Frayton wrote: »

LADYKiLLER wrote: »

Synthwavius wrote: »

Far from it. I played LOTRO for 3 years. It had a much smaller playerbase and a skeleton crew, yet they still managed regular expansion and content releases. ESO is going to need to find the right pace and rethink what they want and can do in this new reality

This.

Game studios don't need to be giant, they just need to be passionate about their project and have a community that's also passionate about their project. LOTRO is a stunning example of that. ESO can be too.

It's not up to employees or players. It's all about money and entirely up to the company that owns ESO. LOTRO has passed through different owners too and its current owner sees a financial reason to keep it going. That doesn't seem to be the case with ESO.

ESO's direction has been obvious for years now since the first major layoffs and staff changes. I can only speculate that the opportunity to prove itself as a worthy investment to its owners has come and gone in that time.

Yes but employees and players reveal whether or not there's a financial reason to keep a game going. Players by playing, employees by making something worth playing. The idea that either of these variables are inconsequential to the overall equation is a huge problem with current business strategies surrounding the gaming industry.

As for whether or not its proving a worthy investment, I'm honestly really surprised considering there's been a lot of talk about that recently. Last numbers I saw were estimating $150M net profit annually? I don't know if that was ever confirmed tho.

spartaxoxo wrote: »

BardokRedSnow wrote: »

spartaxoxo wrote: »

BardokRedSnow wrote: »

spartaxoxo wrote: »

ToddIngram wrote: »

Synthwavius wrote: »

Far from it. I played LOTRO for 3 years. It had a much smaller playerbase and a skeleton crew, yet they still managed regular expansion and content releases. ESO is going to need to find the right pace and rethink what they want and can do in this new reality

Well, they could save some $ by no longer supporting vengeance. That would be a good place to start.

That's probably true of PvP in general and all other niche content.

PvP has a bigger end game population than hardcore trifecta trial teams do, its not niche. Its the dreamcatcher for people who play the game the most and have spent the most on the game, without it youll have much less people who have been here for years actually continuing to play.

PvP struggles to fill 360 slots consistently in a game with millions of accounts. Hardcore trifectas are also niche.

Regular dungeons, questing, and crown store will probably be their focus.

No it doesnt for one, greyhost is locked with a queue every night in pc na, and zos even had to reinstate blackreach because it got so bad.

So youre dead wrong there first of all. When it does struggle its during work hours unless you're DC...

And for two, it has people routinely rotating out of the queue. That 360 is a snapshot within an instance, not the total daily population. Realistically its much more than that.

When I say consistent I don't mean nightly. I mean all throughout the day.

Well vengeance is dead althroughout the day, even holidays and judging from my inability to get a queue for dungeons during normal work hours, its the game in general, not just cyrodiil

Sluggy wrote: »

BardokRedSnow wrote: »

ToddIngram wrote: »

Synthwavius wrote: »

Far from it. I played LOTRO for 3 years. It had a much smaller playerbase and a skeleton crew, yet they still managed regular expansion and content releases. ESO is going to need to find the right pace and rethink what they want and can do in this new reality

Well, they could save some $ by no longer supporting vengeance. That would be a good place to start.

Only bit of silver lining there is. They wont have time to push things no one actually wants anymore.

The thing is. Are they going to consider GH the thing 'No One' wants or Vengeance the thing 'No One' wants? Or maybe both ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Come into greyhost tonight pcna, then vengeance the next day, then ask that same question.

Mattymoo92 wrote: »

ToddIngram wrote: »

Synthwavius wrote: »

Far from it. I played LOTRO for 3 years. It had a much smaller playerbase and a skeleton crew, yet they still managed regular expansion and content releases. ESO is going to need to find the right pace and rethink what they want and can do in this new reality

Well, they could save some $ by no longer supporting vengeance. That would be a good place to start.

They should just remove PvP entirely and focus on the only content that makes money PvE and casual stuff

PvP is the only reason I still play this game and I bet I spend more money on crowns than you do, as many end game pvpers do. Many housing furnishing types are also pvpers

So yea if you wanna kill off the game faster, continue this reasoning just because someone bagged you in cyrodiil.

BardokRedSnow wrote: »

spartaxoxo wrote: »

BardokRedSnow wrote: »

spartaxoxo wrote: »

BardokRedSnow wrote: »

spartaxoxo wrote: »

ToddIngram wrote: »

Synthwavius wrote: »

Far from it. I played LOTRO for 3 years. It had a much smaller playerbase and a skeleton crew, yet they still managed regular expansion and content releases. ESO is going to need to find the right pace and rethink what they want and can do in this new reality

Well, they could save some $ by no longer supporting vengeance. That would be a good place to start.

That's probably true of PvP in general and all other niche content.

PvP has a bigger end game population than hardcore trifecta trial teams do, its not niche. Its the dreamcatcher for people who play the game the most and have spent the most on the game, without it youll have much less people who have been here for years actually continuing to play.

PvP struggles to fill 360 slots consistently in a game with millions of accounts. Hardcore trifectas are also niche.

Regular dungeons, questing, and crown store will probably be their focus.

No it doesnt for one, greyhost is locked with a queue every night in pc na, and zos even had to reinstate blackreach because it got so bad.

So youre dead wrong there first of all. When it does struggle its during work hours unless you're DC...

And for two, it has people routinely rotating out of the queue. That 360 is a snapshot within an instance, not the total daily population. Realistically its much more than that.

When I say consistent I don't mean nightly. I mean all throughout the day.

Well vengeance is dead althroughout the day, even holidays and judging from my inability to get a queue for dungeons during normal work hours, its the game in general, not just cyrodiil

I mean this is pretty much peak "one-issue" voting. The vengeance haters somehow think that by continuing to spread their hate of the medium that they are going to get some kind of resolution. Your signature, your posts focusing on vengeance in a thread that is not about vengeance. What do you all think is going to /actually/ happen? Especially given this news? Whats the actual outcome that you think will result given a RIF?

Do you all believe that somehow magically ZoS is going to delete Vengeance AND start putting resources back in to Grey Host? Because that will /never/ be happening. The best case scenario at this point is vengeance gets removed - and despite the vitriol against it, there are many gamers (myself included) who really enjoy it and think having it is better then Icecrown. You still have Grey Host and Blackreach - your not getting additional Dev time on a 12+ year old model. No game does this. So I just truly don't know what the end game is other then anger.

It's especially sad to see peoples hate of one game mode let them be so unempathetic to the real human lives that are being impacted by these layoffs. It's peak 'perpetually online' behavior to respond to 1000+ people losing their livelihoods with "WELP MAYBE VENGEANCE WILL GO AWAY." Have some human decency.

Synthwavius wrote: »

Far from it. I played LOTRO for 3 years. It had a much smaller playerbase and a skeleton crew, yet they still managed regular expansion and content releases. ESO is going to need to find the right pace and rethink what they want and can do in this new reality

People are so delusional at the moment and all the doomsaying is tiresome.

We have 20 year old MMORPGs still running, as you’ve said games like Lord of the Rings Online or Final Fantasy XI still getting new content after twenty years, ESO is going nowhere.

Content releases might slow down, but that’s about it. The Crown Store exists and still generates a lot of cash.

If something happens, it‘s less content updates per year. And that’s it.

Arunei wrote: »

That being said I do wonder how long those affected knew they were going to get thrown to the wolves. If they've known for a while but never spoke on it (for legal reasons most likely but also very much likely personal ones) then it's possible stuff has already been structured around them having fewer people and release stuff won't change much because of it.

However I don't know man. During the last stream Gina and Finn didn't seem really upset or bothered or...anything like what we might expect someone about to lose their job in like a week might be acting like. If feels to me like they probably weren't expecting it/didn't know. If they did they both had amazing poker faces.

I think they knew layoffs were likely coming, but not who. Frankly, I'm shocked. XBox said it would be focusing on a few single-player franchises, but at the same time, everyone thought ESO would be ok (maybe a few layoffs) because it was self-sustaining. They were wrong. It's not just that half the team got laid off, it's who - people directly involved in content creation, and people like Gina who were important to the team and community. It's really sad.

It does make me wonder if that's why they didn't really want to talk about the warden rework.

Anyway, I'm hoping this won't lead to maintenance mode. As someone posted up-thread, the LOTRO team (one of the other MMOs that kept me for a while) was battered quite a bit, then even spun off into a new studio. It's still going strong. Perhaps ESO won't get all the updates the team planned, but I'm hoping they'll continue to release something. Maybe they'll have to take a hard look at where the playerbase spends its time and stop supporting areas where players aren't investing time and money, so they can focus on the updates that'll resonate with the majority. Who knows? I just hope it won't be maintenance mode.

Seraphayel wrote: »

Synthwavius wrote: »

Far from it. I played LOTRO for 3 years. It had a much smaller playerbase and a skeleton crew, yet they still managed regular expansion and content releases. ESO is going to need to find the right pace and rethink what they want and can do in this new reality

People are so delusional at the moment and all the doomsaying is tiresome.

We have 20 year old MMORPGs still running, as you’ve said games like Lord of the Rings Online or Final Fantasy XI still getting new content after twenty years, ESO is going nowhere.

Content releases might slow down, but that’s about it. The Crown Store exists and still generates a lot of cash.

If something happens, it‘s less content updates per year. And that’s it.

As someone who plays SWTOR/LOTRO actively, strong agree. You can do Maintenance Mode really well, or really poorly. But even ESO's maintenance mode will still be quite juicy. I'm honestly shocked at how much content this game was still getting despite its player count.

Until I see some confirmation that updates are going to actually move forward at a reasonable pace, I would say it is closer to maintenance mode than it ever has been. I will cancel my subscriptions until I know more about what to expect.

What are we defining maintainence mode as in this context?

I don’t know what to say. This was always a possibility as is with nearly any MMO barring a few for quite a while…

I want to say my heart is with all those affected by those layoffs and the hope that the continued interest from the current and prospective playerbase can be enough going forward to at least allow ESO to prosper as best possible, even if it must enter ‘maintenance mode’.

Malprave wrote: »

Major_Soulless wrote: »

Malprave wrote: »

BardokRedSnow wrote: »

ToddIngram wrote: »

Synthwavius wrote: »

Far from it. I played LOTRO for 3 years. It had a much smaller playerbase and a skeleton crew, yet they still managed regular expansion and content releases. ESO is going to need to find the right pace and rethink what they want and can do in this new reality

Well, they could save some $ by no longer supporting vengeance. That would be a good place to start.

Only bit of silver lining there is. They wont have time to push things no one actually wants anymore.

I agree with this. And I’ll probably get pushback when I say we don’t really need any more class refreshes. I feel like all my characters are in a good place now and Zos can get a lot of mileage from adjusting class masteries. Plus we have skill styles which can bring a lot of visual variety.

I really hate hearing about people losing their jobs, but this isn’t necessarily the end for ESO.

They should finish the individual class updates seems unfair to only do DK.

But obviously it will be slower than originally planned

I have a bias here. I rolled a dk main on day one. Although I have characters of all classes dk had gotten the most stale, to me.

Im a templar we needed the help

Major_Soulless wrote: »

What are we defining maintainence mode as in this context?

As it's yet another thread from a PvP player on low population platform, they probably define it as abandoning Gray Host.

In reality, it's leaving the game's servers up for an unspecified amount of time without adding additional content to the game. That's what happened with TES: Legends and TES: Blades, those games weren't updated for years and both were eventually shut down.

Maitsukas wrote: »

Major_Soulless wrote: »

What are we defining maintainence mode as in this context?

As it's yet another thread from a PvP player on low population platform, they probably define it as abandoning Gray Host.

In reality, it's leaving the game's servers up for an unspecified amount of time without adding additional content to the game. That's what happened with TES: Legends and TES: Blades, those games weren't updated for years and both were eventually shut down.

Well even with half a team I don't think we will be waiting years for content

Major_Soulless wrote: »

What are we defining maintainence mode as in this context?

Usually maintenance mode means no new features. Bug fixes and maybe some really small QoL improvements, but nothing new. No new classes, no new zones, no new story content, no new dungeons/arenas/trials, etc.