ZOS, what kind of feedback are you actually looking for when it comes to the PTS?

Rkindaleft · October 16

The question I actually wanted to ask is "ZOS, are you perhaps able to provide some additional clarification on what kind of feedback you're expecting and can act upon when it comes to the PTS?" but it was too long. This is mainly a follow up to the survey you held last month.

What do you, ZOS, see as the intended purpose of the PTS?

Over the years, I have read a TON of long and well detailed posts here in the PTS section and the vast majority of it seems to fall by the wayside. It's *extremely* rare for posts here to get any kind of developer engagement whatsoever, which causes the main problem people have with the PTS: people type out paragraphs of feedback, nothing really ever happens, then after a while, people get annoyed that their feedback always seems to go unacknowledged no matter what, and then they eventually stop providing feedback at all because they feel like doing so is redundant. I'd say the majority of experienced and knowledgeable players who did test on the PTS at one point or another have pretty much stopped engaging with it outside of reading the patch notes.

So, in the hope that a dev at least reads this:

Is PTS just primarily a way for us to get a sneak peak at the upcoming update?
Do you listen to, or want suggestions for solutions?
Are you just looking for an outline of the problem?
Are we wasting our time providing responses because you want to do your own thing?

dcrush · October 17

If you look at the complaints players have about the live writhing wall event and how several of those issues were called out on the pts forum months ago… all signs point towards your last sentence.

Aylish · October 17

Well, you can clearly see the questions in official PTS feedback threads. They‘re more interested in „does it even work?“ than „do people like it?“ or „can we do better?“.

duagloth · October 17

Pts is more of a "good enough,this is the best we've got,lower your expectations"

SpaceElf · October 17

It's UAT really. Even though I also make suggestions and concerns about story related issues, it's well past that point in a project- lines are read and it's written and done. That's what I've always assumed. It's not a beta when it gets to PTS. I keep my constructive suggestions to things they can realistically fix before release, and make a list of what I'd like to have seen, and what I'd like to see in the future. They're gonna do what they're gonna do, but I get the impression they want items actionable in the time they have allotted. Not that it's the playerbase's responsibility to know what that is, specifically, but it makes sense.

I guess I'm surprised when folks still get upset when asking for things that are(probably) limited by the older technology in use here. It's not that things couldn't be better, or that anyone here is wrong, but I really do think they want constructive feedback. I'd say if it keeps coming up and they never do it, over like, several years, then they probably can't.

MashmalloMan · October 17

You need to push for a change when it's relevant to the PTS it released on because there is a low chance it will be addressed before live... even lower but possible for the 1st or 2nd major update after (3~6 months)... or have fun waiting the life time of a young child (3~6 years) before it ever gets addressed again.

Here's some long term abandoned projects:

Dark brotherhood and Thieves guild (justice system)
Overland difficulty
Racial passives
CP 2.0 expansions
Hybridization completion (consumables/mundus/dead skill morphs/combining ws dmg and crit)
Housing limits
Armory not copying scribing selection
Class identity
Ice staff as a dps weapon and new weapons in general
500+ dead sets including the majority of mythics and monster sets
3 piece sets never being expanded on
HP recovery usually being useless
Cross healing in pvp
Lag in cyrodil (yay vengence?)
Raising the dps floor, lowering the dps ceiling, better educating new players

Here's a more recent list of abandoned projects:

New companions, that are actually useful, expand the skills, add romance
Tales of tribute decks or any adjustment whatsoever
New scribing scripts and grimoires or balance adjustments
New infinite archive sets/visions/arenas
BG 2.0 mmr rework, new maps, bring back 4v4v4
And last but not least, Subclassing

I suppose we can also consider Grave Lord Sacrifice's terrible design they said they would revisit, Fartcarver being too strong in pve since release, and this update's light/heavy attack animations becoming broken.

It happens every... single... time. But yeah, they just keep saying, wait for next year, then the next, then the next, always moving the goal posts, never fully seeing anything through.

MoonPile · October 20

Agree. Even simple-seeming bugs that the official Feedback threads directly ask to report are not addressed:

For example, I'd been reporting an item with a collision problem every week. Has it been seen? Should I keep reporting it? And then, just as has happened before and as you wrote, OP – when it goes live, if players manage to obtain this item (a separate problem), they're going to ask "Why is it like this?" and will report this same bug again on Live.

I wish there was at least some flagging system the Devs could use, like other forums have. For example, Procreate is a good one; you can see on their Ideas section which are Recorded, Planned, Not Planned, etc: https://folio.procreate.com/discussions/3

YandereGirlfriend · October 20

SpaceElf wrote: »

It's UAT really. Even though I also make suggestions and concerns about story related issues, it's well past that point in a project- lines are read and it's written and done. That's what I've always assumed. It's not a beta when it gets to PTS. I keep my constructive suggestions to things they can realistically fix before release, and make a list of what I'd like to have seen, and what I'd like to see in the future. They're gonna do what they're gonna do, but I get the impression they want items actionable in the time they have allotted. Not that it's the playerbase's responsibility to know what that is, specifically, but it makes sense.

I guess I'm surprised when folks still get upset when asking for things that are(probably) limited by the older technology in use here. It's not that things couldn't be better, or that anyone here is wrong, but I really do think they want constructive feedback. I'd say if it keeps coming up and they never do it, over like, several years, then they probably can't.

Most baffling are the simple magic number changes that require zero dev time to implement.

Such as making the almost universally dead-on-arrival new sets into something that someone, somewhere might actually use. But even tweaking the value of something like the recent Xanmeer elemental set is too much to hope for, it seems.

silentxthreat · October 21

We have been providing feedback for years but I dont think it ever makes it way to the devs