Medium: PC, PS4, PS5, XBox One, XBox Series X|S
For: ZeniMax Online Studios
Title: Senior Systems Designer
Tools: Proprietary
Team Lead & Manager:
My primary responsibility is leading a team of designers to come up with ways to deliver systemic content. This encompasses rewards and itemization, achievements, and various game-specific systems like crafting, treasure maps, and antiquities. We routinely interface with content design teams to make sure said content is appropriately supported.
I set standards for documentation, making sure every update has thoroughly documented what is in a given update. I also share responsibility with our scrum master to make sure all tasks are appropriately tracked and accounted for. All of this is in addition to other design responsibilities that may crop up and need an additional designer such as new designs or emergent implementation.
I am also a manager. I have seven designers reporting to me, and am responsible for their career growth. I write yearly performance reviews and make sure to regularly solicit feedback from their co-workers. I meet with everyone in one-on-ones and make sure they’re continually receiving the feedback so they can grow.
Event Design:
I was the systems designer assigned to itemizing and rewarding a new in-game event called “Zeal of Zenithar”. The primary focus of this event was to focus on crafters and crafting, but making sure everyone could participate.
By focusing on doubled crafting experience, increased resource node spawning, doubling experience gained from endgame crafting quests (“Master Writs”), and lightly looping in other gameplay systems; this new event turned into one of ESO’s most successful days since the game launched. The first 24 hours registered as one of the top five in concurrent users. The duration of the event saw online population surge, and the players saw the event as one of the best the game had ever done.
Community was so pleased with the event they released the following infographic:
Another event that I improved overall was the Undaunted Celebration. This particular event encourages players to go into dungeons (generally group content) for event rewards, but otherwise did nothing to further incentivize going into the easiest dungeon. I proposed to stakeholders to add dungeon-specific item rewards upon players completing that dungeon, the idea being to encourage players to have reasons to not simply run the easiest dungeon. Upon implementation and shipping, this change was received well by players.
Official Post outlining the change.
Implementation:
One of the first assignments I had was to be an implementer. This meant working in our proprietary tools and building in game things like rewards (items and loot tables), achievements (in game and console), and various content-related systems (treasure chests, survey reports, antiquities, justice, etc.). It also meant writing up accompanying documentation to be reviewed and signed off on by stakeholders.