Some hopefully interesting suggestions ZOS (with a dash of saltiness)

Fherrit

Well, despite having spent the last 2 hours cleaning my still and beer brewer the server is still down on "maintenance". So what's a fella to do with his one night off if he can't play? I could gripe but I did that already and besides, it just gets ignored anyway. So how about a constructive suggestion post? (well, there's some snarky criticism tossed in alongside with it ) Its a long one, ZOS, you got no one to blame but yourself for giving me the time to write this.

I'm no GL of some legendary guild with a 100k players world wide or some YT streamer with a following the size of China's civilian population. But I am fairly experienced with MMOs and my work has some overlap with your business model, which is to say I'm a nerd who thinks he's got a informed opinion but hey, sometimes a lone voice can light a fire, no? Anyway:

Transparency: I get why you have the policy you do, because basically no matter what answer you give it's going to invite criticism and insulting memes and what not. Corporate Suits don't like having their delicate egos challenged this way, so they order you to say nothing and tie your hands, all the while smirking about how brilliant they are for their solution. But the problem is that silence invites retaliation far more than some troll posting trash talk. Humans don't like a void, they take it personally and tend to feel driven to escalate their efforts at getting a response. Granted, your ban-hammer does get rid of the most troubling ones but if they're voicing something that in spirit at least, is agreed upon by many, all they see is you being a thin skinned bully for silencing the voice of dissension, one that got as loud and shrill as it did because of your offensive policy.

Imagine for a moment you're a burger counter and order fries with your sandwich and drink, but the clerk gives you a bowl of soggy Al'Akir beets. Politely, you inquire if he made a mistake, you ordered fries and not Al'Akir beets, but what you get is a silent poker face. Ok, maybe he didn't understand, so you repeat yourself a little more firmly, you did not order beets, he made a mistake and you want the fries you paid for. Again you get the silent look, then figuring you need to take this up with someone higher up, you ask for the manager and lets assume for a moment the clerk flags the manager over. You're annoyed, but you explain you ordered fries, got beets, and this clerk is just giving you the silent treatment. Now the manager gives you the silent poker face. Think you might be tempted to throw those beets in his face? Sure you could file a complaint with the BBB but you know that doesn't go anywhere, so instead you share your story with anyone who will listen. Here's the pop quiz that comes with this little story: How many possible sales do you think the silent burger joint lost as a result of this?

You don't have to go into in depth detail, but one thing you really should do is consider implementing a means by which the player base can check the status of the servers from the horse's mouth, not some 3rd party, and get a expected ETA for them being up again. Seriously, this is just plain simple professionalism. All your competitors do this (the successful ones at least). And then, eat some crow pie and own up when you screw up. Now the staff is probably handcuffed by the Suits who refuse to spend the money on infrastructure and payroll, and of course the Suits don't want that reason being out there because it makes them look as incompetent as we both know they really are, but they'll look a lot less incompetent giving the player base a way to get a server status and reasonable ETA. Doing this shows a simple respect for the schedules of their customers. After all, if you think you might get on in a hour, and its 5 hours later and you still can't get on but you kept trying, how much more frustrated/angry/likely to get fed up do you think that customer is vs the one who is told that the server is going to be down all night and should go do something else with their evening? How would you feel having your time disrespected repeatedly?

Money: I may be wrong here, but your symptoms are highly suggestive of finance problems. Jumping on the B2P/Sub hybrid at the time probably seemed like a smart move, but things right now don't seem to bear that out. From the many chats I've had, I've run across very few people who buy anything from your crown store (or maybe they're just not admitting to it?). IMHO your crown store is a joke, sorry to be abrasive but I'm it is what it is. The other day I saw upon logging in a crafter upgrade of instant research for 320 crowns and thought, hey now...that actually might be worth it. Take a research that's got 30 days and knock it down to 1 day? Especially given the power creep of the dropped sets outclassing the crafted gear...I'm being tossed a bone here huh? Yeah ok that seemed a fair trade.

Only when I looked at it you shave off a day. 1 single day for 400 crowns. Seriously? Who came up with that pricing? $95 in crowns to reduce a 30 day research time to 1 day? Oh I know what the counterargument is going to be, you don't want to undermine all those crafters who "worked hard" (like me) for their research by introducing such a blatant shortcut and upsetting the economy/power scale. The problem is its already skewed with your drop sets where you put players on a treadmill to get not only the drop but with the right trait (really, this is downright sadistic, why you don't let crafters do a one time trait override on a dropped item is beyond me). Which is where I imagine the vast majority of your player base looks at that and snorts in contempt, like they do at a lot of other things in your store, making selling things from the Crown Store difficult, and further hampering your finances. Now if that research reduction cost 50 crown per day I'm willing to bet you'll see a lot more sales, and to prevent a sudden flood of 9 trait omni crafters you limit it to one profession, no more than 10 per month, and they're account bound.

While I'd like to gripe about the costs of mounts and houses, I get why you have those things listed at their rates and can't honestly criticize you there, but with the costumes, utility items and consumables your pricing is downright insulting. But then, how do you stay funded? Yeah, that B2P isn't looking so good anymore is it? And the Crown Store isn't quite generating the income you'd like, what to do? Well you're stuck with it and have to use it, so how do you turn that around to a cash cow instead of a slap in the face it is now, while avoiding a P2W trap?

Not that this is a silver bullet, but with your Housing you're missing out on a golden opportunity to generate a substantial income and interest within the game (well...substantial so long as you don't price gouge, all you have to ask is; if you feel like you got bent and used, you probably did and no one likes to feel that way right? Treat your customers the way you want to be treated). You've got the code in place, lets assume the code is stable and isn't giving you issues, but what you allow players to put in their homes is a pale shadow of what it could be.

Besides furnishing and crafting stations, you could let them create delves of their own making with themes they assemble via the crafting professions and of course, drops from across the game world (not just your newest expansion pack to justify sales). Wait what? Item drops from someplace else besides their current sources?? Am I (insert insult of choice)? EXPs too? What pills are you on Fherrit? Ahem: bear with me a little here.

You could put code in place to let them assemble quests within their delves, granting xps for completion and gold based upon your own formulas and containers that have loot tables just like the various game zones do (and of course the visitor has to have the right DLC or be a ESO plus member ((hint)). The drop rates for green and blue should be the same as in the open world, but purple has a lower drop rate than found in the open world, say 60% of what it is in the open world. Note dungeon drops would not be part of this, just zone drops.

Here's where you can make the money: The loot tables, quests, as well as templates that govern the shape/size/configuration/theme of the delves (i.e. crypts, castles, caves, brothels, etc) are items that can be bought from the crown store. The quests packs can have tiers where each comes with increasing stages to them, the more stages and involved the quest the higher the cost in crowns, and of course the option should be present for building delves incorporating PvP. In fact, with some creativity you could create a staggering number of delve themes for PvE and PvP style play with a potential megagillion component purchases. But you know, be reasonable about it. Don't charge them 400 crown for each and every editable book they could put in their delves, but rather they buy editable books and can put as many as they like, etc.

What you should really do is allow players to design their own homes by buying theme bundles, like Nord packs, Al'Akir, etc assemble them like lego pieces and populate them with npcs that provide services found in the open world like say a Stablemaster, Banker, Merchant, hairstylist and how about some freaking storage? Oh I know, the old 'but we charge money for pack upgrades, can't just let you store a infinite amount of junk in your homes, that and "ourr sairvers kinna hand'l the strain Capt'n, ye'll give the wee Ham'sters a hart attack!" Limitations Sir, limitations. Each house pack has a vault, each vault can hold X number of crafted containers that can hold X amount of items. While I'm on containers, how about craftable locking chests that have traps owners of Delves could put in, and definitely a robust trap system with tiers of deviousness tied to a crafter's standing within the Thieves Guild or Dark Brotherhood (or they could be bought from the store for a reasonable price). These chests could be loaded with items by the Delve's owner from his adventures as a reward for anyone foolish enough to run his gauntlet and seek the reward. Can you say guild event? Can you say old hands having a more fun way of handing out their loot rather than deconning it or giving it away via mail? Want some extra fun? Let such chests have a random item generator from a special loot table that the crafting chest maker has access to oh and gosh...that too can be in the crown store.

Garden planting so a home owner could always have a reliable stock of his favorite herbs (seeds purchased in the crown store: don't ***, be reasonable...notice a theme here?), livestock raising (to get a guaranteed source of hide/meat/poultry or a fishing hole with a better than the current absurd drop rate for roe-doesn't have to be massive), a training area for your mounts so that your alts (if they log out in the player's account wide home) gain a upgrade to the mounts training at a rate of 2/3/4/5x up to the account's highest rated mount for the same cost as it would take to train it normally (i.e. a 3 point advance in say speed would cost 750 gold). This respects the player's time, its an Alt for pete's sake and you're not going to break the game or play balance by letting a player's alt get his mount up to the same level as his main character.

The lore to justify these isn't something you have to worry too much about, since you can always blame Shalidor or Sheogorath creating pockets in Oblivion, heck you could even theme delves to various daedric princes with bundled bad guy templates that can be customized with costumes (again I'd suggest crafted) and appropriate loot tables that are purchased from the crown store and hold with the game's own drop rate. I mean would it really matter if a player ground out a set in a zone you already made or a guild's delve if the rates are the same and the difficulty of the encounter?

Gaining access to these private delves can be gatewayed with a gold entry fee if they're "open", or kept private like the homes are. The advantage of allowing them to be flagged open with a entry fee is the delve's owner gets a income stream and is motivated to make one worth going to, and the game can take a cut of the gold out of the system just like the guild traders do. Some systems would have to be put in place to lock the entry fees appropriate to the content (i.e. the bundle purchased costs any entrant 300 gold per run) so the most complex and invested delves will cost a goodly bit of coin (obviously this too has to be moderated to a larger extent but regular economics will go a long way towards making delve owners price accordingly within a set of parameters you put in).

How about some of these private delves being set up with a challenge mode to beat the timer or waves of foes or environmental challenges like say Minotaurs forcing the visitor into a game of Frogger where the player has to dodge their repeated charges. Or a Delve that has leaping stations to create platform puzzles? Or a teleporting maze (the maze changes its pathing for each person's entrance except the owner) with the option to put a stalking horror into the maze, if it catches you and wins, you "get eaten" (and booted out of the delves, no rezzing in the corner). Tools baby, its all about building a robust toolset that can be assembled like a lego collection to allow players to create content that they can share with friends and guests. You have the beginnings of it, but if you commit some dev time to this a lot of longevity will bake itself into your game.

The benefit of this is you gain two significant things:

1. A significant variety and content to your crown store. People will pour far more into these sorts of things than they will a 1 day cut to the research timer for the same price. (again, be less blatantly money grabby and people will buy more readily).
2. Game content explodes. While you should still make DLCs and such, you can take more time in producing them and the most talented/skilled members of the community who have created the most successful/popular delves can be contributors to any new DLCs. heck you might even hire some staff this way. The truest way to get endless content is to create tools for the user base to create their own with, why do you think Minecraft is as successful as it is?

I'm going to wind this down now, but the last thought I'd suggest you pass on to your Suits is this: Invest in infrastructure. Payroll, hardware, and Customer Service, these are things that are obviously being run on a shoe-string budget. Blizzard, Square Enix and Arenanet didn't get where they are by cutting corners and starving the business, and for God's sake, whatever it is with your servers stop with the band-aids. As of tonight you've lost 3 accounts, the 3 co-workers who I had convinced to give this game a try gave you the boot in disgust. I know that's not an alarming statistic but your entire consumer base are not addicts you can string along indefinitely and word of mouth referral is still a thing in the age of the interwebs. Meh...I'm done, server is baked and so am I.

Kurkikohtaus

A roundabout question, but is there an MMO out there that has the perception of having a "fair and well managed cash shop"?

Of the 4 MMOs in which i have participated since 2007, none of the (non-P2W) cash shops have made any sense to me what-so-ever.

Fherrit

Kurkikohtaus wrote: »

A roundabout question, but is there an MMO out there that has the perception of having a "fair and well managed cash shop"?

Of the 4 MMOs in which i have participated since 2007, none of the (non-P2W) cash shops have made any sense to me what-so-ever.

Keeping in mind that this is strictly my opinion and thus subjective, as well as not having played one for 4 years, and the other for nearly 2 now.

At the time I was in RIFT their cash shop didn't bother me much, most things were cosmetic and the few things that were "essential" were very reasonably priced at the time. That may well have changed since then and TBH I haven't investigated that title since I left it in 2013.

GW2: Their Lion Boxes were flat out stupid IMHO, but like Crown Crates, completely ignorable. I also felt that bank and personal inventory being things you have to buy was annoying, but not to the point of being abusive. You could go a long ways with the non purchased upgrades for storage and the extra storage was priced at a "ok" level. Mind you, on the one hand I'm annoyed by it but the game does run without a sub, so I look at the flat cost of bank upgrades as what I would spend on a sub and the annoyance evaporates. By the time I stopped playing GW2 the items they had for sale were largely of no interest to me because I place very little value on cosmetics. But since the Path of Thorns release I hear that there are more "encouragements" to buy that are semi-necessary which, if true, would annoy me enough to question continued play.

Granted, ESO does give you a set of crowns every month as part of a sub so that's comparable, but the prices of some items within the store are absurd and/or of questionable worth. However just in case I didn't articulate my point clearly, I don't hate cash shops, I understand that B2P games need them as part of their funding mechanism. When the prices/effects are reasonable I'm ok with purchasing things from it, so long as they don't give a clear competitive advantage to the buyer.

Cash shops that are limited to convenience/cosmetic/unnecessary utility are fine. The reduction in research time as an example, IMO is over priced and under performing because of the power creep within the game favoring dropped sets. Were crafted sets the best items or at least as good as drops, then I could see the price point, but not with the direction of the current content.

Sigtric

Is there a Cliff Notes?

geonsocal

DHale

A. You are still paying attention to the forum, therefore you are not disgruntled enough. By ZOS not saying anything "transparent " there is nothing controversial.
B. By you writing a well thought out dissertation they know you are loyal and not going to go anywhere. But old players are not who they want. They want the new people who buy the game, play for a short period of time and buy crown store stuff and then move on to new games. Old players are not any games target demographics. They want the crown store whales who will drop the dough for a mount re skin.
C. ZOS (no different than any game company) will make decisions based on its economic interests so things like bug fixes and lag take a back seat to new content. There are finite resources and a person looking into bugs and fixes is not working on new stuff or profitable stuff.
D. Pvp is a minute part of this game and elite pvp and pve players make up a tiny fraction of a fraction of players. There is no financial incentive to make these people really happy. To remove the lag they would have to buy better servers, rewrite code, start from scratch. Brian has said that the lighting patch did not break Cyrodil and if I was not on the day before and after I might believe that. But the original coders are gone. They laid off many internal staff after the dismal launch.
E. They likely started designing the game code years before the game launched in 2014. They probably used coding language and software not used today. I have read that they started pre production and production 6 years before launch.
F. I still have fun every day I play the game. The RNG makes me crazy but through it all I still have fun. ZOS is looking a the data. They are seeing others are still having enough fun... not happy but content.

Fherrit

DHale wrote: »

A. You are still paying attention to the forum, therefore you are not disgruntled enough. By ZOS not saying anything "transparent " there is nothing controversial.
B. By you writing a well thought out dissertation they know you are loyal and not going to go anywhere. But old players are not who they want. They want the new people who buy the game, play for a short period of time and buy crown store stuff and then move on to new games. Old players are not any games target demographics. They want the crown store whales who will drop the dough for a mount re skin.
C. ZOS (no different than any game company) will make decisions based on its economic interests so things like bug fixes and lag take a back seat to new content. There are finite resources and a person looking into bugs and fixes is not working on new stuff or profitable stuff.
D. Pvp is a minute part of this game and elite pvp and pve players make up a tiny fraction of a fraction of players. There is no financial incentive to make these people really happy. To remove the lag they would have to buy better servers, rewrite code, start from scratch. Brian has said that the lighting patch did not break Cyrodil and if I was not on the day before and after I might believe that. But the original coders are gone. They laid off many internal staff after the dismal launch.
E. They likely started designing the game code years before the game launched in 2014. They probably used coding language and software not used today. I have read that they started pre production and production 6 years before launch.
F. I still have fun every day I play the game. The RNG makes me crazy but through it all I still have fun. ZOS is looking a the data. They are seeing others are still having enough fun... not happy but content.

@DHale You make some good points in your reply. I hope I didn't come across as a frustrated PvPer, I'm pretty casual in that area as I'm not one of those who likes trash talk or strut, I merely enjoy the dynamic competitiveness of it (which is why zerg rushes are something I avoid).

I've run across several sources now that have suggested the issue with the coding and staffing. Sad when Suits start lopping heads for the sole purpose of saving money to the detriment of the product, but I've seen it plenty of times so I guess its standard American Business

My perspective is based on someone who used to play Neverwinter Nights 2 a lot (not the MMO) where creating dungeons for other players to run through gave a old product a lot of life. Its interesting to me that in a age where crowdsourcing funding is as successful as it is, that MMOs don't consider the return on giving players a toolset to do things with. Bethesda's ES series is in large part as successful as it is due to the mod community giving their titles far more immersion, graphics and other enhancements that anymore, Bethesda counts on to add longevity/depth to their titles. Granted its easier to do for a single play game than a MMO, but far from impossible.

The cost though, as you pointed out, they're on a slim budget (which is where I think a fair bit of their problems stem from), even if it would greatly benefit their item shop, i don't think the Suits are willing to make the investment. Ah well, it was something to do while the servers were down, thanks for taking the time to read it and offer up a thoughtful reply.