I love this game and both my wife and I preordered and played all beta weekends. But we all know that way too many quests were not working.

I've assumed that this last weekend was (like past weekends) an older build meant primarily for stress testing, and that the many quest problems were related to problems with the phasing code. It doesn't seem likely that this many individual quests would be bugged, it's more likely a single phasing problem affecting many different quests, so I'm hopeful that all of this will be ready in the release candidate.

But this is a pretty big assumption. If it still fails as often in release as it did this last weekend, we will hang in there, but the game will be massively trashed in the media and word of mouth and the launch may damage the game permanently.

It would sure be nice to hear from the devs in the way that Path of Exile developers kept us all informed.

Whatever happens, good luck, and see you all on the other side!

the bug that caused a lot of quests to not work properly seemed to be just that, a single bug. it looks like it happens because of a lot of stress on phases and when a lot of people are trying to complete the quest at once, and I found myself completed most if note all 'bugged' quests late at night when not so many people are on. so hopefully it won't be that hard to fix.

that said we had 4-5 million players these last two betas, maybe more. and I highly doubt even half of those will buy the game. that coupled with the fact that the servers weren't even running at full strength gives me some hope.

either way, its not a big deal, if ones bugged you can come back and do it later, as long as the servers stay open and I can play its a good launch to me.

Except "its beta" is what it is. Also, we were not playing the latest build or client. Heck, the PTS build is one ahead of the stress build, and they are behind the internal builds and client. Don't stress over it, and ignore the DOOM crowd-they have no clue how betas work. This was another stress build, and guess what NOONE is talking about. Server stability was excellent. No login issues, no server crashes, no logging out and back in. Successful STRESS TEST.

TBH, all of the quest bugs i ever saw boiled down to one thing - an NPC did not spawn. That's it.

Well all I can add is that this weekend test had the same build as the PTS does and there really isn't as many broken quests or other issues as there was on the weekend client. So to me thats simply a sign that most of the issues were due to the stress testing ZOS was doing. Meaning with the amount of players and through their tech they were purposely over stressing the sever to see what breaks, how many players they can handle in a certain area and what they need to do to make the experience as smooth as possible.

There were quite a few other bugs that I encountered, but I have faith they'll all be working come launch.

Buying any new game is a pretty big assumption, MMO or not. Every game released today has problems, whether it's bugs or some sort of game mechanic issue. At least we have had the opportunity to test the game and see if overall we enjoy it before spending the money. Most games don't offer that.

Except, that it WAS a Beta build. They got a week before early access, that's when it's just a beta can't be used.

Please explain what "servers weren't even running at full strength" means. Also, I doubt that 4-5 million players were playing this weekend's beta, but I'm pretty sure that 4+ million will be playing on April 4th and when that happens, if this phasing issue isn't fixed, then a lot of people will rage because there's a sub fee.

I somewhat agree with the OP. I think that with 2 weeks left to release, there are certain main gameplay aspects (phasing for main quest lines, horse demounting in Cyrodil) that are broken and need to be fixed for launch. It's one thing to have bugs in the game, but to have main gameplay bugs is unacceptable to be honest. Not with 2 weeks until launch. The last month of beta is supposed to be mostly polish.

I'm going to hope that the staggered release will help keep a chunk of those problems from happening. On a positive, 4-5 quest that were stuck became unstuck when I went back later. Like the Treating the Root quest in which the NPC was stuck at one root for over an hour. I went, watch some TV and came back and she was back to moving around again. Other NPCs that weren't spawning, also started spawning again.

So there is hope things will be smooth, unless a giga-trillion people log in for early access

From my beta experience (although somewhat limited, lvl 10 max) then this launch will be one of the least buggiest in mmo history, sure its really annoying (and highlighting) when the end of a chain quests gets bugged, but as stated above it was the same bug that caused these quests to stop working.

Its likely that this bug will be gone on release, and if not its unlikely it will be as common as the amount of players wont be so massive.

I have a feeling that the launch will not be as bad as everyone seems. When I read the PTS patch notes (http://www.reddit.com/r/elderscrollsonline/comments/1zluwg/0181_patchnotes/) one thing stood out. That was "Numerous fixes for quest issues and blockers". For all we know, this fix may have solved a lot of issues we saw this weekend. Only time will tell.

i think this well be one of the most important bugs to track down and fix before early access and launch.

No, the weekend beta client is different than the PTS client. The weekend beta was v 0.18 and the PTS is v 0.181

There is no sub fee for a month, after that you can start [censored]ing.

The problem with that is, the build we ran, is a later version than those patch notes. The version I showed was .94 That means we had all the .181 fixes, which if you remember back about a month was the version everyone kept saying was rock solid on the PTS server when the Beta version was .71.

I think it's a little frustrating to have 4-5 quest come to a halt (some being main quest) and folks kept saying "It's an old build! PTS doesn't have this problem!" PTS obviously doesn't have the stress load either. I'm not calling for lynch mobs and pitchforks, just like others shouldn't be so quick to dismiss the many bugs encountered.

The latest patch to the weekend client has the things from the 0.181 PTS patch. Why they didn't label the Weekend client as 0.181 I don't know but comparing the two notes does indicate that the weekend test did in fact have the most recent changes.

I played 19 out of 25 quests in the AD and only one (the frog racing) wouldn't finish. Couldn't get the frog to start jumping. No one could.

Realities of software development. Internal builds will be made in debug mode, which makes them unsuitable for both the private and public beta servers. We simply have no way of knowing the state of the game from the betas we've had access to. While I agree that we can only judge what we've seen, people should have gone into these betas with the understanding that they are just that, beta.

I do not blame ZoS for the same bugs which were still present this Beta from the last 2, nor the fact there were 3 more bugs i found and reported right after each other made progress come to a halt. I relogged so many damn times i just gave up and went to pvp. I blame mostly the PTS people as they are the ones who were suppose to be getting things fixed, but about 98% of the posts i seen from them they are talking about endgame and pvp.

That definitely would have tripped me up.

On a positive note then, after this weekend, they should have all the data they need to patch it up before release.

Are we sure about this?

I'm pretty sure there was an official post on the beta forums about this not being the latest build, combined with plenty of PTS testers saying the same thing.

This. And should be very easy to fix.

Dunno what all the complaining about I didn't notice many bugged quests.