you can't "divert manpower" to bugfixes

Firstmep · November 2020

Muttsmutt wrote: »

in times like these, an egregiously large percentage of keyboard warriors gather round the forums with their flaming pitchworks, here around the ZOS virtual headquarters, all chanting the same battle hymn:

"put EVERY SINGLE man, woman, and child to work, and FIX THE BUGS!!!"

the kindest of them might realize that poor timmy, the 16 year old intern janitor, probably doesn't have the necessary skillset to contribute anything of use to the desperately needed fixes.
the smartest of them might realize that deborah from marketing isn't whipping the coders' backs raw so that they optimize every line of code that has to do with monetization.

and yet an even smaller percentage have the sensibility to realize that in practice, even if jonathan the senior coder could theoretically shove his hands in the server code spaghetti, there's already thomas and his team of veterans simultaneously playing jenga with the code in perfect synchrony. sure, they may be the same people who always have been responsible for that particular moving part of the dauntingly massive machine that is ESO, and the same people who oopsie'd the bugs into existence in the first place- but by god, would their entire jenga tower collapse were they to have to indoctrinate new team members into the way they wrangle the code; to teach them the mystic arts of "if(goingToCrashToDesktop) { dont(); }".

in reality, this is more or less how it works:

game developers have teams assigned to different aspects of the game. each team is a cohesive unit of people working together in a way in which their individual work can be brought together coherently and functionally. assigning one team's duties to another team will NOT speed up the process, because it isn't a straightforward additive equation of "the more people work on it the faster it gets done", it isn't working a field. it's working with a very complex system in which every single person has their own part to play, and multiple people will just get in each other's way.

they can, and do prioritize working on urgently needed fixes which are essential to the game working. they're working with all reasonable able-bodied, relevantly-skilled men, women, and others.
if those fixes aren't ready day 2, they haven't figured it out yet. just because the content pipeline does not come to a standstill when there are critical bugs does not mean they aren't using every single employee whose job is to address those bugs, to address those bugs. they don't pull their coders aside and tell them "hey, i know we're supposed to fix weaving, but we wanna make a new class for the next expansion, you should work on that today instead".
and those people working on fixing the bugs? they're not going to work faster if you metaphorically whip them. nothing will make them work faster except maybe coffee.

TL;DR:
you can't "divert manpower".
so let's all calm down and go shout at a PUG or something.
y'all need to stop acting with the same mental incompetence as a PUG's combat incompetence.

-
obligatory disclaimer:
this is not about "defending" zos. this is about instilling critical thinking, logic, and reasoning, in the place of frustrated "demands". this is about providing a more reasonable explanation for all this mess. for the sake of knowledge.
the current state of the game, or ZOS' buggy day one releases in general, are disrespectful towards their paying customers. they are beneath the quality they should provide. ZOS' developer teams, regardless of their appointed responsibilites, should fulfill those responsibilites better.
given the success of the game, they should have some of the best people in the industry.
maybe they do, maybe they don't- what's clear is that they mess up a lot more than is acceptable to do by their playerbase.
that doesn't mean they're not prioritizing properly. it just means they're bad at their job.
...or the game really is a hellish nightmare to code properly idk i'm not a dev.

Yes, you are 100% right.
How do players expect a working product they paid for.
Completely unheard of.
Newsflash, they don't have to prioritize bug fixes any more than we have to put up with a buggy game.
If I want to vent/rage/yell on these forums Beacuse(once again) a new update broke the game in more ways than I can count, well I very well bloody can.
Not sure why you would expect people to put up with a broken product.
If I go to a restaurant and they serve me stale food, I will complain.

Sadly the video game industry simply doesnt have the same checks in place as many other markets, but that doesn't mean that we as customers should just sit quietly and take it.

Big companies like Zenimax already make sure that negative feedback is non existent in mainstream media outlets like gaming sites etc, we don't don't also need our voices muffled on the games very own forum.

furiouslog · November 2020

Good post, @Muttsmutt , and all valid points. However, when you step back and look at it from 10 thousand feet, the bottom line is that whatever ZOS is doing when it comes to managing their game is not working. Speaking as a paying consumer with time limitations and certain reasonable expectations of performance, any demands I put forward to expedite solutions to the issues they have introduced should be expected. My only remedies are to wait patiently and suffer through it, or to quit the game and go do something else with my leisure time. My preference would be that they design their organization in such a way that this does not happen in the first place.

[Snip]

[Edited for inappropriate content]

fastolfv_ESO · November 2020

the mail bug where mail isnt delivered until you zone was reported when beta was capped at lvl 25, 7 years and running zos knows and will not fix anything

BXR_Lonestar · November 2020

I understand that every man, woman, child, and their pet dogs can't be pulled from other projects to fix the bugs in this game, but tbh, something does need to be done. It used to be that crashes, freezes, and performance issues were limited to Cyrodil and other crowded areas, but now I've had friends crashing while doing quests, in areas where we were the only people around in an area, and there wasn't a whole lot going on around us. Under these conditions, we can't run 4 man dungeons or even consider taking on a trial.

I don't expect them to dedicate every single employee they have to fixing these issues, but a concerted effort does need to be made in order to address these issues. If the current teams are overwhelmed or don't have the man power to do the work, seems like they may need to do more hiring to get them the man power they need.

DigitalHype · November 2020

fastolfv_ESO wrote: »

the mail bug where mail isnt delivered until you zone was reported when beta was capped at lvl 25, 7 years and running zos knows and will not fix anything

They can't even figure out how to securely cache your login password, like almost every other game released in the past decade. They simply do not spend any money on developing anything that doesn't somehow have a current or future plan toward a or reduction in operating cost, retention, or broader monitizaiton scheme.

techyeshic · November 2020

You can't divert resources to fixing bugs, but you could divert from creating more. They are pushing ahead with quarterly updates set in stone and that no doubt has created a gap between what they fix and what they continue to break. It has to at some point, be worse for business than people being frustrated by the state of the game.

Recapitated · November 2020

There are some long-run vs. short-run considerations here. You're not going to discover a mountain of bugs and hire another 20 people on fiverr to solve the problem. But that's not a problem where more workers doesn't help, it's a problem of familiarity and quality of the workers.

But surely you can make the long-run investment of training someone so that they will eventually have the know-how to work on systems where you just need experience working on the game itself rather than just be a competent programmer. Otherwise the game is screwed if anybody from the team leaves because they essentially become irreplaceable.

Are resources stopping ZOS from doing that? Then they can invest less in content developers and more into that. It's not going to pay off right now but it would have if they had started much sooner.

If for some reason having more dev's who are familiar with the code doesn't help, then I guess it can't be helped and this is just the way the game is going to be. But it's not obvious to me that the complexity and uniqueness of the code implies more people can't be working on it.

FangOfTheTwoMoons · November 2020

So what's an acceptable amount of time to fix game breaking bugs? 5 weeks? 7 weeks? Cause that's what it's looking like. The light attack bug was noticed the first week of the PTS. It went live 5 weeks later, then they're making people wait another 2 weeks cause of stadia.

7 weeks of game breaking bugs is unacceptable, no matter how you try to justify it.

https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/comment/6966393

This BGs bug has been going on since June. They didn't even acknowledge it till September, then nothing. How is this acceptable behavior? Yeah it's not a huge game breaking bug, but for it to persist for 5 months is ridiculous. It must be a complicated bug, the most complex bug to date.

FangOfTheTwoMoons · November 2020

fastolfv_ESO wrote: »

the mail bug where mail isnt delivered until you zone was reported when beta was capped at lvl 25, 7 years and running zos knows and will not fix anything

This speaks for itself.

Celephantsylvius_Bornasfinmo · November 2020

Unfortunately the trend for monetization (items/dlc packs/eso+) has truly become their point of focus and it's pretty obvious these days for a large amount of the player base. From what I've seen in some other game's reviews on the net (from Bethesda), it is also the same trend...Elder Scrolls Blades...Fallout Shelter...to name some I've seen in reviews. They invested heavily in monetization software a couple of years ago and we are paying the price I can only imagine or it was a way to make the company more attractive for sale purposes. (tin foil hat on).

I've been an ESO+ subscriber since it came out, but what you can see from my more recent posts is that I won't be subscribing again in future and one must say ESO is pretty much unplayable after a certain amount of hours played without the 'advantages' of ESO+. This all leaves us with a bitter taste for future game releases. TRUST is still the biggest seller in what ever product you sell these days and the trust well has run dry.

precambria · November 2020

quote-if-you-don-t-know-how-to-fix-it-please-stop-breaking-it-severn-cullis-suzuki-92-22-24-edited.jpg

fced · November 2020

zvavi wrote: »

Danikat wrote: »

I've often said to people imagine if you arrived in work one day and your boss told you all the staff in a totally different department were going to stop doing their work and do yours instead, you just need to show them what to do. How do you imagine that would go?

And in such a big game, where bugs are everywhere, every patch, it ain't one day. It is a policy of not having enough hands on deck to begin with. It is not about "all hands on deck fix bugs now." It is about "we don't have enough people in this department to fix all the bugs that were reported in the PTS again and again and again.

Don't tell me they don't have the budget (the money), the community is big enough, everybody who play more than 1 month get ESO+ because of the handicraft bag... May be they could do more money if the game was more stable, because it have a very very bad reputation. Each friend i tried to grab on ESO answered by something like "too old game, too buggy, i liked Skyrim and Oblivion, but it is not the same, ..."On Skyrim, the game after 50 hours was barely unplayable, if I recall correctly loading a save crashed the game or take 10 minutes to load or each time you enter an area with the auto-save, they fixed Skyrim eventually, but far too late, the sick was done.

In cany case, many game have the same problem, they release content too early in draft state, the game is full of bugs. It is not only Bethesda, Remember Anthem, we players have a lot of games like that, we played them because we loved the brand (Bioware Bethesda). Try to do a Vet pledge on DLC dungeon if not at 7am in the morning, you have to wait even as tank or heal (i have 3 roles)
It is very hard to attract new players (who don't even know what are Skyrim, Oblivion, Morrowind) on a game with that archaic gameplay and that expensive, Game + Summerset + Half Elsweyr for full price + Half Greymoor for full price + +++ + Eso +

I will cease to say players, because we are customers, so Custommers can pay, but they whant something for the money they spent.. I thought it was the goal of ESO + (to maintain the game in good condition with a decent developpers staff dedicated to improving the game quality).

fced · November 2020

Youyouz06 wrote: »

Unfortunately the trend for monetization (items/dlc packs/eso+) has truly become their point of focus and it's pretty obvious these days for a large amount of the player base. From what I've seen in some other game's reviews on the net (from Bethesda), it is also the same trend...Elder Scrolls Blades...Fallout Shelter...to name some I've seen in reviews. They invested heavily in monetization software a couple of years ago and we are paying the price I can only imagine or it was a way to make the company more attractive for sale purposes. (tin foil hat on).

I've been an ESO+ subscriber since it came out, but what you can see from my more recent posts is that I won't be subscribing again in future and one must say ESO is pretty much unplayable after a certain amount of hours played without the 'advantages' of ESO+. This all leaves us with a bitter taste for future game releases. TRUST is still the biggest seller in what ever product you sell these days and the trust well has run dry.

Agreed, we pay for the disastrous Fallout 76

Brovah · November 2020

Muttsmutt wrote: »

in times like these, an egregiously large percentage of keyboard warriors gather round the forums with their flaming pitchworks, here around the ZOS virtual headquarters, all chanting the same battle hymn:

"put EVERY SINGLE man, woman, and child to work, and FIX THE BUGS!!!"

the kindest of them might realize that poor timmy, the 16 year old intern janitor, probably doesn't have the necessary skillset to contribute anything of use to the desperately needed fixes.
the smartest of them might realize that deborah from marketing isn't whipping the coders' backs raw so that they optimize every line of code that has to do with monetization.

and yet an even smaller percentage have the sensibility to realize that in practice, even if jonathan the senior coder could theoretically shove his hands in the server code spaghetti, there's already thomas and his team of veterans simultaneously playing jenga with the code in perfect synchrony. sure, they may be the same people who always have been responsible for that particular moving part of the dauntingly massive machine that is ESO, and the same people who oopsie'd the bugs into existence in the first place- but by god, would their entire jenga tower collapse were they to have to indoctrinate new team members into the way they wrangle the code; to teach them the mystic arts of "if(goingToCrashToDesktop) { dont(); }".

in reality, this is more or less how it works:

game developers have teams assigned to different aspects of the game. each team is a cohesive unit of people working together in a way in which their individual work can be brought together coherently and functionally. assigning one team's duties to another team will NOT speed up the process, because it isn't a straightforward additive equation of "the more people work on it the faster it gets done", it isn't working a field. it's working with a very complex system in which every single person has their own part to play, and multiple people will just get in each other's way.

they can, and do prioritize working on urgently needed fixes which are essential to the game working. they're working with all reasonable able-bodied, relevantly-skilled men, women, and others.
if those fixes aren't ready day 2, they haven't figured it out yet. just because the content pipeline does not come to a standstill when there are critical bugs does not mean they aren't using every single employee whose job is to address those bugs, to address those bugs. they don't pull their coders aside and tell them "hey, i know we're supposed to fix weaving, but we wanna make a new class for the next expansion, you should work on that today instead".
and those people working on fixing the bugs? they're not going to work faster if you metaphorically whip them. nothing will make them work faster except maybe coffee.

TL;DR:
you can't "divert manpower".
so let's all calm down and go shout at a PUG or something.
y'all need to stop acting with the same mental incompetence as a PUG's combat incompetence.

-
obligatory disclaimer:
this is not about "defending" zos. this is about instilling critical thinking, logic, and reasoning, in the place of frustrated "demands". this is about providing a more reasonable explanation for all this mess. for the sake of knowledge.
the current state of the game, or ZOS' buggy day one releases in general, are disrespectful towards their paying customers. they are beneath the quality they should provide. ZOS' developer teams, regardless of their appointed responsibilites, should fulfill those responsibilites better.
given the success of the game, they should have some of the best people in the industry.
maybe they do, maybe they don't- what's clear is that they mess up a lot more than is acceptable to do by their playerbase.
that doesn't mean they're not prioritizing properly. it just means they're bad at their job.
...or the game really is a hellish nightmare to code properly idk i'm not a dev.

Lol.. maybe if they actually fix things in their 6 years of the game, yes.. but really, dude... the game is in a really bad state for like 2 years..

Performance, gameplay, patches, mythical.. as a player from beta I really have to say that a lot of ppl tend to lean towards other games if ZOS doesn't care enough to keep ppl in Tamriel..

Tannus15 · November 2020

I would feel a lot less antagonistic about it if we didn't report exactly these problems 4 weeks prior to the update going live.
So far every bug on live I've seen was reported on PTS WEEKS before it went live.

Then it goes live and they have to hotfix an issue that plenty of people had reported on, and then we're stuck with this mess for 2 more weeks.

What happened ZoS? I know you know about it because you moderated my thread in the PTS forum pointing out the problem.

DigitalHype · November 2020

They have the data. If they needed to do better, they would. Casuals don't really care or even notice the bugs. RP'ers just want to wear pretty outfits and play pretend. Interior decorators always have a new thing to chase. Completionists only get upset if something blocks the achievement.

Only a vocal minority are complaining and upset. Many of this group are arguably addicted and also suffer from sunk cost fallacy, fomo, and lack of competition in the marketplace. So, no real threat there either.

Celephantsylvius_Bornasfinmo · November 2020

It's gotten so old now. We put effort in something which isn't giving back in my opinion. I think I'm more active on the forum than in the game itself nowadays and this will soon become boring too.

Moloch1514 · November 2020

Bless your heart OP. Keep it up...there may be a rare Indirik in your future!

p00tx · November 2020

I sent in repair tickets during the earlier portion of this latest dlc's pts phase, directly from the pts server, indicating the presence of a number of issues i found. Guess how many of those issues went live? They had the knowledge, and they had the ability to fix the issues before they went live. Someone, somewhere, opted to ignore the data and push this dumpster fire through.

This company has behaved irresponsibly, yet again, and there is nothing you can say that can defend them. It's gross negligence and someone(s) should be ashamed of their lack of oversight.

twev · November 2020

p00tx wrote: »

I sent in repair tickets during the earlier portion of this latest dlc's pts phase, directly from the pts server, indicating the presence of a number of issues i found. Guess how many of those issues went live? They had the knowledge, and they had the ability to fix the issues before they went live. Someone, somewhere, opted to ignore the data and push this dumpster fire through.

This company has behaved irresponsibly, yet again, and there is nothing you can say that can defend them. It's gross negligence and someone(s) should be ashamed of their lack of oversight.

You're implying incompetence.
I contend that they're putting just as much effort into solving the problems as they intend to.

Sure, software bugs in code happen, especially when the code covers as much territory as this game does. The real issue is how the bugs are handled. they're either pursued with much vigor until they are ruthlessly eliminated, or they are tolerated by the producers.

We are witnessing more tolerance than many of us are comfortable with.
That doesn't make the producers negligent, and clearly not ashamed.
Keep thinking happy thoughts.

MJallday · November 2020

I’ve never read such utter bobbins before!

Of course you can divert resources to do any task in software development and testing.

The considerations are

1) is it the right resource, do they have the right skill set or experience to be able
To fix
2) what impact does it have on software development path , do you continue developing at the same pace or slow down?
3) do you backfill, what’s the lead time
4) is it development that’s required or testing /better QA processes

Anything is possible, but it is a balance between resource budget commitment to
Stakeholders on delivery timescales , costs to maintain if not fixed and also corporate decisions (is it better to not retrospectively fix, learn and apply to a new version)

Also worth considering the devs may be limited by the gameplay engine...

AgaTheGreat · November 2020

[snip]

They won't be able to fix it.

[Picture removed for Censor Bypass]

Mythreindeer · November 2020

AgaTheGreat wrote: »

[snip]

They won't be able to fix it.

[Picture removed for Censor Bypass]

LOL Best meme ever.

And sadly...all too true

Mahabahabtha · November 2020

EvilAutoTech wrote: »

Y'all know who fixed most of the bugs in Morrowind?

The community.

Y'all know who fixed most of the bugs in Oblivion?

The community.

Y'all know who fixed most of the bugs in Skyrim?

The community.

Y'all know who doesn't have access to fixing bugs in ESO?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPR-HyGj2d0

Swordancer · November 2020

There is no point to even discuss and defend the ZoS at all. If company worth 7.5 mld USD is unable to improve quality of the game that is completely losing reputation these days due to too many, way too many bugs and other problems then maybe they should shoot shows or movies instead of wasting our precious time getting nervous when games should be fun.

I'm sure the developers in their studio are well aware of where the problem is and who is responsible for all of it. It is all about money and I don't care if they can't handle that right now becouse of too many lines of code xD, why should I? I mean we are not calling developers by thier names, we talk about huge corporation which fully deserves what is currently happening on the Internet.

Imagine playing some other mmo in the future. Do you want the same things to happen? No, thats why people got full right to complain. Especially since many of these people have transferred huge money to them, spent a lot of time fully frustrated in return. They have right to complain and they should complain. Otherwise any corporation can do with us what they want.

If a couple of heads get chopped off because people start to leave the game, laugh at it on the Internet and stop paying, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. Action reaction.

Muttsmutt · November 2020

twev wrote: »

We are witnessing more tolerance than many of us are comfortable with.
That doesn't make the producers negligent, and clearly not ashamed.
Keep thinking happy thoughts.

i suppose this may be the bottomline in the end, which compounds the points i made initially, and ultimately leaves some bugs unfixed for a long, long time. though i still prefer to think that "tolerance" is given out so freely due to the instability of the code & the limitations that imposes.
but of course, no company will ever straight up say "code's a mess, just live with this bug cause we're not gonna rewrite the entire game to fix your mailbox".

regardless, it's not an acceptable practice, as many posters seem to think i think otherwise.