The Reason Why The PTS is Pretty Much Pointless I Can Tell You Why.

JonnytheKing · October 2017

Zos Needs to give some intensive to player to actively play the pts , a lot of bugs wouldn't make it to the live game if there was more people playing on the pts .Its simple ,, so zos here is some ideas, crowns , mounts, keeping items from the pts, achievements, (just some ideas) clearly people will have to play/do certain things/achievements to actually get the reweds. What do you guys think? But i think this would stop a lot of bugs making to live and over all improving the game

templesus · October 2017

Lol wut? Zenimax doesn’t even listen to the player base, noted by the hundreds of pages on class balancing that have been blatantly ignored.

SydneyGrey · October 2017

The PTS is extremely useful.

It allows me to perfect character faces before I reproduce them in my live game.

Ajaxduo · October 2017

No, plenty of people already but test and report. A lot of fixes just don’t get implemented as fast as people would like.

JonnytheKing · October 2017

Ajaxduo wrote: »

No, plenty of people already but test and report. A lot of fixes just don’t get implemented as fast as people would like.

a very small number guys on the pts , not saying no one does, and im not saying its good for some stuff.

Doctordarkspawn · October 2017

For as long as the PTS has existed, most of the feedback on the PTS.

Reason 1: ZOS does not care for your feedback on balance changes. If you disagree with them, and they want it to go through, it's going *** through. You dont get a say.

Reason 2: Any and all feedback that cant be fit behind a deadline, wont. Compounds reason 1.

PTS has allways been a preview. That's it. They dont want your feedback on balance, what hits the PTS will hit in roughly the same state as live.

SydneyGrey · October 2017

Doctordarkspawn wrote: »

PTS has allways been a preview. That's it. They dont want your feedback on balance, what hits the PTS will hit in roughly the same state as live.

Not totally true. There have been many things they've changed based on feedback they've gotten on the PTS in the past year. Not everything, obviously.

KingMagaw · October 2017

Pointless as ZOS doesn't listen to feedback nor is there any incentive to report bugs or exploits to them.

Recent example is the looting of Fabricants and furnishing plans. There was no point in reporting this bug as already furnishing plans are very restricted in game, ZOS hasn't even updated the Master writ envelopes yet added MW and CWC into the loot table.

Simply there is no incentive to report such things, when people take advantage when it goes live, profit and then ZoS gets around to fixing (Which is nerfing the drop rate to hell letting the exploiters profit more)

EDIT: Buying the game, buying the DLC's and expecting players to do ZoS work for them, is shabby in my eyes.

JonnytheKing · October 2017

lets not bash on zos lets come up with ways that could improve the game, if zos listens or doesnt, at lest we tryed and thats all we can do

MLGProPlayer · October 2017

The players give a ton of feedback. Just look at the PTS forum.

JonnytheKing · October 2017

MLGProPlayer wrote: »

The players give a ton of feedback. Just look at the PTS forum.

i know this but there is a lot that are missed

dsalter · October 2017

should be called PEF
Personal Exploit Finder.
because thats what most use the PTS for.

throwing all the content at you to test is only going to slow testing down and reinforce the PEF, if they want people to test stuff. chop it up.
one week 2-3 landmasses access with all the new gear. thats it.
another week, only 2-3 landmasses and new dungeons.
etc

more annoying but allows you to pressure test areas.

Doctordarkspawn · October 2017

SydneyGrey wrote: »

Doctordarkspawn wrote: »

PTS has allways been a preview. That's it. They dont want your feedback on balance, what hits the PTS will hit in roughly the same state as live.

Not totally true. There have been many things they've changed based on feedback they've gotten on the PTS in the past year. Not everything, obviously.

Totally? No.

There will allways be little changes and contested things, but for the most part, what hits the PTS will hit live in roughly the same state. Even then, sometimes the changes made are made at the last minute with no time for feedback. ZOS does what it likes, and if you dont like it, pull monitary support entirely because that is the only thing that will change it.

MakoFore · October 2017

templesus wrote: »

Lol wut? Zenimax doesn’t even listen to the player base, noted by the hundreds of pages on class balancing that have been blatantly ignored.

+1

Insandros · October 2017

JonnytheKing wrote: »

Zos Needs to give some intensive to player to actively play the pts , a lot of bugs wouldn't make it to the live game if there was more people playing on the pts .Its simple ,, so zos here is some ideas, crowns , mounts, keeping items from the pts, achievements, (just some ideas) clearly people will have to play/do certain things/achievements to actually get the reweds. What do you guys think? But i think this would stop a lot of bugs making to live and over all improving the game

lots of people play betas, TEst servers etc.. to play new content, test gears etc.. when they se a bug, they don't care unfortunately.

Biro123 · October 2017

Insandros wrote: »

JonnytheKing wrote: »

Zos Needs to give some intensive to player to actively play the pts , a lot of bugs wouldn't make it to the live game if there was more people playing on the pts .Its simple ,, so zos here is some ideas, crowns , mounts, keeping items from the pts, achievements, (just some ideas) clearly people will have to play/do certain things/achievements to actually get the rewards. What do you guys think? But i think this would stop a lot of bugs making to live and over all improving the game

lots of people play betas, TEst servers etc.. to play new content, test gears etc.. when they se a bug, they don't care unfortunately.

They do - it just takes time to resolve, test and package up. imho, the main reasons for pts are:

1. Ensure they haven't totally broken anything
Generally the kind of thing that will only become apparent with a certain player volume. If they have and its major, they will hold off with the release date and fix it. And I'm talking major stuff like 'nobody can log in' and 'my characters have all disappeared'.. I'm not talking stuff like, 'this stun doesn't go through block'

2. Player based testing to see if their changes are 'working as intended'
But what do I mean by 'working as intended'. I'm a software engineer by trade.. have been for a long time. What you get is 'requirements' (we want the software to do this) and then the technical design/build (ie making it do 'this'). In ESO, a 'requirement' may be to, idk, double the size of shields.. Now this kind of test is to determine if the size of the shields are actually doubled (as per the requirement) - This is very different to the discussion around whether or not the playerbase agrees with the requirement (ie *should* they be doubled).

3. Listen to player feedback
This fill in the gap from 2. ie views on whether the shield *should* be doubled and what impact it has on gameplay. Unfortunately, many posts/threads on the pts forum are so 'un-objective' and 'un-constructive' - and often posted by people not even testing, that I'm not really surprised if they are largely ignore..

But overall, anything falling under #1 (which is rare) will see a quick turnaround on the fix.
Generally stuff falling under #2 will get rolled up into the next couple of patches (depending what they already have lined up for them and how far on they are)
Stuff falling under #3 will take longer as they'd have to go back to the drawing board effectively, to try to figure out the ramifications of doing a different kind of change or changing the severity of the change. Then they come up with a new 'requirement' - and then the design build starts.. a much longer timeframe till we see it.

But generally, it gives them a head start on fixes for #2 and #3.. Most won't be ready in time for going live - but the head-start means they will be patched sooner rather than later.

All imho ofc..

Reverb · October 2017

I used to be diligent about testing and providing bug and performance feedback on PTS. Not anymore, and likely never again.

PTS is a place to test your build against the new changes, that's it. Any time spent there testing content or giving feedback is time wasted. Bugs found and reported will still go live. Feedback on class, skill and weapon changes will go unheeded (except for sorcs. Curse nerf is the only one they've ever reversed direction on due to "overwhelming negative feedback". All other overwhelmingly negative feedback [cough cough Templar stun removal] falls on deaf ears).

And often, they'll sneak some other big change when it goes live, without any warning or testing/feedback opportunity. Like the crit nerf in the HotR update.

Given our history with the PTS and devs showing that they're not really interested in our feedback, I'm not surprised it's a ghost town. I haven't wasted any time there this cycle, and aren't likely to for future cycles either.

FakeFox · October 2017

In my opinion the problem and the reason why I stopped playing the PTS is their way of communicating (or rather not communicating) with us. They pretty much never respond to any discussion apart from "we deleted comments" or actively take part but instead just introduce massive changes without any proper feedback. For Example: In HotR PTS people complaint about Mothers Sorrow overperforming, instead of entering the discussion and figuring out how to make it balanced they just nerved all crit into the ground on the last day of PTS without giving us any explanation. Bugs are pretty much the same, there are many bugs that have been reported over and over and still made it into the live version. And those are often pretty massive ones, like vFH no death and timerun.
I really like ESO and want this game to be good, I don't need a incentive to test bugs or stuff like that, but being treated human would be helpful.

zaria · October 2017

KingMagaw wrote: »

Pointless as ZOS doesn't listen to feedback nor is there any incentive to report bugs or exploits to them.

Recent example is the looting of Fabricants and furnishing plans. There was no point in reporting this bug as already furnishing plans are very restricted in game, ZOS hasn't even updated the Master writ envelopes yet added MW and CWC into the loot table.

Simply there is no incentive to report such things, when people take advantage when it goes live, profit and then ZoS gets around to fixing (Which is nerfing the drop rate to hell letting the exploiters profit more)

EDIT: Buying the game, buying the DLC's and expecting players to do ZoS work for them, is shabby in my eyes.

High drop rate of furniture plans is not an bug players will report, that is unless its idiotic high like +25% chance of purple drops. 5% drop chance and you feel lucky, now if you farm them a lot you will notice the high rate but most will not report.

Uppercut = giant space program is an obvious bug you report.

coplannb16_ESO · October 2017

as a software-architect myself there are various reasons for this.

- the designer (e.g. the person creating a feature on paper detailing what it should do and how it should behave, non-function/functional qualities) thinks he knows the feature better than X

- the team-lead (classic leadership roles are the bane of creativity and excelence, they do not add value and usually earn more bucks than the actual productive people, see also management) thinks he knows the feature better than the designer and/or X

- the team/company might additionally be lacking a strong vision of what product/game they want to develop. Like in the beginning PvP/AvA was advertised as THE endgame and big and strong selling point. So far we only got crapload of the same old PvE content like in every boring MMORPG to date and usually this sooner or later leads to a decline in popularity (see DAoC and Warhammer Online, its no surprise the same people were involved in those games...).

X (as in knows better than X) can be a team member not in direct control over that feature, can be the community, can be the developer who implements the feature (many leads and designer behave like a software-developer is just a code-monkey and should never voice his opinion cause its worthless).

This is, in larger companies, always accompanied with the pattern of Horst (see https://grusskartenladen.de/media/catalog/product/cache/1/thumbnail/960x/17f82f742ffe127f42dca9de82fb58b1/m/m/mmm_029_13.jpg ). What it means is that most of the time, the guy doing most of the real work (e.g. writing code, developing the product, fixing bugs) is the guy with the lowest salary, with the lowest freedom and hierarchical power is surounded by a *** of other people who do nothing or are basically only involved in telling Horst what to do, how to do it and making sure he complies and does it.

That is why startups in general and indie-developers can be that successful. You only have a handful of Horst, and all the other parasitic-idiots are not there (yet).

Zer0oo · October 2017

The reason is: giving feedback on the pts feels kinda useless and makes things even worse sometimes (e.g. cblast buff by nerfing cfrag, crit changes for the live patch, asylum imperfeced destro now useless, ...)

Basically the make some random surprise changes every 3-6 month, without any warnings what is coming. The pts changes are most of the time final without considering feedback or giving us any feedback what the devs wanted to do.

Peekachu99 · October 2017

99% of the people on PTS are there to see/ test changes on their build, looking for exploits (and not usually to report), or practicing their speed clears before things go live. Hardly anything of an exchange between parties (ZoS/ tester) occurs.

Biro123 · October 2017

coplannb16_ESO wrote: »

as a software-architect myself there are various reasons for this.

- the designer (e.g. the person creating a feature on paper detailing what it should do and how it should behave, non-function/functional qualities) thinks he knows the feature better than X

- the team-lead (classic leadership roles are the bane of creativity and excelence, they do not add value and usually earn more bucks than the actual productive people, see also management) thinks he knows the feature better than the designer and/or X

- the team/company might additionally be lacking a strong vision of what product/game they want to develop. Like in the beginning PvP/AvA was advertised as THE endgame and big and strong selling point. So far we only got crapload of the same old PvE content like in every boring MMORPG to date and usually this sooner or later leads to a decline in popularity (see DAoC and Warhammer Online, its no surprise the same people were involved in those games...).

X (as in knows better than X) can be a team member not in direct control over that feature, can be the community, can be the developer who implements the feature (many leads and designer behave like a software-developer is just a code-monkey and should never voice his opinion cause its worthless).

This is, in larger companies, always accompanied with the pattern of Horst (see https://grusskartenladen.de/media/catalog/product/cache/1/thumbnail/960x/17f82f742ffe127f42dca9de82fb58b1/m/m/mmm_029_13.jpg ). What it means is that most of the time, the guy doing most of the real work (e.g. writing code, developing the product, fixing bugs) is the guy with the lowest salary, with the lowest freedom and hierarchical power is surounded by a *** of other people who do nothing or are basically only involved in telling Horst what to do, how to do it and making sure he complies and does it.

That is why startups in general and indie-developers can be that successful. You only have a handful of Horst, and all the other parasitic-idiots are not there (yet).

And don't forget that Horst also has to spend 80% of his time capturing evidence and proving to people that he has done his job - and only 20% of his time actually doing it.

vovus69 · October 2017

PTS is basically preview for me. zos never taken any comments into account. I would better stop here - already have several messages deleted by zos and warning 2

Good luck talking about this...

-vovus

Kikke · October 2017

this is so false! I'm amazed of the ignorance of the playerbase.

Normal PTS cycle: PTS1 - bug reports -> PTS2 with bug fixes -> bug reports -> PTS3 update - bug reports -> PTS4 bug fixes - bug reports -> final PTS with bug fixes and tweaks on PTS mechanics.

So. were do they NOT care about bug reports? were do they NOT fix buggs? people are so bandwagon the thread.

I'd say good luck trying vmol, vhof, vas without any PTS testing and bug fixing.

ZOS_GinaBruno · October 2017

Ok, want to address a few things here.

First, we've thought about ways to incentivize participation on the PTS, but have always run into issues. For example:

The more bugs you report, the more rewards you get! This won't work because players might simply report random things as bugs just so they can reach the threshold.
Log in/complete a thing/get to this point and you get a reward! This isn't quite fair to our console players who don't have access to the PTS. We could just do rewards that already exist, but where's the incentive with that?

As for us "not caring" about PTS feedback, this couldn't be farther from the truth. Many of our devs stay late just to read your feedback, whether it be on new systems, areas, or yes, even combat balance and changes. We've mentioned this before, but just because we don't change something doesn't mean we aren't reading and taking it to heart. PTS is extremely valuable not just for feedback, but also bug reports. Look at each week's patch notes - you are a big part of why things get found!

Everyone, let's please stop bashing the team or making assumptions. This is your first and last warning.

IronCrystal · October 2017

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

Ok, want to address a few things here.

First, we've thought about ways to incentivize participation on the PTS, but have always run into issues. For example:
The more bugs you report, the more rewards you get! This won't work because players might simply report random things as bugs just so they can reach the threshold.

Log in/complete a thing/get to this point and you get a reward! This isn't quite fair to our console players who don't have access to the PTS. We could just do rewards that already exist, but where's the incentive with that?

As for us "not caring" about PTS feedback, this couldn't be farther from the truth. Many of our devs stay late just to read your feedback, whether it be on new systems, areas, or yes, even combat balance and changes. We've mentioned this before, but just because we don't change something doesn't mean we aren't reading and taking it to heart. PTS is extremely valuable not just for feedback, but also bug reports. Look at each week's patch notes - you are a big part of why things get found!

Everyone, let's please stop bashing the team or making assumptions. This is your first and last warning.

Good to know you read the feedback. It's still disheartening though when clearly undesired balance changes make it through with little to no changes.

Jamini · October 2017

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

Ok, want to address a few things here.
[*] The more bugs you report, the more rewards you get! This won't work because players might simply report random things as bugs just so they can reach the threshold.

Any half-decent bugtracker/ticketing system lists the reporting party. It's trivial to identify who first brought up a unique issue if your internal bug tracker has even the most base of features.

As for us "not caring" about PTS feedback, this couldn't be farther from the truth. Many of our devs stay late just to read your feedback, whether it be on new systems, areas, or yes, even combat balance and changes. We've mentioned this before, but just because we don't change something doesn't mean we aren't reading and taking it to heart. PTS is extremely valuable not just for feedback, but also bug reports. Look at each week's patch notes - you are a big part of why things get found!

Virtually none of the overwhelming feedback given on the PTS in the last year that I've been here has went in, except for REMOVING a much-needed nerf to an over-performing class and changing said nerf into an outright buff.. Multiple reported bugs have made it to live as well.

Frankly, I've seen feedback not only ignored but have actions taken directly in the opposite manner that your player-base wanted/recommended on more than one occasion.

Please don't treat your player-base like idiots.

Mojmir · October 2017

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

Ok, want to address a few things here.

First, we've thought about ways to incentivize participation on the PTS, but have always run into issues. For example:
The more bugs you report, the more rewards you get! This won't work because players might simply report random things as bugs just so they can reach the threshold.

Log in/complete a thing/get to this point and you get a reward! This isn't quite fair to our console players who don't have access to the PTS. We could just do rewards that already exist, but where's the incentive with that?

As for us "not caring" about PTS feedback, this couldn't be farther from the truth. Many of our devs stay late just to read your feedback, whether it be on new systems, areas, or yes, even combat balance and changes. We've mentioned this before, but just because we don't change something doesn't mean we aren't reading and taking it to heart. PTS is extremely valuable not just for feedback, but also bug reports. Look at each week's patch notes - you are a big part of why things get found!

Everyone, let's please stop bashing the team or making assumptions. This is your first and last warning.

if a dev reads something it should marked somehow,doesn't even have to say which dev(but not include forums mods, this makes people mad when they think an actual dev responded to their thread).

rhapsodious · October 2017

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

Ok, want to address a few things here.

First, we've thought about ways to incentivize participation on the PTS, but have always run into issues. For example:
The more bugs you report, the more rewards you get! This won't work because players might simply report random things as bugs just so they can reach the threshold.

Log in/complete a thing/get to this point and you get a reward! This isn't quite fair to our console players who don't have access to the PTS. We could just do rewards that already exist, but where's the incentive with that?

How about "the more bugs you report which get filed as internal tickets and routed to an appropriate team"? I imagine that while you'd still get a lot of people saying "you nerfed me this is a bug" or whatever, those just kinda get thrown into the abyss or filed as Not An Issue. Meanwhile, ones that have merit or warrant investigation get looked at further.

It doesn't take into consideration the severity/impact of the bug, which results in not locking out people who don't have time to, say, get a group together for a trial, or get through the main questline of the zone.

The point about consoles is valid, though.

As for us "not caring" about PTS feedback, this couldn't be farther from the truth. Many of our devs stay late just to read your feedback, whether it be on new systems, areas, or yes, even combat balance and changes. We've mentioned this before, but just because we don't change something doesn't mean we aren't reading and taking it to heart. PTS is extremely valuable not just for feedback, but also bug reports. Look at each week's patch notes - you are a big part of why things get found!

Ngl someone I was playing with the other day commented on how nice the CWC readable plaque textures look and I feel slightly personally responsible for that. So thanks for getting that feedback to the art team!

--

I think a lot of the issue stems from the fact that the team has a "vision" for combat. For example, that Agony would be changed to a HOT skill to complement the nature of the NB's proficiency at HOTs. Or the changes to Petrify and Rune Prison. This vision remains consistent throughout the PTS and patch cycle; tweaks are made but they still adhere to that vision. People who disagree with the vision, the concept, are never going to end up happy with it.

I'm not blindly defending ZOS there, I think if the reaction is overwhelmingly negative they should re-evaluate their design decisions. But it's something I've noticed, that most of the time, they're very reluctant to go back on their "idea". They change numbers and things like cast time, but they very rarely do a full revert, figuring that most people will (and do) adapt. Matches up pretty well with the idea of the PM/team lead giving them a task.

I think part of the frustration also stems from things like class balance, where Templars have had weird scaling (that I don't think has been determined to even be intentional or not) that doesn't get answered beyond a "we're looking into it". Which is as much of a communication problem as a "we don't have time to fit this in" problem. I think more open communication on issues like these for the duration of the PTS cycle would help immensely, as well as alleviate the concerns where the player base feels ignored. But at the end of the day, please remember that the dev team are humans, with feelings.

But really, even an occasional /lurk would help. (:

Rex-Umbra · October 2017

Pts is just players yelling about buffing there class/playstyle and nerf every one elses class/playstyle no one checks for bugs.

**The Reason Why The PTS is Pretty Much Pointless I Can Tell You Why.**

The Reason Why The PTS is Pretty Much Pointless I Can Tell You Why.