I am writing this post with the hopes of bringing to light a most important issue that absolutely plagues not just ESO but almost every single game we love.
Do you find yourself feeling like most of the games you play are filled with bugs and give you the general overall feeling that you are playing a beta and not a fully fleshed out, polished, or a ready for retail product? I can probably safely assume that most of your answers to that question are YES and I hope to enlighten you as to why this is happening and where to place the true blame on the source of this plague.
Most of us are quick to blame the developers of the game because it is after all their product and therefore they are the ones responsible for the state of the game once it is sold to or given to us as a retail product. This is technically true but there is a key factor that most gamers either forget or it never even crossed their minds that there is someone else involved with the products development who is the true reason and the most important entity involved in a games release to which the blame should directed towards far more accurately than the actual games developers.
This entity that we tend to forget is the financial firm that bankrolled the development of the game. Before a game ever enters development it is just an idea. An idea that will take incredible amounts of time and more importantly MONEY to ever become more than just an idea. The developer takes this idea (The Elder Scrolls Online) and presents this idea to a firm of investors to which they must sell this idea to them and hope that they will see the potential of this idea to make money. No investor is going to bankroll a game that they think will not make them a profit. This is the most important step a developer must go through if they ever hope to even have a chance of creating their game. The sad part about this is that they are for lack of better words; Selling their soul to the devil. I say this because it is a necessary evil in which the developer must absolutely do unless they are by some incredible way able to financially support the development of their game through their own funding or through donated funding such as a kickstart, but regardless it comes down to money, period!
I say this is a necessary evil because it involves an entity in the development process who's concern is nothing other than money. They do not care if the product has bugs, missing content, or half baked content. As long as the product can make them money then they could care less about the things that annoy the user, in this case is you and I. I truly believe that no serious developer would ever release a half baked product with their name attached to it unless they had no other option. They so desperately want their idea to become reality they will do almost anything they can to help their game reach the player. This so very often is the absolute reason that we are subjected to games that if those games were a meal that we went to a restaurant to enjoy a nice quality meal that we would be able to send back to the chef and justifiably complain that your meal was not cooked properly, to which you would most likely not only get the situation fixed immediately but more than likely receive a discount if not a complete refund for the hassle. Investment bankers in the video game industry know that it is not so easy to turn around and say hey, my game to which you charged me $60 for (just a hypothetical number to which can be applied to any game and any amount you paid) is completely under par, missing content, has content that is broken, basic no brainer content is left up to add-on creators to add UI functionality that should have absolutely been included in the game by default.
From the developers point of view they are stuck between losing their funding or upsetting their clients to some extent. The developer realizes that with no funding they cannot even give you a half baked product let alone desperately try and play catch up and fix or add said content. At some point during the development phase the money grubbing investor gets tired of waiting on a return for their investment and they force the hand of the developer to release the product as is or risk losing everything and being written off as a loss. The developer then has a serious choice to make, release the product with bugs and missing content to which they can hopefully fix at a later date or end up not being able to release anything because the bankers pulled the plug. You may be thinking if I were in their shoes I would tell the bankers to kiss me where the sun doesn't shine but there is a serious problem if they were to do this. When they sold their idea to the investment firm they had to make a contract with them and in this contract are the ownership rights to the games coding. No investment firm is going to invest their money into a product to which if the developer decides after a point in time that they no longer wish to work with them could simply turn around and get a different investment firm to back them. At this point the developer does not truly own their product, the bank does. They cannot just pick up and move to a different bank without permission and hefty fees from the investor if they are even granted permission. They would literally need to buy their own game back from the bank which lets be honest if they could afford to do that then they wouldn't have needed an investment banker in the first place.
The banker looks at $$$ only. They say to themselves ok this product has taken X amount of years to develop. We have invested X amount of dollars so far. Even though this product is not 100%, hell it may not even be 75% if we can sell X amount of copies we will break even and if we sell X amount of copies then we turn a profit and as long as we break even then we don't care if the customer is 100% satisfied because we got our money back and usually even turned a profit. They hold a mighty power over the developer and they force them to release products that you and I wouldn't dare pay for if it were a car, a house, food, or any other type of product.
You can be quite sure that a game who was once a subscription based game and turned F2P has absolutely reached that marker to which the investment banker has reached their quota. The can then afford to drop the subscription requirement and reach a whole new target audience with the hopes that they will see more profit from customers who weren't willing to pay a monthly fee but might be more inclined to spends a few dollars here and there via in game purchases for real money aka the Tamriel Unlimited Crown Store. Everything they sell in that store or in any game that offers in game purchases for real money is pure profit because they are selling a virtual product. The only cost to them is the manpower it takes to create the product, a product that requires no actual resources to create. They don't require steel to make a digital vehicle, they don't have to buy housing and feed to create a digital horse, etc...hopefully I made my point clear with that analogy. In the grand scheme of things micro transactions (in game purchases for real money) actually have the potential of earning them even more profit than a monthly subscription because most people are more inclined to make micro transaction purchases. They used the subscription to guarantee a certain revenue stream quota and once they reached that quota they no longer needed that guaranteed revenue to support their investment.
The point I am trying to make with this long post is absolutely not saying that ZeniMax is doing anything wrong, it is to point out the fact that the true reason this game or any game like it has the feeling of an unfinished product is because it is an unfinished product and it is that way because the bankers have forced the hand of ESO developers to release the product before it was truly ready to be released. This is why the developers are constantly playing catch up, trying to get the game up to par with what a true 100% polished retail game should be.
As a gamer community the only choices we have are to understand that this is an unfortunate reality when it comes to our hobby and we can try to understand this sad reality and simply support the developers of our game by continuing to pay our fees and make purchases with the hopes that they will finally be able to be closer to 100% as quickly as possible. Another option we have as gamers is to write into our favorite gamer magazines and try to get them to write articles on this plague to our hobby and bring it to light to more of our brothers and sisters with the hopes that somehow it will change the way bankers behave when financing video game production. We can write to our congressman/women and try to bring to light the fact that our hobby is being abused by bankers and they are releasing sub par products to which any other industry would be crushed if they had these kind of business practices. No other product that I can think of is abused as much as video games. We are constantly subjected to broken products and expected to just "understand" or trying to convince us that this is just the way it is so accept it. It is wrong and we do not deserve to be abused in this fashion. They know that we love our hobby so much that we will pay for that game anyway so they abuse us because they know we will buy it anyway.
Try to remember all the things I talked about in this post and try to remember that it is not always the developers fault and is more justifiably the fault of the financial investors as to why we are constantly sold fools gold. I love this game and I love many other games that have been subjected to this plague but we cannot hope to ever see things change if we don't stand up together and let the developers know that we are aware of this and they need to let their investors know we are aware of this and are getting tired of it. Hopefully if we make our protest loud enough and protest to the right people then maybe congress can write laws to protect us from receiving half ass products because the investors are forcing our developers hand to release games that are not ready to be released.
I hope this post was informative and I hope it will do more than just be buried in the pile. Please write to your favorite magazines, write to your state senator, tell your friends to do the same, lets make our voice heard and do something positive for our favorite hobby.