Dear ZOS, I'm writing a follow up to my first post about communication with players that I posted back for Update 33 here https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/598936/in-the-future-maybe-ask-your-players-for-more-ideas-about-things/p1

I'm really not writing this for myself. I have no stake in this update. I quit endgame a few years back because of the very thing you are doing right now which is massive combat changes every 3 months that change how combat works and nerf all players in an attempt to reign in the top 1%. I simply went back to questing, housing, and RP, and I was content. I'm one of those low APM players you have tried to target with this current update, but this update isn't where I got burned. Mine was Update 33 when you traded out our individual character data and achievements for AwA instead of trying to work AwA in on top of what we had, which is what many had originally hoped for and would have been the best of both worlds. I won't go into detail about how that hurt the RP side of my gameplay (and still does) because that is not really the focus here. I'm only including it to show that I deeply empathize with the players who are now both blindsided and angry and hurt by something they didn't see coming and didn't ask for. I'm watching the same thing play out here that played out with the AwA update, and I'm bringing to your attention again a few points in my post linked above about how keeping massive changes in secrecy until they hit PTS, which gives you massively limited time to fix the consequences of such changes, and wastes development effort on things that may be harmful to your player community and ultimately your bottom line. None of us want to see ESO lose players or us losing faith in you. You don't want to lose our subs or crown purchases. That puts us in a symbiotic relationship of us paying for your entertainment so we can have a fun and entertaining experience.

I want to again bring up that the secrecy of not communicating sweeping changes until PTS cycles is really not working. Granted you communicated a whole lot more about the current update than you did with AwA, the fact is players can't give any meaningful feedback unless they know the details, the numbers, and are allowed to test these things in off times on the PTS. There was one time you allowed the community to test some hefty changes to light and heavy attacks in an off update PTS test, and the feedback and data helped you to make a decision that was good for the game and players, and your pockets. You gained our trust through that, and we both avoided a disaster. Keeping us in the loop and even including us in your decision making through off cycle PTS tests, bringing back Community Reps, and opening more lines of communication will give you the exact data you need for your decision making so you don't have to go through massive changes every 3 months to backpedal things that didn't pan out or have PR disasters that cause players to lose motivation and leave. I know you have spreadsheets and internal data, but you don't have the human element in those things, the ideas and creativity that only human to human feedback will give you.

Sometimes it's easy to feel like our ideas are somehow not important and maybe even patronized, whether you intend that or not. The forceful push of changes that create severe backlash, changes that could be put on hold and reworked but never are gives us a helpless feeling that our ideas are seen as childish somehow and unimportant. That's how your players feel. You have extremely gifted and creative players who not only provide excellent feedback, but point out to the how and why of it, and even offer solutions that just might work if you took a minute to listen and consider them instead of plowing ahead stubbornly because you put the dev time in and now come hell or high water that update is going through no matter what state it's in. Talk to us more. Give us some off cycle PTS testing of ideas you have and together we can figure out the best way to reach those goals together. Don't blindside us anymore with something you've already wasted dev time and money on that you now can't roll back. Let off cycle PTS become a regular testing ground for combat balance changes where you can get the human to human data you need that spreadsheets and internal statistics can't give.

I how it's hard to trust in letting us into the loop more after so many have expressed anger at you in unproductive ways, but someone has to make that first step of trust. Let us help you much earlier in your development planning when ideas are being hashed out, and then let us test them so we can give you the data you want from human beings testing those ideas and taking them into game play situations to find out the consequences long before you have to force these things through during a PTS update cycle. Help us regain trust in you through you bringing us into the planning and decision making so that together we can make ESO a really great and highly fun and entertaining game that it was and should be. Only your players know what players of your game want, and you have a bunch of them right here to glean from. In the future maybe ask your players for more ideas about things in their planning stages, and let players test them in of cycle PTS. I just hope that at this point you can clearly see that the cycle of secrecy and then PTS drops is not working, and I hope something can be implemented. Simply toss secrecy out the window and let players test everything in advance to provide you time for sufficient feedback and fixes.



Edited for typos and clarity