ZoS you are way too tolerant

Vanya · January 2019

The amount of daily negativity ,insults and utter nonsense is absolutely staggering, You need stricter rules,An honest suggestion. Sometimes I am disgusted to look at the general discussion. I wonder how players have energy to argue and complain on daily basis, yes indeed debates and discussion surely why forum is for,but its greatly exaggerated and you do allow individuals to drag with their trash talk for too long before the thread is eventually locked. Take it as critic please ,surely you wont disallow it ,right especially not for a payed customer. Not only the harassment in general but the quality of threads is poor.

courier · January 2019

I see what you did there.

qbit · January 2019

I get banned all the time. I don't know what you're on about them not banning enough people...

Dragonnord · January 2019

ZOS allows that in-game (PvP is hell hate zone) with people harrasing people and using all kind of horrific language (I see that daily) and you expect ZOS to do something here massively?

And I agree with you; 9 out of 10 threads here have insults, trolling, baiting, derailing, etc. It's really disgusting to read many of them.

mb10 · January 2019

Relax, its a gaming company not a dictatorship.
We invest are time, money and effort into the game over years, we are the fans who are the fuel to their business and ambitions.

We love the game and ofc get rattled when we arent happy with what they're doing so we will voice our opinions, every time.

Ryath_Waylander · January 2019

I'm seeing little love for this game. I come to these forums enjoy interesting discussions about a game I truly enjoy, when I have free time at work. All I've seen and heard on these forums since CWC event is moans, complaints, demands and more moaning. The only edifying post I've seen lately is the amazing crystal dragon one player built. Unfortunately, it was soon swallowed up in the sea of hate. It's a crying shame.

PapaWeeb · January 2019

Ryath_Waylander wrote: »

I'm seeing little love for this game. I come to these forums enjoy interesting discussions about a game I truly enjoy, when I have free time at work. All I've seen and heard on these forums since CWC event is moans, complaints, demands and more moaning. The only edifying post I've seen lately is the amazing crystal dragon one player built. Unfortunately, it was soon swallowed up in the sea of hate. It's a crying shame.

People behave this way because they do care about the game. If they didn't care, you wouldn't see them here

Tandor · January 2019

I do think the quality of the forum has gone markedly downhill in recent months. In my view it's nothing to do with the constant complaining about game changes or performance etc, those have been pretty constant since the game launched, rather it's associated with the more recent introduction of what come across to me as insidious and frankly puerile claims that "ZO$" are only interested in the bottom line and have no interest in producing a quality game - with the oft stated assumption that if a problem doesn't relate to the Crown Store they won't be interested in fixing it. That sort of nonsense is utterly non-constructive and could very usefully be removed from the forum leaving the more constructive discussions including the old chestnuts like game changes and performance.

All I would say about the argument that it's because people do care about the game that they behave in this way is that they have a funny way of showing it! That motivation doesn't excuse immature and insulting behaviour, it really doesn't.

Veuth · January 2019

The virtue signalling is strong here.

therift · January 2019

The Forum is a lightning rod of discontent. Better to have that discontent posted here, under the company's control, than to remove the lightning rod and force that discontent to strike all over the social media landscape.

starlizard70ub17_ESO · January 2019

PapaWeeb wrote: »

Ryath_Waylander wrote: »

I'm seeing little love for this game. I come to these forums enjoy interesting discussions about a game I truly enjoy, when I have free time at work. All I've seen and heard on these forums since CWC event is moans, complaints, demands and more moaning. The only edifying post I've seen lately is the amazing crystal dragon one player built. Unfortunately, it was soon swallowed up in the sea of hate. It's a crying shame.

People behave this way because they do care about the game. If they didn't care, you wouldn't see them here

People come here to whine and complain, (or they have free time at work.) People who love the game are too busy playing the game to show up on the forums that much.

Turelus · January 2019

I've mentioned before how I feel the forums could benefit from taking up an "anti-toxicity" rule much akin to Paradox Interactive's forum.

It's basically rules which mean people who only come to the forums to spread misinformation, attack players/developers or generally are not adding anything constructive and creating a toxic atmosphere can be removed.

This both makes the forum a nicer place for the community to come and talk, debate and leave feedback as well as a much nicer place for a companies staff to go. As Paradox put it, the forums are part of the workplace for their staff and as such they should be protected from abuse there.

It's worth nothing as well this isn't a censorship tool and many people still give Paradox a lot of negative feedback, the difference is now they have to be constructive in doing so and not just trash talking the company/staff with nothing helpful.

VaranisArano · January 2019

I'm not sure what you expected.

The forum is where players go to talk about the game and to give their two cents about current and future development. Often enough, those two cents are pointing out where they are unhappy or see a need for improvement.

As for insults and constantly questioning of ZOS' competence and commitment to a working game, I'll put it this way.

I've been playing PVP in Cyrodiil since before Morrowind dropped.

In that time, the persistent performance issues have not been fixed, new bugs have been introduced, old bugs that were squashed have reappeared, and Cyrodiil continues to be a laggy, buggy mess that's worse than when I started playing despite changes that were supposedly to make it better.

Yes, I love playing in Cyrodiil.

No, I'm not satisfied with ZOS' handling of Cyrodiil. And after years of problems and poor communication, yeah, it really starts to feel like ZOS can't or won't fix Cyrodiil.

Everyone on the forums who's complaining has a story like that. Maybe its their beloved MagSorc who got nerfed in Murkmire. Maybe its their MagWarden who hasn't been good since the PTS. Maybe its watching PVP be increasingly dominated by new proc sets that get introduced every single update only to be nerfed weeks or months down the line when ZOS finally admits they were unbalanced from the beginning. Maybe its the inadequacy of massively changing racial passives and only offering one free race change that doesn't even include a name change with it.

There are a lot of things I love about ESO. The questing. The characters. The crafting. The large scale battles of Cyrodiil. Battlegrounds. Tanking group dungeons. I'm sure everyone posting complaints on the forums has something they love about ESO.

But let's not pretend there aren't reasons to be dissatisfied with ZOS' handling of ESO.

Morgul667 · January 2019

I think zos should start that with themselves

Many people would be happy if there was some communication and logic behing what is going on

We are almost 5 years into the game , yet performance is bad , and nothing happens or is communicated by zos

Are we supposed to encourage such behavior so it looks all shiny ?

Brrrofski · January 2019

Well people who join a forum generally are invested in the game and care a lot about it. So they will be vocal about the negative parts of it be sure they want the game to be the best it can be.

If anyone wants more "positive" and fun reading, the Reddit subreddits are mostly that.

Anotherone773 · January 2019

Vanya wrote: »

The amount of daily negativity ,insults and utter nonsense is absolutely staggering, You need stricter rules,An honest suggestion. Sometimes I am disgusted to look at the general discussion. I wonder how players have energy to argue and complain on daily basis, yes indeed debates and discussion surely why forum is for,but its greatly exaggerated and you do allow individuals to drag with their trash talk for too long before the thread is eventually locked. Take it as critic please ,surely you wont disallow it ,right especially not for a payed customer. Not only the harassment in general but the quality of threads is poor.

People can either come here and vent about what are mostly valid issues or they can go play another game and spend their money there.

I just vented on here last night. Why? Because of a BG bug that means the BG never starts and we have to take a 20 minute penalty to get in a BG that might last 10-15 minutes to get an event ticket. This same bug was present the last time the mayhem event was on and yet the bug STILL is not fixed.

On top of that i had 4/5 matches for the BG quest and when the BG reset for me so i could get purple awards again, so did my quest. So instead of having to do 5 BGs for event tickets i had to do 9 BGs for the same two tickets.

Are these not valid issues to come to the boards about? Well we dont have to complain right? We could state the issue in a nice and kind way and then patiently wait until they fix it we grow old and die.

We already did that long ago. But when you have to come to the board about the same issues that were brought up 6, 12,36 months ago and have 5,10,50 threads on them... well you tend to be out of patience. Other dev teams in similar games can fix a majority of bugs in a timely manner. Why does it take ZOS 3 years to fix a bug? Hell CCP fixes their bugs in less than 48 hours usually.

So tell me...why should we pleasantly and patiently wait for ZOS to address issues when this game plays like it is in Beta... actually, i have played games in Beta with LESS bugs. But why should we not be annoyed frustrated and angry? The quality control here is terrible. I dread patch day because they fix 5 things but break 10 other things in the process.

No... if ZOS operated to the standard that is expected of a game company with a game like this and if ZOS operated with professionalism that is the standard for their industry, then things would different. But they are absolutely ridiculous and only a small step above those money pit game developers.They want people to stop complaining then they need to get a little better at fixing and a lot better at listening.

adriant1978 · January 2019

Turelus wrote: »

I've mentioned before how I feel the forums could benefit from taking up an "anti-toxicity" rule much akin to Paradox Interactive's forum.

It's basically rules which mean people who only come to the forums to spread misinformation, attack players/developers or generally are not adding anything constructive and creating a toxic atmosphere can be removed.

This both makes the forum a nicer place for the community to come and talk, debate and leave feedback as well as a much nicer place for a companies staff to go. As Paradox put it, the forums are part of the workplace for their staff and as such they should be protected from abuse there.

It's worth nothing as well this isn't a censorship tool and many people still give Paradox a lot of negative feedback, the difference is now they have to be constructive in doing so and not just trash talking the company/staff with nothing helpful.

There are already plenty of rules to cover most forms of genuine toxicity:

Abusive Language and Disruptive Behavior: We do not tolerate abusive language or disruptive behavior on our forums. This goes for abusive and disruptive comments and behavior that are directed at a ZeniMax Online employee and ESO community member, alike. Please remember to be respectful and constructive at all times on our forums, and help us maintain a friendly and welcoming atmosphere for all.

Conspiracy Theories and Misinformation: We do not tolerate the deliberate and malicious spreading of false info or conspiracy theories about ZeniMax Online Studios, its game(s), or its employees. This does not include honest mistakes; rather, this rule pertains to those who go out of their way to spread harmful or malicious rumors about ZeniMax Online Studios and its employees, or The Elder Scrolls Online.

Cursing and Profanity: Purposefully circumventing our forum profanity filter or otherwise cursing or using profanity is not permitted on our forums. Our forums have a profanity filter in place for the purpose of keeping profanity off our forums — please help us keep the ESO community constructive and profanity-free by respecting that filter.

Demands and Threats: We encourage you to share feedback, suggestion, and requests with us, but we expect all of our community members to refrain from resorting to demands or threats. We believe that demands and threats are not constructive. Threats of real-life violence, in particular, are something we take very seriously and do not tolerate in the ESO community.

Flaming: It’s okay to disagree and debate on the official ESO forums, but we do ask that you keep all disagreements civil, constructive, and on-topic. If a discussion gets heated and turns into a debate, remember that you should stick to debating the post and/or thread topic. It is never appropriate to resort to personal comments or jabs about those participating in the thread discussion.

But I think once you go down the road of demanding that all contributions be 'constructive' it does cross the line into censorship. I've seen this rule in place on other sites and seen people get sanctioned simply for saying "I don't like this". I don't think we need that here.

Aurielle · January 2019

Is this the only game forum you visit? They’re all like this when developers make unpopular changes. Most of us are here because we enjoy and are invested in the game; it’s natural to get upset when characters on which you’ve spent thousands of hours playing get hit with unnecessary nerfs that are very obviously designed to net more race change token sales.

Anotherone773 · January 2019

Turelus wrote: »

I've mentioned before how I feel the forums could benefit from taking up an "anti-toxicity" rule much akin to Paradox Interactive's forum.

It's basically rules which mean people who only come to the forums to spread misinformation, attack players/developers or generally are not adding anything constructive and creating a toxic atmosphere can be removed.

This both makes the forum a nicer place for the community to come and talk, debate and leave feedback as well as a much nicer place for a companies staff to go. As Paradox put it, the forums are part of the workplace for their staff and as such they should be protected from abuse there.

It's worth nothing as well this isn't a censorship tool and many people still give Paradox a lot of negative feedback, the difference is now they have to be constructive in doing so and not just trash talking the company/staff with nothing helpful.

Censorship is never a good idea. When people start feeling that they are being censored for what they say, they stop bothering to say anything and just leave. Many games with heavily moderated boards like you suggest, tend to be very dead and the devs get almost no feedback. People just leave. I have never played an online game, in 22 years, in which a heavily censored forum also had an active and robust gaming community. Usually the game appeared to be nearly dead.

a great way to keep people from complaining is to address concerns in a timely manner. This game has horrible customer service, almost non existent PR. and zero quality control. How about we suggest they work on those instead of invoking Stalinism to silence the opposition?

VaranisArano · January 2019

Tandor wrote: »

I do think the quality of the forum has gone markedly downhill in recent months. In my view it's nothing to do with the constant complaining about game changes or performance etc, those have been pretty constant since the game launched, rather it's associated with the more recent introduction of what come across to me as insidious and frankly puerile claims that "ZO$" are only interested in the bottom line and have no interest in producing a quality game - with the oft stated assumption that if a problem doesn't relate to the Crown Store they won't be interested in fixing it. That sort of nonsense is utterly non-constructive and could very usefully be removed from the forum leaving the more constructive discussions including the old chestnuts like game changes and performance.

All I would say about the argument that it's because people do care about the game that they behave in this way is that they have a funny way of showing it! That motivation doesn't excuse immature and insulting behaviour, it really doesn't.

I suspect that those "insidious and frankly puerile" claims that ZOS is only interested in monetizing the game at the expense of playability have something to do with the ongoing, persistent, known issues that have not been fixed that cover all areas of gameplay. Cyrodiil performance issues and recurring bugs, Battleground queue bugs and MMR problems, recurring Trials exploits, and unfixed bugs with quests. Dungeon groupfinder queue problems (which borked the Undaunted Event for the 2nd year in a row) and the Daily Random Fungal Grotto I Dungeon exploit. These are known and have been known in some cases for years and are still not fixed.

The jade-colored glasses looks at that and says "Whelp, ZOS either can't or won't fix these issues. They certainly don't want to communicate with us about it. But they'll talk about the Crown Store, LOL."

The rose-colored glasses says "Well, Crown Store changes are usually quicker and easier, and that's why it gets priority. Plus, the monetization-planning team is probably different from the Fixing team, so surely ZOS cares about playability but it just takes more time and effort for us to see the results and they don't want to announce stuff if there's no progress."

I don't have a problem with ZOS making money. I do have a problem with ZOS' failure to fix major known long-standing problems with their game. But then, I'm of the opinion that a quality product makes more money in the long term than bug-ridden game with sweet cosmetics, but then, I'm not looking at a quarterly profit margin to meet.

Morgul667 · January 2019

Anotherone773 wrote: »

Turelus wrote: »

I've mentioned before how I feel the forums could benefit from taking up an "anti-toxicity" rule much akin to Paradox Interactive's forum.

It's basically rules which mean people who only come to the forums to spread misinformation, attack players/developers or generally are not adding anything constructive and creating a toxic atmosphere can be removed.

This both makes the forum a nicer place for the community to come and talk, debate and leave feedback as well as a much nicer place for a companies staff to go. As Paradox put it, the forums are part of the workplace for their staff and as such they should be protected from abuse there.

It's worth nothing as well this isn't a censorship tool and many people still give Paradox a lot of negative feedback, the difference is now they have to be constructive in doing so and not just trash talking the company/staff with nothing helpful.

Censorship is never a good idea. When people start feeling that they are being censored for what they say, they stop bothering to say anything and just leave. Many games with heavily moderated boards like you suggest, tend to be very dead and the devs get almost no feedback. People just leave. I have never played an online game, in 22 years, in which a heavily censored forum also had an active and robust gaming community. Usually the game appeared to be nearly dead.

a great way to keep people from complaining is to address concerns in a timely manner. This game has horrible customer service, almost non existent PR. and zero quality control. How about we suggest they work on those instead of invoking Stalinism to silence the opposition?

You said it better than me xD

Tandor · January 2019

Morgul667 wrote: »

I think zos should start that with themselves

Many people would be happy if there was some communication and logic behing what is going on

We are almost 5 years into the game , yet performance is bad , and nothing happens or is communicated by zos

Are we supposed to encourage such behavior so it looks all shiny ?

No, you're supposed to air such grievances but in a polite and constructive way.

Morgul667 · January 2019

Tandor wrote: »

Morgul667 wrote: »

I think zos should start that with themselves

Many people would be happy if there was some communication and logic behing what is going on

We are almost 5 years into the game , yet performance is bad , and nothing happens or is communicated by zos

Are we supposed to encourage such behavior so it looks all shiny ?

No, you're supposed to air such grievances but in a polite and constructive way.

We have done it and got nothing but disrespect from ZOS... this is usually what triggers people. Key issues not addressed, terrible communication and bad attitude.

Im not saying people are right to take it out on zos, im saying zos brought it on itself and it will not change if they keep going like today

Zathras · January 2019

Turelus wrote: »

I've mentioned before how I feel the forums could benefit from taking up an "anti-toxicity" rule much akin to Paradox Interactive's forum.

It's basically rules which mean people who only come to the forums to spread misinformation, attack players/developers or generally are not adding anything constructive and creating a toxic atmosphere can be removed.

This both makes the forum a nicer place for the community to come and talk, debate and leave feedback as well as a much nicer place for a companies staff to go. As Paradox put it, the forums are part of the workplace for their staff and as such they should be protected from abuse there.

It's worth nothing as well this isn't a censorship tool and many people still give Paradox a lot of negative feedback, the difference is now they have to be constructive in doing so and not just trash talking the company/staff with nothing helpful.

I hear what you are saying, and I agree in spirit. However, once you take an active stance on having a "clean" forum, it can become a problem unto itself. It tends to foster zealotry in the forum goers, and intolerance towards others who have negative criticism: a protectionist mentality for their game.

Now, there certainly is that already, but it gets countered. Active, focused, forum guidelines that culls people and hushes naysayers, tends to create imbalance and breed an environment that becomes toxic in a different way, yet toxic nonetheless.

I think having a "Don't Be Too Much of a *** or You Take a Vacation" unwritten rule works well, when used properly.

[Edit for censor bypass.]

Turelus · January 2019

adriant1978 wrote: »

But I think once you go down the road of demanding that all contributions be 'constructive' it does cross the line into censorship. I've seen this rule in place on other sites and seen people get sanctioned simply for saying "I don't like this". I don't think we need that here.

"I don't like this" is fine, adding more would be better but it's still fine.
The Paradox rules are aimed at the people who go from thread to thread saying "Devs don't play" "they only care about cash" etc. and really just making posts which drum up discontent rather than building on or providing usable feedback.

adriant1978 · January 2019

Turelus wrote: »

adriant1978 wrote: »

But I think once you go down the road of demanding that all contributions be 'constructive' it does cross the line into censorship. I've seen this rule in place on other sites and seen people get sanctioned simply for saying "I don't like this". I don't think we need that here.

"I don't like this" is fine, adding more would be better but it's still fine.
The Paradox rules are aimed at the people who go from thread to thread saying "Devs don't play" "they only care about cash" etc. and really just making posts which drum up discontent rather than building on or providing usable feedback.

I take your point, but I have seen this kind of codified "be nice" rule mutate into a complete intolerance of criticism. I prefer standards of conduct to remain unwritten where possible along with a certain amount of moderator discretion.

Yolokin_Swagonborn · January 2019

I've seen people banned for posting funny gifs, Banned for reacting to other people toxic behavior instead of holding back. Banned for quoting someone or using parody, satire or sarcasm to illustrate a point.

I think the enforcement of these forums are plenty strict as they are.