Update On Endeavors Resetting Issue

ZOS_Kevin

Hi everyone, before the weekend starts, we want to provide an update on the current issue where daily Endeavors are sometimes resetting more often than intended. We are aware this is happening, and we are currently investigating solutions for this. While the investigation continues, we would like to remind everyone they should not exploit this issue. While we understand some people will unknowingly run into this through normal play, we will be monitoring and banning those who take extreme advantage and exploit it. Once we have additional information on a fix, we’ll follow up on those next steps. Thank you for your understanding here.

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ZOS_Kevin wrote: »

Hi everyone, before the weekend starts, we want to provide an update on the current issue where daily Endeavors are sometimes resetting more often than intended. We are aware this is happening, and we are currently investigating solutions for this. While the investigation continues, we would like to remind everyone they should not exploit this issue. While we understand some people will unknowingly run into this through normal play, we will be monitoring and banning those who take extreme advantage and exploit it. Once we have additional information on a fix, we’ll follow up on those next steps. Thank you for your understanding here.

So, not even an apology to offer for the dozens, or maybe even hundreds of innocent players that were banned for simply doing writs on multiple characters like they've done for years?

DragonRacer

Uh, is this still only a PS EU thing? Or are all platforms affected?

Honestly making me paranoid to game at all if it's the latter because I don't want to go through what PS EU just went through. I generally don't even look at the endeavors at all, so I guess I will need to watch them like a hawk and just... log off for the day if they reset? For fear of accidentally repeating any of them?

ShawnF

ZOS_Kevin wrote: »

we understand some people will unknowingly run into this through normal play

For those of us who want to actively avoid being banned, do you have any guidelines on what not to do? "don't do writs in auridon on a khajiit between 8 & 10 GMT" or whatever? Sure, people could theoretically take that information and choose to exploit it, but you've already said you'll ban them.

I don't pay close enough attention to endeavors to notice if I'm getting them more than once, and now, like the poster above, I feel like I have to be paranoid.

sarahthes

ShawnF wrote: »

ZOS_Kevin wrote: »

we understand some people will unknowingly run into this through normal play

For those of us who want to actively avoid being banned, do you have any guidelines on what not to do? "don't do writs in auridon on a khajiit between 8 & 10 GMT" or whatever? Sure, people could theoretically take that information and choose to exploit it, but you've already said you'll ban them.

I don't pay close enough attention to endeavors to notice if I'm getting them more than once, and now, like the poster above, I feel like I have to be paranoid.

There is a big difference between intentional and unintentional behaviour.

For example, if endeavors reset by getting the dark brotherhood daily coffer, and you always get the dark brotherhood daily coffer, they will be able to tell that you are not doing anything abnormal, and you won't be punished permanently even if you get caught up in a temp ban during a round of investigation.

But if you never used to get the daily coffer, and you suddenly started doing it every day on every character, and redoing the endeavors between each reset... well. That would also be obvious.

Krymsyn_Panda

I don't even want to be caught in a temp ban. I don't pay attention to Seals of Endeavor, but now I have to keep any eye on them to avoid losing the game time I pay for?

I would rather not play then play while afraid I'll get even a temp ban for something out of my control and perfectly within ZoS's control.

DragonRacer

Yeah, I really don’t want a temp ban for accidentally stumbling over something out of my control. Neither do the other 499 people in my trader guild who depend on me for keeping it running. Gonna have to proactively monitor endeavors now, I guess.

Jamie_Aubrey

One of the things that scare me about this is the PVP related ones like Deal x Damage or repair X damage

Means people are going to get these more than once and to stop it everyone would have to stop taking keeps until it's fix or fear facing a ban

Azphel

Bot train goldsellers running around 24/7: I sleep
Players getting extra Glowing Horse Tokens due to a bug: Real ***

Elsonso

DragonRacer wrote: »

Uh, is this still only a PS EU thing? Or are all platforms affected?

Honestly making me paranoid to game at all if it's the latter because I don't want to go through what PS EU just went through. I generally don't even look at the endeavors at all, so I guess I will need to watch them like a hawk and just... log off for the day if they reset? For fear of accidentally repeating any of them?

I think that the bar mentioned above is "Extreme"... A couple times is not going to trigger anything, and now that you are aware of it, if you see yourself inadvertently getting Endeavors, you know to be more careful and stop doing that activity for the day.

Edit: Remember that for every person on social media that knows about this, a hundred or thousand don't. ZOS Is not going to mass ban the majority of their players because they get the same Endeavor a couple extra times during the day while not paying attention. They are going to be going after the person who is spending all day at the Endeavor buffet. So to speak.

ShawnF

sarahthes wrote: »

even if you get caught up in a temp ban during a round of investigation.

This is what I want to avoid.

They seem to have decent logs and have unbanned everyone who didn't deserve it, which is nice - but they started the process by swinging a huge hammer and taking out of ton of (apparently) innocent people. I'd like to avoid accidentally standing in the path of that hammer.

Finedaible

Lets play roulette then. Certainly our odds are good, right?

... Right?

JoeCapricorn

Oh that's just wonderful!

What are today's endeavors? I swear if any of them are "complete 2 quests" and it somehow resets each character and I get a false ban because of it...

OSDFJAOFJOASDJOFASDJ OFASDJFK ASDJKFSDJ FASD KFJAFK

Do the endeavors only reset after you complete the third one? I think I know a way to avoid eXpLoItInG by just doing two today until my last character and then the third one then /quit and hold my breath. ;-;

To add to the ominous aura of this: There's no in game music. It's eerily silent. I can hear NPCs and other characters. No music.

Coffeebug

As someone who has just been banned and I still don't know when or how I earned the extra seals, how exactly am I supposed to feel about this? Some endeavors are 'do two quests' or 'harvest 10 nodes'. I do over 140 quests a day and generally harvest over 100 nodes. What exactly am I supposed to do to avoid this mess?

Treeshka

How about disabling endeavors until a fix is in place that ensures it is fixed? To compensate everyone can get set amount of endeavors upon login.

Necrotech_Master

Treeshka wrote: »

How about disabling endeavors until a fix is in place that ensures it is fixed? To compensate everyone can get set amount of endeavors upon login.

i would think this is the best way to handle the situation, if something is messed up with the endeavors, do a small hotfix to just disable them until a solution can be found and then provide some compensation for the days the endeavors were disabled (such as just awarding the max amount of endeavors that would be obtainable had the system been enabled)

JoeCapricorn

Yeah, I'd rather that be the case, than there be a big ol' trap that's going to ensnare yet more innocent players who did not know that a bug even occurred.

ZOS, your approach to this is embarrassingly bad.

Troodon80

So what definition of "extreme" are we using today? Obviously if a player is wracking up thousands of endeavours, it'll raise some eyebrows (and rightfully so), but what of people just playing as normal; playing the way they have for the last 8-10 years? What of players who, for example, might be farming world/delve/public dungeon/group dungeon bosses for set collections and it just so happens that the endeavour for a given day was to kill world/delve/public dungeon/group dungeon bosses or doing daily writs but it turns out daily quests or crafting is an endeavour?

You need to set some sort of definition of extreme so people know what is and is not too far, and instead of banning simply go through and batch remove the erroneous endeavour tokens. You've done it before with skill points, you can do it with this.

This has been such a sloppy mess over the last few days, between the extra long queue times and players getting banned for something they have no control over. On top of that, ZOS was supposed to be doing better with its communication. Gleefully smashing people in the face with a ban hammer is not good communication, nor is threatening people with a ban on the forum.

Wording is also important, and both your wording and the wording used in the tickets/e-mails sent out condemn the players involved. It's been like this for a long time and back when I got a ban in 2020 I said the same thing. The wording comes across as almost bipolar: "You've been found guilty of cheating/exploiting, you dirty filthy criminal; you absolute scum, you're the worst sort of human being! We're going to do an investigation and if it's found out that you didn't cheat/exploit, we'll give you your account back. " and when it is found out after the investigation that the players were picked up mistakenly, there isn't even a word of an apology, as though players should be thankful to get their account back after much stress? I have two serious questions: is this what you really think of players? Do you really think this is good enough behaviour?

You guys ignored all the suggestions over the last couple years with the previous ban waves. You guys can do better than this. Do better, be better.

MidniteOwl1913

I do the endevors every day. It's part of my regular routine. So I guess I should start keeping track of the number of seals I have and make sure I'm not getting more per day than I'm supposed to. What happens if somehow I do trigger the bug and end up with more seals? What should I do to avoid being banned??? My guess is there wouldn't be anything I could do but wait until the process how ever long it takes was finished. That's too much of a risk for something as insignifigant as seals.

I don't want to but I guess I will just skip seals until this is resolved.

I'm on PSNA, if the bug is only on EU (or some other platform) please say so, it would be a big help!

Amottica

Finedaible wrote: »

Lets play roulette then. Certainly our odds are good, right?

... Right?

Zenimax is not playing roulette. They would be looking for specific behavior to determine who they banned up front.

TaSheen

Amottica wrote: »

Finedaible wrote: »

Lets play roulette then. Certainly our odds are good, right?

... Right?

Zenimax is not playing roulette. They would be looking for specific behavior to determine who they banned up front.

Um. I'm not sure I believe that.... I'll just do no more than 2 a day for the duration, and 1 weekly if there's ever one of the only two I do (antiquities or resource nodes) before this is over.

As it happens, I do keep reasonably close track on the 6 highest level characters I have (1 on each of 3 accounts, both PC megaservers) - and part of that is actually going out of my way to do a couple of endeavors each day on all of them (some days it will be only one); for me it's get it done when crafting, doing event etc rather than assuming I'll get stuff like that done in gameplay.

OtarTheMad

Just disable the endeavor system on all platforms until it’s fixed so more innocents don’t get banned, simple.

boi_anachronism_

Amottica wrote: »

Finedaible wrote: »

Lets play roulette then. Certainly our odds are good, right?

... Right?

Zenimax is not playing roulette. They would be looking for specific behavior to determine who they banned up front.

Ok so for example the weekly is "complete 3 trials" i run idk how many a week. Or "complete 6 dungeons" i do way too many to count across all my toons. Id rack up thousand in endeavors. If im farming for gear i may run a dungeon 20x in a day. Do 1 dungeon is a daily very frequently. For those that pvp "do x amount of damage with siege" you do that in like 10mins.

sarahthes

boi_anachronism_ wrote: »

Amottica wrote: »

Finedaible wrote: »

Lets play roulette then. Certainly our odds are good, right?

... Right?

Zenimax is not playing roulette. They would be looking for specific behavior to determine who they banned up front.

Ok so for example the weekly is "complete 3 trials" i run idk how many a week. Or "complete 6 dungeons" i do way too many to count across all my toons. Id rack up thousand in endeavors. If im farming for gear i may run a dungeon 20x in a day. Do 1 dungeon is a daily very frequently. For those that pvp "do x amount of damage with siege" you do that in like 10mins.

If you run trials fairly frequently, getting that endeavor 2 or even 3 times would be looked at more closely, compared to your previous behaviour, seen to be typical, and your account cleared. Especially if the condition to reset the endeavor also matches your normal gameplay habits.

They have all that information available. Every single thing you do in the game is logged.

Stop being paranoid. If you aren't doing anything intentionally shady you won't be permanently banned.

Even running the same dungeon 20x in a row. They also see that you immediately bound every weapon drop before starting the next run, and then once you were done running the dungeon you ported to a house with a transmute station and crafted gear from that dungeon. Your account would be fine.

baratron

This is a very stressful situation for players like me who have over ONE YEAR's worth of login time and cannot possibly afford to lose our accounts.

Endeavors are designed to be done in ordinary gameplay. How many quests do I do on a typical day? How many nodes do I pick? How much gear do I craft or decon?

It makes me not want to play at all beyond logging in to get my Event Tickets, because there is too much risk to my account.

I have bidding rights for three guilds, one of whom relies on me every week because I'm the GM, another of whom relies on me whenever the GM cannot login for some reason. I can't possibly jeopardize that by a bug/exploit that is beyond my control.

What are we supposed to do, stop picking flowers or deconning gear or doing Dungeons? What about people in Trial progs who run the same Trial over and over during the week?

Please, for the love of Akatosh, simply disable the Endeavors system and give us all a fixed number of Seals per day until this bug is actually fixed.

JoeCapricorn

sarahthes wrote: »

Stop being paranoid. If you aren't doing anything intentionally shady you won't be permanently banned.

This is the problem, there are multiple reports of people getting banned (and being told it is permanent) for normal gameplay activities.

So I went in and I carefully monitored the endeavors to see if anything was amiss. I was also cautious when switching characters, checking to see if the "Craft 4 Clothier Items" endeavor reset for whatever reason. It did not, so I continued on.

Finally on my last character I only had two other endeavors to do. I don't really like PVP so "kill a player" was not an option, and it's easy enough to avoid resurrecting other players when playing solo. I ran the Stormhaven public dungeon on my baby Arcanist and got the second endeavor, which was kill a boss in a public dungeon in Stormhaven.

The third one was easy, "Sell 25 items to merchants". If there were some sort of error that caused endeavors to reset, this was the one I was worried about inadvertently doing twice. But fortunately, my Arcanist had few items in their inventory and I did a few more quests in Coldharbour to progress the main story on them. I checked every now and then and endeavors remained 3/3 completed. The timer seemed to indicate that the reset would be at 5 AM.

I do admit to the horrible crime of going to Rawl'kha and meowing at some of the locals. But nothing happened to reset endeavors there. Had I found the thing that triggered this, I would have risked a forum reprimand to post it here as a service to tell others what to avoid doing. I encourage anyone who does find what triggers it to issue a similar PSA, to spit in the face of the automated banbots.

Troodon80

sarahthes wrote: »

Even running the same dungeon 20x in a row. They also see that you immediately bound every weapon drop before starting the next run, and then once you were done running the dungeon you ported to a house with a transmute station and crafted gear from that dungeon. Your account would be fine.

The problem being that the ban happens first and then the investigation happens. This is how it has been for every previous ban wave. Then you have to hope you don't get a message like "A crack team investigated and the suspensions will hold." ZOS has a track record, so you'll have to forgive people for being "paranoid."

Elsonso

Are people actually seeing their Endeavors get reset on such a regular, even daily, basis?

Necrotech_Master

Elsonso wrote: »

Are people actually seeing their Endeavors get reset on such a regular, even daily, basis?

i only notice the daily endeavors resetting daily

SimonThesis

@Zos_Kevin Why wasn't this issue caught and resolved in the PTS before mass amounts of players were banned then unbanned?

phaneub17_ESO

Complete 2 quests, do that 20 times per day turning in 7 crafting quests per character. Open one chest, 20 times per day for the Zenithar daily hitting dolmens. Kill X creatures, could also happen on multiple characters doing the chest one at dolmens.