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Elder Scrolls Online: Matt Firor Speaks to the Community
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
Matt Firor has taken to the Elder Scrolls Online forum to speak to player concerns. He addresses black market activity, bots and gold spammers, the duping issue and goes into a bit of detail about some of the fixes Zenimax has put into place already.
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
Thanks to Keithian for posting the letter in this forum thread!
Comments
When are you going to do something about gold spammers constantly flooding ingame chat?
It's 2014 - you had to know and anticipate that this is a HUGE problem in today's games.
Oh yeah... Patch sounds nice..
"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"
This I'm very interested in.. I can see some nerfhammer landing in certain area's *Sorcerers, cough*
Just hope I dont get another nerf..
Look forward it and the drama that will inevitably follow....
read the fucking article much? lol
Have you logged in? Do you still see gold spam or is it really gone?
Deja Vu.. http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/410864/Matt-Firor-Discusses-the-State-of-the-Game.html
Did you read the article? He said they are working on it and even used himself as an example of still seeing gold spammers and botters everyday.
Preventing gold spammers and botters is an extremely tricky thing to do. The spammers themselves will always find loopholes and work-arounds. And from the developer perspective you need to be 100% certain any system you set in place won't generate false positives. This is EXTREMELY difficult to do in any type of software development.
That being said...having static harvesting and boss spawns was a big mistake IMO. For regular players it doesn't make much difference but static spawns are a botters wet dream.
I get it, the guy just asked when and he gets jumped on and swore at. I kinda think its a valid question. Working on it is very vague. But thats just IMO.
a legit a proper response to the community.
nothing new if you play daily, and read reddit on game status. It would be nice if they gave an extra week time play - before charges come into play on all accounts across- since early players didnt get much of that and personally for me it ruined my leveling experience early in game with the story.
as i said- i will see how this game 'settles in' a month from now.
Name one popular MMORPG that has zero gold spam and I'll give you a cookie.
Name one MMORPG that didn't have massive gold spam on launch and I'll give you a cake.
Name one MMORPG that didn't have bots and I'll give you ice-cream.
If you lie you get nothing.
How about the fundamental game design issues which don't allow players and friends to properly co-op this game, opting instead to separate people into different phases?
Or forcing people who should be working TOGETHER in a dungeon to instead compete for treasure chests, like the nodes in the greater world which cause conflicts and disdain between players [even if generally minor] gathering resources...
There's a lot to love about this game, but there are a whole lot of ass-backwards game design decisions that were made which leave me baffled as to how any designer could think they are the best way to go... I won't bother with a list because Angry Joe already pretty much covered most of the things in his review. Most.
BOYCOTTING EA / ORIGIN going forward.
what about the full month sub before we can get to our allready paid for 30 days?
A good PR article.
He is telling the community what they want to hear and clearly the steps outlined need to be actioned quickly.
Lets see if they do deliver time will tell...
Read my above post to get my point. I was replying to how rude to the guy who was frustrated about a real problem. Poor guy just asked when lol. FF14 gold seller problem was huge and by far the worse botting I have seen. Between the time they said they are working on it like ZM is doing now and when they rolled out some fixes and bans was many weeks. When seems like a fitting question.
First and foremost, I'm still having fun in the game. That's all that really matters to me.
I got to laugh at some people on this site though. You blame Zenimax for botters and gold spammers. That's like blaming the Police because someone you know got killed, because everybody in 2014 knows that there are bad people that want kill people...doesn't make sense to me lol. Blame the botters and gold spammers, not the developers.
Mystery Bounty
I also love this game. It's my favorite game in a long time and I'm already deeply hooked on it.
However ZOS has definitely made some big design errors.
To use your example: Yes, it isn't law enforcement's fault that there are bad people in the world that we need to police. Yes, it isn't Zenimax's fault that there are gold spammers/hackers/botters than they need to police. However, Zenimax implementing static spawns, to me, is the equivalent of the police giving people guns for free and then getting upset when they use them to kill people. Static spawns that spawn in the same place at the same time are simply a botters paradise. There wouldn't be nearly as much of a problem if the design philosophy was different.
Oh look: damage control.
Talk is cheap, and half of that stuff should have been considered, say, BEFORE THE EFFIN GAME WAS LAUNCHED!
Such an announcement is not unexpected at all, when a big money title has as many problems as this one out of the gate.
It all comes down to: "Please keep paying us the $15/mo while we fix things that should have been fixed 6 months ago..."
People were largely unwilling to do so with TOR, it remains to be seen if they will here.
When will Windows be free of security flaws?
When it's a productive question, sorry. Fighting botters, exploiters, and gold spammers is an ongoing initiative. As long as there is a buck to be made, they will find away around whatever changes are implemented. "We're working on it" sounds like a BS cop-out answer, but I swear that sometimes people think that these guys release and just kick back with their feet up on their desks and watch the cash roll in. There is plenty of work to still be done, it's all a matter of what has highest priority. There are some major bugs in there, but based on the article I would assume that there will be at least some changes coming with the next patch.
Crazkanuk
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Azarelos - 90 Hunter - Emerald
Durnzig - 90 Paladin - Emerald
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Tankinpain - 90 Monk - Azjol-Nerub - US
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Dude.....
DaoC had no Gold Seller Spam with Release.
So Bigmouth, now it's time to get me a Cake. ASAP.
Aerowyn's Video Compilation of ALL things Guild Wars 2
Still no reason to be rude to someone asking when.