And this, boys and girls, is why so many other MMO's have gone to public PTS structures. the general Volume will pull out the issues that the special little teams do not.

a Closed PTS is a recipe for disaster, especially on larger scale patches. Even WITH Open PTS, things are still missed...why people would think that closing it up, putting 5% (or less) of the player population on them, and running with that would be better. no clue.

This game needs an Open PTS. simple as that. Close the PTS for a week. gather your precious data with your spekichul friends. then open it to the rest of the gamers that actually pay your bills, get a flood on the PTS, and they will find the leaks.

You know how you test a gas tank for leaks? you fill it with liquid to the top, and you apply pressure. the leaks are obvious. you put just a small glass of liquid in there....good luck if you find anything. in the latter case, you will always be surprised when you put it back in your truck, cause the leaks will surely show then.

I'm beginning to wonder if this company really does expect it's players to pay 15$ a month to PTS their games. on live. I wonder if were the ultimate PTS for the console. If that's the case, then I'm cancelling my subs early, and I hope they wash out before that. i have plenty of games that actually treat me like a customer for that money...not punish me.

I almost wish this game was a more normal ES release, and i just could play 1-50. it seems they are much better at those closed SPRPG games. I loved 1-50 in this game. but I will not play a game as buggy as this, that tortures its players if they decide they want to finish the other 2/3 of the game in Vet mode.

You know...I'm in the networking field. I work in communications. When I do a maintenance, I have at the LEAST, a half dozen testers in cars in various areas that would impacted by my work. making sure they can still do what the customers do after I'm done. And I have every other team that is impacted by my work on a bridge to test their stuff when I'm done. if something, ANYTHING, doesn't work after were done, we work on it till it works, or we roll back. I have had bridges lasting multiple days before.

thank goodness they weren't my work that caused it, because those kinds of outages usually get people fired in my playground. I've seen it before. It amazes me that a company, even if its "just" a gaming company, doesn't have people testing their releases after they release.

Does anyone who builds this game actually play it afterwords? did they take snapshots of mob health and difficulty before the game? do they have a database or log file that contains basic mob stats Before the change and after? did then even think about it? did they map out the possibilities of the scope of impact this would bring to the product before they implemented it?

Perhaps the developers and implementations teams need to get off their lab environments and actually play their games once in awhile. especially after they update them. You make a change to an area...you get in and play it. it shouldn't take that long...it was less then an hour after patch and players were asking questions about the changes in the forums. that means in house testers could have caught it even faster.

The thing that makes me angry is they did this without testing it. Honest mistakes happen but being careless like that is not one of those mistakes. Especially doing this before a weekend.

If the patch was untested it could have WAITED until it was tested properly and we would all happily be playing. I am sorry I don't see the great urgency in pushing this patch out it contains little to nothing that improves game-play.

The careless nature of their coding and quality assurance is what makes me angry. Its like they just did not give a krap.

pknecron wrote: »

The holiday was LAST weekend. Despite what many think, America is NOT the centre of the universe.

what? we are so!

You do realize that canceling subscription will not make them smarter or to work more... its just a way to make the rest of the guys that stay in the game lose faith that this game will not be F2P in 3 months...

MichaelD wrote: »

You do realize that canceling subscription will not make them smarter or to work more... its just a way to make the rest of the guys that stay in the game lose faith that this game will not be F2P in 3 months...

Well, sorry about their luck. I have better things to waste my time & money on than a game that is not getting the technical attention it deserves.

In its current state, I wouldnt even play with F2P.

Reenlister wrote: »

rawne1980b16_ESO wrote: »

temjiu wrote: »

And this, boys and girls, is why so many other MMO's have gone to public PTS structures. the general Volume will pull out the issues that the special little teams do not.

I think they should hire you.

You would have solved quite a lot of the problems in this patch just by doing that.

No sarcasm. It should be a public PTS because the people they have doing the closed PTS seem to have no clue what they are doing.

mmm, I don't know if the blame can really lie at the feet of the testers. I say this only because I have and do know a few of them. Sadly what I have seen so far, is what really amounts to a lack of listening to the said test, or even in fact, the general public. Bugs we can all agree I believe happen, and while it may not be fixed to our individual liking, bugs do get fixed. The real problem is we are seeing a trend of pushing out things that are just not ready, and showing us time and time again, the impression of they don't really care, they will just clean up the mess later.
That is pretty sad to think, but it is becoming the general appearance.

Your right. It's not a single tester (as in PTS) or an implementation guy, or a customer service rep. anyone who has done a huge project in an even huger company knows how many teams it takes to organize this stuff, run it through labs, certify it, and get it on a network.

It is a global mentality that pertains to how they manage this stuff that makes it or breaks it. I've seen VP's (high level directors) come into an org and totally break it. I've seen those VP's replaced (usually discreetly, with respect), and the new VP has things turned around in a month or two. It's not that they go into individual details and micro-manage peoples lives. they come in with a different and effective paradigm for the organization, and it works where the last one didn't.

all of my points were details that could improve this situation. but overall I feel there is a larger paradigm that will rot this game out from underneath if they don't get a hold of it. And that's not a choice a customer service rep makes, or an implementations guy...or an engineering guy, or even their managers. it goes up much higher then that.

And I hope those higher level people are getting this message. I hope its not so filtered by the time it gets to them that its mis-understood. I have a feeling that there are hundreds, if not thousands of people that would love to play this game if the company can get the right balance. many of those people (including myself) are willing to put up with smaller things, constant changes to the game, and even occasionally breaking stuff, if we see in the larger picture that the game is going in the right direction. I've done it with many games in the past, I'd do it with this game. but not in the state it's in at the moment.

It's what I said in another thread.. It's the grey suits and the ones in charge with an ego as big as mount rushmore. Sheer incompetence.

I'm gonna be so pissed if by the time i get home from work in 2 hours this still is not fixed and im still unable to play.

http://www.zenimaxonline.com/contact.php

Let these guy's know.

temjiu wrote: »

I honestly hope they figure it out. ES was always a fun genre to me. my first month or so in this game were wonderful. In spite of the bugs. Bethesday deserves to have their amazing Genre convert to the MMO world and attract a new audience. and now....I stare at the login screen and wonder if i want to log in.

I think the game has a lot of potential, and having a Vet 10 DK and a Vet 7 Sorc should speak for itself. The graphics are great, voice acting for every line of dialogue, the zones well designed and the staggering amount of content; Nobody can deny that a LOT of work has went into this game to make it as polished as it is so far.

The trouble is that if the game doesn't function properly, it nullifies the rest. There is a reason indie games are very much alive, even for people that have the latest computing power. Look at Minecraft!

Functionality > The Rest.

My problem now is that, like many others after the patch, I can't bring myself to log in for the entire 20 minutes without a crash that I can play, and it is extremely disappointing. On top of that I have read that many people are Vet 12 already (took 3 hours?) after exploiting some bug or mechanics. Now, I know that the memory leak issue is being addressed, but don't Zenimax have a proper hot-fix system in place? This should have been resolved already.

I've been reading the forums a lot since the patch yesterday to try and track the response and progress, and overall, I see two categories of people. The ones that have fought through all the initial bugs (Vet 5+), and those that missed a lot of these issues - coming in after the 5-6 small patches that were released (level < 50). Granted, all of the initial bugs were addressed by giving players a free 5 days on top of their subscription, and ultimately some bugs are to be expected for a newly released title. But, I think that these players who have been here since early access expected a better patch than this, considering it has allegedly been on PTS for some time.

I have already lost a lot of guildies during the first 30 days, and I was one of the ones to believe and preach to the rest that a lot of the current problems would surely be fixed in the first "big" patch. This was my expectation from a AAA title that hasn't addressed many issues other than quests so far in their weekly patches. And, if they have addressed other issues - they were undocumented changes, of which we all know at least some exist.

The biggest problem I believe, which many posts have touched on, is the customer service. The basic idea of customer service is that you manage the customers' perception by setting expectations. Not once have I seen proper expectations set. You don't have to be negatively transparent to set proper expectations.

In fact, if I was in charge of CS and this patch was released, the first thing I would do is send out a mass email to simply say that we are looking into the issues. This email would include a link to an official forum thread (locked thread) which would be updated every hour or so. These are critical bugs and keeping people updated is a duty. (Please don't mention "dev tracker"! it makes me cry).

Overall, my perception as of this moment is one of incompetence, and I really wish it wasn't. Given enough time any issue can be fixed. It's how you go about addressing the issues that make the difference.

It's not the people with passion for the game, venting on the forums, that Zenimax need to worry about. It's all those clicking un-subscribe without ever visiting.

p.s. For those not sure about the long weekend. It's a holiday Monday in US and UK, can't tell you about anywhere else.

Kalann_Pander wrote: »

There should be a few people in the Customer Service capable of expressing to the target public meaningful information. I should know, it's part of my job - keeping the client updated on serious problems and how they should manage in the meantime - with words I know they will understand.

I'm not a system admin, but I know my system well enough to know the impacts.

At the moment, there's ::
- No colored announcement at the top of the page.
- No official thread in Customer Support.
- No official thread in PC Technical Support.
- No official thread in Official News & Patch Notes.

In short, there is NO official communication regarding this major bug - if you don't mess around in the forums, you won't even know of it, and regardless, the info you will find (like here) is likely to be fragmented, and maybe downright false.

Ok, fair enough, there should be some CS rep with information talking to us.

Requiemslove wrote: »

jdoe wrote: »

Exactly when did schools start teaching our younger generation that hard restarting their computers might result in spontaneous combustion?

Just want to bring this up, @elorei‌ said before, about hard drive corruption, I can attest to this. Hard restart of a computer can lead to hard drive corruption. Happened to me, on my old mini Acer computer. [when I say old, its only really 2009, but it cost me a considerable amount to get a new Hard-drive and to get it fitted...I aint too hot on computer hardware]

The reason this happens is because you have two types of memory RAM (short term volatile memory) and HDD (long term non-volatile memory).

Imagine editing a word document and then closing it without saving first. The changes are lost. This is because while you are editing it, you are using your short term, much faster RAM to temporarily store the file. When you save it, you dump what is in RAM to your HDD.

Now, imagine when windows loads up that it has many files open, as well as any programs you have open. If you hard reset your machine, some programs might not have saved, some might be in the process of saving and worst of all, windows might not have time to write critical files, ultimately resulting in a corrupt installation.

Always, always, shut down your machine

temjiu wrote: »

And this, boys and girls, is why so many other MMO's have gone to public PTS structures. the general Volume will pull out the issues that the special little teams do not.

a Closed PTS is a recipe for disaster, especially on larger scale patches. Even WITH Open PTS, things are still missed...why people would think that closing it up, putting 5% (or less) of the player population on them, and running with that would be better. no clue.

This game needs an Open PTS. simple as that. Close the PTS for a week. gather your precious data with your spekichul friends. then open it to the rest of the gamers that actually pay your bills, get a flood on the PTS, and they will find the leaks....

Read the whole post, but wanted to say how true this bit that i quoted is. For all the crap FFXI put its players through, when they started to turn it around was when the idiot producer running it into the ground was fired and the new dev leaders opened up the Test server.

Any player with a valid sub could apply and they rolled all upcoming changes onto it and let players just play with it. They took input, directly interacted with players during events(that they did for the test servers), and most importantly they made sure that stuff that bugged out on the test server was fixed before it was added to the live game servers.

It was/is a great system and ZOS would benefit from it.

NullByte wrote: »

Requiemslove wrote: »

jdoe wrote: »

Exactly when did schools start teaching our younger generation that hard restarting their computers might result in spontaneous combustion?

Just want to bring this up, @elorei‌ said before, about hard drive corruption, I can attest to this. Hard restart of a computer can lead to hard drive corruption. Happened to me, on my old mini Acer computer. [when I say old, its only really 2009, but it cost me a considerable amount to get a new Hard-drive and to get it fitted...I aint too hot on computer hardware]

The reason this happens is because you have two types of memory RAM (short term volatile memory) and HDD (long term non-volatile memory).

Imagine editing a word document and then closing it without saving first. The changes are lost. This is because while you are editing it, you are using your short term, much faster RAM to temporarily store the file. When you save it, you dump what is in RAM to your HDD.

Now, imagine when windows loads up that it has many files open, as well as any programs you have open. If you hard reset your machine, some programs might not have saved, some might be in the process of saving and worst of all, windows might not have time to write critical files, ultimately resulting in a corrupt installation.

Always, always, shut down your machine

Yes, the only problem with that is sometimes shutting down your machine any other way than pressing the power button or hitting the on/off switch is not available to you. I understand the fear of this memory leak issue people have been mentioning, what if you CANT shut down your machine? What if this game makes you hit the power button, or flick the on/off switch? I don't want to go down that road again.