Beam-me-ups unlock wayshrine function dead after the update

Ilumia

Patch notes says:
"General
Jumping to someone on your friends list no longer unlocks the destination Wayshrine before the teleportation finishes."


This means the lovely function to quickly unlock wayshrines by automatically semi-porting to all people in your zone must be blocked from working.
I used it a lot to help unlock wayshrines when I was skyshard hunting or doing a daily nowhere near anyplace I'd been. I like exploring zones, but always when I was completing quests in the designated order they were realeased. And I'm quite far behind, so during events or lead-hunting for antiquities, it was still a nice feature to be able to go mush faster to the right area.
I'm really sad to see this go as I used it quite a lot for convenience.
Now I have to go back to porting to every single person in my zone from the guild roster - it'll take forever again.

Does anyone know why it was changed?

[edited for profanity bypass]

Belegnole

I'll miss it too. I found it convenient on alts.

Ilumia

Belegnole wrote: »

I'll miss it too. I found it convenient on alts.

Precisely

Baertram

Means manually starting the teleport and aborting it by moving the char does neither work anymore, hmpf :-/
ZOs this was an unnecessary move and fix, it was open since 2014, so why now?

Ilumia

Yes - this game is so full of chores and grindy activities - please do not remove functions that help bettering that

PeacefulAnarchy

Baertram wrote: »

Means manually starting the teleport and aborting it by moving the char does neither work anymore, hmpf :-/
ZOs this was an unnecessary move and fix, it was open since 2014, so why now?

Someone told them about it in December and we can't have nice things that hurt no one.

Gamer1986PAN

Well @DeadSoon and i already talked about this when we where informed about that this will possibly be "fixed".
Of course we did not think ZOS does manage to fix it in the next 5 years, because game breaking bugs are in the game for more years than this small little backdoor for more comfort.
But we have a few ideas how to replace the feature and i am sorry ZOS but this will cost you much more performance like our way we have used with BMU until you fixed this bug. And of course its not as fast as the current option but at least you will get most wayshrines unlocked while you are afk but users are still upset about it.

We will replace this feature until you make it at least optional to unlock wayshrines accountwide instead of characterbased for free like you did with the achievements and that is a promise...

But at least you gave me a good laugh with a bug like this one and i have to admit its at least a good and rare find:

Fixed a very rare crash that could occur when you jumped away from a zone at the same moment another player started consuming food.

I mean i don't see any hint why this could give me a crash if i travel while another players consumes food - it just does not make any sense but tells us a lot of how bad the code behind that has to be...

Gamer1986PAN

PeacefulAnarchy wrote: »

Someone told them about it in December and we can't have nice things that hurt no one.

In fact they knew at least since October 21 about it.

ZoLatKam

Imo, fixing this bug was very short-sighted on Bethesda's part. Especially considering the fix planned by the authors of BMU.

This bug wasn't game-breaking, it wasn't a cheat (for those of you who want to argue this, please save all of us the headache and just accept that a "cheat", in this context, is considered to be anything that gives one player an unfair advantage over other players that skill alone cannot account for... And I cannot see how "saving time" can be considered a cheat).

The only thing this bug did was allow a couple of helpful mod authors provide players the ability to save a bit of time, if they so desired (Because, not everyone has half an hour or so to waste, running around picking up wayshrines.)

Edited for grammar and clarity.

WrathOfInnos

ZoLatKam wrote: »

Imo, fixing this bug was very short-sighted on Bethesda's part. Especially considering the fix planned by the authors of BMU.

This bug wasn't game-breaking, it wasn't a cheat (for those of you who want to argue this, please save all of us the headache and just accept that a "cheat", in this context, is considered to be anything that gives one player an unfair advantage over other players that skill alone cannot account for... And I cannot see how "saving time" can be considered a cheat).

The only thing this bug did was allow a couple of helpful mod authors provide players the ability to save a bit of time, if they so desired (Because, not everyone has half an hour or so to waste, running around picking up wayshrines.)

Edited for grammar and clarity.

Lol, idk about that definition of cheat. If you could instantly level to max CP would that be a cheat? It only saves time grinding. Or maybe one to provide infinite gold materials? It only saves time farming.

I'll agree this specific example seems pretty harmless, but my understanding is that you can still unlock all these wayshrines, it just requires you to sit through a loading screen for each new zone.

Gamer1986PAN

Well at least you can be faster if you have a player that makes grouplead for you and you travel with BMU to the group lead. In your current zone the loading screens are faster with BMU compared to base game loading screens, when you are in the same instance of the zone like your group lead.

ZoLatKam

WrathOfInnos wrote: »

ZoLatKam wrote: »

Imo, fixing this bug was very short-sighted on Bethesda's part. Especially considering the fix planned by the authors of BMU.

This bug wasn't game-breaking, it wasn't a cheat (for those of you who want to argue this, please save all of us the headache and just accept that a "cheat", in this context, is considered to be anything that gives one player an unfair advantage over other players that skill alone cannot account for... And I cannot see how "saving time" can be considered a cheat).

The only thing this bug did was allow a couple of helpful mod authors provide players the ability to save a bit of time, if they so desired (Because, not everyone has half an hour or so to waste, running around picking up wayshrines.)

Edited for grammar and clarity.

Lol, idk about that definition of cheat. If you could instantly level to max CP would that be a cheat? It only saves time grinding. Or maybe one to provide infinite gold materials? It only saves time farming.

I'll agree this specific example seems pretty harmless, but my understanding is that you can still unlock all these wayshrines, it just requires you to sit through a loading screen for each new zone.

I apologize for being unclear.

By putting "in this context" in my statement, I meant to imply "within the scope of unlocking wayshrines", specifically - Not "cheating on a global scale".

For instance, while "instantly boosting to max CP" or "gaining infinite gold mats", solely in the scope of "saving time" is functionally no different that "saving a few minutes unlocking wayshrines", the 2 examples you provided require altering the game in such a way that it would very clearly violate the TOS, as well as, likely, some local area laws - Because it would require accessing the game's code directly on the server side.

Therefore, I am unable to see how they can be legitimately compared to benefiting from a bug that's existed since the game launched in 2014. While said benefit MIGHT be a violation of the TOS, it does not afford a significantly measurable benefit over any other player. Furthermore, I would be genuinely shocked to learn that it violates any "out of game laws".

AndASM

Why would they possibly spend time "fixing" this when they haven't fixed bugs like... the ability to log in, the ability to play, the ability to open doors, and so forth??

Baertram

the only thing this bug did was allow a couple of helpful mod authors provide players the ability to save a bit of time, if they so desired (Because, not everyone has half an hour or so to waste, running around picking up wayshrines.)

And here comes the truth: The game is about having you stay and play as much time as needed so that you visit the crown store and pay real money, or pay monthly subscriptions to ease your game play.
I guess we all know why it was fixed Because we, the ones who complain now, are not leaving the game because of this one missing feature now. We could, but I for myself will not (not because of this one thing).

Ilumia

Baertram wrote: »

the only thing this bug did was allow a couple of helpful mod authors provide players the ability to save a bit of time, if they so desired (Because, not everyone has half an hour or so to waste, running around picking up wayshrines.)

And here comes the truth: The game is about having you stay and play as much time as needed so that you visit the crown store and pay real money, or pay monthly subscriptions to ease your game play.
I guess we all know why it was fixed Because we, the ones who complain now, are not leaving the game because of this one missing feature now. We could, but I for myself will not (not because of this one thing).

While I mostly agree with what you mention, I have been feeling less and less attached to the game with all these changes that make the game worse for me. I thought I'd stick with eso for longer, but the business model, combined with awa (that took away the replayability for me, because I feel their identity was also a lot in their achievements) and this, making it harder to navigate with an alt just makes me feel les like playing.

Baertram

Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. I'm glad I had known this fix is coming and was levelling my last alt before. But there are alot wayshrines left and it really is annoying to manually get them with that loooong porting + finding anyone in zone first.
We got used to the nice and quick unlocking.
But in the end it provided me a bit peace now, riding more, re-recovering the map, even finding new spots that way.
It's only a mess if you need to be quick to be in time at a boss or something liek that where in the past BMU unlocked the WS and then you ported manually from WS to WS -> way faster than porting to group leader. But the downside always was: In 25% of the cases you were in another instance then (not in the group leader's one, and all others were invisible to you) and missed the boss too ;-)

Cuddlypuff

I'm not sure if this BMU feature is already planned, or even possible, but I'll put it out there since I believe the addon dev is active on these forums.
Use case:
1. Account 1 main/crafter manually goes around the map and unlocks as many wayshrines as possible.
2. Account 2 alt has few wayshrines unlocked.
3. Acct 1 main parties up with acct 2 alt.
3. Acct 1 main starts "waypoint sharing" routine. Perhaps produce a hash of all known wayshrines to manually export to Acct 2 alt.
4. Acct 2 alt starts "waypoint discovery" routine. Perhaps produce a hash of all known wayshrines to manually export to Acct 1 main.
5. BMU generates a list of "unknown" wayshrines that Acct 2 needs to discover from Acct 1.
5. From now on, both characters will teleport around to each unknown wayshrine. This process will continue until Acct 2 alt has every single wayshrine unlocked. Ideal case is entirely automated, afk unlocking of every wayshrine in every zone.

Baertram

-You cannot see "at what wayshrine" someone currently is, the API is missing. I think if you group you can get the position but you cannot detect the next wayshrine near. This was done by the game as you tried to port and thus unlocked "all wayshrines" where someone in the group or guild or friends list was standing next/nearest to.

So BMU will be able to maybe port you around and unlock wayshrines where someone is standing next/near to, but it cannot tell exactly automatically it is wayshrine x or y! Else one would need to define some kind of map sections on each ingame map and relate them to a wayshrine... I doubt this is anything one would like to manually do AND maintain for new maps/changed maps each time.

LalMirchi

While I really like BMU the Unlock all Wayshrines seems like a hack. Not required, but deemed useful by some players. This "nerf" preserves the games integrity.

nathamarath

LalMirchi wrote: »

While I really like BMU the Unlock all Wayshrines seems like a hack. Not required, but deemed useful by some players. This "nerf" preserves the games integrity.

We'll talk again after you created your 5th alt and are about to re-re-re-re-re-explore Tamriel

ElderPenut

LalMirchi wrote: »

While I really like BMU the Unlock all Wayshrines seems like a hack. Not required, but deemed useful by some players. This "nerf" preserves the games integrity.

This is just a bizarre statement, and a severe misunderstanding of what constitutes a hack. What "integrity" does requiring players to unlock every wayshrine on every alt preserve? I'm genuinely curious how you think the game changes in any material way if ZOS suddenly made wayshrines account wide. It doesn't change the new player experience as they have to unlock them manually the first time anyways, and all it does is save veteran players time by making playing alts more accessible.

Personally, I thought the BMU feature was a great alternative to ZOS having to allocate development time to make wayshrines account wide. I had plans to make alts previously, but now I'm reluctant going forward because of how burdensome and time consuming it is to unlock wayshrines. I'm bored of my main character and wanted variety, but I'm discouraged from making alts due to the time investment I have to commit to unlocking wayshrines before I can actually start enjoying the game and progressing my character. This just makes me less likely to play ESO than all the other games in my catalog.

I just think it's disrespectful of the players time to disable this feature in BMU without providing an alternative. This was a poorly thought out mistake on behalf of ZOS. It's flat out bad game design to make it so time consuming for no added benefit. And to be clear, I'm a fan of skyshards being character specific, and NOT account wide, as it is directly tied to character power.

Baertram

I'm genuinely curious how you think the game changes in any material way if ZOS suddenly made wayshrines account wide

.

I think we all need to accept that this game is about having players playing it longer, that's what ZOs needs. And the removal of this "bug" seems to achieve this too.
The more time we play, the more stuff we need to do again, the more often we will use a crown shop to ease the pain.
I can understand that as we all got the possibillities to do, or don't do that.
Depends on personal preference, money available etc.

So in the end the decision to fix this "bug", and it definately was one, was correct. The side effect now is welcoem to ZOs, but not to all of us No matter if the unlocking f wayshrines was a general wrong decision by ZOs. I also would like to have thema ccount wide after my first character. But I guess it's not possible, or not easily possible, beside the facts that this game needs money to be run, and removing this possible income won't help the game in the end.
They need to keep the scales between earned money, features and player satisfaction.

Necrotech_Master

Baertram wrote: »

I'm genuinely curious how you think the game changes in any material way if ZOS suddenly made wayshrines account wide

.

I think we all need to accept that this game is about having players playing it longer, that's what ZOs needs. And the removal of this "bug" seems to achieve this too.
The more time we play, the more stuff we need to do again, the more often we will use a crown shop to ease the pain.
I can understand that as we all got the possibillities to do, or don't do that.
Depends on personal preference, money available etc.

So in the end the decision to fix this "bug", and it definately was one, was correct. The side effect now is welcoem to ZOs, but not to all of us No matter if the unlocking f wayshrines was a general wrong decision by ZOs. I also would like to have thema ccount wide after my first character. But I guess it's not possible, or not easily possible, beside the facts that this game needs money to be run, and removing this possible income won't help the game in the end.
They need to keep the scales between earned money, features and player satisfaction.

technically speaking there is no "crown store fix" to ease the pain of unlocking wayshrines on a new toon lol