What are you doing to this game ZoS???

iPeriphery

ZoS, you are killing your game. I have been playing ESO since Beta and honestly, It's just gotten progressively WORSE and more buggy since Imperial City came out. You guys need to stop trying to fix what isn't broken, and focus on the many many bugs that have still yet to be fixed since Beta, or have been in the game for 2+ Years. Every patch, lag and performance gets worse and worse. Focus on the huge list of broken things you have before adding new content. Come on guys, this is nothing new. You've had years to get your *** together

You are killing your player-base by constantly throwing the game on it's head every few months. People don't like constant nerfs and changes to class identity every patch. You very clearly DO NOT play your own game; Especially not PVP. You need to stop being stubborn and just seperately Balance PVE and PVP already like we have been asking for years, this way you don't feel the need to completely GUT your game and class mechanics every few patches. People have had enough of your bullsht and aren't going to stick around much longer. Hell, even CP was only a band-aid fix that only further increased the unbalance in this game; rendering PVE content laughable, and making people absolutely busted in PVP, as well as severely widening the gap in which new players have to overcome to catch up to veteran players.

It's SO sad seeing what could have been such an amazing and fun game like what it was for such a long time, completely pooped on every single update. None of the things about this game that actually make an MMO Good, are present any longer. Stop trying to rely on the single player RPG PVE quest stuff to completely carry an MMO! That's not the point of an MMO! The point of an MMO is to have competitive and engaging content to do with FRIENDS!!!! Without that, there is 0 replayability. Stop treating the game like an Elderscrolls game first, and like an MMO first and you will have 10000x more success.

At this point you might as well roll back to IC, add all the QoL Updates and try again, because at this rate you guys won't ever succeed in making classes feel unique and diverse like they used to be. There's no reason to even log in anymore. PVP is homogenized and lost all sense of diversity that it used to have way back when. And the game engine is so limiting that it can't even handle all the players without lag.

ESO has been getting to the threshold where people aren't going to put up with your sht anymore Zos. You can ban me, or delete this post; but you can't change the Truth, and the fact of the matter is that nobody even wants to have to make these kinds of posts on the forums but tbh you guys have made the playerbase have to resort to this. Learn how to actually play your game before you make changes that are uninformed and break it further.

Cyrodill keeps getting more and more unplayable every patch, and you guys don't seem to give a single F, you are making a unwise decision by prioritizing crown store content over performance. FIX the bugs that are crippling your playerbase and get worse and more broken with every patch, and you will make wayyyy more money than any singular crownstore update. That's the problem with the gaming industry now a days, you treat people like units of energy to extract money from. How about actually making a game that is engaging and fun? You would make more money and have a much longer future to draw income from if you would stop treating human beings like cattle to be milked dry of every last penny.

Not to mention the complete and utter failure Necromancer was. I wanted to like it so bad, and as I was leveling up Necro it was honestly really fun, but man what a dissapointment.... And the worst part is that it's been this long and its STILL broken. Like come on, you can't expect people to pay for this stuff and it be completely broken

Hippie4927

Paragraphs are your friend.

iPeriphery

@Hippie4927 Good point.

rotaugen454

I’ve seen both good (in my view) and bad (also in my view) changes since beta, but it has kept me here 5+ years and 4000 hours of gameplay. My MagSorc hated the massive shield nerf from before, all my other characters shrugged and kept driving on. This upcoming update has them all nervous, mainly because the guy pushing the buttons for them will have to adapt and learn new rotations, get sets, change skills, etc.

iPeriphery

rotaugen454 wrote: »

I’ve seen both good (in my view) and bad (also in my view) changes since beta, but it has kept me here 5+ years and 4000 hours of gameplay. My MagSorc hated the massive shield nerf from before, all my other characters shrugged and kept driving on. This upcoming update has them all nervous, mainly because the guy pushing the buttons for them will have to adapt and learn new rotations, get sets, change skills, etc.

Of course they have added many amazing and good QoL Changes and things throughout the years, but when the game gets to the point where it's having an identity crisis and isn't even recognizable anymore; is completely different situation. Also would help if they would fix all the bugs that are destroying the game before making new content and adding 1000 more bugs to the mix.

Blinkin8r

What we need: A great fix patch.
What Zos has specifically said they're not interest in doing: A great fix patch.
Problems with this game 101

Chadak

"ZOS, What are you doing?"

Stupid, amateur-hour things.

What they should be doing is in line with this.

Particularly this excerpt -

A. Best Practices

At the beginning of concept development, the engineer encounters evolving user preferences, imprecise
specifications of product parameters, varying levels of technology maturity, market and funding uncertainties, and
perhaps evolving regulatory, political and other hard-to-quantify factors.

Often called “the fuzzy front end” of product development, this phase is absolutely critical to embarking on a lean engineering undertaking.

Several key best practices have emerged.

Perhaps the most important element is to focus on understanding the customer and end user value expectations for the product – its features and attributes, quality, price or cost and availability.

No amount of efficient lifecycle engineering or engineering process improvement can make up for a poorly conceived product that a customer does not want.

Difficulties include less-than-fully-defined user value (after all, the product is less than fully defined at the
beginning of product development) and the importance of multiple stakeholders, particularly when end user and
acquirer (stakeholder that puts up development money) may be different. The issue of value definition and creation
in product development was studied by Slack.

A second important element is to keep the “design space” as open as long as possible before making critical decisions to address uncertainty. Toyota uses a technique called set based design in which the design choices for
subsystems and components are made from a set of possible choices ranging from a proven design to ones from
emerging technologies.

The final choice is delayed as long as possible, even into the detail design stage, in order to
have the best information available before a final choice is made.


***

ZOS' consistent history for at least the past two years' worth of ESO development demonstrates two things clearly that are in contradiction of these fundamentally summarized best practice design principles, and it is worth noting that these design principles are industry agnostic; they are designed for industry ubiquity in any industry in which a product is designed and/or fabricated, no matter what that product is.

Firstly, ZOS has shown no meaningful sign of servicing the majority of their customers. The nature of their most consistent changes reflect a pattern of preference for vocal minorities within specific and exclusive subsets of the playerbase, and are never ideal to the most common use cases.

Secondly, ZOS demonstrates a clear pattern of inadequate planning, including a noteworthy incomprehension of their own fundamental systems.

This game is a machine, just as certainly as the engine in your car or the device on which you're reading this. They make it systematically obvious that they do not understand the interoperations of their own mechanical systems through egregious and rapid-fire 'throw things at the wall until they stick' method of patching and re-patching of the same things.

This is not in line with industry standards of tweaking and modifying the mechanics of powers, abilities and classes; fine tuning is not done in double-digit percentage modifications. It's usually not called 'fine tuning' at all when large single integer modifications are being made.

Between these two points, I see no basis for confusion about how we've arrived at our present circumstance.

ZOS does not know what they are doing when it comes to the most mechanical of systems inherent to this machine we call a game. They have no singular design goal when it comes to classes or even single powers and abilities, and this is repeatedly demonstrated through their consistency of inconsistency when it comes to the magnitude and nature of their modifications made to them.

This is not a pattern of behavior that demonstrates confidence or even working knowledge of the mechanics at play.

This is not a pattern of behavior that indicates any plan or goal inherent to a desired outcome.

ZOS is winging it, and that is not, has never been and will never be an acceptable engineering practice in any respected or respectable field or industry.

lookstwice

I think you left your mic on the floor.
Great post.

Enemy-of-Coldharbour

They're 'killing it'!

Katahdin

They said they are killing it
I guess they meant they are REALLY killing it off

JumpmanLane

Spot on OP. Spot on. ZOS has to reach a point where the just STOP fiddling with combat and fix the myriad of bugs and performance issues.

I’ve gotten to the point I don’t even LOOK in the crown store and haven’t finished a chapter since Morrowind. Never did a dlc quest since the one with fang lair lol.

And don’t get me started on events lol.

Androconium

Just because it look and feels half-finished, doesn't mean that it isn't a fully operational Death Star.
Everything is proceeding as I have foretold.

valeriiya

Blinkin8r wrote: »

What we need: A great fix patch.
What Zos has specifically said they're not interest in doing: A great fix patch.
Problems with this game 101

This^^^
I don't get too worked anymore about changes to skills and classes, none of that matters when I'm sitting in a long load screen or keep getting blue screens.

xF1REFL1x

Since Elsweyr I have to agree... the game is the worst I've experienced from that point. Disappointing to say the least.

Stebarnz

THEY... DONT... CARE!

Just unsub and play free until they get the message they are not 'killing it'

[Edit to remove mention of protest]

volkeswagon

The part that pisses me off is we pay for the game and it's expansions, plus a monthly subscription then you absolutely gauge is with the price of crowns. It costs more for 15 crown crates then it does for the expansion. Crown prices should be at least half what they are. The game is just getting too expensive to play. Performance hasn't been too bad for me. I know that will vary depending on one's connection as well as the connection consistency. Why do some people have horrible lag and issues with freezing and login in problems and others don't

shaielzafine

It's funny nobody from the dev team has come and stepped up yet to talk about all the performance and server problems, more advanced nerf roulette and more aggressive crown store practices. I know Matt Firor said back in April they would fix servers in 3 weeks, then they came back and said it would be later in the year. Nobody so far has come forward talking about the pts patch that was leaked. There's also talk about fixing group finder, you know like in the last 3 years I've been playing. ESO is starting to feel like a freemium game, and I will play here and there but I don't want to subscribe anymore to a freemium game. If it feels like it's a "Minimum Viable Product" then I will stop throwing money at it. Ultimately what did make me unsub was the server & game performance problems, both in hm trials and in PvP. I can be a casual pve player like majority of people, that only logs in for new story if they can't fix their game. Oh and the giant banner ads when you log in and constant reward reminders when you log out make the game feel like a really cheap mobile game. There's even exclamation points in the UI all over the crown crates and crown store constantly. So much for roleplaying and immersion for an elder scrolls story adventure.

Eraldus

I don't have ESO+ sub, but I was planning to buy Elsewyr along with Morrowind and all other expansions, so that I could have the game up to date, but after seeing that aberration called Buildbreaker, I decided to just save the money for Borderlands 3 and later for Cyberpunk 2077 instead...

It's kinda sad, because I had returned to ESO just recently, after a one year break, since I was pretty busy and couldn't really play back then, but just as I came back, I see the devs nerfing the game to Oblivion, thanks to a bunch of PVP muppets that sucks at playing, and thinks that by having the game ruined for both PVE and PVP, that they'll start to win matches, when people will just find another way to kill them easily and they will start crying for nerfs once more.

I also can't wait for TES VI to be finally ready to be released, even if its release is years ahead from now.

validifyedneb18_ESO

I dont disagree with your point about focussing on bugs, but this:

Stop treating the game like an Elderscrolls game first, and like an MMO first and you will have 10000x more success.

This is why the beta and launch version of the game sucked.

Also, changing the meta randomly, while it seems to no make sense, keeps the game fresh, in the same way a new MMO expansion changes the way classes play with new talents, gear sets and special mechanics.

Just because things "work" doesn't mean the game wouldn't just die if they never updated anything.

ezio45

Agree completely with almost everything in this post. (I do think can balance without separating pve and pvp, it only seems like they cant because they make terrible balancing decisions. )

Every patch performance gets worse and worse, classes skills feel completely the same. Build are extremely pigeon hold from nerfs to the point where it feels like you cant experiment or go off meta and still have a functioning build.

Pve content is either super easy or extremely difficult chaotic messes. Pvp, well good luck pvping with the lag or crashes or load screens.

Sick of "adapting" every 3 months for the last 2 years, to nerfs that are out of no where ( can you think of the last time someone complained about dots?) or them taking something that needed a slight nerf and they took a sledgehammer to it or something they nerfed because it didnt fit up with some rule set they made up for balancing.

Over all just to much of zos trying to make things adhere to standard or to make things more challenging (when even they have said content completion is low) instead of making classes feel unique and content being fun

StabbityDoom

Blinkin8r wrote: »

What we need: A great fix patch.
What Zos has specifically said they're not interest in doing: A great fix patch.
Problems with this game 101

When did they say that? (I don't doubt you, just want to read it)

StabbityDoom

I wonder if the people doing the race "balance" are the same people tasked with stability and performance of the game itself. My hunch is no. Someone correct me who knows better please.

Jeremy

iPeriphery wrote: »

ZoS, you are killing your game. I have been playing ESO since Beta and honestly, It's just gotten progressively WORSE and more buggy since Imperial City came out. You guys need to stop trying to fix what isn't broken, and focus on the many many bugs that have still yet to be fixed since Beta, or have been in the game for 2+ Years. Every patch, lag and performance gets worse and worse. Focus on the huge list of broken things you have before adding new content. Come on guys, this is nothing new. You've had years to get your *** together

You are killing your player-base by constantly throwing the game on it's head every few months. People don't like constant nerfs and changes to class identity every patch. You very clearly DO NOT play your own game; Especially not PVP. You need to stop being stubborn and just seperately Balance PVE and PVP already like we have been asking for years, this way you don't feel the need to completely GUT your game and class mechanics every few patches. People have had enough of your bullsht and aren't going to stick around much longer. Hell, even CP was only a band-aid fix that only further increased the unbalance in this game; rendering PVE content laughable, and making people absolutely busted in PVP, as well as severely widening the gap in which new players have to overcome to catch up to veteran players. It's SO sad seeing what could have been such an amazing and fun game like what it was for such a long time, completely pooped on every single update. None of the things about this game that actually make an MMO Good, are present any longer. Stop trying to rely on the single player RPG PVE quest stuff to completely carry an MMO! That's not the point of an MMO! The point of an MMO is to have competitive and engaging content to do with FRIENDS!!!! Without that, there is 0 replayability. Stop treating the game like an Elderscrolls game first, and like an MMO first and you will have 10000x more success.

At this point you might as well roll back to IC, add all the QoL Updates and try again, because at this rate you guys won't ever succeed in making this game actually good. There's no reason to even log in anymore. PVP is homogenized and lost all sense of diversity that it used to have way back when. And the game engine is so limiting that there isn't even any naval combat/pvp or pve. ESO has been getting to the threshold where people aren't going to put up with your sht anymore Zos. You can ban me, or delete this post; but you can't change the Truth, and the fact of the matter is that nobody even wants to have to make these kinds of posts on the forums but tbh you guys have made the playerbase have to resort to this. Learn how to actually play your game before you make changes that are uninformed and break it further. Cyrodill keeps getting more and more unplayable every patch, and you guys don't seem to give a single F, you are making a unwise decision by prioritizing crown store content over performance. FIX the bugs that are crippling your playerbase and get worse and more broken with every patch, and you will make wayyyy more money than any singular crownstore update. That's the problem with the gaming industry now a days, you treat people like units of energy to extract money from. How about actually making a game that is engaging and fun? You would make more money and have a much longer future to draw income from if you would stop treating human beings like cattle to be milked dry of every last penny.

Not to mention the complete and utter failure Necromancer was. I wanted to like it so bad, and as I was leveling up Necro it was honestly really fun, but man what a dissapointment.... And the worst part is that it's been this long and its STILL broken. Like come on, you can't expect people to pay for this stuff and it be completely broken

The game certainly has it's fair share of problems, many of which you touch on. But it's still the best MMO on the market right now if you ask me. Most MMORPGs I play I'm sick and bored of after the first month or two. But I've been playing this one since BETA and I still enjoy it. It also has far more depth, diversity and interesting combat options than your average MMO does - especially in the modern era.

Kalle_Demos

Jeremy

ezio45 wrote: »

Pve content is either super easy or extremely difficult chaotic messes.

Yeah I agree. This is probably the biggest problem with the game right now.

Hopefully this new development team will do a better job at finding the right balance between too easy and too frustrating. This upcoming update and the new DLC dungeons will tell the tale. The new CP system they are currently in works on will be a good indicator too. Because if they keep moving in this same direction - where content is either brain dead easy or annoyingly frustrating they are going to start running into problems.

iPeriphery

Jeremy wrote: »

ezio45 wrote: »

Pve content is either super easy or extremely difficult chaotic messes.

Yeah I agree. This is probably the biggest problem with the game right now.

Hopefully this new development team will do a better job at finding the right balance between too easy and too frustrating. This upcoming update and the new DLC dungeons will tell the tale. The new CP system they are currently in works on will be a good indicator too. Because if they keep moving in this same direction - where content is either brain dead easy or annoyingly frustrating they are going to start running into problems.

I got news for you, no matter what they decided to do with the New CP System; it will fail. Why? Because CP just creates a gap between new and old players that shouldn't be there. They should instead make a talent system with key stones like League of Legends where you can choose 2 or 3 trees to draw passives from that all have a Keystone which has a specific mechanic to it that you can only choose from 1 per tree, that will benefit your class. CP is inherently flawed and introduces too much of a power creep, where as having a talent tree to pull from is limited but still useful enough to make more diverse builds without gating it behind a boring and pointless grind that many new players wont even play long enough to get to because of the laggy servers and buggy game.
@ZOS_GinaBruno @ZOS_KaiSchober We love your game and are just very disgruntled with the current state, please take the feedback from this thread without offence, but instead treat it as an opportunity to be aware of what will help dig you out of the ditch your game currently is in, so that you can profit greatly in the long run and keep your game alive to profit from for many years. We all love this game and don't want to see it go down the toilet, but that's sadly where it is heading if you don't step up, admit your mistakes, and make a change.

TheInfernalRage

So, before I even started playing this game (Morrowind), it was already bad, declining and getting way much worse. I must be crazy to be playing it to CP 1155 and those who have greater CP than me must have lost their mind. What a terrible game to be playing. At the rate of how much the player-base is described in the OP, this game should have been dead before I even reached CP 160. However, here we are, still talking about its impending death, venting our disappointments, and just arguing to make the game better.

If this game started declining and dying in 2015, why in the world are we still playing this trash of a game in 2019?

iPeriphery

TheInfernalRage wrote: »

So, before I even started playing this game (Morrowind), it was already bad, declining and getting way much worse. I must be crazy to be playing it to CP 1155 and those who have greater CP than me must have lost their mind. What a terrible game to be playing. At the rate of how much the player-base is described in the OP, this game should have been dead before I even reached CP 160. However, here we are, still talking about its impending death, venting our disappointments, and just arguing to make the game better.

If this game started declining and dying in 2015, why in the world are we still playing this trash of a game in 2019?

Because every other game on the market just happens to be even bigger of a pile of trash lmao. Minus League of Legends, they stepped up their *** when they added TFT, amazing new game mode. Not even missing ESO rn tbh, but It's still sad seeing one of my favorite MMO's that I've played since its beginning, get worse and worse over time. We are only still playing cause we have had up until this point hope that things would get better, and they had been getting better for a while but it stopped.

Honestly, game's been dying since a little bit before SypherPK and King Richard quit. There's a reason why the hard core players are leaving in droves, and have been for a while. This game is nowhere near as challenging to PVP or PVE in as it used to be, and it seems like build diversity and class balance gets worse and worse every patch.

iPeriphery

ezio45 wrote: »

Agree completely with almost everything in this post. (I do think can balance without separating pve and pvp, it only seems like they cant because they make terrible balancing decisions. )

Every patch performance gets worse and worse, classes skills feel completely the same. Build are extremely pigeon hold from nerfs to the point where it feels like you cant experiment or go off meta and still have a functioning build.

Pve content is either super easy or extremely difficult chaotic messes. Pvp, well good luck pvping with the lag or crashes or load screens.

Sick of "adapting" every 3 months for the last 2 years, to nerfs that are out of no where ( can you think of the last time someone complained about dots?) or them taking something that needed a slight nerf and they took a sledgehammer to it or something they nerfed because it didnt fit up with some rule set they made up for balancing.

Over all just to much of zos trying to make things adhere to standard or to make things more challenging (when even they have said content completion is low) instead of making classes feel unique and content being fun

To be honest, I think most people would agree that adapting every 3 months is a big pain in the ass, and the constant killing of playstyles is due to the homogenization they keep trying to push. I think the easiest example in this case to see is Magblade and how a once fun and unique offensive healing playstyle is now almost extinct because of consistent nerfs.

burglar

I feel like there is an overarching goal with the class changes ever since Wrhoebeler left, and I was skeptical about magblade myself with the recent PTS notes, but even though they're not significant, some of the changes to the vampire and weapon skill lines could have positive effects for magblade. I'm hoping the game gets better.

The performance issues are 'a bit much' and make ESO+ not worth it. I would keep playing the free version, but after a day or two the game becomes the Elder Scrolls of Inventory Management.

iPeriphery

ProbablePaul wrote: »

I feel like there is an overarching goal with the class changes ever since Whoebeler left, and I was skeptical about magblade myself with the recent PTS notes, but even though they're not significant, some of the changes to the vampire and weapon skill lines could have positive effects for magblade. I'm hoping the game gets better.

The performance issues are 'a bit much' and make ESO+ not worth it. I would keep playing the free version, but after a day or two the game becomes the Elder Scrolls of Inventory Management.

I've been playing this game since beta, and it has gotten better in a lot of aspects, yet it has also gotten way worse in others. I feel like most of the playerbase still hopes that the game keeps getting better, but with these new patch notes I think it's pretty clear that unless something is done, it will just move in the wrong direction. Thank you for your input though, I agree that the performance issues are definitely one of the biggest downfalls in this game right now.