ZENI STILL HAS NOT LEARNED HOW TO DO THIS SIMPLE TASK

GreyBrow

So, we all learned how horrendous patches/maintenance can be, especially if the patch is large, and our internet is not the best. (Ex.: data caps, roaming, etc.,)

After the last debacle that Zenimax caused with a 12 GB patch, nearly everyone on the forums seemed to beg you, on their hands and knees, to give us some information in advance about the patch.

Even something as simple as a day's warning would be nice. You obviously knew on friday when you left your desk that on monday morning at 8 am sharp, you'd be applying the patch, yet you still fail to do something as simple as tell us what the patch will be on, and how big it will be.

We're not asking for a lot. In fact, what we're asking for would take no more than three minutes of your time. Just pop on the forums and say "hey guys, we will be applying a patch monday morning. The patch is expected to be roughly 2.3 GB and will contain x, y, z."

Seriously, am I being a spoiled brat or is this not to much to ask for?

Razzak

You are asking them to communicate to us in something other that basic PR statements. Yes, you are asking for too much.

Gyudan

ZeniMax may patch, update, or modify at any time with or without notice to You. Notwithstanding the foregoing, ZeniMax has no obligation to make available any patches, updates or modifications or correct any errors or defects in the Services. ZeniMax makes no guarantees about the persistence or availability of any user names or other personas at any time and assumes no liability for lost or deleted Account data. Except as prohibited by applicable law, You agree that ZeniMax will not be liable for any interruption of the Services, delay or failure to perform, any loss of Content (including, but not limited to, User-Generated Content and Downloadable Content), and/or Account data (including, but not limited to, Character data) resulting from any causes whatsoever. ZeniMax reserves the right to offer new Services, change and/or discontinue certain Services at any time in its sole discretion.

Tsssst, spoiled brat! I agree with you though.

Enodoc

They said in the Road Ahead that they want to increase "overall transparency and communication with you", and I agree this would be a good place to do that. For example, they could add a bit more to the maintenance banner:

We will be performing our regular maintenance on the North American server, Monday at 8:00AM EST (1:00PM GMT) and on the European megaserver, Monday at 10:00PM EST (3:00AM GMT Tuesday). We will be releasing patch [x], containing [y], which should be around [z] GB. We expect this maintenance to last [t] hours.

Rune_Relic

Enodoc wrote: »

They said in the Road Ahead that they want to increase "overall transparency and communication with you", and I agree this would be a good place to do that. For example, they could add a bit more to the maintenance banner:

We will be performing our regular maintenance on the North American server, Monday at 8:00AM EST (1:00PM GMT) and on the European megaserver, Monday at 10:00PM EST (3:00AM GMT Tuesday). We will be releasing patch [x], containing [y], which should be around [z] GB. We expect this maintenance to last [t] hours.

Damn it @Enodoc ...you make it sound so simple

k9mouse

In the patch notes selection, ZOS can put

Propose Patch notes
Z,Y,X,Q

After the patch is done,
Real Patch notes
Z,Y, Q

Cherryblossom

Is Z, Y, X, Q tech speak, because I don't understand. ZOS Please don't use Z, Y, X, Q to let us know as I even struggle with text messages from young people.

I honestly don't know why people bother with these post now, they have failed for the last 8 months to communicate, why on earth do you think they might start now?

kijima

If you use those letters in Scrabble on a triple world score, it's game over.

Elsonso

I figure that there are a few contributing factors here:

1) They have a secrecy culture that spans the company. People in the company know what is going on, but they don't know what they can say in public so there is a hesitation to say anything for fear of saying something not approved for publication.

2) They are not efficient where it comes to internal communication. People can't communicate with the customer because they simply don't know what is going on until someone finally gets around to telling them, usually after the fact.

3) They are afraid that if they say anything about what is coming, and part of that does not come, people will consider the statement to be a promise and hate on them.

4) They do not have a department/position that has the job of communicating with the world so all of this stuff is done by people who have other jobs

5) The decision makers do not work on the weekend or do not have the information they need on the weekend to make decisions about what to tell us. Tied in with a mix of the above, they have nothing to say until Monday morning, anyway.

6) Someone in the company thinks that each Update and Patch is like a Christmas present and we should not know what is in it until we unwrap it.

They seem to be working on it incrementally, so they are slowly getting better. However, in my experience, it should not take this long to sort things out. This leads me to believe that some combination of the items above complicate matters.

Edit: Added a couple extra words to make things sound less harsh. Trying to understand, not hate.

Kraven

C&P:

ZOS_JessicaFolsom admin
April 10 edited September 26 in Official News & Patch Notes Staff Post
Starting immediately, we have changed the regular maintenance times for The Elder Scrolls Online, based on player feedback. The game undergoes regular maintenance to provide you with the best service possible. We have scheduled the following windows for this purpose, although we may not need to use them every week:

North American Megaserver
Mondays at 8:00am EDT (12pm GMT)

Kraven

How dare they have regularly scheduled maintenance!!!!? At the same time weekly!? The audacity!

seanvwolf

The original post is drenched in assumption and misleading information.
ZOS, until very recently, released patch notes a day prior (Sunday for Monday patches), until it turned out that if a patch doesn't go through correctly, that the patch info they release is misleading and negatively impacts the community unnecessarily. I think this is the only time I've seen them patch something and not provide explicit notes a day in advance, likely in an effort to troubleshoot their patch QA and implementation process. But they did mention in ESO Live that there would be patch today with their regular server maintenance.

ers101284b14_ESO

Kraven wrote: »

C&P:

ZOS_JessicaFolsom admin
April 10 edited September 26 in Official News & Patch Notes Staff Post
Starting immediately, we have changed the regular maintenance times for The Elder Scrolls Online, based on player feedback. The game undergoes regular maintenance to provide you with the best service possible. We have scheduled the following windows for this purpose, although we may not need to use them every week:

North American Megaserver
Mondays at 8:00am EDT (12pm GMT)

Today is a patch and not just regular maintenance. On Friday Gina said today would be the incremental patch but they do not have the patch notes up. Which is what he is complaining about.

AlexDougherty

GreyBrow wrote: »

We're not asking for a lot. In fact, what we're asking for would take no more than three minutes of your time. Just pop on the forums and say "hey guys, we will be applying a patch monday morning. The patch is expected to be roughly 2.3 GB and will contain x, y, z."

Seriously, am I being a spoiled brat or is this not to much to ask for?

Well it would be nice, not sure when the patch is actually finalised, it could be a few hours before they send it out, but even if it's after they send it out, they could tell us how big.

But yes a message the day before would be ideal, so we can try and download huge patches in offpeak hours (which speeds it up).

DenverRalphy

seanvwolf wrote: »

The original post is drenched in assumption and misleading information.
ZOS, until very recently, released patch notes a day prior (Sunday for Monday patches), until it turned out that if a patch doesn't go through correctly, that the patch info they release is misleading and negatively impacts the community unnecessarily. I think this is the only time I've seen them patch something and not provide explicit notes a day in advance, likely in an effort to troubleshoot their patch QA and implementation process. But they did mention in ESO Live that there would be patch today with their regular server maintenance.

Unless you're playing on the EU server, I don't recall ZOS ever releasing patch notes prior to the patch/patch-day.

AlexDougherty

DenverRalphy wrote: »

seanvwolf wrote: »

The original post is drenched in assumption and misleading information.
ZOS, until very recently, released patch notes a day prior (Sunday for Monday patches), until it turned out that if a patch doesn't go through correctly, that the patch info they release is misleading and negatively impacts the community unnecessarily. I think this is the only time I've seen them patch something and not provide explicit notes a day in advance, likely in an effort to troubleshoot their patch QA and implementation process. But they did mention in ESO Live that there would be patch today with their regular server maintenance.

Unless you're playing on the EU server, I don't recall ZOS ever releasing patch notes prior to the patch/patch-day.

They did for a few patches, but not all.

Kraven

DenverRalphy wrote: »

Unless you're playing on the EU server, I don't recall ZOS ever releasing patch notes prior to the patch/patch-day.

1.5.5 went out on Sunday, in fact several did. Then several came back with "such and such didn't make it in this patch." to which people (more than the few in this post complaining) started complaining and throwing a fit. "Why didn't X make it in!?"

Memory lapse?

Kraven

1.5.3 = Sunday

Kraven

1.5.2 = Friday

Cherryblossom

seanvwolf wrote: »

The original post is drenched in assumption and misleading information.
ZOS, until very recently, released patch notes a day prior (Sunday for Monday patches), until it turned out that if a patch doesn't go through correctly, that the patch info they release is misleading and negatively impacts the community unnecessarily. I think this is the only time I've seen them patch something and not provide explicit notes a day in advance, likely in an effort to troubleshoot their patch QA and implementation process. But they did mention in ESO Live that there would be patch today with their regular server maintenance.

When have ZOS released the Notes Prior to the release?
If something is missed off, I've not seen any complaints where they have changed the Patch Notes. I've seen complaints where they have released the Patch Notes after the Patch and they have been wrong never the other way round!
It's nice that they mention it in ESO Live, but the forum is where people come for information, not sitting for an hour watching them avoiding the big questions.

Enodoc

DenverRalphy wrote: »

seanvwolf wrote: »

The original post is drenched in assumption and misleading information.
ZOS, until very recently, released patch notes a day prior (Sunday for Monday patches), until it turned out that if a patch doesn't go through correctly, that the patch info they release is misleading and negatively impacts the community unnecessarily. I think this is the only time I've seen them patch something and not provide explicit notes a day in advance, likely in an effort to troubleshoot their patch QA and implementation process. But they did mention in ESO Live that there would be patch today with their regular server maintenance.

Unless you're playing on the EU server, I don't recall ZOS ever releasing patch notes prior to the patch/patch-day.

Agreed. They've almost never released the patch notes before the day. You can even check through the patch notes forum and see that almost every time, they are released during the NA maintenance, about 30 minutes before the server comes back up. Not having the full patch notes in advance is fine; a brief sentence would suffice.

Kraven wrote: »

How dare they have regularly scheduled maintenance!!!!? At the same time weekly!? The audacity!

@Kraven we know regular maintenance is weekly. What we would like is a bit more information in advance regarding what is happening during that maintenance.

For example: Today we are releasing Patch 1.5.7, which mainly contains bug fixes. This should be around 500 MB, and we expect this maintenance to last approximately 3 hours. or Today's maintenance is a server reset with no patch to download. We expect this maintenance to last 1 hour.

Kraven

Oh missed one.
1.5.4 = Wednesday for a Thursday patch

AlexDougherty

Cherryblossom wrote: »

seanvwolf wrote: »

The original post is drenched in assumption and misleading information.
ZOS, until very recently, released patch notes a day prior (Sunday for Monday patches), until it turned out that if a patch doesn't go through correctly, that the patch info they release is misleading and negatively impacts the community unnecessarily. I think this is the only time I've seen them patch something and not provide explicit notes a day in advance, likely in an effort to troubleshoot their patch QA and implementation process. But they did mention in ESO Live that there would be patch today with their regular server maintenance.

When have ZOS released the Notes Prior to the release?

They did release the patch notes early a few times, but stopped because people were complaining about the patch before it happened.

But they did do it two or three times.

Kraven

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

We are releasing patch 1.5.7 today and will post the patch notes in a few!

DenverRalphy

Kraven wrote: »

DenverRalphy wrote: »

Unless you're playing on the EU server, I don't recall ZOS ever releasing patch notes prior to the patch/patch-day.

1.5.5 went out on Sunday, in fact several did. Then several came back with "such and such didn't make it in this patch." to which people (more than the few in this post complaining) started complaining and throwing a fit. "Why didn't X make it in!?"

Memory lapse?

1.5.5 went out on a Monday. The notes were posted after the patch.

Enodoc

Kraven wrote: »

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

We are releasing patch 1.5.7 today and will post the patch notes in a few!

See now, if that was stated in the maintenance banner, the thread it was posted in wouldn't have needed to exist at all.

DenverRalphy

Kraven wrote: »

1.5.3 = Sunday

I don't know what calendar you're looking at, but your days seem to be off.

wafcatb14_ESO

Wow and I thought this thread was going to be about them being incompentent and unable to fix the Lag issue we have had since the Awesome lighting patch 4 months ago .

Kraven

Enodoc wrote: »

Agreed. They've almost never released the patch notes before the day. You can even check through the patch notes forum and see that almost every time, they are released during the NA maintenance, about 30 minutes before the server comes back up. Not having the full patch notes in advance is fine; a brief sentence would suffice.

Kraven wrote: »

How dare they have regularly scheduled maintenance!!!!? At the same time weekly!? The audacity!

@Kraven we know regular maintenance is weekly. What we would like is a bit more information in advance regarding what is happening during that maintenance.

For example: Today we are releasing Patch 1.5.7, which mainly contains bug fixes. This should be around 500 MB, and we expect this maintenance to last approximately 3 hours. or Today's maintenance is a server reset with no patch to download. We expect this maintenance to last 1 hour.

Perhaps you missed it. 1.5.2 -1.5.3 - 1.5.4 - 1.5.5 patch notes all went out the day in advance. And that's with 30 seconds of actually looking instead of making speculations and assumptions based on fiction in order to have something to complain about.

Of course I must be mistaken, since it must be a fact that they "almost never released patch notes before the day." just because you said so.

Kraven

Just the facts ma'am, just the facts.

Kraven

http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/discussion/142486/patch-notes-v1-5-7#latest