devtrackers.gg
INTRODUCTION
With some of the recent activity on social media and the PVP announcement, I wanted to take some time to more thoroughly answer a question that @ZOS_GinaBruno posed in Twitter:
https://twitter.com/GinaLBruno/status/1475905404316045323
Twitter does not really allow for the textual space required to answer the question, so I wanted to take a crack at it.
Let’s postulate a few things:
[list=1]
[*] It will never be possible for ZOS to make all of their consumers happy at the same time, because sub-populations of them have different if not divergent interests and priorities within the game.
[*] ZOS is running a business, and will have some internal priorities and strategies that will never get shared with the community because of their sensitivity.
[*] ZOS wants to develop a policy for communications and product development that puts their consumers at the center – in other words, run a customer-focused organization that strives to understand their consumers in order to reliably and reasonably meet their requirements.
[*] The consumers’ time and experiences in the game come at the opportunity cost of other fun or important activities, and are therefore inherently valuable to them.
[/list]
Okay, so with that in mind, here’s my personal advice, boiled down to two simple keywords with a whole lot of further explanation:
EMPATHY
Have empathy for your consumers, and communicate with them while keeping that empathy top of mind. A lot of player complaints that come back to ZOS come from a place of frustration, which usually falls into one of the following categories:
[list=1]
[*] Frustration with game performance: e.g. a player was unable to achieve in game goals due to technical performance in Cyrodiil and/or trials. The frustration comes from a sense of the player’s time being wasted because a bug or some technical problem undermines their ability to play, progress, or win.
[*] Frustration with perceived unfairness: e.g. the CP retooling and “loss” of CP value for players who had already achieved a certain level of XP in the game, the perfected Maelstrom weapon decision. In these cases, the player thinks that the value of the time that they already spent in the game is being negated due to a design decision.
[*] Frustration with the accessibility to content of interest: e.g. the recent Battlegrounds queuing design decisions, “power gaps” that exclude players who can not seem to meet in game performance benchmarks necessary to clear content, accusations of P2W due to pricing of crown store/chapter expansions, complaints about apex mount costs and scarcity. In these cases, the player is frustrated that they don’t get stuff they want either because it costs money, or the game is not designed in a way to help improve them to get where they want to be.
[/list]
Empathy is key to understanding how to effectively respond to complaints or problems brought up by players. It’s also hard to respond to all of these things with empathy because sometimes they are just not objectively legitimate complaints, so being able to parse them out is a function of a development approach that contains some baseline assumptions about the player’s role in the game and their intended experience.
As such, an important feature of being able to communicate with empathy is also being able to clearly articulate ZOS’s approach towards the player role in the game. You’d need to start by aggregating the complaints, and then asking why they are possibly so angry about it. Consider factors like: are they paying money? What’s the opportunity cost of that purchase? How much time do they have, and how does that relate to our time-based objectives for players? Are they getting appropriate value for their purchase, given their in-game interests and focus?
Another factor to consider with respect to developing empathy is this: everyone who is issuing formal communications to the player base should be seasoned players of the game. They should inherently know what the player experience feels like, inclusive of all content and on a real and active set of servers. You should be paying your community managers to play the game well enough and for long enough that they have actually experienced what the typical player sees in the game. I’ve seen some of the community folks streaming, and then being surprised or annoyed at some of the issues or design decisions implemented in game, and then they express themselves in real time at how annoying or challenging that is. I’m not saying that they should announce their real identities in game either – they just need to see what it’s like to play as someone coming in and trying to clear content.
AUTHENTICITY
Why is authenticity important? It goes straight to your collective credibility within the player community. Without authenticity, people will cynically dismiss what you say with completely callous disregard, and you don’t want that to happen.
So what does it mean to be authentic? Authenticity derives from the communication characteristics of responsiveness and transparency, as well as the dimensions of trust: competency, integrity, and benevolence. Let’s parse those out:
Is ZOS perceived as a trustworthy company?
[list]
[*] Benevolence: Do ZOS’s consumers think that ZOS cares about them? Will ZOS make decisions that are in the consumer’s best interest?
[*] Competency: Do ZOS’s consumers think that ZOS will reliably perform in a manner that is expected or promised?
[*] Integrity: Do ZOS’s consumers think that ZOS is honest and forthcoming in their communications, such that they will uphold their promises and commitments?
[/list]
How do consumers perceive ZOS’s communications?
[list]
[*] Responsiveness: Does ZOS issue communications in a timely and relevant fashion?
[*] Transparency: Does ZOS share relevant internal information regarding policies and decisions in communications to their consumers?
[/list]
All of these factors lead to how authentic an organization is perceived to be. Note that this is perception – not necessarily reality. But I think you can parse out what consumer opinions are out there from various social media outlets, and draw your own conclusions. And if it’s still uncertain, tack some questions on to your marketing surveys. I’m sure you’ll be able to get the appropriate feedback.
I think an important part of building that authenticity is to establish and share your baseline for what you are trying to achieve. What is ZOS’s mission statement or corporate goal with respect to ESO? Is it to keep the lights on? Grow? Maintain? Further develop the IP? Make more ESO swag? I also think that a part of that is to articulate clearly what your intended experience looks like, e.g. “ESO is a game designed to take a player X months to achieve X, and Y months to achieve Y, or what have you. In other words, what is the intended life cycle for a player in this game?
If you have that baseline understanding that is shared with the community, all communications that come after it contains that context, and then it is easier to build those other things as long as you also include that empathy factor.
On competency: Gina’s note seems to say that sharing “no new news” for features in updates ends up frustrating people. Not sharing it also frustrates people, but it further makes them think that it dropped off the radar entirely. Many companies who share planning timelines with their customers run into this issue. I presume you have a project manager or planner on staff who is watching tasks and resources and balancing them. There are always uncertainties that hit these timelines, many of them are external factors. For example, in his EOY letter, Rich said that you guys had problems getting new server hardware from suppliers. I didn’t even know that you were ordering new hardware. Telling us that you are doing that, putting a timeline on it with a stretch goal, a most likely goal, and a slip goal would have been the way to go for that, with updates. Extend that idea to all of the issues you currently manage – make a list, put the range of dates to completion on it, and just keep that updated with change logs to provide context. And make it easy to find on the website, too. If the landscape changes, and things need to be reprioritized, most reasonable people will accept and appreciate that, even if they are not happy about it. But at least they’d also know that ZOS was not happy about it either.
On transparency: I think this is one of ZOS’s serious failings, and it has to do with how decisions that were made which angered people were given no explanation. Where I see this done relatively well is In combat design changes – developer notes often accompany the changes where it’s known that it will possible be controversial. Other changes that increase time gates, fix exploits, or accessibility to gear and such are given no explanation, provide little to no detail, or are sometimes not even included in the patch notes. These need to have an explanation, otherwise it encourages speculation and conspiracies, which are then shut down for discussion due to forum rules, and that routinely kills ZOS’s authenticity. You will, at times, do something that angers people, don’t explain why, and then disallow any discussion from taking place. That’s not good.
On responsiveness: The recent Lambert stream was a big hiccup, and it did not get a response for some time. It could have used an immediate “Terri’s opinion does not in any way reflect the perspectives of ZOS, we recognize that PVP players have been asking for changes to improve Cyrodiil performance for a long time, and we are continuing to dedicate time and money to close those performance gaps. Also she was just kidding around with the people in chat.” Saying nothing after that makes it look like you all think what she said.
CONCLUSIONS
Wrapping this up, I can provide additional examples of ZOS communications and how I personally felt about them, but I don’t think it will help. I think that if you objectively look inward to determine if you have done a good enough job at developing consumer empathy and applying that empathetic viewpoint in improving your authenticity, you’ll know most of what needs to be done. FWIW, I think in the past year you guys have done a lot better, and have even made some QOL changes that really went a long way to show that you listened to your consumers. If anything, you might have done more to take credit for that by saying “you guys have complained a lot about this and we heard you, and we have done X Y Z to fix it”. So please keep that trend upwards going, and also please acknowledge that if you are all really serious about communications, you still have a ways to go.
FOLLLOW UP
I wanted to include this in the OP, because it touches on a few issues I didn't really cover, one of which is the communication outlet, which is a sticking point for forum users:
I think that stuff like this is an evergreen process, where you keep learning and feeding back into your system so that things improve. At some point, you get to a point where your systems address all of the stuff you intended to address, and then maybe you freeze it and declare victory. Gina and her colleagues are not going to just stop where they are at on the basis of the Twitter feedback that they received, particularly since the conversation is limited to a certain number of characters, but also because they are not yet at the point of declaring victory. They have been staffing more community positions, so they are probably still figuring out how to best manage and utilize those resources, so they are still at the front end of revamping their communications approach. I'm pretty sure you'll get heard.
Also to the folks who think Gina should respond here, give her a chance, it's the weekend and she deserves time off like anyone else. I don't personally want or need a response anyway, but I do hope that she reads it, because I thought about it for a while and I posted it with the full intention of trying to be helpful. FWIW, I linked to this thread on that Twitter thread, and she responded straight away and thanked me for taking the time. But it's weird to me that there is no acknowledgement on the forum itself, which could possibly be a function of policy and roles.
That does go towards how our feedback is collectively managed and addressed, though. The housing forum guys who posted later in this thread clearly feel unheard - a lot of people provide other sorts of feedback that is so common that it's ubiquitous (e.g. overland difficulty, dark convergence set). Players who provide feedback would like to know if they were heard or not - they took personal time to express a preference - it would benefit ZOS to let them know that they were at least heard even if there is no intention of implementing their ideas.
I think there are three "list" types of information that ought to be organized and managed, which would also help with this concept of being heard:
[list]
[*] Roadmap: containing all current initiatives and tasks that are planned or in progress, with timelines for completion that include a date or range of dates.
[*] Bugs: Bugs that were reported, with line item status updates as so : Reported, Investigating, Investigated and not a bug, Investigating and is a bug but not yet slotted to be fixed, Bug is being fixed (moved to roadmap), Bug is fixed.
[*] Suggestions: Player feedback that is recorded, with line item status updates like so: Suggestion heard, Suggestion being evaluated, Suggestion will not be addressed (and why), Suggestion being addressed (moved to roadmap), Suggestion implemented.
[/list]
I think that covers most of what players care about?
The thing about this level of transparency is that it's on us as players to behave maturely when we don't get what we want. I see some people get obsessed over not getting what they want and injecting toxicity into all forum and social interactions in response to denial - that would need to stop, because it teaches ZOS that when they are great about transparency it's still a losing proposition. What helps in mitigating that obsessive behavior is clearly explaining ZOS's decision criteria - it's a lot harder to rail against something if there is a good rationale behind it. I'm sure that ZOS would try to make everyone happy if it were possible, but they can't - they have limitations. Gina pointed out in her Twitter conversation that if the real answer to a player concern is that ZOS is trying to monetize something, you have to make a decision between telling the truth, which sucks (as Gina said), or sounding evasive and therefore inauthentic. I've vote for authenticity every time, but I don't have a problem with the fact that ZOS is a for-profit organization. The fact that all crown purchases are time convenience or cosmetic things is really excellent. I don't have to buy anything apart from new content, which represents an investment and ought to be paid for. Players who want to be handed everything for free can not be reasoned with anyway, it's not a reasonable response, and these people will only get more angry if they are presented with an evasive response, but the reasonable player base will also maddeningly roll their eyes. Better to earn the respect of some of the base rather than none of it.
So, what I'd suggest that ZOS do is say why they can't do the things that are going to make some of these engaged players happy, and hope that those explanations are accepted. It's not our business or role to prioritize ZOS's management of resources, revenue streams, calendars, etc - we need to accept their constraints and trust that they are a given, and also react with a more accepting tone when they have to re-prioritize big fixing or feature implementation instead of complaining about it. If they tell us the truth, we need to accept it. It's not on us to solve or manage their problems. We just need to express them, but we are also deserving of a response when we do. If they did that, and the information was out there, it would result in far fewer complaint/suggestion threads - and this forum would take on a much more positive tone because the lists and roadmap would become the lightning rod to absorb complaints. Maybe we'd even get more original content contributed instead of rehashing the same issues over and over.
I can tell you, the two things ZOS implemented in the past two years that really made me happy as a subscriber were the sticker book, and adjusting the probability of loot tables to be contingent on a player's item collection. If I had known that they were thinking about that, or even acknowledging it as an issue that somehow needed to be addressed, I would not have posted near as much about those issues as I did, if at all.
[edited for name in thread title]
With some of the recent activity on social media and the PVP announcement, I wanted to take some time to more thoroughly answer a question that @ZOS_GinaBruno posed in Twitter:
https://twitter.com/GinaLBruno/status/1475905404316045323
Twitter does not really allow for the textual space required to answer the question, so I wanted to take a crack at it.
Let’s postulate a few things:
[list=1]
[*] It will never be possible for ZOS to make all of their consumers happy at the same time, because sub-populations of them have different if not divergent interests and priorities within the game.
[*] ZOS is running a business, and will have some internal priorities and strategies that will never get shared with the community because of their sensitivity.
[*] ZOS wants to develop a policy for communications and product development that puts their consumers at the center – in other words, run a customer-focused organization that strives to understand their consumers in order to reliably and reasonably meet their requirements.
[*] The consumers’ time and experiences in the game come at the opportunity cost of other fun or important activities, and are therefore inherently valuable to them.
[/list]
Okay, so with that in mind, here’s my personal advice, boiled down to two simple keywords with a whole lot of further explanation:
EMPATHY
Have empathy for your consumers, and communicate with them while keeping that empathy top of mind. A lot of player complaints that come back to ZOS come from a place of frustration, which usually falls into one of the following categories:
[list=1]
[*] Frustration with game performance: e.g. a player was unable to achieve in game goals due to technical performance in Cyrodiil and/or trials. The frustration comes from a sense of the player’s time being wasted because a bug or some technical problem undermines their ability to play, progress, or win.
[*] Frustration with perceived unfairness: e.g. the CP retooling and “loss” of CP value for players who had already achieved a certain level of XP in the game, the perfected Maelstrom weapon decision. In these cases, the player thinks that the value of the time that they already spent in the game is being negated due to a design decision.
[*] Frustration with the accessibility to content of interest: e.g. the recent Battlegrounds queuing design decisions, “power gaps” that exclude players who can not seem to meet in game performance benchmarks necessary to clear content, accusations of P2W due to pricing of crown store/chapter expansions, complaints about apex mount costs and scarcity. In these cases, the player is frustrated that they don’t get stuff they want either because it costs money, or the game is not designed in a way to help improve them to get where they want to be.
[/list]
Empathy is key to understanding how to effectively respond to complaints or problems brought up by players. It’s also hard to respond to all of these things with empathy because sometimes they are just not objectively legitimate complaints, so being able to parse them out is a function of a development approach that contains some baseline assumptions about the player’s role in the game and their intended experience.
As such, an important feature of being able to communicate with empathy is also being able to clearly articulate ZOS’s approach towards the player role in the game. You’d need to start by aggregating the complaints, and then asking why they are possibly so angry about it. Consider factors like: are they paying money? What’s the opportunity cost of that purchase? How much time do they have, and how does that relate to our time-based objectives for players? Are they getting appropriate value for their purchase, given their in-game interests and focus?
Another factor to consider with respect to developing empathy is this: everyone who is issuing formal communications to the player base should be seasoned players of the game. They should inherently know what the player experience feels like, inclusive of all content and on a real and active set of servers. You should be paying your community managers to play the game well enough and for long enough that they have actually experienced what the typical player sees in the game. I’ve seen some of the community folks streaming, and then being surprised or annoyed at some of the issues or design decisions implemented in game, and then they express themselves in real time at how annoying or challenging that is. I’m not saying that they should announce their real identities in game either – they just need to see what it’s like to play as someone coming in and trying to clear content.
AUTHENTICITY
Why is authenticity important? It goes straight to your collective credibility within the player community. Without authenticity, people will cynically dismiss what you say with completely callous disregard, and you don’t want that to happen.
So what does it mean to be authentic? Authenticity derives from the communication characteristics of responsiveness and transparency, as well as the dimensions of trust: competency, integrity, and benevolence. Let’s parse those out:
Is ZOS perceived as a trustworthy company?
[list]
[*] Benevolence: Do ZOS’s consumers think that ZOS cares about them? Will ZOS make decisions that are in the consumer’s best interest?
[*] Competency: Do ZOS’s consumers think that ZOS will reliably perform in a manner that is expected or promised?
[*] Integrity: Do ZOS’s consumers think that ZOS is honest and forthcoming in their communications, such that they will uphold their promises and commitments?
[/list]
How do consumers perceive ZOS’s communications?
[list]
[*] Responsiveness: Does ZOS issue communications in a timely and relevant fashion?
[*] Transparency: Does ZOS share relevant internal information regarding policies and decisions in communications to their consumers?
[/list]
All of these factors lead to how authentic an organization is perceived to be. Note that this is perception – not necessarily reality. But I think you can parse out what consumer opinions are out there from various social media outlets, and draw your own conclusions. And if it’s still uncertain, tack some questions on to your marketing surveys. I’m sure you’ll be able to get the appropriate feedback.
I think an important part of building that authenticity is to establish and share your baseline for what you are trying to achieve. What is ZOS’s mission statement or corporate goal with respect to ESO? Is it to keep the lights on? Grow? Maintain? Further develop the IP? Make more ESO swag? I also think that a part of that is to articulate clearly what your intended experience looks like, e.g. “ESO is a game designed to take a player X months to achieve X, and Y months to achieve Y, or what have you. In other words, what is the intended life cycle for a player in this game?
If you have that baseline understanding that is shared with the community, all communications that come after it contains that context, and then it is easier to build those other things as long as you also include that empathy factor.
On competency: Gina’s note seems to say that sharing “no new news” for features in updates ends up frustrating people. Not sharing it also frustrates people, but it further makes them think that it dropped off the radar entirely. Many companies who share planning timelines with their customers run into this issue. I presume you have a project manager or planner on staff who is watching tasks and resources and balancing them. There are always uncertainties that hit these timelines, many of them are external factors. For example, in his EOY letter, Rich said that you guys had problems getting new server hardware from suppliers. I didn’t even know that you were ordering new hardware. Telling us that you are doing that, putting a timeline on it with a stretch goal, a most likely goal, and a slip goal would have been the way to go for that, with updates. Extend that idea to all of the issues you currently manage – make a list, put the range of dates to completion on it, and just keep that updated with change logs to provide context. And make it easy to find on the website, too. If the landscape changes, and things need to be reprioritized, most reasonable people will accept and appreciate that, even if they are not happy about it. But at least they’d also know that ZOS was not happy about it either.
On transparency: I think this is one of ZOS’s serious failings, and it has to do with how decisions that were made which angered people were given no explanation. Where I see this done relatively well is In combat design changes – developer notes often accompany the changes where it’s known that it will possible be controversial. Other changes that increase time gates, fix exploits, or accessibility to gear and such are given no explanation, provide little to no detail, or are sometimes not even included in the patch notes. These need to have an explanation, otherwise it encourages speculation and conspiracies, which are then shut down for discussion due to forum rules, and that routinely kills ZOS’s authenticity. You will, at times, do something that angers people, don’t explain why, and then disallow any discussion from taking place. That’s not good.
On responsiveness: The recent Lambert stream was a big hiccup, and it did not get a response for some time. It could have used an immediate “Terri’s opinion does not in any way reflect the perspectives of ZOS, we recognize that PVP players have been asking for changes to improve Cyrodiil performance for a long time, and we are continuing to dedicate time and money to close those performance gaps. Also she was just kidding around with the people in chat.” Saying nothing after that makes it look like you all think what she said.
CONCLUSIONS
Wrapping this up, I can provide additional examples of ZOS communications and how I personally felt about them, but I don’t think it will help. I think that if you objectively look inward to determine if you have done a good enough job at developing consumer empathy and applying that empathetic viewpoint in improving your authenticity, you’ll know most of what needs to be done. FWIW, I think in the past year you guys have done a lot better, and have even made some QOL changes that really went a long way to show that you listened to your consumers. If anything, you might have done more to take credit for that by saying “you guys have complained a lot about this and we heard you, and we have done X Y Z to fix it”. So please keep that trend upwards going, and also please acknowledge that if you are all really serious about communications, you still have a ways to go.
FOLLLOW UP
I wanted to include this in the OP, because it touches on a few issues I didn't really cover, one of which is the communication outlet, which is a sticking point for forum users:
- VaranisArano;c-7493850
I feel like I'm sitting here on the forums, adding my two cents long after the conversation is over.
I think that stuff like this is an evergreen process, where you keep learning and feeding back into your system so that things improve. At some point, you get to a point where your systems address all of the stuff you intended to address, and then maybe you freeze it and declare victory. Gina and her colleagues are not going to just stop where they are at on the basis of the Twitter feedback that they received, particularly since the conversation is limited to a certain number of characters, but also because they are not yet at the point of declaring victory. They have been staffing more community positions, so they are probably still figuring out how to best manage and utilize those resources, so they are still at the front end of revamping their communications approach. I'm pretty sure you'll get heard.
Also to the folks who think Gina should respond here, give her a chance, it's the weekend and she deserves time off like anyone else. I don't personally want or need a response anyway, but I do hope that she reads it, because I thought about it for a while and I posted it with the full intention of trying to be helpful. FWIW, I linked to this thread on that Twitter thread, and she responded straight away and thanked me for taking the time. But it's weird to me that there is no acknowledgement on the forum itself, which could possibly be a function of policy and roles.
That does go towards how our feedback is collectively managed and addressed, though. The housing forum guys who posted later in this thread clearly feel unheard - a lot of people provide other sorts of feedback that is so common that it's ubiquitous (e.g. overland difficulty, dark convergence set). Players who provide feedback would like to know if they were heard or not - they took personal time to express a preference - it would benefit ZOS to let them know that they were at least heard even if there is no intention of implementing their ideas.
I think there are three "list" types of information that ought to be organized and managed, which would also help with this concept of being heard:
[list]
[*] Roadmap: containing all current initiatives and tasks that are planned or in progress, with timelines for completion that include a date or range of dates.
[*] Bugs: Bugs that were reported, with line item status updates as so : Reported, Investigating, Investigated and not a bug, Investigating and is a bug but not yet slotted to be fixed, Bug is being fixed (moved to roadmap), Bug is fixed.
[*] Suggestions: Player feedback that is recorded, with line item status updates like so: Suggestion heard, Suggestion being evaluated, Suggestion will not be addressed (and why), Suggestion being addressed (moved to roadmap), Suggestion implemented.
[/list]
I think that covers most of what players care about?
The thing about this level of transparency is that it's on us as players to behave maturely when we don't get what we want. I see some people get obsessed over not getting what they want and injecting toxicity into all forum and social interactions in response to denial - that would need to stop, because it teaches ZOS that when they are great about transparency it's still a losing proposition. What helps in mitigating that obsessive behavior is clearly explaining ZOS's decision criteria - it's a lot harder to rail against something if there is a good rationale behind it. I'm sure that ZOS would try to make everyone happy if it were possible, but they can't - they have limitations. Gina pointed out in her Twitter conversation that if the real answer to a player concern is that ZOS is trying to monetize something, you have to make a decision between telling the truth, which sucks (as Gina said), or sounding evasive and therefore inauthentic. I've vote for authenticity every time, but I don't have a problem with the fact that ZOS is a for-profit organization. The fact that all crown purchases are time convenience or cosmetic things is really excellent. I don't have to buy anything apart from new content, which represents an investment and ought to be paid for. Players who want to be handed everything for free can not be reasoned with anyway, it's not a reasonable response, and these people will only get more angry if they are presented with an evasive response, but the reasonable player base will also maddeningly roll their eyes. Better to earn the respect of some of the base rather than none of it.
So, what I'd suggest that ZOS do is say why they can't do the things that are going to make some of these engaged players happy, and hope that those explanations are accepted. It's not our business or role to prioritize ZOS's management of resources, revenue streams, calendars, etc - we need to accept their constraints and trust that they are a given, and also react with a more accepting tone when they have to re-prioritize big fixing or feature implementation instead of complaining about it. If they tell us the truth, we need to accept it. It's not on us to solve or manage their problems. We just need to express them, but we are also deserving of a response when we do. If they did that, and the information was out there, it would result in far fewer complaint/suggestion threads - and this forum would take on a much more positive tone because the lists and roadmap would become the lightning rod to absorb complaints. Maybe we'd even get more original content contributed instead of rehashing the same issues over and over.
I can tell you, the two things ZOS implemented in the past two years that really made me happy as a subscriber were the sticker book, and adjusting the probability of loot tables to be contingent on a player's item collection. If I had known that they were thinking about that, or even acknowledging it as an issue that somehow needed to be addressed, I would not have posted near as much about those issues as I did, if at all.
[edited for name in thread title]