Hey everyone!I know most people were not able to attend the PAX East event and myself included would love to have known what was said, thanks to @Dominoid and his recording that is possible but not everyone can listen so my partner ( @JasminaChillibeaner) and I have transcribed the audio for you guys to read. There may be a mistake or two in which case we apologise, just point it out and we will correct it! We may have gotten a speaker wrong here and there but often it's hard to understand exactly who is speaking, apologies to you guys if we did! Thanks to @ZOS_GinaBruno for hosting a great Q&A.For formatting, the questions are numbered and the speakers are:Rich Lambert @ZOS_RichLambert Mike Finnigan. @ZOS_Finn Heather Powers.Jared Carr.Jeremy Sera. @Jekerl Lawrence Schick. @Lawrence_Schick Unknown speaker.Question Asker, used for follow-up questions.You don't. Part of that is our console partners don't support that. And so that'd very hard to go through that approval process, it takes a while. We needed to iterate on it as quickly as possible.If we could, we would!Absolutely.The current gear that you have will be converted to Champion Points. So a VR14 piece of gear will changed to CP140 gear. If you are a player that stopped playing before CP were introduced and you are VR14 without the CP required to equip that gear then we will give you the CP required. You will always be able to wear the gear that you have currently which I think is a really important thing.So we want to keep the loot drops that happen in those Trials the same as the level. If it drops at VR12 because the mobs are VR12 then the gear will be around Champion Rank 120 or so. That being said because SO is being upgraded (or scaled) that gear will drop at maximum champion point.In Dark Brotherhood? The overall land mass is bigger than TG as we wanted to really stetch things out and make it feel like there is more space. I think the number of delves/world bosses is the same as Thieves' Guild.It is not as big as Orsinium but it is bigger than Abah's Landing.Part of the reason for that is like in Thieves' Guild there will be missions associated with the DB that take you out of the area of the Gold Coast. So it's not just Gold Coast missions and you will be going all over Tamriel "solving problems".So, it does have its own skill line. A big part of that skill line is the Blade of Woe. A lot of the executions that you saw were using the Blade of Woe.So, I should start saving up my skill points now?Or you can run around and find a bunch more.Without playing a different role? Without killing people?All the people you kill are bad people.The Blade of Woe? It is a tool that gets given to you by the speaker when you first join the guild. Mechanically the way it works is that it's a synergy.There is a bit more lore towards Shadowscales revealed in this upcoming content but I will not spoil it. Tis not about the vanilla Dark Brotherhood (nor the liqorice DB) this is about the basic DB and Shadowscales are a thing unto themselves that we will explore in greater detail another time. So we have not done all the DB stuff yet.Yeah, so, poison making is an extension of alchemy. The way it works mechanically is that if you want to make a potion you use water but if you want to make a poison you use oil. So all the mixing and matching of various combinations are built into the system already. One of the things I'm really excited about is there are definite ways to start to drain resources from other players in PvP which changes the game play up a bit, so it's a really complex system.So, nothing's impossible. Right with the justice system the PvP portion of it specifically there are a lot of edge cases. We have a lot of really creative players who run around in Cyrodiil and when you see what they're doing and how there doing it and y'know we have to be very careful that we don't break what we've got already. PvE portion of the justice system is really popular and everyone loves it and changing that, well, I've heard a lot of suggestions like just let players opt-in well as soon as you do that the less scrupulous players start to play with that and find some loopholes and so we decided that rather than go down that road we'd focus our efforts elsewhere. But nothing's impossible.Umm, I don't know off the top of my head. I know that the snakeblood passive in the Alchemy line actually has an effect on poisons as well so my assumption is that it does but I haven't tested it personally. That's a question I can go back and ask Wrobel.A ***-ton.Using a technical term!So like, my entire bank is food which I would love to clear up because I have one character which I have to hold the maps you get at the beginning of the game and so I have to relog a lot which means I'd love to be able to use my bank for other things. Is there a limit?There is a limit, it's a really really really big number. I think it's something like 42-billion or something like that. It's insane. I am sure someone will figure out a way to fill it completely but it's unrealistic!Yep, it's something that we've talked about publically that we will be doing. Unfortunately I can't tell everyone when but we are working on it right now.So, right now the team is actually building the editor for how it's going to work and we're establishing the permissions system so we're a way off from nailing all those things down so I don't want to commit to what it will be right now because we have to iterate on it.That's a very leading question! Open-ended. I would like to do something with Craglorn but that won't be there for Dark Brotherhood however we are converting the Gold and Silver zones over to Champion Points as well or rather changing the balance in there. You go through the first few levels of CP really quickly and you earn them at a different pace compared to silver progression so we are rebalancing this.So, there are a bunch being made. Wrobel is not here and he is the one that knows the most about it but an example I can give is with the Fighter's Guild we are the FG skill-line more on stamina because the Mages' Guild is more focussed on Magicka. So we're doing things like that.Poisons are equipped in a different slot than in your quick slot.The assassination stuff from the Dark Brotherhood is exclusive to the Blade of Woe.No, I don't think so.Define player interactions?In PvP for example.Assassinations are purely DB, you won't get to kill other players outside of PVP but we are making some changes to the Imperial City, we are putting district capture in so that is going to offer a big change there and incentivize people to go back there. We've added some new things to the Tel Var merchants also.Dying costumes? Maaaaaybe. He's not allowed to confirm or deny that we will allow you to dye costumes.How about "/lurk"?Crowns on Xbox? We are working with Microsoft to fix this issue.It's an Xbox known issue that we are working hard and very closely with Microsoft to take care of as soon as we can.I'm looking at Heather because every time I say something she shoots daggers at me.We can't say anything just yet about Q3 and Q4 but there will be a lot of cool stuff coming and I am really looking forward to engaging the community more than we have in the past and if you are a superfan coming to stuff like this you will know stuff first and early and be able to work with us on it.So, you won't be able to craft CP 500 gear right off the bat. We're going to cap it right now at around 160 which means current level, we wanted to get through this conversion process, make sure it all worked and then go crazy.Yep, I am pretty sure there are additions to the Alchemy skill line.There is actually a new slot right next to your weapon and you equip it right into that slot and then as it processes the poison it takes the stacks.: The way the setup is working is that there is an equip slot for Bar 1 and an equip slot for Bar 2 so you can have different poisons on each bar but it's there and it's equipped which is treated like equipment so you can't swap it over in combat.It's similar to the way weapon enchantments work now that the poison isn't hitting every single time but procs like an enchantment does.Yep, the poisons have charges.Uh, it depends on the quest. In general you do not have to use the Blade of Woe but in a number of quests it is a bonus rather than a requirement.So, we actually think a lot of these decisions are data-driven as well as feedback driven. We get feedback from people saying this is too hard or not too hard and then we got to the data to decide and we take a look to see how many players are accepting the quest how many players are abandoning the quest, how many players are starting but not able to complete and we go through this process. We have target numbers that we wish to hit for these values and so if 0.1% of the population is able to complete a dungeon that took us quite a long time to do that's not the target number want. We want to get more players involved in doing those dungeons and so we look at those kind of factors when deciding how or when to reduce difficulty.Yes.You can't put anything into the bags but you can take stuff out as required.What is my opinion? I think it's really effective and I think that what we intended it to be hit the mark. It might be a little strong but overall it's pretty cool. I do think that we looked at proxy det and how that works or scales and it is really strong on that initial burst even on one player so we are going to look at that but overall it's pretty cool.We have a lot of stam changes coming up including stamina based sets.I don't love scaling down. But you have a really good idea. Scaling the existing content that's a good idea.We're working on it right now. I've seen the design and I know the UI team has a first cut of it so we are close! It's not for Dark Brotherhood though.I really wish Wheeler was here. You can capture each district individually much like you capture resources in Cyrodiil and they provide buffs to you whilst you are in there. They also provide respawn points.JS: So you could have different factions owning different parts of the city.Playable races? No.I think you take inspiration from everywhere. I play MMOs like crazy and other types of games. I love going to Flash game sites and seeing what they do. You have to do that in order to be a good developer.I think when we do stuff for Trials and group content people think we just pull from group related stuff but we don't. We take inspiration from all games, single player and sport games and think "How can we use this to reward the people using our content?" and so we take inspiration from everywhere.But we also listen particularly hard to our own community because they are the ones who are closest to our heart so we do take from everywhere but you guys come first.There are multiple methods for completing the goals in a number of the quests especially when it comes to the repeatables and it is much more up to you how to complete them.No.So there’s no assassination?Well that depends how good you are. I’ve seen some streams and some videos where they get blown up almost instantly. The Blade of Woe is purely for PvE.We work with Concept very closely, in fact with all the art groups that collaborate work with us and we work way out in advance on new crafting styles and new armors. Weird-ass Daedric stuff is very popular so at some point you’re going to see more weird-ass Daedric stuff.We can neither confirm nor deny.I don’t actually know the answer!I think they address that a thousand years in the future, don’t they?As far as borders and things on maps, maps are lore just like everything else in the Elder Scrolls. Maps are to a certain extent represented by how people in the game perceive their areas so borders are a thing of question and not everyone has the same answers, so borders shift. Over time there may be some changes to the displayed maps that you see for gameplay purposes but there are lots of different maps of Tamriel and they don’t all lay over each other perfectly in the same way that our world does not. Imperial City though, that’s all Gerard’s fault.Not in the short-term.Is it being considered?The Daedric Princes and their cults are central to the stories of the Elder Scrolls and will have central stories in the future as we go forward.You should come back at 5 o’clock.I think we’re gonna go with soft jazz. That spells Dark Brotherhood, I think.Our Audio Director over there is working on some new stuff, he’s always thinking up something new every DLC so you’re gonna get some new music.Not just new toots, he’s very very dedicated to making music work like what’s happening in-game, that’s key to his purpose.He actually did an ESO Live where he talked about some of the elements musically that he added to Thieves Guild. It was fascinating because sometimes we take him for granted because he’s doing music all the time but to see some of the stuff that he adds, it’s great.That’s not on our short-term plans, eventually we would like to return to Skyrim because there’s lots of fun stuff we haven’t done there.I would rather fix the performance issues than lower the cap on the number of players in there. We’re addressing those issues right now, we’re kind of attacking it at two angles; we’re attacking it from the latency, or the server performance side, we’ve got a pretty big fix for optimisation going in for how we manage giant lists of data and target sets, to make that a lot more efficient, and then we will talk a bit about the client side and framerate issues.When we talk about performance there is a clear distinction between latency and framerate, framerate is on the client side. The first change that we made to address issues was moving strictly to DX11. We’ve had support from both DX9 and DX11 but neither were optimal because we were supporting both. That’s why we shifted to exclusively supporting the DX11, optimising that code. We do have another bugfix that’s going in on the next live push, which is May 2nd, and that is going to address the framerate issues some people have been having where you hit a low framerate and just stay there. We’re going to get some better performance on the GPU with the DX11 change and now that we’re on DX11 the client graphics engineers feel like they could now take advantage of that and do something additional, off the grid, in the future. Further, we think we can also move some processes off the CPU onto the GPU.The Nightingales are strictly 4th Era. They do not occur in the 2nd Era.We actually have plans for Craglorn as a whole and it’s a ways off so I don’t wanna go into too much detail on that.That would be a spoiler. I don’t think we can go there!Just the PTS on Monday.It’ll be shortly after we announce the launch date for PC.Last time Wheeler and I talked about this there was going to be a no-Champion Point campaign and a Champion-Point campaign. I think we decided on a 49-point campaign but for sure there’s going to be two rule sets.No flying mounts! But otherwise, players love exotic mounts.There will be a new tiger coming with Dark Brotherhood.We need to see how it goes over and what the players like and don’t like about it and we can figure out if we can give more.Yes, we have a plan… but I can’t say. There’s no veteran dungeons coming with Dark Brotherhood (and that’s about up to where we can say) but yes, we are going to add more dungeons for sure. If you’re saying taking the existing dungeons and making veteran versions, we have plans.Yes.There's some changes with Dark Brotherhood. Read the patch notes on Monday.Partly because we made it specifically for the consoles and part of the reason because there's a lready really good options out there for PC.They aren't universal though and people in dungeons rarely talk and I don't like that.You're right they aren't universal but not right now.Hats!?They go on your head!We've added hats.It's another way to customise your character.There will be a system by which you can customise your character. But the system is not done. It is being implemented r ight now. You will be able to do things like wear a hat, other costumes, different skin and that kind of thing. You will be able to recustomise what you look like.We are reducing the power a little but of both normal and veteran ICP/WGT/COA and this goes along with an earlier question of what goes into these decisions and just really we took a look at the data and what people were doing wasn't hitting the numbers we wanted. We want more players to complete this content so we made the decision to reduce the power. Now that being said you guys should definitely play it it's not like we've taken a hatchet and dropped it 25%.It's still hard!Small incremental changes are what we've made and they go better than sweeping 15% reductions.We have done a pass on the traits in the game that aren't used very often like exploration. It was good while you were levelling but after that is was useless. So we've changed that so it also boosts your Champion Point XP as well. So it's a useful trait forever and not just during the levelling process so we've done that with all of the traits that you've told us about.Horse armour!?We have no plans for a horse barber shop at this time.We're not adding a new weapon skill line for Dark Brotherhood. We have some ideas for other skill lines but we'll see where it goes. But you aren't the first person to ask, it's highly requested.Literally everyone in the studio asked me that question when Microsoft made their announcement and the answer I gave them is that it asks more questions that it answers. We need to do our due diligence on there and find out what exactly that means and we need both of our console partners support this idea until we can start entertaining it. We are excited about it though.We've got to make sure that it's right before we get it out and there are a lot of edge cases with it and it has required a lot of testing so most of the improvements have been made and a lot of it is done but there are still a lot of things left to do like blocking.Right, blocking. For Dark Brotherhood we have got a few changes to how animation cancelling works in the PTS build and what we've done for the block stuff is make it under the old system where block still takes priority but all the other animation cancelling things are in there. We've also made it so whenever you block you see the effect on yourself and other players. We don't want to make gameplay feel less responsive and that's why we took it out.We don't want to break anything, so.Yes we've adjusted that, it takes into account Champion Points.I think that question says more about you than it does about your horse!God I would love to.Yep, I agree.I'll say that you're not the first person that has asked for that and brought that feedback. IT is definitely something that we're looking at that we really want to do.I will get in trouble for this but I want to put it in for housing.That I can talk about? I can't talk about it. I love the idea of spellcrafting and jewellery crafting though we have to do it when it makes sense.We don't plan on mass-wiping player skill points again.It wasn't as popular as we'd hoped.