As a graphic designer and UI professional for nearly 20 years I know there's times when underlying code changes break things. Sometimes a little, sometimes everything ends up having to be scrapped. It's part of the business.
But literally every single addon I run, was broken, by what you did, except one - mine. And that's because my piddling little 32 byte file is outside your environment. You can't touch it, you can't change what it does or how it behaves. It doesn't even need ESO, it can be used for any application to make more resources available while limiting cores so other processes aren't starved.
What happened today was very, very disruptive to your most ardent supporters. Those who gain nothing by adding significant value to what you profit from. And to those who use those privately developed, personally funded intellectual properties to enrich their gaming experience.
The licensing agreement forced to accept as TOS, killing settings files. Many things just thrashed, completely and utterly inoperable. I spent hours trying to discover what's even salvageable. Most wasn't. I lost valuable data, and valuable time that could, should have been spent enjoying/playing the game.
We've already lost some of the Major players in the addon scene. Some of the best third party developers who contributed the most widely used third party additions to TESO. For the betterment of your community, and your paying customers others stepped up and took over most of those projects.
You have tough choices to make. Every business venture does. But maybe sit yourself in the chair of gamer Joe, or coder Jane - try to sit there and stare at your screen and see everything broken, and feel that. Feel that weight settle in. Feel the disappointment, feel it turn to frustration, to uncertainty - to paint it vivid, distrust.
It plants the very real seed that your efforts, your investment as a player and/or a developer are jeopardized.
No one is ever comfortable with a rug being jerked out from underneath them in a business relationship, ever. And as a former professional working for globally top ranked companies at the leading edge of their industries, I know for fact you are all too aware and familiar with that feeling yourselfs. But you get paid. We have to pay for the privilege.
Sincerely,
Bryan Montford
Beta Participant, Imperial Edition Pre Order customer, and (very) minor third party "developer" for TESO gamers.
What exactly did happen? I am on the EU server and could not test the 1.2.3 version of the game yet.
I read some claims that Tamriel is going down, but nothing concrete.
In turn what you wrote here is nothing but a rant. This is the Addon forum, we don't need any rants.
If you have question to us, ask that question. If you are a developer solving problems should be your first instict - not talking about them.
Flawed information is flawed. Trust me, botters don't bother using addons. They straight up hack the game and use tools they write themselves that absolutely don't follow any of the rules. Addons are legitimately written pieces of code that use the supplied approved UI API.Ragnar_Lodbrok wrote: »Personally Id have been happy they didnt allow add ons. Add ons were the root cause of all the botting issues for months.
Thank you so much for that affirmation, and as the co-founder of ESOUI you'd know as well as any expert. One might employ the term "authoritative" concerning the subject.Addons are legitimately written pieces of code that use the supplied approved UI API.
Ragnar_Lodbrok wrote: »Personally Id have been happy they didnt allow add ons. Add ons were the root cause of all the botting issues for months.
Even Mr. I Am Not A Programmer knows this. I'm not a programmer, but I had to understand what they were doing so the work I did accomplished the needed task at hand. I was the bridge to fill the void between coder and and end user.Best practice: never* change existing, defined API functions or interfaces. Always add new functions and deprecate old functions...
Ragnar_Lodbrok wrote: »Personally Id have been happy they didnt allow add ons. Add ons were the root cause of all the botting issues for months.
Trust me, botters don't bother using addons. They straight up hack the game and use tools they write themselves that absolutely don't follow any of the rules.
I am not going to read every post in this thread. I'm not going to weigh in on who's more right than anyone else or who worded what poorly. At the end of the day you're all just users of Zenimax Online Studios' product. And that's the crux of it.
@ZOS_GinaBruno, and the rest of your team, I'm going to give you a bit of advice: Disable Lua addon support entirely. Your API is overly, unreasonably limited and when it comes down to it it's fairly obvious that your company either does not really concern themselves with Lua or the API any further than as an afterthought, or that your company is utterly clueless on how to properly manage it.
API updates must be announced in advance of upcoming patches clearly so that your addon developers (IE: those people who dedicate their free time to improving your product and garnering you additional users and accounts through their voluntary, unpaid support) can adapt to your API changes in advance and possibly even provide feedback before you cross that point of no return.
This kind of update has become standard for ZOS and ESO. 0 warning, just pull the trigger. Leave your addon authors guessing because, well, why not... they'll just figure it all out again anyway, right?
If I handled my day job as poorly as your API team does there jobs I wouldn't have my job. I've been in Information Technology for 22 years. I've been programming in one capacity or another for 28 years. I've been on good teams, bad teams, Waterfall projects, Scrum projects, Agile projects, blended cobbled together horribly managed projects, etc. Whatever excuses anyone wants to bat around for the way things are being handled, trust me... I've heard them. Whatever challenge you think you're facing, trust me... I've faced it (and for a lot more serious industries such as military & healthcare). Rest assured, none of the excuses make up for it.
So... just stop. Turn it off. Be a game with a non-customisable UI like you obviously want to be and just be done with it.
I've clocked almost two thousand hours working on addons, a website and talking to communities for this game since October 2013 pre and post launch and while I enjoy playing it I'm || close to just dumping all of my projects and walking away... mostly from the lack of "care" that I see for the subset of your community that I'm a part of.
I have to agree with Wykkyd here - I'm fairly close to just walking away as well. Not because my particular addons were all that broken in this particular update, but because of the general lack of respect towards addon developers it seems to imply.
The non-public testers were just slated to test what they were told to test. Some changes went through without QAing because they didn't expect it'd need QA.if Zen have PTS environment, why nobody came with the list of things that are broken in update 2 to the dev community before?
I have played some TES but I won't count myself as a fan. Solo games come and go for me. I tend to stick around with online games though.The idea of bringing the elder scrolls into the MMO space has been a contentious one from the very beginning. With the TES crowd expecting one set of features while the MMO crowd expects differing set.
The API, at it's best was an attempt to resolve a massive battle between these two groups as to what the game 'should' be visually. What tools 'should' be present or available. I witnessed much of it, participated in more then a few of those discussions prior to this games launch.
The middle ground, that I think they hoped to find, was a void no mans lands that no one wanted. And so it was decided that they would focus on making this title as true to it's name as they could whilst simultaneously allowing for third party addons to fill the gaps in functionality desired by some portion of the customer base. This basically sums up what we were all told back in October when the PTS first launched and we all got our first glimpse at the wide open API.
When early access launch arrived and we realized the amount of restriction that the API was then subject, a whole new round of recriminations, accusations, and complaints flew about with wild abandon. For all the abuse, all the name calling, all the cries for this to included or excluded. (And yes I am guilty of contributing to this so please don't think that I'm excluding myself in this.) For all of this, is it any real wonder that the API may have indeed have become little more then an afterthought? A system that is only begrudgingly included. I can't really blame the Zenimax team if this is indeed the case. I know I've personally been disgusted by the whole mess many times.
Perhaps it would be for the betterment of the game as a whole for the entire API to be shut down. Just as @Wykkyd suggested. Sigh, I don't know. What I do know is that there are works out there that I find convenient. But there is nothing out there that I find I can not live without and be happy with the game. There have been those in this thread who have said that "we wouldn't have known how broken things were with out such a such add on!" A line I heard iterated many times once @Atropos put out FTC. Perhaps after all is said and done we would have all been better off not knowing, and simply allowed ZOS to tinker with the numbers behind the scenes until they hit something that felt right. A point of view I've expressed many times only to earn the scorn of many in our community. The line "ignorance is bliss" quoted by @Attorneyatlawl comes to mind in particular. And despite how it might sound here, he was not in agreement with me on these points.
Once thing that the OP does illustrate well is the depth of the emotional response these individuals can, have and do put into these forums and their direct feedback. This game is going in one direction. Our add on community, I think, is headed in another. And no that does not included every author but is intended as an observation of the overall trend of the applications as they have been developed. They seek, in general, to as best they can, replicate systems common to the mmo universe. While Zenimax if focused on making this a TES game first and foremost. And despite this, it is expressed here, the desire to be shown deference. That the desires of our authors should take a front seat in the design chair, to in effect direct where this ship is headed. I understand the desire. But I also think it exceedingly foolhardy to expect. Especially this early in the game.
Advanced warning, and complete documentation of upcoming API changes is something that will eventually come about. But for now the waters are far too turbulent. Changes that are directed too abrupt to accommodate such systems. Not to mention the content release schedule that is breakneck by anyone's standards.
To @GrfxGawd your detractors are right in one thing, for the most part your post was an emotional catharsis. The relevancy of such a response to a patch is not a thing I'm going to get pulled into however. But keep in mind that direct feedback that as you state you intended for Zenimax's eyes, would be better placed in feedback as opposed to here. More appropriate here I think would be an attempt to document the problem and then list what you've found does or does not work as a fix. It has nothing to do with not wishing 'public discussion' but rather that you've misplaced where you've chosen to 'rant'. For my part let me just say that I'm sorry to hear you've had such a rough time of it. I hope a resolution comes your way quickly. With no information on you're batch file aside from the fact that you say it helps better utilize system resources, there is little I can offer you in the way of help. I any case good luck to you.
If this was a "bug", as it has been so generously monikered, ZOS has had a great many hours to announce and make apology for the accidental disruption and deletion of data caused by their programming error, the User Account "" error. Nothing has been said.
it has been confirmed by ZO that it IS a bug
....they should of posted information on this the first HOUR the patch was back up... 2 days later is totally unacceptable
I have played some TES but I won't count myself as a fan. Solo games come and go for me. I tend to stick around with online games though.
I think you are wrong. Ignorance is bliss? No way, we have thousands of games to compare this game to. If the vanilla UI was the only way available to play this game I most likely would have never bought the game. There is a chance I might have bought it, but I would have been bug reporting the hell out of the UI. Once I realized this plain UI was the vision for this game I would have felt ripped off and quit. Plain and simple.
If this was a "bug", as it has been so generously monikered, ZOS has had a great many hours to announce and make apology for the accidental disruption and deletion of data caused by their programming error, the User Account "" error. Nothing has been said.
This was no accidental oversight on the part of Zenimax. The "@nothingHereNow" combined with the borderline draconian additional TOS along with no API being delivered and utter and complete disregard of of basic industry standard of deprecation of functions (and more) - this wasn't an accident. At best, you can call it massive systemic corporate incompetence, but I think that's just playing the part of the naive apologist.
Now, lest someone says "You should worry about fixing a problem and not waste our space - blah blah blah" - Accurately assessing the origin of a failure is an extremely crucial part of systemically isolating both the chain of events, and where/how errors were induced before you can begin to formulate methodologies to mitigate what's wrong now, and implement solutions to help prevent future failures.
To reiterate what Wykkyd has already stated, if I as a designer had done my job as they are doing theirs, I wouldn't have had a job.it has been confirmed by ZO that it IS a bug
....they should of posted information on this the first HOUR the patch was back up... 2 days later is totally unacceptable
@CorithnaThe idea of bringing the elder scrolls into the MMO space has been a contentious one from the very beginning... And so it was decided that they would focus on making this title as true to it's name as they could whilst simultaneously allowing for third party addons to fill the gaps in functionality desired by some portion of the customer base. ... While Zenimax if focused on making this a TES game first and foremost.
I like the game.I have played some TES but I won't count myself as a fan. Solo games come and go for me. I tend to stick around with online games though.The idea of bringing the elder scrolls into the MMO space has been a contentious one from the very beginning. With the TES crowd expecting one set of features while the MMO crowd expects differing set.
The API, at it's best was an attempt to resolve a massive battle between these two groups as to what the game 'should' be visually. What tools 'should' be present or available. I witnessed much of it, participated in more then a few of those discussions prior to this games launch.
The middle ground, that I think they hoped to find, was a void no mans lands that no one wanted. And so it was decided that they would focus on making this title as true to it's name as they could whilst simultaneously allowing for third party addons to fill the gaps in functionality desired by some portion of the customer base. This basically sums up what we were all told back in October when the PTS first launched and we all got our first glimpse at the wide open API.
When early access launch arrived and we realized the amount of restriction that the API was then subject, a whole new round of recriminations, accusations, and complaints flew about with wild abandon. For all the abuse, all the name calling, all the cries for this to included or excluded. (And yes I am guilty of contributing to this so please don't think that I'm excluding myself in this.) For all of this, is it any real wonder that the API may have indeed have become little more then an afterthought? A system that is only begrudgingly included. I can't really blame the Zenimax team if this is indeed the case. I know I've personally been disgusted by the whole mess many times.
Perhaps it would be for the betterment of the game as a whole for the entire API to be shut down. Just as @Wykkyd suggested. Sigh, I don't know. What I do know is that there are works out there that I find convenient. But there is nothing out there that I find I can not live without and be happy with the game. There have been those in this thread who have said that "we wouldn't have known how broken things were with out such a such add on!" A line I heard iterated many times once @Atropos put out FTC. Perhaps after all is said and done we would have all been better off not knowing, and simply allowed ZOS to tinker with the numbers behind the scenes until they hit something that felt right. A point of view I've expressed many times only to earn the scorn of many in our community. The line "ignorance is bliss" quoted by @Attorneyatlawl comes to mind in particular. And despite how it might sound here, he was not in agreement with me on these points.
Once thing that the OP does illustrate well is the depth of the emotional response these individuals can, have and do put into these forums and their direct feedback. This game is going in one direction. Our add on community, I think, is headed in another. And no that does not included every author but is intended as an observation of the overall trend of the applications as they have been developed. They seek, in general, to as best they can, replicate systems common to the mmo universe. While Zenimax if focused on making this a TES game first and foremost. And despite this, it is expressed here, the desire to be shown deference. That the desires of our authors should take a front seat in the design chair, to in effect direct where this ship is headed. I understand the desire. But I also think it exceedingly foolhardy to expect. Especially this early in the game.
Advanced warning, and complete documentation of upcoming API changes is something that will eventually come about. But for now the waters are far too turbulent. Changes that are directed too abrupt to accommodate such systems. Not to mention the content release schedule that is breakneck by anyone's standards.
To @GrfxGawd your detractors are right in one thing, for the most part your post was an emotional catharsis. The relevancy of such a response to a patch is not a thing I'm going to get pulled into however. But keep in mind that direct feedback that as you state you intended for Zenimax's eyes, would be better placed in feedback as opposed to here. More appropriate here I think would be an attempt to document the problem and then list what you've found does or does not work as a fix. It has nothing to do with not wishing 'public discussion' but rather that you've misplaced where you've chosen to 'rant'. For my part let me just say that I'm sorry to hear you've had such a rough time of it. I hope a resolution comes your way quickly. With no information on you're batch file aside from the fact that you say it helps better utilize system resources, there is little I can offer you in the way of help. I any case good luck to you.
I think you are wrong. Ignorance is bliss? No way, we have thousands of games to compare this game to. If the vanilla UI was the only way available to play this game I most likely would have never bought the game. There is a chance I might have bought it, but I would have been bug reporting the hell out of the UI. Once I realized this plain UI was the vision for this game I would have felt ripped off and quit. Plain and simple.