SeaGtGruff wrote: »

valenwood_vegan wrote: »

Well, if we're now gonna start broadly generalizing about different groups of players based on the fake participation meter, then I'm proud to be playing on PC/NA, where we're intelligent enough to realize that our efforts are meaningless and our time is better spent doing something other than this event

You clearly believe that it's a "fake participation meter," and many others have essentially voiced that same sentiment. And it seems that you all believe your unproven conspiracy theory is a fact, and I suppose you feel that anyone who doesn't buy into that unproven conspiracy theory clearly isn't "inteligent enough to realize that our efforts are meaningless." Abd I feel like that is precisely why PCNA's progress is so far behind the other servers' progress.

If you don't care about the event and the race to unlock Eastern Solstice, then that's fine. But when there are a whole bunch of players on PCNA who feel the same way and cannot be bothered to participate, don't blame the lack of progress in the meter on some conspiracy theory, because the real reason for the slow progress is staring back at you from your bathroom mirror.

Whatever. The rest of us will get Eastern Solstice unlocked sooner or later. Your help would be welcomed, but we'll get there with or without your help.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but it's not unproven.
It's a confirmed fact that the participation meter is fake.
They’ve changed it multiple times, publicly, and even acknowledged it in their own posts.

When PC/NA moved faster than expected, they slowed it down.
A few days later, they sped it back up.
They’re adjusting the formula on the fly to hit a predetermined date.

That’s not speculation. That’s documentation.
So if you want to call it a conspiracy theory, fine, just make sure you include the word "proven."

This isn’t about players slacking off.
It’s about a system that was never designed to reflect actual participation in the first place.

Furyous wrote: »

DenverRalphy wrote: »

To be fair, when they did make changes, ZOS did go out of their way to mention that those changes were made uniformly across all servers. Do they have the ability to control how fast they are completed? Sure. But barring any evidence to the contrary, the only manipulation thus far has been to ensure the first place server can't hit Phase 3 before U48 lands on consoles. But again, as far as we know those changes are being made uniformly across all servers. Regardless which server is in the lead.

This is false.

The changes to the PC/NA server were made only on that server.
They rolled the numbers back on PC/NA when it was moving too fast, and a few days later they jumped the numbers up, again, just on PC/NA, when it was moving too slow.

They’re not adjusting based on participation.
They’re adjusting based on timing.
And that’s not speculation, it’s visible in the data.

Really? Please show me where only PC NA was changed.

Interesting to see players are going against each other because of some made-up competition, instead of criticizing who's responsible for this unimaginative, repetative, boring and lore-lacking event. It almost feels like the artificial rivalry this event brought up has come to fruition. How convenient people are ignoring the actual problems about it.

Danikat wrote: »

I'm still not sure why they'd want to do that, but a lot of design choices in ESO seem to be based on old-fashioned attitudes in MMOs and "faction loyalty" and getting players to argue about them with each other was one of those.

If people from other servers are seen as rivals instead of friends whom one wants to play with, it might eliminate crossplay demands over time. But that's the only thing I can see there.

It's not very congruent either, since in other places it's still "the community" and "ESOFam" all over. Which feels, from my point of view, just as strange, because it's usually generalizations that are also not true.

madman65 wrote: »

Now that we can actually see just how much participation is being put into the wall, makes me wonder if PC will be dropped. All the consoles ARE by far working the wall faster so what do you think?

Honestly, the lack of participation has probably got more to do with becoming a boring grindfest very quickly rather than anything else. People simply have other things to do.

I'm on XBEU, and I'm very surprised at how we're in the lead. All I do now is each daily once for the yellow reward, then I'm back to normal play.

Meridiano wrote: »

It doesn't matter if bars are fake or not. The customers have paid for the content, and ZOS have deadlines for releasing it. Even if all participants log off and progress stops, the Wall will fall at some point. Either bar will move on (if it's fake indeed), or ZOS cancel it on X% and say "well, a pity" (if it's not fake). I'd say, this is not about fakeness, it's all about meaning. Bars are meaningless, there's no way ZOS giving players the power to prevent the content release.

I don't think they'd do the second one, because of the negative press it would get. Admittedly ZOS did say they want to 'make history' with this event and if it runs as planned it's entirely unremarkable (it's not even the first time ESO has done an event like this, and they're very common in gaming generally) whereas the event stalling out because not enough people play it would be newsworthy, at least within gaming journalism. But I doubt that's the kind of attention they want.

At most I think they'd claim something like they discovered a bug which had stopped progress being tracked correctly and because they don't want all our hard work to go unrewarded they'll be retoactively awarding the missed progress as well as fixing the bug, which will push the leading servers over the line and leave the trailing ones with just a few percent left to complete, then hope that's enough of an incentive to get some people on those servers to do a few quests.

More likely even if it had been real up to that point they could easily switch over to fake progress bars at any point, either manually adjusting them or simply change the requirements for completion to something that is being done, like more worthwhile daily quests.

At the very least I suspect there's a 'rubber banding' or 'catch up' mechanism because even though there's been variation between the others the gap between the first and last server has consistantly been 24-25% since about 1/2 way through phase 1.

DenverRalphy wrote: »

Furyous wrote: »

DenverRalphy wrote: »

Really? Please show me where only PC NA was changed.

I was there both times, when they rolled it back just after launch, and when they pushed it forward to 26%.
Both adjustments were only reported on PC/NA.
They weren’t mirrored on the other platforms at that time.

The rollback was observed and discussed by PC/NA players in multiple threads.
A few days later, when the meter stalled around 6–8%, it jumped to 26%, again, only reported on PC/NA.
I’ve searched the forums and haven’t found a single post from EU or console players reporting similar rollbacks or sudden jumps.
If those changes had been applied across all platforms, we’d expect to see at least some discussion from those communities, but there’s been nothing.

So while ZOS hasn’t explicitly said these were platform-specific, the available evidence strongly suggests they were.
It’s a pattern visible in the timeline and the community response.

If you have a source confirming that these changes were applied uniformly across all servers, I’d genuinely like to see it.
So far, I haven’t seen anything from ZOS or the community to support that claim.

Here's one of the posts from ZOS staff stating they were applied evenly across all servers.
https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/comment/8379526/#Comment_8379526

We were all here to witness the "corrections" made to the progression bars. Each time PCNA or PCEU were changed, so too were consoles. I have yet to see any adjustments to the progression bars that were solely for the PC servers.

And here's a graph of the first 9 hours of the event, polled every 5 minutes

TheMrPancake wrote: »

I have tracked the percentages shown on the website over the last 9 hours. Here is a graph of them.



(Data was polled once every 5 minutes. Every horizontal major gridline is 1 hour.)

Anywhere the value goes down is manipulation from zos.

It is also suspicious to me that ps4 NA, xbox NA and PC NA went up sequentially twice.

Notice how each server is correcting at a different time. If ZOS changed it all at once (like they said), shouldn't the readjustments happen all at the same time? And not multiple times per server as we see for XBEU?

ZOS can say whatever they want. That doesn't make it true.