Character creation is bugged - your appearance might not be what you selected

Nerouyn · October 2020

I've experienced this with 3 characters recently and video recorded the last one.

I've bugrepped it in game but that'll be ignored.

Tried bugrepping it on your support website, twice, including the video, but that's also bugged. The little spinning square just spins forever.

Seems to be random. I've created several characters recently whose appearance is what I selected.

I can upload the video to youtube but it's a bit tedious blocking out character names etc. Which I'll do in a few days if left with no alternative.

This is a very, very, very serious bug.

Character appearance can only be fixed with a crown store token, which means ZO is effectively charging players to fix a problem which their bug created.

Nerouyn · October 2020

For the sake of establishing that the potential size of the differences, here's a few screenshots.

This is what I chose for body.

This is what I got. Which are the default settings.

These aren't the only problems. They're scattered throughout.

Nerouyn · October 2020

Tried 2 more character creations today - all that my current amount of deletions will allow - and both were bugged.

Again, I video recorded both.

The first one kept all settings, except character height, which it set to default.

The second one kept height - hooray - but reverted most other settings to default.

This is insane.

Many players might be affected by this bug and be unaware.

I'm very familiar with my preferred appearance for each race so it's relatively easy for me to spot when it's off. And I never used up the race change tokens so I can use those to quickly check.

InaMoonlight · October 2020

Owh yeah that would be quite a problem, @ZOS_GinaBruno is it an issue you are aware of?

Nirntrotter · October 2020

Is that why my new NB looks off?! Oh gods, please no

Nerouyn · October 2020

Nirntrotter wrote: »

Is that why my new NB looks off?! Oh gods, please no

If you don't have any change tokens, the free way to check is on the PTS where everyone has free crowns and everything in the crown store costs 1 token.

Nerouyn · October 2020

Thinking back it may be 5 of my characters who were affected by this rather than 3.

A few weeks ago I made 3 characters on my other account but didn't play them immediately. Identical except for skin tone because I was thinking of vamping one.

Later I was scrolling through and noticed that 2 and 3 had wrong ears. Identically wrong.

I don't have change tokens on that account. Just being the ears that I could see were different and enough time having passed that I couldn't specifically remember doing their ears, I figured maybe I'd just forgotten.

Nerouyn · October 2020

Nirntrotter wrote: »

Is that why my new NB looks off?! Oh gods, please no

If on checking you find that you've also been affected by this bug, maybe wait a few days before reporting it.

I'm desperately trying to squeeze all the value I can out of the double xp while it lasts. Once the event's finished I'll name mask the videos, upload to youtube and post them here. That evidence will give your report more weight.

InaMoonlight · October 2020

Confirmed today too. Created a Bosmer, and as ALWAYS when I do so, I make them as short as possible (Gotta relate to them

)...

Once in the game, and then on charselect I could see her features were DEFINITELY more heroic then I prefer or would pick, and she's a whole head taller then my other 4 Bosmers.

Any chance we could get a free appearance-change token for the affected characters?

EDIT: I had a race-change token, and used it. I could see alot of the sliders were all wrong, and spent my race-change token to test if my corrections would stick. it did.

But bah now I'm out of a racechange token I had bought for another char lol

Nerouyn · October 2020

InaMoonlight wrote: »

Confirmed today too.

Sorry to hear that you've also been affected by this one.

I don't think I can face doing any more dolmens today so I'll figure out the mask thingy and upload the video instead.

Nerouyn · October 2020

One video of bug.

https://youtu.be/FQ9n2xmpbfc

Over on the right is my spreadsheet with my specs, for reference when you get to the end and what the game gave me instead.

Praise Azura, I managed to get one character past this bug this morning but I still have another to go and no idea how many daily deletions that's going to require.

And I've another recently created character affected by the bug who I've put too much work into to delete and try to get the game to create as I specify.

Nerouyn · November 2020

ESO Support as expected.

Reported the bug in-game, again, linked to this video and said that I felt owed at least an appearance change token.

Response?

Hello!

Thank you for contacting The Elder Scrolls Online Team!

Race, Name and Appearance Change Tokens can be used on the Character Select screen, while Outfit Slot and Change Tokens are found at the station itself.

While we don't normally offer restorations for Character Change Tokens, in some cases, exceptions can be considered.
If you're seeking a token restoration, please reply with this information and we'll gladly investigate:
How many Crowns were spent on the token?
When was the token purchased and used?
We look forward to helping you resolve this issue.

Kind Regards,
The Elder Scrolls Online Team

Thanks for nothing.

InaMoonlight · November 2020

Nerouyn wrote: »

ESO Support as expected.

Reported the bug in-game, again, linked to this video and said that I felt owed at least an appearance change token.

Response?

Hello!

Thank you for contacting The Elder Scrolls Online Team!

Race, Name and Appearance Change Tokens can be used on the Character Select screen, while Outfit Slot and Change Tokens are found at the station itself.

While we don't normally offer restorations for Character Change Tokens, in some cases, exceptions can be considered.
If you're seeking a token restoration, please reply with this information and we'll gladly investigate:
How many Crowns were spent on the token?
When was the token purchased and used?
We look forward to helping you resolve this issue.

Kind Regards,
The Elder Scrolls Online Team

Thanks for nothing.

Reply to it, they're asking those questions because they're trying to refund the crowns for it

ApostateHobo · November 2020

Wow yeah this is a pretty serious bug, hope they see this and get it fixed soon!

Nerouyn · November 2020

InaMoonlight wrote: »

Reply to it, they're asking those questions because they're trying to refund the crowns for it

Refund crowns for what?

Just like my post here makes no mention of needing to be refunded crowns, neither did my ticket.

No the truth is more arcane.

First and from my experience up to seventh "replies" from their CS is a crude AI cherrypicking a single term out of your ticket / email and taking an epicly wild stab in the dark at what you need.

Hence dealing with ESO CS often feeling like banging your head against a brick wall.

ApostateHobo wrote: »

Wow yeah this is a pretty serious bug, hope they see this and get it fixed soon!

Not just that, they're gonna need to hand out change appearance tokens like candy.

Once they track down the code responsible for this bug they'll be able to determine precisely when it first started screwing with characters' appearance.

But it will be impossible for them to determine which characters created since that date have been affected. So they're either going to have to assume it's all of them and pass out a change token for each, or widely publicise the bug and invite players to check their appearance and contact CS if they think they've been affected.

The latter option would both be more embarrassing and more work for their CS.

InaMoonlight · November 2020

Well, I for one am out one race change token

(Bought the name+race deal, used the namechange on another char on NA)

ZOS_GinaBruno · November 2020

To be clear, was this occurring on the PTS or PC Live servers?

Nerouyn · November 2020

PC live, NA.

Bug experienced on 2 accounts going back possibly as long as about a month ago.

InaMoonlight · November 2020

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

To be clear, was this occurring on the PTS or PC Live servers?

For me it happened on PC NA the live server

Dagoth_Rac · November 2020

Can you fix it with an appearance change token? Or do your chosen settings there get ignored once back in game, too?

Reverb · November 2020

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

To be clear, was this occurring on the PTS or PC Live servers?

It’s happening on PC NA Live, as my (not intended to be) chonky Orc can attest.

Nord_Raseri · November 2020

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

To be clear, was this occurring on the PTS or PC Live servers?

Ps4 NA as well

Nerouyn · November 2020

Dagoth_Rac wrote: »

Can you fix it with an appearance change token? Or do your chosen settings there get ignored once back in game, too?

If they give me some change tokens I could try. I'm not willing to potentially waste any of my freebie race change tokens on an attempt.

However....

Two things make me think that they're already aware of the bug and it also affects the appearance change screen accessed with tokens.

This a post from yesterday in another thread.

https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/550842/fantastic-customer-service/

belfong wrote: »

I bought Appearance Change and even though I spent hours to tweak my Appearance, something still goes wrong after I commit. In the game and at certain angle, my appearance is weird. I sent Support a ticket, not expecting it to be entertained and they responded within a day and helped me! The funny thing is that my spam filter caught the email and I wasn’t aware of it until two weeks later.

It’s a truly fantastic support and customer service. Great job there, ZOS!

And look at their auto response to my ticket.

While we don't normally offer restorations for Character Change Tokens, in some cases, exceptions can be considered.
If you're seeking a token restoration, please reply with this information and we'll gladly investigate:
How many Crowns were spent on the token?
When was the token purchased and used?

They bothered to say that they normally don't refund tokens because they don't want to create a precedent for doing that.

But there are "exceptions" which is probably just the date of attempted change, because ZO already know it's bugged.

This player didn't know it was bugged and just wasn't happy with their result in game. But without making an "exceptional case" for it were instantly given a token refund. Presumably based solely on the date they used their token / the change screen.

Nerouyn · November 2020

@ZOS_GinaBruno

As detailed in my previous post I suspect ZO were already of this bug weeks ago but since you replied previously in this thread I'll give you an update.

No further progress on this but a few more anomalies to report.

I replied to the last CS communication with this:

Oh dearie me, no.

Consumers are entitled to software in good working order, which yours isn't.

The ONLY way for me to fix the appearance of any of my characters affected by this - I haven't been able to yet but will check them all - is an appearance change token.

Which you've just told me I have to pay extra for.

Charging consumers extra to fix broken aspects of your software is hilariously illegal.

Which elicited the standard this-matter-is-being-escalated response. On Nov 2.

Hilariously illegal might be a trigger phrase for escalation? Perhaps rather than bothering to report bugs / problems in detail in tickets and then being subjected to endless bot responses we should just submit "hilariously illegal" to start and go from there?

Nothing since then.

But I logged in to the CS site and there was an anomaly I've seen before. The summary page falsely reports ticket progress.

Screenshots below taken just now. First shows summary page reporting last update being 2 days ago.

Second shows most recent update from the 2nd, 6 days ago.

Whoever you've outsourced CS to might have some way to sneakily "update" a ticket without actually doing anything constructive, which would make their statistics for speed of response to customers appear much quicker than they are.

Also bizarrely on the 2nd I received a please-give-us-feedback email about this ticket. Which is still open.

tripp · November 2020

Oh, so it wasn't just me... Nothing major, but my Nord ended up at either default or negative height. Not that great, considering I was going for an Astartes theme...

Nerouyn · November 2020

tripp wrote: »

Oh, so it wasn't just me... Nothing major, but my Nord ended up at either default or negative height. Not that great, considering I was going for an Astartes theme...

It appears that they've known about the bug for at least a month and have been routinely, automatically refunding appearance change tokens to anyone who submits a ticket and who used a token in the known-to-be-bugged period.

But not players affected by this when creating new characters. Them they try to rob by forcing them to use the crown store to fix their bugged appearance. Which is illegal.

Since they'll have no means to distinguish between affected and unaffected characters they should give out a free appearance change token to every character created / changed during the bugged period.

But I'd recommend you submit a ticket insisting on change tokens to fix your characters, include a link to this thread and specifically refer to the included video evidence of the bug.

Sirvaleen · November 2020

Can happen on PC EU too. So many bugs since the update though, I just used a token..

Nicole94 · November 2020

@ZOS_GinaBruno

Thank you for contacting
The Elder Scrolls Online Support Team

Question Subject: Hi there. I recently purchased a Race/Name Change token.
I had a High elf Necro and I used the race change to build my beautiful little dark elf. I worked on her for over and hour. I checked everything twice. Was very happy, and clicked

Question Reference # 201111-006495

Date Created: 11/11/2020 07:34 PM
Date Last Updated: 11/11/2020 07:34 PM

Status: Thank You for Your Feedback
Message Log:
The Elder Scrolls Online Team response on 11/11/2020 07:34 PM
Greetings,

Thank you for contacting The Elder Scrolls Online Team!

We greatly appreciate you bringing this potential bug to our attention. This information has been collected and will be passed on to our development team. You will not receive a further response to this ticket.

We encourage you check the Bug Reports section of the ESO Forums as well. The development team checks these regularly and it allows you to add video and screenshots more easily to help dscribe the issue you're experiencing.

Thank you for your continued interest and support!

Kind Regards,
The Elder Scrolls Online Team
Customer response on 11/11/2020 07:34 PM

Hi there. I recently purchased a Race/Name Change token.
I had a High elf Necro and I used the race change to build my beautiful little dark elf. I worked on her for over and hour. I checked everything twice. Was very happy, and clicked save. The first think I notice is the "bags" under her eyes, as I go into the "real" world. I accept that could be lighting, I will look over that. But then Imagine my horror when I am talking to a friend in game, and I type /lol and I hear this obnoxious orc like laugh. I KNOW I checked that, I never miss that!
Mortified I immediately buy an appearance change token, only to discover, that I DID set it! But the laugh is not the same! And when I say it is not the same, I mean I clicked that voice test for 20 minutes cycling through the voices of type A and NONE of the laughs sound like this.
I also did /lol over and over and over in game to see if it was a "cycling" laugh. Always it is the same, I sound like an Orc.

I am very disappointed. I want my crowns back for the Appearance change token, I want the voice type A to sound in game like it does in Character Creation. Or I want that refunded as well.
I don't have to tell you that in a RPG many people put a lot of effort into character creation, and we expect what we see and hear.
Again, lighting in the world is very different and I do understand I could look slightly different than during a perfect lighting situation. This is not a complaint about her looks, only her sound.
Please help me to fix this. Thank you

We will assume your issue has been resolved if we do not hear from you within 96 hours (4 days).

If your issue has not been resolved, you can respond directly to this email. We look forward to working with you again should you need us!

Can you please tell me what I need to do next?

*******************************************************************************************************************************

Situation is resolved, took less than 6 hours. on a complicated matter. Thank you Customer Support Team!!!