You don’t really want to mess up your trust with your fans, especially if you’re a developer of an MMORPG. Zenimax Online Studios, the developers behind the Elder Scrolls Online game, recently activated something in an update which they did not intend to activate. You see, there was an ad tracking software in the game, and it is called Redshell. Zenimax experimented with this tool as a means of generating more money in the future with targeted ads, but they accidentally turned this thing on in their latest patch, which was not intended, or at least so they claim.
The main question here is, why didn’t they tell their players about this accident before a player posted about it on the forums? It all sounds very fishy, but ZOS’ Matt Firor responded to this whole situation and said this on the Elder Scrolls Online forums:
Several factors came together in Update 18 and Red Shell was erroneously added to the live build when we were still testing and evaluating it. It has never been active in ESO, even though the base tech is in the client – i.e. it was never enabled. So, we will remove it from Update 18, which will take place in the PC/Mac incremental build scheduled for this coming Monday (it was never considered for Console, so won’t be in Tuesday’s U18 launch). We never should have done this without giving everyone a heads up it was coming, and we will learn from this mistake.
What do you think, is Zenimax being honest with their Elder Scrolls Online player base?
