What happened to the ESO population in the last week?

Eevee_42

I’ve noticed that Cyrodiil and IC are absolute ghost towns. Even with the current event going on, the Steam numbers are showing less players. Hardly anybody is online on my friends list or in guilds and battlegrounds seem dead. Have the past two years of lackluster chapters started affecting the player population?

Jaimeh

Cyro was conspicuously empty last weekend, I agree. A number of things might be the culprit, including the new world beta attracting some players who are checking it out.

MrMazurski

New World beta,

Personally, I am tired of this 24/7 lagfiesta on all pvp zone, even trial is sometimes problematic.
And I think many people are tired of this state of affairs and the lack of reaction from ZOS, or their totally strange changes in the meta game, the lack of repairing very annoying bugs (so I'm waiting almost 3 mouth for them to fix the random bug what turn off charge / jump skills for DK)

NW dont looking like good alternative for ESO. But it's nice to play a game in which despite the superhyperspeed net you don't get any lag

kinguardian

The UK lockdown rules have gone so businesses go open again and people are allowed to see each other again etc.
On top of that the really warm weather in a lot of places.

And other places had natural disasters occur like parts of the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany. The floods litteraly took people's houses. Massive destruction.
Such a nightmare those poor people it is horrible.

So I think that is definitely part of that it slowed down. At least for the EU server.

kargen27

July in past years has had a player numbers drop then the numbers bounce back up.

alanmatillab16_ESO

Eevee_42 wrote: »

I’ve noticed that Cyrodiil and IC are absolute ghost towns. Even with the current event going on, the Steam numbers are showing less players. Hardly anybody is online on my friends list or in guilds and battlegrounds seem dead. Have the past two years of lackluster chapters started affecting the player population?

lol since when has Imperial City and Cyrodiil been representative of the player population of ESO as a whole instead of just pvpers? Take a look in Craglorn, Vulkhel Guard, Elswyr and Skyrim. Come back when those areas are devoid of players and you might have a point.

shimm

Pve is more crowded than ever, it’s just pvp that has had population drop off. Thus it gets less attention.

JJOtterBear

pvp'ers are checking out other games. also its been heavily established, officially and otherwise that Steam numbers are not a reliable metric for the overall health for the game.

Urvoth

shimm wrote: »

Pve is more crowded than ever, it’s just pvp that has had population drop off. Thus it gets less attention.

Maybe if it had more attention it wouldn't have the population drop off.

Ken_Koerperich

Ghost town empty.

Wanted to try and get to LV5 for Purge, Vigor, Rapid Maneuvers....

To low a level to solo anything, and nobody was in there, the bar/icon showed zero on all alliances....

This event killing ability to get skills man....

oldbobdude

Lol. Maybe now is a good time to use my Cyr treasure maps.

Alucardo

PvP should be back to normal around 2nd August, maybe. That's when the NW beta ends xD

Indigogo

Barely been in cyro for a few weeks, coming from someone who lived in there.

It's not fun. Can't play during prime time for the lag and crashes,. Can't play during quiet times because you get zerged by 15 thirsty night cappers if you take a rss.

YandereGirlfriend

It's completely anecdotal but I do remember a few years ago when Reddit "Advertise Your Guild" threads would have 50-100 different posts in them.

Over the last year the average is more like 10-15.

For what it's worth.

BazOfWar

I was taking a new character through blackwood at peak time EU and had to walk away from a few world bosses because the map was void of people.

It just goes to show that Zos cannot be arrogant and think that players will just continue to play eso when it is so neglected.

Eventually something new is going to arrive and draw these players away.

zelaminator

BazOfWar wrote: »

I was taking a new character through blackwood at peak time EU and had to walk away from a few world bosses because the map was void of people.

It just goes to show that Zos cannot be arrogant and think that players will just continue to play eso when it is so neglected.

Eventually something new is going to arrive and draw these players away.

Or maybe it shows you that an event is going on, and people are farming the heck out of it

Marcus_Aurelius

EU Ravenwatch has gone for at least 30min queue to instant during primetime, despite the lesser population the lagfiesta is still there.
I tried playing but after 10min I logged out, I really can't stand that thing anymore.

Meanwhile lot of stremers are showing PvP somewhere else. If thing don't change Cyro will be empty very soon.
it's really a pity cause I love Cyro.

markulrich1966

more than a year ago I suggested to scale the difficulty of worldbosses with the amount of players around, to compensate the exodus on xbox EU.
Many left because of lag that was massive after release of elsweyr, so less left to farm bosses, so even the last left tired of soloing them.

This did not happen, in contrast companion quests now spread out the people even further. While this brings back some life to old zones, it increases the problem, that you find no more co-players to farm bosses in typical regions like summerset or northern elsweyr.

As a result, now even on the far more populated NA server you can be forced to solo such bosses (the event right now is a welcomed exception of course).

In Blackwood, farming worldbosses is even more discouraging, they are stronger than others, and the daily rewards have no guarantee to drop Ivory Brigade Clasp. So this region quickly gets as deserted as it happened with Murkmire, where difficulty and no guarantee for hackwing plumage kept players away from the bosses there.

Just some examples, why people get tired and take out-times, as I do it myself more and more often (just login for endeavours, then switch to other things).

Jazraena

Elsweyr bosses are usually packed with people on PC EU, even during mornings and afternoon.

Checking Blackwood world bosses almost 2 months after release while there is an Elsweyr event going on might not be the best indicator of population.

Neither is Ravenwatch. Ravenwatch specifically is being abandoned thanks to PTS changes; and I suspect people are also taking some downtime after Midyear Mayhem. I certainly am - and will then very likely change to Gray Host with the upcoming stuff.

YandereGirlfriend

Jazraena wrote: »

Elsweyr bosses are usually packed with people on PC EU, even during mornings and afternoon.

Checking Blackwood world bosses almost 2 months after release while there is an Elsweyr event going on might not be the best indicator of population.

Neither is Ravenwatch. Ravenwatch specifically is being abandoned thanks to PTS changes; and I suspect people are also taking some downtime after Midyear Mayhem. I certainly am - and will then very likely change to Gray Host with the upcoming stuff.

PC-NA Ravenwatch has definitely seen its engagement crater in the last week.

All the guilds on DC have pulled out except for one (and even that one will likely leave when the campaign ends) and relatively early in the evenings it is single-bar for all factions with the same 5 players on one side fighting the same 5 players on the other at random resources.

This is not the portrait of a campaign with a healthy future.

Caligamy_ESO

NGL I have been off in New World myself.. it's been kinda refreshing and I'm very much looking forward to playing it when the beta is over and we can keep our progress.

The crafting is robust, the world is gorgeous, and the combat feels like you have to make meaningful choices on the attacks you do rather than.. getting hit in the face while performing a memorized skill rotation.

AdamLAD

Xbox EU for PvP is always a ghost town in comparison to every other server. So many people have left for PC or NA or left all together. Its only going to get worse. Zenimax seriously needs to consider merging or crossplay down the line, when/if they can fix the performance issues.

tonyblack

MYM ended so a lot of players burned out and took break from pvp for a while. Elsweyr is packed though, dragons and wb go down in seconds. And why it would be different? IC is always dead because of questionable design choices (it punishes big groups with small telvar gain) and bg have small but steady population, my queue usually take less than 5 minutes in prime time. Even new world beta don’t excuse this population decline. It’s lack of new pvp content and bad cyrodiil performance that drive players away.

phaneub17_ESO

Some who left for New World may not come back for a while... because their gpu got fried. It's not just RTX 3090 there are reports from AMD as well.

schoober

It’s not just Cyro. The whole world map is lagging recently.
And yes, Blackwood was a completely failure and it’s always empty. It’s not a problem for me since I can solo all the wbs. But I understand it can be very disappointing for people who needs help.
Companions was pretty cool tho, and you can see lots of players using them.

Ilithyania

ESO is mostly PvE players i assume.

Tandor

schoober wrote: »

It’s not just Cyro. The whole world map is lagging recently.
And yes, Blackwood was a completely failure and it’s always empty. It’s not a problem for me since I can solo all the wbs. But I understand it can be very disappointing for people who needs help.
Companions was pretty cool tho, and you can see lots of players using them.

I don't think you can say that Blackwood was a complete failure. Whenever there is new content most players immediately rush through it, and there was a greater incentive to do so this time because of enabling the companions.

One of the main problems with population counts these days is that ESO is overflowing with events, and whenever the next one comes along a lot of players rush to the event zones, leaving the others to claim that because their non-event zones are deserted the game is clearly dying. We're seeing this claim a lot while everyone is in Elsweyr, and it's compounded by PvPers taking the opportunity which exists for a couple of weeks to try out the 3 skills combat in New World.

Of course, we also see the same claims that the game is dying being made every July/August when people are away on holiday or simply doing other stuff outdoors in the Summer weather.

As for performance, I don't know what platform and server @schoober is playing on, but I've been doing a fair bit of overland content on both PC NA and EU from the UK in recent days, including a lot of crowded dragons and WBs in Northern Elsweyr and I haven't encountered any lag at all in that time so it's not my experience that "the whole world map is lagging" but that may of course be down to different platform and server or even peak times etc.

Hymzir

Don't know, haven't logged on myself since... last Friday was it?

I guess New World is one reason - it looks like a fairly decent MMO that specifically plays like an MMO. Oddly enough, lot of MMO players look for that in an MMO. Plus it's a fresh new start, and after 7 years of ESO beta, lot of people might be interested in trying something new.

Summer is another reason I suppose. People go on vacations or just chill and laze about, since it's way too hot to do anything productive.

It doesn't really help that the game is a buggy mess, the servers spazz out all the time, and when they do work, lag makes everything aggravating [snip]. And then there are those upcoming changes looming on the horizon. Not looking forward to them either.

However, for me it's event fatigue. I just can't arse myself to log on and grind dragons [snip] I've done to death years ago, just for a low RNG shot for a piece of another new cosmetic shinie that I'm not interested in nor would ever use.

I know, I know, one can always ignore the event, and all the other daily checklist grind they've added to this thing over the years, but... Well, doing daily writs, and then the endeavors, and then go do the event stuff, is the most optimal thing to do - as far as reward vs. playtime is involved, so you have to consciously decide to go for the sub-optimal route. Furthermore, once you do decide not to bother with the latest bit of carrot they are dangling in front of yet another grind, what's left?

PVP is a mess, and something I can only really stomach once or max twice a week. I've never seen the appeal of grinding the same dungeons over an over again in hopes of getting lucky with that 1% chance of getting the bit of gear you want, and I couldn't care less about the arbitrary achievements. To me they've always felt equally meaningless and silly as "Finish dungeon X in under 10 minutes while standing on your head and yodeling the Swiss national anthem."

Housing is essentially locked behind a paywall and requires insane amount of grind for mats and recipes, or/and gold to buy all the bits you need, and is still woefully limited by the insanely low furnishing slots to bother with. And all the cool new plots cost gazillion tons of real life money. I get more fun out of building in say Conan Exiles or Sims or just doing custom interiors for Skyrim in the CK. (And I essentially bought all content for Conan in the summer sale for less than what it would cost to buy one of these ESO virtual houses...)

Everything else is a grind and farm of repetitive crud - like find x pieces of thing y that drop 2% of the time from mobs in public dungeon z. It's tedious, annoying and unrewarding, and most of all, not entertaining.

All that is left are the quests, and those are sorely lacking in quality these days. The year long formula of world shaking calamities has grown old, and it doesn't really help that you are just a passive observer in these stories. You are the hired muscle that kills all the baddies, so that the actual protagonists of the stories can then act out their scripted key moments and do all the important bits.

So last Satruday it was, I think, that in a listless mood I decided to hop on back to Enderal and continue my exploration of Vyn. I didn't really even notice that it's been several days since I last logged on ESO.

I'm still gonna do the story and quest content ESO has, that I haven't finished yet, but am in no real hurry to bother with them. And not caring about daily log in bribes, endeavors, or even the ever constant event grind makes for much less aggravating play experience. There's still plenty of worthwhile stuff to do in ESO, but I just don't feel a reason to log on each day anymore.

[edited for profanity bypass]

EpicHero

We still play every day, and for the last few months, not a SINGLE day has gone by, in which we didn't encounter grouping bugs.

From the super hard to fix stuck in a group that you can't leave nor queue up with and the can't invite anyone bug, who thankfully are less common. To the showing up in a group that you were in before, but have already left and are no longer in... to the queue up for a dungeon bug, and get left behind with some or all people in your group showing offline in the group (but not in the guild tool). At least those issues can be fixed by a relative quick log out and back in or a travel to player.

But that a game that has been around for this long, can't even do grouping properly, tells you everything you need to know about the state of the game and it's developers.

I can only guess that they just don't care... the money keeps flowing in anyways.

Until it doesn't... and good luck trying to repair your reputation then.

waitwhat

Also the celebration this past week has brought a lot of people to Anequia and Pelletine, even Alinor is pretty empty.

Kel

JJOtterBear wrote: »

pvp'ers are checking out other games. also its been heavily established, officially and otherwise that Steam numbers are not a reliable metric for the overall health for the game.

My problem with this line of thinking is when anyone complains about numbers being low, everyone points to how well it's doing on Steam.
Not pointed at you directly, just a case of this forum having it's cake and eating it too.