CosmicSoul wrote: »

Vert32 wrote: »

I would like to know why ZOS does not meaningfully participate in the forums. I would define "meaningful participation" as discussing the pros and cons of game features that affect the combat. As shown below (according to my data), ZOS commented on 38 threads out of 360. That's only 10.6%. Of ZOS's 38 comments only 2 (5.3% of the 38 comments) of the comments could potentially affect combat. And one of those was @Wrobel commenting on AOE Caps over 1 year ago. The other comment was @ZOS_JessicaFolsom commenting on Miat's PVP Alerts.

I admit that I never actively participated in the forums until yesterday (1/8/17) but after compiling these numbers why would I. Suppose that ZOS regularly views (not comment on) threads for more than just keeping everybody in line (which the data does not suggest) and they are actively looking for ways to positively and meaningfully (combat) change ESO. Wouldn't you expect better improvements to combat, balance, performance, or diversity?

I believe that if ZOS wants to improve ESO they need to more regularly engage the community. Although, as stated in my first thread, "PvP: Risk and Reward" (way to long to read), I don't believe the answer to balancing PvP is in the forums.

ZOS, transparency and communication are the best way to understand what your community thinks. As far as I can tell ZOS is severely lacking in both.

FORUMS ANALYSIS

I took a sample the first 12 pages of the General ESO Discussion and the first 12 pages of the Combat & Character Mechanics as of 5:30PM - 6:00PM PST on 1/9/17 and recorded discussions that ZOS participated in. Additionally, I noted what type of input was provided by ZOS and those are as follows: warning/removal of nonconstructive comments, notification of thread shutdown, notification of thread relocation, bug fixes, non-game effecting comments, and game effecting comments.

The following is a summary of ZOSs forum interactions over 24 pages of discussion on 2 forum topics (a detailed list can be viewed at the end of this thread):

Total Comments from ZOS: 38 (100%)

Warnings/Removal of Nonconstructive Comments: 7 (18.4%)
Notifications of Thread Shutdown: 14 (36.8%)
Thread Relocations: 10 (26.3%)
Bug Fixes: 3 (7.9%)
Non-Game/Combat Affecting Comments: 2 (5.3%)
Game/Combat Affecting Comments: 2 (5.3%)

The first comment will detail the data collected.

Did you exclude test server attention? Considering thats where balance changes and other things start they have been very good with communication.

The thing is, those of us who do PTS testing? The feedback from there isn't always heard. Things go through regardless when we talk about problems that lead into direous consequences. So I have to disagree; They don't listen. We've warned them about tons of things. Lighting in Cyrodiil, warned them that removing the deer wasn't the source of the issue, AoE Caps, proc sets, weapon ults, Nirnhoned (back when it was bug and it took them THAT long to fix), various bugs and issues in Dungeons, Trials, and other various forms of group content, hacks and exploits (numerous ones). The list goes on and on. All of these things were talked about in PTS threads and most of them didn't get a resolution. The ones that did took nearly a -year-. That's not good with communication.

IndyWendieGo wrote: »

CosmicSoul wrote: »

Vert32 wrote: »

I would like to know why ZOS does not meaningfully participate in the forums. I would define "meaningful participation" as discussing the pros and cons of game features that affect the combat. As shown below (according to my data), ZOS commented on 38 threads out of 360. That's only 10.6%. Of ZOS's 38 comments only 2 (5.3% of the 38 comments) of the comments could potentially affect combat. And one of those was @Wrobel commenting on AOE Caps over 1 year ago. The other comment was @ZOS_JessicaFolsom commenting on Miat's PVP Alerts.

I admit that I never actively participated in the forums until yesterday (1/8/17) but after compiling these numbers why would I. Suppose that ZOS regularly views (not comment on) threads for more than just keeping everybody in line (which the data does not suggest) and they are actively looking for ways to positively and meaningfully (combat) change ESO. Wouldn't you expect better improvements to combat, balance, performance, or diversity?

I believe that if ZOS wants to improve ESO they need to more regularly engage the community. Although, as stated in my first thread, "PvP: Risk and Reward" (way to long to read), I don't believe the answer to balancing PvP is in the forums.

ZOS, transparency and communication are the best way to understand what your community thinks. As far as I can tell ZOS is severely lacking in both.

FORUMS ANALYSIS

I took a sample the first 12 pages of the General ESO Discussion and the first 12 pages of the Combat & Character Mechanics as of 5:30PM - 6:00PM PST on 1/9/17 and recorded discussions that ZOS participated in. Additionally, I noted what type of input was provided by ZOS and those are as follows: warning/removal of nonconstructive comments, notification of thread shutdown, notification of thread relocation, bug fixes, non-game effecting comments, and game effecting comments.

The following is a summary of ZOSs forum interactions over 24 pages of discussion on 2 forum topics (a detailed list can be viewed at the end of this thread):

Total Comments from ZOS: 38 (100%)

Warnings/Removal of Nonconstructive Comments: 7 (18.4%)
Notifications of Thread Shutdown: 14 (36.8%)
Thread Relocations: 10 (26.3%)
Bug Fixes: 3 (7.9%)
Non-Game/Combat Affecting Comments: 2 (5.3%)
Game/Combat Affecting Comments: 2 (5.3%)

The first comment will detail the data collected.

Did you exclude test server attention? Considering thats where balance changes and other things start they have been very good with communication.

The thing is, those of us who do PTS testing? The feedback from there isn't always heard. Things go through regardless when we talk about problems that lead into direous consequences. So I have to disagree; They don't listen. We've warned them about tons of things. Lighting in Cyrodiil, warned them that removing the deer wasn't the source of the issue, AoE Caps, proc sets, weapon ults, Nirnhoned (back when it was bug and it took them THAT long to fix), various bugs and issues in Dungeons, Trials, and other various forms of group content, hacks and exploits (numerous ones). The list goes on and on. All of these things were talked about in PTS threads and most of them didn't get a resolution. The ones that did took nearly a -year-. That's not good with communication.

@IndyWendieGo I'm not on PC so I have never participated in PTS but its easy to see that from patch notes to PTS to patch release that the feedback that you guys work hard to provide, for the most part, is entirely ignored. The other option is that there is not enough time from the start of the PTS to the patch release to accurately address/correct for the warnings that you provide. I'm sure this is somewhat the case, but if so, ZOS should revert the intended adjustments back to the way they were and go back to the drawing board.

That, in my opinion, is entirely reasonable and would be appreciated because then we would know that they are at least listening. And with how much BAD changes (see the @IndyWendieGo list above) have made it through PTS, I am inclined to believe that they just do not care.

Vert32 wrote: »

BEGIN BUNCH OF PONTIFICATING ABOUT ZOS FORUM INVOLVEMENT
*TIRE SCREECH AND RECORD SCRATCH SOUNDS*

"I admit that I never actively participated in the forums until yesterday (1/8/17)."

*INSANE MANAICAL LAUGHING*

loluwotm8

Vert32 wrote: »

I would like to know why ZOS does not meaningfully participate in the forums. I would define "meaningful participation" as discussing the pros and cons of game features that affect the combat. As shown below (according to my data), ZOS commented on 38 threads out of 360. That's only 10.6%. Of ZOS's 38 comments only 2 (5.3% of the 38 comments) of the comments could potentially affect combat. And one of those was @Wrobel commenting on AOE Caps over 1 year ago. The other comment was @ZOS_JessicaFolsom commenting on Miat's PVP Alerts.

I admit that I never actively participated in the forums until yesterday (1/8/17) but after compiling these numbers why would I. Suppose that ZOS regularly views (not comment on) threads for more than just keeping everybody in line (which the data does not suggest) and they are actively looking for ways to positively and meaningfully (combat) change ESO. Wouldn't you expect better improvements to combat, balance, performance, or diversity?

I believe that if ZOS wants to improve ESO they need to more regularly engage the community. Although, as stated in my first thread, "PvP: Risk and Reward" (way to long to read), I don't believe the answer to balancing PvP is in the forums.

ZOS, transparency and communication are the best way to understand what your community thinks. As far as I can tell ZOS is severely lacking in both.

FORUMS ANALYSIS

I took a sample the first 12 pages of the General ESO Discussion and the first 12 pages of the Combat & Character Mechanics as of 5:30PM - 6:00PM PST on 1/9/17 and recorded discussions that ZOS participated in. Additionally, I noted what type of input was provided by ZOS and those are as follows: warning/removal of nonconstructive comments, notification of thread shutdown, notification of thread relocation, bug fixes, non-game effecting comments, and game effecting comments.

The following is a summary of ZOSs forum interactions over 24 pages of discussion on 2 forum topics (a detailed list can be viewed at the end of this thread):

Total Comments from ZOS: 38 (100%)

Warnings/Removal of Nonconstructive Comments: 7 (18.4%)
Notifications of Thread Shutdown: 14 (36.8%)
Thread Relocations: 10 (26.3%)
Bug Fixes: 3 (7.9%)
Non-Game/Combat Affecting Comments: 2 (5.3%)
Game/Combat Affecting Comments: 2 (5.3%)

The first comment will detail the data collected.

If customers start arguing with each other about something and you chime in as the product seller, you could give the impression that you're picking a side and *** off some of your customers. That can happen whether you intended to pick a side or not.

Angry customers are one thing, but customers that are angry because you took the other customer's side are not likely to stick around, let alone spend money on the product.

So for devs, the smartest thing they can do in most cases is just keep their opinions to themselves while they watch from the sidelines.

I think that's why you don't see them jumping into the middle of forum discussions very often.

srfrogg23 wrote: »

Vert32 wrote: »

I would like to know why ZOS does not meaningfully participate in the forums. I would define "meaningful participation" as discussing the pros and cons of game features that affect the combat. As shown below (according to my data), ZOS commented on 38 threads out of 360. That's only 10.6%. Of ZOS's 38 comments only 2 (5.3% of the 38 comments) of the comments could potentially affect combat. And one of those was @Wrobel commenting on AOE Caps over 1 year ago. The other comment was @ZOS_JessicaFolsom commenting on Miat's PVP Alerts.

I admit that I never actively participated in the forums until yesterday (1/8/17) but after compiling these numbers why would I. Suppose that ZOS regularly views (not comment on) threads for more than just keeping everybody in line (which the data does not suggest) and they are actively looking for ways to positively and meaningfully (combat) change ESO. Wouldn't you expect better improvements to combat, balance, performance, or diversity?

I believe that if ZOS wants to improve ESO they need to more regularly engage the community. Although, as stated in my first thread, "PvP: Risk and Reward" (way to long to read), I don't believe the answer to balancing PvP is in the forums.

ZOS, transparency and communication are the best way to understand what your community thinks. As far as I can tell ZOS is severely lacking in both.

FORUMS ANALYSIS

I took a sample the first 12 pages of the General ESO Discussion and the first 12 pages of the Combat & Character Mechanics as of 5:30PM - 6:00PM PST on 1/9/17 and recorded discussions that ZOS participated in. Additionally, I noted what type of input was provided by ZOS and those are as follows: warning/removal of nonconstructive comments, notification of thread shutdown, notification of thread relocation, bug fixes, non-game effecting comments, and game effecting comments.

The following is a summary of ZOSs forum interactions over 24 pages of discussion on 2 forum topics (a detailed list can be viewed at the end of this thread):

Total Comments from ZOS: 38 (100%)

Warnings/Removal of Nonconstructive Comments: 7 (18.4%)
Notifications of Thread Shutdown: 14 (36.8%)
Thread Relocations: 10 (26.3%)
Bug Fixes: 3 (7.9%)
Non-Game/Combat Affecting Comments: 2 (5.3%)
Game/Combat Affecting Comments: 2 (5.3%)

The first comment will detail the data collected.

If customers start arguing with each other about something and you chime in as the product seller, you could give the impression that you're picking a side and *** off some of your customers. That can happen whether you intended to pick a side or not.

Angry customers are one thing, but customers that are angry because you took the other customer's side are not likely to stick around, let alone spend money on the product.

So for devs, the smartest thing they can do in most cases is just keep their opinions to themselves while they watch from the sidelines.

I think that's why you don't see them jumping into the middle of forum discussions very often.

I agree that there will always be dissatisfied customers, but I would argue that observing from the sidelines satisfies less customers. The issue with historical input is that they are poorly constructed. Not poor from my subjective opinion, but poor from the perspective that the "best" responses that they have offered in the past have been absentminded in both content and consideration for reception.

Before I use this example, I want to be clear that I am only using this as an example because it is the best one that I can think of. This is not a discussion on AoE Caps, although I will add my personal thoughts as to where ZOS fell short in the conversation.

To my knowledge, one of most detailed and meaningful conversation ZOS has engaged in was the famed "AoE Caps Discussion" in which @Wrobel in detail explained ZOS position and thoughts on AoE caps.

Wrobel wrote: »

Last week, we had a really successful discussion on player abilities. It was super constructive and we got a ton of really great feedback. This week, we’d like to have that same constructive discussion with AoE caps and falloff. AoE caps are something that have been talked about on the forums for a while now and discussion has picked up recently, especially with regards to PvP. We’d like to discuss them in a bit more detail and provide some design goals for the system, as well as the overall vision for larger scale PvP in ESO.

We want AoE abilities to be useful in PvP. That being said, we don’t want them to be the end all be all - single target abilities should also be useful. The intention of the caps and falloff is that AoE damage will be able to outpace healing in large group battles, but not dominate it. Healing abilities currently cap at 6 targets, where damage can hit up to 60 targets (100% to the first 6, 50% to the next 24, and 25% to the last 30).

With that being said, there are a few situations where healing is able to out scale damage. The first step we are taking is to look at some of the abilities that heal far more than we would like in large group fights. We’re specifically looking at Purge and Barrier initially, and will be reducing the max targets these abilities can hit. While we are looking at specific abilities, we are also looking into Magicka Detonation. This ability was always intended to be more effective versus groups and less effective against individual targets, and it is not meeting those design goals currently.

Remember that a group of 5 players is not going to be able to kill a group of 20 players in most situations. It is possible if you catch the group completely off guard or funnel them into a tight space, but in a straight up 5 on 20, the larger numbers are going to win most times.

For feedback this week, we’d love to hear about situations in which you feel like you are having problems against large groups of players. Include the number of players you’re fighting against, abilities you believe they are using, and abilities you feel need tweaks to make them more effective against larger numbers.

This is great, this is the sort of communication I would expect to see from a customer interactive forum. This was posted in November of 2015 and in the following month @Wrobel posted a follow up (as shown below) in consideration of the "conversations" that took place. Conversation in is quotes because I admit that the majority of discussion on the forums are childish squabble that are difficult to interject in a positive manner.

Wrobel wrote: »

Thanks for spending so much time and effort writing up detailed posts on this topic. PvP players are very passionate and seeing passionate fans enjoy the game is the reason we get up in the morning.

We want PvP fights to be tactical, involving player positioning as a key element of engagements. We don’t want 2 huge masses of players mindlessly bumping into each other while spamming 1 ability. Part of the issue currently is that damaging PBAoE abilities are very powerful, and there are not a lot of effective options to combat this strategy from range. The two avenues of attack we are perusing are buffing siege weapons and investigating making ranged abilities more effective at damaging large groups of players.

Wheeler is making significant adjustments to siege weapons. You can view and comment on these new changes here. As siege already hits an unlimited number of targets and has an effective cooldown, it’s the perfect tool to get players to spread out.

On the ability side we’ve got a number of changes planned. PBAoE abilities such as Steel Tornado and purge are much too powerful and cause players to want to stack together to make sure they can all hit the same targets and be purged by the same ally. We’ll be reducing the radius of Steel Tornado so it’s not so much more effective at dealing AoE damage relative to the other abilities in the game. Also, we are reducing the initial damage of Magicka Detonation so it’s less effective vs a single target. To compensate, both the bonus damage per target and the max size of this bonus is increasing. In addition to this we’re looking into making other ranged class abilities deal effective AoE damage.

These modifications are substantial, and we don’t want to stack too many changes at once. We need to be able to measure the impact and performance changes. We’re going to continue working on performance in Cyrodiil - Fixing the lag is something everyone wants to fix.

Here are some additional issues we’re considering based on your feedback from this thread:

• Cone abilities are much harder to hit with than a standard circle, but aren't more effective
• Multiple gap closers used on the same target means they can’t move
• Cammo hunter stealth attacks can double proc, killing targets very quickly
• Force pulse counts as 3 reflects against Reflective Scales
• Retreating Maneuver buff sticks on healers while they are casting
• XP to advance Assault and Support skill lines is very high

Please continue to keep the posts constructive. Productive discussions are best for the players and the devs  Top posts on both sides of this debate: Zheg #93 and Sublime #60.

When comparing @Wrobel two contributions, it becomes rather apparent that the content is nearly identical. If that can be agreed upon then it would appear that ZOSs consideration for the discussion between the customers was little to none.

I would like to sum up what ZOS did here.

@Wrobel Post #1
1) Present their thought on a subject and describe their objective as they would like to see it (good, I would like to see more of this).
2) Offered thoughts/ideas as to possible fixes (great, this is exactly what we need to see so we can anticipated complications and offer warnings and alternatives).

A week or two go by:

@Worbel Post #2
3) Restate objective (good).
4) State the adjustments that will be made, which were nearly identical to the first posts "ideas" (BAD).

If that can be agreed upon, then I would argue that @Wrobel took little to no consideration for discussions on the thread and was already set in his decision as to what ZOS was going to do to achieve their objective. If he did consider thread discussion, then he would have realized that a real PvP player's concern with AoE caps is that they 100% favor larger groups and put smaller groups at a disadvantage.

Additionally, the changes made have done nothing to impact ZOSs original objective. If anything came from the applied adjustments, ZOS took a step backwards by further increasing the quantity of thoughtless combat between two or more large groups. Thoughtful combat is less relevant today than ever.

ZOS failed to consider content when coordinating these two posts and that failure did nothing to dampen the poor reception by the customers in doing so. Unreasonable customers (customers that fail to objectively view a discussion) will never be satisfied. Truly thoughtful input from ZOS will always reinforce reasonable customers that ZOS are making positive changes to ESO weather or not they are taking a side.

I agree it is easier for ZOS to stay out of it but argue that it is not beneficial overall.

Congratulations if you read all of that. Shame on you if you skipped to the end.