Soarora wrote: »

To be fair, some bugs do get fixed and some changes do get made. Just not all of them. PTS cycle needs to be longer.

There are bugs that are flagged in week 1 of what is typically a 5-6 week cycle. They then make it to Live. It then gets reported again. ZOS then say "oh sorry thanks for telling us" and then hotfix it within a week. The cycle length isn't the problem.

Gabriel_H wrote: »

Find a few dozen "volunteers" to play on the PTS. Vet them, monitor them, do whatever. Use them as your primary source of feedback focussed solely on flagging bugs. Have them submit reports. Gift them crowns for the each bug they report.

My understanding is that they do give certain players special access outside of the PTS and seem to lean on these players for subjective feedback. The vetting for these players seems to be as simple as them being 'influencers' and their reward is the special access in itself. A positive example would be NinjaPulls (a streamer/youtuber) who has mentioned that they were given access to a 'media' server with the Writhing Wall event after it had been removed from the PTS. They're generally very level headed and have also talked many times about utilizing their direct access for good in elevating bug reports and making positive balance changes (eg. preserving the special interaction between Daedric Prey and Maw of the Infernal).

On the other hand, there's another streamer/youtube (not NinjaPulls) who bragged about being able to play a build of the game with subclassing months ahead of the public announcement. They're only ever insufferably positive about the change subclassing has brought to the game (or any other change ZOS makes really) and are physically incapable of noticing any bugs or faults. This special access is also completely wasted on them because they never distill anything useful to their audience. As an example, they posted a LLM excrement with hallucinated activities and rewards as an excuse for a guide to the Writhing Wall event (which has only recently been corrected) rather than anything truly helpful (like ESOHub's article for instance) despite presumably having the same access to the media server. Just an incredibly lazy person whose only feedback to anything (even the game crashing to desktop) is probably "that's great".

So I think ZOS do rely on a select few for 'higher value' feedback than the general population. The problem is that even that small pool is poisoned.

kevkj wrote: »

Gabriel_H wrote: »

Find a few dozen "volunteers" to play on the PTS. Vet them, monitor them, do whatever. Use them as your primary source of feedback focussed solely on flagging bugs. Have them submit reports. Gift them crowns for the each bug they report.

My understanding is that they do give certain players special access outside of the PTS and seem to lean on these players for subjective feedback. The vetting for these players seems to be as simple as them being 'influencers' and their reward is the special access in itself. A positive example would be NinjaPulls (a streamer/youtuber) who has mentioned that they were given access to a 'media' server with the Writhing Wall event after it had been removed from the PTS. They're generally very level headed and have also talked many times about utilizing their direct access for good in elevating bug reports and making positive balance changes (eg. preserving the special interaction between Daedric Prey and Maw of the Infernal).

On the other hand, there's another streamer/youtube (not NinjaPulls) who bragged about being able to play a build of the game with subclassing months ahead of the public announcement. They're only ever insufferably positive about the change subclassing has brought to the game (or any other change ZOS makes really) and are physically incapable of noticing any bugs or faults. This special access is also completely wasted on them because they never distill anything useful to their audience. As an example, they posted a LLM excrement with hallucinated activities and rewards as an excuse for a guide to the Writhing Wall event (which has only recently been corrected) rather than anything truly helpful (like ESOHub's article for instance) despite presumably having the same access to the media server. Just an incredibly lazy person whose only feedback to anything (even the game causing to desktop) is probably "that's great".

So I think ZOS do rely on a select few for 'higher value' feedback than the general population. The problem is that even that small pool is poisoned.

I'm struggling to think who this last guy is. Does he make a joke at every intro?

kevkj wrote: »

twisttop138 wrote: »

I'm struggling to think who this last guy is. Does he make a joke at every intro?

I don't think I can mention the name directly in relation to the negative things I said without getting taken out especially given his already preferential status with ZOS. I will say there's only a handful of written Writhing Wall event guides that I could find from a quick search and only 2-3 of them are from active/prominent youtubers/streamers. And only one of those people fits the bill for the other traits I described.

Ohh. I see now.

I mostly gave up on using the PTS because so many bug reports were ignored (and other feedback, but that's more subjective) that it became clear it was a waste of my time to find and report them.

I'd be genuinely happy to play a rough or unfinished version of a release to test it and find bugs, but apparently what we're given is the finished version as it is going to come out, whether it works or not so the bug reports are useless. Now I only play it on PTS if I want to check things out for my own info. I still report bugs when I find them but I don't spend much time on it.