I was recently made aware of a tweet put out by a member of the dev team over the proposed light and heavy attack changes. I won't post the entire tweet, but the TLDR was that the community shouldn't have knee jerk reactions to proposed changes, and just trust in the dev team, and Zenimax as a whole to make the right changes.... I am going to do my best to keep this post from getting deleted by moderators because I think this is a discussion that needs to happen. So, let's have a conversation about trust in the dev team when it comes to elder scrolls online.
Firstly, I would like to say trust is earned and after years of being ignored, lied to, and taken advantage of by this company they lost any trust I had in them long ago. Asking the community to "just trust us" is so condescending at this point. Speaking as a member of the pvp community, a portion of the game that has been abandoned by ZOS long ago I have no trust left for this company. I mean in the most recent live stream you couldn't even type "PvP' in the chat without it being removed by moderators. I could list hundreds of ways this company has broken any kind of trust I may have once had, but it would just be a wall of text.
Secondly, let's talk about how things are tested in this game, and how feedback is handled. I do not thing these "knee-jerk" reactions would happen so often if the balance team actually listened to feedback, and paid attention to what testers on the PTS are telling them. A lot of people use to spend hours a day on the PTS testing thing before content drops, but now it is a ghost town. When feedback is constantly ignored, bugs that are caught week 1 of the PTS cycle still go live, and when changes like the light/heavy attack changes are proposed no amount of testing changes the teams mind. So people gave up. Why waste your time. So, you are left with people that lash out when they see a change that they do not agree with. Strictly speaking from a PvP perspective the dev team is completely detached from what is actually going on. That was made clear in the changes to Mag Warden in the last patch. The dev comment about artic blast and shalks being to offensive and to easy to line up the cc with burst has 1 never actually played a Mag Warden and 2 can't PvP all that much.
Lastly, I think we should talk about communication. The dev team member in question really shouldn't be communicating this type of stuff via social media or twitch since there was another incident not long ago. I am not going to go into that further in fear of this post just being taken down, but to me, after the last incident anything that comes out of his mouth comes off as condescending. If we are going to discuss things like trust I think it would help if the combat team came on the forums and actually explained the direction they want to take combat. WIth these wild changes that rework the most basic mechanics of the game every few months no one knows what result they are aiming for. From the outside looking in, to me, it just looks like you are dumbing down combat as much as possible to cater to your target audience. Which is not veteran players that have put time, money, and a whole lot of effort into this game. So open and clear communication could maybe rebuild some of the trust that in my case no longer exists.
<snipped for Baiting>
Edited by ZOS_Hadeostry on July 10, 2022 7:30PM