To the people who defend the game

Aeradon

Lodestar wrote: »

AlexDougherty wrote: »

This old chestnut. Yes, the business of making games is a business, very few would argue otherwise. But the problem is you can't release a faulty product onto the market and expect it to perform properly.

At launch this game was several months away from completetion, we are only just getting to the point were they could have started to think about launching it (a lot of the current problems would only been apparent after full capacity so couldn't have been predicted).

The problem is that the games industry has gotten used to launching far too early and patching it up, this wouldn't work with any other product. Would we buy a washing machine that stopped halfway through the cycle, or a car without second gear, or a word processing program that lacked punctuation (commas, full stops and the like).

The bad PR from launching this game has probably outweighed any profit from launching it. Now I don't know ZOS's finances, or if they had any contractual obligations to the launch window, so I won't comment on them. I simply don't know if they had a pressing reason to launch before the game was ready.

That said I am enjoying the game, and I am seeing progress, so I'm personally very happy with the game.

This is exactly my standpoint. And it is also compounded by the fact, MMO veterans are noticing this gap in quality, and starting to become more despondent and agitated by it. And many people will try this as their first MMO, given it's IP this is significant.

If I had an important day at work, and was running late. I may just shower, skip breakfast and make sure I had everything I needed ready to take with me, and have enough time to make the journey as I could.

What I would not do, is get up, have something to eat, forget everything I needed, yet somehow still be late, even though I never showered, or bothered to dress, and showed up to the meeting in yesterdays underwear, unshaven, with nothing I needed for the day. That is close to what ZOS has done, and said "oh traffic is always terrible" as an excuse. You would have been better off calling in sick, and make up for it next day, by an early night, and have everything ready the next day.

It is a strange way of doing things when you think about it. Launch is usually when you have your biggest playerbase. Yet that means, if your not in an acceptable state of release, you are going to see a large number of people, who will only ever experience that early buggy mess, and go away with that first impression. Surely you would limit that mess?

Agreed.

To touch up on MMO veterans noticing the loss of quality: What I fail to comprehend is, despite all the good we see in few of the previous MMO, be it great company culture or brilliant ideas, these were not looked upon and picked up by the recent ventures.

Once again I would like to stress these points as I feel that it's of utmost importance.

While it may be a norm for MMO to be launched incomplete only to be updated over and over again with content that was developed and kept hidden, it would be more effective to launch a complete game to gain a larger player base, rather than to hold back the content only to please and maintain a smaller player base.

While it may be a norm for MMO to release with bugs coupled with excuses such as "the game is too vast for everything to be tested", we have seen MMO launched with acceptable bugs that aren't game breaking or progress blocking. These MMO ranged from F2P to P2P, low budget to high budget, and having a vast virtual world is no excuse for release of a buggy game that clearly should've stayed in testing stage. Some companies go great lengths as to hire game testers and have policies that their employees must play a minimum of hours everyday for few years prior to launch. Whatever does the job for you, do it. This is how you win player base, "Dedication" is what we want to see, not how much budget you placed in or how many cups of coffee you drank over 5 years. With the amount of progress blocking bugs present, it is obvious that not even the team has played the game over and over again within that 5 years of development.

While it may be a norm for MMO to have patches and maintenance that does not have proposed duration or have constantly overshot deadlines, we have seen MMO with clear pre maintenance notes and objectives, with a deadline of which they would always be able to resume service minimum of 15 minutes before hitting proposed time. These are great company culture, companies that test their codes and are certain they could place it into the live game without any repercussions. Companies that knows time is the essence, and are able to abide by strict schedules. Companies that uphold their promises and are able to deliver on time. It may be a game, but please be professional and treat it as a product like just any other.

Please don't feel that it's because I do not know anything about coding or testing that I could say this. And I believe I have played enough MMO to be able to judge what is good service and what is bad management. It all depends on the management and developers, example a game could be translated within 3 months or 2 years, I've seen the same game being translated with project duration difference as vast as mentioned.

Coding wise, I was paid by fellow students to complete their thesis or projects in college. Some of the many are coding assignments and projects. I've also involved myself in the replication of a popular MMORPG for our college server, tweaked weekly for crazy events which involves adding insane quests or simply changing the entire game concept to utter madness. We spent nights writing codes and testing, pushing the game to the limit in order to confirm that there are no possible bug, performance loss or defects whenever we perform our weekly updates. These updates are also performed on time, within proposed durations as we already know what we are going to do and have tested multiple times on different test servers, and are certain that the results would not vary and will bear no repercussions due to dependency or any other issues.

Buck up ZOS. There are so many choices out there. What makes your product shine is up to you, and it definitely doesn't involve providing similarly mediocre or worse service as compared to the others.

Just a reminder, in case you don't already know, your preorder subscribers who unsubbed before July will have their last day of subscription on 8th of July. Your proposed FPS fix is on 7th of July. These preorder players are those who are important, they are MMO vets and loyal fan boys or both. If you are unable to convince them and show dedication within that one day, you'll lose them. PVP carries minimum of 10k active players judging from the leaderboards, and that is the very minimum. Your choice.

@ZOS_JessicaFolsom‌ Please convey this message if you can.

Kypho

Customer service is terrible i know. About patch and bugs and all, if you ever played mmo what had no new annoying bugs after patches, pls tell me what it was.

Soulharvester

Well, I disagree with the customer service and the patches thing.

Its a new game and patches are gonna happen. Rather see them than not.
In my opinion, that is professional.

Customer service wise, thats an ever changing process and I have seen ESO Gamemasters within the game, helping people now. Its a great concept in my opinion.

The process evolves and meets the demands, things take time, great things take a little longer sometimes.