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Issues With the Latest Patch and Zenimax Development
kirnmalidus
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I think we can all agree that the latest patch was an unmitigated disaster. Even if you don't care that VR6-10 mobs are now impossible to kill, the fact that they borked quest completion achievements and accidentally deleted an entire PvP campaign with an update is incomprehensible. I sent the below email to Bethesda Softworks regarding the damage that Zenimax Online Studios is doing to the reputation of my beloved Elder Scrolls series, and I suggest that others who agree that this patch should not have been pushed live in the current state do the same.
I've been an Elder Scrolls player for a very long time. I've never played an MMO, but I was very excited for ESO. I bought the Imperial Edition and have been playing since 6 AM Central on released day.
I think someone at Bethesda (probably the Elder Scrolls brand manager) should poke their head into the ESO forums and read what is going on with the game. Before the patch yesterday many promises were made to fix major bugs (including an entire class being basically unplayable for most people) that were not fulfilled with the patch yesterday.
Furthermore, the patch introduced many new bugs, some of them completely game-breaking. Players have lost quest progress, lost quests completely, Vet zone mobs have had their difficulty scaled to impossible (Zenimax has already admitted this was an error), achievement data was wiped/reset, and already broken classes were further crippled. That's just a few of the issues they introduced, you can learn about more of them in the forums. I heard they even accidentally deleted an entire PvP campaign.
Many of us players are wondering if Zenimax has any sort of QA process in place at all for game updates. If they do have a QA process in place, it is inadequate and needs major improvement ASAP.
If I was the Elder Scrolls brand manager at Bethesda I would be having some very serious conversations with Zenimax right now about their continued right to use the Elder Scrolls brand. At this point they are doing permanent and irreversible damage to IP you guys have spent decades diligently building. If they can't properly represent the brand in a way that doesn't do irreversible damage to it in the long run, you should pull their rights to use it.
Life of a Nightblade (Screenshot Tumblr)
“Attention Zenimax: Stamina builds don't hold up to magicka builds, and this is causing most of your class imbalance. It makes melee weapons and bows weaker than staves and class abilities. It makes medium and heavy armor less desirable than light armor. Fix this imbalance, and you'll address most of your balance issues.”
- @ruze84b14_ESO
“Attention Zenimax: Stamina builds don't hold up to magicka builds, and this is causing most of your class imbalance. It makes melee weapons and bows weaker than staves and class abilities. It makes medium and heavy armor less desirable than light armor. Fix this imbalance, and you'll address most of your balance issues.”
- @ruze84b14_ESO
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Minsc✭✭✭That is a great mail , the problem I see though is , that as far as I understand their structure, the big ''daddy'' is actually Zenimax Media Inc and not Bethesda Softworks ( the publisher)
Edited by Minsc on May 23, 2014 9:45PM2 -
Sabin1269✭✭✭Great mail, they will "Fix" it again and make it unplayable and even worse than before! They really should be letting people play for free until they get this crap fixed and have at least a good week or two of a playable game with no issues! why the hell am I still paying a sub fee for a game I can maybe play half the month?0 -
kirnmalidus✭✭✭✭That is a great mail , the problem I see though is , that as far as I understand their structure, the big ''daddy'' is actually Zenimax Media Inc and not Bethesda Softworks ( the publisher)
Zenimax media is ZOS' parent company, but Bethesda owns the rights to the TES intellectual property and they licensed them to Zenimax/ZOS. Most contracts for licensing agreements like that stipulate that the licensee will not damage the overall value of the intellectual property being licensed, which you could easily argue ZOS/Zenimax is doing a great job of.
Life of a Nightblade (Screenshot Tumblr)
“Attention Zenimax: Stamina builds don't hold up to magicka builds, and this is causing most of your class imbalance. It makes melee weapons and bows weaker than staves and class abilities. It makes medium and heavy armor less desirable than light armor. Fix this imbalance, and you'll address most of your balance issues.”
- @ruze84b14_ESO2 -
Soliduparrow✭✭✭Apparently the PTS people were told to only test craglorn content and not anything else. Zenimax is making some amateur mistakes.
Temporary fix on how to solo these: Equip full light armor and resto staff. Add one heal skill and one way to regen mana. Then use volcanic rune from the mages guild to keep them permanently cc'ed.Edited by Soliduparrow on May 23, 2014 10:07PM0 -
huangmao✭for the tens to hundreds of millions I expect they may be making, I cannot believe how completely incompetent the executive management at zenimax are.
If you really want to message someone, do some research and find the ruling board behind zenimax -- the ones who hire the CEO -- and beg and plead for them to fire the CEO.
Make it a decent letter.0 -
kirnmalidus✭✭✭✭Soliduparrow wrote: »Apparently the PTS people were told to only test craglorn content and not anything else. Zenimax is making some amateur mistakes.
Temporary fix on how to solo these: Equip full light armor and resto staff. Add one heal skill and one way to regen mana. Then use volcanic rune from the mages guild to keep them permanently cc'ed.
I appreciate the feedback on how to deal with the vet difficulty increase. Personally, I'm able to overcome VR7 in most cases, it's just costing me a lot of soul gems and gold for armor repair. There are some cases of elites or those waved fights that I'm getting stuck on, and what annoys me most there is people are so fed up the high vet zones are ghost towns so I've waited hours for help (on main quests mind you) and not found any.
But this isn't about a specific bug or issue. This is a broader issue of poor quality control. In my email above I didn't even mention many of the bugs people are discussing on the forums that are actually far worse, mostly because I personally haven't experienced them or witnessed it and I'm not big on hearsay. Every specific bug I mentioned above I personally experienced and saw evidence of in-game.
I've read forum reports of the game not launching at all after patch (just like with previous patches), login errors, people getting stuck infinitely in banks, people get stuck in doorways when passing through them, weird color splotches on screen, major memory leaks and more.
This is why my email suggested they investigate the forums for themselves.
I am very concerned about the across the board lack of quality control with updates.Life of a Nightblade (Screenshot Tumblr)
“Attention Zenimax: Stamina builds don't hold up to magicka builds, and this is causing most of your class imbalance. It makes melee weapons and bows weaker than staves and class abilities. It makes medium and heavy armor less desirable than light armor. Fix this imbalance, and you'll address most of your balance issues.”
- @ruze84b14_ESO3 -
kirnmalidus✭✭✭✭for the tens to hundreds of millions I expect they may be making, I cannot believe how completely incompetent the executive management at zenimax are.
If you really want to message someone, do some research and find the ruling board behind zenimax -- the ones who hire the CEO -- and beg and plead for them to fire the CEO.
Make it a decent letter.
I care about the Elder Scrolls. I've enjoyed this game, but I've gotten as much out of it as I would have any other Elder Scrolls title at this point and I'm fine with that if that is how it goes.
What I don't want to happen is for this debacle to put the next single player TES game in jeopardy. That would be very, very sad.Life of a Nightblade (Screenshot Tumblr)
“Attention Zenimax: Stamina builds don't hold up to magicka builds, and this is causing most of your class imbalance. It makes melee weapons and bows weaker than staves and class abilities. It makes medium and heavy armor less desirable than light armor. Fix this imbalance, and you'll address most of your balance issues.”
- @ruze84b14_ESO1 -
Ojustaboo✭✭✭✭✭
✭When morrowind and oblivion were originally released, their forums were full of people complaining about the game, many unable to get the game working at all and many others complaining about bugs. Far worse things were being said about them than being said in the ESO forum.
If you google oblivion mods, the number one most essential mod, quoteThe Unofficial Oblivion Patch
This should be your first port of call. It fixes over 1,800 bugs still present in Oblivion even after Bethesda finished patching it.
And just like ESO with its addons, many mods including the above one were made by players to fix things they felt wrong with the game.
I love TES, but they have always been one of the most buggy games releases ever.
So to say ESO is ruining their rep, I see it more as business as usual.
They get away with it for one reason, their games are unique and many people, myself included, love them.0 -
kirnmalidus✭✭✭✭
I played all previous games on console so I dealt with the bugs and was able to play through them.
This patch introduced bigs that made ESO unplayable for many players.Life of a Nightblade (Screenshot Tumblr)
“Attention Zenimax: Stamina builds don't hold up to magicka builds, and this is causing most of your class imbalance. It makes melee weapons and bows weaker than staves and class abilities. It makes medium and heavy armor less desirable than light armor. Fix this imbalance, and you'll address most of your balance issues.”
- @ruze84b14_ESO1 -
Korozenn✭✭✭✭
The Elder Scrolls Online is continually receiving patches and bug fixes, and ZeniMax Online Studios as a company treats it as any developer of any online multiplayer game does nowadays: you release patches/hot fixes each week to upkeep the game. You can't compare the issues this game has to past TES games because those games were single-player experiences that weren't stressed by an influx of players all logging onto the server at the same time (which, under the right amount of pressure, can cease to function properly at times, and is especially common in these early launch-periods).
It's the first major content update, so I'm not surprised this occurred in all actuality. Issues like these can be fixed with a patch or hot fix as sometimes they're not as major as we perceive (the issue with achievements is cosmetic and will be fixed next week, as announced earlier by ZOS), and no one will see their accounts roll-backed as a result of this fix, hopefully.
Still don't know about the PvP Campaign being deleted as we haven't received an official statement about that yet. Something like that could be fixed with back-ups of progression data that I'm sure ZeniMax has for said campaign, if it really was removed, though.
With a game as massive as this, problems are bound to occur this early in the game's life. It's good to keep note that even though it was tested, it's possible these issues existed in some regard and escalated as more people started logging onto the megaserver all-at-once and the server was put under heavy pressure (quest progress reverting, side quests that were finished appearing again, achievements completion bug, etc.) which you can't test in the volume of players the game currently has until the patch is already deployed, unfortunately.
I'm sure ZOS is hard at work on a fix for these issues right now, so I would just keep playing and progressing through the game as you normally do and avoid doing quests that you know you've already done if your progress in them was reverted back. The achievements issue is just cosmetic and you will still get your progress counted after their patch is deployed to fix this cosmetic issue. Edited by Korozenn on May 24, 2014 12:16AM2 -
kirnmalidus✭✭✭✭
The Elder Scrolls Online is continually receiving patches and bug fixes, and ZeniMax Online Studios as a company treats it as any developer of any online multiplayer game does nowadays: you release patches/hot fixes each week to upkeep the game. You can't compare the issues this game has to past TES games because those games were single-player experiences that weren't stressed by an influx of players all logging onto the server at the same time (which, under the right amount of pressure, can cease to function properly at times, and is especially common in these early launch-periods).
It's the first major content update, so I'm not surprised this occurred in all actuality. Issues like these can be fixed with a patch or hot fix as sometimes they're not as major as we perceive (the issue with achievements is cosmetic and will be fixed next week, as announced earlier by ZOS), and no one will see their accounts roll-backed as a result of this fix, hopefully.
With a game as massive as this, problems are bound to occur. The issue here isn't that there are problems, though, as much as it is the lack of proper play-testing that went into the product before releasing it to the public. However, it's also good to keep note that even though it was tested, these issues raised in severity after a larger number of people started logging onto the megaserver all-at-once and the server was under heavy pressure, which you can't test in the volume of players the game currently has until the patch is already deployed, unfortunately.
Exactly. That's all I'm saying. There is a problem with the quality control process. It may be not enough testers. My guess would be that is part of it.
I'm not complaining about an individual bug, the issue here is the lack of QC.
Life of a Nightblade (Screenshot Tumblr)
“Attention Zenimax: Stamina builds don't hold up to magicka builds, and this is causing most of your class imbalance. It makes melee weapons and bows weaker than staves and class abilities. It makes medium and heavy armor less desirable than light armor. Fix this imbalance, and you'll address most of your balance issues.”
- @ruze84b14_ESO2 -
Korozenn✭✭✭✭kirnmalidus wrote: »
The Elder Scrolls Online is continually receiving patches and bug fixes, and ZeniMax Online Studios as a company treats it as any developer of any online multiplayer game does nowadays: you release patches/hot fixes each week to upkeep the game. You can't compare the issues this game has to past TES games because those games were single-player experiences that weren't stressed by an influx of players all logging onto the server at the same time (which, under the right amount of pressure, can cease to function properly at times, and is especially common in these early launch-periods).
It's the first major content update, so I'm not surprised this occurred in all actuality. Issues like these can be fixed with a patch or hot fix as sometimes they're not as major as we perceive (the issue with achievements is cosmetic and will be fixed next week, as announced earlier by ZOS), and no one will see their accounts roll-backed as a result of this fix, hopefully.
With a game as massive as this, problems are bound to occur. The issue here isn't that there are problems, though, as much as it is the lack of proper play-testing that went into the product before releasing it to the public. However, it's also good to keep note that even though it was tested, these issues raised in severity after a larger number of people started logging onto the megaserver all-at-once and the server was under heavy pressure, which you can't test in the volume of players the game currently has until the patch is already deployed, unfortunately.
Exactly. That's all I'm saying. There is a problem with the quality control process. It may be not enough testers. My guess would be that is part of it.
I'm not complaining about an individual bug, the issue here is the lack of QC.
Agreed. I'm sure I heard before that the PTS was supposed to go public at some point, but even then, how was this content supposed to be tested properly if it was only held for testing in Craglorn? There's certainly a lack of quality control before deploying these patches.
Bugs like these could start out relatively small when implemented and not begin to rear their head around until more players log-on to the server.
It's clear the older achievements were renamed into these newer ones, but in the process, they must have forgot to 'connect' the two together so your progression was counted like they did in other areas across the board for achievements, for instance. Issues like these can really only be seen on the live server when many players are on the server at once and they've already had progress in these different regions pre-patch, unless ZeniMax changes the way the PTS is handled (as aforementioned) in the future.
I hope they do make the PTS go public (public, in that it's only open to people with active subscriptions) and allow players to start testing this content out across the entire game with their progress counted, just as it is for the live servers. Doing something like that would avoid running into issues like these in the future, most certainly.Edited by Korozenn on May 24, 2014 12:30AM0 -
I cannot even download the patch. Receiving the message: "Reliable source serving corrupted data" a message I have never received before. I agree with the above comments; this game has been riddled with problems from the start that Zenimax does not seem to want to address in a complete and timely manner. I am really considering using my subscription money for a more stable MMO.1