Fundamental Issues with Bugs, Customer Service and Testing

gordonbennett · April 2014

Hello everyone

I'm an old windbag who used to play and run large multi-player games before the internet was invented <lights pipe and reclines in old rocking chair by a roaring fire>. You'd be surprised at how much has not changed over the years. Players have always been emotionally upset when the investment they have put in to building up empires or characters either goes up in smoke or is suddenly and unexpectedly changed in some way.

So I have a lot of sympathy with companies sinking a lot of investment into a game on the scale of ESO where every customer is a potential screaming lunatic with blood and anger in their zombie-like pale faces.

However, a great deal of this can simply be avoided by tact, diplomacy, sympathetic and timely response and a general aura of meaningful endeavour.

Put simply, players need to feel that the great money-eating corporate machine is not a great money-eating corporate machine.

Alas, this has not been the case so far with ESO. It's the same everywhere else, but that is no justification.

There appears to be a disconnection between customer service and the technical division. Unannounced maintenance is the current example of this. Notices say nothing of why maintenance is necessary nor do they give even an approximate time for their completion. If we knew that the server was down whilst members of the Zenimax staff went round to the houses of gold-spammers to cut off their ***, I am sure people would be more appreciative.

Similarly with bugs and testing. The so-called 'Beta-testing' that is used these days in this and all other industries (especially mobile phone software) is nothing like what old farts like me would recognise as beta testing. It's become focused on making sure the processes work rather than a test of the quality of the end product. This is why two game-breaking bugs that were reported on in the Beta were allowed to wreak havoc in the past couple of weeks.

So the problem with TESO? In all aspects, communication, both between players and different divisions within the inter-organisation. No individual bug or exploit is more significant than this. I love Elder Scrolls games and I love ESO. Please don't let ignoring the ringing telephone be the death of it.

gordonbennett · April 2014

Alas I cannot comply. I am retired and have been from the gaming industry long before LinkedIn started.

But to get to the main point and NOT to get distracted by the frankly rude demand that I somehow justify my existence... Are you saying that the issue of poor communication is not a problem here?

I am concerned that this is the broad field in which success or failure will be determined and that not recognising it as such will lead to the latter.

Sorcerious · April 2014

True, I don't mind the issues but some more forum posts about what's going would surely be appreciated.

Then again, why bother if you know that you're going to be jumped on by anger-filled, raging werewolves that are 'rightfully entitled' to play the game for a year because they endured the issues that are to be expected?

It's not like Skyrim was bug free (hell it was even worse than ESO and still they sold 20 million copies).

It's just that forum-goers are usually the biggest complainers, and they go to a forum to do just that, complain, complain and then complain some more. Even if everything would be working smoothly people would still complain about things that would be better 'in their opinion'.

Go have a look over at the Blizzard forums and it's just that: if they announce an unexpected maintenance or there are bugs or whatnot, the thread is immediately filled with people complaining that this shouldn't happen, or people start asking questions that have nothing to do with the problem described in said thread...

Normally, for these reasons, I avoid forums like the plague, it's always always always the very vocal minority of a community that is disillusioned.

/rant

TLDR: I do agree with the OP, but I also understand why they don't.

zairasai · April 2014

I study software development. Apart from that I have a Master's degree in psychology - and frankly said: I do agree with gordonbennett in each and every point.

Yes, it is true that it is an immense task, but that does not in any way excuse the lack of communication which can only be understood as either lacking organization (which I assume is the case) or disrespectfulness towards customers. My intuition (not that this would have to be perceived as reliable by anyone else but myself) says it's both. Why bother about those few hundreds who leave because they feel like they're treated unfairly? Thousands will stay and accept pretty much any treatment they are being given...

gordonbennett · April 2014

Ok I'm now reading this as a personal attack.

My experience in gaming was sufficient for me to understand the importance of customer relations. This has made or destroyed some very large corporations over the years with millions of customers in any industry. In gaming, as I empathised, you get blistering flames from predominantly young and angry people who have to put up with a bit of inconvenience.

It happens. It has happened since the dawn of gaming. I have seen violence at gaming conventions and ancient friendships count for nothing.

My point can be illustrated by visiting the part of this website that informs on server status. A simple addition of 'the server will be down for at least 'x' hours' would:

a) give everyone a chance to make other plans for the duration.
b) show players a desire to keep them adequately informed and therefore improve harmony.
c) cost nothing.

If, for example, I had detected an error in a game startup which affected everyone, I would send a post to everyone informing them of this, explaining and, if appropriate, apologising. It took no time and meant a lot to the players who were paying for me to go to university.

A prime example of the impact of providing information comes not from gaming but from a well-known national rail company. When they started to explain why trains were delayed, customer satisfaction improved immeasurably. Indeed, when the train could not continue because of a hazard or a suicide, passenger anger turned immediately into understanding.

Now look at what happened recently when bank slots started to be reset to 60. Many players had posts which marked their issue as 'resolved'. Result-- flames, anger, death! A bit of attention to communication at that point would have lightened many hearts.

Mistakes happen-- sure. How you deal with mistakes is at least as important as the mistakes themselves. Here we need some fairly general information. It can change perceptions far more than any number of bugs or errors. Somewhere else on this board is someone who was incorrectly banned, BUT, they got an apology and now all is well.

I also have experience on how bad vibes can affect the morale of the people running the game.

This posting is not meant to be any kind of angry 'let's get hysterical and attack Zenimax with pitchforks and torches' type posting-- merely the only means I have at my disposal, short of a private mailing, to bring attention to a point that I think needs to be addressed- communication.

Squishy · April 2014

I'm not in the industry, I am but a simply IT peon.

This kind of thinking, described in ITIL,(roughly put) is what gets us broken softwares, because there is a deadline... Is it sort of working? Do we know about the issue? Can we patch it later? Then we release... Oh yes, this works SO well for the customers...

OP is completly correct. When the left hand knows what the right hand is doing, there's less chance they'll cross path where they should not.

The industry as you call it, has litterally made a mockery of things for about 10 years now, releasing half working products, full price. One of the best example coming to my mind, Knight of the old republic2. Good game, except half of the content was missing, and the community, after years, managed to recover most of it. Or most recently, CitiesXL, it's buggy? Let's just sell the IP to someone else, who doesn't fix the issue, release a new version as buggy as the first, while the customers who bought XL have nothing to claim now. Those are the industry practices nowadays.

If you compare games (with a few exceptions of course) over the last 30 years, well, the finished products are declining in quality (as far as stability and completion goes). That's just my unworthy customer's opinion though

.

offycakes · April 2014

@gordonbennett‌
I wouldn't waste any time on Klarick, just another kludge in the vacuum.

I agree with your initial post. Other games have a feel of someone taking the lead in explaining immediate and long-turn goals as well as detailing plans for reconciliation of identified problems. The lack of this organized response leads existing players to question spending any more time on this experience as the current events may critically affect the future game.

It will be interesting to see what steps they ultimately choose to take.

Noth · April 2014

What I see here is an idealistic view of how things should work.Yes ideally they would work as the OP says. Reality is, that almost never happens. Hell every class I've ever taken for certifications, licenses, jobs there was always the proper way, and the realistic way of doing things.

Putok · April 2014

OP, I agree completely that ZOS seems to be having huge issues with intra-organizational communication. It seems like different departments are not communicating well, coordinating well, and often have no idea what each other are doing. My guess is the organization is structured in such a way that employees are broken up into teams, divisions, or departments that have very little organized contact with each, and almost never share tasks.

Jirki88 · April 2014

Your reading comprehension seem to match the rocket science capabilities of the fly currently starving to death inside your head.

Answer everyone personally? Where did he ask that? You keep referring to dev posts... What posts? This entire thread is about the utter inability of ZOS to communicate - is this the devs responsibility? No. No big companies nowadays have their devs do Community Management or PR. There's Community Managers here that post everytime there is anything... And what do they post? "Oh, server is down, have patience". Is that communicating? Will that calm people down? Will it make them feel like the company cares, at all? No. Does it take that much for these COMMUNITY management people to actually post "Sorry, we have hardware issues and have to take down the server for approximately three hours, but this may be prolonged since we don't know the full extent of the problems"? Make a post like that, you'll have a huge lot of annoyed people be silently grumbling and then go do something else. Make the first kind of post, you'll annoy them and make them go post threads in the forums and encourage each other. Then you got pitchforks and torches and whatnot.

That said, I have no idea why I made this post, since you're a troll who just want to provoke people with valid concerns, but since you made me reply, I'll give you a 2/10.

Lovebone · April 2014

You have quite the need to go for player and not the ball, to use a football term (the soccer kind of football, not the padded rugby kind)

He used his background to illustrate from where he had formed his opinions, and NOT to validate the quality of his points. Though I dare say having played video games since the mid 80's I agree with him, and understand his concerns-

Please, argue his points and not his person. You seem way too eager to prove that you are smarter than him, while ignoring the substance of his post completely.

You mentioned earlier that this is a large scale project, and I totally agree, it's a fact that no sensible person can really dispute. However, the scale of the project is matched by the scale of the companies behind it, and you would expect experienced developer companies like those in play, to learn from the mistakes of other less communicating game developers and those that emphasize customer relations on just about everything.

I have one minor note to all of this discussion though. Easter vacation work both ways, so while there's certainly a lot of players on vacation, there's certainly a lot of developers on vacation too.

NextGame · April 2014

The launch for this game has been pretty pathetic and there are several game breaking bugs affecting character progression (broken main quests), game features (how often are mail and bank/s going to be unavailable?) and basic items such as loading into the next area without having to restart the client. This has not been helped by the unexplainable desire by ZOS to reinvent every mechanic they can lay their hands on from Auction Houses being Guild Stores to the appalling forum layout.

That said, if you can see past these items (and at times it is a massive trial, looking at you Northpoint quest chain & excessive prime time outages) the core of the game is very fun and has the potential to be excellent if ZOS can pull their finger out and start behaving like they actually want to run a successful MMO.

Unfortunately, with all the title's current problems, both software related & product management related I cant help but wonder if we are going to get ETA as to when this title will be released to early access on steam? Because that's roughly where it should be sitting in the market at the moment

bob_jeko · April 2014

1 EVE Online
2 EVE Online
3 EVE Online

pborerb16_ESO · April 2014

Sometimes it's small things, even just a different phrasing that can make a big difference. For example, just now I started a thread here because I was under the impression that the current maintenance downtime of the European megaserver could be a part of planned maintenance, and was reiterating that EU server maintenance shouldn't happen in EU prime time. I was wrong - as it turned out, it's unexpected emergency maintenance, and if I had noticed that there's a dedicated "Server Status" forum (only looked under "official news" and in the customer support forum here), I wouldn't have posted.

But why was I under the impression of planned maintenance in the first place? Because the message in the game client looked so regular, so planned: "The European megaserver is currently unavailable while we perform maintenance." If they just would have put in the word "emergency" or something like "due to unexpected issues" and maybe even a short apology (there's enough room, they posted longer messages in the past), I'm sury many people would immediately have had a lot more of understanding without having to visit the forum. - So yes: Communication is important, and some improvements that make a marked difference cost neither time nor money.

bob_jeko · April 2014

denzilmason · April 2014

I am currently enjoying reading this thread. And Klarick, your positively delightful. I think they should give you a job in customer relations.

The original post is correct.
<lights pipe and reclines in old rocking chair by a roaring fire>
The developers are doing the best they can, the community people are doing the best they can. Should the company have to answer everyone's questions one by one. No.

But general information as described in the thread, that allows the customer to be satisfied even though the service that they are paying for is not available, that is something every business would like to achieve.

Lets give an example in real life to reply too. If an internet provider who provides for millions of people, cuts everyone's internet off for 2 hours and doesn't inform them why, is this acceptable?

SintNicolaas · April 2014

Klarick, how come everyone else here gets their posts marked as 'awesome', 'insightfull', 'agree' and you are getting just 'lol'?

Squishy · April 2014

Last post from me on this one, as this is getting completly pointless.

What we've been saying, or I've been saying anyway, is that the communication problem is mostly internal to Zeni. Yes they communicate with us, however, the way things are said or announced are not always what they should be.

In tonight's downtime, we could not ask for an ETA, as it was unplanned, over a holiday period, so this one, is fine.

But the massive banning that happened, was an example of a massive communication failure. A lot of people were wrongfully banned, and apparently, received 0 communication about it. That to me, is incredibly bad. Banning someone that deserves it, that is fine. Not telling them why, or even telling them they have been banned, other than when they try to login, that is terrible practice.

Many of the now exposed bugs, allowing people to dupe for example, were supposedly reported during beta. Something THAT bad, should have been adressed, and since they found a workaround pretty quickly now, why was it not implemented and tested in beta?

I read quite a few posts about bad support, where the support did not know there were bans in progress, or that there was a maintenance happening. This, if correct, is the sign of a massive internal communication issue. Even ITIL has guidelines for that, with banners, voice messages, alerts etc. Letting your frontlines know about what's currently happening is helpdesk 101 stuff.

Yes, there are communications from Zeni with the playerbase, that can not be denied, but the informations given, or the delay/method of getting them sometimes are not really what you'd expect from a MMO environment.

An example tonight, they shutdown the servers without telling the people logged in about it. Granted, it was an emergency, but they should have at least send a message to everyone online, that the servers were coming down in 1 minute. The board was litterally flooded with people asking what was happening, and most were very angry, which I can understand.

BigM · April 2014

bob_jeko wrote: »

Klarick wrote: »

Ok Mr Bennet. Please point to the other MMOs that have this awesome communication. You say they exist...give me 3.

1 EVE Online
2 EVE Online
3 EVE Online

EVE Online, I hope you are kidding. I seem to remember support was doing some cheating along with other players. Good game to pick, NOT!

Lovebone · April 2014

Klarick wrote: »

The responses I expected to be honest. The company is communicating, there are many posts to prove the fact. Just look for them. To be honest, I shouldnt have to tell Mr Gaming dude and I have a degree dude, where to find them lol. Im Buzz Aldrin and I have not the time.

What it comes down to: You guys arent experts. You arent producers, developers, programmers, and have zero clue. However, on a forum full of kids, you do have the ability to be anyone you wish to be. Lol, a retired game Master lol. Please.

A guy with a masters degree, cant read? Cant research the forum to see how much ZOS is communicating?

Lets not forget the sophmorish predictions:
Your game is doomed. Im an expert.
If you dont do X, then your doomed as a company. lol.

Again, where are the multitude of MMOs that have this great communication system Mr Bennet?

Where are the names of all these LARGE corporations That have crumbled under the guise of poor CS?

Yeah ... thout so.

While I have not played that many MMO's myself and obviously cannot respond for the OP, I can say that currently Star Citizen is setting the tone in how to care for customers. Other games like EVE online has great communication, having only had a few major hiccups over its 10+ years in existence. Another Fantasy game of old times called Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, which probably had the worst launch far surpassing ESO and any other games I have tried, had great communication.

That was your three positives you requested earlier.

LARGE corporations that have utterly folded on its customer service and customer relations are as follows.

SOE for Combat Upgrade in Star Wars galaxies fixing a game that wasn't broken, and thus broke it themselves while ignoring the player base. Perhaps the biggest screw-up in gaming history. Like Star Citizen this game sets the tone, but in a negative way. I hear the second and recent Star Wars MMO didn't fare so well either, but cannot attest to it as I didn't play it. Same with LoTR.

Again, you are completely lacking any discussion on the points in the thread, at which I do think a masters degree in psychology comes in handy as to determine your reasons to post in the first place.

Then again, same could be said for me for taking the time to "white knight" while the EU server is back up.

Noth · April 2014

Actually there was customer service reps using their GM accounts to spawn things in for the corps they were in. Granted they have long since been dealt with, it doesn't change the fact that what he said was true.

james_edwards1979b16_ESO · April 2014

Eve Online/CCP. Simple as.

The comms from Zenimax re: all of these outages is shockingly poor. They should look to CCP for examples of how to talk frankly with their audience. CCP constantly provide information on server outages, update issues, maintenance windows and problems, what they are doing to optimise it, what works, what doesn't work, their plans to overcome issues, server info, specs, optimisation procedures. I mean everything you can think of, they feedback.

They have gone so far as mathematically explaining in-game functions for how missiles impact ships, gun tracking maths, some seriously in-depth stuff. Sure, most people won't want to know... but you can't blame them for lack of info.

Zenimax on the other hand is:
Server is down.
Server is up, thanks for your patience.

All Zenimax need to do is say, look the server is down. It's the server that handles inventory (for example), and everyone has 10 times the gold they should have, which will seriously unbalance the game. And although we could just ignore it and deal with it in the maintenance window, that will involve a roll-back of what people have purchased with money they shouldn't have. This will require significant man-hours to unpick all of the data, time which would be better spent developing the game. So with that in mind, we have made the decision to offline the login servers. We will of course keep you posted with updates as and when we have them.

Followed by 30 mins later: the servers are still down but we have out emergency procedures in place and a team onsite investigating the issue.

OK, so that's a bit of a random example. Something real-world again from CCP is when they suffer hack attacks of ISP hub outages. They are very frank and forthcoming with updates. Even if it is beyond their control.

The only time I have known CCP to be too secretive was when one of their staff was publicly named as having abused his position to enhance his ingame character and that of his corp-mates. They hushed that one up a bit.

Bansheedragon · April 2014

Klarick wrote: »

The responses I expected to be honest. The company is communicating, there are many posts to prove the fact. Just look for them. To be honest, I shouldnt have to tell Mr Gaming dude and I have a degree dude, where to find them lol. Im Buzz Aldrin and I have not the time.

What it comes down to: You guys arent experts. You arent producers, developers, programmers, and have zero clue. However, on a forum full of kids, you do have the ability to be anyone you wish to be. Lol, a retired game Master lol. Please.

A guy with a masters degree, cant read? Cant research the forum to see how much ZOS is communicating?

Lets not forget the sophmorish predictions:
Your game is doomed. Im an expert.
If you dont do X, then your doomed as a company. lol.

Again, where are the multitude of MMOs that have this great communication system Mr Bennet?

Where are the names of all these LARGE corporations That have crumbled under the guise of poor CS?

Yeah ... thout so.

Please point out to me where the OP said the company was NOT communicating?
As far as I can see he never said there was NO communication, he only said it was POOR communication.

I have ready through this entire thread and in each and every one of your posts I see you attacking the person rather than the message being presented.

I'm left with the impression that you seem to think that you know more than the OP, and everyone else for that matter, does and are simply trying to show off your imagined superior knowledge.

In reality you clearly missed the point of the OP , and I cant help but think that you dont even know it, but actually think you really do know more than everyone else here.

bob_jeko · April 2014

Noth wrote: »

bob_jeko wrote: »

martinbonkowskib14_ESO wrote: »

bob_jeko wrote: »

Klarick wrote: »

Ok Mr Bennet. Please point to the other MMOs that have this awesome communication. You say they exist...give me 3.

1 EVE Online
2 EVE Online
3 EVE Online

EVE Online, I hope you are kidding. I seem to remember support was doing some cheating along with other players. Good game to pick, NOT!

Good fail sir, good fail.

And now to counter your ignorance I will submit a picture of evidence, of you being wrong of course..

BTW I must have ganked you alot in eve as the butthurt man you seem to be.

Tallyho, and good night to you, sir.

Actually there was customer service reps using their GM accounts to spawn things in for the corps they were in. Granted they have long since been dealt with, it doesn't change the fact that what he said was true.

I know, im just to tired after been waiting for the EU server to come back up i guess.. and bored.

So I decided to join the trolls.- But tomorrow is a new day with a bright forecast.

But CCP have done somethings right as EVE Online has been in existence for a long time and endured without F2P. And the longer you exist the more room for errors. But to judge a company that successful because of some corrupt employees is not right, therefore the trolly post.

Goodnight ppl.

alluringsumo · April 2014

Been playing about a week. Played tons of MMOs. Never been treated so poorly or unprofessionally by any of them. Obviously some people's experience will vary but mine has been terrible. This company basically said to the people it banned....hey you can use the rest of your time now....sorry we screwed the pooch. No effort to make it right. They didnt just mess up. They took to the forums yesterday to defend their actions and claims they werent mistakes which compounded the problem by making those complaining look like cheaters. Again no apology for this insult.

So much gold selling spam you cant chat, they take 12 hours to respond to a ticket and 5 minutes to ban a post they don't like. Their priority is damage control and image, not their customers. They could make the best game ever but if you cant trust them to handle their part responsibly it is all a waste.

Laura · April 2014

wiser words have rarely been spoken in regards to gaming.

Darzil · April 2014

Best customer service (ok, it's a browser based MMO, and mostly text) : Kingdom of Loathing - Two 2-hourly podcasts a week with the devs answering player questions ! (for the last 11 years)

alluringsumo · April 2014

Sad when they cant rise to the service standards set by free-to-play games. Really is.

alluringsumo · April 2014

I certainly comprehend service. Regardless of their challenges they are SELLING a product, not giving it away. That puts an onus on them to provide at a certain level. It may be hard but if they cant they have no business taking people money. Sorry you don't have standards. I do.

My complaints are less about what they have failed to do than irresponsible actions they have taken on purpose. This isn't about coding being hard....its about treating your customers like they have some value to you. The result isn't DOOM. Its losing customers. The market is saturated with games and there is no reason to give your hard earned gaming dollars to companies that don't value you.

Really a better analogy would be if someone keeps spitting on you do you keep coming over to their house to play. Probably not.

alluringsumo · April 2014

Klarick wrote: »

And exactly where have they failed you alluringsumo? Are you so impatient, and demanding in your real life? Where else do get more for your hard earned .50 cents a day?

Well that's the kicker. Every time I post the details they flag and delete it. You cant even say exactly what they did. But trust me it isn't about being demanding.

I'm sure they WANT to provide a good experience. But they have, for me, failed miserably. Glad you are having a good experience but you are certainly not everyone. Pretty easy to sit back and talk smack when it isn't affecting you.

revanghost · April 2014

Klarick, you are being illogical, manipulative, and abusive.

OP doesn't need to "prove" his claims by giving you real life info. In fact, I'm pretty sure soliciting that info might get you in trouble.

Why don't you deal with his claims about ESO instead of trying to propagate an ad hominem attack?