balance changes. We don't expect you to reveal everything or spoil future content, but one of the reasons players are so upset with the comments made in the AUA is because every time there's a problem with an update, concerns are met with silence, feedback is met with crickets and questions go unanswered. Then when you get comments like you did in the AUA, that show a fundamental misunderstanding of the combat landscape, it says to us, that it's almost like you didn't even bother to read any of it. It shows a blatant disregard for the wants and needs of the community.

This problem doesn't even just involve questions about combat, either. It took so many updates to even find a solution to something as small as the Grim Focus permaglow despite it being almost consistently on the front page of the forums for 3 years...

ZOS_Kevin wrote: »

Also wanted to follow up here. Thank you for the feedback on the AUA. We are taking this feedback to the team to see how we can improve these in the future. The goal with these is to provide a pipeline for communication. Especially with recent changes to leadership, we felt it was important to have an AUA that covered a wide mount of topics. But we are taking in the feedback to improve these in the future along with some of the commentary about the game to share with our team for continued improvements.

Kevin at this point all I can say is "that dog don't hunt". We've been repeatedly reassured that "improved communication" was the rule of the day since well before U35, but especially with U35 and U46 but the devs always fall back into lack of communication, blowing off community questions, and giving us scripted video Q&As that don't answer the questions that the community wants answered and then silence once again. This is not sustainable and nobody believes the improved communication line anymore. We love this game, we love the community, and we love you Kevin but the others are actively driving the community away from the game. This needs to be fixed, if not for a game sustainment angle, for a fiduciary responsibility to the Microsoft shareholders angle.

AngryPenguin wrote: »

Why are any discussions related to ESO taking place anywhere other than the dedicated forum for such discussions?

Good grief! Were they trying to hide this discussion from us or something by putting it on reddit and not even telling people there was a discussion going on there? I'm on the list to get announcements and advertising and got no heads up about this.

Wanted to clear this point up. We posted on the forum that we would be doing an AMA on Reddit, days before the AMA happened. Just to give a heads up that it was happening. So we did not attempt to hide the discussion. We wanted as many people to participate as possible.

The reason we chose to do the AMA on Reddit is because the formatting for threaded discussions is far easier to follow than in our forum threads. We have looked into how we could make the experience better on the forum, but Vanilla Forums (our provider) doesn't support threaded conversations.

Nemesis7884 wrote: »

Spreadsheet balancing and standartization of everything might have made sense before subclassing....but now it makes 0 sense...they should rather form the skill lines around specific themes, strengths and weaknesses to make them more interesting....in a paper stone scissor style fashion

Subclassing itself is a misnomer. Real subclassing would have been a templar being able to further spec into a sub role such as a priest or paladin not stealing skill lines from another class - that is multi-classing. Also the devs told us that power creep wasn't concerning when we raised it as an issue during the U46 PTS cycle so why are they all of a sudden concerned about power creep with consumables? The dev's priorities are so misplaced that I cannot adequately describe them without my post being 75% [snip]s.

Soarora wrote: »

Yeah… I keep thinking about that… like we already know ZOS spreadsheet balances even when we keep begging them not to but to see it so plainly is bizarre.

Before hybridization, there was a "standardization" initiative which changed a bunch of "over time" abilities so they would all align and be consistent. I was not a fan of the change, because abilities that weren't necessarily "DPS-rotation" abilities were steamrolled over in the quest for standardization, like rapids and HOTs. In almost all cases, for the builds I was running at the time, it resulted in a reduction of fun and an increase in annoyance.

But in addition to this, I remember this initiative so distinctly because it was the first time I remember thinking "they are doing this to try and automate testing, balancing, and adding new abilities." I was concerned about that direction because too much consistency is the enemy of fun.

And, here we are.

I think somebody at ZOS a long time ago figured it was better/more foolproof/more efficient/more affordable to balance on a spreadsheet with guidelines, chasing a world where a lot of this could be automated and dev cycles/times would be greatly reduced. And have doubled/tripled/quadruped down on the idea, looking to eliminate "just one more layer" until they reach that goal, instead of absorbing the feedback and reversing course, not really understanding that our feedback was really about this strategy, not just the issue of the day. Just my theory.

If things can be automated and no expertise is needed, it's not really special anymore, is it?

I know all the reasons you all have given and I agree and understand. The best part is that load screen tidbit along the lines of "Sometimes you can run away while in combat and flee through a door." But not a wayshrine. Its so annoying.