Thank you Kevin for your feedback !
I was present during a few storms in ESO time and I can see now that it is not always easy to respond the way that nobody get even more angry, and myself when I tried sometimes to have a dialog with all kind of players esp when I knew little about the topic I made them even more angry. So I avoid comments about hot and angry topics if I cannot agree or have little knowledge, but to have total silence was a bit strange aswell.

Can we make Kevin employee of the month? I'm not being cynical this time.

The forum is the back bone of the veteran community. I can see it through account creation dates and participation from many members here.
I think discord or other outlets for media are good too, but everything must be based here with a visual/back end update to the forum banner (see above).

Smaller print, clickable titles instead of full links...something tidy and more informative that regroups all of your 'coming up' media excursions/streams/articles/updates.

Some ask for transparency regarding communication/choices/future endeavours:

At the moment I see four subjects in the general section (top visible section) which are marked with the Z icon (moderator/employee intervention/promotion of that subject). Some of these are getting a bit old or don't reflect the most demanded/posted subjects on the forum.

(To reinforce my argument: Sometimes I only find out you guys are streaming because someone told me)
(PS: the 'some players' phrase is in the forum banner again...it's all of us, guys...come on!)

TLDR;
They need to focus on profit, not community.

I started playing ESO right at the launch (I even played in beta). I quit sometimes after Summerset released. So, I went through several major changes to the game.

This is how I understand the reasoning of ZOS decision making.

The way I see it, ZOS is mostly focused on the players who pay they most money - the casual ones. At the start, the game was subscription based. You bought it and then paid for the subscription (just like WoW, FFXIV). Soon after (maybe a year or so) they switched their strategy due to (most likely) low income. They started releasing these chapters, DLCs and a ridiculous number of cosmetics. You can plainly see it all when you open the Crown Store.
(I am not saying this is necessary a bad thing. It's just a drastic shift in their strategy to earn more money. It's a company and it needs to be profitable to keep its business.)

Years later after I quit, I came back, opened the forums to browse what troubles players nowadays, and it's still the same things - crappy Cyrodiil performance (even after several "Performance Improvement Patches", game crashing randomly, childishly easy content, balancing issues (I guess these are plaguing every MMO though)... It's all pretty much endgame oriented. Nothing that would bother a casual player who just wants to do quests, explore, dress up differently every other day, paint his hat a different color every now and then, move stuff around his house(s), etc. Simply put, I suppose Cyrodiil, Battlegrounds, Vet. Dungeons, Vet. Trials, Vet. Arenas don't bring much in terms of money.
For Cyrodiil PvP, all you need is base game and you never have to pay a single euro ever again. Why would they invest hundreds of hours into something that doesn't bring them profit? How many people play the game and pay ESO+ just for Cyrodiil? Be sure they have the exact data.
Sure, you need to buy chapters and DLCs for the trials and dungeons (or pay for ESO+). But I expect the vast majority of their income is coming from the crown store (noticed the everyday spam of "WTB Crowns"?).

For better or worse, they need to focus on what brings them money or they can lose their jobs if/when Zenimax/Microsoft decide they are not profitable anymore. Therefore, most of their manpower goes to these "easy money" thingies.

There could be another simpler explanation (please take this as a brainstorming, I do not intend to insult anyone): someone in ZOS could be extremely arrogant and doesn't want to admit he's wrong about how he handles the game, accept outside ideas, etc.

Elo106 wrote: »

Aliniel wrote: »

TLDR;
They need to focus on profit, not community.

This is how I understand the reasoning of ZOS decision making.

The way I see it, ZOS is mostly focused on the players who pay they most money - the casual ones.
There could be another simpler explanation (please take this as a brainstorming, I do not intend to insult anyone): someone in ZOS could be extremely arrogant and doesn't want to admit he's wrong about how he handles the game, accept outside ideas, etc.

techyeshic wrote: »

They know better than you. Why would they take your feedback?

Doesnt explain why they would say that they heard us loud and clear we do not like sets that fight for us and in the very next patch they add 3 overpowered proc sets.

They focus on profit plenty, catering to the casuals is true, they said as much. But casuals are dependent on content creators for guides, builds etc and no matter how you cut it if the game barely gets any views and the few streamers that are there are constantly complaining its a bad look for the game.

So yes make money but there has to be a somewhat competitive end game.

The kind of people researching builds from streamers are already largely not casual. Someone can be pretty enthusiastic and hard core about the game but just not be very good at it. Core users are more than just the endgame.

And frankly I think a big issue with endgame content is trying to cater it too much to the .1% of the playerbase. That's a recipe to drive away new people and leave yourself with an evershrinking group of vet players.

A lot of the vet dlc content is designed to only be completable by a handful of people (relative to the size of the playerbase). It's not enough they get more rewards from leaderboards and achievements, they also have to be the only ones that can complete it at all.

It kills a ton of the interest in this content from new and midgame players, the latter of which should have a desire to upgrade into endgame players but largely don't in this game at an unhealthy proportion because the difficulty spike is so extreme.

The same is true in pvp. What it takes for being unable to walk two feet without being casually one shot by someone you literally have no hope of killing to slaughtering newbies is too steep.

For example, in an fps you die to a brand new player's sniper rifle headshot the same as top 500 player. The difference between the two of them is their skill, with much less artificial barriers between the two of them. Many games have some artificial barriers and do really well, but the difference isn't as extreme as in eso.

They don't, really. It is just a PR feel good policy I think developers have to offer to make us feel good.