What is wrong with Zenimax? Is the current situation out of their control?

Apricot

Gaudrath wrote: »

Nope. You are obviously not a programmer.

You're right. I'm not a programmer. I'm also not a pilot but I don't have to be to know the plane's on fire.

Gaudrath wrote: »

It has nothing to do with bad typing. It has everything to do with the sheer volume of code and the inherent sensitivity of complex systems to minute errors.

Errors are small and easy to make, consequences are big and obvious once the system is placed under pressure. Which only occurs on live.

In that case, good job RIFT, GW2 and WS for hiring competent coders.

Atrayo

Hi Guys,

All we need is that guy from Coldharbour with the kettle on his head to become the company spokesperson for Zenimax.

Right now the honeymoon period with the customer base starts to wear off. The Live dev team starts to fall into their pattern more or less for the 1st year after retailing. The exception being if the game fails expect mass lay offs. It's typical now to fire the entire development workforce that built the game. In order to save costs on the side of labor. Thankfully this has not been the case with Zenimax / Bethesda. (due to all the financial inputs of boxed / digital client sales and now subscription fees)

The worst MMO launches I have witnessed are that of Funcom for "Anarchy Online" and Cornered Rat Software for "WWII Online". (a MMOSIM) Those two were nightmares, Zenimax came no where close to that again thankfully. Even during the beta the servers were mostly up without batty crashes. The gold retail launch in my opinion has been slightly good.

However whats tripping the Zenimax team is the after care of all the incidental issues with the game. Becoming what seems from our perspective as a foul-up of internal processes of the game and of management. I hope its not a Sweat Shop environment in development which is notorious for introducing avoidable errors in the game code. Right now its Zenimax's time to lose consumer confidence with the "Service" aspect of the game itself. The Community outreach team of staffers has only mentioned about bringing down the European Servers last night. Nothing else, which is a deafening silence before the storm of disgruntled customers that we're brewing.

If this lack of communication from the developers continues even just to manage our expectations. Even if they tell us 10 times in a day of the daily progress report of squishing these issues I would be pleased. (following the example set by SOE community support staff) Zenimax hopefully your collating these forum posts and passing them up the line for your series of meetings to gauge the morale of your customers. Not to be unfair with your struggle to stay on schedule but if you allow customer sentiment to unravel on you. In a month or two you'll be needing to lay off staffers. Because of a loss of subscribers that once burned you may find hard to replace with new subscribers. Until that is you go to plan B and revert to a Free To Play business model. After squeezing as many dollars as possible out of this product / service in income and expenditures.

starkerealm

b92303008rwb17_ESO wrote: »

I have been playing MMORPG games for over 10 years and, except Funcom, I have never seen a company f*** up their game so bad like Zenimax did.

Cryptic comes to mind. Though they're doing a lot better these days.

Also, TOR, though I don't know if that goes at the feet of Bioware or the remnants of Mythic they were using as a chew toy.

I suspect that going into the holiday weekend with a major patch was a mistake. I mean, I get the thought process, but 1.1.2 should have gone up on Monday, so they could push a hotfix for yesterday if something went off the rails... which it very well might have. *shrugs*

fiachsidhe

Gaudrath wrote: »

fiachsidhe wrote: »

Rift, TERA, and Neverwinter, to name a few. GW2 had a pretty smooth launch.

You mean that GW2 with invisible zergs running around and people exploiting render lag to hell and back? That GW2?

Or Rift which got a ton of flak for server instability?

Here's a question for you, in recent memory can you name an mmorpg that has had as bad of a launch?

Launch has been very smooth. I played since first day of early access, and with the amount of content I covered since then I'm pretty happy. Maybe <10% of the game was affected.

Of course, they had a streak of big ones lately. Vampire ultimate spamming. Now VR rank scaling. And caltrops bug.

You're right, its been an ENTIRE month. ZoS should be churning out daily hotfixes. Instead they are doing jack *** for weeks at a stretch only to break even more of the game.

You are obviously not a programmer either. You have no idea how complicated it is to push through a patch. It's not like some dude is sitting in the corner typing away with Firor peeking over his shoulder telling him what to do. You have dozens of people. Any one of them can make a small mistake that breaks something. You have multiple interdependent systems, all sensitive to changes made within any of them.

You have to go through version control, and with dozens of people working on the same code you spend a lot of time keeping track of who did what and why.

Daily hotfixes. No such thing. Just like bug-free coding. Can't be done.

Yes I do mean those games. Whose problems are so light compared to this one that its amazing you can even make the claims you did with any sincerity. Did you play any of those games? Or did you just scan google for some early complaints just to fill in your response. Because I did. I preordered and played every one of them. They were all GOLD compared to this train wreck.

Maybe not every day but I've seen games take down servers and patch every few days.

None of the games I mentioned come even remotely close to being as messed up, ill-planned, and inept as this one. The one you go on to praise.

Its mind boggling how you can mention one maybe two minor issues from the games I quoted, and then minimize the issues in this game which are quote numerous as only effecting less than 10% of the game.

Duplication bug, that bug that turns off your ability to fight at all, and slows you down.

Botters everywhere.

Memory leaks.

No I'm not a programmer, but guess what? I DON'T HAVE TO BE.
What a lame, cliched logical fallacy argument. I don't have to be a chef, to complain that my food is undercooked. I don't have to be a mechanic to complain that my car runs like ***. and I don't have to be a programmer to understand that other companies have been able to hotfix these very same types of issues quicker.

Complicated patches? COMPLETELY MOOT. It was easy enough for them for them push out nerfs. It was easy enough to make an entire dungeon. But apparently its was too complicated to make passives activate properly? When every other class's work just fine? And these have been issues since BETA! PLEASE!

You don't have to be a programmer to understand that Zenimax Online is focusing on wowing us with new content, so we'll ignore the technical issues, and bugs! They did with their single players games too!

So do yourself a huge favor, if you're going to continue defending Zenimax, and arguing against the critics here. DRop the whole "you aren't a programmer" argument. It's a complete strawman.

fiachsidhe

Gaudrath wrote: »

[
Of course. I design and code web apps. Those are relatively simple programs - usually a couple thousand lines of code. Sometimes just hundreds.

So I speak from experience when I claim that errors are easy to make and not because the programmer is lazy or sloppy. One wrong key press at a wrong time and in the wrong place and you have yourself a bug. Sometimes they're easy to spot, and sometimes really really hard. Until it goes live, then it's immediately complained about.

Ha! I love how every time someone calls out someone else on "not being a programmer" they either:

A. Aren't one themselves
B. Work in IT, or program aps or other vague little PoS programs.

So in other words you aren't really speaking from mmorpg development experience. Not the same kind. Not even close really. And you're exaggerating the issues just to defend Zenimax. Who has millions of dollars and entire teams of people working on each aspect of the game.

You are so disingenuous.

Just shouting "code is complicated" doesn't cut it. I can do that. I'm not a programmer, and everything you offered up as insight into programming I also know. The problem is none of it excuses the problems this game is having.

fiachsidhe

AngryNord wrote: »

fiachsidhe wrote: »

Here's a question for you, in recent memory can you name an mmorpg that has had as bad of a launch?

I'd think that the original launch of FFXIV would qualify as 'even worse'?

and how did Square-Enix react?

- They apologized publicly, twice.
- The Lead of the project stepped down and was replaced
- They rebuilt the entire game from the ground up
- They allowed players to continue playing the old version for free
- They turned the rebirth of the game into actual story/lore
- The new version launched well and is ten times better
- The original players were rewarded with extra stuff for sticking with the old version