LPapirius wrote: »

Erickson9610 wrote: »

I'd like an "Other" option in the poll so I can say "both" — there are separate teams working on separate things.

Plus, there's a lot more to this game than just "combat and performance" and "cosmetics". You also have to consider the writing/stories, gameplay systems (like Antiquities and Tales of Tribute), housing, and dozens of other aspects of the game like that. Removing cosmetics wouldn't allocate more resources to combat, or to any other aspect of the game.

Good polls force the respondent to take a stance, not waffle between a bunch of different options. I deliberately left out the "other" or "both" options so people would have to answer which matters more to them.

At the time of this reply, there are 50 total votes, with 446 views. I think that shows that regardless what you intend for the poll to represent, the majority of people who clicked to read the thread didn't see a poll response to accurately represent their opinion so abstained altogether. One of them being me.

I know we are less likely to see first hand improvements that are made to performance issues. But there is no arguing that it appears that ZOS' near exclusive focus for years now has been shinies to sell in the crown store.

Nobody can reasonably argue that there aren't massive performance issues that have been ongoing for years now that need more attention, so ZOS should be focusing more on performance than cosmetics. The cosmetics are worthless if the game doesn't play. So ZOS needs to hire more people to fix the programming that's resulting in these perennial performance issues.

I chose the combat option because even though that is a different team than the one that does cosmetics, it all comes out of the same pot of money. If you shift your focus towards cosmetics then there is less money for combat improvements.

Erickson9610 wrote: »

katanagirl1 wrote: »

it all comes out of the same pot of money.

ZOS might have a separate budget for each team, so I wouldn't assume that there is some "pot of money" that ZOS can draw from on a whim. None of us can really say how things actually work internally there.

It is the amount of money they can spend on development. Every company knows what their budget is for a project.

@LPapirius ZOS cannot sell something that customers feel they've already paid for / are entitled to. So if poor balance and performance are causing the population to decline, they have to recoup the losses by getting more money out of those who remain. Of course that is not sustainable in the long run, hence the announced change in release cycle / monetization strategy for2025/ 2026. So, you may actually get your wish in a way. A shift of focus to 'back end' teams. But that shift will more likely take the form of drastic cuts in the arts / design departments than an expanded combat development team. For instance, the Vengeance experiment is done instead, not on top of what that team might otherwise have been doing.

I care more about the performance than the cosmetics but comparing them in the way that you are doing is making a false equivalence. You can't ask a graphic designer to stop making outfits or textures and fix some esoteric networking bug instead, it's a completely different skillset, and vice versa if you ask the combat code programmer to go and design some character textures we'll all end up with characters that look like Monkey Jesus...

katanagirl1 wrote: »

I chose the combat option because even though that is a different team than the one that does cosmetics, it all comes out of the same pot of money. If you shift your focus towards cosmetics then there is less money for combat improvements.

To me it seems like this might be the core point the OP is trying to make. Investments into cosmetics are coming at the result of short changing the effort to improve performance. After all, creating cosmetics is easy. Fixing coding problems that result in performance issues is hard. Someone just out of school can create cosmetics. It takes a seasoned coder that will cost significantly more to employ to fix coding problems.

A fundamental point that hinders OP and us all is that, as I understand it, "performance" issues are due to the inherent limitations of the now-ancient game engine underlying ESO. They can hire devs to work on cosmetics, and on PvP combat balance, and have some effect in those areas. But no matter how many devs they hire to work on "performance", ultimately there is very little improvement to be made short of making 'ESO2' on a new engine. All they can do is small optimisations and changing the balance of where performance limits impact which functionality.

AngryPenguin wrote: »

katanagirl1 wrote: »

I chose the combat option because even though that is a different team than the one that does cosmetics, it all comes out of the same pot of money. If you shift your focus towards cosmetics then there is less money for combat improvements.

To me it seems like this might be the core point the OP is trying to make. Investments into cosmetics are coming at the result of short changing the effort to improve performance. After all, creating cosmetics is easy. Fixing coding problems that result in performance issues is hard. Someone just out of school can create cosmetics. It takes a seasoned coder that will cost significantly more to employ to fix coding problems.

Yes, and while someone mentioned that there was a budget for cosmetics and a budget for performance, they both come from the total sum for all of ESO. It’s like your own personal budget for all of your expenses. If you spend too much on entertainment for example, you will have less for housing and food.

Muizer wrote: »

katanagirl1 wrote: »

Yes, and while someone mentioned that there was a budget for cosmetics and a budget for performance, they both come from the total sum for all of ESO.

While it is of course true you cannot just change budgets on a whim, they obviously get reviewed periodically. It stands to reason that is what will happen in the context of moving from year round stories to whatever release cycle it is we'll be getting.

Is adding personnel actually going to help much in addressing performance? Well, given that ZOS wants to take an experimental approach.................most definitely. Setting up an experiment, running it, collecting data and analyzing it is very labour intensive work and will definitely scale with the amount of people working on it.

I believe this is just what OP is saying, maybe they can confirm. Perhaps there is less money going into combat development and more into cosmetics because that is how the latest budget is set up. If they want to hire more people to do the work for combat development, then that money comes out of that budget too. This isn’t rocket science, it’s just accounting.

katanagirl1 wrote: »

I believe this is just what OP is saying, maybe they can confirm. Perhaps there is less money going into combat development and more into cosmetics because that is how the latest budget is set up. If they want to hire more people to do the work for combat development, then that money comes out of that budget too. This isn’t rocket science, it’s just accounting.

Agreed. Setting up a good poll is not easy anyway. On this forum more often than not the questions are rhetorical: formulated to affirm a statement by the OP than gathering info. I don't think that is the case here, but the OP did kind of muddy the waters by asking voters to go along with some questionable assumptions. It probably would have been better had the question simply been: Should ZOS shift their priorities A) towards cosmetics, away from balance and performanceaway B ) towards balance and performance, away from cosmetics. C) Keep things as they are without any further personal opinions up front. So that is how I chose to answer the poll. I'm just going to look past what exactly the OP labels a 'cosmetic' or how exactly they think ZOS should shift focus.

JeroenB wrote: »

Muizer wrote: »

katanagirl1 wrote: »

I believe this is just what OP is saying, maybe they can confirm. Perhaps there is less money going into combat development and more into cosmetics because that is how the latest budget is set up. If they want to hire more people to do the work for combat development, then that money comes out of that budget too. This isn’t rocket science, it’s just accounting.

Agreed. Setting up a good poll is not easy anyway. On this forum more often than not the questions are rhetorical: formulated to affirm a statement by the OP than gathering info. I don't think that is the case here, but the OP did kind of muddy the waters by asking voters to go along with some questionable assumptions. It probably would have been better had the question simply been: Should ZOS shift their priorities A) towards cosmetics, away from balance and performanceaway B ) towards balance and performance, away from cosmetics. C) Keep things as they are without any further personal opinions up front. So that is how I chose to answer the poll. I'm just going to look past what exactly the OP labels a 'cosmetic' or how exactly they think ZOS should shift focus.

I must still disagree strongly with that wording, as "(PvP combat) balance" and "performance" really are independent issues. A player can be strongly in favour of more investment in all sorts of performance issues experienced throughout the game, but not care in the slightest about combat (often especially PvP). Plenty of game elements that OP bundles under "cosmetics" ("ToT, companions, housing etc.") suffer from their own "performance" issues stemming from the current game engine limitations. So any poll formulation linking "performance" to only one game element just doesn't make sense (unless you happen to favour that game element).

Perhaps the inclusion of "performance" is clouding OP's actual question, and it is really much more simple, along the lines of:
Should ZOS shift their priorities more towards (a) non-(PvP-)combat game elements, or (b) (PvP-)combat game elements. (With "new content" being neutral.)

(I include "PvP" explicitly because that seems to be OP's focus from reading his posts, but perhaps his point is intended to cover other (group) combat game elements as well, such as dungeons and trials.)

This is my issue as well.

Performance covers so much more than simply combat, and affects all aspects of the game.

Because, yeah, I want ZOS to focus on performance with everything they do, but I am not a PvPer nor do I do group stuff all that often, so I wouldn't really want them to focus on combat/balance. Even regular non-PvP/group stuff I would prefer they focus on cosmetics, but still making sure that things perform well.

@OP, the poll is flawed.


A focus on "combat" and "performance" (assuming a decrease in comestics) means the game is more likely to run out of money. They don't sell performance and combat in the crown shop. Cosmetics are equally as important unless people want the game to have less staff. I reckon the cosmetics team has a drastically higher % return on encouraging purchases than the combat team.


Basically, the game will run at the minimum performance level to ensure that players stay around to buy cosmetics. If too many players start leaving, then they might throw a bone to a development team for issues.

Muizer wrote: »

JeroenB wrote: »

I must still disagree strongly with that wording, as "(PvP combat) balance" and "performance" really are independent issues.

I suggested this wording as something that would have better served the OP's goals. You're dismissing those goals themselves as invalid. It's not the same thing, you know?

Sorry, I don't quite understand what you intend to say with this. Could you clarify?

If OP's "goal" is to knowingly incorrectly present one aspect of the game that people might consider important (performance) as only being associated with one specific other aspect of the game that OP enjoys (PvP combat balance) and explicitly not with other aspects of the game that OP does not enjoy (everything OP dumps under 'cosmetics') despite the first (performance) in truth being associated with both of the others, in order to create a false narrative matching OP's preferences, then I am indeed dismissing OP's goal. Which seems a perfectly reasonable position to take.

Note that as far as I can tell I have at no point so much as suggested that I believe that such is OP's "goal" (i.e. knowing intention); that idea hadn't come to mind until I read your response to me. My intended statement throughout has merely been that this is the effect of the wording of his poll, as it is of your alternative wording. I would like to think that OP's actual "goal" is more along the lines of my own rephrasing, or reazea's post above, and his poll wording is just an unfortunate turn of phrase. Ultimately, unless OP returns to the conversation and provides clarification, we cannot know.

I would like both.

However, since I'm not a fan of combat concept in ESO, and that no matter the improvements, it will keep the same basic concept, I don't expect that changes on that side would mean much to me. So I go for cosmetic.