No one to test the manors?

Jemcrystal · January 2017

I appreciate this update and all the hard work. ZOS is talented.

........ ☼ ....
⌂⌂⌂ ♀ ⌂⌂⌂

Here's my concern:

I am casually reading through PTS and a few things strike me. (1) No one can afford the manors so they are not getting tested. (2) There are not many PTS people. (3) It is not being organized by house. Many houses are going to get missed. (4) There is no information about how to become a PTS'er. (5) Reports on housing are being jumbled in together with other updates. I wish you had only released housing and not the pvp/pve nerfs. There is not enough attention focused on the housing and it is a huge project. It is not getting the attention it needs with people obsessing over their skills and kills. (6) How is anyone going to test the crafting furniture aspect? (7) It's what the players can afford which means testing is for the rich old farts who have been in this game for like forever - I hate to even think how this is going to work for console.

Suggested fixes: (1) Make it more clear how to join PTS to new players like myself. Maybe with a thread link in that blue rectangle up there? (2) Ask for a group of testers that are willing to be assigned a house. Do it in an orderly fashion starting with the manors. Make sure each house gets at least one tester. Make sure these people agree they are not going to get to keep the homes and are fully aware of that. Give them fully furnished houses to test free for a week (or w/e time duration - see so little info on PTS itself). Yes I know you probably already did this in your LaBoRaToRy but ... *emotion* ek.

riberion · January 2017

Anyone can test the manors on PTS. They cost 1 crown furnished, and crowns are replenished every day. I own all three. As far as getting on the PTS, all you need to do is go into your launcher settings and click "show test environment" and it will download. You will then have two log in options on the left side of your launcher.

Edit: This is assuming you are on PC.

bebynnag · January 2017

people are able to uplasd their characters to PTS - some some of those 'rich old farts' as you (rudley) put it will be transferring their characters over & doing all of the manor tests

they are consist of dedicated crafters who will be testing furniture crafting and the new master writs exhaustivley!

they are also the data miners who are giving us amazing information

console players can use PTS if they have access to a PC, and if they have an xbox controller can also test console interactions on our behalf

yours
console player - (who can very easily afford 2 manors when this goes live, just need to get the money together for the 3rd one!)

idk · January 2017

@Jemcrystal

Setup your launcher to use the PTS. (Gear in upper right corner to access that menu).

The PTS population often doesn't equal the live servers.

There are players who can afford the manors. I known one just shy of being able buy all there. Some players can afford every single home. They are active in the game which means a constant cash flow.

Leandor · January 2017

PTS is a separate server. It has nothing to do with the live servers and nothing you have there will impact what happens on live.

On PTS, you are provided with ownership to all houses by creating a template character. You are also provided with crowns and everything on crown store costs 1 crown only.

You are also supplied with many, many items in gold quality, tons of crafting materials, tons of Alliance Points, tons of gold... generally speaking, you are provided with everything you could ever want to test.

As to how to access it, you need to set PTS visibility in the launcher. To do that, click on the cogwheel icon in the top right corner of the launcher window and tick the "show public test environment" checkbox.

Having done that, pick the PTS in the server list on the lefthand side of the launcher.

Also, PTS is only available on PC, no consoles.

bowmanz607 · January 2017

Manors are affordable. Oneven, there are plenty of millionaires I game that have nothing to spend money on. Two, my guess is that most of the Manor or bigger house purchases will be by guilds who pool their money to have a place called home. Guilds should be able to come up with that money no problem.

You probably won't find many streamers like sYoder or Feng testing out out the houses, furniture, etc. But that does not mean people are not testing them or won't be testing them. You get millions of gold on pts and plenty of crowns, so getting access on pts won't be an issue. Plenty of people have been looking forward to housing since launch.

Danikat · January 2017

Anyone who owns a PC copy of the game can test on the PTS, you just have to download it. That's what makes it a Public Test Server.

And like most test servers it includes tools to facilitate testing. You can create a template character with (amongst other things):

10 million gold
Boxes of 200 of each crafting material in their inventory
Boxes of crafting recipes, including furniture
Level 50, 300 CP, about 500 skill points and all skill lines fully trained

Which means you can afford to buy any house you want with gold as soon as you log in, and craft any furniture you might want for it. You can also buy them from the crown store for 1 crown each, using 5,500 free crowns which are totally separate from the ones on your real account.

As for people's willingness or interest in testing it that can be an issue but I don't think you need to worry in this case. Yes there are some people who are only interested in balance changes and couldn't care less about housing. But there's also people like me who lack the attention to detail to be interested in balance who logged in entirely to check out housing and have already spent hours previewing houses, buying them, decorating them, and will do a lot more of it before the update is released.

What you're asking for sounds more like a closed test (something which isn't done on a Public Test Server). ZOS almost certainly do that too, but it will have happened already during the alpha phase of development. That is much more structured - testers are told what to do and how to do it. It certainly has it's advantages (and if a developer can only do one I'd certainly advocate for that over a PTS) but it has limitations too. Testers who are only assigned to check one or two houses may not spot discrepancies between them. Testers following a procedure laid out by the developers will not deviate from what the developers expect them to do and so won't pick up on bugs that result from doing that. But if you simply unleash hundreds, or even dozens, of people on your new release with no structure and only limited instructions you'll get a far, far wider range of activity from them and all kinds of strange bugs and issues will come out of the woodwork.

Jemcrystal · January 2017

[quote="puffytheslayer;3659207"............... 'rich old farts' as you (rudley) put it .....................[/quote]

Sorry, I looked it up and you are right. The term "old fart" is no longer considered a title of humorous respect. It either was once or was in the circles I grew up in. My attempt at levity fell flat. The idea that a gamer could be considered holding a type of tribal elder status was humorous to me. I grew up around fishermen who used "old fart" as a term of endearment. I am appropriately shamed once again for not understanding this generation's terminology. I apologize.

Dubhliam · January 2017

There is nothing to test there.

Houses are just blank spaces.

The only thing that gets tested is the House Editor, which works exactly the same in any house.

Sengra · January 2017

I highly recommend getting the PTS for yourself and look at all the houses and decorating options. I downloaded it yesterday and it can be confusing at the beginning because there is so much to do and look at. (Also it will probably be my only chance to walk around the bigger houses and go crazy with decorating

).

randolphbenoit · January 2017

Daggerfall Over look they added a tower but door does not work. There looks a like a balcony but no way to get to it. Also anyone know there an King Emeric Throne?

luen79rwb17_ESO · January 2017

There's been tons of feedback on manors. Mainly they cost too much and provide too little.