Oghier
3483
Multilingual CS reps, and possibly tax advantages.
Reemul
3484
Yeah Ireland is nice juicy tax haven. Rates are super low, people like Amazon,Google, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft all do accounts out of their or did. Apparently it has a business tax rate of just 12.5% for starters.
KevinC
3485
Oh FFS, I sure hope the support reps had advance notice, but I doubt it. That’s awful, and really makes me want to avoid giving Zenimax another penny.
I know that might sound irrational, but I used to work for a smaller, privately owned software developer that got gobbled up by a multi-billion dollar multinational, and I’m just thoroughly disgusted with the way the corporate world treats ‘headcount’. Thankfully after 8 years I’m out of that world and back with a smaller developer (a company made up largely of refugees from the previous corporate overlord, at that).
Blargh. Sorry for the rant. Merry fucking Christmas, Zenimax!
Oghier
3486
My return lasted three days. I bounced off it hard.
It’s a terrific game, especially if you’re a casual player. I’m not, though. I’m a min-maxer in MMO’s. I looked at what it would take to get back into the top-tier, or nearly so, gear-wise, and I quailed at the time investment. That’s not a problem with the game. I think I’m just done with themepark MMO endgames, at least until I retire someday.
But maybe I’ll feel different tomorrow :)
I may not have the correct info but from what I have heard the “layoffs” were the expiration of a 6 month employment contract that ramped up customer support for the console launch. From the brief glimpses I’ve had of the outsource world this is quite a common practice and many of the 300 will probably be moved to other contracts by what is presumably an outsource customer support agency. Hopefully this is the case.
Top tier pvp gear is not that hard to reach. You can be competitive with purple gear/enchants. That’s mostly what I have since I’m always messing around with builds and gear combo’s. One important thing though is to make sure that you upgrade your weapons to gold “legendary” level. That makes a huge difference in spell or weapon power which in turn makes a big difference in damage. I was amazed actually in how much better a gold versus a purple weapon is especially when dual wielding swords.
KevinC
3488
I sure hope that’s the case, Vic!
Good to see that the game is still the unstable mess I left after month 2.
Played again for the first time now, and after 18 minutes of waiting got into a random dungeon. 15 minutes into it I lose all sound and about 19 minutes into it the game crashes. :)
32-bit ftw.
Oghier
3490
The 64-bit client arrives next year with the Thieves Guild DLC. I think it’s Q1.
It wasn’t 300 employees being terminated, nor was it this December: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-12-18-elder-scrolls-online-irish-customer-service-office-closed-and-300-jobs-lost-report
PDATE 21ST DECEMBER:*Bethesda PR has refuted the report by local news source Connacht Tribune. Bethesda said only approximately 50 jobs had been cut at the customer service centre as part of routine manoeuvring mid-August after the console Elder Scrolls Online launch.
“Following the successful console launch of The Elder Scrolls Online: Tamriel Unlimited in June, we have a thriving console and PC online community. We adjusted customer support levels in mid-August by reducing staffing by approximately 50 people to reflect the game’s stability and the needs of our players,” Bethesda PR said in a statement sent to Eurogamer. “This is a normal practice. We have been diligently working with the IDA, and the employees affected by this decision since the summer. We are disappointed by the inaccuracies in the report of the Connacht Tribune.”
Wendelius
Decided to see if PVP had improved.
Joined a game and found a nice group quickly enough.
We captured a keep, I attack enemies and npc guards but get no visual feedback that I am doing damage to them, but I see that I at least get some PVP points.
We move to the next area, my horse is the slowest there is but luckily people are buffing the speed so I can keep up for a while.
We capture another keep, I die and I respawn at another keep – except I have to wait for 2 MINUTES on a loading screen.
Fast forward to us capturing a Scroll.
We capture it, and some of us die while the other manage to escape with it.
I select to respawn AHEAD of the Scroll team to group up with them, except I have to wait for ANOTHER 2 MINUTES on the fucking loading screen.
So I decide to use the “teleporter” again and move even further ahead… and I have to wait for EVEN LONGER…
Eventually, the scroll team make it to the capture point, ask if everyone have the quest – I have the quest –
Except that I am too far away – or something else broken – so I did not get capture completion for the quest.
Guess I’m uninstalling this shit again.
I’m assuming you are on PC. If not then ignore this.
Long loading screens in general popped up after the IC update in August. My loading screen with a SSD went from 20 secs to over a minute. There was alot of complaining about this by many players. This was recently fixed though for me with one of the most recent updates.
But if it is just your Cyrodiil loading screen then that is a different issue most likely. I had this a while on my old computer last year where I would get disconnected and the when trying to log back in the cyrodiil loading screen would hang. I was running windows 7. I don’t know if it is just correlation and not causation but since my old comp died (hard drive crash) my new pc with windows 8 mysteriously solved this problem. I have heard of lots of people having this problem since I was searching high and low for a fix. It was intermittent though. Some nights no problem. Others it was awful. Just FYI.
Other than the long loading time issue mentioned by Vic (now fixed), my ESO experience has been completely smooth. No technical issues whatsoever. This is with an older system earlier this year (Core2Duo/ATI 5850/Win7) and then later (i5 4690/290/Win10) I know that doesn’t help, but thought I’d point out that it’s not a universal issue.
Group finder does take a godawful long time though, especially if you’re playing off peak.
/shrug. I’ve never had a crash, or a long loading time…weird.
Being a little thick I just discovered this and everybody probably already knows it but you can do the “daily” quest in Wrothgar multiple times if you just hang out in zone chat and join up with a group looking for players to take on the different world bosses. If you group up and they share the quest with you and then you help kill the world boss you get credit for the quest and can go turn it in and get the mystery box. This looks like the only way to chase some of those rare item set pieces…this plus the daily delve quest.
I do hope the item sets are better for the Thieves Guild DLC. The Wrothgar item sets are really lack luster (especially for magicka builds) and the IC sets are locked behind a fickle rng joker. I just want to mostly PvP and running those four man dungeons 50+ times does not appeal to me. They have said they are going to let you buy monster helms/shoulders with AP so I am hoarding that right now.
As an aside, the one other thing that I really enjoy in this game is stealing stuff. You can make 15k gold a day just doing the rounds of strong boxes and pick pocketing. I recently discovered that guards have a good chance to yield blue loot. I should be all set when the Thieves guild drops with my legerdemain maxed out to 20. Hope they add some active skills to the line or start a new one.
stusser
3498
From what I hear the problem with the new group finder is it downlevels people in veteran levels to meet the lowest (real) level character in the group, so you end up with hugely variant power and skill levels that often can’t complete the content. As ESO is actually very popular now and has the population to support it, I expect them to adjust that dial and fix it soon enough.
Actually the opposite. And when you make a group manually, the dungeon gets scaled to the party leader. So you can see how scaling works. And the manual, via party leader not using tool, works ok.
It takes people of any level and everyone is scaled up to VR15 (max-1) and the mobs are set to VR16. Which works fine if you are in vet ranks, or perhaps an alt with lots of Champion points (post max level AA type points that carry over to alts), or even a near vet level with great gear. But the group gets one or two L12-25 players with blue or worse gear as that’s what drops, no AA points, may not have passives or even have unlocked enough skills to fill both bars, heck may not even have the second weapon bar yet being pre-15 and that is utter fail. The worst is when you use the tool and you are all under L30, you STILL get scaled to VR15 and the tank can’t tank, dps takes 5 minutes on a trash pack and healers can only throw their hands up assuming they live long enough to. Basically the whole group has to kite to kill and it takes a long time. Personally I think yakkity sax music should be added. But if you don’t use the tool, you can’t connect with the other three factions to make groups.
The lowbies avoid it. The non-lowbies are are afraid we won’t and avoid it. The fastest fix is probably to actually do the downlevel to lowest, as that works GREAT when done manually.
Took 18 minutes to find a group using the finder tool the other day, was two VR16 players, me at 45 and the last I dont remember. We made good progress. Then sound disappeared, and the game ‘crashed’ so hard I had to reboot the computer as the process “hung” and I am told I didn’t have permissions to manually kill it. Good times.
Seems like all the problems we had at launch are still there. I suppose the 64-bit exe they are introducing next year might fix it. As it is the game is barely playable.
Razgon
3501
Not “we” - “you”. The game is incredibly stable right now, and I haven’t had a single crash in ages, as you can see upthread, is the case for others as well.
While crashing sucks, hyperbole never helps anyone, and you’d be better off trying to figure out what went wrong, instead of saying that “the problems we had at launch are still there”, which is clearly not true.
“We” as in those who experience the same problems (That were also there at launch).
(Or as "players of the game = “the we”. Some of us had problems, others did not.)
Try searching for the problem “scenario” and you will come across several other posts on the Bethesda forums with the same problems, many of them dated 2014.
Don’t be an idiot, of course I am troubleshooting it.
