What am I paying a subscription fee for?

Mullberry · April 2014

Fozee wrote: »

I'm not sure $15 is hard earned. Most of us probably make that in the bathroom every month at work.

The girls where I work charge $20

byghostlightrwb17_ESO · April 2014

pallan68b14_ESO wrote: »

"We will be bringing down the North American megaserver for maintenance and disabling logins tonight at 11:47pm EDT. We'll let you know as soon as we have an update. Thank you for your patience."

Translation,

We'd like to thank you for spending your hard earned money on a broken game. Please ignore all the game breaking bugs, server lag, rollbacks, and server outages. Although we did have beta testing, we were too busy counting the money from preorders to get these issues fixed. While most other MMO's fail within months because of the same issues, we consider ourselves special and have learned nothing from them. Thanks again folks! We go FTP in a week.

So whats your answer? Lets just keep ignoring all the issues and just keep the servers live so you can play? or you prefer the devs to just click their fingers and everything becomes perfect?

WoW had these issues at the start and seemingly It didnt hurt them. EQ2 had least issues at the start and its still here 10 years later. Thats just naming two.

I say all that as an Aussie who now losses two nights a week (one of them a Friday).

Jeremy · April 2014

pallan68b14_ESO wrote: »

"We will be bringing down the North American megaserver for maintenance and disabling logins tonight at 11:47pm EDT. We'll let you know as soon as we have an update. Thank you for your patience."

Translation,

We'd like to thank you for spending your hard earned money on a broken game. Please ignore all the game breaking bugs, server lag, rollbacks, and server outages. Although we did have beta testing, we were too busy counting the money from preorders to get these issues fixed. While most other MMO's fail within months because of the same issues, we consider ourselves special and have learned nothing from them. Thanks again folks! We go FTP in a week.

I'm not defending the bugs. But going to provide some perspective.

Most other MMORPGs I was around for at launch were virtually unplayable for days and weeks after. Final Fantasy 14 for example I could not even log in for weeks due to countless errors and server capacity issues. SWTRO I had to wait in a massive queue line and pray I didn't lose connection once I was lucky enough to get on.

So by comparison - the issues this game has had upon launch have been relatively minor.

Sorcerious · April 2014

People need to stop thinking that, due to the anonimity of the internet, they can take to the streets (or, well, the internet) voicing their opinion that they think everyone values.

I also had my fair share of problems, but that's the problem of today: people want their content now, not when it's finished, NOW, in whatever state it is in. All games these days get released with day-one patches, or get patched within a week with a major list of bug fixes.

We, as people, created this ourselves. And oh yeah, consumer rights are overrated. They are perfectly allowed to have bugs in their and take the servers offline within reason.

If only 2% of the playerbase (again a very minor, very vocal part of the community) have massive issues and only 2 hours downtime a week (or 4 or 5), that's still within reason and perfectly acceptable.

sirtenleekill · April 2014

I deff do agree on this but not too the full extent, there's a lot of things going on for them so we do need to be patient HOWEVER if these major bugs keep happening then the subscription fee should be waved for May as well, the least Zeni and Betha can do, no one wants to pay for a broken game I don't mind playing it though

since we did purchase it...

revanghost · April 2014

darkkterror_ESO wrote: »

Lag wrote: »

Technically you haven't payed for a subscription fee until the beginning of May.

Damn, I wasn't fast enough, not by a long shot.

This is quite wrong, and fails to consider what your $60/80 buys you. By buying the game, you have paid money for the first month. It's not "free." Just because marketing tells you that you get 30 days "free" time does not mean you didn't pay for it.

Jadeviper1974 · April 2014

Fozee wrote: »

I'm not sure $15 is hard earned. Most of us probably make that in the bathroom every month at work.

Lets not discuss how you are earning money in the bathroom at work. This is a public forum with children present.

raglau · April 2014

Ergophobian wrote: »

pecheckler wrote: »

I wish the online video game industry had service level agreements like so many other hosted services.

Like who? Please list a hosted service that promises uptime. The best anyone can do is "We try for 100%, but we can't promise anything."

Office 365 - 99.95% uptime with financially backed SLA. £9 per month. AWS and Azure, very similar. Many more.

Thepal · April 2014

My concern is growing that these issues may lead to F2P. I'm really enjoying the game, and think this may be the first MMO I will actually stick with due to the fact it plays exactly how I want an MMO to play.

But these bugs are growing. More and more people are going to leave/get refunds. The more this happens, the less money Zenimax will have. If they drop beneath some magic number, they're not going to be able to support continuing the game as-is, and it will end up F2P. When that happens, the game will no longer be able to sustain itself. I'm hoping we're still far off from that many people calling it quits (my thought is that a large percentage of those that do get refunds would post here, which means refunds aren't as wide-spread as they seem from reading the forums).

I'm not attacking Zenimax. I'm a programmer, so I have an idea of just how much code would be tied up in this issue (since it seems to be related to how the megaserver itself works) and that anything change they do make would need to be tested to a ridiculous degree to make sure it doesn't break anything else (since, as this bug as demonstrated, an issue with the megaserver code can cause large issues... much bigger than we're experiencing). I'm sure they are concentrating on fixing this more than anything else, since anything else would be insane. And it will take time. I'm just hoping not too much time.

Jadeviper1974 · April 2014

Ergophobian wrote: »

pecheckler wrote: »

I wish the online video game industry had service level agreements like so many other hosted services.

Like who? Please list a hosted service that promises uptime. The best anyone can do is "We try for 100%, but we can't promise anything."

I pay Comcast $80 a month, I've had "downtime" with them for 7 months they can't solve. I can't do anything about it.
I pay T-Mobile $120 a month, and many times calls simply won't go through. I can't do anything about it.
I pay Zenimax $15 a month, for unlimited access to a really cool game. Since launch, it has been down for a total of 2 hours when I actually was available to play.
It's a game, get over your entitled selves.

I don't actually mean this to be sarcastic and/or slight to the poster, I am genuinely trying to give information. Comcast will actually pro-rate your monthly bill for any downtime over 1 hour. Now you must call and report the outage and get a reference number, then during business hours you have to call customer support and give them the reference number that tech support gave you and ask for them to pro-rate your bill. If you do it enough not only do they pro-rate, but they will give you a free month of service. I have gotten 3 free months before when the techs actually ran over the hub or whatever they were supposed to be working on near my house, service was out for like 2 days. It takes a bit of legwork on your part but Comcast will at least try to make it good.

(Edited for spelling)

Khami · April 2014

revanghost wrote: »

darkkterror_ESO wrote: »

Lag wrote: »

Technically you haven't payed for a subscription fee until the beginning of May.

Damn, I wasn't fast enough, not by a long shot.

This is quite wrong, and fails to consider what your $60/80 buys you. By buying the game, you have paid money for the first month. It's not "free." Just because marketing tells you that you get 30 days "free" time does not mean you didn't pay for it.

The free month free is not part of the price of the game. Collector Editions are always more but they have more in them.

I paid $80 last year for SimCity Deluxe Edition. It's not a MMO. Price is the same as the digital version of Imperial Edition of ESO. The $100 for the box version was the cost of the book and the huge statue.

revanghost · April 2014

Jadeviper1974 wrote: »

Ergophobian wrote: »

pecheckler wrote: »

I wish the online video game industry had service level agreements like so many other hosted services.

Like who? Please list a hosted service that promises uptime. The best anyone can do is "We try for 100%, but we can't promise anything."

I pay Comcast $80 a month, I've had "downtime" with them for 7 months they can't solve. I can't do anything about it.
I pay T-Mobile $120 a month, and many times calls simply won't go through. I can't do anything about it.
I pay Zenimax $15 a month, for unlimited access to a really cool game. Since launch, it has been down for a total of 2 hours when I actually was available to play.
It's a game, get over your entitled selves.

I don't actually mean this to be sarcastic and/or slight to the poster, I am genuinely trying to give information. Comcast will actually pro-rate your monthly bill for any downtime over 1 hour. Now you must call and report the outage and get a reference number, then during business hours you have to call customer support and give them the reference number that tech support gave you and ask for them to pro-rate your bill. If you do it enough not only do they pro-rate, but they will give you a free month of service. I have gotten 3 free months before when the techs actually ran over the hub or whatever they were supposed to be working on near my house, service was out for like 2 days. It takes a bit of legwork on your part but Comcast will at least try to make it good.

(Edited for spelling)

This is excellent, mainly because you elegantly expose what big businesses do to the consumer (in this case, Ergophobian) by misinformation, misdirection, and lengthy confusing rhetoric. Consumers feel like they can't do anything about getting treated like garbage simply because they value the service too much to leave and/or no one else offers the service.

So, in their misinformed state, consumers often accept their fate and their lost money and bark at other consumers who don't want to "just accept it" like they have done. In this function, these accepting consumers become a part of the sustaining of the problem that they originally didn't like.

Yasha · April 2014

Khami wrote: »

The free month free is not part of the price of the game.

There is no free month. The $90 for standard edition includes 30 days of game time. The actual language used is "•30 days of game time included". If you consider that as "free" then logically the game is also "free"; the $90 is just a donation?

byghostlightrwb17_ESO wrote: »

So whats your answer? Lets just keep ignoring all the issues and just keep the servers live so you can play? or you prefer the devs to just click their fingers and everything becomes perfect?

WoW had these issues at the start and seemingly It didnt hurt them. EQ2 had least issues at the start and its still here 10 years later. Thats just naming two.

The answer is to properly test the game under load and hammer out the serious bugs that prevent us from actually playing the game before charging a sub. We are essentially paying a sub to do beta testing atm.

I am certain that the serious issues will be largely dealt with over the next two months- but I do not agree that I should have to pay a sub while they work out how to make the game playable.

I have been at the launch of 4 recent mmos (GW2, NWO, Rift, Tera) and none of them had the constant issues that actually prevented me from playing the game. This is easily the most bug plagued launch out of those four. Whoppty-doo if it is a better launch than the pioneer mmos of yore.

thegamekittenub17_ESO · April 2014

-ahem- What I meant by free..is this company considers it free no matter if we paid for it when we bought the game.

Do I think it is a free month? Absolutely not. I purchased game with game time. And if that wasn't enough I had to sub right away to get that 30 days. So it was not free in any form.

But when I made my statement I meant that this company considers it free. I have yet to see any employee of this company call it anything else.

Sorry, I should of worded my post better.

jarrellj · April 2014

Sacred_Warrior wrote: »

Le sigh. Will refrain from insults here and let angry customer vent. Still funny yet really irritating.

If you find it so irritating why did you read the post in the first place? The subject told you exactly what the post would be about so if you find that kind of thing irritating why didn't you just keep moving? Because it's hard to resist the temptation to be smug and self righteous?

Personally I find that a LOT more irritating than their fully justified complaints about hard earned money spent on a broken game.

OP, I hope you'll let us know if your problem gets solved. Many others In The same boat and feeling the same way.

JJ

Zershar_Vemod · April 2014

I am actually surprised about the lack of intelligence virtually all the complainers have displayed...

You paid nothing so far - it's the free month. If we were paying right now, THIS is what it would go to - FIXING bugs as they show up and iron out the game for the future.

AlliN · April 2014

If only 2% of the playerbase (again a very minor, very vocal part of the community) have massive issues and only 2 hours downtime a week (or 4 or 5), that's still within reason and perfectly acceptable.

Is having main quest bugged in a way I can't progress at lev 17 with many other players, becasue the phase is not changing - and relogs, abandons and all client side solutions are not working, becasue problem is databese related - within reason to you? Is that acceptable with the price and sub?

As a bug, yes, as a problem presisting a week, not really.

Ah, yes, I forgot, support advice is "Create new character for the time being, sorry".

Look me in the eyes (of text) 0_0 and tell me, this is right.

thegamekittenub17_ESO · April 2014

Zershar_Vemod wrote: »

I am actually surprised about the lack of intelligence virtually all the complainers have displayed...

You paid nothing so far - it's the free month. If we were paying right now, THIS is what it would go to - FIXING bugs as they show up and iron out the game for the future.

So, if we read the box and it states..contains 30 days of playtime it does not state you get free 30 days of game time.

So that means that upon purchase that the 30 days is included with the charge.

Please don't call me unintelligent, when I can clearly see what is on the box that is sitting by my desk.

Name calling or judging someone's intelligence over this is just wrong.

cf197778_ESO · April 2014

Fozee wrote: »

I'm not sure $15 is hard earned. Most of us probably make that in the bathroom every month at work.

Sounds like a bargain. Which bathroom do you work at?

Yasha · April 2014

Zershar_Vemod wrote: »

I am actually surprised about the lack of intelligence virtually all the complainers have displayed...

You paid nothing so far - it's the free month. If we were paying right now, THIS is what it would go to - FIXING bugs as they show up and iron out the game for the future.

Yes, naturally the person who apparently cannot read calls others "unintelligent".

You know what the word is for the period a game company spends fixing bugs- especially ones that prevent you from even playing the game- "Beta".

Saerydoth · April 2014

Honestly, overall the game was going pretty well (aside from some quest bugs) until last night. Last night the you know what seems to have hit the fan. And tonight it did again. Although I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt, after all WOW still has these types of issues to this day, 9 years after launch.

It seems that most of the bank issues are happening during periods when the servers are having issues. There might be a connection there.

That said, it would be REALLY nice if they would post at least saying that they know there are issues with the servers tonight and are working on it.

I'm actually ok to just play Diablo 3 tonight (since I'm waiting for someone else to be able to start ESO with me anyway). But some acknowledgement of the issue would be nice.