“When the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, they end up running the companies. The product people get driven out of the decision making forums, and the companies forget what it means to make great products.”

_Steve Jobs (The Lost Interview)

The amount of posts on here about ZoS not caring about the game or about fixing issues is ludicrous to me. This game isn't perfect, but neither is any other game. It's going to have issues, and sometimes those issues take a while to fix. I've been playing ESO since 2015 and haven't had half the issues others are reporting because I'm on Xbox, but based on my own personal experience I think ZoS is doing a fantastic job on the communication front. Every issue I've had in this game that I've submitted a ticket for, I've heard back from someone within 24 hours. Even during this last Undaunted event when my game glitched and I didn't receive my Mystery Reward Box at the end of a dungeon they were quick to respond and remedied the issue for me. There was one instance in particular about a year ago where I kept getting stuck in werewolf form, and they corresponded with me for three days via email to keep me updated until they figured out what was wrong and fixed it. So yes, this game has its issues and will never run exactly the way you all want it to, but ZoS is a great team of people who care about the game and our experience.

That's not the question I would be asking.

The question I would ask is, "Does ZOS care enough about random online bullies to allow them to fundamentally alter established and negotiated work priority?"

I sure hope not. Give control to a bunch of *** stirrers and you'll generally just wind up with more ***.

Now, I do agree that there could be some more responsiveness to 'rulebook' type inquiries - whether doing something in the game is officially approved or officially disapproved. But for the most part, I feel the team is doing a good job progressing incrementally through actual issues while letting the bored tantrum throwers burn themselves out if the Report button doesn't catch up to them first.

i think they care but, they are ordered to do what their bosses tell them to do.

here is some proof that they do care:

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

Update: We do have a (untested) fix for this issue, but we want to make sure we do thorough testing on it first and not rush it into a patch. Our plan is to have this fix included in the next update.

comments like that have been the ongoing theme since beta, no one can deny this.

but, sadly there are many other problems that plague eso.
when Paul Sage quit eso, they should never have made it public.

Neoealth wrote: »

Do you really think discussions or debates thrive if everyone just has the same opinion? And opinions can obviously be positive or negative.

Discussions and debates only thrive if everyone's playing by the same set of rules.

Some prefer the methodology of Ericson, Murphy, and Zeuschner. Others prefer the more private counsel of Me, Myself, and I.

Rain_Greyraven wrote: »

Example: Have an opinion other than "Orange man bad" in game and see how long you keep your account. Yet.... you can deliver death threats all day long over trivial things like owning a certain Apex mount . You will get banned on the forums for posting a a gif of a certain President but are allowed to post gifs of other Presidents.

Technically, any real-life political discourse is against the Code of Conduct and should be reported as such, but this is an instance where that specific use falls under targeted harassment of a Zenimax Media Inc. member or his or her family. The rule applies regardless of how visible or obvious the connection is.

"ZOS" isn't some monolithic personality.

I'm sure the people whose job it is to fix bugs and improve gameplay care about fixing bugs and improving gameplay.

I picked other because the whole question is a bit too general. ESO is a gaming company, they produce games. If they didn't care about their game, they wouldn't continue to support it. TLDR at end.

But they're definition of "care" and ours as players differs wildly.

From ESO perspective, there are probably individuals in every department that DO care about the game. and each team itself probably has a global aspect of "caring" Im sure the Dev's care about putting out a quality product that they would want to play themselves. Doesn't mean that they get the authorization or budget to do what they envision, but they probably care.

The Board Probably cares from the perspective of a revenue stream, and whatever increases that stream, they will do. If reducing Lag by spending millions on improving the hardware in their data-centers improved revenue flow enough, they would do it.

Customer service reps probably are a mixed bag as well. Some care, some don't. CSR as a group would probably say they do care...I'm sure many of them like getting paid, and care a great deal about their job continuing. (I do know that CSR is a thankless profession that breeds stress and heart conditions, been there in the past for many years. just pointing out that perceptions differ greatly here).

the player-base has a very different perspective, and even within that, there's probably dozens of fractions of perspectives as to what defines "caring". If you play PvP on a console, you probably think they don't care. If you play solo and casual group content on a PC, you may think they do.

TLDR :
End result? "Caring" is a broad envelope that you need to define better. And the problem is, there's so many different variations of what really is "Caring" that the poll would be invalid even with that. it would be better to list "reasons" why people feel the company doesn't care. Even then, the whole accusation is inflammatory and confrontational. People say stuff like "you don't care" as a last resort push button in arguments when they don't have anything else to stand on. It's a passive aggressive attack, and more often then not, competently unfounded.

EDIT: not being accusatory here OP, you sound like you are honestly just interested in what people think about the whole caring concept. I just wrote my thoughts down on the concept in general.

DMuehlhausen wrote: »

ATomiX96 wrote: »

they care about fixing bugs, but they are too tunneled on crown store content.

They aren't though. it's separate teams that do crown store and bug fixes. This is a massive game with billions of lines of code. Stuff happens and breaks. The best example of this comes from Aliens Colonial Marines. The game was ok, but was essentially broken fro about 3 years before they stopped support for it in like 2014. Just this year a modder noticed in the code a single miss spelled word. This one word is why the game was broken as it controlled the AI for the Aliens and how they react. The word was suppose to be Tether, but somebody had typed in Teather. This one typo is responsible, for most of, what was wrong with the game.

So yeah it actually can come down to a single word in all the code that can be breaking the game.

https://za.ign.com/aliens-colonial-marines/122775/news/modder-fixes-aliens-colonial-marines-ai-with-one-simple-codi

If one typo in code breaks your entire application then that is some poorly designed software. Sure, typos suck, and sometimes they can leave you scratching your head for a few minutes, maybe a few hours at most if your design flow is terrible. I'd love to just get a glimpse of the code used in ESO. I bet it looks like the stuff I was writing back in 1999 when I was 16, and trying to teach myself C++.

This of course depends on who you count as Zos. The ones in the trenches working on it day in day out I'm sure care about the product. Unfortunately the higher up the corporate chain the less involved in day to day matters and the more quarterly profits matter. Also unfortunate that they are the ones that call the shots and decide which team gets what funding. Since crown store can show a direct low cost/high profit ratio and maintenance doesn't, guess where funding priorities lie....

ATomiX96 wrote: »

they care about fixing bugs, but they are too tunneled on crown store content.

Then why do we still have a broken mailbox system after 5 years?
why do we need so many mods to right the glitches and bugs they never fixed?
why is pvp server worst than when the game came out?
why is the only thing thats working properly is the god damn cash shop ?
why is it that everytime that we points something that isnt woprking via in game ticket we still get blamed or we get told that they care and its never fixed?
why is it that some quests in alikir are still cross wired with fighters guild quest and get into conflict with each other?

The Devs care, otherwise corprate can make stupid choices so it seems like ZOS doesn't care

To be brutally honest, I have no interest in additional Trials, elite dungeons or similar.
I am entirely a PvE player.

To me two releases of these are a total non-starter and add nothing to the game as they are 'End Game level content'.

For my money, they could scrap these Dungeon Only DLC releases and spend the resources on fixing bugs.

Malborn
PC-EU