Chadak wrote: »

"ZOS, What are you doing?"

Stupid, amateur-hour things.

What they should be doing is in line with this.

Particularly this excerpt -

A. Best Practices

At the beginning of concept development, the engineer encounters evolving user preferences, imprecise
specifications of product parameters, varying levels of technology maturity, market and funding uncertainties, and
perhaps evolving regulatory, political and other hard-to-quantify factors.

Often called “the fuzzy front end” of product development, this phase is absolutely critical to embarking on a lean engineering undertaking.

Several key best practices have emerged.

Perhaps the most important element is to focus on understanding the customer and end user value expectations for the product – its features and attributes, quality, price or cost and availability.

No amount of efficient lifecycle engineering or engineering process improvement can make up for a poorly conceived product that a customer does not want.

Difficulties include less-than-fully-defined user value (after all, the product is less than fully defined at the
beginning of product development) and the importance of multiple stakeholders, particularly when end user and
acquirer (stakeholder that puts up development money) may be different. The issue of value definition and creation
in product development was studied by Slack.

A second important element is to keep the “design space” as open as long as possible before making critical decisions to address uncertainty. Toyota uses a technique called set based design in which the design choices for
subsystems and components are made from a set of possible choices ranging from a proven design to ones from
emerging technologies.

The final choice is delayed as long as possible, even into the detail design stage, in order to
have the best information available before a final choice is made.


***

ZOS' consistent history for at least the past two years' worth of ESO development demonstrates two things clearly that are in contradiction of these fundamentally summarized best practice design principles, and it is worth noting that these design principles are industry agnostic; they are designed for industry ubiquity in any industry in which a product is designed and/or fabricated, no matter what that product is.

Firstly, ZOS has shown no meaningful sign of servicing the majority of their customers. The nature of their most consistent changes reflect a pattern of preference for vocal minorities within specific and exclusive subsets of the playerbase, and are never ideal to the most common use cases.

Secondly, ZOS demonstrates a clear pattern of inadequate planning, including a noteworthy incomprehension of their own fundamental systems.

This game is a machine, just as certainly as the engine in your car or the device on which you're reading this. They make it systematically obvious that they do not understand the interoperations of their own mechanical systems through egregious and rapid-fire 'throw things at the wall until they stick' method of patching and re-patching of the same things.

This is not in line with industry standards of tweaking and modifying the mechanics of powers, abilities and classes; fine tuning is not done in double-digit percentage modifications. It's usually not called 'fine tuning' at all when large single integer modifications are being made.

Between these two points, I see no basis for confusion about how we've arrived at our present circumstance.

ZOS does not know what they are doing when it comes to the most mechanical of systems inherent to this machine we call a game. They have no singular design goal when it comes to classes or even single powers and abilities, and this is repeatedly demonstrated through their consistency of inconsistency when it comes to the magnitude and nature of their modifications made to them.

This is not a pattern of behavior that demonstrates confidence or even working knowledge of the mechanics at play.

This is not a pattern of behavior that indicates any plan or goal inherent to a desired outcome.

ZOS is winging it, and that is not, has never been and will never be an acceptable engineering practice in any respected or respectable field or industry.