How would you prioritise development?

Dayv

It's impossible to fix everything at once and it's impossible to please everyone. As a software engineer I'm also aware that just throwing more people at a project has diminishing returns and can even become counterproductive. I appreciate that ZOS at least appears to be trying to be more communicative with the Nightblade Updates post, But as far as what they are trying to prioritise goes I can only go on what patches have come out. It appears to me that bots seem to get priority over everything else. Sadly, I think this is a bit like the ever-waging war on drugs which just saps more and more resources while never achieving its aim.

I play a VR7 NB mostly pve with a bit of pvp and mostly solo as my main and a lvl 20 Sorc, strictly in phase with 2 other friends who do the same. I just find that the things I'd like them to prioritise don't really match with what I'd like to see. There's no real right or wrong here just personal preference. I would order things as follows.

1. Quest blockers
3. Fixing broken combat abilities (some hotfixes for NBs please)
4. Fix broken crafting - proper ingredients in VR. Enchanting levelling
5. Class balancing - let's not worry about nerfing anything other than clear exploits or making content any harder until things are working as stated.
6. environmental bugs - falling through the floor, getting stuck in walls etc.
7. extra content
8. bots and spam

I could make a bigger list, but I'll leave it at that. How would you prioritise?

Iceman_mat

1. I would set resource spawns to random locations in a zone (this can potential cause more problems then you think)
2. Get rid of invisible walls on cliffs (people remember skyrim movement, let us move like skyrim movement)
3. get ride of those killer fish in water, basically don't limit were i can go in a small area. if you want to limit me, make it a big area (map edge not *** edge of a cliff)
4. lower npc chat times (dagger fall banker)
5. increase holding capacity. When i have to make life choices on gear just because i'm leveling all the professions I can (except provisioning) then their may be a problem with the bag / bank capacity, These choices happened at like lvl 3 mind you.
6. decrease mount prices, I know your imperial bundle thing sells that horse and you sell horses for money but honestly take a note from marvel avenger alliance on this one (facebook game) horse #1 5k moves slowest, scale rest accordingly. Paid for horse ranks next to like 2nd best. Your game needs horses, don't punish us cause we didn't pay real money for one. Give the people who did a perk.
7. change your "seeing perks" on your crafting trees. I shouldn't have to spec into a skill to "see further away resources". Change instead to like a scan. E.G I look at a enchant rune (blue) I can see it's type at lvl 1, scaling up gives me more info. Apply to other resources as needed (how much ore it's holding, stats on that alchy flower) and how it can be used (potions / w.e) at it's highest lvl
8. More group pve oblivion gate type things. I like this idea, i like how it is working, i'm not saying over load the game with more but maybe a few more here or there. Ya got the big ones and ya got the smaller ones (random spawn in's) maybe add some mediums and later on a very few crazy big ones.


I could probably make a bigger list to and yes I know these seem like small issues but that's just it. If you do things that make the immersion / experience more playable then the player base will see something tangible that has been changed / improves game experience whilst bigger issues are taken care of in like big patches like the one that just happened.

These are also bias as they are things I have encountered in my own gameplay/


-Cheers

onlinegamer1

Since I do this for a living (I am a product manager), what ZoS needs to be prioritizing are things related to the launch of a new product to ensure good reviews, good play experience, and good recommendations from players.

This means all bug fixing and exploit handling, and almost no new development. As nice as it is to get a new piece of content less than 2 months after release, they should have been dedicating these first few months totally to bug fixing, including bot handling and other exploits.

IMHO, that was their biggest post-launch mistake (they made a ton prior to launch, but lets not discuss those.)