Follow-up Q&A from ESO 10-Year Celebration Event Community Roundtable

ZOS_Kevin

Below are some questions we received during the in-person Community Roundtable session at the ESO 10-Year Celebration Event in April that we promised to follow up with answers. We hope you find these answers helpful!

Q: Has there been any consideration for guild mounts that show off the guild tabard in some way? (Maybe a raised banner?) What would that take?
A: We love this idea and hear it often from our many players in guilds. We’ve talked about this internally over the years as well. It’s one of those things that is quite a bit trickier on the technical side than it sounds due to how guild tabards and overhead guild nameplates are coded, players being able to be in five guilds, etc. Know that we are aware of the desire for this as a guild feature.

Q: Have there been any discussions about integrated voice chat for PC/Mac, even if just to coordinate for instanced group content? Sometimes people don’t want to install new apps to talk with each other and instead opt to communicate via in-game chat. This is especially painful for pick-up groups.
A: While many players do opt to use Discord or other external voice chat solutions, we understand the pick-up group communication pain point. We’ve discussed integrated voice chat for PC/Mac servers and while it’s not a hard “No, never”, this is another one that requires a significant technical investment and isn’t something we currently have on the roadmap.

Q: What happens to guilds if the guild leader passes away? What is the official process for passing on the role of guild leader?
A: If a guild leader becomes inactive for at least 60 days, for any reason, someone from the guild can contact Customer Support to request transfer of the guild leader role. From there, we look to transfer the role of guild leader to the person who meets the following criteria:

• Active within the last 60 days
• A member of the next highest rank in the guild (one of the guild’s existing “officers”)
• The person who has been in the guild the longest, if everyone else is the same guild rank
• Not already the leader of another guild

We use this specific ranking system because it is fair, neutral, and allows us to be consistent. It also helps us minimize situations where guild leadership is stolen, passed to a newer member of the guild, etc. Once guild leadership is transferred, that person is welcome to pass it to someone else in the guild if they wish.

While it is a bit more involved, there is also a process in place if someone wants or needs to claim a deceased family member’s account. This process is in accordance with similar laws related to what happens to online accounts when someone passes away.

Q: Will we ever get proper guild halls in ESO?
A: We love the idea of guild halls in ESO and recognize that our community has asked for them since the game launched. We have had many internal conversations about them over the years. The current challenge is the necessary caps. Much like the item limit caps in player housing, there is also a limit to how many characters can simultaneously be in a player home (it’s 25). As with items, these caps are in place to ensure that players on lower spec machines don’t encounter significant performance issues while in player homes.

When we’ve asked ourselves in the past if a 25-person cap would feel good for a guild hall, especially if it’s a guild of 500 active players, the answer has always been no. It’s not the kind of guild hall experience we’d want to give you. So, while the idea of guild halls isn’t completely off the table, it’s important to us that we find a solution that allows us to do it right, and support the ability to have more than 25 simultaneous players in the guild hall.

Q: Do you have any plans for improved guild tools in ESO?
A: While we don’t have any specific plans to share currently, there are many things on our backlog that we’d love to do with ESO’s guild system and the related tools. Over the years, we’ve collated pages of ideas from you, our community, as well as from internal suggestions.

We do want to improve guilds, in general, and the tools that players use to run them. As with anything we add to ESO, it all comes down to time and resources, determining what will have the greatest positive impact for our players, and prioritizing against all the other items on our game features and improvements backlog.

Please keep the suggestions and ideas coming, though. We do want to hear them!

Q: Will we ever get the ability to hide our guild tabard, like we can hide helms?
A: This is another request that has come up often over the years. We understand how important this is to some of our players, especially our roleplay and ESO fashion enthusiasts! Like the suggestion for guild heraldry on mounts, this is something we do have on our backlog and want to improve the overall experience. It’s also not as simple as turning off the visibility of armor pieces such helms and shoulders, for example, due to how our guild tabards and overhead guild nameplates are coded on the back-end.

Q: You all should send out surveys to guilds to get feedback about guild tools and what quality-of-life guild features players want. Would you consider that?
A: Great idea! Yes, we will talk with our amazing Research team about creating a guild-focused survey. Thank you for the suggestion!

One thing you all can do to help us is ask your guild members to consider opting into getting emails from us here. While we can share links to surveys on our social media channels, forums, and in Discord, being able to email it to more players who are in guilds would greatly help us hit a much broader and more diverse population.

Q: Could we get a solution for the guild MOTD text getting bumped/interrupted by automated game messages when typing it up? It’s so frustrating when that happens!
A: Thank you for sharing this with us! We agree that isn’t a great experience. We’ve passed this along to our UX and QA teams for investigation.

Q: Will we ever get Steam achievements for ESO?
A: Steam achievements require a separate (and additional) process from achievements on any other platform. Due to this, we have no current plans to add Steam achievements for ESO.

Q: We’d like to be able to get empty plots of existing player houses, or the ability to “remove” the house from the plot. Is that something you might consider?
A: Interesting suggestion! Historically, the empty plots aren’t nearly as popular as the houses; that said, we will pass this suggestion along to the Housing team for consideration. Due to how we build out the housing spaces, it is unfortunately not as simple as just “removing” the house from an existing space. Even existing player housing spaces would require additional world building where the house is/was.

Woeler

Why is every feature request always answered with some kind of vague dodgy answer that doesn't say anything?

Mattymoo92

Woeler wrote: »

Why is every feature request always answered with some kind of vague dodgy answer that doesn't say anything?

Honestly, it’s a politicians answer

Gareaap

ZOS_Kevin wrote: »

Q: Will we ever get the ability to hide our guild tabard, like we can hide helms?
A: This is another request that has come up often over the years. We understand how important this is to some of our players, especially our roleplay and ESO fashion enthusiasts! Like the suggestion for guild heraldry on mounts, this is something we do have on our backlog and want to improve the overall experience. It’s also not as simple as turning off the visibility of armor pieces such helms and shoulders, for example, due to how our guild tabards and overhead guild nameplates are coded on the back-end.

It being on the backlog means it's happening this year? Or it's on the backlog but we are just gonna bump it down every year for the next 5 years and release it during the next anniversary event? (if the game survives that long)

It's wild to me the technical debt is large enough that reworking the other hide clothing parts can't be expanded to include this without it being apparently to expensive to be worthwhile for ZOS.

vsrs_au

Woeler wrote: »

Why is every feature request always answered with some kind of vague dodgy answer that doesn't say anything?

I think that's a bit unfair, particularly when you mention it just after Kevin's reply. He's definitely one of the better communicators at ZOS, and we're lucky to have him. They get simply inundated with feature requests every year, and can't possibly implement them all, so of course they have to be careful what they say, to avoid giving us the impression they're committing to something when they may not be able to do it.

BetweenMidgets

Woeler wrote: »

Why is every feature request always answered with some kind of vague dodgy answer that doesn't say anything?

Clear communication has not been, and likely never will be, a ZOS strong point. Both in the game and outside of it.

I'm sure we are supposed to be thankful for whatever communication we DO receive...

Eclipse318

Re: Guild Halls, one issue we've run into is the inability to transfer ownership of attuned crafting sets, mundus stones, the transmute station, etc. -- I realize these are bound furnishings, but when the officer who was hosting the guild hall abruptly left the guild, all the millions upon millions of gold and hours we all spent on getting attunable stations was down the toilet and we had to start building up the sets all over again. It's been an extremely slow and frustrating process that would have been easily solved with the ability to transfer ownership of a bound item. And, actually, it would be nice to be able to transfer ownership of any bound item (i have a lot of bound furnishings I'd love to get rid of). Any way to make that happen?

CheeseTuber

Okay .... summary for people who don't wanna read the entire thing

1.

vsrs_au wrote: »

Woeler wrote: »

Why is every feature request always answered with some kind of vague dodgy answer that doesn't say anything?

I think that's a bit unfair, particularly when you mention it just after Kevin's reply. He's definitely one of the better communicators at ZOS, and we're lucky to have him. They get simply inundated with feature requests every year, and can't possibly implement them all, so of course they have to be careful what they say, to avoid giving us the impression they're committing to something when they may not be able to do it.

I don't think Woeler is blaming Kevin though. Kevin is just an employee who has the unenviable job of dealing with us gamers

Woeler's main point is regarding the content of the response which comes from ZoS as a whole from their dev team or at least their PR department. And you have to admit Woeler makes an excellent point. That is some weak answers there.

Erissime

What I find interesting is the fact that the majority of questions seem to be mainly guild-related, and some quite far-fetched in imo, like the hiding a guild tabard for example ( which yes, is annoying when you have a nice outfit and don't want an ugly tabard of a rather beloved guild to ruin it) - but then those tabards aren't everywhere a requirement and costumes hide them fine and well. Anyway - Since this seems to be more of a guild-themed thread, I also have a question:

Shall we ever be able in the foreseeable future to change the guild's alliance?

I know - just as far-fetched as the tabard, because who cares? And guilds are supposed to be inclusive of everything and everyone - and so is my guild. But I do play in another alliance than the one I've listed the guild to back when I joined the game and none of this mattered, and it irks me that I try to get people to play with me, but then the question of my guild hits hard. Not in "this alliance". Disbanding and recreating are out of the question at this point.

I forgot to mention that I'd also pay for such a feature, just like we pay for the "alliance change token".

Naftal

But what about the sixth guild slot we were promised?

baratron

Eclipse318 wrote: »

Re: Guild Halls, one issue we've run into is the inability to transfer ownership of attuned crafting sets, mundus stones, the transmute station, etc. -- I realize these are bound furnishings, but when the officer who was hosting the guild hall abruptly left the guild, all the millions upon millions of gold and hours we all spent on getting attunable stations was down the toilet and we had to start building up the sets all over again. It's been an extremely slow and frustrating process that would have been easily solved with the ability to transfer ownership of a bound item. And, actually, it would be nice to be able to transfer ownership of any bound item (i have a lot of bound furnishings I'd love to get rid of). Any way to make that happen?

In fact, that was one of the questions asked at the Q&A, so I'm surprised they haven't said anything about it.

furiouslog

I would ignore the in game chat features, because every other PC game I've played that has those still ends up using discord anyway, due to the guild management infrastructure. Any MMO I've ever played that had in game chat ends up with me turning the chat off due to some racist yelling the N word over and over, or listening to two 12 year olds giggle at each other or at some guy's name because it's vaguely spelled like one of the hundred different words in the English language for poop. Not worth the effort.

Deserrick

“ When we’ve asked ourselves in the past if a 25-person cap would feel good for a guild hall, especially if it’s a guild of 500 active players, the answer has always been no.”

Guilds already have links to a certain player’s house that serves as the guild hall. The person cap doesn’t prevent it from working like a guild hall for visitors, who can use it for wells, stones, benches, and so on.

Making an official guild hall system wouldn’t feel any worse for visitors, and it would likely feel better for visitors because multiple officers could furnish the guild hall, making even less-established guilds able to offer training dummies and other accommodations to its members.

Izanagi.Xiiib16_ESO

@ZOS_Kevin
Thanks for posting this, kind of unusual that so many questions (all but 2?) were specifically guild related as most of these questions have been asked and answered in the exact same way for many years already.

Perhaps you would consider as part of the 10y anniversary allowing each section of the community to ask a similar range of questions on the forums?

TaSheen

furiouslog wrote: »

I would ignore the in game chat features, because every other PC game I've played that has those still ends up using discord anyway, due to the guild management infrastructure. Any MMO I've ever played that had in game chat ends up with me turning the chat off due to some racist yelling the N word over and over, or listening to two 12 year olds giggle at each other or at some guy's name because it's vaguely spelled like one of the hundred different words in the English language for poop. Not worth the effort.

Exactly this. Absolutely no use for it personally.

spartaxoxo

Woeler wrote: »

Why is every feature request always answered with some kind of vague dodgy answer that doesn't say anything?

Because they're saying no but they don't want to say never.

LonePirate

I'm either playing a different game than the people who submitted those questions or ZOS chose to answer the most innocuous of questions. Guilds, Steam and housing are pretty much near the bottom of my priority list given everything else going on in the game.

Jaraal

Woeler wrote: »

Why is every feature request always answered with some kind of vague dodgy answer that doesn't say anything?

Because "No" is never a popular answer.

Elsonso

Hmmm. My take:


Guild Mounts: No
PC Voice chat: No
Guild Halls: No
Improved Guild Tools: Yes
Hide Guild Tabard: No
Guild Surveys: Yes
Guild MOTD interruptions: Maybe, but No
Steam Achievements: No
Empty Housing Lots: Maybe, but Yes.

spartaxoxo

My take

Guild Mounts: Hard Pass

Guild Voice: Hard Pass

Guild Leader passing: Yes, they can assist with this right now

Guild Halls: Soft no.

Improved Guild Tools: Not anytime soon, but someday

Hide Guild Tabards: Hard Pass

Guild Surveys: Sure, they can whip up an email

Guild MOTD Interruptions: Yes, added to backlog

Steam Achievements: Hard Pass

New Empty Plots: Maybe but they don't sell as well so don't hold your breath.

Removing Houses to make empty plots with existing layouts: Hard Pass

ob1ken0bi

Is there a reason why crafting stations are bound?
I mean, someone is starting a guild and it’s up to one person to either have all of them already or spend endless amount of time, money and lost gameplay to gather everything for a guild house. I haven’t done that but know some who have and it’s countless hours of just doing writs and mats and real money (for mundus).
Why isn’t it set up for others to help with his process?

Come to think of it, why is there any furnishing bound? Should be able to trade, transfer or sell any furnishing in the game.


And why isn’t there a class change token?
Seems weird you can change a race (physical appearance) from Khajiit to Orc (which is not possible in real life) yet can’t change a class (profession). It’s like a job change from Nigtblade to Arcanist.
But I can lose a tail and look like Shrek no problem

And would be nice to be able to change alliance using seals of endeavors. Many of us didn’t have “Any Race Any Alliance” when we started and stuck with the alliance those races were from. We should be able to do this without paying $20 per character.

TaSheen

ob1ken0bi wrote: »

Is there a reason why crafting stations are bound?
I mean, someone is starting a guild and it’s up to one person to either have all of them already or spend endless amount of time, money and lost gameplay to gather everything for a guild house. I haven’t done that but know some who have and it’s countless hours of just doing writs and mats and real money (for mundus).
Why isn’t it set up for others to help with his process?

People in guilds I know of actually do contribute - they provide Master Writs (tradeable) to the Guild Master, along with mats etc so the GM can do the writs to produce vouchers toward the GM stations.

Araneae6537

You can equip a guild tabard or not so what exactly is the point of hiding one???

Personally, I think making the add-on feature of assigning a player’s house as the guild house would be great. No need to have a separate “guild house” feature IMHO. Of course it would be great to have the option to raise the guest limit, but that’s another issue.

LunaFlora

Araneae6537 wrote: »

You can equip a guild tabard or not so what exactly is the point of hiding one???

Personally, I think making the add-on feature of assigning a player’s house as the guild house would be great. No need to have a separate “guild house” feature IMHO. Of course it would be great to have the option to raise the guest limit, but that’s another issue.

it's probably a request because people like the guild name above their characters, but not the tabards themselves

Elsonso

LunaFlora wrote: »

Araneae6537 wrote: »

You can equip a guild tabard or not so what exactly is the point of hiding one???

Personally, I think making the add-on feature of assigning a player’s house as the guild house would be great. No need to have a separate “guild house” feature IMHO. Of course it would be great to have the option to raise the guest limit, but that’s another issue.

it's probably a request because people like the guild name above their characters, but not the tabards themselves

Exactly. The tabard hides, and can also change, the underlying outfit, which sort of negates creating an outfit.

Photosniper89

ZOS_Kevin wrote: »

Below are some questions we received during the in-person Community Roundtable session at the ESO 10-Year Celebration Event in April that we promised to follow up with answers. We hope you find these answers helpful!

Q: Has there been any consideration for guild mounts that show off the guild tabard in some way? (Maybe a raised banner?) What would that take?
A: We love this idea and hear it often from our many players in guilds. We’ve talked about this internally over the years as well. It’s one of those things that is quite a bit trickier on the technical side than it sounds due to how guild tabards and overhead guild nameplates are coded, players being able to be in five guilds, etc. Know that we are aware of the desire for this as a guild feature.

Q: Have there been any discussions about integrated voice chat for PC/Mac, even if just to coordinate for instanced group content? Sometimes people don’t want to install new apps to talk with each other and instead opt to communicate via in-game chat. This is especially painful for pick-up groups.
A: While many players do opt to use Discord or other external voice chat solutions, we understand the pick-up group communication pain point. We’ve discussed integrated voice chat for PC/Mac servers and while it’s not a hard “No, never”, this is another one that requires a significant technical investment and isn’t something we currently have on the roadmap.

Q: What happens to guilds if the guild leader passes away? What is the official process for passing on the role of guild leader?
A: If a guild leader becomes inactive for at least 60 days, for any reason, someone from the guild can contact Customer Support to request transfer of the guild leader role. From there, we look to transfer the role of guild leader to the person who meets the following criteria:

• Active within the last 60 days
• A member of the next highest rank in the guild (one of the guild’s existing “officers”)
• The person who has been in the guild the longest, if everyone else is the same guild rank
• Not already the leader of another guild

We use this specific ranking system because it is fair, neutral, and allows us to be consistent. It also helps us minimize situations where guild leadership is stolen, passed to a newer member of the guild, etc. Once guild leadership is transferred, that person is welcome to pass it to someone else in the guild if they wish.

While it is a bit more involved, there is also a process in place if someone wants or needs to claim a deceased family member’s account. This process is in accordance with similar laws related to what happens to online accounts when someone passes away.

Q: Will we ever get proper guild halls in ESO?
A: We love the idea of guild halls in ESO and recognize that our community has asked for them since the game launched. We have had many internal conversations about them over the years. The current challenge is the necessary caps. Much like the item limit caps in player housing, there is also a limit to how many characters can simultaneously be in a player home (it’s 25). As with items, these caps are in place to ensure that players on lower spec machines don’t encounter significant performance issues while in player homes.

When we’ve asked ourselves in the past if a 25-person cap would feel good for a guild hall, especially if it’s a guild of 500 active players, the answer has always been no. It’s not the kind of guild hall experience we’d want to give you. So, while the idea of guild halls isn’t completely off the table, it’s important to us that we find a solution that allows us to do it right, and support the ability to have more than 25 simultaneous players in the guild hall.

Q: Do you have any plans for improved guild tools in ESO?
A: While we don’t have any specific plans to share currently, there are many things on our backlog that we’d love to do with ESO’s guild system and the related tools. Over the years, we’ve collated pages of ideas from you, our community, as well as from internal suggestions.

We do want to improve guilds, in general, and the tools that players use to run them. As with anything we add to ESO, it all comes down to time and resources, determining what will have the greatest positive impact for our players, and prioritizing against all the other items on our game features and improvements backlog.

Please keep the suggestions and ideas coming, though. We do want to hear them!

Q: Will we ever get the ability to hide our guild tabard, like we can hide helms?
A: This is another request that has come up often over the years. We understand how important this is to some of our players, especially our roleplay and ESO fashion enthusiasts! Like the suggestion for guild heraldry on mounts, this is something we do have on our backlog and want to improve the overall experience. It’s also not as simple as turning off the visibility of armor pieces such helms and shoulders, for example, due to how our guild tabards and overhead guild nameplates are coded on the back-end.

Q: You all should send out surveys to guilds to get feedback about guild tools and what quality-of-life guild features players want. Would you consider that?
A: Great idea! Yes, we will talk with our amazing Research team about creating a guild-focused survey. Thank you for the suggestion!

One thing you all can do to help us is ask your guild members to consider opting into getting emails from us here. While we can share links to surveys on our social media channels, forums, and in Discord, being able to email it to more players who are in guilds would greatly help us hit a much broader and more diverse population.

Q: Could we get a solution for the guild MOTD text getting bumped/interrupted by automated game messages when typing it up? It’s so frustrating when that happens!
A: Thank you for sharing this with us! We agree that isn’t a great experience. We’ve passed this along to our UX and QA teams for investigation.

Q: Will we ever get Steam achievements for ESO?
A: Steam achievements require a separate (and additional) process from achievements on any other platform. Due to this, we have no current plans to add Steam achievements for ESO.

Q: We’d like to be able to get empty plots of existing player houses, or the ability to “remove” the house from the plot. Is that something you might consider?
A: Interesting suggestion! Historically, the empty plots aren’t nearly as popular as the houses; that said, we will pass this suggestion along to the Housing team for consideration. Due to how we build out the housing spaces, it is unfortunately not as simple as just “removing” the house from an existing space. Even existing player housing spaces would require additional world building where the house is/was.

Why are all of these centered around guilds? You're telling me for a game that was sold as PvP no one asked about PvP? All of these questions have been asked and answered over the years - these responses sound like they came from an intern to a politician.

How much technical debt does this company have?!

tsaescishoeshiner

Woeler wrote: »

Why is every feature request always answered with some kind of vague dodgy answer that doesn't say anything?

They're pretty clear whether the ideas are potentially on the table or currently not worth being worked on. If they say "yes, we will do this" or "no, we won't do this" then people get upset if they wind up changing their mind later.

James-Wayne

ZOS_Kevin wrote: »

Q: We’d like to be able to get empty plots of existing player houses, or the ability to “remove” the house from the plot. Is that something you might consider?
A: Interesting suggestion! Historically, the empty plots aren’t nearly as popular as the houses; that said, we will pass this suggestion along to the Housing team for consideration. Due to how we build out the housing spaces, it is unfortunately not as simple as just “removing” the house from an existing space. Even existing player housing spaces would require additional world building where the house is/was.

I love the land plots!!!

I wish there was more variety but maybe others dont buy these because the price to get into building your own structure is very expensive in ESO. The furniture drops almost never drop (at least for me they dont) just look at the recent IA drops, they are so rare the price is extreme on traders. Also materials are very expensive, and you need 100s of them to build somthing so both drops and cost of materials needs to be heavily overhauled for housing in general to be more popular especially in the land plot bracket.

Maybe some QoL for Q3 in regard to acquiring furniture plans or materials... the vendor in Artaeum is amazing like this do more of that pretty please

Elsonso

For another comment, I was reviewing a very old AMA and ran across this and thought I would show the answer to one of the questions from 2015...

For context:

ZOS_Kevin wrote: »

Q: Have there been any discussions about integrated voice chat for PC/Mac, even if just to coordinate for instanced group content? Sometimes people don’t want to install new apps to talk with each other and instead opt to communicate via in-game chat. This is especially painful for pick-up groups.
A: While many players do opt to use Discord or other external voice chat solutions, we understand the pick-up group communication pain point. We’ve discussed integrated voice chat for PC/Mac servers and while it’s not a hard “No, never”, this is another one that requires a significant technical investment and isn’t something we currently have on the roadmap.

From January 2015:

Are there any plans to add the console VOICE feature to the PC/Mac?

zos_konk :It's definitely something we're looking to add to the PC/Mac version, but it won't be available until after console launch.

DukeNugem

Thank you for the feature to help guild members if the lead passes away or disappears.

Araneae6537

I wouldn’t want to see ZOS put resources into voice chat on PC since we do have other options. In addition, many people adamantly prefer not to be in voice and such an option in game might make them feel more pressured and less comfortable to join group activities (or maybe not, unless you got dropped into some voice chat by default or something, no idea how it works on console).