Is ESO going into "Maintenance" mode soon?

rootkitronin

They certainly aren't innovating, and more often than not lately the quality of the content has been lacking - huge rise in copy and paste content. What that means for the overall health of the game, no idea.

I'm sure ZOS makes a killing from ESO, but like most companies, I'm sure they're also trying to look at how they can squeeze even more money out of their product. Reducing overhead on ESO would absolutely make it more profitable, although the quality would most likely suffer - and personally that's what I think is going on now.

I'm sure there's still going to be new content for years to come, but I do think you're going to continue to see a downward trend in quality and innovation when compared to what has come before.

Many players won't care, some will, but it's not like there's another Elder Scrolls mmo you can go play, and ZOS knows it - so where's the motivation for them to go above and beyond at this point? There isn't any, they'll be looking for a balance of effort/cost vs revenue, and they'll slide happily into that little rut until it's no longer cost effective - and who knows when that'll be, though I doubt it's anytime soon.

Could be very wrong with this take, but I think the content and communication speaks for itself.

Amottica

Monte_Cristo wrote: »

xthrshx wrote: »

Almost no one uses or cares about companions.

The amount of companions I see in the game suggests otherwise.

True. Not sure how someone can suggest no one cares about them. Heck, just look at the active forum threads. Some are talking about companion gear drops during the event. If no one cared about comps, why do they care about their gear?

Jordan.nick11b14_ESO

If update 35 is any kind of vision as to what the future in ESO looks like things are going to go downhill quickly.
Combat is absolutely more tedious and in a worse place now after they tinkered with it than before--and, developers just aren't listening, sadly.

xthrshx

2 million players? ESO doesn’t have anywhere near 2 million real, active players. If they picked up 2 million new accounts over the course of the past year, that actually suggests an even sharper decline in long-time players and bodes worse for the overall health of the community.

The vast, overwhelming majority of accounts are inactive, barely active, or bots. Their daily players total maybe 200,000. The more you inflate that total account number, the worse that active player count is.

UnabashedlyHonest

xthrshx wrote: »

2 million players? ESO doesn’t have anywhere near 2 million real, active players. If they picked up 2 million new accounts over the course of the past year, that actually suggests an even sharper decline in long-time players and bodes worse for the overall health of the community.

The vast, overwhelming majority of accounts are inactive, barely active, or bots. Their daily players total maybe 200,000. The more you inflate that total account number, the worse that active player count is.

I wonder how many people have formed personal guild banks with inactive and additional accounts just for storage purposes.

jad11mumbler

The bare minimum content each year makes it feel like its been on maintenance the last few years already.

Dr_Con

Katheriah wrote: »

MrLasagna wrote: »

One of the highlighted features for the new update is "Emperor Scaling in Cyro", a thing no one care about and that should have taken like half an hour to program.
I think this is the answer to your question.

I wonder if anyone even asked for this.

@Katheriah
In fact, they have. I can't remember which section I saw it in but someone gave a compelling argument to modify emperor scaling.

rbfrgsp

[snip] is 'emperor scaling'?

[edited for profanity bypass]

Dangranma_Burgrukgad

Monte_Cristo wrote: »

Wonder what those 2 million people are doing

Obviously not bickering on the forums...

Why should they be bickering when they don't care about the game since they don' play it anymore?
You can believe in some manager PR talk or in numbers, your choice.

Grizzbeorn

MrLasagna wrote: »

Kingsindarkness wrote: »

The two million people the game has picked up in the last year would like to have a word with you....also you realize you don't speak for everyone right?

if you look at steam charts

right, because everyone plays on Steam...

Jaraal

rbfrgsp wrote: »

[snip] is 'emperor scaling'?

New on the PTS where your emperor powers and the faction's HP bonus scales with how many keeps your alliance controls.

[edited to remove quote]

Dangranma_Burgrukgad

Grizzbeorn wrote: »

MrLasagna wrote: »

if you look at steam charts

right, because everyone plays on Steam...

Do you know what statistic trends are?
Can you understand that if people are decreasing on Steam it means that they all decresing on all platform?

Iron_Warrior

I don't care if this game is doing good or not in some charts. I advice you to quit this game if you feel the game is going downhill, that's what i'm going to do at least. This "year of the bretons" was a disaster. High isle was a chapter with another generic storyline, a poorly designed cardgame as the main feature,and an obvious crown store reject mount as the prize for getting trifecta in the hardest content in the game. Then lost depths came with the horrendous balance changes, and now with firesong it's the second year in a row that we don't get an arena. How can i believe that they care for this game?

Games should be for fun, if you as a player are concerned about the future of this game, then it should be a big enough red flag. Wish i realized this sooner...

Grizzbeorn

MrLasagna wrote: »

Can you understand that if people are decreasing on Steam it means that they all decresing on all platform?

Whatever you say, bud.

LukosCreyden

Either way, they will need to introduce some manner of new combat gameplay soon (class, skill line) otherwise the game will start to fade. Things have been getting stale for a while now and no amount of funky balance changes or new sets will change that.
The card game, antiquities and companions are all excellent additions to the game, but without any new toys to play with in the game's chief component for too long and more players will continue to leave purely out of boredom, regardless of the state of class balancing.

If they cannot add new skills to the game due to limitations, then there seems to be only one real course of action to breathe some life into the core gameplay; abolish classes. Of course, whilst this is an extreme example, it seems the only clear alternative to me.

The other option is to focus solely on attracting new players with every release and hope that old players stick around, never mind the fatigue. Many would argue that this is already what they do. What seems so old and boring to us, is still fresh and exciting to every new player.

Danikat

Amottica wrote: »

Reverb wrote: »

I think they’re tired of working on it, and they can’t wait until everyone is tired of playing it. A few more updates like U35 should do the trick.

odd since most people like to have job security. This goes against the notion of keeping one's job.

Also if they are tired of working on ESO they can get another job, it's not like there's a shortage of other game studios to move to. People change jobs all the time without having to force their previous employer to discontinue what they were working on.

(And yes that goes for the most senior people too. Apparently Zenimax was sold to Microsoft because the people who previously owned it wanted to retire and understood that didn't mean shutting down their company.)

Athyrium93 wrote: »

Didn't they just upgrade the NA servers and are getting ready to do the EU servers? That doesn't strike me as going into maintenence mode. My guess is they are overwhelmed with the server upgrade and that's why content is slacking.

I don't know about that, because the server upgrade would be done by entirely different people to new content. The writers, artists, modellers, even the people who program things like enemy AI or balance skills probably aren't also responsible for installing new servers. It might affect when things can be released, because you don't want a new chapter, or even a major patch, going out at the same time they're swapping the servers over, but I doubt it slows down making stuff.

Amottica wrote: »

Monte_Cristo wrote: »

xthrshx wrote: »

Almost no one uses or cares about companions.

The amount of companions I see in the game suggests otherwise.

True. Not sure how someone can suggest no one cares about them. Heck, just look at the active forum threads. Some are talking about companion gear drops during the event. If no one cared about comps, why do they care about their gear?

There's also topics requesting new companions and discussing what kind of companions players want. At one point there were so many the moderators had to merge them together. To me that's more telling, because that's not just people using a mechanic since it's there - they're actually asking for more of it and getting excited about what that could mean.

Jaimeh

ZOS_Kevin wrote: »

Hey All, wanted to chime in quickly here. We are not going into maintenance mode. We've got more stuff on the horizon to keep everyone in Tamriel busy for some time. The team is excited to share more when we're ready, but until then, we have Firesong up next.

Thank the Divines! Although I must say the 'for some time' stresses me out a little, I'd hear something like for many many more years to come

rbfrgsp

[snip] is 'emperor scaling'?

Jaraal wrote: »

rbfrgsp wrote: »

[snip] is 'emperor scaling'?

New on the PTS where your emperor powers and the faction's HP bonus scales with how many keeps your alliance controls.

Either good or terrible idea, I've not had a chance to look for myself.

Is the new system additive or reductive? In that - is the current emp boost the max possible under the new system, when you have all keeps?

Or will the new system mean stronger max power emp, thereby adding to all the other broken entropy mechanics in cyro (volendrung, scrolls), that mean the strong get stronger when they're winning?

[edited to remove quote]

Lebkuchen

Kingsindarkness wrote: »

MrLasagna wrote: »

Kingsindarkness wrote: »

The two million people the game has picked up in the last year would like to have a word with you....also you realize you don't speak for everyone right?

Wonder what those 2 million people are doing,

Obviously not bickering on the forums...

I bet my playstation, TV and couch that most of the "two million people the game has picked up in the last year" are not active players. I spend over 200 Euros every year, some of us spent thousands to support the company. I wonder what a statistic of the 2 million new players would look like.

People in the forums (and a lot more people in game) are upset because they love the game and see its potential to be one of the best games ever. It is hard to believe that a company of this size is unable to solve the performance issues and struggles to give us interesting new content. It feels like they are holding back for some reason. Like they are not investing the resources back into the game that it deserves. And that the team is getting tired of this game. And a lot of players hope this could change before the whole game falls apart like some parts of the game already have.

Reverb

UnabashedlyHonest wrote: »

xthrshx wrote: »

2 million players? ESO doesn’t have anywhere near 2 million real, active players. If they picked up 2 million new accounts over the course of the past year, that actually suggests an even sharper decline in long-time players and bodes worse for the overall health of the community.

The vast, overwhelming majority of accounts are inactive, barely active, or bots. Their daily players total maybe 200,000. The more you inflate that total account number, the worse that active player count is.

I wonder how many people have formed personal guild banks with inactive and additional accounts just for storage purposes.

Many, many people bought 9 accounts for $5 each, on sale, to form private guild banks. We’ll never know how many people, but assume it’s in the thousands.

Offshore botters and RMT agencies also create new account each time they are banned, further adding to the false numbers.

Zeni has an interest in never letting the “active player” numbers be known. Because we can be sure it doesn’t tell a good story compared to the overall sales numbers.

Gaebriel0410

Why would these hypothetical thousands of people go through the effort of buying 9 (nine??) accounts even at 5 bucks a pop, just to make a personal guild bank?

If no friends have slots available, just ask in zone chat if people want to help you out and temporarily join your guild until you have 10 members. There's always new players around, so just go to a starter zone and offer them some gold for the effort.

I really really doubt that it's common to buy 10 accounts.

Arthtur

You dont have to buy accounts for guild bank. You just need to wait for free weekend and create 9 accounts for free... Yes it counts to their number of "new players".

K9002

Gaebriel0410 wrote: »

Why would these hypothetical thousands of people go through the effort of buying 9 (nine??) accounts even at 5 bucks a pop, just to make a personal guild bank?

If no friends have slots available, just ask in zone chat if people want to help you out and temporarily join your guild until you have 10 members. There's always new players around, so just go to a starter zone and offer them some gold for the effort.

I really really doubt that it's common to buy 10 accounts.

A lot of people don't buy more copies of the game for 5 bucks, they wait for the free play trials. We had at least two such trials this year. They do it because someone temporarily joining a guild isn't enough. The guild needs to maintain 10 members, the moment people leave the guild bank is closed. So it's much safer to make 9 free throwaway accounts that will stay in the guild forever, even long after they've been marked as inactive.

DMuehlhausen

Yes cause the most played MMO in the world is going to go to Maintenance mode. Honestly where do these people come from.

Malthorne

Maybe not “maintenance mode,” but it definitely feels like it’s in “do the bare minimum mode.”

Jaraal

DMuehlhausen wrote: »

the most played MMO in the world

https://steamdb.info/graph/?category=20

tohopka_eso

DMuehlhausen wrote: »

Yes cause the most played MMO in the world is going to go to Maintenance mode. Honestly where do these people come from.

Wondering that myself. If people want to see a game in maintenance mode, should check out RIFT. I still log in there and follow there discord page.
Oh, and I don't play ESO on steam so it's irrelevant to me when people keep trying to use there charts.

Gaebriel0410

K9002 wrote: »

Gaebriel0410 wrote: »

Why would these hypothetical thousands of people go through the effort of buying 9 (nine??) accounts even at 5 bucks a pop, just to make a personal guild bank?

If no friends have slots available, just ask in zone chat if people want to help you out and temporarily join your guild until you have 10 members. There's always new players around, so just go to a starter zone and offer them some gold for the effort.

I really really doubt that it's common to buy 10 accounts.

A lot of people don't buy more copies of the game for 5 bucks, they wait for the free play trials. We had at least two such trials this year. They do it because someone temporarily joining a guild isn't enough. The guild needs to maintain 10 members, the moment people leave the guild bank is closed. So it's much safer to make 9 free throwaway accounts that will stay in the guild forever, even long after they've been marked as inactive.

Oh that makes more sense. I just saw someone mention 5 bucks, hence the assumption.

Still I have no clue what people need that much space for, I always considered myself a hoarder, I even collected all the disguise items and kept a lot of treasure items I found, but I guess I am at the lower end of the scale.

Jaraal

tohopka_eso wrote: »

Oh, and I don't play ESO on steam so it's irrelevant to me when people keep trying to use there charts.

https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/584393/pc-players-only-do-you-play-eso-through-steam/p1

tohopka_eso

Which is a small comparison still. As I said I don't play thru steam and my point still stands on a game in maintenance mode