A Critique of ESO and Zenimax OL - 2 weeks in

zbcole · April 2014

First off, I am not aiming for this to be a "fan boy" or doom is gloom. I love the game, and will continue to play.

I think the overall launch went great in scope for what this is - a large scale Class A mmo launch. It is certainly one of the better launches I have been apart of, and I have been a Beta Tester/Early launch guy for most every MMO out there.

That said - there are some items of concern that I have seen in the course of the game. And there is reason for concern as to the level in which ZOL has responded - or lack thereof.

Support Feedback
-ZOL has provided a bad experience in terms of Support for the game. Most of this stems from a terrible design of reporting information to their support team. i.e. When you report a "Gold Farmer" - this triggers a support ticket when support is not needed, we are just sending the info along.

This waters down their process in triaging their support because nearly everything is a support ticket item, and ZOL has more work to do with fewer people - and the community is getting generic, canned "Captain Obvious" replies as their support because of large volume issues. This problem seriously compounds many other problems within the game in crippling ZOL's ability to manage their game as well as allowing problems to manifest too long.
Inventory Integrity
-Bank inventory, personal inventory, disappearing items, email inventory is normally a testing phase for most major mmos. I have seen more glaring problems with this game in terms of faulty code than I have with other games. Yes, the launch is still a good one in my opinion, but this type of problem is a major problem that deserves a faster than 2 week response. The fact that it made it to "Live" production is a bad indicator for their in-house QA team.
Quest Killing Bugs
-Items 2 & 3 are debatable in terms of which one has greater impact. Either is detrimental to the game experience. My encounters with #2 has not occurred, and #3 has been slight and sporadic. I know the frequency for others has been more though, just through chatting with others in guild and in zone. Issues that affect progression or inventory should be a Class A priority for ZOL. These should be addressed promptly. A 2 week turnaround is not prompt in the development cycle.

I develop, albeit on business class software. If we experienced a bug that meant that our customers lost business (inventory) or shut them down (progression) - it is fixed on a timetable of hours, not days and weeks.

I think item #1 is compounding ZOL's ability to identify the prioritized issues to a large extent - but that doesn't excuse them for this low standard way of doing business.
Exploitation
-One of the things I despise in MMO's is people that take advantage of circumstances within a game. Gold Farmers and Sellers are in that category, but so is farming mobs that block content from others in the game. Then you have players now that are selling "bites" - or in most cases scamming to sell a bite and causing a situation that I am sure violates the game's TOS. It doesn't exist if players can't farm, or the behavior is stopped. Item #1 again impacts ZOL's ability to adequately respond to Gold bots, and players performing in the above scam
Add-Ons and Optimization
-First, I think having Add-Ons in an MMO is a great thing. Let the players control what they want/don't want as part of their UI. However, I question the intelligence on incorporating Add-Ons in from Launch. It adds a tremendous amount of variables from which to troubleshoot problems. i.e. There is a zrMinimap add-on that will seriously increase your load time and decrease your framerate. How many people that are complaining about optimization are really experiencing issues from a faulty Add-On.

This IMO creates more variety than ZOL should want in cleaning up an immature product. Immature is not meant as an insult, as every product that is recently released is "immature." Instead of looking at environment or code issues, ZOL also has to consider whether the potential impact the player is experiencing is from a 3rd Variable, a faulty add-on. This just creates unnecessary delays in getting the fixes in the game - something every player wants.