@ZOS_GinaBruno

You guys have a bug report posted that states that some of the crashes are being caused by out of date add-ons, but you do not offer any guidance on which add-ons are causing the issue. Why is this information not available to the community?

I presume that you are dancing a fine line between helping the community and creating a public relations issue for add-on authors - calling out specific add-ons as a problem could be behaviorally similar to naming and shaming because the authors could get criticized in the forums in response to that information. If that's the case, can you at least let us know if there is a process for alerting the add-on author of the problem so that they are aware and can fix it?

Some issues might be with a particular function and not specific to a single add-on. If that is the case, couldn't you at least share that with us?

I think this is important, because the optics are that you are vaguely throwing the entire add-on authoring community under the bus and letting your customers bear the burden of trying to diagnose these issues in a vacuum, and as you are probably aware since you have resources committed to such diagnostics, that process takes time. If I want to properly test add-ons, I need to disable, run and see if I get a crash, and parse it all out. If I have 20 add-ons installed, that could take a week or more of play before I might have identified the issue, because the crashes are not reliably triggered, and it's not a guarantee that it's being caused by the add-on, it could be caused by ZOS's code and the things you are currently fixing.

The player community is not organized and full of volunteers to test the root cause of add-on crashes, nor does it have all of the information needed to perform proper diagnostics anyway because the specifics are not shown in the logs. Your team has already positively identified that certain add-ons are a problem. So, if you have made authors aware to avoid them public shaming, that's fine, they can choose to be transparent or not. If you do not do that, then I would argue that placing the diagnostic burden on every single player having an issue is a greater burden than the burden on an individual or group of authors who might have to deal from some public backlash from the community, and even then, that would really only be triggered by ungrateful anti-social jerks who lack empathy.

Ironically, while writing this post, I was also doing crafting writs, and the game literally crashed while I was finishing up that last paragraph. Was it an add-on or was it a code problem? No idea. Can't you please share more information and help us out?