Poll "Concluded" Class Reworks Vs Skyrim Expansion

rhythmsuji · August 12

With these results which are not shocking, my main follow up question would be. With the class reworks being the prime focus of the community, what is the opinion of the players that we could likely see both of these large projects worked on simultaneously with not much employee overlap? Of course there would be some art department, QA team which has shrunk significantly, Production team, and some design team. But most other departments would likely have far less to work on both projects simultaneously. And we do not know how much of the new Zone is done, but if they began working on it shortly after Solstice and already teased it. (I would hope it's a good chunk) as to where it seems class reworks genuinely were getting started as the previous finished.

(weigh in if you think any of this assessment is wrong)

BUT if this assessment is largely accurate. Could we not assume or expect that they could nearly harmlessly work on the expansion as well? I suspect they are already, but I did also want them to know the community wants it. Just HEAVILY secondary to class reworks if they were mutually exclusive lmao.

Oceanchanter · August 13

I don't want to rain on your parade by being realistic, but the total of votes is just 151.
With 86 votes being for the Class Rework.

That's versus the overall player population.
Last number of registered players we were given was 25mil in April 2025.

Even with average Steam activity (which includes PC only and most of players are, from what I'm told, on console) around 9k people vs people who registered on the forums AND take a part in the poll.

The numbers are, almost certainly, not enough to make ZOS adjust their roadmaps and schedules.

I want class reworks as much as the next guy, and I was excited for Warden and Sorcerer (which are my main 2 classes) getting some touch-ups, but from where I'm sitting its unlikely the post-layoff roadmap changes.

Melivar · August 13

Things are going to come when they come and not much is going to change that. I want my nightlblade revamp as much as everyone wants there chosen class too for reference.

As Oceanchanter said polls on the forums are largely ineffective.

Everyone here thinks the forum voice has a lot of weight but in reality it just doesn't move the bar much. I don't think I have ever seen a poll with more than 500 votes in all my years maybe something on the bosmer stealth removal way back when.

This one actually did pretty well with 150+ while most are less than 100 in total.

AllenaNightWood · August 13

i want both but there no reason it prioritize 1 over the the other because not everybody in studio is working on 1 thing

JustLovely · August 13

At this point just keeping the lights on might be as good as they can do.

Elvenheart · August 14

I want to find out what’s up in Winterhold, but it would be nice to do it with my refreshed characters. 😇

DoofusMax · August 14

For a bit of context on polling, let's assume a daily player base of about 66K across all platforms and servers. Steam's is the only publicly available tracking data and only counts its share of the PC end, but it pretty consistently runs around 10K concurrent players. Let's be nice and assume that 30K captures the PC concurrent players and then be mean to console players by giving them 60% of the PC player count for each platform.

If we assume that your sample of 151 players is a random selection of the daily concurrent players, then your margin of error due to sampling is about 8% (7.97% actually). So that 56% who favored class reworks could be as high as 64% or as low as 48% while being 95% confident that the true result is somewhere within that range. There is a 5% chance that the results are just meaningless statistical noise.

That sampling assumption is what's known in the biz as an "heroic assumption" because the sample was actually drawn from those who (1) have a forum account, (2) dropped by during the runtime of the poll, (3) read the poll's post (in English, btw), and (4) decided to express an opinion, so it is not representative of the larger daily concurrent player base by any stretch of the imagination. EDIT: the post had 1.5K views, which probably includes scrapers, all of which are going to be among the 151 responses, but a large chunk of which are people who commented and then came back later to see what others had to say.

I give the poll good marks for covering the response set pretty well (A, B, Both, Neither, and Don't Care) and the response set probably doesn't bias the results in any particular direction. I'm a bit less enthused on the neutral wording of the question, but will give it a pass.

At best, the "conclusion" which can be drawn from the poll is that among the ESO English-language forum users who responded during the time the question was available (it's still on Page 1 at the time of writing), we can be 95% confident that somewhere between 48% and 64% of those users preferred class reworks over other options. I would not try to generalize that to the larger player base with any reasonable degree of confidence. Sorry, but "the community" for this one is a self-selecting and very small sample of the player base.

Soarora · August 15

rhythmsuji wrote: »

With these results which are not shocking, my main follow up question would be. With the class reworks being the prime focus of the community, what is the opinion of the players that we could likely see both of these large projects worked on simultaneously with not much employee overlap?

I voted class reworks, but I think it’s unrealistic to expect ZOS to sic all their employees on it. I’ve never been in the industry but I get a sense that working on multiple projects is necessary. After all, we don’t want teams sitting idle waiting for their turn with the class reworks (or if they’ve completed what they can on it for now, don’t want them to sit around and do nothing).

Ishtarknows · August 15

I voted for new content because reworking of class skills won't bring my friends back to the game and won't be enough to keep me playing without new playable content, which the class rework isn't.

Even if the class rework went through on all classes and we get a version of *our favourite class* that we love, someone will come along and moan that PvP isn't fair due to XYZ and like poor DK this week PvE tanking and difficult solo content now becomes harder due to nerfs. PvE will forever suffer due to PvP and until this is corrected ie balanced entirely separately I don't see much point in a class refresh myself.

PoveusRonin · August 15

Ishtarknows wrote: »

I voted for new content because reworking of class skills won't bring my friends back to the game and won't be enough to keep me playing without new playable content, which the class rework isn't.

Even if the class rework went through on all classes and we get a version of *our favourite class* that we love, someone will come along and moan that PvP isn't fair due to XYZ and like poor DK this week PvE tanking and difficult solo content now becomes harder due to nerfs. PvE will forever suffer due to PvP and until this is corrected ie balanced entirely separately I don't see much point in a class refresh myself.

Very much this. With how long it is taking them, a lot of players will leave if they concentrate on the reworks. We need to keep having new content that is more than a couple quests to find more cheese.

I will admit, they did fairly well with the Thief Guild new quests but so far that's the only content with any meat to it that wasn't limited time events.

Oceanchanter · August 16

DoofusMax wrote: »

Sorry, but "the community" for this one is a self-selecting and very small sample of the player base.

Kinda like asking the yacht owners only about decisions regarding the port while also ignoring freight ship captains cause they are not members of the yacht club.
Or asking people with significantly more playtime with their Templars whenever Templars should be buffed or not.

"We had only 1.5k views on that post, and just 86 people want to focus on Class Reworks. Not worth the time and money to change the roadmap."
~John Zenimax, probably

As for "heroic assumption", someone less enthusiastic would call it sampling bias.
That's the beauty and the curse of statistics and polls - anyone can spin it in whichever direction anyone wants.

ZOS would have to send an in-game to every player with a poll/feedback form to gather more reliable data than a small group of forum users voting on a user-made poll.
I'm assuming that would only happen if they wanted to change the post-layoff roadmap to begin with.

All we can do is be patient.

rhythmsuji · August 18

DoofusMax wrote: »

For a bit of context on polling, let's assume a daily player base of about 66K across all platforms and servers. Steam's is the only publicly available tracking data and only counts its share of the PC end, but it pretty consistently runs around 10K concurrent players. Let's be nice and assume that 30K captures the PC concurrent players and then be mean to console players by giving them 60% of the PC player count for each platform.

If we assume that your sample of 151 players is a random selection of the daily concurrent players, then your margin of error due to sampling is about 8% (7.97% actually). So that 56% who favored class reworks could be as high as 64% or as low as 48% while being 95% confident that the true result is somewhere within that range. There is a 5% chance that the results are just meaningless statistical noise.

That sampling assumption is what's known in the biz as an "heroic assumption" because the sample was actually drawn from those who (1) have a forum account, (2) dropped by during the runtime of the poll, (3) read the poll's post (in English, btw), and (4) decided to express an opinion, so it is not representative of the larger daily concurrent player base by any stretch of the imagination. EDIT: the post had 1.5K views, which probably includes scrapers, all of which are going to be among the 151 responses, but a large chunk of which are people who commented and then came back later to see what others had to say.

I give the poll good marks for covering the response set pretty well (A, B, Both, Neither, and Don't Care) and the response set probably doesn't bias the results in any particular direction. I'm a bit less enthused on the neutral wording of the question, but will give it a pass.

At best, the "conclusion" which can be drawn from the poll is that among the ESO English-language forum users who responded during the time the question was available (it's still on Page 1 at the time of writing), we can be 95% confident that somewhere between 48% and 64% of those users preferred class reworks over other options. I would not try to generalize that to the larger player base with any reasonable degree of confidence. Sorry, but "the community" for this one is a self-selecting and very small sample of the player base.

Yeah if it was assumed I implied we know all players desires, that was not the intent.

It just seemed like the Poll stopped getting votes so that was the best it was going to largely do, which is what I meant by concluded. And is just another space where a similar question has been asked across various spaces, the outcomes certainly have variant percentages. But it does seem like the most common desires have been the class reworks by far and then "wishing expansions came back" and one of the prime complaints ive seen across most social media's, has been that "seasons killed any new zone content" or something along the lines of nothing being added anymore.

There cannot be a factually 100% certain outcome to put into a court of law, but the only thing im pretty confident of personally is that these are the two most commonly desired things. (Out of actual options)
We could also add like, full combat system rework, or changing the game engine or something lol. But we all know those aren't real options.

A very notable contender, which 'could' be possible but we don't know how far they actually got over the years. Is Cross play, I see that one a ton too. Especially from players who have quit and say they would come back, but I was just curious about another sample size for these two major desires.

DoofusMax · August 18

For the moment, I'm inclined to hypothesize that the reason Class Reworks caught most of fanfare is because the two bits which did get reworks (WW and DK) are now significantly OP'd in comparison to the rest, which went on hold with no timeline for completion.

For the story stuff, the usual process is that just about everyone jumps on board as soon as something goes live and then it dries up pretty quickly because "been there, done that, and the tee-shirt (rewards) ain't worth buying." Then players want more new story stuff and the cycle repeats.

Cross-play/Cross-prog is also one of the big contenders and probably still is, but wasn't offered. It's of no importance to me since I play on PC and have no desire to pay the extra $$$ per month to XBox to play the same game I'm already playing (for a few bucks per month because sub). But that does not mean that it's not important to other players who would like to be able to move platforms without having to abandon their progress and start over from scratch.

No one has to prove anything in a court of law on this. The whole point of surveys is to get a good feel for what the population of interest has in mind and to inform the decision-makers who either will or won't act on that information. I got the bits and bytes I paid for. Those change with updates and maybe it's in a direction I like, but maybe not. I just try very hard to discuss the game I have, and limit any comments about the game I'd like to see to personal opinion rather than trying to assert any claim that "the community" shares that opinion. I will definitely call out what I think are poor design decisions (Tome Points and weekly challenge rerolls being two very notable recent ones), but the "I think" is central to that claim.

rhythmsuji · August 18

DoofusMax wrote: »

For the moment, I'm inclined to hypothesize that the reason Class Reworks caught most of fanfare is because the two bits which did get reworks (WW and DK) are now significantly OP'd in comparison to the rest, which went on hold with no timeline for completion.

For the story stuff, the usual process is that just about everyone jumps on board as soon as something goes live and then it dries up pretty quickly because "been there, done that, and the tee-shirt (rewards) ain't worth buying." Then players want more new story stuff and the cycle repeats.

Cross-play/Cross-prog is also one of the big contenders and probably still is, but wasn't offered. It's of no importance to me since I play on PC and have no desire to pay the extra $$$ per month to XBox to play the same game I'm already playing (for a few bucks per month because sub). But that does not mean that it's not important to other players who would like to be able to move platforms without having to abandon their progress and start over from scratch.

No one has to prove anything in a court of law on this. The whole point of surveys is to get a good feel for what the population of interest has in mind and to inform the decision-makers who either will or won't act on that information. I got the bits and bytes I paid for. Those change with updates and maybe it's in a direction I like, but maybe not. I just try very hard to discuss the game I have, and limit any comments about the game I'd like to see to personal opinion rather than trying to assert any claim that "the community" shares that opinion. I will definitely call out what I think are poor design decisions (Tome Points and weekly challenge rerolls being two very notable recent ones), but the "I think" is central to that claim.

Yeah I definitely have all of my own desires of what I wish to be the case or what I don't personally care about for my own enjoyment.

I mainly take interest in trying to understand what "the most" people enjoy to understand how the collective is enjoying what's going on, how the plans will be received and how to give advice to ZOS in the event it might be helpful and accepted.

I just plain flat out love ESO and enjoy it in many ways, so it's very very in my interest for the majority of players to like ESO in the long run.

And sometimes that's even just letting players or prospective players know that something they wanted in ESO, got done or is being worked on. But like, if near zero people showed interest in cross play. And I only play on PC as well, I would never talk about it again. Only reason I mention it is because thousands of people over the years have begged for it, quit over it not being there, or said they would return if so.

Could be very good for the games health/lifespan, which does directly benefit me or anyone who loves it for sure.