Anyone else feeling upset for our devs and the strain they must be under? (Positive post)

jadarock · November 2019

I'm all for your positive attitude but when my skills dont fire or bug out time after time or I get DC'd right before a nice tic it just gets old then you ice the cake by pumping out dlcs and crown store fluff instead of making ground on these well known issues
OP as much as I do love and enjoy this game Zos deserves the negative feedback

regime211 · November 2019

wishlist14 wrote: »

I am feeling overwhelmed by the negative feedback on our forums to the point it's actually made me feel a bit flat in mood lately. I enjoyed Southern Elsweyr tbh. I loved the main questline and I enjoyed being driven to open up the furnishing achievements. I like to feel motivated to accomplish achievable tasks.
The npcs were fantastic, loved them all and it was great to reunite with some of the older ones too. I had a lot of laughs and giggles(no spoilers).
I was also in awe of the dragons, those amazing majestic creatures always grab my attention but my biggest treat was .....( spoiler so cant say as some have not yet played the dlc.) I also found the landscape stunning and it was very enjoyable to explore.

I must say that the storyline was very interesting and it kept me entertained. I want to take this time and space to thank our devs " Thank you for this beautiful and fun dlc and also for the extra week you gifted us for the event. I know it must be a very tough and trying time for all of you and I'm sure you are working extra hours to fix many of the issues our servers have been experiencing. I need you to know I love this game and i want you all to succeed so we can keep enjoying eso for many more years to come.

I hear so many complaints yet eso has some of the best story telling of any game i have played thus far. The housing system is better than anything that is out there. I love the realistic yet uniqueness of eso furnishings and housing. I think time is needed for our devs to get the servers working properly...I feel this is a process that is being worked on right now. I have to be honest and say that the combat system is weak atm and im not enjoying it...if i had a choice i would rewind the game but it is still not a deal breaker for me. I'm still here and i still have hope and faith in eso.....i am sure there are many players that want eso to flourish, to move onwards and upwards. I also want to add that i enjoyed the grapples more than i imagined i would 😅😃.

Thank you Zenimax team ❤

Naw

valeriiya · November 2019

Nope, not at all.

I do however feel bad for Gina and the other ladies because they get a lot of hate for things they have no control over like the content of the patch notes, server stability and communication. I feel like they would love the game to work smoothly as much as we do.

tahol10069 · November 2019

I give them money every month. I also don't go around insulting them. I don't have to LOVE them on top of that (like you seem to do. They are not your friends btw, they want your money). I have done my part. I can also criticise their decisions if I don't like them. That doesn't mean I criticise them as persons, I don't even know them. But I have to live with the decisions they make in my hobby. If I get very annoyed by their decisions, I can take my hobby elsewhere and that is perfectly OK. They control the game, I control my money and my time. It is up to me how I use them. I have no loyalty to any game or developer (blind loyalty to any corporare or business is the stupidest thing I know), and they have no loyalty to me. So we are even.

Heatnix90 · November 2019

Nah, they knew what they were getting into. They prioritized pushing out content over actual fixes for years and it's finally catching up to them, they should have realized during One Tamriel that whatever they cobbled together wasn't gonna hold a supposedly increasing population.

Donny_Vito · November 2019

Heatnix90 wrote: »

Nah, they knew what they were getting into. They prioritized pushing out content over actual fixes for years and it's finally catching up to them, they should have realized during One Tamriel that whatever they cobbled together wasn't gonna hold a supposedly increasing population.

Can you clarify who you mean when you say "they" throughout your post? Are you referring to ZoS as a whole, or are you referring to the blue-collared workers following the orders?

darthgummibear_ESO · November 2019

Why would I offer sympathy to the people consistently making gameplay worse while ignoring systemic issues that make it unplayable for a lot of people, and never addressing bugs that have been around since the launch of the game?

Oh but hey...none of that matters since the crown store works flawlessly.

Emmagoldman · November 2019

I feel sorry for a vast majority of ZOS. The story writers, artists, graphics, game designers. ESO is gorgeous!

The one department that continually fails is the combat team. Of course, that is by far the harderst job. Someone please everyone who is attached to their class with unique visions of the game.....
Yet their method is illogical. Sweeping huge changes patch to patch. The game should be moving towards smaller and smaller adjustments not tossing the baby out with the bath water.

vestahls · November 2019

AlienSlof wrote: »

Turelus wrote: »

I dislike some of the more direct abuse they get, especially when some of the issues are not directly their fault or something they have the power to fix. e.g. I don't think Rich or Gina are exactly in a position to fix the EU server issues, yet they will be on the front line for abuse about it (being bigger known faces or those who's job it is to work directly with the community)

However I do think ZOS as a company should be held to account for its failings and a fire kept under their feet to remind them they need to improve.

This. ^

I try not to 'shoot the messenger' with the reps, as they are only telling us what they are told by their bosses to tell us. For the most part, they won't be permitted to voice their own opinions, they are there to field ours and try to pacify us. They can only pass on information they themselves are given to pass on.

Similarly, I can't entirely blame the devs, those peeps who actually MAKE the game and do the bulk of the work. They are TOLD what to make, so they make it. They are likely often held to ridiculous deadlines like many in the manufacturing side of a business. When I started my signwriting career, I worked in a company that told me what to paint, where and when, and how soon it was expected to be ready. We were managed by a team of salespeaple and managers who knew little of what went into creating a sign from start to finish, and so gave us often unrealistic deadlines.

Can't say quite the same for the combat team. I had hoped taking on Gilliam would have given them a voice of reason, but he's either told 'just do it' or they simply don't listen to him and do whatever they want anyway. I had high hopes of the combat stuff being better with him in there, but that has not exactly been the result. Again, the blame I lay firmly at the feet of the bosses.
Those I have little respect for are the marketing team and the bosses at the top doing the dictating. They treat us gamers with cynicism and a lack of respect, and I find that the best reason of all not to praise this company. They treat us as open wallets, and yes, some of the people who post here certainly seem to be that, throwing more money at crates than I've ever held in my hand at any one time. Those 'whales' are telling ZO$: 'yes, it's absolutely fine to keep doing what you're doing, keep it up!' Those of us who close our wallets are probably barely noticed in the face of a player tossing £$1000's at the Crown Store.

I say all this on the back of running a successful pub sign business myself up until my retirement. If I had treated my customers like ZO$ treat us, I would have gone out of business faster than I can even say it! I had a well-earned rep for quality at competitive prices - had I produced a service like the EU have had recently, I would have been sunk very quickly, and looked down upon. Therefore, I can't look up to, or praise ZO$ on the recent performance and laziness and pure greed.

Even now, when I make FREE mods, I am very particular about the quality being 'just right' and everything is extensively tested in my own games BEFORE release to general public. I don't charge a single coin for any of them. Some of the things I've seen recently in the CS are untested, quick 2-minute reskins in Photoshop - clipping, bad dye channels, sloppy reskin work. I would be ashamed to put those out into the public domain in that state. ASHAMED. And then to ask rather a lot of players' hard-earned money for them. Doubly ashamed.

I have loved this game for a long time, and still enjoy it whn I do play. I've made (and lost ) some fantastic friends, some who came with me from the Elder Scrolls modding community, some I made through play. I now play with a closed wallet and have had to adapt my style to cope with the limited storage.

If ZO$ actually start properly fixing things and treating us with respect, then I will in turn respect them back and open my wallet once more.

randomkeyhits wrote: »

The actual developers, the content creators? Not got a problem with them at all.

The management, the decision makers, the money men? ohhhhh hell yes do I have problems with them

Not much actual evidence for this feeling but I really believe that at least 90%, probably more of the issues are down to the management team not wanting to spend the money to make things right until they are faced with being on the ragged edge of disaster.

I want to be fair on this but I honestly believe that so much of our pain is avoidable and thats just wrong.

^^^

These guys got it.

Really disheartened like the OP by the amount of people going "Nah, they're paid for it, f them." No employee is bad on purpose (well ok some are, but cases of sabotage are rare). If an employee is bad, they're underperforming because management can't get it * together in either: hiring the right people for the job, or hiring enough people, or just giving s***y orders without knowing how things work at the ground level. Unrealistic expectations and deadlines, as mentioned above. Management usually doesn't have a clue about a n y t h i n g, I'm sorry.

I also have no evidence for it, but I guarantee the developers/writers/even the server maintenance people, are overworked and underpaid to keep costs down. And I wouldn't be surprised if some of the work is outsourced to whatever country half-way across the globe, making it more difficult to control quality, but ₡h€a₱€r for the bosses.

And I could guarantee there are managers who get their bonuses partly based on how much cost reduction they can achieve. This seems to be the way modern companies are run, especially big ones. I don't think the gaming industry is an exception.

myskyrim26 · November 2019

I DO feel upset upset for ZOS and the troubles they face. No company wants problems. No company running an online game wants problems with their servers.

I strongly believe that ZOS do everything they can to fix and improve ESO. Why the game still has problems? We can't imagine. Maybe they don't have enough financing. Maybe their board of directors thinks that there's no reason to spend more money on new servers, more employees or whatever.

Anyway, ZOS do what they can. I'm grateful for that.

ZOS gave us an amazing opportunity to explore the ENTIRE TAMRIEL - all the provinces, and even mysterious places like Artaeum. I'm more than happy with that. I'm happy and grateful.

Vlad9425 · November 2019

Nope. Combat was my favourite aspect of this game and this patch it feels awful. I can’t thank them for ruining what I enjoyed most about this game. On a positive note the new zone looks awesome so props to the art and design team I guess.

Billdor · November 2019

ZOS_JesC wrote: »

Greetings, we've removed a handful of bashing comments. Please remember, while its fine to disagree with one another, bashing comments directed at ZOS employees or other forum members are not permitted. We ask that your comments remain constructive and civil. Thank you.

You mean you're censoring people who speak valid points? Like what the actual hell is your Sysadmin team doing to resolve these issues? You can bash on about code changes all you like, LFG still sucks.

CaffeinatedMayhem · November 2019

Yes, I do feel bad for the devs. We know the original code was outsourced; that means it's probably poor quality and the ZOS devs may not have had much control over how things were done. Secondly, getting more hardware in a data center isn't as easy as picking up the phone and BOOM all problems gone. I've worked in ops. These things take time, and sadly, management often doesn't give approval to *start* the process until things are horribly broken.

So lay off the devs. This is a video game, not hospital software. This game is one of the few ways I have to interact with human beings, given that I'm homebound by illness most days. Yes, I was a little harsh, South Elsweyr isn't the worst DLC ever, but I am still pretty disappointed that to shoehorn in improvements, housing was dropped off a cliff.

Tavore1138 · November 2019

In so much as 95% of us who work for a living are getting screwed by someone higher up who just wants to make as much money with as little investment as possible - then yes I feel that solidarity for what must be a thankless task.

As a customer who pays a sub and a not inconsiderable additional sum for crowns and chapters (which alone retail at the cost of a whole pro-studio game every year) - I am angry with the steady decrease in underlying quality, customer service and communication.

I actually quite like Dragonhold for the content - it feels much less 'phoned in' than the preceding chapter.

But as an EU PC player constant outages, login issues, performance issues that never seem to get any better that good content work can be offset by not being able to actually access it or having skills lag out when I can.

For the money they must be getting in form their revenue streams they could buy a lot of high quality dev resource and a lot of hardware which makes me feel that either there is something fundamentally broken beyond all fixing and a clock somewhere is counting down to game death OR that they are simply too greedy and short sighted to invest enough in the game to fix it.

My personal experience of big companies suggests it is probably the latter and we have a right to be angry even if, sadly, it is the public faces of the company that get the grief that might be better directed at the greedy people in the board room. But then when you take a job shilling for people like that you have to take the knocks that come with the salary or go work somewhere else.

SeaUnicorn · November 2019

People don't complain about the story, they complain about massive pendulum swing changes to the combat that noone asked for. Devs chose to take on a scope of change way bigger than they were able to handle proficiently and inemented the changes that people clearly asked not to do. If they would listen to their customer base, focus on what matters most and plan workload according to their capability this would not be the case.

randomkeyhits · November 2019

vestahls wrote: »

I also have no evidence for it, but I guarantee the developers/writers/even the server maintenance people, are overworked and underpaid to keep costs down. And I wouldn't be surprised if some of the work is outsourced to whatever country half-way across the globe, making it more difficult to control quality, but ₡h€a₱€r for the bosses.

Considering it more I think I have a concrete example which is the PS4 release process. Though if I'm wrong I'd love to be corrected.

They do a release and apart from crown store related stuff, nothing, absolutely nothing will cause them to pay up for a hot fix. We have to suck it up for weeks and wait for the next scheduled update before we can expect sometimes seriously game breaking issues to be resolved. I honestly don't remember any hot fixes which were not crown store.

In comparison, I won't even go to one of my favourite examples, I'll use Hello games of No Man's Sky infamy. Even they get their priorities right and when something bad (tm) happens can deliver a timely hot fix for their player base.

To me this means that the management are clearly putting their profits above player satisfaction or even their games reputation....

So for staff like Gina stuck between a rock and a hard place I've only respect and compassion, its a tough job.

Donny_Vito · November 2019

Billdor wrote: »

ZOS_JesC wrote: »

Greetings, we've removed a handful of bashing comments. Please remember, while its fine to disagree with one another, bashing comments directed at ZOS employees or other forum members are not permitted. We ask that your comments remain constructive and civil. Thank you.

You mean you're censoring people who speak valid points? Like what the actual hell is your Sysadmin team doing to resolve these issues? You can bash on about code changes all you like, LFG still sucks.

I imagine comments like these are being censored because they should be. Formulate a thoughtful response and lay out your argument, and your comment will not be removed. Blurt out a response like that which resembles the babbling of a teenager and you will probably get it removed. Come on, behave like an adult. Just because this is a forum it doesn't mean there aren't still social standards to abide.

Loves_guars · November 2019

Yes I was thinking this the oher day. At least about the devs. ZoS higher sphere is another thing. The anger in any case should be directed to those who decided that the server and performance are less important and don't want to spend money on those areas. The artists, writers, support and devs in general are amazing.

Hallothiel · November 2019

I find the idea that certain ‘major players’ could do things better hysterical. Oooh they can stream / put something up on Youtube or whatever - that obviously means they are competent at game development. Ffs.

Frankly I care not a jot for the opinion of some idiot with a camera, laptop and an overly inflated belief that what they post really really matters ‘cos they know soooo much.

If I was anything to do with ZOS (oh, sorry, should write that ZO$ as thats what all the cool kids do) I would avoid these forums like the plague as they are full of toxic idiots who are unpleasantly rude to the wrong people. Which is helpful to no-one as nothing annoys frontline staff more than being shouted at for something that wasn’t their fault.

Ashtaris · November 2019

I just got disconnected 3 times in the last 40 minutes. After the 3rd time, that was my cue to go do something else around the house. Do you really think that I should feel sorry for the devs who have done such a poor job of managing the servers? Nope, sorry, ain’t gonna happen.

Tigerseye · November 2019

So, I've crashed for the 4th time today.

Plus I've had to deal with the usual horrible lag, on PC EU, while fighting every dragon.

It's now telling me I'm already logged in, when I haven't been logged in since I crashed 10 mins ago and was forced to restart my laptop (as the game sometimes takes my laptop down with it).

How is anyone supposed to be happy with this?

Hallothiel · November 2019

Rather than post here, why don’t those unhappy with things do a small bit of research & find out company contact details and use them to explain their discontent?

preevious · November 2019

Yes, I actually feel quite bad about it.

I'm on PC EU, and, granted, we sometimes have a bit of troubles/login issues. Still, the game runs perfectly fine most of the time, and is so vastly superior to most other MMO that it's not even worth mentioning.

I feel bad for the dev team and for the community managers sustaining fire on these forums.

I also feel ashamed for all the entitled Whiny McComplains crying threads after threads despite playing withput issues most of the time. Seriously, let's be honnest a second. If they had issues every single time, they wouldn't play, and thus wouldn't complain. Those sad guys need help..

SipofMaim · November 2019

No. Any dev who can't handle the frustration and anger on this forum is probably not visiting it. And the forum moderators do a good job of zapping the rants that are straight-up abusive. (I do feel some sympathy for them.)

I'm feeling a great deal of contempt for the parent company at this point, and sorry for players who just want to play and mind their own, and can't. Since you ask, OP.

wishlist14 · November 2019

redlink1979 wrote: »

Game has issues but also has great stuff in it, we all agree on that.

Well said 😊🖒🖒

Karivaa · November 2019

Yes I do. I have played since the game was released. The first developers who designed the game abruptly quit initially and the game has not worked right ever since. I can’t remember the exact details. I also feel the company puts more pressure on them to make new content instead of fixing old content.

Shantu · November 2019

If you love it so much, go play the game and stop reading the forums if it upsets you.

As to the question, no. While I'm upset, it's not because the poor devs don't get any respect. It's because they do stupid things no one understands, to which they appear incapable of communicating nor hearing the roar of negative feedback.

Players: "You killing the fun in the game!!"

Devs: "Huh? What's not fun about math?"

Players: "You don't listen!!"

Devs: "Listen to what?"

wishlist14 · November 2019

Kagukan wrote: »

I am paying for this game because I still enjoy it. If I felt the same as OP then not only would I stop paying, I would stop playing.

I love eso, I am addicted to checking these forums and made this thread to thank the devs and give them some positive feedback in a sea of negativity. The forums don't affect my game experience but they don't help my mental health so i have to be careful to stay away when the negativity gets overwhelming.

I guess im here to defend my game as there is nothing out there as good or fun as eso for me personally. So im not going to allow negativity to stop me from playing my game.

Thank you kindly for your response 😊❤

cheifsoap · November 2019

I really like this game but it sounds like you're being dismissive of the feedback. Yes, a lot is noise; but outside of the QQ for nerfs - this game is broken. Its so painfully broken it amazes even me at times why I even play this game. If you don't like reading negative comments - stop reading them!

Edit: Functionally broken; not mechanically broken. 5 bluescreens in less than 2 hours is asinine - if this was any other product on the market, there would be a mass recall.

Somber97866 · November 2019

It's not the actual content that ppl are upset about. It's the sweeping changes, recall of buffs and performance issues. Especially for endgame content.