ZOS Focuses way too much on the feedback of elite "celebrity" gamers while they roundly ignore player consensus and feedback on the forums as a matter of course. It's a problem.
Original Post Below:
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Apparently, right now, a select elite of ESO youtubers like Sypher and Deltia, etc are meeting in person with Zenimax after being invited to the headquarters.
While these youtubers provide a service with their content, they hardly represent the ESO player base neither formally nor informally. They most often represent each other. They represent a micro-industry that operates along side ESO. If anything in-game, they represent a small minority of elite guilds that don't experience ESO like the rest of us and are not good representatives.
Please allow me to explain and provide examples.
PvP: I'm not suggesting any of the specific youtubers or "celebrity players" cheat (although some do and have been banned for it), but they also don't experience playing against cheating, or even against OP players, in the same way. Members of this class of ESO players avoid combat with each other. Many of the known cheaters in this game belong to the same guilds as these elite celebrity ESO players. That doesn't mean the celebrity youtubers are cheating, but it usually means the cheaters don't fight against them. This results in this group having an unrealistically casual viewpoint on cheating as something more benign than it is.
Exploits/Secrets: And exploiting game glitches is the cousin of cheating. Things that aren't working as intended, but are unlikely to get you banned, are passed around as open-secrets within the group and become staples of builds, but are not shared publicly because they don't want them fixed.
Here are two examples of fixed exploits that people weren't getting banned for, that I think I can provide since they no longer work.
1) You could double enchant Flanking Set jewelry with a total of 6 jewelry glyphs instead of 3.
2) You could glitch out Hist Bark set to give a dodge bonus even after you took the set off.
So while you were making the hard choices about how to enchant your jewelry, some players were not. When you were spending 3000 stamina to cast Shuffle, or wearing 5 pieces of Hist Bark, others were dodging with neither.
I'm not accusing anyone of doing these things, but I know the people who did do these things are embedded within that small community. So, at it's most benign, this colors the feedback and impressions of the players in that community which are passed on to Zos as apparently about the only feedback they are actually interested in.
Powercreep: Even if none of the youtube celebrity player cheat, or exploit, or take advantage of tricks....the higher ceiling of performance that is enjoyed on average in these communities is exacerbating the power creep problem in this game. Members of this sector of the community are always the first to say, "This game offers me no challenge. VMA is too easy. This is too easy. That is too easy".
Balancing: Their opinion of balance rarely reflects the community because they rarely face players utilizing abilities to their maximum effectiveness due to the fact that players within this class avoid fighting each other. This is the only game I've ever played where friends cannot play against each other. I've had several of the people I consider members of this niche group actually tell me point blank, "Friends don't kill each other in PvP. I'll give you a pass and you give me a pass. Stop fighting against me or I'm taking you off friends list".
Instead of two great players with great builds fighting each other and learning that certain abilities are indeed out of balance, they pass by each other, high-fiving one another as they farm the pugs from each others alliances and convince themselves that the game is perfectly balanced but THEY are individually "Gods of PvP".
These players don't have experiences in the game that would allow them to adequately represent the larger player base.
The resources were used to have this elite youtube gathering session at Zenimax would have been better spent reading the forums, selecting a few issues with broad community consensus, and then having an internal meeting on how to best address those concerns. But that's too much to hope for.
Yes, I'm painting with a broad brush. There are exceptions to every rule and I'm not trying to disparage anyone specifically. I don't blame anyone for accepting the invitation. This is a rebuke of how Zos operates.
I subscribe to Deltia's channel, I like his content, and his personality. But I don't like him as a representative of ESO players.
If you like their videos, that's fine. If you run their builds, that's great. If you think I'm full of crap, that's okay. And Zos can invite whoever they want on a sleepover.
But, if you've ever wondered why this game is balanced around the top 1% of players and the roleplayers being bought off with mount reskins with everyone in the middle ignored, THIS IS WHY.
[Edit to remove mention of moderator actions and political references]
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