ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

Turelus wrote: »

@ZOS_GinaBruno is it possible to have the Dev Tracker set to a list format like a thread or just the name of the topic and first 200 characters of the message a dev has posted? Right now it's kind of a mess to read with topics being hugely long or small, this thread for example the Dev Tracker is showing one massive long post for your last reply taking up the entire left side.

Yep, that's one of the options we're exploring.

Can you also explore the option to set a default language to browse the forums and dev tracker so we don't manually have to go through every English language option every time?

I have NO IDEA why this has taken so long for you guys--and please do share when the dev tracker was added, because I certainly don't remember being it there a few days ago.

chipz88b14_ESO wrote: »

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

Harkrider wrote: »

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

Hey there, everyone! As @jamesharv2005ub17_ESO‌ suggested, a good starting point is the Dev Tracker. We understand that it may be a little overwhelming to sort through, and we're looking at ways to improve the functionality there. Also, we're planning to implement a Dev post signifier so you can easily spot when a Dev has responded in a thread, and also jump right to the next Dev reply. We hope to have this live pretty soon.

In regards to the issues that you may have run across or report, please understand that the severity of each issue varies greatly, and some are more complex than others. Every issue requires some level of investigation, though, and typically this is where you'll find the silence coming into play while we look into all the factors and try to figure things out.

We do encourage everyone to check out the patch notes that get published weekly during our scheduled maintenance, as we'll list out the issues that have been addressed and fixed.

Thanks for the reply, @ZOS_GinaBruno

is the dev tracker a new feature? I sure as heck don't remember it being there a few days ago.

It's always been there, just a little hidden.

A little? Can someone please provide a link to this dev tracker or point out where a link can be found?

Okay, upper right corner, got it: http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/tracker. ^f is my friend.

I'm sure it's meant to be helpful, but it's a bit of a cluster atm.

Altairien wrote: »

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

Hey there, everyone! As @jamesharv2005ub17_ESO? suggested, a good starting point is the Dev Tracker. We understand that it may be a little overwhelming to sort through, and we're looking at ways to improve the functionality there. Also, we're planning to implement a Dev post signifier so you can easily spot when a Dev has responded in a thread, and also jump right to the next Dev reply. We hope to have this live pretty soon.

In regards to the issues that you may have run across or report, please understand that the severity of each issue varies greatly, and some are more complex than others. Every issue requires some level of investigation, though, and typically this is where you'll find the silence coming into play while we look into all the factors and try to figure things out.

We do encourage everyone to check out the patch notes that get published weekly during our scheduled maintenance, as we'll list out the issues that have been addressed and fixed.

The issue in this case is two-fold, one of which is directly in your control.

1) Rock solid data integrity is absolutely essential in any online only game. Essential! Players don't have hundreds of saved games to fall back on when things go wrong. We have exactly one saved game and it's located in your datacenter. We trust (and pay) that you maintain 100% rock solid handling of that data. This is clearly not the case here.

ESO right now isn't a game, it's a Russian Roulette simulator. *click* Nothing. *click* Nothing. *bam* Oh, I was only horribly injured (loss of bank slots, banked items, and banked gold). *BAM* I've been killed (add loss of character progression, skills points, mounts, etc.)

Like many players, I can handle "typical" launch issues such as failure to logon, broken quests, blocked content, etc. As a programmer, I understand that stuff happens. This issue isn't "typical."

I know it's not the Community Team's fault that someone or several someone's failed at basic software development. Whether it was not specifying requirements sufficiently, not performing thorough unit or integration testing, or if it was a failure at the functional or performance level, something failed. This game should have never gone live with data reliability as poor as this. But it has, so...

2) Keeping consistent, open, frequent communication is vital when problems are this serious. ZOS has already violated our trust by compromising the data(see #1 above) yet you compound the error by keeping secrets from us now. This is directly under the control of the Community Team.

You should be giving us frequent updates, daily at minimum. Here are just a few examples of what we should've been hearing throughout this process (which, for the record, has now lasted over 2 weeks):

• "A special dev team (consisting of...) has been formed to fix this problem. This team will be focused exclusively on this issue until it is fixed."
• "The dev team has gathered all the data thus far and they are currently evaluating possible scenarios and causes."
• "The dev team has narrowed down possible causes and are now performing extensive testing to eliminate possibilities and isolate the cause(s) of this bug."
• "The dev team has identified the cause(s) and continues working through the weekend to craft a fix. At this point, the fix is expected to fix the following: <list>"
• "The dev team and quality assurance is aggressively regression testing potential fix(es) to ensure this issue will be fixed for good."
• A fix has been verified and will be implemented <data>. It will fix <stuff here>. Items/slots/gold/stats will/will not be restored (and what can players do for what is not restored)."

Having cute, in-character yet generic (and often flat out wrong) messages from CS is not the answer. Those tend to heap inflammables on hot coals. Yes it's just a game. No, this type of bug isn't funny (again, see #1 above).

I realize that marketing (and others) don't want it widely known that ESO is an unstable data nightmare right now (too late!), but only giving occasional generic reassurances that do nothing to address customer concerns is how you burn through the customer goodwill that you started out with. You know the console gamers are watching this with especially keen interest. Have marketing crunch those numbers.

/Thread

niocwy wrote: »

Altairien wrote: »

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

Hey there, everyone! As @jamesharv2005ub17_ESO? suggested, a good starting point is the Dev Tracker. We understand that it may be a little overwhelming to sort through, and we're looking at ways to improve the functionality there. Also, we're planning to implement a Dev post signifier so you can easily spot when a Dev has responded in a thread, and also jump right to the next Dev reply. We hope to have this live pretty soon.

In regards to the issues that you may have run across or report, please understand that the severity of each issue varies greatly, and some are more complex than others. Every issue requires some level of investigation, though, and typically this is where you'll find the silence coming into play while we look into all the factors and try to figure things out.

We do encourage everyone to check out the patch notes that get published weekly during our scheduled maintenance, as we'll list out the issues that have been addressed and fixed.

The issue in this case is two-fold, one of which is directly in your control.

1) Rock solid data integrity is absolutely essential in any online only game. Essential! Players don't have hundreds of saved games to fall back on when things go wrong. We have exactly one saved game and it's located in your datacenter. We trust (and pay) that you maintain 100% rock solid handling of that data. This is clearly not the case here.

ESO right now isn't a game, it's a Russian Roulette simulator. *click* Nothing. *click* Nothing. *bam* Oh, I was only horribly injured (loss of bank slots, banked items, and banked gold). *BAM* I've been killed (add loss of character progression, skills points, mounts, etc.)

Like many players, I can handle "typical" launch issues such as failure to logon, broken quests, blocked content, etc. As a programmer, I understand that stuff happens. This issue isn't "typical."

I know it's not the Community Team's fault that someone or several someone's failed at basic software development. Whether it was not specifying requirements sufficiently, not performing thorough unit or integration testing, or if it was a failure at the functional or performance level, something failed. This game should have never gone live with data reliability as poor as this. But it has, so...

2) Keeping consistent, open, frequent communication is vital when problems are this serious. ZOS has already violated our trust by compromising the data(see #1 above) yet you compound the error by keeping secrets from us now. This is directly under the control of the Community Team.

You should be giving us frequent updates, daily at minimum. Here are just a few examples of what we should've been hearing throughout this process (which, for the record, has now lasted over 2 weeks):

• "A special dev team (consisting of...) has been formed to fix this problem. This team will be focused exclusively on this issue until it is fixed."
• "The dev team has gathered all the data thus far and they are currently evaluating possible scenarios and causes."
• "The dev team has narrowed down possible causes and are now performing extensive testing to eliminate possibilities and isolate the cause(s) of this bug."
• "The dev team has identified the cause(s) and continues working through the weekend to craft a fix. At this point, the fix is expected to fix the following: <list>"
• "The dev team and quality assurance is aggressively regression testing potential fix(es) to ensure this issue will be fixed for good."
• A fix has been verified and will be implemented <data>. It will fix <stuff here>. Items/slots/gold/stats will/will not be restored (and what can players do for what is not restored)."

Having cute, in-character yet generic (and often flat out wrong) messages from CS is not the answer. Those tend to heap inflammables on hot coals. Yes it's just a game. No, this type of bug isn't funny (again, see #1 above).

I realize that marketing (and others) don't want it widely known that ESO is an unstable data nightmare right now (too late!), but only giving occasional generic reassurances that do nothing to address customer concerns is how you burn through the customer goodwill that you started out with. You know the console gamers are watching this with especially keen interest. Have marketing crunch those numbers.

I too agree very very much.

Data integrity MUST BE the top priority problem-you-have-to-fix.

As for your point 2), it's not much, but maybe you didn't check this yet.

I did indeed see that (note: when it was posted 5 hours and 5 minutes after my post) and yes, it isn't much, but it's certainly more than we have been getting.

Unfortunately, they've added more uncertainty with their choice of words in part of that statement. It appears that when @ZOS_JessicaFolsom says:

ZOS_JessicaFolsom wrote: »

...it will not be retroactive. Know that we want to make this right for all impacted—we’re still exploring options to help those who have stored items/gold, and bank slots go missing.

She is indicating that ZOS is "looking at options to appropriately and adequately compensate everyone impacted by this issue. Right now ZOS is unsure what form that compensation will look like, but rest assured that everyone impacted will be compensated to the best of ZOS's ability."

It appears that way to me anyway. However, it doesn't appear that way to everyone. That was a self-inflicted and easily avoidable communication misstep.

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

Hey there, everyone! As @jamesharv2005ub17_ESO‌ suggested, a good starting point is the Dev Tracker. We understand that it may be a little overwhelming to sort through, and we're looking at ways to improve the functionality there. Also, we're planning to implement a Dev post signifier so you can easily spot when a Dev has responded in a thread, and also jump right to the next Dev reply. We hope to have this live pretty soon.

In regards to the issues that you may have run across or report, please understand that the severity of each issue varies greatly, and some are more complex than others. Every issue requires some level of investigation, though, and typically this is where you'll find the silence coming into play while we look into all the factors and try to figure things out.

We do encourage everyone to check out the patch notes that get published weekly during our scheduled maintenance, as we'll list out the issues that have been addressed and fixed.

what about an indicator that shows "dev has seen and read this topic"?
thats why most of us think that you dont care about us

Something to keep in mind with things like the Dev Tracker, or Altassian/Jira, is depending upon how it is set up, the status updates most likely WILL be delayed.

In Progress usually means that the Dev's have discovered the cause of the problem and are actively working to resolve it.

This doesn't mean that they didn't know about it 9 days ago when it was first reported.

Depending upon how the system is set up, bug reports may not be assigned as soon as they are reported because, first of all, they need to triage the report to determine what team will be working on it, and second, assigning a bug may expose the assigned persons name, and instead of assigning it to a single person, there may be a combined account that gets the bug report that everyone from the specific team works on.

So just having a bug report assigned provides no real information, and it unnecessarily exposes a dev to derision from users if the users even remotely think that a bug report isn't being worked on fast enough.

The company I work for has @companyname.com for email addresses. Which means as soon as someone knows the name of a person who works for the company, they are opened up to receiving emails from users.

It does happen, a lot, and some of those emails are downright nasty. Game developers need to spend time doing their jobs, not dealing with emails from irate users who think they are entitled to email random people and complain.

Most companies will not release information regarding an open bug for a variety of reasons.

First and foremost is that until the issue is actually fixed, they have no idea when a fix might be released to production (live servers).

Something that may seem easy to fix could have game breaking affects on something else, and until they are able to locate the cause, get a fix in place, test, and more test on their alpha server, then release to the internal beta server where they actually build the patch, then test again to make sure one teams fix doesn't interfere with another teams fix in the same patch, and the rest of the game, then schedule the release, there could be 1, 2, or even 3+ months involved.

Communication from the company for every bug, both big and small, means dedicating one team to do nothing but have meetings all week long with the various teams trying to get information together that the users want, then making sure the information they are able to release is current, then getting a blog post out, only to have the information change the following day.

Every bug that a user runs into seems to be a game breaker for them, but it isn't. If a bug is affecting 1% of the users it will take less precedence than a bug that affects 30% of the player base.

Even if the 1% bug is an easier fix, because the team will be dedicating resources to the bigger issue first.

This is why I like the way Star Citizen is being developed with total crowd funding and no Publisher to screw things up. Gone are the days when the developer is afraid to reveal that they are working on it because each fan of the game is also a backer and the developer then feels the need to keep the backers informed.

I won't post a link or anything but Star Citizen is totally crowd funded and we just reached 42 million in donations this week and with no publisher taking their piece of the pie that is an AAA title with a BIG budget. You can also still get into SC with a donation of $40 USD as there are still alpha slots left for purchase.

LazerusKI wrote: »

@JessieColtub17_ESO
thats true, a bug that affects ALL players is more important than a bug that affects a FEW players.
but what about bugs that affect ALL Vampires, ALL Werewolfs, ALL Nightblades?
those are not important? i NEED to relog after every single death to get SOME of my passives working again. Vampirism phases? hey...we have 50% fire-weakness but our skill-cost advantage does not work...great

If it is in the Dev/Bug Tracker, then they know about it, even if it appears that no movement is happening on the bug from the user side.

The reason why there may not be communication from the company is because as of yet, they do not know what is causing it. This doesn't mean they are not working to figure it out.

@Altairien, I have never been much of a forum poster, but rarely has anyone left me with nothing I wanted to add on a topic. Thanks for post. I have tried to provide similar feed back in my CSR surveys. /agree wholeheartedly

I sincerely hope they listen and fix their CSR approach quickly. How you manage defect resolution is as important as fixing the defects themselves when it comes to engendering trust in customer relations.

@ZOS Customer Service
I know you guys are trying hard and everyone knows that frontline customer service is a tough job. However, you guys need to step back and recognize that at this stage in the lifecycle you have over engineered your delivery system to a point that your are exacerbating issues with your canned responses and triggered surveys.

If you would develop a communication plan which incorporates the suggestions laid out by @Altairien, you will find most of your customers will weather the storm as things get resolved. While there will still be swarms of nerd ragers and irrationality posted on the forums, know that there are probably many more players like myself, who are really excited by the games potential and are hoping Zenimax can pull it together.

However, I am concerned that if the customer service team can't step up to the challenge of learning to manage issues with connectedness and empathy with the player base, too many will move on to the next offering. Someone above mentioned the Eve Online CSR model, and I think it is an excellent example. As a player there, you feel like all of CCP is with you on the journey to see where the game will take you.

I advise you to adopt that mindset. The CSR team should be our scouts and agents helping us navigate the rough terrain together. You are our eyes and ears to the organization, communicate what you know, and what you don't know. We can get through it, together!