Open Letter to all decision makers for ESO (not necessarily the Dev team)

NewBlacksmurf

For those who have been around, you've seen many comments from me and while I fall into trying to help, or communicate I also get involved in debates, feedback and interesting discussions. For some time I've observed questionable decisions regarding this game and when I observe and compare PC to Xbox One, those observations often result in a forum comment or social media remarks and memes.

For all the hard work your developers, Forum Mods, and even the support staff who all get a lot of aggressive and often negative comments, the actual observation is that those folks are not the source of most of the forum, Reddit and social media outlet negative responses from current, prior and would-be customers. Your very often, over promising and under delivering.

The issue is this.....Corporate Decision Makers

Please consider changing your procedures in order to utilize a collaborative decision making process versus a command decision making process. Typically as a customer our points of view are outside but the impacts are most often noticeable for those who intentially read official statements and announcements or news from this team. I'm suggesting the decisions are command because my personal observations suggest leaders are habitually making decisions without first consulting their teams.

Your software expands across PC, Mac, Steam, PlayStation and Xbox however, customer consistently read news, announcements, dev tracker comments, social media or watch ESO Live and immediately afterwards, there is a shock factor every time. Now I'm excluding any shock factors where customers may express discontent with class, race, weapon, base stats, champion points, etc because the command decisions apply there as well but I hope to focus on decisions that relate to release dates, bugs, oversights, omissions, and segmentation of player base.

If your decisions were collaborative decisions, there would be a plan phase, discussions ongoing, community involvement, as well as talking with 3rd party teams so that your content timelines align with little deviation. See having started on PC during closed beta, I experienced testing phases and feedback as well as collaboration but I understand that happens because of a control group, when we got close to launch, my intent was to play on console, however, little to no communication about the console delay was offered until the last moments.

This was the first observation which was confirmed by your own news, interviews and eso live shows where you begin to share that delays would occur due to console requirements. The delays actually were not due to console requirements, they were due to the command decision making rather than collaborative decision making. If the decision makers involved all relevant parties months ahead, the teams could have addressed any issues that would have impacts and therefore, when the game was up for pre-order, all platforms would have had accurate details rather than subjective information. It's even interesting that Leaders suggested that your subscription model was changed due to Xbox live, but in that you revealed that you assumed rather than planned to understand and confirm what would best align. Now your eso plus, crown store and crown crate stores require more real money with no options to purchase ingame currencies above timed exclusive crown items....which seems a command decision as well because there are large groups of forum threads asking to be able to buy more than 5500 crowns however, the threads and comments have been ignored.

Fast forward to your Morrowind time line and skipping changes to subscription models or excluding Xbox one from subscription options......

In January you went public about Morrowind being a chapter, and this was lacking details thus the pages and pages of QnA and what often causes community members to tag Gina. I'd imagine she gets over 2,000 tags a week at this point but it's often due to a command decision rather than collaborative. If it was collaborative, the January announcement would have read something like this.

-We are happy to announce our next update which is Morrowind and we have decided to change how our DLC works. .....(important info like) why the model was changed and what access would work by platforms and what wouldn't work. That announcement would go on to clarify PTS dates, and the companies decisions to select participants without option to sign up (after making sure console only folks wouldn't get emails)

Later it would outline the planned release date or dates and the companies desire to offer early release for the base game patch (but this would come only after making sure you could send the update for certification 45 days ahead)

So here you wouldn't have announced the game until you had made a collaborative decision and confirmed that the plans that were announced are possible, within scope, and very unlikely to miss any targets.



The company is charging a very high price for any and all cosmetic as well as dlc content but from my perspective, your approach is that of some of the very small start up studios.

In terms of balance changes, the community expresses a consensus decision making process but that's another topic within itself. There are plenty of threads on this, but here my hope was to share an observation with the hopes that the companies decision makers would change.

NewBlacksmurf

I need to add, that your command decisions that segment console, gamepad UI and pc mouse and keyboard has further contributed to glaring complaints for lack of information and these decisions show further how the decision maker isn't offering realistic solutions but instead designing interfaces that require add-ons which also by design and omitted from the gamepad UI seen on consoles....NOT because of what Sony PlayStation or Xbox allow but due to ZeniMax command decisions.

Obviously the controls dictate needed adjustments but the user interface should be exactly the same and the.controls are what should differ by platform. I lack the information but want to suggest that your development timeline would be exponentially reduced if you slow down and move to one user interface that I'm express should be the current PC mouse and keyboard UI but from there, the cursor would be replaced by the use of the game pad that highlights selections.

People like me want to play your game and often budget spending $15 to $30/month without question, however when your command decisions create frustrations, confusion, and lack detail which require going to a website or forum and posting and searching for info, the command decision process detracts from the marketing and development progression goals you have.

Before any new content is delivered, all platforms would appreciate being able to go to zones without textures delays to load, falling through floors, crashing in trials and dungeons as well as most major cities that require dlc purchases.

We like to have the perspective that content releases aren't adding new bugs or game breaking changes but prior to, hoping to see known issues being resolved, not patched with hope that it's fixed but actually confirmed.


Another collaborative decision making change I'm suggesting is to actually play on Xbox one and PS4 for eso live and throughout the week when known bugs or bot reports are on the threads. People honestly believe GMs no longer exist or never have existed on PS4 and Xbox One.

@ZOS_GinaBruno and @ZOS_JessicaFolsom I'd appreciate if this could be shared not only to developers but corporate leaders if you both find this of any value.

Thanks for all you two do

Moloch1514

@ZOS_Marketing. Please read. Seriously, the marketing team needs to have a presence on the forums since they drive the company now.