Tabbycat wrote: »

Whining from certain elements of the community caused ZOS to make some poor decisions in regards to the game. Hopefully they will learn from this and stop catering to the whims of the media.

Companies, like people, make decisions based on their own judgement and experience, or lack thereof, not because others "make them."

It's like saying it's your boyfriend's fault you cheated on him because he wasn't nice to you on the phone earlier or something.

NiRN wrote: »

You have to have a good, stable game for a community to rally around. It's up to the company to build a solid game that keeps interest and people subscribing that will in turn foster a loyal, good community.

Exactly this. You simply cant have one without the other. If the former fails, the latter will too.

To me both need improvement.
What is nice to see is that the vast majority of posters in this thread have posted mature comments and voiced their opinions reasonably, whether you agree with them or not. That means there is hope for the community and lets be honest the community is the heart of any MMO.
Yes ZOS has made mistakes, yes the game has many bugs but it seems that ZOS is working on those, again, whether we all agree with the way they prioritize or not. Sure I would like to see certain bugs fixed first - Large group bug, weapon swap and ability delay, stability in Cyrodil (yes all still ongoing despite the recent patch) and I would like to see a fix for stamina builds, updates to medium and heavy armour, oil (being able to be placed anywhere -middle of a field, and it can even flow uphill, etc.) But all those are MY priorities, other players want different things - Nightblades and Templars, being a prime example they will have different priorities as will hard core raiders, more casual players and so on.
- ZOS has to balance all these wants and demands and lets not forget that the vast majority of players will never post on the forums but hopefully they will fill in-game bug reports and ZOS will take those into account as well when prioritizing bug fixes and improvements.
- So the posters in these forums do need to chill out, its fine to be angry and frustrated as everyone here is a paying customer, its fine to post your views but try to be objective and constructive.
- for ZOS, their biggest issue is communication with their player base, especially at this early stage when there are a lot of issues, instead of having a monthly Road Ahead it may do to have a bi-monthly or weekly one at least for a little while. Or something like that, a News Letter or Community/Game Update, and never ever do stealth nerfs. If you miss something out of the patch notes, as soon as you realize, post it with an apology.

Too early to say whether the game is a failure or a success.
Most of the community seem nice.

So I would have to go for Fail Question.

nerevarine1138 wrote: »

The forum community, on the other hand, has been pretty much overrun with hysterical shrieking about how the game is sinking, how the game is going f2p, how [insert class here] is broken beyond repair, how ZO is actually an extension of the Illuminati, etc.

Isn't everything a branch of the Illuminati, including my local Library. In fact when you add everything up that the Illuminati supposedly control, you get everything except your local shops.

Which makes you wonder, who controls the local shops

The community 'feels' terrible on the forums, but if you notice most of the 'THIS GAME SUCKS AND IS UNFINISHED, GOING F2P' is constantly from the same 10 or so people with some deviation. This is par for the course with an MMO, and - in my experiences at least - the in game community generally had alright people with trolls here and there.

I know I could do without the 'go back to wow' and the ' have fun with your broken game lololol' people, but, This is the internet and maturity isn't a requirement.

The game it self is not a fail. The way Zenimax are handling the game could be considered as a fail.
A gaming community will always complain about something, BUT... the amount, depth and passion shown on this forums complaints shows that something is seriously wrong ! ! !

Falmer wrote: »

Yes, the game has issues, but mature adults should be able to articulate those issues in a constructive manner. The devs are not going to listen and act on forum rage as they are also all too familiar with it.

I think the issue is that the issues were articulated in a constructive manner but it's been a one-sided conversation. Zenimax hasn't really participated in their side of the conversation so people get frustrated.

The game and it's developers fail at community building on too many levels, hence this toxic shark tank of a forum and the tough to find community in-game. (Keep searching, it's there!)

Though I found the more people have realized that this game indeed has problems and talking about those problems is necessary to have them solved, the less toxic it got. Rather than trying to silence the harbinger of bad news in the hopes of burying all issues alongside, we are now seeing different takes on solutions discussed.

It's not really a civil, nor healthy surrounding just yet, but there's hope. And it assures me we, the players, are the last to blame for what is happening with ESO and our community. We're not innocent, but we're not the problem the either. Just a symptom, kinda ill, but if treated right, we'd be well in no time.

warbladex wrote: »

People have way to high expectations for a game that's being out for just over 2 months. Even other MMO's like WOW had a huge amount of issues when it started up and took a hell of a lot longer then two month to fix them all but yet people forget that.

Thank you! People either forget what WOW was like at launch, or didn't start playing until WotLK. ESO, as a new title, is very impressive in my eyes. I have yet to see all of these "bugs" people are talking about.

As for all the class imbalance rants... Welcome to MMOs? There will always be people who crunch the numbers, and there will always be that one best class build that you need to be 100% competitive. Always.Different builds and classes might take turns with nerfs/buffs/reworks, but there will always be that one build.

I picked 'Others'.

TESO is a good game at its core. Which is saying a lot in this day and age when realistically the MMO genre is, and has been for a time, on the way out imo. But it's problems are not so cut and dry as to point at one out of the pile and say, 'Well der's yer problem right 'ere!'.

In no real order:

* You have the devs, who i actually believe have a plan. They just don't seem to have the facility to know when to stick to it and when to amend it. And more importantly HOW to properly amend it. See most of the changes and additions they have made, and NOT made, to TESO thus far.

* You have the playerbase, which is so splintered it is beyond depressing. In one corner the hardcore MMO players, in another the almost fanatical TES fans, and in the middle the bulk of players that lean a bit more to one side than the other but overall just want to have a good time. Oh and let's not forget almost sociopathic subset that seems to just want the game to die for the luls.

* You have the suits, who are sitting in their boardroom pushing the devs relentlessly for a recoup of their initial investment. In reality these are the guys and gals that set the unrealistic launch day for TESO, regardless of whether it was ready to go live or not. Their pushing most likely is why the devs seem to be so clueless.

* You have the game industry at large, which has been molding gamer's opinions(mostly to the ill) of TESO since the second it was announced. Pick a reason, most of these guys and gals have had a yin to see this game fail that is so large it is almost like they are personally invested.


That's just 4 bits from the pile of mess that is currently TESO. And i say pile of mess because that is what TESO is atm...but it can still be pulled out of the fire imo. Like i started of with, the core game is a good one. I for one will ride out the squalls and hope ZOS can sack-up and right the ship.

All MMO communities have trolls.
What you see of the community on the forums is a small subset of that community but by the nature of the beast the trolls will be more apparent.
There are a lot of good people in this community and I don't think the trolls are any worse than in any other MMO community.

All MMO games have bugs.
When people find bugs that impact on them then some will come to the forums to vent.
Is ESO anymore buggy than any other game was at a similar stage? That's almost impossible to say - it will likely be a different answer for everyone you ask based on their particular experiences and flavored by their particular expectations for ESO.

Game companies are stuck between a rock and a hard place:
On the forums they either let let people post pretty much what they like (within reason) and are accused of ignoring things; or they attempt to mod the forum to keep things sane and then get accused of being the thought police with over-modding.
They surely want to have a game that people want to play, a game free of bugs, or at least a game where the bugs that exist don't over burden their support team - but these games are complex and addressing things like class balance and PvP campaign balance is not trivial.

I had high expectations for ESO; I'm currently disappointed with how things are in the game - I'm not really able to play it my way - but I hope that they get things turned around because I still see a lot of potential here.

Either way, the trolls will still troll and the vast majority of the community will play or walk regardless of the them and there trolling.

Zenimax has pocketed the initial game units revenue and three months subscription revenue. They've likely satisfied their investor return and are now simply milking the proverbial teat.

This isn't new in MMOs, it's been the bane of player base satisfaction and game platform stagnation for longer than ESO was envisioned.

Game stability, class balance and progressive end game design are months away if not longer.

Unfortunately, hopeful players are caught in the static loop of reactionary driven patches versus pro-active workable solutions by Zenimax.

alexandru987eb17_ESO wrote: »

Releasing a game with no Auction House?

Whilst I understand they'd have issues with a global auction house due to megaserver size, I'm amazed they can instance players in the world but not in an auction house!

No instanced PvP?

Shouldn't be needed in a 3 way realm combat, certainly wasn't in DAoC. Time will tell if it's unbalanced here.

No instanced solo dungeons so you must fight bots or other players to try and finish it?

Yeah, the design of these needs a lot of work.

No way to help your friend with his quest in a *** MMO?

Well, they have said they were working on this. Amazed that they went live without such a basic thing though. A lot of this game has stuff done for "immersion" but ends up just with poor control systems and glaring playability issues, which of course break any immersion quickly. Ten minutes into any other game you are ignoring the interface, no matter how un-immersive. Two months into this game and the interface is still killing me.

My biggest issue with the game is lack of balance. My biggest issue with the playerbase is not realising that Veteran Levels are far from required to do stuff in PvP. You'd be far better off gaining experience and alliance levels and pvp skills than trying to get marginal stat increases in Veteran Levels. Somehow we have a complaint that Veteran Levels make too little difference but are required for PvP! Personally I wish they only gave PvE bonuses.

Sorry most of you don't know how to play this game, much less how a game is to be played.

Sorry if you allowed the need for instant gratification to impact your ability to understand that challenges are to be met with personal consideration and sometimes you need skill and not math or the ill perceived solution of the general consensus.

Sorry if you fail to accept that social connection is required to access the content in its entirety and that the lone wolf will always die alone.

...and, sorry Zenimax the community has failed you. You tried to help us evolve from a decade of simply button sequences and timer countdowns. To many choices in character development is apparently to complicated for a community who is used to ordering food by number.