Reaction to Matt Firor's post

Phazzle

Read with images at ESO Traveler

Matt Firor, the President of Zenimax posted an article yesterday that addresses some of the concerns that players (myself included) have been expressing. The grouping and phasing bugs were explicitly acknowledged and, unsurprisingly, Zenimax has a plan to debug these. Apparently, they were absent from the patch notes because they are being fixed on a continuous basis.

Matt also presents a tantalizing list of features that are currently in development including: guild tabards, Thieves Guild and Dark Brotherhood quest lines, and an improved phasing system. He discusses some of the positive and negative reviews of the game and touches on how Zenimax uses this information to improve ESO. He closes by offering five days of free play as an olive branch to players who have been affected by the glitches and server downtime.

Personally, I was pleased to see that some of the major problems that we have all been fretting about are not being ignored. I am also excited about some of the awesome features that we can expect to see from ESO. I saw numerous things in the list that players have been asking for on the forums. Hopefully this puts some of our concerns to rest.

You can read Matt's article here.

See you in Tamriel,


Phaz

Thete

Saying that the Thieves Guild and Dark Brotherhood will be coming into the game isn't responding to player suggestions; it was always the plan. However, you don't/can't bring out all your content at launch because then there's nothing to build up to.

The five days free game time is not an olive branch but a business decision. They pretty much needed to do that to get people who couldn't play during the 30 day access to see that things have improved (I hope) and re-subscribe.

Nobody seriously would suggest that the designers would ignore any issues raised by the playerbase. The issue is whether they have the capacity and/or ability to deal with them. It has to be said that, at launch, the answer was 'no'. However, maybe they've accelerated themselves along the learning curve and are in a better situation to turn that around. I certainly hope so. If I find no more progress halting bugs (not bothered about inconsequential bugs) before my game time expires then I for one will be happy to resubscribe as I do enjoy the game while it is possible to play. Hopefully others will too. I always have in the back of my mind that WAR never really recovered from releasing the game before it was ready and that's why the servers shut down 5 years later.

Phazzle

Of course it was always in the plan, fortunately the plan aligns with players' expectations. Also, any decision that involves that much money is certainly a business decision, but it doesn't diminish the conciliatory nature of said decision.

I will also be happy to resub. I am sure the glitches will be fixed eventually and the game is 90% playable as it is now.