ZOS_Kevin wrote: »

sans-culottes wrote: »

We’ve heard repeatedly from ZOS—most recently via @ZOS_Kevin—that improving communication with the community is a priority. And yet, a funny thing keeps happening: silence tends to follow the most pressing questions.

Questions about combat direction. About long-term system coherence. About whether core class kits like Necromancer will ever receive attention beyond cyclical nerfs. About crossplay. About console-specific bugs. About the design vision behind subclassing beyond “play how you want.” You know, the usual.

Instead of clarity, we often get curated responses to low-risk, low-impact questions (“Will the pumpkins return this October?”), while harder ones vanish into the ether like a recalled motif style. When responses do arrive, they’re often framed in the language of “we’re listening,” which has come to function more as ritual than reassurance.

So here’s a modest proposal.

Why not take a page from developers like Ghostcrawler (League/WoW) or Ion Hazzikostas (WoW), who—whatever their flaws—at least attempted periodic, structured communication that addressed thorny systems questions head-on? These weren’t always smooth, but they acknowledged the community’s capacity for complexity. Sometimes even candor.

A monthly systems Q&A. A short devblog explaining philosophical priorities. Even a regular “here’s what we’re working on, and here’s what we’re not” post. Anything that signals, even faintly, that player feedback is being heard, engaged, and integrated—not just politely acknowledged before being swept into a spreadsheet.

We know you can’t answer every question. But it’s increasingly hard to avoid the feeling that the questions being answered are selected for their safety, not their significance.

And that’s not communication. That’s containment.

Hi all, just wanted to follow up on this thread. Appreciate the overall conversation here. Sorry in advance, this is going to be a long one.

So to start, we have been making strides in communication on a few fronts. So we have worked on a few community Q&As already this year and working on finishing up our remaining PvP centered ones, where we have directedly answered player questions. We also have AMA's planned for this year as well, so stay tuned to those. We just had our ESO Direct (less than a month ago), which has a good chunk of info on what we are currently working on and soon to release items. We had several communication fronts through out the Vengeance Campaign Test and during the PTS cycle portion of the test where we directly answered user questions. Additionally, we opened a few pipelines for the community to voice bugs and pain points they would like addressed so that we can get the teams on those tasks during our year of transition. Also pipelines to help with ongoing lag issues, which our engineers have been able to make some strides and implement new tech to help better identify issue points (noted in past patch notes). And we can't forget the Guild Summit we held with guild leaders in March to get their thoughts on guild improvements and overall game pain points. Things we are targeting in future updates and were asked by players and answered directly. These are on top of working on getting better messaging for maintenance windows and other smaller items that impact the day to day experience.

While this isn't direct communication, we also have the Kinda Funny Podcast Series where we are discussing the dev process from the early days to now. So that should give some general development insight from Rich and Matt.

That doesn't mean things are perfect. I was just in some meetings earlier this week about more ways we can improve communication over the next several months. But we believe are headed in the right direction. And these changes were based on player feedback from the end of the year.

We know there are more things you want us to talk about. Things like Overland difficulty and other wide systems changes like that. There are some things that are too early to share and can (most likely will) go through quite a bit of change before they are ready to be talked about. Not talking about final product here, just generally. However, the community team is talking to dev teams to see what we can talk about and when, because we do know you want info earlier.

As for dev blogs on systems, we have done those and continue to do them. We had one in the last 30 days focusing on the new Player Response Systems that you can check out here. We have definitely also done many of these in the past around Trials encounters, Item Set philosophy, etc. If you would like more deep dives and philosophy talks, we can flag that for the web team to take a look at how they can prioritize that.

We also try to inject some of that commentary in Dev Comments in the patch notes. I recently got feedback that folks would like more of those outside the confines of combat, so this is something we are working to incorporate that in the U47 Patch Note cycle.

On a personal note, I was wanted to acknowledge the taking a page from other devs book comment. We constantly are looking at what fellow teams in the space are doing. But we also have to scale expectations accordingly. The teams mentioned are awesome and do great work. They are also pretty different in size compared to us. So we have to scale the work we can do accordingly. @Freelancer_ESO gets to the heart of the matter, and it plays into the overall point here.

Freelancer_ESO wrote: »

I think you'd run into the issue that pushing a greater focus on communication could easily end up taking development time away from actually developing for little actual gains.

Bar the "little actual gains" line because communication is always important and holds everything together, the overall point is this is a balancing act. Let's take PTS for example. We have teams that reading your feedback and implementing what they can during the PTS cycle. Doing all of that is a tight turn around and then getting those all prepped for patch notes is a lot. It's why we try to provide what we can in the dev commentary. Having said all of that, we understand that you want more conversations. It is a process we are working through (and have started with the PvP Q&As) to make sure we can hit an appropriate balance, but we are talking about this and working on ways to support it. So we are looking at what other teams are doing and seeing how they can work for us and ultimately work for you.

I said it would be a long one, right! We know this isn't the immediate fix to your concerns, be we are taking the steps to get to where you want us to be. We hope some of the communications from the first 4 months have shown our commitment here, but fully understand more needs to be done to get to a great place. So with that, my action items for you are this: share with us communication methods you have resonated with from other games you play. Obviously we cannot do everything, but being able to identify what is working for you can better narrow our focus in giving you the comms you desire. Happy to read any additional feedback and relay what is needed to the correct teams.

(Also sorry for any typos. Wrote this over the course of a few hours between meetings, so if anything doesn't make sense, I can edit. )

Estin wrote: »

ZOS_Kevin wrote: »

We know there are more things you want us to talk about. Things like Overland difficulty and other wide systems changes like that. There are some things that are too early to share and can (most likely will) go through quite a bit of change before they are ready to be talked about. Not talking about final product here, just generally. However, the community team is talking to dev teams to see what we can talk about and when, because we do know you want info earlier.

I didn't read every reply so I'm unsure if someone already said it, but I would like to chime in with my own opinion regarding your statement here. Personally, it's never too early to share information on what's being worked on, even if it's only in a concept phase. This is a MMO, something that constantly receives post launch content. There's no need to be secretive with new systems like it's an upcoming single player game. I know ESO is it's own thing and can't be compared to other MMOs such as Runescape, but if there's one thing something like Runescape is good at, it's their clear transparency for what's being worked on in pretty much full detail, and that is something that allows for player feedback in the early stages, something which I feel is pretty important. This is what consider better communication whenever the topic is brought up.

I do understand that allowing for such feedback in the early stages of development will generate a lot of noise with unhelpful feedback and complaints, but there are players who, as unhealthy as it may be, have been playing the game for years and know the game well enough to know what can and can't work. I'm not saying that their feedback and suggestions are always the right decisions since every one has their own opinion even at that high of a knowledge, but they do often offer some pretty insightful viewpoints that should be taken into consideration during development. I personally believe that it will help a ton to prevent a lot of uncertainty around major systems. Systems like IA, BGs, and Subclassing, while they work, need post development attention to polish them, and on average, that can take well over 2 years to do that, and any players who cared enough would have already moved onto something else by then. It's why I believe Vengeance will turn out to be good since this type of communication is being used for its development, and I wish to see more of it.

Erickson9610 wrote: »

Estin wrote: »

ZOS_Kevin wrote: »

We know there are more things you want us to talk about. Things like Overland difficulty and other wide systems changes like that. There are some things that are too early to share and can (most likely will) go through quite a bit of change before they are ready to be talked about. Not talking about final product here, just generally. However, the community team is talking to dev teams to see what we can talk about and when, because we do know you want info earlier.

I didn't read every reply so I'm unsure if someone already said it, but I would like to chime in with my own opinion regarding your statement here. Personally, it's never too early to share information on what's being worked on, even if it's only in a concept phase. This is a MMO, something that constantly receives post launch content. There's no need to be secretive with new systems like it's an upcoming single player game. I know ESO is it's own thing and can't be compared to other MMOs such as Runescape, but if there's one thing something like Runescape is good at, it's their clear transparency for what's being worked on in pretty much full detail, and that is something that allows for player feedback in the early stages, something which I feel is pretty important. This is what consider better communication whenever the topic is brought up.

I do understand that allowing for such feedback in the early stages of development will generate a lot of noise with unhelpful feedback and complaints, but there are players who, as unhealthy as it may be, have been playing the game for years and know the game well enough to know what can and can't work. I'm not saying that their feedback and suggestions are always the right decisions since every one has their own opinion even at that high of a knowledge, but they do often offer some pretty insightful viewpoints that should be taken into consideration during development. I personally believe that it will help a ton to prevent a lot of uncertainty around major systems. Systems like IA, BGs, and Subclassing, while they work, need post development attention to polish them, and on average, that can take well over 2 years to do that, and any players who cared enough would have already moved onto something else by then. It's why I believe Vengeance will turn out to be good since this type of communication is being used for its development, and I wish to see more of it.

What happens when players give feedback that is acknowledged but not acted on?

Even if players get early access to give feedback on planned features — that's the point of the PTS — players can't expect to always change these upcoming features the way they'd like.

If players were allowed to see the long term vision for what ESO would become, they shouldn't be able to veto it ahead of time. The current approach allows ZOS to have big reveals that generate hype, while allowing them to choose how they act on player feedback.