sAnn92 wrote: »

Agreed, a balance patch at least every month would be healthier.

I think it costs a lot of money to do patches

Resipsa131 wrote: »

sAnn92 wrote: »

Agreed, a balance patch at least every month would be healthier.

I think it costs a lot of money to do patches

Why would you think that?

I believe users are the testers, so most changes will only be rolled out with a DLC because that is the only time we the users test changes on the PTS.

Time and again we see "simple" changes either not work or cause other problems. I believe their approach is not unreasonable based on historical problems and performance. That does not mean I like it.

I would suggest that they paper trial balancing and class changes BEFORE dropping them to the PTS. By this I mean, communicating to the users what they are thinking of doing to get our feedback BEFORE HAND.

Turelus wrote: »

He also said exactly why they're large releases and not small patches.

Because they go through extensive debate/testing both by ZOS and us before they go live. That wouldn't be as thorough is they were in the incremental patches.

You are kidding right? I mean if they would be less thorough than now... i dont know they would have to break something on purpose and release it?

Lysette wrote: »

Turelus wrote: »

He also said exactly why they're large releases and not small patches.

Because they go through extensive debate/testing both by ZOS and us before they go live. That wouldn't be as thorough is they were in the incremental patches.

Well, CCP, who run EVE online do that as well very carefully and there is even a board of elected players who work together with the Devs - this is ok for bigger changes, which have to be done with care and have a longer development cycle (as in weeks) - but bug fixes have to be done a lot quicker and are done by CCP in a very responsive way - this makes us players feel as if they care and they actually do - I do not have the same feeling with ZOS, otherwise simple bugs would be fixed within days and medium ones within a week. But of course, if a company does not care about a quality product, nothing will help.

The CSM have to my knowledge never been effective in stopping bad changes, nor been involved in balance changes.

Take the nerf to nullsec bounties and the "extra cash maker" structure, or the recent SP injectors where most CSM members said they were horrible ideas but CCP rolled them out any way.

I fully agree CCP has better communication and speed on issues, however they also have much bigger teams and a different development/company structure to my understanding. CCP reports to CCP, ZOS reports to Zenimax.
Again it took CCP a long time to reach where they are now, and only after the slap in the face which was the Incarna/Monocle debatable.

EVE Online also benefits from daily downtimes, meaning they're able to release a patch every day without additional downtimes, if ZOS were to release a patch more than once a week people would scream bloody murder (as we see any time a server restart/emergency patch is released).

Don't get me wrong here, I would LOVE to see ZOS work the same way as CCP however I feel they're far too different as companies and developers. Still, ZOS have listened to some of the feedback offered from us about how CCP have successfully done thing, for example the lists of changes threads we now see for expansions testing.

Turelus wrote: »

Lysette wrote: »

Turelus wrote: »

He also said exactly why they're large releases and not small patches.

Because they go through extensive debate/testing both by ZOS and us before they go live. That wouldn't be as thorough is they were in the incremental patches.

Well, CCP, who run EVE online do that as well very carefully and there is even a board of elected players who work together with the Devs - this is ok for bigger changes, which have to be done with care and have a longer development cycle (as in weeks) - but bug fixes have to be done a lot quicker and are done by CCP in a very responsive way - this makes us players feel as if they care and they actually do - I do not have the same feeling with ZOS, otherwise simple bugs would be fixed within days and medium ones within a week. But of course, if a company does not care about a quality product, nothing will help.

The CSM have to my knowledge never been effective in stopping bad changes, nor been involved in balance changes.

Take the nerf to nullsec bounties and the "extra cash maker" structure, or the recent SP injectors where most CSM members said they were horrible ideas but CCP rolled them out any way.

I fully agree CCP has better communication and speed on issues, however they also have much bigger teams and a different development/company structure to my understanding. CCP reports to CCP, ZOS reports to Zenimax.
Again it took CCP a long time to reach where they are now, and only after the slap in the face which was the Incarna/Monocle debatable.

EVE Online also benefits from daily downtimes, meaning they're able to release a patch every day without additional downtimes, if ZOS were to release a patch more than once a week people would scream bloody murder (as we see any time a server restart/emergency patch is released).

Don't get me wrong here, I would LOVE to see ZOS work the same way as CCP however I feel they're far too different as companies and developers. Still, ZOS have listened to some of the feedback offered from us about how CCP have successfully done thing, for example the lists of changes threads we now see for expansions testing.

Yes but releasing a new game, next gen if you will, with the mentality of yesteryears then you're only hurting your game.

There are other MMOs other than EVE where hotfixes and back end client fixes are pushed without any down time or player side patches. (I'm not saying they should do this to fix the current issues - just an example of what is possible)


Stacking up fixes and waiting 3-4 months or more than 12 months in ZOS case, is not acceptable for a healthy MMO.

I'm not making excuses for mediocrity to succeed. I'm asking the team to look at this problem and fix it.

Why cant we just get fed small patches, let us chew on it, test it out.. Instead of cramming huge patches down our throats, and making us wait for DLC updates..

WalkingLegacy wrote: »

Turelus wrote: »

He also said exactly why they're large releases and not small patches.

Because they go through extensive debate/testing both by ZOS and us before they go live. That wouldn't be as thorough is they were in the incremental patches.

You're assuming and trying to persuade us that their incremental patches are thorough, when they aren't.

petraeus1 wrote: »

Bug fixes - agreed, more incrementals are good. Balance updates, not so much, unless something is completely super-batman OP imba. Rather than hotfixing imbalances, I'd rather have ZOS take their time to weigh balance issues within the larger picture of classes, CP, item sets and to make changes that encompass all these areas with a larger scheme in mind, instead of responding to outcries from the community. Because the community will always cry about imbalance. You know this too, if you have any experience with MMOs or online games. Kneejerking is the worst thing they could do, so while I'm not against more frequent patches, grand balance updates should not come every couple of weeks.

There's taking time, and taking too much time. It is starting to become a trend on the experience of their QA team (if they even have one) and the skills and experience of Wrobel's team. The point of the thread is that bug fixes (broken skills, quests, animations, items, etc etc) balance changes (such as two similar skills but one is more favorable over the other or broken skills like Templar Charge) are NOT DLC contents.

Patch notes example on what class nerfs/buffs/fixes should look like:



Blizzard is starting a good trend with Developer comments on why they do something. This is something that other companies should mimic. I realize this a double edged sword though and listening to Wrobel's reasoning may cause a deep desire of head to keyboard smashing.

League has been doing this for awhile and of course it causes negative feedback from people who don't agree with the change but it allows for understanding and communication. If people disagree with a change, but don't know why it was implemented, they can't make sound arguments as to why the change was wrong or right. When devs actually explain their position, people can more effectively counter or accept the develop position. I suspect tESO don't want discussion from anyone except the secret guild meetings they hold with PC players.

As far as the actual topic of the post goes, I agree bugs need to be addressed significantly faster. BALANCE(balance does not equal bug) changes on the other hand should not happening left and right. Ideally, the game wouldn't need balance changes if it was done right the first time but that's obviously not possible. Balance changes should be tentative because the smallest tweak in numbers can have a huge negative impact. However, issues that are clearly not intended(bugs) need to be acknowledged and removed ASAP.

Its not just that the balance fixes come out so rarely that's annoying. Its when they do they throw down 200 of them at once. They take an ability that is a bit too power down grade that, then up grade a lot of others, and then completely change the mechanics and wonder why the slightly over powered ability is now worthless or 10 times worse than it was before.

Balance issues should be rolled out a small number at a time and see how they effect things, not 100's at once and the we have to wait months when they got their number wrong and its even more unbalanced.

The main problem, IMHO, is that ZOS don't seem to play their own game or then their "official" Beta Testers are not doing a very good job or don't care about the unbalancing of classes.

Also, although every product any company creates aims profit, ZOS seems to be more concerned about their own gains rather than attend their customers.

PvP players complain about extreme lag in Cyrodiil. ZOS answers that the major issue is with players spamming AoE abilities at same time and they can't fix all of this issue in their controlled environment. I don't honestly believe it!

We had huge loading screens for months and the company's "engineers" didn't have a clue of what could be the cause. If their testing team were capable enough (or at least played the other titles, since it's a recurring issue) they would notice that long loading screens were happening after several quests being completed. They said it was fixed, but recently the problem is back and worse, even for fresh started characters (I tested myself).

All games and applications I'm involved with have a x64 architecture, required or not. Hell... Skyrim's players asked for one years ago.

The company IS aware (sidenote: assuming ZOS and Bethesda are the same) and only now, many more years later we'll have it in ESO.

In this meanwhile TONS of, IMHO again, useless different pets, costumes and items that make the first weeks of the game much easier than needed (gems and potions) -OR- that takes away all the purpose of hard work (motifs) are available in Crown Store.

OK, without those items the company could not maintain themselves, but it's more and more stuff I don't want to see in zone that only lags my end (again, proved, today I had my first barely playable time in Wrothgar due huge FPS drop that never happened before). The same in trials...

Not to mention latency that's not only high for those in the southern part of the globe but also because goes higher for no reason (sometimes even if we're standing still alone in an island)

And last but not least, an inefficient help desk and the lack of transparency. I stopped reporting bugs in-game (/bug) because all I've created so far are still opened (mostly cosmetic issues) and in my Account Overview, impossible to understand (what I write in report's body goes to the subject, chopped) and those I create manually, relating something that really affects me (in small scale though) not resolved yet too.

We debate things here and there and sometimes we need a touch from the company with small details more accurate and they completely abstain themselves. I'm not saying that an "engineer" should come here and say technical stuff (although it would nice for some) but just don't hide everything

Can you inagine if class balance changes were pushed out at rabdom every couple of days?

How would you ever track that? Things would be effed up my friend.

I agree 5 months is a bit extreme but i do understand there does need to be a period of testing to gather data and to ensure youre not tipping to the opposite end of the scale. Pushing out hotfixes for game balance issues every week would be chaos.

Skill fixes though, i can definitely get behind.

WalkingLegacy wrote: »

Inarre wrote: »

Can you inagine if class balance changes were pushed out at rabdom every couple of days?

How would you ever track that? Things would be effed up my friend.

I agree 5 months is a bit extreme but i do understand there does need to be a period of testing to gather data and to ensure youre not tipping to the opposite end of the scale. Pushing out hotfixes for game balance issues every week would be chaos.

Skill fixes though, i can definitely get behind.

I don't think that is what we are really pushing.

They develop something in house. Once it has substance they push it to the PTS. Test on PTS once enough metric data is collected.

Then they see if what is collected closely matches what they were going for and push live, or take it back behind currents, evolve it and push back to PTS.

This would require them to actually dedicate themselves to use the PTS and us. It would require them to use the data to actually fix things before it goes Live too.

No game is gonna survive balances and bug fixes saved for quarterly DLC though. And doubly so because they're on such a tight schedule, that things pushed to the PTS can't even be fixed in time for the dedicated time given and then everything broken is pushed Live anyways.

PLS ZOS make my day and start doing these things!
....pls

People are acting as if ZoS is the first company to do class (balance), bug, expoit and/or glitch changes. News flash, they're not, other companies push these out regularly, once every month or two or even sooner if it's a major issue.

I can understand updating once a DLC on console with the fee's they get charged by Microsoft and Sony if they do more than one update every 6 months. It was something like $20k every update after the first on X360 & PS3, they got one free update every 6 months. But on PC this is more than ridiculous. Bug, glitch, exploit and balance updates should be pushed live once available on PC, this allows for more testing and time to get it right for the once a DLC updates for console. It's a sad truth, but in a lot of cross platform games (I.e..on PC & Console) the PC players test all updates and fixes to make sure they get released to console in their best form; for whatever reason ZoS doesn't do this and it's hurt them a lot.

WalkingLegacy wrote: »

sirrmattus wrote: »

The problem with this game is the community, you guys accept failure. You are "ok" with bugs. You are "ok" with constant DLC and Crown Store items, yet there still have been so many bugs that persist from the beginning. You are "ok" with constantly being screwed and scammed by zos. I don't understand this. How can you be passionate about something but accept the constant failure from developers? Even down to the simplest things like free respec. This isn't something we should be begging for, there was a major overhaul, we need and deserve a free respec. Horse advancements; I've spent so many real $'s on horses, when I create a new toon, I have to do it again? How can you accept this? I understand some of you are kids, who don't work for the $ you spend on ESO but some of us are adults with families, and the $'s do count and do add up. Then you have a these classes, that don't even give me reminiscence of the old TES games. Who are these phony classes? DK? Templar? Yet the lore lovers scream and are never heard. Where is our option to choose the destiny of our champions like its always been in TES? This game is an utter failure, and a scam by zos. I've been searching the past 2 months for good pvp mmo because this game doesn't have what it offered. So many of these ftp games are miles ahead of ESO in terms of PVP, its unbelievable. The only reason I spent so much time and $ into ESO was for then end game PVP, only to find out its a disaster with no real goal or point. This game was supposed to be PVP focus, if not, why not just make another single player TES game? They have ruined the franchise with ESO. There is no turning back now.

I think it's only the single-player gamers you're referring to. Veteran MMO players are already moving on. Once I finish all the content my friends and I will probably be moving on too. That is unless they get their rears in gear.

I know a LOT of veteran MMO players that play this. Me among them. When I started playing "mmos" they cost money per hour to play. I just think if you come to an elder scrolls mmo looking for quality pvp then maybe you might not have the right game. There are lots of games who focus on the hardcore pvp crowd. Elder scrolls customers for the most part are casuals. Their money spends the same except the overhead drops drastically. Most of the pvp customers eat up their fees in time spent trying to deal with their issues.

So I wouldnt count us out just yet (us old timers I mean). For a game you say you hate I do like you plan to finish every bit of content before moving on.