Official Discussion thread for "A Look Back on 2015"

ZOS_GinaBruno

This is the official discussion thread for the blog article A Look Back on 2015. Thanks to everyone for another exciting year, and we can't wait to kick off 2016 with you!

Turelus

Yikes I forgot how much happened this year... Looking forward to 2016!

One thing you forgot to mention (or I overlooked)

We've seen amazing levels of communication from ZOS the last quarter of this year and I hope going forward into 2016 this communication between developers and players continues. I would love to see the return of the road ahead and maybe even the introduction of Dev Blogs where the key developers can write a little about what they're working on and how they achieve things.

Also can we have some graph pron? I would love to see a compilations of graphs showing things like; most played class/race of 2015, most used skill of 2015, total value of healing/damage done in 2015. I am not sure if your logs record this information but... we need to see it, in really really sexy graph form!

ZOS_GinaBruno

Turelus wrote: »

We've seen amazing levels of communication from ZOS the last quarter of this year and I hope going forward into 2016 this communication between developers and players continues. I would love to see the return of the road ahead and maybe even the introduction of Dev Blogs where the key developers can write a little about what they're working on and how they achieve things.

Thanks! We're discussing potentially spinning up some Dev Blogs next year so the team can do a deep-dive on some of the newer systems or features.

Mosha

@Turelus completely agree, graphs need to be had plox.
Really looking forward to 2016, really hoping for the same or even better levels of Dev - User communication.
Happy holiday!

Lysette

Seriously, when ESO came out first and I saw the reviews and some gameplay on youtube I was disappointed to the most and I guess a lot of fans experienced this in the same way. I intended to not play this game, but stick to the single-player games.

Then ZOS invited to this free weekend a bit ago - and I thought, I might give it a chance and see how it improved - oh boy, was I impressed what ZOS has done to the game meanwhile; I bought it on the spot. I really have to thank you guys for listening to the community and turn this game around - well, not just around, my first impression is now, that it might actually be the best fantasy MMO out there currently. And unlike in other MMOs the community seems to be great as well. I enjoy playing it now.

So carry on with your great work - and don't forget to implement proper poison usage on weapons, it will make bows viable.

kylewwefan

Please don't start logging the time I've spent playing this game! Don't need to see that in a sexy graph!

DannyLV702

Uhhhhhh uhhhhhh I have stage fright bye!

kongkim

Its been a really good year in ESO and really looking forward to next year.
So Happy Holiday to ZOS and all others ofc.

SlayerSyrena

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to everyone at ZOS! I'm amazed at how much you guys accomplished this year. The game is better than ever.

Zaldan

Where to start?

At the beginning sounds good..

Criminal behavior was introduced to Tamriel when we released the Justice System in March.

Shame we only got part of the Justice System.

Also in March, we published the Champion System to enhance your character development.

Failed attempt to remove Veteran Ranks, made even worse by the inadequate diminishing returns and catch-up mechanic requiring ZO$ to add another limit and catchup mechanic.

Once the dust settled from console launch, we opened the Imperial City for battle in September

I'd love to know how much this was an attempt to fix PVP performance by creating half a dozen sub zones to spread the same player count across and how much it was an actual attempt at a PVP DLC considering it's a neutered version of what PVP players were expecting. Might just be that I always find myself in Imperial City when it's practically empty.

Of course, there were many other improvements and additions to the game including dungeon scaling for existing dungeons, the single-player progressive challenge Maelstrom Arena, two new dungeons, subtitles, controller support for PC, and so much more

Maelstrom Arena, the crowning jewel of a paid for content with so many bugs/exploits the leaderboards are a work of fiction and still doesn't work properly and wont for months yet. I tried the PC controller support and it was awful, how people can play on console with that UI I don't know, so many of the keybinds not showing up in settings even though they're there.

We've seen over a million comments posted on our official forums over the past year alone!

Does that include the reasons people can't play? Though a lot of the reasons I've seen appear to be the smame ones with different wording, does that count?

We also have a massive million-dollar sweepstakes for players.

Or we don't, as a lot of player found out. Would love to know what percentage of your player base you alienated with that particular promotion, couldn't come up with something more/all your players could get behind?

With the Thieves Guild and Dark Brotherhood on their way in the first half of next year, you have a lot to look forward to

Yep that's how long we'll be waiting for any major bug fixes too still amazes me you think keeping players waiting months for bug fixes is acceptable.

2016 is gonna be "Interesting"

Turelus

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

Turelus wrote: »

We've seen amazing levels of communication from ZOS the last quarter of this year and I hope going forward into 2016 this communication between developers and players continues. I would love to see the return of the road ahead and maybe even the introduction of Dev Blogs where the key developers can write a little about what they're working on and how they achieve things.

Thanks! We're discussing potentially spinning up some Dev Blogs next year so the team can do a deep-dive on some of the newer systems or features.

Best Christmas present ever?

Hope you and all the team have a great holidays Gina.

ZOS_GinaBruno

Turelus wrote: »

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

Turelus wrote: »

We've seen amazing levels of communication from ZOS the last quarter of this year and I hope going forward into 2016 this communication between developers and players continues. I would love to see the return of the road ahead and maybe even the introduction of Dev Blogs where the key developers can write a little about what they're working on and how they achieve things.

Thanks! We're discussing potentially spinning up some Dev Blogs next year so the team can do a deep-dive on some of the newer systems or features.

Best Christmas present ever?

Hope you and all the team have a great holidays Gina.

Thanks, same to you!

Darlgon

S

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

This is the official discussion thread for the blog article A Look Back on 2015. Thanks to everyone for another exciting year, and we can't wait to kick off 2016 with you!

Sigh..and again.. asking for the date born from a logged in and able to post player. Good thing I was born on January 1, 1915.

Just gonna edit this here:

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

We'll be taking a short break to relax and share a sweetroll or three with our families, but we'll be back on January 4 th to kick off the New Year.

@ZOS_GinaBruno Does this portend a special edition Monday Jan 4,2016 edition of ESO Live?

ZOS_GinaBruno

Darlgon wrote: »

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

We'll be taking a short break to relax and share a sweetroll or three with our families, but we'll be back on January 4 th to kick off the New Year.

@ZOS_GinaBruno Does this portend a special edition Monday Jan 4,2016 edition of ESO Live?

No, just that we'll be back in the office. Sorry

zZzleepyhead

Criminal behavior was introduced to Tamriel when we released the Justice System in March.

But not the part I was anticipating. Still no enforcers...

Also in March, we published the Champion System to enhance your character development.

woooooweeee! Ya that sure did enhance character development lol
So much so that it needed a complete overhaul to fix. golfclap

As if March wasn't busy enough, we also launched The Elder Scrolls Online: Tamriel Unlimited, and allowed you to play ESO with no monthly subscription required. With this update, we launched our in-game Crown Store where you could purchase a variety of cosmetic and convenience items.

I stand by my salty comments I posted that day.

In June, we welcomed Xbox One and PlayStation®4 players to Tamriel when we launched ESO on consoles. It was so exciting to see so many of you logging in at once during launch week!

"In June we opened the floodgates and noobs poured onto reddit and our forums. It was so exciting we accidentally neglected PC and PvP has gone to ***." Ya, I'm still enjoying the daily 'Is X well populated?' posts.

Once the dust settled from console launch, we opened the Imperial City for battle in September.

No no no - I'm supposed to be dealing out the insults here.

We wrapped up the year by inviting you to rebuild the city of Orsinium in November.

and yes.. yes you did.
Orsinium has been fun. Good job guys

Rune_Relic

Thanks for all the hard work.
Enjoy the break and get plenty of rest.

Zheg

Not to be a negative nancy, but each one of the bullets had major problems associated with it

1. Criminal behavior was introduced to Tamriel when we released the Justice System in March.
2. Also in March, we published the Champion System to enhance your character development.
3. As if March wasn't busy enough, we also launched The Elder Scrolls Online: Tamriel Unlimited, and allowed you to play ESO with no monthly subscription required. With this update, we launched our in-game Crown Store where you could purchase a variety of cosmetic and convenience items.
4. In June, we welcomed Xbox One and PlayStation®4 players to Tamriel when we launched ESO on consoles. It was so exciting to see so many of you logging in at once during launch week!
5. Once the dust settled from console launch, we opened the Imperial City for battle in September.
6. We wrapped up the year by inviting you to rebuild the city of Orsinium in November.

1 - It had gold generating issues in the beginning, but ultimately, no one even pays attention to it. I guess it's good for RPing, but without the last phases of the justice system, the current system really doesn't serve a purpose.
2 - The champion stars still don't all work the way they're supposed to, there are gross imbalances in terms of physical vs. magicka benefits (particularly on mitigation), it took almost the full year to get a catch up and cap system in place that should have been there for the initial implementation.
3 - I guess since you guys needed the money it's ultimately a good thing, but you lost a lot of player trust switching away from a subscription model after insisting for over a year that it would never be anything but a subscription model.
4 - Console release had/has tons of issues from what I could tell from forums, text chat being at the forefront. You alienated your PC players by making them wait literally 4+ months for basic fixes because consoles were being prioritized over all else. Now that you have to deal with both PC and consoles, the frequency of fixes is reduced because you have to send your builds to Microsoft or whoever for consoles, so you tend to try and wait and package everything together. This means having 65k fall damage for months on end (after it was previously "fixed" in prior patch notes...) is a thing.
5 - You didn't gate IC to begin with, so Axe has failed as a campaign, IC has substantially reduced population 2 months after its release, TV reward system favors dps over healers/support (who literally get nothing sometimes...), the dungeons were far overtuned initially and had little in the way of actual rewards, and the rewards were BoP from the dungeons.
6 - BoP rears its head again. Orsinium by far has been the most successful release (I think), but all of the new sets are locked behind an RNG grindfest because you forced everything to be BoP so people were obligated to buy a release most were going to buy anyway. VMA has also forced the glaring discrepancies of class balance to the forefront.

Believe it or not, I'd add one item to the list, and it's bizarrely both a big achievement and a massive failure for the year. Lag in pvp HAS been improved towards the end of the year in the sense that we no longer have 40+ banners on flags and 75+ meteors being spammed to the point that your sound effects sound like artillery fire. The massive failure component of that is ping still has silly issues. So, we traded not being able to use our skills at all to having them go off 5+ seconds after hitting them in what needs to be a reactionary and dynamic play considering the (still) low TKK.

Soooooo... again, you guys had a few bright spots throughout the year, but ... I'm not sure I'd call this a good year for you

To end on a less sour note, as someone already pointed out, I'll reinforce that the increased dialogue towards the end of the year is much appreciated and much needed. Brian started to up his post count and has put out some really candid and informative tidbits, and Eric finally created a forum account.

nimander99

I'll say it: Merry Christmas ZoS!!!

Great improvements to the game, can't wait for 2016!

tinythinker

"The game isn't the only place that's been busy. We've seen over a million comments posted on our official forums over the past year alone! "

Yeah, and a dozen of us are responsible for a third of those...

(or at least it seems that way sometimes...)

PrinceBoru

Great year ZOS!
Thank you all for your efforts in creating this game.
ESO brings happiness to so many!
I'm looking forward to what 2016 brings!

Darkonflare15

@zaldan Yay thxs for stating the negatives. Like we do not have enough of that already or that we are clueless about it. Hooray to our great comunity for reminding us everyday that nothing is perfect.

Darlgon

tinythinker wrote: »

"The game isn't the only place that's been busy. We've seen over a million comments posted on our official forums over the past year alone! "

Yeah, and a dozen of us are responsible for a third of those...

(or at least it seems that way sometimes...)

I both agree and shake my head in disappointment.

sir_buttersworth

Excited to see the new additions for next year!

death_gamer

thanks! please Russian Localization )) add!

Tomato

Money grabs and broken PvP system

found1779

now if only in 2016 we could get text chat on console

TheBull

Bar none, best dev communication of all the mmorpgs. Don't stop!

Fecius

Happy Holidays!

Come back refreshed and replenished! And good luck in the next year!

Bloodfang

Darlgon wrote: »

tinythinker wrote: »

"The game isn't the only place that's been busy. We've seen over a million comments posted on our official forums over the past year alone! "

Yeah, and a dozen of us are responsible for a third of those...

(or at least it seems that way sometimes...)

I both agree and shake my head in disappointment.

Because more than 5% of playerbase ever posts on the forums lol..

Just check how many people actually got 10 comments badge, 24k out of 5+ million copies sold across all platforms.

Fellenore_Ewalion

One does not drink mead from a glass!

Still, have a merry holiday, Gina & ZOS!

Faunter

I can't wait to see what's in store for ESO in 2016!