It's been a long time since I played other MMOs, so I don't remember everything into details. But I'm pretty sure they usually separate patches from fixes. Fixes should be coming out on weekly basis while patches can be less frequent and introduce changes and tweaks. ZOS doesn't separate these two things and I don't understand why as well.

"Why does it take so long for changes or fixes to happen in the game?"


Really? A game of this size and you wonder why they dont implement changes instantly?

On one hand they are slated for breaking things on each fix and on the other that they dont make those changes fast enough.


As @Thevampirenight points out they have multiple platforms and multiple processes for these patches to be both accepted by the relevent compaines and implemented.


As an aside, do you think they are NOT looking to fix issues? Yeah ZOs have been terrrible when it comes to listening to reports from the beta server (time to zone was a specific bugbear of mine) but if somehting is not working as intented, then theres a pretty good chance that this is down to it being hard to fix or a fix impacting on something else.


Final point, people keep saying trite "the Community wants" statements as if it makes their post valid. I am a member of the PvP community and the LAST thing I want is any form of arena.

Arenas are allways unbalanced and force you to play a specific build/class to have any sucess. This game is not balanced on small combat, its never advertised itself as such and its imnplementation would have a negative affect (in my view and in my experiance with other games)

They couldnt even make a single player arena work in this game ffs

Rather than Sorcs being the winners (as in VMSA) it would be templars who ruled the PvP arena and the screams from your "Community" would be strong as they realised that lack of one in a group meant they would not stand a serious chance


Ok, last final point. The "Community" is the most vocal 2% of the 3% players who post/read the forums. The other 97% of the playerbase should not really be pressganged into shoring up your arguement for the game to be something other than ESO.

Alcast wrote: »

Short Staffed
Unexperienced Staff (They kicked most devs that developped the game and replaced them with cheaper employees)
Unexperienced Staff
Unexperienced Staff
Unexperienced Staff
Bad Resource Management Overall I would say
Broken Systems


And if there really are 80 different systems, then well good luck not f...ing up smth xD

They are releasing a japenese mega server soon, so they will most likly have to have people to work on that as well, and from what I know they quit, few of them maybe to better jobs or because they did not like the way the game was going. Who knows. I am refering to the main devs.

Alucardo wrote: »

Without them answering the question in totality I'm going to go ahead and assume these other things are paid content for the DLCs - things that are going to earn them money.
Now that's cool, and I get it, but ffs be honest with us. We're not stupid.

Exactly, which is why reports from the PTS are basically worthless, by the time code hits the PTS, nothing is going to stop the dates of the next DLC.

Totally understandable, but painfull for the players.

The trouble is that the user base is now seemingly in conflict with the game (by userbase, those who get engaged on forums etc)

Where we crave information, this information is not forthcomming due to any number of reasons. Generally noone at the developers end is willing to get tied down into a "BUT you said" pissing contest.


Think back to games you loved, and think about how involved the devs were with the forums etc

Its a far cry from the wall of silence (or worse, posting on external sites) that we get today.



The TU ESO has failed, time to dump it and make the game a subscription again. Say 20 quid a month, less players, but more resources to throw at the game. Win Win and the freetards can go play a different game

I'm guessing their server side tech is subpar and inefficient. How many hot fixes have we seen? Hotfixing is where you push a fix live without a client side patch.

They also use their 'quarterly' DLC to push bug fixes and class balances. No idea why but I speculate it's to make their DLC patch look inflated with so much...content?

speeez wrote: »

One-liner summary: This isn't just another pvp complain post, I'm a pvper who wants to understand what's happening on ZOS's side instead of just complaining without knowing.

Disclaimer: For those of you who know my name, I make the videos for fun and entertainment purposes, it doesn't accurately reflect how I feel about ESO or the developers at ZOS.

Im a newer player to the game, Im a pvper, I love the game so far and am enjoying it immensely and I can't wait for arenas even though it may take some time (I have the patience, especially since I'm newer ).

Okay now with all of that said, in my experience so far, I have noticed that there are a decent amount of bugs or issues in the game that need fixing or arent working as intended, as well as things (ex: arenas) that the pvp community want implemented in the game. Now my question is this:

Why does it take so long for changes or fixes to happen in the game?

I know there was a similar question asked to Matt Frior in the last ESO Live podcast, however I didn't really understand. He said something in regards to "80 other systems" to be worked on? I don't understand his answer or I misunderstood completely on what he said and I am really confused.

If I were to take a guess myself, I would guess that ZOS is short staffed. I would also guess if they had more employees or more resources we would be able to see changes/fixes faster. But I could be very very wrong so I don't really know.

Also, I'm not familiar with the game development cycle at all. So if anyone knows how it works from an employee standpoint and could shed some light that would help me understand as well.

I'm hoping to hear from ZOS or at least your guys' thoughts on what you guys think

I think you might be correct about the small staff I believe because they are so slow to do things they just don't have the staff to pump out things quickly as they would like to. I think the statement about the 80 things going on was just an arbitrary number to get a point across that they have a lot of irons in the fire these games have a lot going on and are huge to keep up what may seem like a simple fix for us may take a lot of code and then you have to understand what systems this code may affect then you have to write the correct code then you have to test it quality assurance public testing depending on how large usually you have several departments working on different projects and then in the end they bring them all together to form the final product.

xellink wrote: »

sadownik wrote: »

Well when the console version wasnt out it was exactly the same story so i dont know what was the excuse then. And @Jura23 - yes you are right. I spend most of my time in gw2 right now (i know, i know its hated around here) and i was shocked by the Z. attitude. Playing gw2 got me spoiled in so many ways. After expansions release we had 2-3 hotfixes every day for well over a week and then 1 every 1-2 days for 2 more. You are just getting a message ingame - "new version of client available", you log off, download the patch and you are back in game.

Quick fixes??

LOL, have you seen their mac client. Trading post was not working properly on the mac client for 2 years. Hell, their mac client isn't even out of beta yet and will probably never exit beta.

Memory leaks and bad performance on the mac client too, since they launched it, it has barely improved.

Im sorry to hear that but since i play on pc i didnt know that and on pc side it all works well,

speeez wrote: »

Okay now with all of that said, in my experience so far, I have noticed that there are a decent amount of bugs or issues in the game that need fixing or arent working as intended, as well as things (ex: arenas) that the pvp community want implemented in the game. Now my question is this:

Why does it take so long for changes or fixes to happen in the game?

I know there was a similar question asked to Matt Frior in the last ESO Live podcast, however I didn't really understand. He said something in regards to "80 other systems" to be worked on? I don't understand his answer or I misunderstood completely on what he said and I am really confused.

If I were to take a guess myself, I would guess that ZOS is short staffed. I would also guess if they had more employees or more resources we would be able to see changes/fixes faster. But I could be very very wrong so I don't really know.

Also, I'm not familiar with the game development cycle at all. So if anyone knows how it works from an employee standpoint and could shed some light that would help me understand as well.

I'm hoping to hear from ZOS or at least your guys' thoughts on what you guys think

I cannot speak for ZOS (no one outside of ZOS can) but I can say what I think is going on behind the curtains. No conspiracies, no gloom and doom, no sky is falling.

ZOS is a business and they have to balance the expenses of running the entire ZOS division (development, customer support, operations, etc) against the revenue coming in from the sale of the game. For any long term company developing or operating an active MMO, this is going to be the case.

ZOS allocates development resources against this balance in order to deliver for the game. This is necessarily a constrained resource, and to make it worse, many of those resources are so specific that they cannot be interchanged. It is necessary to make sure that they have the right number of the right type of resource available to do what they want in the time they are comfortable with. Getting this balance right takes time and patience as demand for a resource can ebb and flow and you do not want to get in a position where you are chronically overstaffed in an area.

Inevitably, there will be more things to do than can be done. It is an active game with active development. They have to decide what can be done, in what order, at what expense, how long it will take, and with what return (revenue). They have to place all these things in order of importance, taking all of the different aspects into account, and then they assign resources based on this list. This priority list is the key to when things are developed and how long we have to wait.

I would imagine that the list is optimized for resource allocation, revenue, popularity, ease of implementation, time to develop, and probably more. We will never see the list. As players, we would find the order of the items wrong and incomprehensible. We lack the knowledge to properly sort the list, not that we wouldn't try. (The end result would be a zillion different lists, all of them worse than what ZOS has.) It is possible that the list is somewhat biased on the population of the game and what they like to do, as well as the direction they want the population to grow, but there are a ton of factors that get involved, like how much a feature costs and how long it would take to develop. Some parts of the game are easy to develop (pets, costumes, mounts) while others are harder (PVP Arena, housing, etc). It is so hard to attribute ZOS love or hate for a particular demographic in the face of this.

Let's say they want to do a PVP Arena and it has finally risen high enough on the list. It is going to take a specific number of resources from a number of disciplines. I will pretend 9 months for those resources to develop it. There is art to do, probably NPC dialog that needs to be written and recorded, zone work to do, and balance issues to take care of. It is a big project and not one to be undertaken lightly. They can expect to include it in a certain paid DLC content that will generate a projected amount of revenue, or a base game update that will generate a projected amount of license sales. When the moons line up and all the proper resources are available, they allocate the resources. They have to do this 9 months (pretending, remember) before it will be in the game. They do not announce to us that they start working on this. Fairly close to when it is done, they tell us it exists. On the eve of it being done, they tell us a lot about it. When it is done, they deliver it. After that, we get to play with it.

Of course, it is not that easy. It never is. After they start working on things, some times something else comes up that is deemed to be more important and some of the people working on it are needed for that. Perhaps they come across something during development that requires that another thing change first. There are a number of different reasons. In any case, they may have to stop working on it and they set it aside. This is a fact of life in development and the larger the project, the more likely it is. Spell system is likely a very good example of this. When the priority rises on the sidelined project, it will be picked up, dusted off, updated as necessary to fit the current game, and work will resume. A 9 month project might take 12 months to finish. Naturally, there is no guarantee that work will resume, and Justice System PVP is an example of this. Between conception and delivery, things can happen to change the delivery date, or terminate it completely.

The two important points here are that we cannot see their priority list and we have no idea how long it takes to develop something. We cannot tell when they start a project because they don't tell us. We probably won't know about it until the last month before they are done. Until then, it is likely something they are working on but they cannot give a date of when it will be done. The reason is because they cannot guarantee the delivery date. The date has not yet been scheduled. Once the date is scheduled, they change the story pretty quickly and that story gets more solid as the date approaches.

This is what I use to translate ZOS-Plan-Speek to English

"it is something we would like to do, but have no plans at this time" ... it is on the priority list but probably has no resource assigned to it.

"back burner" ... work that was once talked about but has no resources assigned. They have to have talked about it. If they have not mentioned it, they won't say this.

"no ETA" ... work has probably been done on it, but there is no expected update or patch that is close enough to talk about. It may or may not be active work but it is something that could have active work being done on it. This is in the "it is coming" category. This is significantly further out than "Soon™".

"we have no plans to do this" ... not even on the priority list or so far down that it probably won't ever be done.