but, the most important is:

Any Word, from @Zenimax

Just adding one more voice here. I also wish that you'd offer Steam keys to your existing customers. If Steam charges you a fee for said service, make it a paid sidegrade for those of us who bought in early. I'd pay a few bucks for that. I'm a big fan of the Steam platform and would prefer to have everything running through there (complete with Steam cards and such).

As for the pet, offering unique bonuses to new customers without an option for loyal customers to obtain it? Not cool. I'm not a huge fan of vanity pets as-is (taking up inventory slots and having to keep bringing 'em out when changing locations), but it's a bad precedent. If it were a unique mount, (or something else that I'd actually care about), I'd be pretty annoyed!

Never forget.

There is a lot of butt hurt here so let's simplify things. If you are whining for the following reasons:

• I want to use the Steam Overlay
• Someone got something I didn't
• Hur-durr derp, I just like jumping on the bandwagon and complaining about everything

Here are some solutions:

• Add ESO using Steam's "add a non-steam game". Ta-da! It's now accessible through your Steam Library
• Well that would be the first time in the history of forever that someone got something someone else didn't have. Evil Zenimax, how dare you provide incentives for new players to join ESO.
• Stop being a tool, no one cares if you're going to "quit in disgust" or whatever. Bugger off and leave us to it.

I pre ordered the Imperial Edition and understood that I was paying a premium for that product. I was not daft enough to think that it would never go on sale or be rebundled with different items at some stage because I'm not a halfwit. So to all the people whinging: please, please try to stop being wankers. I know it's hard but I have faith in you!

From another angle, did anyone else notice this?

Literally every other in-game pet's non-pet counterpart is killable.

Mudcrabs: killable.
Monkeys: killable.
Scuttlers: killable.
Guar: killable.
Pigs: killable.
Dwarven Spiders: killable.

Dogs: not killable in-game.

I think that's discriminatory, and shows a ridiculous amount of favoritism to the Steam-only buyers. Either give us pre-order players the dogs, too, or let us kill them in-game like everything else to take out our frustrations.

If I can mercilessly slaughter pigs, monkeys, scuttlers, guar, chickens, squirrels, lizards, and dwarven constructs to harvest their organs and parts for my own devilish purposes, dogs had better be on that list, too.

I'm not at all for real-life violence towards any living thing. However, let's face it, Zenimax/Bethesda really wiped their rich *** orifices with our subscriptions this time.

UlanX wrote: »

durr

You sound like support by telling us to add it as a non-steam game ._.

UlanX wrote: »

There is a lot of butt hurt here so let's simplify things. If you are whining for the following reasons:

• I want to use the Steam Overlay
• Someone got something I didn't
• Hur-durr derp, I just like jumping on the bandwagon and complaining about everything

Here are some solutions:

• Add ESO using Steam's "add a non-steam game". Ta-da! It's now accessible through your Steam Library
• Well that would be the first time in the history of forever that someone got something someone else didn't have. Evil Zenimax, how dare you provide incentives for new players to join ESO.
• Stop being a tool, no one cares if you're going to "quit in disgust" or whatever. Bugger off and leave us to it.

I pre ordered the Imperial Edition and understood that I was paying a premium for that product. I was not daft enough to think that it would never go on sale or be rebundled with different items at some stage because I'm not a halfwit. So to all the people whinging: please, please try to stop being wankers. I know it's hard but I have faith in you!

I hope you will eventually understand that detractors of Zenimax's latest sales ploy are not 'whinging' because we're in a state of perpetual butthurt and have nothing better to do than jump on the hatewagon. It's a nice, little strawman that magically brushes aside all of our valid criticisms, I'll give you that much.

Let me address your strawmen arguments in consecutive order, as I have interpreted the actual criticisms:

1. Yes, you can add non-Steam games to Steam, but the issue is how incompetently Zenimax addressed questions regarding this, and moreso, how this relates to the second criticism.

Nowhere on the official Steam sale announcement on the ESO homepage, nor its linked FAQ, nor its Steam page counterpart indicated any instructions whatsoever for existing subscribers to add their game onto Steam. One would have to dig through pages upon pages of player-generated forum threads just to reach a working level knowledge of what to do.

I suspect this is because, for all intents and purposes, ESO Steam has been marketed as its own, separate entity, complete with its own exclusive vanity pet. If it were at all possible for current subscribers to port over their non-Steam games onto Steam and still get access to the Steam-exclusive vanity pet without purchasing the game a second time, then criticism #2 would not even be an issue.

2. The Steam-exclusive vanity pet is indicative of just how much the suits at Zenimax have suffered from their psychosis in relation to their dedicated subscription base.

Again, if the purpose were for Zenimax to partner with Steam and incentivise their non-Steam subscribers to adopt the Steam platform, then they could've just as easily allowed current subscribers to port over their games onto Steam to obtain the full benefits of the Steam promotion. Almost nobody would be complaining about being locked out of a vanity pet if they could easily obtain the vanity pet by porting over their already-purchased subscriptions to Steam.

Instead of using the vanity pet as an incentive to introduce Steam to all of their subscribers, Zenimax chose to use it for the purpose of luring only new customers, and only new customers on Steam. And for whatever confounded reason, there have been people who have bought ESO *again* on Steam who can't even use their new purchase on their existing account:

"I ended up buying it. Sure, it might seem a bit silly to purchase the same game twice, but the way I see it, with the discount that was being offered (40%), I was just paying a little premium for a month of game time and the exclusive pet (already having everything else that came with my retail Imperial Edition), and of course, the convenience of having the game added to my Steam library, and not as a "non-Steam game".

"To my surprise, the code that was given to me could not be activated on my existing The Elder Scrolls Online account.

"I contacted Zenimax Online's support service and after an exhausting back-and-forth, they basically told me I was really out of luck because there was no way the Steam code could be used on an existing account, and they wouldn't be able to give me the aforementioned pet and 30 days of game time. According to them, I would need to create a new account.

"Nowhere was it stated that a new account was needed, nor that existing accounts wouldn't be eligible to receive the bonuses included in the Steam code. After lots of players complained to Zenimax Online about this issue, they did put up an article on their "knowledge base" saying this. But the damage was done already."
- s2x.Shiro's review on Steam, (located as the second most helpful review, for reference)

So not only does Zenimax not want existing players to port onto Steam, they also secretly forbid all existing customers from receiving any benefits whatsoever from the Steam promotion (and they didn't even initially inform existing customers that the Steam promotion is off-limits for them).

Perhaps you don't know this, but a substantial chunk of the mmo community plays mmos for the satisfaction of exclusivity and completionism, especially those who prefer the pay-to-play model that ESO uses. Many mmo players want to feel like they can be respected, by maxing their toons, and collecting all collectibles. This is fundamentally why mmos use achievements, trophies, toon levels to reflect progression in relation to other toons, and why there is a separation between the Imperial Collector's Edition, and the Standard Edition. This is also the reason why game preorders contain exclusive content that incentivises completionists to purchase games well ahead of reputable game reviews, as a value offset for essentially buying the /promise/ of a product.

Therefore, the significant portion of ESO subscribers who preordered the game's Imperial Edition and have stayed subbed at $15/month for this long have had a reasonable expectation that they would be getting *everything* in terms of the game's content. That is to say, if players put in enough effort after paying all their dues, they could potentially be counted among the highest echelon of players who have completed and collected everything. Expansions also conform to this expectation, as *nobody* would be locked out of purchasing expansions for the base game.

As so many other commenters have explicitly stated, 100% locking out the Steam vanity pet for existing, loyal subscribers shows just how much Zenimax cares about its subscription core of collectors and completionists. They utterly demolished the reasonable expectation precedent of their mmo that those who buy everything from the start will get the full product, as long as they keep paying their dues.

How can Zenimax honestly hope to maintain a loyal and steady cash flow when it alienates the same people who are most likely to keep their game subscriptions? If you substitute the word, 'subscriber', with 'customer', how ridiculous would it be for a company to reward new customers without making an equivalent or better reward available for its long-term repeat customers?

And on a purely vain level, why are latecomers entitled to their own exclusive items when they contributed neither the dedication, nor the early game funding despite all its inherent risks, to deserve it?

This is just one more strike in the pattern of cash grabs and paygates that has been endemic to ESO, ever since they announced the Imperial race lock even though they are a pay-to-play game.

3. Really, if I have said absolutely nothing worthy of complaining about in the above rant, then let me be the first to apologise to all the suits at Zenimax, because they would have obviously created a perfect game with perfect business decisions, summa *** laude. Surely the last thing Zenimax needs is detailed feedback from hundreds of people who actually play their game.


tl;dr: quit being a whiny fanboy, UlanX. (See, I can make strawmen, too!)

Unsubbed.

If you ever let me connect my current account properly to Steam, even if I have to pay for it, I will come back. This isn't the only reason, but it is the straw that broke this camel's back.

Wabu wrote: »

Araflin wrote: »

"Many a person has bought clothes only to see the same garment on sale a week later..." .. On it.. Not everything is as black and white

Well then where does that leave our old copies of TESO? In the garbage! We cannot claim the Steam features on our nerfed copy of the game. This failure/bad business has to be managed accordingly so it is resolved with the interest of the consumer, and not it's sales.

• yes he did compare it to a shirt because it's basically the same principle. It's a consumer product. He also provided other examples such as purchasing a phone on a monthly contract only for that telco provider to come out with a new spangled deal a month later. It is that black and white but some "gamers" have an over inflated sense if entitlement.

• why do you think non Steam copies will be rubbish? Steam WILL have it's specials and unique products, you need to deal with that but that's not to say the same won't apply to the ESO store. Far too many assumptions going on.

This is not the first time a game has offered different items to people who purchased their game in different ways, some people need to step back and stop getting so bent out if shape over this.

At the end of the day, if you really don't like it spend your money elsewhere.

Araflin wrote: »

"...grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference."

Steam is a separate business. They work out deals with publishers to put the games on their "platform". Those publishers have no need to issue instructions on how to use Steam. The are also not beholden to the companies after to keep up any maintenance / game changes that may occur (e.g. Defiance going F2P - DLC for it bought on Steam didn't work in the game after the change unless you bought it originally via Steam).

I'm still unsure why them placing ESO on offer over a weekend is really such an issue, even after reading all the "complaints" here. MANY businesses do similar things (especially phone companies and banks) and no one hold petitions and crys foul - they move their business to the offered one or accept they will not get the new phone / discount / cheeky pink pig piggy-bank. Many a person has bought clothes only to see the same garment on sale a week later and "reasonable expectations" are NOT contractual obligations ( @deltahost )

I opened this post with a simple quote in hopes of bridging some understanding that, "Because I want it!" is not a valid business arrangement. All you are showing is you feel entitled to something you did not pay for.

In my opinion, I believe @UlanX built the above as a house of bricks, not straw, because I see the argument stands despite the large amount of Huff-and-Puff you tried to blow it down with.

Dunno about your phone company , but when i call mine to complain , more often than not i get myself a deal so that i dont change companies.

Zen *** their current customers , the problem with that is , you can only be the new guy once , then you just join the rest , that makes it people think twice before they deal with a company like this.

Reason , like i said many times , just telling people zen creates content only to new players works like a charm to make them give up on buying the game.

I dont mind the whole steam part , that is another company , if they start to give 50% sales on the "DLC" there while zens gives nothing to those of us here , it will probably create even more complains , but that i think it is passable.

Now , the whole dog issue , that is not. That is content of this game entirely made to new players and i use that to turn as many players as i possible can till zen atleast appears to have learned something here.

True , maybe nothing will come from this , not like i will ever cost a relevant amount of subs anyway , but atleast i will have tried and if nothing does change , i can be a bit happy i made some save their money , it would have been a waste to give it to a company that does this anyway.

You have got to be kidding, what a kick in the guts.
Not only have we paid good money for the IE played through the Beta's and the crap that followed the launch including the Credit Card fiasco, now we are second class citizens!
I have had dealings with steam, all bad, way back when they took over Counterstrike, it was a case of first in first served, all the key gen's had a field day, those of us with legit keys were told tuff, we should have been quicker.
This is just a continuation of the headlong charge to F2P with Steams help.
Screw it, may as well go play Rift and be done with it.

Hey @Ulanx,

I know Araflin compared this game to a shirt, I thought it was funny. As you say, The Elder Scrolls Online is a product for the consumer. By all means it is best to call out the stick in the mud, for said publishers of this product, closed forums, and peers on this thread.

Honestly I did not know TESO has a store. Does it let me play the game in a way I see fit, no. There is anti-competitive behavior between Steam and ZeniMax Media stores. Consumers are limited with one store to purchase TESO commodities. Sure it is possible to explain that it is nothing new, look at the ISPs, shirt industry , etc.

It is good to point out the bad. The reason as to why people are bent out of shape is largely due to the way this product(s) is being bent out shape and how they are treated. By all means I will spend my money elsewhere. From what I get is that you feel entitled to defend ZeniMax Media, no problem with that. I feel entitled, but for a different cause. I suggest you refrain from being abrupt with the people on this thread.

It is bad that there is no official response from ZeniMax Media that addresses this problem. From the lack of their communication I doubt that issue will be addressed and resolved. Whether it be implementation of old TESO copies to Steam, or people losing trust in the product to move on to a product that works for them. Many people have lost trust.

I used a metaphor to express how I felt the general tone of this thread was going. I did not articulate myself well enough for it not be considered "flaming".

For this I apologise, but I have tried reason, argument and well known lines of poetry (I omitted the god reference in respect too).

I still stand by the simple fact I like this game, it's not perfect, but it is improving and also a BUSINESS. Put aside your entitlement and play (Obviously, a clean shirt is now a requirement) or don't.

As she's my partner, I reserved the right to voice an opinion.

Many a comment in this thread has failed to grasp that ZeniMax and Steam are separate businesses and one has little or no control over the other outside of whatever agreement they have signed. I am glad you understand.

Many of the comments on forums (and in game) I see are just complaints, the majority of them trivial, after a while they get annoying. Having suffered through several MMO's with vicious money-making principles (I don't want to drop names here but one involved Cylons and the other may Never have been set in cold, snow filled, evenings) I find peoples repeated complaints on such small matters galling.

It's great to voice an opinion. We did too. We also have a desire to explain ourselves when posts are directed to us.

As a level 30 Steam member this kind of pisses me off. As you can see, most of the time my Steam profile will show that I'm in ESO. I had to tell it to add ESO as external software to let my friends know what I'm playing.

So, in exchange for FREE PUBLICITY (all my many friends see the game name pop on their screen every time I log in, its on my profile when I'm playing and on their friends list along with my name) I get NOTHING unless I pay you again? That's really sad. And I don't care for ANY of the pets I have as a Beta player and the "expensive" game owner. I have two dogs in RL, I would love to have one in-game.