PTS Update 42 - Feedback Thread for Mail Expiration Changes

LarsHarper

ZOS_Kevin wrote: »

Hello, All. We have received a lot of feedback regarding the changes to the Mail expiration timers on the PTS. We understand the concerns raised around shortening Mail timers, specifically in instances where a player may need to step away from the game for an extended period of time, and that with this shortened window they may miss items or gold coming from Guild Traders through the Mail.

As we reviewed this feedback and investigated those concerns, our data revealed that the vast majority of items listed at Guild Traders sell within a week. If an item does not sell by then, it typically doesn't sell during that listing period. In light of this, Guild Trader listings will now be reduced from 30 to 14 days. All Mail expiration timers will remain at 14 days. To be clear, the timer for Mail expiration will be 14 days from when the item sells or is returned to the player. A Guild Trader listing will expire 14 days from when an item is listed. This will affect all new Mail items and Guild Trader listings from U42 launch onward.

We understand that this may not be the news some of you were hoping to hear, and want to provide context for this decision. Based on the data of how quickly items typically sell, the team felt that 30 days for Guild Trader listings was unnecessarily long, and reducing the Mail expiration timers and the Guild Trader listings will allow for improvements in server performance by reducing strain on the database.

If you plan on being away from the game for an extended period, we recommend taking those personal plans into account when making decisions regarding Guild Trader listings.

We hope this information has been insightful, and as always, you are welcome to leave additional feedback in the PTS section of the Forums.

The data may say that a high percentage of items sell within a week, but that might be because a lot of the items being listed are basic, interchangeable, items like mats that have low margin and high churn. But the more valuable items are less common, take more time to sell, and, most importantly, are the items that drive the most interest in the trading system.

For example, assume I only had 2 trading slots. I use one to list a stack of rubedite and the other to list a rare motif. Let's say it takes the rubedite 1 day to sell, and it takes the motif 24 days to sell. Every day the rubedite sells and I list another stack. After 24 days I will have sold 1 motif, and 24 stacks of rubedite. If you are just looking at sales, you might say that 96% of the listings sell in just 1 day, and only 4% took more than 14 days. But fully 50% of my trading capacity was taken up with items that take a long time to sell. If you are looking at items, you might even say that I sold 4800 individual pieces of rubedite and only 1 motif so only 0.02% of items sold took more than a week to sell.

But a simplistic analysis like that completely misses the point. In the situation above, it is the motif that I care about the most and gives me the biggest dopamine hit when it sells. Selling the mats is just a background daily thing that I grind out. It’s not as big of a deal and doesn’t spark the same interest in trading even if, at first glance, it looks like it accounts for 96% of the sales I make.

People looking to buy items don’t care a lot about rubedite either. They are looking for the rare item, or the uncommon/underpriced item they need to complete a build/achievement/goal or that they can buy and flip for a profit. Take away those items and interest in the traders drops. You might just be buying the rubedite so you can continue to do your writs and hopefully get a sealed motif worth a lot of vouchers that you can then sell for a big profit (but which will also take longer to sell). You don’t spend a lot of time looking for good deals on rubedite either because there is so much of it and the price differences (at least for the first page of results at the trader) are minimal.

I bet if they re-ran the numbers and even did a simple thing like excluding mats they would see some very different results. But not sure if they actually want to listen or look at the data deeply, or if they are just looking for an easy way to try and justify a change they have already decided to implement, no matter what kind of feedback they get. It seems like the attitude is “nope, we have data and know we are right” and don’t bother to question if they actually understand what the data they have are really saying. Even if the face of, in this case, pretty much 100% disapproval from their customers. Given a lot of the past mistakes that have been made in the face of strong community opposition like this in the past, I don’t think that level of arrogance is at all justified by prior results. Telling us that we might think we feel this way, but your surface-level look at the data “proves” that we don’t really know about something we have spent a reasonable amount of time on daily for years is very condescending.

And, to get back to the whole reason they said they were making this change, the rubedite sales above generated 48 system mails (buyer and seller) while the motif sale only generated 2. In the same time frame, both out of 1 trading slot. So, do you really want to force people into trading styles that put a higher load on your mail server? It is the items that take longer to sell and have lower churn that are actually easier on the mail system, which theoretically is the underlying issue.

Jaraal

LarsHarper wrote: »

ZOS_Kevin wrote: »

Hello, All. We have received a lot of feedback regarding the changes to the Mail expiration timers on the PTS. We understand the concerns raised around shortening Mail timers, specifically in instances where a player may need to step away from the game for an extended period of time, and that with this shortened window they may miss items or gold coming from Guild Traders through the Mail.

As we reviewed this feedback and investigated those concerns, our data revealed that the vast majority of items listed at Guild Traders sell within a week. If an item does not sell by then, it typically doesn't sell during that listing period. In light of this, Guild Trader listings will now be reduced from 30 to 14 days. All Mail expiration timers will remain at 14 days. To be clear, the timer for Mail expiration will be 14 days from when the item sells or is returned to the player. A Guild Trader listing will expire 14 days from when an item is listed. This will affect all new Mail items and Guild Trader listings from U42 launch onward.

We understand that this may not be the news some of you were hoping to hear, and want to provide context for this decision. Based on the data of how quickly items typically sell, the team felt that 30 days for Guild Trader listings was unnecessarily long, and reducing the Mail expiration timers and the Guild Trader listings will allow for improvements in server performance by reducing strain on the database.

If you plan on being away from the game for an extended period, we recommend taking those personal plans into account when making decisions regarding Guild Trader listings.

We hope this information has been insightful, and as always, you are welcome to leave additional feedback in the PTS section of the Forums.

The data may say that a high percentage of items sell within a week, but that might be because a lot of the items being listed are basic, interchangeable, items like mats that have low margin and high churn. But the more valuable items are less common, take more time to sell, and, most importantly, are the items that drive the most interest in the trading system.

Couldn't agree more.

I sell a lot of mats, intricates, soul gems, lockpicks, and whatnot that are usually gone within a day or two. But the vast majority of my income comes from rare / expensive items in the 500k-10 million gold range, and they typically take longer to sell. And I'm not a unicorn, there are many players out there who do it that way. So to look at the data and say, 'The vast majority of items sell within a week' so they decide to cut listing time in half is not looking at the big picture.

And that's why the argument that 'Listing fees are trivial so it's no big deal' is also a rather narrow view. Spending 50,000 gold to list an item for 5 million times 20-50 items adds up. So no, a lot of us aren't ok with having to pay 106% more listing fees.

AmishDefector

If this results in drastically improved performance im for it. I can speak from experiemce on items either sell quick or dont at all. The mail timer thing seems to be an issue for a lot of folks but if the point is they dont want the data of 30 or more mail pieces for thousands of players on the servers, having the timer on login wouldnt solve it.
Valid points made by all above, i feel these comprimises could be made:
Smaller listing fee
Guild store timer 14 days
Mail expiration after 21 days
Add 1 or more guild slots to allow for an additional trading guild to make up for the shorter time

merevie

Players in other games have altered their behaviour when time penalty trader changes were implemented.

The most obvious first one is to not use the guild trading system- bartering in zone, cod and frequent seller/buyer deals can be done instead.

Varana

AmishDefector wrote: »

If this results in drastically improved performance im for it.

And you actually, really, honestly believe that this is what will happen?

*goes looking for bridges to list on the guild trader*

Necrotech_Master

merevie wrote: »

Players in other games have altered their behaviour when time penalty trader changes were implemented.

The most obvious first one is to not use the guild trading system- bartering in zone, cod and frequent seller/buyer deals can be done instead.

WTS spam and using COD mails were pretty common back in the days before the public guild traders existed lol, at that time you only had the other guild members to sell items to through the guild store, which if you had a 500 person mostly active guild was still reasonably decent

nowadays with the public guild traders, it allows smaller guilds to make money, but with the competition of the traders themselves can still be hard to maintain a consistent trader

wose

spartaxoxo wrote: »

The number of players who can afford an item that is 1 million+ coin is greatly smaller than one who can afford a 2k+ coin item. And those people may not even be in the market when you list the item. In addition, the listing fees on those items are much greater. So effectively doubling those items listing fees is something that can be burdensome to players, especially those who got lucky with item and are not normally big sellers.

So reducing your listing price will already reduce the listing fee accordingly, AND you'll have a larger buyer public. Win-win.
No need to change the percentage making up the fee.

kringled_1

Varana wrote: »

AmishDefector wrote: »

If this results in drastically improved performance im for it.

And you actually, really, honestly believe that this is what will happen?

*goes looking for bridges to list on the guild trader*

Those might not sell in 14 days, I hope you remember.

Gareaap

Congrats it took this change to finally get me to jump through the hoops to make a forumaccount.

Like has being repeated allot already in this thread and any thread linked to this.
This change is bad and should not go to the live servers.
The arguments used to defend this change are flawed and based on skewed statistics. (funnily you didn't even gave us the numbers you based it on)
Holidays are allot of times are around or longer then 14 days with preparation time so telling us to just throw away gold and hurt the trading guilds is unacceptable advice.

Besides this change hurts PVP'ers with an endless amount off RoTW they can't store. And people that are trying to keep treasure maps stored before they do them. There needs to be beter arguments why you are pushing this through or they need to not be pushed to the live servers.

Kiyakotari

I have significant health issues and cannot always predict when I will be away from the game. Would you like to know what this change means for me?

This will be freeing up a guild slot. I can't guarantee that I will be able to log back in within a 14-day timer that starts as soon as an item sells. I guess I'll sell items in zone chat from now on.

Thanks, ZOS! Wonder what I'll do with that extra slot when I get it? At least I won't have to deal with the listing fees any longer. It's a shame about losing my buddies in the guild, though. I've been in the same one for over 5 years.

WyndStryke__2

I'm sure I won't say anything here which hasn't been said a million times already by other people, but these are my thoughts:

• Trading slots expiring after 7 or 14 days or whatever - that's fine, I don't care, anything which has been sat around on the store for that long probably isn't going to sell. Nor do I care about the posting fee, if it wasn't going to be sold in 14 days it wasn't going to be sold in 30 days either, so either way the posting fee would have been wasted. If people are using guild slots as storage, that's on them.
• Mails expiring is a different thing entirely. It is not unusual to have your life disrupted in some way for that period of time. If another solution could be found that would be great. The following are my (probably bad) ideas:
  • Hibernate the mails - store them in long term storage in another server. Once the user finally logs in again, they can be retrieved within a few minutes / hours or whatever.
  • Coalesce the emails at the time of sending, there are already too many. If one person has bought x of your items from the same guild vendor, put the gold into the same email. There is no need to generate 10 separate emails if someone bought 10 stacks of materials, it's just gold, it does not need slots. Similarly, instead of them receiving 10 emails with a single stack of materials each, send them two emails (one with 6 stacks, and the other with the remainder). For expiring items, do the same - batch up the emails in sixes. For all of these examples, this may involve delaying the original email by a minute or so while waiting for more items to expire or be purchased by that user.
  • Coalesce the emails at the time of (first) expiration. Store gold emails can be merged together, attachments can be merged in groups of 6. Hireling emails from different characters can have their attachments stacked . Then restart the expiration timer.
  • Auto-bank gold instead of expiring it
  • Auto-bag crafting mats if the recipient has a craft bag, instead of expiring it

There are already too many automated emails in the game. Reducing the server load by grouping them in the first place would have a bigger benefit than expiring them. The emails are already annoying for the user if you have a lot of characters and do a lot of trading.

The emails sent from guild sales are already worthless, they don't say who bought your item, what the item was, or which guild vendor it was from, so what on earth is the point of sending them individually. If they actually contained useful information then my opinion might be different. Maybe even directly credit your bank and don't generate an email in the first place. Similarly, when purchasing items, maybe they could go directly into your inventory without an email.

marcbf

Reginald_leBlem wrote: »

bloodandiamonds wrote: »

Players: Absolutely no one wants these changes.
ZOS: Cool, let's implement them.

"And make them worse!"

"I am altering the deal. Pray, that I don't alter it any further."

ThelerisTelvanni

Well I whonder if the databace has a capacety problem (to many datapoints) or a problem with to many database accesses per second.

If there is a capacety problem with to many items listed at traders, this change will most likely not solve it since most are gonna relist unsold items as soon as possible. It will only bring short relive and after that more stress on the system because everyone takes the items from the mail and relists them. Additionally taxing the mail system that seems to crumble already since it is often unresponcive.

I honestly do not see how this is suposed to free recources.

One thing that might reduce stress on the mailing system a little might be to put the daily recources you get via mail directly into the crafting bag if you are an ESO+ member. Maybe with a little notification what you got.

Adding additional inventory and bank slots might also help (depending on your data structure of cause), since some players missuse the guild trader and mail as a way to store items.

But honestly why did you not get propper hardware when you upgraded last year? Did the game grow that rapidly beyond expectations or why are we facing this problem now?

I personally do not like the quallety of life reduction you are planning. And I am not a heavy user of the mail and vendor system.

Jaraal

ThelerisTelvanni wrote: »

I honestly do not see how this is suposed to free recources.

Yeah, they never explained that part. People are just going to keep relisting their items until they sell.

What we do know for a fact is that this new change will generate over twice as many listing mails, either as people filling the 14 day cycles with new items to sell, or as unsold listings coming back three times in 14, 14, and 2 day overlapping mails as opposed to receiving one mail every 30 days.

@ZOS_Kevin, can you help us understand how generating even more mails than we have currently will help performance? Clearly your team has more insight than you've shared with us to this point. But from a layman's point of view, this new mail system appears to involve more data than is currently being used. So is there anything more you can tell us about how this works?

KlauthWarthog

If I were to guess, I would say it is probably related to how the listing data is stored/cached.
Maybe instead of there being one big "file" with all the listings, there is a "file" for each day, with each listing going into the appropriate "file" for the day it got listed. Then, querying the entire set of listings would mean having to read from multiple "files". And reading 14/15 "files" is faster than reading 30/31.
But, that is just wild speculation.

olsborg

If rewards of the worthy mails would expire within 1 hr, I would be happy.

merevie

"nowadays with the public guild traders, it allows smaller guilds to make money, but with the competition of the traders themselves can still be hard to maintain a consistent trade"

< this

A very polite way of describing the current situation. Perhaps Zos is unaware also.

The trading relationships are toxic. There are particular people -some of whom are taking 250k per month from their players, who have personal vendettas/enjoy bullying other guilds. There's a corner of ESO which is a very dark place.

Kiyakotari

ZOS: Passing off "addressing" coding issues to players instead of actually correcting them at the source, since game launch.

Seriously, no comment on how this impacts players with health issues?

There are a lot of us, and we're already a largely ignored community despite well documented research that indicates there is value in using games for things like pain management. I have significant chronic pain. On a 1-10 scale, my 1 is a tourniquet, my 6 is a lumbar puncture, and I sit at a level 3-4 on an average day. (Yes, I have experience with tourniquets and lumbar punctures, as well as *un-sedated and not-anesthetized surgery*, so these are not hypotheticals - I know what I'm talking about when it comes to pain, it's why I never tell providers a 10. Because I can't realistically imagine a pain at that level.) My primary form of pain management is gaming, and the only game I play is ESO. I run multiple accounts across both PC-NA and PC-Eu servers, because when I really need distraction from pain, 1 account or 1 accounts just will not cut it.

ESO is already horrible about disability accommodation.

Almost every other game of this age and at this price point offers at least the most basic attempt at a colorblind mode. Not ESO. My nephew who is colorblind has to rely on an addon in order to be able to play the game. If he wanted to play and he relied on console, he'd just be screwed.

When ESO implemented heavy attack builds with Oakensoul, it was something that allowed players who had long complained about physical issues with their hands being a barrier to making them relevant as DPS (if that was their preferred role). These were demographically prevalent things like RA and Psoriatic Arthritis and the like, and rare things like the ones I have. I personally have Erythromelalgia, which is more intermittent but can also vary from being almost completely incapacitating to mildly inconveniencing, depending on how it plays out from flare to flare. Regardless, in short order complaints about "abuse' by players that did not need such an accommodation resulted in the nerfing of the Oakensoul ring - but not in a way that "harmed" the people who were using it to "cheat" the DPS system, as those were people who could already do decent APM's and did not have physical limitations. I've spoken extensively with players who already had very high DPS prior to the introduction of Oakensoul, and their complaint is consistently not with the DPS it allows. It's with the survivability buffs that let people (up to a certain point) ignore the "standing in stupid" and similar mechanics in trials and high-level dungeon runs. They have no objection to people using Oakensoul to reach the same DPS, it's the DPS + survival that was and still is an issue. People who want to use Oakensoul to access content as a pure DPS that they would not be able to otherwise, due to physical issues, would not benefit overly much from the protective/healing/etc buffs (those are gained from healers/tanks) in trials and dungeons, and suddenly found their ability to benefit from the DPS buffs that made the ring effective for them in addressing their physical limitations stripped away.

Those are simply to two examples that jump out most obviously to me, with my own experiences, but I know there are others for other players. I have a hard of hearing and a fully deaf guidie, and they both struggle with communication in group content since ESO has simply passed the buck for that off to things like Discord, which is GREAT if you have a headset/microphone and can, you know, hear them, but not helpful at all if you need something like real-time captions. It's so bad for my deaf guildie that they're just madly grateful when people will even run pledges with them.

OperandMcYeets

Took them a week to activate my forum account just so I can pile on here.

This is pointless and wont help

ZOS_Kevin wrote: »

If you plan on being away from the game for an extended period, we recommend taking those personal plans into account when making decisions regarding Guild Trader listings.

"its not me, its you..." This is a QoL change for the worse and you're punishing your entire player base for some reason. Housing, fashion, trials, crafting, trading, etc. are all nice end game activities. Micro-managing mail should not be in that category. To me, this is the equivalent of having a sticker book and then ripping it away to make everyone grind again. This is terrible QoL and honestly, you guys should be striving to do the opposite.

MsOblivyous

As a guild officer of a trade guild, I do NOT appreciate your proposed changes. This is going to severely hurt trade guilds and undermine the entire community who uses this part of the game.

I suspect though that like the other [snip] ideas you've had where people told you NOT to do it, you're going to ignore everyone and do it anyway.

[edited for profanity bypass]

Ra'Shtar

Can you please just make sales go directly to the bank instead of being sent by mail?

JoeCapricorn

Everyone hates this change, that just guarantees it will [snip snip snippity snip] go through

MoonPile

No further patch notes or dev comment?

This has gotta be one of the most universally-hated changes in ESO's history. Maybe not top, but definitely on the list.

acastanza_ESO

MoonPile wrote: »

No further patch notes or dev comment?

This has gotta be one of the most universally-hated changes in ESO's history. Maybe not top, but definitely on the list.

Yeah, it's actually disgusting that they're going through with this, especially the incredibly disrespectful way they're going about it.

wenchmore420b14_ESO

I haven't bothered commenting on this as I just see this as a repeat of AWA, and several recent changes that the community was ignored and disregarded.
My take on this is from the "older" players, which make a big part of the community.
I myself recently had to afk because of health issues for 9 months+. Just this month (May), I had to unexpectantly go into the hospital for almost 2 weeks. This 14 day limit is just another micro-management aspect that some of us can't complete due to RL and /or health issues.
Once upon a time ZoS used to listen to it's community, back during beta and for a couple years after launch, but sadly, no more. ZoS and BGW really need to take a page from Larian Studios playbook on listening to its player base.

sol0

If we get these changes with 14 day mail deletion and sales trader listing drops for server enhancement will we stop seeing this any time soon?

Jaraal

sol0 wrote: »

If we get these changes with 14 day mail deletion and sales trader listing drops for server enhancement will we stop seeing this any time soon?

This message happens when there's lag, and all your inputs pause and then get shot to the server in one big bunch. The anti-cheat code has an autokick trigger if the number of data messages exceeds a certain threshold in a certain time frame.

I get this one a lot when it's laggy in Cyrodiil and I'm using a multi shot lancer, hitting multiple targets at once (especially if they are wearing thorn sets and some damage is reflected back to me), and then all that blurts to the server when the lag spike clears. Can't tell you how many Iancers I lost getting kicked like that. But it was enough to make me stop using them.

g0thiCiCecReaM

I think you guys really need to re-evaluate your backend. There are plenty of MMOs with more players on the same server cluster that don't have this "strain on the database". Seriously....look at EVE Online, World of Warcraft, Everquest 2 (population is actually smaller than ESO). EVE is probably the one you should be looking at. While mechanically in game is a wee bit different, the backend for trade data (a billion times more listings than ESO), mail (probably millions more messages being sent and received any any given time than ESO) and generally 30-40k players online at peak hours...plus they have a huge out of game API people have thousands of programs attaching to with probably millions of requests handled a day.

It's a little perplexing that ESO would have as many issues when many, much older MMOs don't suffer the same issues and don't limit things like this to such a short period. I had mail from 10 years ago in EVE, same in EQ2, and probably WoW if I ever logged back in.

Not trying to be a jerk, but I think it's time to start looking for a better solution to your back end issues than doing these "band-aids" all the time.

Rishikesa108

I think ZOS should put the limit back to 30 days for listings, at least for those who pay the Plus. Plus has not been improved for a very long time and has lost much of its original appeal. This would be a good opportunity to ensure that at least the players who have paid for the Plus can continue to have the 30 days for listings.

Silaf

Zeny should allow us to use a special token once a year to redeem all endevors, mails and dayly rewards for the next 7 days after use.
This would allow us to take a vacation at least onece a year witout the feeling of missing out.

And maybe sell more tokens in the crownstore ^^