Developer Comments for things other than Combat Changes

tomofhyrule

This has been a common theme every PTS cycle - patch notes come out, people look over all of the changes, and yet the only things we get a "why" from the dev comments are a few of the more egregious combat changes. And even then, not all of them.

Sure, we don't need a comment for every single bugfix, but there have been probably one or two major non-combat issues per PTS cycle that end up with a long thread with a lot of heated discussion... and no indication that the devs have anything to comment on there. Look at the problems with the U35 jabs model change, the U41 Class styles being locked, etc. Now, it's the UI 'modernization.' Why? Why was this necessary? People are also frustrated that ZOS's stance seems to be "we're adding Subclassing, so who cares if your original class is not up to snuff - it's not like people made characters with their Class in mind, right?"

Please ZOS, this is what we're talking about when we feel that nobody's engaging in communication with the PTS players. Over the past week, there was one comment from a team member in a PTS thread, and it really wasn't addressing any issues players came up with; it was just an answer to a question about something that wasn't even being tested on PTS. We are all taking time (most of us also not being paid to do so because we aren't all full-time content creators!) to test and give feedback on the new stuff, and then we see nothing done. And then everything goes live and everything we said would be a problem for the greater playerbase ends up becoming a problem with a multi-page thread in General and people getting up in arms about it.

PTS testers have been feeling that we are not valued for a while now. A little bit more interaction with the PTS testing community would go a long way to make people feel better about the game and its future.

Erickson9610

ZOS has been adding a lot more developer comments in the patch notes themselves than they used to. I wish they had made more developer comments regarding some changes and at least acknowledged the complaints people have had (maybe following up with some metrics that prove that their changes were worthwhile after all) but asking developers to directly interact with the community is asking for an argument that will never end, because neither the players nor the developers wish to compromise.

sarahthes

One of the devs has been directly interacting with raid teams via twitch and via the Nexus raiding hub discord regarding the new trial, known bugs, and balancing. I think that's pretty cool.

ZOS_Kevin

Wanted to touch on this briefly. We can always do a better job at getting more developer comments into the patch notes. We try to do more outlines of things, so if you go back to week one of this PTS cycle, we introduced Combat Animation Memory Reduction. And we have a fairly lengthy outline of what the goal of this was. We just did not call it a developer comment. But overall, we do try to address these where possible.

We know folks would love the dev team to chat more in the threads and we are working on ways to make stuff like that possible, like with some of the Q&As we have done this year. But we are also trying to be mindful of the team's time. These weeks during PTS, folks are reading your feedback and bug reports, trying to fix bugs and adjust things based on feedback as much as possible. And that is on top of getting items ready for patch notes each week. So it is a constant balancing act while making sure they have the time needed to complete tasks. But we will take this feedback and see how we can improve the communication here.

licenturion

Good point. Especially that nothing is said about the UI modernization is bizarre since literally 99.99 percent of feedback is overly negative and one of the most active threads for U46.

Pretty sure this will evoke some feelings with more casual or non-forum players as well. They may not mind or feel a 1 percent nerf on a set or skill. But UI redesigns usually doesn't go over very well.