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Matt Firor Discusses the State of the Game
Belgaraath
Member UncommonPosts: 3,204
This kind of snuck onto the official forums. I think it is a very sincere response to some of what is plaguing the game. They need more updates to the community like this one. It's unfortunate that they are spending "85% of Customer Service emails/calls" on black market activity. At least they are trying to remedy it the best they can. The good news is that it looks as if the first major update including the first Adventure Zone is only a couple of weeks away :-).
http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/discussion/85974/state-of-the-game-address/p1
As it’s now two and a half weeks since we officially launched on April 4, I think it’s a good time to bring everyone up to date on The Elder Scrolls Online service, maintenance windows, and what we’re doing to add content, make the game better, and address some issues that are near and dear to the community.
First and foremost, please know that we are doing everything we can to combat the gold spammers and bots – especially ones that “camp” dungeon bosses – that you see in game. I play the game every day; I see them too, and yes, they drive me crazy. We have had a daily running battle with them ever since the game launched – moving them from global chat, to in-game email, to creating bogus guilds and inviting players – and we continue to take measures to keep them away from players, even when it isn’t always apparent that we are. Most of the battle has been on the back end of the game – we regularly ban accounts involved in spam and bot activity – our teams are working on better systems to identify those accounts and characters that are doing black market activities, and we’re also working on some game feature refinement to make it harder for them to acquire gold in the first place. Fighting black market activity like gold selling spam and farming bots is a marathon, not a sprint, but we will do whatever we can to reduce their impact on the game.
The scope of the black market activity accounts for up to 85% of Customer Service emails/calls. Because of this huge influx of contact relating to this one issue, our CS team has been slower to react to other problems than planned – our sincere apologies if you have been held up for a long period of time waiting for CS to respond to you. Again, our goal is to keep this activity away from you so you don’t have to contact Customer Service in the first place.
Also very visible was last week’s gold “duping” (duplication) bug – where players could manipulate stacks of items in their inventory to create copies. We fixed the problem and banned the accounts of the worst offenders And yes, we erroneously caught up some legitimate accounts in that ban, for which we apologize – all erroneously banned accounts were reinstated within about 8 hours. Contrary to some reports, exploitation of this bug did not result in destabilizing the ESO economy in any way. We did turn off guild banks to limit the spread of the problem, but that was only until we put up a new version of the game that fixed the exploit later that evening.
All of these fixes have resulted in several more maintenance periods than we planned for – we know that everyone wants to play the game and hates downtime – but please be aware that every time we take down the servers for maintenance, it is either to fix a problem or put up an update that makes the game better. We are working on shortening the length of maintenances, this will get better over time.
So, here’s the list of our more prominent fixes since launch, as well as info about ongoing support that we’re doing for ESO:
- Fixed the bug where a small percentage of players lost their expansion bank slots.
- Fixed quest-blocking bugs, especially ones in Coldharbour, that prevented players from completing either a main quest step, or the Coldharbour zone.
- Fixed many other quest bugs not related to the above where items/NPCs didn’t spawn properly.
- Fixed the Greenshade (Aldmeri Dominion zone) problem, which caused the zone to crash every few hours. This one was fixed on 4/4, but was a problem during early access.
- Fixed two dupe issues: the above one involving stacked items, and another (on a much smaller scale) involving crafting hireling emails.
- Put many back-end fixes and procedures in place to block black market gold farmer activity.
We still have much to do – there still other quest problems on our fix list, most of them involving the situation where they become “de-synched” from the zone and don’t spawn their items or NPCs properly. We are in process of putting up our first major update to the game on our Play Test Server (PTS), which includes many updates to the game, including class and weapon ability tweaks, content fixes, and updates to almost all game systems. It also contains our new end-game Adventure Zone, Craglorn, with Veteran content aimed at 4 and 12-man groups. So stay tuned for PTS patch notes for all the other fixes that we’ve been working on. This is a major update to the game, so it will be on PTS for at least a week or 10 days for testing before we take it live.
We’re working on fixing problems, we’re combatting black market gold farmers, and we have a hefty new patch coming shortly. ESO is already an awesome game, and it will only get better from here. Thanks for your patience and support, and I’ll see you in Tamriel. - Matt
There Is Always Hope!
Comments
Nope not good enough and to late......LIGHT THEM TORCHES AND SHARPEN THE PITCHFORKS GUYS, TIME TO GO BURN DOWN ZENIMAX OFFICES....WHO'S WITH ME ?
anyone ?
oh...yeah. Sorry. You are abit late to the send off, they all left pretty soon after launch heading towards the offices.
The Deep Web is sca-ry.
Stop being a logical voice of reason. You won't fit in here lol.
There Is Always Hope!
I'm such a slow leveler. I'm only 25. By the time I get to end game 5 more adventure zones will be out lol. Just glad some group content will be out at end game for those that don't want to do the 50+ or 50++ and don't want PVP. That will put at least some of the end game complaints to rest and hopefully additional content will continue to flow every 4-6 weeks as promised.
There Is Always Hope!
Even over the last week, I noticed there were less gold spammers in chat. Instead of being a constant never ending stream, they were coming in waves, still too often, but better. I was also getting one mail like every other day. Anyway, not sure they will all be gone within a week or two as that isn't the norm for any MMO, but I do expect a lot of improvement with the amount of bugs and the issues around phasing.
There Is Always Hope!
Eventually yes but you also have to understand that patience of people varies a lot. 2 weeks was enough to break a lot of players and hence all the negativity.
Every MMO gets stable in few months but how many have been able to retain a good chunk of players back as a P2P MMO? other than WOW which was 9 years ago.. not one MMO comes to my mind.
I know I'll just sound like a fanboy and my post will be read by few, but I feel it has to be stated.
I honestly believe that Zenimax is doing a great job considering the fact that they are in virgin territory (first MMO), in addition to the huge amount of players that dropped on them at once - which incidentally is why there is a HUGE presence of Gold Spam/Bots.. That's a sign of a heavily played game. They have done a great job so far in reducing the spam. Occasionally some of the spammers will find a new loophole in the chat system and I'll get bombarded for a while, but eventually it's gone again.
One thing I wish they would do is allow us to quickly report gold spammers and bots. Still have it take a screenshot in addition to your report, but when there are 10 spammers in the zone all at once it's very time consuming to report each one using their current system. Other games did this well. Written tickets for CS are for other issues.. Bottom line - We should be able to right-click and report the spammers as easily as it is to right-click and ignore them.
All that said, the important thing is that they are openly aware of the issues and are doing what they can to combat them. We'll just have to see how well they do over time. So far I, personally, give them good marks.
They should have a function that allows you to report a gold spammer that makes them open to pvp. It would be so much fun beating them down.
Yep. In a perfect world, systems like that wouldn't be abused and we could have nice things.
Well said. I agree about the right click. Not sure why that is so difficult for them to do.
There Is Always Hope!
I liked Matt last comment " ESO is already an awesome game, and it will only get better from here. ".
The game could be awesome but quickly becomes horrible when confronted by all the bugs, exploits, desynched grouping, unresponsive combat and PVP balance issues.
I think these issues will be fixed sooner than later and ESO will be on track into becoming an awesome game. Right now unfortunately its not! Even with everything fixed, its still not awesome but full of potential of being. The game just needs fixing and a couple of content patches for more diversity in features, quality stuff to do in-game.
I'm positive about ESO's future but realistic at its current state, they have a lot of work to do to put it back on track but feels that it will only get better from here.
Zenimax's first mmo but Matt Frior is an industry vet; and most of the people involved in the game will be industry vets. So this is not a valid excuse.
And a lot of stuff is no different from single player games e.g quest bugs - so no different from Skyrim then!
Got to feel that it wasn't quite ready for release.
In summary, Matt Firor is saying that they're working hard to fix all these bugs and design shortcomings...
Okay, so what? We paid for a quality product; are we supposed to be impressed that ZOS is fixing stuff that shouldn't have been broken to begin with?
WHY WEREN'T ALL THESE BUGS AND DESIGN OVERSIGHTS CAUGHT BEFORE RELEASE?
That's a simple question and ZOS has been avoiding it.
Irrespective of the good points of the game, there is no excuse for the state of the game at release. The fanboi mantra that "All games have bugs" is unacceptable; any of us who developed software commercially know that. Unfortunately, a whole lot of people have been indoctrinated with the "sheep" mentality.
The game was inadequately tested and, in many cases, the problems and bugs were identified and management decisions were made not to fix them. It was more important to spend money on voice-overs and marketing than fielding a good product.
Should have learned their lesson from the SW-TOR debacle...
I'm thoroughly enjoying the game so far, and it's good to see that Matt is being open about the issues that exist. Rome wasn't built in a day, and ESO improves with each patch.
Given that I'm progressing very slowly and savouring every minute of the journey, it's unlikely that I'll ever expereince any of the "major bugs" that the speedlevelers are complaining about. I did lose a few bank slots, but that was minor.
In a perfect world, complex commercial software wouldn't release with bugs. But it's not a perfect world, as any of Microsoft's customers can tell you.
And no, it isn't add-ons.
Good read.
Super happy they are working so hard on the game, and SUPER DUPER happy that they finally banned mmogfails. Hopefully that site will die off now.
Because there's a simple answer and ZOS shouldn't have to say it.
Developers don't really have a say in their own deadlines like people apparently think. Every delay in release costs money, and when hard deadlines are set for a game to go live, they have to prioritize unfinished portions of the game and the biggest bugs. So even if something was a known issue, that doesn't mean they could get to it before release.
I don't know about you, but even at my job I have to prioritize tasks, some tasks, despite their importance are not as critical as others so they are lower on the list of things to do. Eventually they get done, and sometimes they don't get done in time.
You give them far too much credit, many of the exploits and bugs were reported months ago. That has zilch to do with deadlines.
They just have really bad code bolstered by a really bad engine and all of that tied neatly with the bow of incompetent server architecture.
regarding the red line above: it is literally impossible to launch a perfect program, that is why every program has patches. When a program is being written it is impossible to think of every possible scenario, the game was not inadequately tested at all, they did just fine. This is especially difficult when you have millions of people using your program at the exact same time.
1) Sometimes it takes many months to fix a bug that seems small.
2) When designing a program everything has to do with deadlines.
3) Unless you are apart of their IT team how would you have any idea what their server architecture is?
1.) No, it really doesn't. It certainly didn't take them "months" to fix it the moment it became widespread. They are simply inept.
2.) Ultimately, yes, but not months in the past when people point out gamebreaking errors. If someone took my simul codes and told me there is a massive data cloning bug, I am not going to brush it off in lieue of getting the code done. Unless I was incompetent that is...
3.) Their server architecture IS bad. Why do you think the game has all this downtime?