I have a genuine question about ZOS's development process.

Cooperharley · April 28

You would think with a system as MASSIVE as subclassing that there would be just all-hands-on-deck communication trying to get this subclassing feature shipped out. Why is there not communication day in and day out? We can give feedback all we want, but we never get anything back and then get a week like this where there's literally nothing updated. I know at the top it says that Week 4 will have lots of combat changes, but my goodness dude, most of those changes will end up making it to live more than likely and we just have no idea about what's going on.

If you take Grinding Gear Games (POE) or Blizzard (World of Warcraft), why is it that they can have rolling combat updates throughout the year and we have this tiny 5 week period where it's all or nothing and no REAL change can be made? Is it an unbelievable amount of bureaucracy? I'm just confused man. I used to really love the game, but I just want to understand what's going on behind the curtain a bit. We've been told that we're getting this seasonal content, which let's face it, is just a chapter strewn out over a year. We've gotten less and less content year after year with the intent of more time being put in place for development, bug fixes, improvements, etc. I haven't seen any difference, or at least nothing MAJOR.

- Why do we have to have a small 5 week period of development for a patch and then it's set in stone for 3 months before we get any update? What is that about?
- Why is the back and forth process during a PTS cycle painfully slow? Why are Brian Wheeler and Rich and other development team members not on here communicating with players and taking in feedback consistently if we ARE limited to such a small period?

If you're going to switch from a chapter purchase to a pre-order year-long seasonal purchase model where we're essentially putting our faith in y'all to develop something we all will like, don't you think it makes more sense to be more involved?

Dreadwar · April 28

Seems like the process is mostly for bug fixes and for show.

React · April 28

This is exactly how I'm feeling. It really feels like they do not care how this system is going to impact balance, and they're just hoping it'll drum up some short term interest in the game to keep people spending through this year.

I agree that it's likely some sort of bureaucracy issue, or a result of some manager/mangers being unwilling to change how things operate behind the scenes. Any other studio would be communicating daily when attempting to implement something as game changing as the sub classing system. They'd be going so far out of their way to address every point of feedback and concern. They'd be willing to admit where they're wrong, and delay things if necessary to provide a system that doesn't impact the game in a negative way. Yet, all we've seen are very small/irrelevant tweaks and a claim that there will be more in week four - with only three weeks until the system goes live.

I guess we shouldn't really expect anything different, because they've always conducted themselves this way.

Zyaneth_Bal · April 28

Cooperharley wrote: »

You would think with a system as MASSIVE as subclassing that there would be just all-hands-on-deck communication trying to get this subclassing feature shipped out. Why is there not communication day in and day out? We can give feedback all we want, but we never get anything back and then get a week like this where there's literally nothing updated. I know at the top it says that Week 4 will have lots of combat changes, but my goodness dude, most of those changes will end up making it to live more than likely and we just have no idea about what's going on.

If you take Grinding Gear Games (POE) or Blizzard (World of Warcraft), why is it that they can have rolling combat updates throughout the year and we have this tiny 5 week period where it's all or nothing and no REAL change can be made? Is it an unbelievable amount of bureaucracy? I'm just confused man. I used to really love the game, but I just want to understand what's going on behind the curtain a bit. We've been told that we're getting this seasonal content, which let's face it, is just a chapter strewn out over a year. We've gotten less and less content year after year with the intent of more time being put in place for development, bug fixes, improvements, etc. I haven't seen any difference, or at least nothing MAJOR.

- Why do we have to have a small 5 week period of development for a patch and then it's set in stone for 3 months before we get any update? What is that about?
- Why is the back and forth process during a PTS cycle painfully slow? Why are Brian Wheeler and Rich and other development team members not on here communicating with players and taking in feedback consistently if we ARE limited to such a small period?

If you're going to switch from a chapter purchase to a pre-order year-long seasonal purchase model where we're essentially putting our faith in y'all to develop something we all will like, don't you think it makes more sense to be more involved?

Tbh you probably don’t want to to know what’s going on behind the curtain, might make you like the game less

valenwood_vegan · April 28

The process seems to be that by the time something appears on PTS, the relevant decisions have all been made and it's going live as is with minor tweaks. Unfortunately, even assuming feedback from the PTS is being looked at and considered, it's happening far too late in the process to matter and far too late for any meaningful back and forth.

The lack of communication and follow-up regarding such a massive change to the core of the game is still stunning though.

Zyaneth_Bal · April 28

React wrote: »

This is exactly how I'm feeling. It really feels like they do not care how this system is going to impact balance, and they're just hoping it'll drum up some short term interest in the game to keep people spending through this year.

This does seem to be the case, especially considering how zos don’t actually care about the game itself

Markytous · April 28

I'm sad, folks. I didn't want Subclassing. I wanted this moment with expansions ending to be the "golden age" where systems stopped being piled onto each other and where the chance to balance all this out would finally come. Now I'm not just losing build diversity enforced by powercreep but I'm also losing class diversity masqueraded as "in the spirit of Elder Scrolls". This was the moment and it's gone now. Full speed ahead on transforming the entire game yet again for another year instead if fixing the existing content.

MashmalloMan · April 28

Markytous wrote: »

Full speed ahead on transforming the entire game yet again for another year instead if fixing the existing content.

I like subclassing tbh, they've just done it in such a poor way, but this right here grinds my gears.

When the hell are they going to finish hybridization? They said the goal was to combine w and s damage/crit like they did for phys and spell resist or phys and spell pen. They're practically meaningless now... yet 3+.. going on to 4 years, nothing.

Food, potions, poisons, mundus stones, sets, passives, class minor group buffs, skill effects, still left in a state as if hybridization never started. It's infuriating.

Someone explain to me why this PTS, NB's Magicka Flood passive now provides 6% stam/mag instead of 8% mag, yet Bound Armor morphs still give 8% stam or mag. They couldn't even bother to rename it. To top it off, the no pet passive now gives 5% stam/mag, where as it used to give 10% and NB's get 1% more. What is with the NB favouritism over the years? When will it stop?

Off topic I guess, just wish they'd finish something they started at least once. Their newest drop content developement seems to be rounding out Scribing. They were adding new elements each patch, maybe new named effects, readjusting values, new grimoires. 1 year later, nothing

rauyran · April 28

The development for any large feature starts months before we even hear about it. It takes months of planning and development effort to make any major feature change. They will only announce the feature once it is complete and on the final debugging stages before launch. The PTS is never about making changes to these features, it's about uncovering bugs. Balance changes are possible if it means changing a configuration value somewhere, but not if it requires development time. Half the dev team will have moved onto the next major feature already.

MashmalloMan · April 28

rauyran wrote: »

The development for any large feature starts months before we even hear about it. It takes months of planning and development effort to make any major feature change. They will only announce the feature once it is complete and on the final debugging stages before launch. The PTS is never about making changes to these features, it's about uncovering bugs. Balance changes are possible if it means changing a configuration value somewhere, but not if it requires development time. Half the dev team will have moved onto the next major feature already.

Pretty sure people understand that, it doesn't make it right.

As OP pointed out. Grinding Gear Games (POE) and Blizzard (World of Warcraft) are able to completely course correct within days of a patch dropping. Those developers know to set asside developement time to address the feedback of the new features they're release instead of calling it a day and waiting 6-18 months, as it tends to feel with ZOS.

It's not hard to pinpoint either, their most recent "we're listening and watching" was about Grave Lord's Sacrifice. The amount of brilliant ideas on the PTS when that came out, the constant feedback since, the statisics they must have to objectively show the ratio of players who actually engage with the morph and if it's even worth it for the class to take. It's been about a year if I'm not mistaken and it remains largely the same. The only thing they "fixed" was brought up during the 1st week it released where you were forced to use it in combat, but it's still attached to an annoying pet ai that needs to make contact with you. In fact it's relatively worse now that it has 1 less effect via the corpse generation on Skulls. Not saying it's a bad thing, but it does have 1 less thing in its budget with no compensation.

colossalvoids · April 28

Comparing zos to GGG is setting yourself up for a major disappointment. I do agree with everything however, if is indeed frustrating and tiring to be on a recieving end whilst still caring about the game so the best you personally can do is to try distance yourself a bit again the very least, helps tremendously. We all know well enough that we won't get the communication we want, it's been ten plus years and every year there's a promise about communication which is different from what dedicated players see as a communication. Vastly different.

Cooperharley · April 28

colossalvoids wrote: »

Comparing zos to GGG is setting yourself up for a major disappointment. I do agree with everything however, if is indeed frustrating and tiring to be on a recieving end whilst still caring about the game so the best you personally can do is to try distance yourself a bit again the very least, helps tremendously. We all know well enough that we won't get the communication we want, it's been ten plus years and every year there's a promise about communication which is different from what dedicated players see as a communication. Vastly different.

I’m comparing ZOS to virtually every other major developer here. I understand it’s vastly different and that’s my point.

What is going on to make it that way? It’s infuriating with less and less content being released, then charging us more for that chapter spread over a year with a rebranded name (seasons) on top of less communication and a rushed feature that’s about to inherently change the foundation of the game.

My brain is soup lol

Stx · April 28

I would love to be wrong about this. But my running theory for at least 4-5 years now is that this game is just a cash cow for them and they don’t put much effort into maintaining it at all.

If you compare the price tag of this game to other popular MMOs, this game has similar cost but the amount of content is less, and the frequency and total number of balance changes are FAR less. Even games that have a much lower price tag like GW2 roll out more frequent balance patches with more lines of notes.

Again, I could be wrong. But the proof is in the pudding. They seem to put effort into player houses, crown store cosmetics, and other forms of cosmetics that they think will make players buy crowns. That’s what you see being released frequently.

I am very excited for subclassing, and I will always love this game for the zone design, the lore, and I still enjoy it. But I do wish they would put more work in.

Rkindaleft · April 28

Stx wrote: »

I would love to be wrong about this. But my running theory for at least 4-5 years now is that this game is just a cash cow for them and they don’t put much effort into maintaining it at all.

If you compare the price tag of this game to other popular MMOs, this game has similar cost but the amount of content is less, and the frequency and total number of balance changes are FAR less. Even games that have a much lower price tag like GW2 roll out more frequent balance patches with more lines of notes.

Again, I could be wrong. But the proof is in the pudding. They seem to put effort into player houses, crown store cosmetics, and other forms of cosmetics that they think will make players buy crowns. That’s what you see being released frequently.

I am very excited for subclassing, and I will always love this game for the zone design, the lore, and I still enjoy it. But I do wish they would put more work in.

I don't want to get snipped for conspiracy theories but it definitely feels like they've just moved a lot of their development team over to working on their new IP, I feel like when you look back at the last few years at the content they released it becomes obvious and that's one of the reasons as to why most of the new stuff is just re-skinned/crown store focused.

Less content in the Gold Road chapter, the Home Tours update, the Battlegrounds update going live with a bajillion bugs, they stopped releasing proper Q3 updates to do QoL and bug fixes in which major bugs that have been in the game for years still haven't been fixed (looking at you, Lady Thorn circle, not to mention the lack of actual testing because when they ported the boss to Infinite Archive the bug can occur there now as well) they even said it in the 2024 Directors Letter that they were going to focus more on bite-sized content which while we haven't seen exactly what that means yet it probably just means less content.

StarOfElyon · April 28

The crazy thing is that people on console have paid for the game on PC as well just to be able to test on the PTS and they have had their feedback ignored for years. The players are doing the work so the devs don't have to.

Sarhion · April 29

So evidently there's a potential strike going on against ZoS and Microsoft right now, so that could be contributing to the chaos.

BahometZ · April 29

It's difficult to summarise how badly this "subclassing" is for the game. It's like adding helicopter blades to a car. Many people are distracted and think ooh cool blades without even thinking about how it's supposed to integrate with a system not designed for it. Nevermind that the car doesn't even run properly or come with a manual.

Zos plowing ahead with this is insane but sadly on brand. They'd rather blow up class balance than walk back from this in anyway. It's been announced and you can't look weak.

I've seen many different arguments against it on these forums and in-game but haven't heard a good argument for it anywhere, other than "it's a cool new thing". Well hybridisation was a cool new thing that was never completed, eroded class identity, and shifted the game to a meta that turned huge parts of the player base off. Now we're still in the middle of scribing, a cool new thing that has further diluted that identity, and they haven't even finished dealing with how it has affected game balance and entrenched a dull arc meta. How much effort will zos put into subclassing before they wipe their hands and move onto to the next half-baked idea.

Also 4.8 second templar beam is a bad joke.

supabicboi · April 29

is it possible to go hire another combat director. dude is destroying our game, like fr go away wheeler.

no public sentiment has been good, what changes to his process, ideology, and action plan for combat has the guy made after the backlashes from the live streams? how long has it alrdy been since then, there is still no communication as to how combat is supposed to be, just another subclassing feature for short term profit. balance the combat system for crying out loud.

isnt there already enough time wasted for the guy to continue on in this position? what has he contributed so far? why is it that the game we play and dedicate our time and effort in, dictated by this guy who doesn't know jack abt it, and worse, making the worse possible calls ever.

Lags · April 29

Cooperharley wrote: »

You would think with a system as MASSIVE as subclassing that there would be just all-hands-on-deck communication trying to get this subclassing feature shipped out. Why is there not communication day in and day out? We can give feedback all we want, but we never get anything back and then get a week like this where there's literally nothing updated. I know at the top it says that Week 4 will have lots of combat changes, but my goodness dude, most of those changes will end up making it to live more than likely and we just have no idea about what's going on.

If you take Grinding Gear Games (POE) or Blizzard (World of Warcraft), why is it that they can have rolling combat updates throughout the year and we have this tiny 5 week period where it's all or nothing and no REAL change can be made? Is it an unbelievable amount of bureaucracy? I'm just confused man. I used to really love the game, but I just want to understand what's going on behind the curtain a bit. We've been told that we're getting this seasonal content, which let's face it, is just a chapter strewn out over a year. We've gotten less and less content year after year with the intent of more time being put in place for development, bug fixes, improvements, etc. I haven't seen any difference, or at least nothing MAJOR.

- Why do we have to have a small 5 week period of development for a patch and then it's set in stone for 3 months before we get any update? What is that about?
- Why is the back and forth process during a PTS cycle painfully slow? Why are Brian Wheeler and Rich and other development team members not on here communicating with players and taking in feedback consistently if we ARE limited to such a small period?

If you're going to switch from a chapter purchase to a pre-order year-long seasonal purchase model where we're essentially putting our faith in y'all to develop something we all will like, don't you think it makes more sense to be more involved?

you would think so, but you would be wrong. If you've been around for many years you know how zos balances and communicates. Huge sweeping changes out of nowhere, little to no communication, and pushing the updates/changes out, within the time frame they have decided, regardless of what people say about how things are on the PTS. Its been this way for a long time now, and no amount of talking about change will convince me they can change.

And ive also wondered why zos cant, or wont, implement things like other games do. Why they refuse to do small changes over time, little by little, instead of huge sweeping changes/blanket changes in a very small window of time. Its either they cant or they wont. And if they cant, it makes me wonder if its something to do with the infrastructure of the game. Maybe its also why they have seemingly never been able to pin point why their game becomes utterly unplayable when a large amount of players pile up in a zone (cyrodiil) for the last decade. Even though they have been apparently investigating and working on it for like 5 years now. It just seems odd that they cant find the root of the issue after all this time. But maybe the root of the issue is just built into the core of the game and cannot be changed without changing everything. Idk all this is just my opinion/speculation, not fact, so please dont moderate me. Thanks.

VaxtinTheWolf · April 29

Whenever someone asks this I wonder what you were expecting at this point. It's been an ongoing pattern for a long time. I've stopped interacting with and uninstalled the PTS years ago. It's just here to give whatever idea they thought up in secret to a larger audience for the purposes of removing bugs and smoothing out the critical functions of those systems. If any player feedback is ever actually taken seriously, It most likely wont show up until the next chapter or whatever, if ever at all.

If something shows up on the PTS, it's coming to the live server. I'm not really playing anymore outside of collecting the daily log-ins' and or an event or two, but I still loosely follow the updates. If they actually communicated their plans in advance in the ways players wanted them to do like 5 years ago, I actually believe they wouldn't be able to sustain the current update cycle they've been using because a chunk of the update would probably be rejected by players. It's almost always been 1 positive, 3 negative, and then adjustments on the PTS to take away one or two negatives, but you still get a mixed final result where you're stuck with something barely anyone wanted to deal with.

To the forum staff reading, pass on this question; Is it at all possible, for what remains of this game's life cycle, to have you all announce your combat changes like 2 months in advance, with details about what you actually intend to do with the purpose to get early player feedback well before it actually gets to the live servers. Then after contemplating said feedback, go on and push the hopefully much more refined PTS patch for everyone to try out and get another round of feedback to polish those adjustments even further.

Lags · April 29

BahometZ wrote: »

It's difficult to summarise how badly this "subclassing" is for the game. It's like adding helicopter blades to a car. Many people are distracted and think ooh cool blades without even thinking about how it's supposed to integrate with a system not designed for it. Nevermind that the car doesn't even run properly or come with a manual.

Zos plowing ahead with this is insane but sadly on brand. They'd rather blow up class balance than walk back from this in anyway. It's been announced and you can't look weak.

I've seen many different arguments against it on these forums and in-game but haven't heard a good argument for it anywhere, other than "it's a cool new thing". Well hybridisation was a cool new thing that was never completed, eroded class identity, and shifted the game to a meta that turned huge parts of the player base off. Now we're still in the middle of scribing, a cool new thing that has further diluted that identity, and they haven't even finished dealing with how it has affected game balance and entrenched a dull arc meta. How much effort will zos put into subclassing before they wipe their hands and move onto to the next half-baked idea.

Also 4.8 second templar beam is a bad joke.

can you think of one time they have walked bad something that was a bad idea? Or was implemented and didnt workout, or was bad for the game? Anything that wasnt like a test or something. I cant.

huskandhunger · April 29

It's more of like a show and tell and to sort out bugs, not really an avenue for player engagement much less any proposed changes.

alpha_synuclein · April 29

I uninstalled PTS after u35 and never came back. PTS feedback is irrelevant for balancing or direction of the game. I would like to believe that it might be helpful with bug fixes, but atm I am doubting this also.

ceruulean · April 29

VaxtinTheWolf wrote: »

If they actually communicated their plans in advance in the ways players wanted them to do like 5 years ago, I actually believe they wouldn't be able to sustain the current update cycle they've been using because a chunk of the update would probably be rejected by players.

That's how it's supposed to be. The whole point of early feedback is to figure out what's worth developing. Why would you waste time and resources developing a feature that the customer base doesn't really want?

Estin · April 29

I commented a while back when there were talks about improving communication between the players and ZOS. The only way that could be done is if they stop keeping everything a secret from us until it's too late to make any changes. A lot of problems with BGs could've been averted if they simply told us they were working on it at the beginning of 2024 and gave monthly updates for its design and even allowing for tests. The same for Infinite Archive, Necromancer changes, and now this. If ZOS announced subclassing last year, or even at the beginning of the year, giving us all the details on how it would work and allowing them to test it, it would give players plenty of time to provide feedback so that real changes can be made instead of temporary™ adjustments so it can be "acceptable" for the scheduled release date.

I'm really disappointed how the new content release schedule talked about in the director's letter was just words at this point, because subclassing is being pushed out for june deadline before it's even ready to be released. No amount of class tweaking is going to make subclassing in this form be good. It needs more time to before it can be released. I'm dreading next week's update because I'm suspecting every class is going to be hit with the standard 33.33%™ nerf in order to make subclassing not too strong while they work on subclassing 2.0 over the next 2-3 years. It really makes me dread the potential veteran overland concept later this year too, because it may not end up going well either.

I don't speak for everyone, but in my eyes, better communication means telling us what's being worked on much earlier in advanced and letting us test it. Vengeance can be used as a great example. Vengeance was a concept quickly put together to do nothing but acquire performance data, yet a lot of players, even veteran pvpers, are amenable to the idea of it being a new campaign despite no guarantee that Vengeance will ever come back again. A lot of feedback was given, such as adding more variety to skills, upping target limits, adding set customizations, etc. We're already seeing in this PTS cycle that vengeance is getting more skill lines despite it not being a playable campaign. The direction it is heading, it is very believable that attributes, traits, enchantments, passives, and sets will be added, all based on test data and player feedback over several test iterations. This is how all development cycles for major game changes should go. It's the only way to obtain feedback before it's too late to do so, as it is with subclassing. If the iteration of Vengeance we saw was released as a permanent campaign instead as a 1 week test, it would've been a dead campaign by now due to how basic it was. It would've taken 1-2 years for it to receive any updates to make it enjoyable to play for longer periods, but most players would have moved on by then, unwilling to go back making it an underpopulated campaign like what happened with Ravenwatch going no proc and then back to allowing procs. Subclassing being released as is will have a similar effect to the entire game.

Please do not ignore the warning signs, and shelve Subclassing until it's ready. It's a free update not attached to the content pass or new zone. It will not affect sales for it. It can definitely be pushed back another 3-4 months for it to receive the changes it needs.

Danikat · April 29

As other people have said the PTS is not (and never has been) really for testing and feedback. Once something is announced and added to the PTS it's almost finished and only open to very minor adjustments. They're certainly not going to scrap or fundamentally change a major feature like subclassing, no matter what the feedback is.

The clue for me was that almost everything has voice acting in place by the time it's available on the PTS. Recording voice acting is relatively expensive and time consuming so it's usually one of the last things to be done, because you don't want to have to re-do it all after something is redesigned.

When I've played on testing servers or alpha/beta versions for other games there's little/no voice acting (unless it's things like generic lines reused from earlier releases) and sometimes even animations and text dialogue aren't finished because it's important to get the mechanics working first.

Once all the details have been completed it's just not practical to change anything, so the feedback can't be used even if the developers agree with it. The point is simply to showcase what we are going to get, whether we want it or not.

YandereGirlfriend · April 29

One of the major shortcomings of their development process is in their unresponsiveness to simply tweaking existing numbers to achieve better balance.

That, in the overwhelming majority of instances, requires literally zero touches to existing code (or art) apart from changing those magic numbers chosen for applicable bonuses.

Honestly, that should be the sort of thing that is adjusted weekly, as it commonly is in live service games. The fact that we only get opportunities for basic adjustments every ~4 months is absolutely wild.

gc0018 · April 29

I earlier make a post about what could happen behind.

Despite I am just reposting some top comments from YouTube, in-game channel chat and other ESO forums, the Mod delete my reply with the reason "Conspiracy Theories and Misinformation". If they are really "Conspiracy Theories and Misinformation", why won't YouTube / other forums mod delete them at the first place?

What does that joke said? "The best way to spread a rumor is to officially deny it".

Stx · April 30

I didn’t even know they use “conspiracy theories and misinformation” as a reason to censor people on the forums.

That’s actually really hilarious 🤣

Thumbless_Bot · April 30

Cooperharley wrote: »

You would think with a system as MASSIVE as subclassing that there would be just all-hands-on-deck communication trying to get this subclassing feature shipped out. Why is there not communication day in and day out? We can give feedback all we want, but we never get anything back and then get a week like this where there's literally nothing updated. I know at the top it says that Week 4 will have lots of combat changes, but my goodness dude, most of those changes will end up making it to live more than likely and we just have no idea about what's going on.

If you take Grinding Gear Games (POE) or Blizzard (World of Warcraft), why is it that they can have rolling combat updates throughout the year and we have this tiny 5 week period where it's all or nothing and no REAL change can be made? Is it an unbelievable amount of bureaucracy? I'm just confused man. I used to really love the game, but I just want to understand what's going on behind the curtain a bit. We've been told that we're getting this seasonal content, which let's face it, is just a chapter strewn out over a year. We've gotten less and less content year after year with the intent of more time being put in place for development, bug fixes, improvements, etc. I haven't seen any difference, or at least nothing MAJOR.

- Why do we have to have a small 5 week period of development for a patch and then it's set in stone for 3 months before we get any update? What is that about?
- Why is the back and forth process during a PTS cycle painfully slow? Why are Brian Wheeler and Rich and other development team members not on here communicating with players and taking in feedback consistently if we ARE limited to such a small period?

If you're going to switch from a chapter purchase to a pre-order year-long seasonal purchase model where we're essentially putting our faith in y'all to develop something we all will like, don't you think it makes more sense to be more involved?

It's an archaic development process... probably waterfall.

They need to bring their shop out of the stone age and use Agile or some form of it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_software_development

Customer collaboration is a KEY of agile. This is why I am fairly certain they do not use it.

I say this from experience. I ran a java shop with over 100 developers for years. This is not how we do things any more... unless you're zos. If I ran my shop like this, well, I wouldn't have ran it for long.

Did I mention that customer collaboration is not part of waterfall? Imagine that...

Surprises are not good.... mostly...

Surprise, you get two team bgs.

Surprise. You get multi-classing.

Surprise, you get Vengeance.

It's head spinning.

I get new zones, story lines, etc... surprise me with that. Awesome...

I don't get changing fundemental parts of the game that people pay real money for without asking for their input first. It's mind-boggling.

Ragnarok0130 · April 30

Sarhion wrote: »

So evidently there's a potential strike going on against ZoS and Microsoft right now, so that could be contributing to the chaos.

Honestly I couldn’t care less since I’m not responsible for MS/ZoS’ Human Resources and labor woes. We’re paying customers and it’s on MS/ZOS to provide content and balance for us as their paying customers. If they are not able to to provide that level of service due to a strike they need to communicate that to us and perhaps reduce their sub pricing until they can provide the level of service they’ve provided for the past decade.

Honestly how many times do we have to demand communication improvements from ZoS, then ZoS comes out of their cave, makes statements that “we’re listening and will improve communication” and then they go right back to radio silence in direct opposition to what they just said until the next big blow up where they repeat the same statement to placate us?