Suffice to say Bethesda the once respected company has become nothing more than a joke. If not for the abhorrent ways they treat those who stick around it would be a tragic comedy to rival the ancient classics. Featuring incompetence that would feel at home in a Leslie Nielsen flick, greed that would rival dragons, with a dash of “lolwut?” from the Scary Movie saga, and topping it off with a woke agenda of modern films.

However the company arrived into this state, it is becoming increasingly clear how vastly incompetent their upper management is. For now the company cannot even manage to promote Skyrim correctly!

Originally their free weekend was scheduled to start and conclude on Thursday, before Bethesda attempted to fix the issue. Adjusting the end date to the proper conclusion of Monday appears to have not resolved the issue as there is no free weekend for Skyrim Special Edition on the Steam Storefront as of this writing.

A rather embarrassing gaff on the part of the company to fail to even get the start data and time of the free weekend working right.

Where that slight oversight is embarrassing, Zenimax Online has had a worse time with their Undaunted Event. Originally designed to run the entire weekend sending players into randomly created dungeons for a chance to win a “mystery box” aka loot box that contained “useful items and collectibles, including style pages, costumes, pets, mounts, and (in some rare cases) homes.”

That was until a critical issue with the activity finder caused it to overload the data base causing load issues.

Please read the latest update on the Undaunted Event.https://t.co/ZyZBbV9F7L pic.twitter.com/fNEPa4jaeb

— The Elder Scrolls Online (@TESOnline) November 15, 2019

As a result until the foreseeable future the event has been postponed pending a resolution to the issue.

Though the developer’s claim that it was tested one has to ask how such an issue could have been overlooked? Even though I’m not tech proficient even I can reasonably deduce the issue could have been deduced through the extrapolation of figures combined with some simple multiplication. If each instance generates X load then multiply Y (number of load instances) to determine what the projected load will be under any given parameter. Y being determined by reasonable projections based on player activity and typical active count to determine a high range and a low range for the figure.

Some will roll their eyes and say it isn’t that simple, but by Zenimax Online’s own account they knew it was an issue. They allude to as much when they said “While we did put protections in place prior to the event to ensure stability, these clearly weren’t adequate.”

Certainly some developers are contemptible, especially as the company diversity hires over merit, hiring to profit off of Work Opportunity Tax Credits that in Maryland go up to $9,600 per person. Yet to lay the blame for this solely at their feet is erroneous. If they had countermeasures in place pre-event they knew about and likely warned upper management who made the decision to go live anyway.

A lot of the tragic comedic issues coming out of Bethesda these last few years all have one thing in common. They appear to have a top down origination. Until management is fixed gamers will likely to endure or laugh at increasingly poor decisions from the company.