Open Letter From The Noore to Zenimax Addressing Unresolved Issues Driving Players From The Game

Animal_Mother

Rallick71 wrote: »

Half the issues would be fixed if Batswarm had it's cost doubled (if not trippled) and Impulse didn't do more damage than Single target abilities.

AoE should never do more damage than Single Target (unless they cost a whole lot more Magicka|Stamina to cast) and DoTs should outpace Single Target due to their purgable nature.

Sasky wrote: »

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ZOS_JessicaFolsom wrote: »

Thanks so much for this very detailed, well-thought out and constructive write-up, The Noore! We've passed it along, in full, to the Dev Team.

In a way, this still misses the point. @ZOS_JessicaFolsom‌, please make sure to get some sort of communication back from the team about these issues. And keep players apprised on these and emergent issues on a weekly (or biweekly) basis. The underlying theme in all the issues is that we simply don't get enough response from ZOS on bug progress, exploits, grey areas, etc. and that can be as frustrating as the actual problem itself.

I think most MMOs fail at this. The only one I think that got it right (out of the ones I played) was vanilla Rift. Even with F2P, Rift's communication hasn't gotten too bad.

One of he most frustrating things here with communication, are the stealth patches or hotfixes with no documentation for the players. If I just spent 3-4 minutes updating game files, at an unscheduled time, I want to know what changed.

Xexpo

I agree on many of the issues with PvP addressed by the OP.
I do not, however, agree with all of the purposed solutions, and I am not going to write a wall of text in response.
But, fix these core problems and PvP will be better.

ps nerf monkeypulse

Bleakraven

Very good post, thank you. I am not a very active PvP player (I do prefer PvE, after all), but I want to enjoy PvP as well and every time I enter Cyrodiil, I am unable to fully enjoy it due to numerous bugs, lags and insta kills.

I don't really enjoy PvP in most games, but ESO was the first to truly motivate me for PvP and where I had a great time strategizing and competing.

I hope these problems are addressed sometime soon, so I can join you guys in PvP ^^

c0rp

I saw no mention of AOE caps and the blobbing it promotes. I am 100% sure that this is driving players away from the game.

Oldtimer209

/Signed. Thanks to the OP for a well constructed post. Many players have already unsubbed due to many of the issues you bring up as well as some of the others that were brought up by other players.
ESO has so much potential, and most of us playing want to see it succeed for years to come.
Unfortunately, the content in Cyrodiil is less than desirable in its current state and I refuse to travel there any longer due to the myriad of problems that plague the zone.
I have been playing since early Beta, purchased the Imperial edition and subbed for 6 months. My sub will soon be up and I will not be renewing.
I will keep an eye on the forums hoping ZOS will convey some type of message
of what their plan will be to address the issues brought up here. Good luck.

russb7b14_ESO

Excellent post! I agree with everything!

Dleatherus

fromtesonlineb16_ESO wrote: »

'Player Council'.

Well, let's see .. LOTRO formed one of those 3 years ago, the effects are clear, that clique gets what it wants, everyone else puts up or shuts up.

ZOS uses as 'ad hoc' council called Entropy Rising for PVE content .. we see the LOTRO effect here too.

My prediction: the OP and his clique ... aka. 'guild' ... are looking for the same effect in the PVP side of the game.

My prediction is that you didn't even bother finding out anything about the EVE player council or about myself or The Noore before spouting your false accusations

Don't choose to cite LOTRO as a failure and ignore the intent and success of the Council i specifically referred to

Since you were too lazy to do any research yourself, allow me to help you:



that bit where they refer to'the greater good for the greater player base' sounds like the complete opposite of a clique to me - how does it sound to you?

the white paper they refer to at the end of that image can be read here: http://web.ccpgamescdn.com/communityassets/pdf/csm/CSMSummary.pdf


to learn a little more about me you can simply left click my name, click on 'comments' and read through

as an amusing ending note: The Noore meets with ZOS every 2 weeks in voice comms for feedback sessions/discussion - if we were a clique and wanted to push our own agenda as you predict, we would want to keep it on a small and clique-like level rather than propose a council made up from members of the community with no guarantee that we would even be on that committee?

D.

frosth.darkomenb16_ESO

@Dleatherus‌ , not doubting you, but if you get a direct access to ZOS, why use an open letter?
Your concepts are sound and as you can see here, many are in agreement.
But was it necessary for zos to see public approval before listening to constructive feedback?
It concerns me that popularity could be of value when evaluating an idea.

Also, is it a two way comunication? For instance, do you have any access to opinions or insider information?
Any idea on, for instance, when we can expect some public responses regarding issues brought up by the community for a while?
Or if there is even an existing response?

I'm specifically thinking about aoe target caps, but it also applies to immovable and other long standing issues that are non-technical but exclusively design related.

Laurentia

Dleatherus wrote: »

as an amusing ending note: The Noore meets with ZOS every 2 weeks in voice comms for feedback sessions/discussion - if we were a clique and wanted to push our own agenda as you predict, we would want to keep it on a small and clique-like level rather than propose a council made up from members of the community with no guarantee that we would even be on that committee?

D.

So you're saying they already provide feedback on a biweekly basis and still all those issues named in the OP exist? Yeah, that totally shows how usefull a coucil would be....This indeed is quite amusing.

Nazon_Katts

Give people power and they're bound to abuse it.

A council, even if we get a vote on that, is a closed system. We're stuck with it for however long the 'legislation period' might be. That's last millennium and shouldn't have a place in the connected world today. There's no need to rely on a few individuals speaking for all, if you can just ask everyone almost instantly and simultaneously.

Get the trends from the boards, social media and in game feedback and then just send out questionnaires and polls to see how the majority truly feels about certain subjects.

If you don't want to go that short extra and insist on doing it yourself as a developer, rather hire people that actually can offer a deeper insight, like psychologists, sociologists and economists, than relying on the opinion of a few and select players. We got enough elitism in this game already.

Armitas

Nazon_Katts wrote: »

Give people power and they're bound to abuse it.

A council, even if we get a vote on that, is a closed system. We're stuck with it for however long the 'legislation period' might be. That's last millennium and shouldn't have a place in the connected world today. There's no need to rely on a few individuals speaking for all, if you can just ask everyone almost instantly and simultaneously.

Get the trends from the boards, social media and in game feedback and then just send out questionnaires and polls to see how the majority truly feels about certain subjects.

If you don't want to go that short extra and insist on doing it yourself as a developer, rather hire people that actually can offer a deeper insight, like psychologists, sociologists and economists, than relying on the opinion of a few and select players. We got enough elitism in this game already.

There are both naturalistic and living certainties in this world. Just as nature will strive to fill a vacuum, the living will fill an absence of power. There is no player here, nor human on the planet that is immune to the corruption of power. They say that absolute power corrupts absolutely, and that is why power must be divided rather than consolidated. That every man may tolerate and strive against a measure of corruption rather than a single man against it all.

Having a professional council would be better than a player council, though it also comes at a large financial cost. Some way or another they should definitely have some external position that can provide a measure of rivalry.

Dleatherus

@frosth.darkomenb16_ESO @Laurentia‌

why the open letter?

because in our opinion, and the declining number of pvp players bears some witness to this, their current system of meeting with a few guilds for feedback is failing the pvp community as a whole in terms of keeping the pvp community appraised of what their priorities are, and where they are in the cycle of addressing/fixing them

something needs to change - this is a proposal that might help that change

It also an open letter so that the pvp player community knows that these issues (and i include the AoE caps and unbreakable cc ones that others have brought up - thank you) have been stressed to ZOS as THE issues that are of concern, why they are of concern, potential solutions for them, and the benefits of focusing just on these key issues, and not on some of the 'trivial' issues

as a side note they ARE working on the issues mentioned - but frustration amongst us as players creeps in at times when we see a post that says 'we're fixing the issue of guild tabards occasionally not appearing on some npc's after you claim a keep' and yet have not heard an update regarding progress on some of the core issues affecting us (though not always the case many of our brains think 'wtf??? - why are they fixing npc guild tabards and not fixing some of the REAL stuff)
This puts the devs in the unenviable situation of they are damned if they do, damned if they don't

as an example they are in fact working extremely hard to fix the postern door issue - a working fix is being tested as we speak, and barring the discovery of any unwanted side-effects, will be pushed out to us on the live servers relatively soon - i believe THESE kinds of communication would go a long way in reassuring the pvp community that though some of the cycles might be annoyingly long, that we would be understanding if we are simply kept in the loop

too often in these days of instant gratification we jump to the wrong conclusion of 'wow- postern doors still not fixed, aoe not fixed, fps still an issue, exploiters running around unchecked - i'm unsubbing'

i do agree with you that a council would ONLY work if ZOS was genuinely vested in working closer together with its pvp player base, and that it wasn't a token 'puppet council' made up of 'favorites' and 'yes men' just for the sake of public relations and being able to say 'everything is running fine - look - we have a player council'

D.

vlaskov1tz

No for councils. ZOS just need to improve their communication according to fixes on the table. Also, they need to listen and ANSWER to the community. If there is no answer the community feels ignored.

frosth.darkomenb16_ESO

Thank you for the answer.

Any estimates on how many they actually are?
I am a developer by trade, and some of these changes, to me, seem like at most 1 week time of implementation.
For instance, making immovable require 5 HA equiped should take barely a few minutes, just reuse the code available for the perks that require the same thing.

It makes me feel that many of these changes are actually held up by a slow decision process at the design level.

Triston

Dleatherus wrote: »

@frosth.darkomenb16_ESO @Laurentia‌
i do agree with you that a council would ONLY work if ZOS was genuinely vested in working closer together with its pvp player base
D.

this.

I guess I'm confused about a company's investment in an MMO. I've worked on an online game before and the features we built were ones we wanted to see and play because of the experience we brought from other online games we played.

We couldn't wait to play it ourselves.
Why is there a need for a group of players to tell them what is wrong with the game?
Do the decision makers/developers play their own game?

Are they in guilds and teamspeak running with regular players and hearing/learning about the issues we have? They don't need to join the important ones, hell our guild accepts pugs in our groups as long as they have teamspeak and they don't even need a mic.

I know as a developer if I was using an application I created and was forced to encounter bugs and bad design decisions I would sure as hell be leading the crusade to get them fixed.

But I also know that management has time lines. New features pay the bills and if their mentality is about pushing new product down our throat and the heck with the consequences (bugs, bad design, unintended features) the developers have little say in what can or cannot be done. (Waterfall vs Agile).

I've stood that cliff before and as a developer you either jump with management to save your job or die slowly until you quit.

Are the decision makers of this game be it ZOS or Beth want to fix things and slowly add things to the game or do they want to push features at us until we choke on them? Are they invested in the game or are they invested in their money?

Nazon_Katts

frosth.darkomenb16_ESO wrote: »

Thank you for the answer.

Any estimates on how many they actually are?
I am a developer by trade, and some of these changes, to me, seem like at most 1 week time of implementation.
For instance, making immovable require 5 HA equiped should take barely a few minutes, just reuse the code available for the perks that require the same thing.

It makes me feel that many of these changes are actually held up by a slow decision process at the design level.

It's probably the same corporate policy that prevents any reaction to the outside world in a timely manner. A simple answer to a simple question can take weeks, if not months. Seems the only one around who's allowed to speak freely is Mr. Wheeler. Or maybe he just did it anyways.

Considering the gravity of this particular post here, I find the lack of a meaningful response shows that again. If there was someone in charge who could act on his own and wouldn't need permission for every printed word, he'd be already here and taking care of things.

Dleatherus

frosth.darkomenb16_ESO

hrmm - sorry - am not quite sure how many of what you are referring to - guilds they speak with? issues they are working on? number of devs to any specific issue? players left in pvp?

numbers provided below are purely speculative based upon some reasoning and deductions which i won't get into for the sake of brevity, though you can msg me if you want as to how i came up with the numbers if it's of interest to you)

number of guilds they speak with - i would think it's at least 5 and probably no more than 15-20

issues they are working on - no idea - and in part one of the reasons for this open letter stressing the ones that we would like them to focus on

number of devs assigned to any specific issue - no idea - and again part of the reason of this open letter to help them focus their resources on the issues that collectively as a player base we judge to be the most critical

players left in pvp - guessed at in total, not all on at the same time - 8,000 - from an estimated guess of around 60,000 -100,000 during the first month of game launch


and yes - it is the very slow decision/implementation progress that i hope this letter speeds up

D.

frosth.darkomenb16_ESO

It was how many devs are there in total. But good estimates for the rest.

Usually, the online population at prime time is 1/5th of the total population.
your 8000 estimate seems a bit low.

But even then, it is a fairly low number compared to the PvE population.
I think their "bang for their buck" philosophy is hurting the PvP players.
Or just the hybrids like me, that enjoy all parts of the game.

I'm really looking forward to the imperial city, hoping that with it will come many of the fixes we've been hoping for.
This will be PvE content depending on the health of Cyrodiil, and if players can't access it because PvP doesn't work well, or if their campaign of choice never switches emperors, then it will put more pressure on fixing PvP.
I just hope it will get fixed in anticipation rather than in reaction.

Dleatherus

frosth.darkomenb16_ESO wrote: »

Usually, the online population at prime time is 1/5th of the total population.
your 8000 estimate seems a bit low.

yes - i could be well low in looking at it - speculation on my part at best on this one for sure

figured each alliance pop locks at about 500 x 3 alliances = 1500 x 2 full campaigns = 3,000 at 1/5th total pop would be 15,000

add in the combined pops for the 'dead' campaigns and it could be 20,000 - double that for the EU players (which i hadn't put into my initial estimate) and we're at 40,000

D.

Ojustaboo

For me it's the seemingly lack of urgency with these things, and a feeling that Zenimax aren't really bothered how the players feel, for example

As soon as Emp farming became rampant, they should have disabled the ability to get emp within a couple of days until they had a solution.

Rather than effectively having a countdown to when it becomes harder (countdown to the next update)

Another example is how on the EU, player after player said one 30 day campaign wasn't enough and pointed out how two 90 day were full every night.

We werent listened to, chaos and queues abound, people did leave.
And they could have announced that a new server would be added in the next few days, but no, total silence, people leave, then they chuck another server on the 1.4 PTS.

That is both a sadly predictable and too slow responce. Here's one of my posts on Aug 7th, note last paragraph

Ojustaboo wrote: »

So the two 90 day servers that were full every night in the EU didn't give them any indication that one 30 day server would not be enough?

That to me was totally avoidable and numerous people had given feedback on this since it was first announced.

When I log in for a bit of PvP, I don't want to wait over 30+ mins in a queue, even worse is those times we are then thrown out and sometimes have to rejoin the queue to get back in.

I play PvP with my guild mates in a group in the evenings between 8pm and midnight. That's when I want to play, that's when I've always played, telling me I can log in at another time (when I'm not available to play) helps no one.

What will probably happen is nothing for 6 + weeks in which time a fair few players who love PvP will give up and go elsewhere, then they will add a new server then wonder why it's so empty.

Agree with most of the OP except for the player council. I loath that idea now, just like I loathed it when it was first announced in Lotro. It shouldn't be needed, they can email surveys out to all active players and they have the forum.

If the council had 100 members, for all I know none of them has a play style like mine and none speak for me in any way whatsoever.

philip.ploegerb16_ESO

It's amazing how much effort must be taken, to get a response from Zenimax officials, still, it's a good sign that there is a response at least.

Maybe Zenimax should learn from how the Camelot Unchained staff deals with their fans, I was already looking more forward towards that game as I was playing ESO, and that with the release being over a year away and no garantuee that the game will become truely good.

It's just that they really stay in touch with their fans, they even promised to not lie to their player-base. It'd be a dream if Zenimax could take over that behaviour, as it is now, forums have gone completely crazy and the only thing that could fix it, being constant news / feedback from the officials to show they're listening is almost non-existent.

jnjapexb14_ESO

Great post - ZOS PvP designer will dutifully ignore as we have been saying these same things since beta.

We can barely support 2 campaigns of PvP ;(

StihlReign

We were told 5 million beta tested the servers...

Which makes one wonder —

Why can't the server handle 1500 people? or 5000? or 8000?

Are there 1500 people in the campaign when it's pop locked? Doesn't feel like it.

Two Alliances at one fight...still feels like 50-90 DC and 50-90 AD for a total of maybe 200 ea. in the campaign.

Look at Thornblade. Huge fight. Almost everyone there.
Now try and find the other 400 people. It's almost impossible. There's often little to nothing else under attack during a major conflict. Which is odd since this would be the most opportune time.

Even when we watch the enemy FC during major conflicts we see the same players continue to emerge. It's odd. Back in the day we could could feel how many players were in a campaign (Wabba, Auriel's Bow). These days...

I just don't see how there's 8000 players in PvP. Maybe total that PvP. I'm not looking at a percentage based on the total that play the game.

I'm looking at the nightly active PvP combatants in game. Maybe we need a roll call.

dcincali

If they added faction swapping, I know for a fact a few top AD guilds would switch.

demonlkojipub19_ESO

We definitely shouldn't try and go a council route. No one can speak for everyone. There are tons of issues with this or that in the game that some people will say are non-issue because thats how it is for them personally, or vice versa.

Dleatherus

demonlkojipub19_ESO wrote: »

We definitely shouldn't try and go a council route. No one can speak for everyone. There are tons of issues with this or that in the game that some people will say are non-issue because thats how it is for them personally, or vice versa.

would you be able to suggest an alternative?

I have NO faith in their using of surveys sent out to their subscribers - many of us playing the Beta from well over a year ago now would report back on some of these very issues that are still plaguing us today

I am NOT happy with their response times, particularly in regards to responsibly communicating back to their subscribers regarding just the issues mentioned in this thread

we don't need a daily report on every action taken - just a weekly update addressing the issues that have driven so many players from PvP, that would give some faith and hope to those of us remaining

D.

Nazon_Katts

There are no alternatives to actually caring. If they don't care, nothing we suggest will do any good.

Tintinabula

Faction swapping...hmm..I have often wondered about this..Make it a Vet 12 quest story line. Though I would never use it myself.

GreyPilgrim

Overall, this is really well thought out, I'm not sure I agree with it all, but it sure has some good stuff to think about.

One thing I would say is that I'm leery of systems that blame players for design flaws. While there are clearly some people who will use things like insta-kill bugs with abandon, but there are also people who aren't 'hard-core' PvPer's who might have no idea that the skill they're using is currently an exploit.

Personally, I don't use bow atm in PvP, but I can only imagine that if one of my abilities suddenly did a lot more damage, since I don't use macros that show me a continous stream of info, and I'm not glued to the forums, I might not even know that I was exploiting. Half the time I hit someone, they're being hit by someone else too, without a data stream I might not realize that I had capped someone for 50000. I'd just assume they went down really fast because a bunch of other people hit them. It might take me a while to notice it on a solo attack before I realized what was up.

I'm not gonna say this happens often, but it concerns me that 'casual' PvPer's could get caught with a ban hammer intended for exploitative min/maxers. That would also drive people out of the game, which is not the goal of this post.

Nazon_Katts

In lotro, back in the days when it was precious and new, it took just a few kills of a mob with a bugged loot-table to have a GM pop up right next to you. They would inform you the mob in question drops inappropriate items and the process of farming it is considered an exploit and you'd be facing a ban, if you didn't stop.

If the death recap screen can give feedback in numbers and who inflicted them on the player, then it can do the same automatically for GMs in the case there are numbers beyond a certain threshold. Then all they would have to do is the above.