What keeps you playing ESO?

Grianasteri

The lack of viable alternatives

A combination of there being a severe lack of viable alternatives a the same scale, to immerse myself in... and the truly magnificent game world/lore that ESO has created (I can still just spend hours pottering about doing not much of anything, and still enjoy myself).

I must say, it has become increasingly difficult to justify ESO+ and more importantly my time and effort to the same extent I have in the past, since my time is short and I have other competing priorities... what compounds this massively is the seemingly never ending series of updates and game breaking changes that force me to regrind/farm again and again. Its extremely poor practice and is causing burn out in a lot of people, myself included.

The answer is a period of settled stability, stop adjusting things just to try something different, stop completely tearing up existing systems and introducing new ones on the back of already significant and ongoing changes, its just too much.

Inaya

Other

Because I'm having fun. Great variety of things to do. Beatiful game world. Being able to enjoy the journey and play at my own pace instead of rushing to end game. Crafting, housing, achievements, exploring, thieving, farming, trading...I'm having fun!

TheCaptainJosh

Combat, PvP or PvE

ESO has a great combat system (or at least it was at some point). This, as well as being a part of the Elder Scrolls universe, is the reason why I keep coming back. Getting harder and harder to come back though

Tommy_The_Gun

Other

Idk. I really don't But I keep booting the game, do some crafting dailies and then I turn the game off.

ectoplasmicninja

The game world

I've been playing for almost four years now, and have done basically every quest in the game, discovered all the places, found found the skyshards, etc. The Elder Scrolls universe is my favourite fictional universe in existence, and that's primarily what keeps me here - being able to spend my free time in such a huge chunk of Tamriel.

My job is difficult and stressful and at the end of the day and week I truly just don't have the energy to do something challenging as a hobby, so the ease of the majority of the content means I can relax and just unwind jogging through the hills and grasslands and forests and swamps, taking in the environments and the ambient sounds, harvesting everything I see and occasionally helping out my fellow travellers. ESO is familiar and predictable for the most part, with a sprinkling of "huh, I've never seen this before", and I don't mean that as an insult at all - it's what makes it the perfect game to come home to.

BlackSparrow

The game world

Miragent wrote: »

BlackSparrow wrote: »

The breadth of things to do, in particular, is great. I can spend one evening helping save Thedas from whichever evil entity is trying to destroy it this time, and then I can spend the next evening making a maze in one of my houses, and then I can spend the next evening just relaxing while fishing. Most MMOs these days have at least some of that--and some MMOs have more--but there's just something immersive about the Elder Scrolls setting that makes it easy to wander off into the wilderness and still find fun things to do.

You could have a better shot at saving Thedas if you played Dragon Age series games

Sssssh, noticed that after a good night's sleep. XD

Daemons_Bane

Other

My guildies

illusiouk

Nothing... I just lurk on the forums these days.

I quit after this latest patch, I reserve my grinding to a new fresh game, to whatever and whenever that may be.

Lugaldu

The game world

I have been playing for almost 13 years nothing else than Elder Scrolls. Is that an obsession? Maybe.

xaraan

Friends

Mostly having friends that I play this game with has kept me around when I may have otherwise left.

But beyond that is really (and this is more as a group decision amongst friends - two different sets of them, one that does trials/pve more and one group that does pvp more both have the same thoughts) is that there isn't really another game that measures up. ESO has really benefited from the lack of depth and quality in the MMO genre IMO.

And the other thing that I think has kept this game going strong past being the best in a weak field is being Elder Scrolls. Without those two things I don't think the game would have done as well. So I'd rank game world here. I'd also say that the art/design team is the strongest thing in the game and always does a good job.

Last would be combat. Mainly because I do like the playstyle of ESO vs some other MMOs I've tried. Not because the game is well balanced or even well thought out in other ways. The fact it took them a year+ to balance racials finally and make changes we all knew were needed day one is sad, and still haven't fixed some other issues with weaker races. The fact that the CP changes were rolled out when they feel half polished is annoying. The armor changes that certainly rebalance things, but not necessarily in the right ways. And the fact they had to disable 95% of the sets in PvP to appease some people in proc balance (instead of balancing the actual sets) is also very unimpressive.

The things that challenge what keep me here:

The constantly having to rebuild my character every year (or even multiple times a year depending on the patch) and relearn how to play.

Feeling lied to from ZoS on things. Like rolling out active pvp tests in cyrodiil and telling us we don't need to worry about them - they are just tests for gathering info. And then deciding the latest "Test" will be semi-permanent. (So that was a lie)

Constantly feeling like I'm being punished for playing the game a long time by constantly having my XP hampered or drops changes and being told to rerun stuff I've run a thousand times already. (Going from 810 active CP to more than double that in the latest update and feeling weaker, not just in combat, but in Quality of Life abilities like harvesting adds to that).

And watching the crown store become a bigger money grab every year. As crown crates got added, then had motifs added to them, then b/c of uproar changed them to style pages and no one noticed lol. And have more crap added to crates to make the drop chances even worse because of a bigger pool of crap items. Watching housing become something only for whales to enjoy to the fullest extent. The prices are ridiculous for most houses and more unique furniture behind crates as well. Watching them add things you can only get in the crown store like inventory space crosses the p2w line IMO as well.

And the poor dungeon/trial designs have let me down the last couple years. Not that they are the worst or anything, but the balance is all over the place. Even the design - some dungeons you have to do a special thing for HM, some you have to read a scroll, some you have to activate a banner, some you have to activate a banner on each boss, etc. They should all be consistent. Same with power level, some are really hard, some are really easy. The trials seem like they are designed and then the power just cranked up due to feedback of top end guilds, which ends up with just stupid high health bosses and one shots galore. The final vKAhm fight comes to mind. This is mind-numblingly boring in HM and also frustrating b/c of the one shots that have to be dodged every few seconds and one miss means the whole hour long fight starts over. (Because it already hard enough to find tanks for trials, why not make the job even more miserable.)

And lastly, watching me get what seems like less for my money every year as chapters go up in price and content goes down. It's in small ways, but it's noticeable if you look.

Vlad9425

Other

Honestly at this point it’s just addiction... I don’t even enjoy the game anymore.

Lisa

Other

At this point it's become a habit. Other games have come and gone, but I always end up back in ESO. My sister has finally joined me as well, so that's a nice change of pace.

Animus-ESO

Combat, PvP or PvE

Eso has the best pvp out of any mmo right now. New world might be a competitor maybe ashes but it looks they are ditching the resource management system for a GW2 style combat which will just end up getting CCed to death every fight.

Elvenheart

The lack of viable alternatives

Miragent wrote: »

BlackSparrow wrote: »

The breadth of things to do, in particular, is great. I can spend one evening helping save Thedas from whichever evil entity is trying to destroy it this time, and then I can spend the next evening making a maze in one of my houses, and then I can spend the next evening just relaxing while fishing. Most MMOs these days have at least some of that--and some MMOs have more--but there's just something immersive about the Elder Scrolls setting that makes it easy to wander off into the wilderness and still find fun things to do.

You could have a better shot at saving Thedas if you played Dragon Age series games

I was wondering who Thedas was and why I hadn’t yet gotten the quests to save him/her. Now I understand 😊

Lysette

The game world

Thrusts-His-Spear wrote: »

Eso has the best pvp out of any mmo right now. New world might be a competitor maybe ashes but it looks they are ditching the resource management system for a GW2 style combat which will just end up getting CCed to death every fight.

The combat system is really bad compared to other games - too twitchy, AoE and Dot overused, lack of sensible rules, which would hinder zerging, which is why we have terrible lag in mass combat - and the worst, we have abilities, which we cannot use, because our characters are just not smart enough to memorize more than 12 of them at a time (2 bars) - so most of them are just a waste of skill points and it is not realistic to just remember some of the learned skills and not the others.

Elvenheart

The lack of viable alternatives

I had dabbled in some of the other Elder Scrolls games, but by that time non-MMOs had become pretty stale for me because my love of being in an online world with other live people who share a similar interest had grabbed me. I love persistent shared worlds where you can chat with others and group up as needed. But lore-wise, what I was into was Dungeons and Dragons (Neverwinter), WoW, Secret World (how I miss that one!) etc. so I didn’t know much about Tamriel at all, and even after playing it took a long time for me to warm up to the world. However, ESO had one thing that almost no other game had - playable vampires! Maybe they weren’t much (and still...no, I won’t say it), but getting to play a character in an MMO that was a VAMPIRE brought me here. This was only supposed to have been until Worlds of Darkness came out. But then WoD got cancelled so here I am!

The thing that kept me was the beautiful game engine. I said many times that I wished Neverwinter and Lord of the Rings Online had this game engine. When I sometimes go back to spend time with my characters in those games I inevitably return quickly to ESO because I like the way my characters and the world looks and feels here way better. I’m finally comfortable with the lore, but if a game came along that had playable vampires, especially Secret-Worldish, or if it was based in Faerun (D&D) or Middle Earth, and it had a game engine as good or better than ESO it would probably be time for me to move on. Since all of that is pretty unlikely, I’ll probably be in Tamriel for a long time!

PS. I AM looking at Ashes of Creation a bit 😉