mutharex wrote: »

Get a new hobby

coryevans_3b14_ESO wrote: »

Martinus72 wrote: »

That's very thoughtful but very bitter view on the state of this game and definitely reason is that it comes from pvp player who probably is spending several hours a day on playing as part of that bitterness I could put on being burnt out side as well.
From my point of view as pve casual player having full time job and gf who's tolerant to my escaping into Tamriel but still my playtime is somehow limited (clocked 18 days /played and I'm vet7) I'd give this, basing on my 10 years of experience of playing several MMO's good 80/100.
There's need for lots of polishing yet but it is like rough diamond with huge potential, it is still in toddler's phase of MMO lifespan so giving all credit of trust to devs that they will use this potential to its full in the future and their plans do look promising.
For now tho what matters to me is the fact that it's the sixth month of playing ESO and still every time I just love to immerse myself into Tamriel again to have great fun because after all it's just a game and relax in free time, simple fact many are forgetting here and treating this like matter of life and death...

You obviously didn't read any of it. Also, if you give this an 8/10 at the 6 month mark with all the issues the game STILL has, bugs that have existed since BETA FFS!!! C'mon brah, you may try to convince yourself that it's an 8/10 but it's not. The review wasn't bitter at all. It was all "matter of fact". Denial ain't just a river in Egypt.

coryevans_3b14_ESO wrote: »

mutharex wrote: »

Get a new hobby

I don't understand why you put that here?

This was a great review and mostly spot on. If this wasn't a TES game they would have folded up the tents long ago. The only reason people are hanging on is because of the ES loyalty. Which I do have. BUT, it's almost gone. Very little patience left.

b92303008rwb17_ESO wrote: »

Nice post. I completely understand the tough love OP had for this game. I agree on most parts, especially the "Developer/Player relations".

On the other hand, I am just curious how much longer will OP stick with this game. Personally, I have been a subscriber from the head start and since I love this game so much, I have made a promise that no matter what, I will subscribe till the day ZOS stops operating ESO. I just have a very humble wish that ZOS won't take all the loyal support from us players for granted. Please, ZOS, I am begging you, make this game successful.

ers101284b14_ESO wrote: »

Aenra wrote: »

I enjoy the game, am subbed and will remain so. I cannot cease thinking however how badly, horridly, it would have been received if it did not have the huge IP that it has behind it. However, it is evident they work hard, it is evident that whatever the past issues, they comprehend and are capable of adjusting!
I remain hopeful and positive. Personally

Rylana wrote: »

This week marks the six month semi-anniversary of this game's live release (including early access). As a veteran MMO player of about 20 years (started MMO gaming back in the early days of Ultima Online), and a Sanguine Beta tester, I am going to give you, Zenimax, a review straight from the heart, honest and up front. I will rate your game in 10 different categories, with brief explanations for those ratings, as well as give you an aggregate average based on the average of those 10 scores (1-10 scale). You will see some stellar ratings you earned, and some extremely poor scores as well.

Visuals, graphics, sound, immersion (environmental) - 10/10
- This is the only time I have ever rated a game I have played a full 10 in this category, simply because ZOS you nailed this one. The lush full graphics, shadings, rendering, voiceover work (complete with celebrity voice cast), the sheer quantity of locale and diversity thereof, makes this game by far the most beautiful and visually pleasing MMO I have ever played. Bar none.

Story, textual content, questing, and things to do - 9/10
- I took off a point because of the veteran system and the repetitive nature of some quests (searching for guar in stonefalls four different times for four different quest givers, for example). Otherwise, the story is rich, the lore loyal to the brand, the mission content captivating at least on first playthrough, and the content broad enough that there is no way to do everything this game has to offer in a short time span. Today, I am still working on 100 percenting my first character, over 20 days actual /played on it, and I am still not done. 7200 achievement points, full crafting and the like, still more to do yet (i might even try fishing)

UI/Interface/Controls/Bank/Inventory - 5/10
- The UI is glitchy and has been plagued with bugs since Beta. The ALT key being the menu key has always irked me, otherwise the controls themselves are standard fare, nothing amazing, nothing terrible. The interface can be quite annoying and is overly simplistic (even with addons you never quite get a feel for your characters' "real" stats without getting out a calculator and doing a ton of self testing). With all of the crafting materials needed in this game, only 8 character slots, limited scale on inventory and bank space gated by extremely high gold costs to upgrade, you really missed it on inventory management. I can spend an hour a day sorting out the days loot/decon/crafting mats/sales/purchases/etc for my three primary toons. You need to double inventory space (at least in the shared bank) by default at a bare minimum. With the upcoming additions/changes to provisioning and spellcrafting the problem is going to intensify. Stocking crafting mats for just one type of equipment can take up 20+ inventory slots (and thats only if you intend to craft max level gear, it can be more like 40 if you want to carry the raws and refines of each level). Please put some TLC into this in the near future, it has been a thorn in the side of many players for a long time.

Guilds/Grouping/Social/Marketplace - 6/10
- Until you added the guild vendors in a recent patch, this was a 3/10. Big improvement, but more can be done. Like the UI category, the guild interfaces are still buggy/difficult to use easily, the guild store options are still plagued with sort/search bugs, and the market system in general makes buying/selling more of a hassle than it needs to be. I have to take time away from playing the game to play another game called "ESO buy and sell in zone chat or guild stores across the world". I can typically make more money in a more timely fashion by just grinding a spawn and vendoring loot. That being said, a global marketplace may not be the way to go, but a regional one (all of Aldmeri Dominion territory-wide) instead of gating it behind guilds may be a step in the right direction. This brings us back to guilds and other social functions. There are no real channels for communication to meet people besides zone/say (which are usually littered with market chatter), the grouping tool for dungeons/trials is an utter joke that no one ever uses anymore (the blind adding probably has something to do with this). Make more of an effort to make it easier and more user friendly to find groups of people doing the same thing with less legwork and this problem vanishes quickly.

Player advancement/balance/respec/leveling - 4/10
- As said before, the veteran grind is the worst part about this game, bar none. You take the same thing you already did (level to 50), and do it all over again twice, then you add four more veteran levels within six months of launch and youve turned the game into nearly a korean grinder. It breaks immersion of the main story, slows progression to a crawl, and adds what feels like arbitrary time sinks to even the simplest thing (making your character more powerful/better gear). A casual player can level a character 1-50 in about a week-10 days. That same player will spend the next 2 months in the vet system. For one character. Just one. I know the Champion system is coming, but stop increasing the level cap before then, just stop it now. Also, no new crafting mats/tiers/no new titles/costumes, etc. Why not? And lets not forget if you make a mistake in your build and find out its not as viable as you thought, youre going to be out 10k gold or worse to respec it (ill grant that you made a respec for just morphs recently, but we still lack a single morph or single skill line option). I dont know about you, but fully reassigning 250 skill points is not my idea of a good time if I just wanted to drop woodworking for example. Youve been making progress, good progress, on class abilities/powers/skill balance lately, but more needs done. If you truly want this game to be "play how you want" then any build should be useful (if not downright viable) in any form of content, it should never just be about max DPS or max HPS or max CC, etc.

Player vs Player (PvP) combat - Cyrodiil/General Performance/Stability - 2/10
- You promised us huge epic battles. We got that, but we also got massive performance issues, ongoing bugs, ongoing exploits, ongoing abuse of mechanics, ongoing stability problems. One look at your Alliance War subforum will tell you the story of how bad the PvP is in this game (at least right now). We have buff servers, dead servers, a server with the whole playerbase fighting at one location crashing it and resetting scrolls, a non vet campaign with level 10 players fighting against vet rank 5 NPCs, more former emperors than China ever had, and very little hope for our future. All we want is balanced populations, healthy but not overpopulated campaigns in a setting that does not lag us to the point of client crashing, that delivers good fights, that isnt infested with bugs and exploits and cheats that go unpunished (one of your GM's called a known exploit "skilled playing"... what the hell). We want an Arena for 4v4v4 or something similar, we want more than just blob vs blob crash to desktop every 20 minutes, if the server can even handle it. I bought this game for the PvP, I am finding it hard to justify continuing to purchase subscriptions at the rate I am losing interest in Cyrodiil. Its becoming torture vs fun.

Bugs/Bug reporting/Customer Service/Issue Resolution - 3/10
- When you actually get help it is usually good (every CSR I have spoken to has been friendly, helpful, and pleasant, they alone are the reason you even got 3 points), but you often have to wait massive amounts of time. In some cases (like bugs or performance related issues), you have to wait weeks or months for a fix, while CS tries to calm you down and make you laugh. The problem is, I want things fixed, fixed, fixed. From the billing issue fiasco at launch, to the disappearing collectors edition rewards, to the player reports, to the bot reports, to the dupe bug that threw the economy out of whack, your response time generally has been utterly atrocious/underwhelming. Yeah you got rid of the botters, a month after launch. Which I guess is pretty good all things considered, but you never really got rid of the problems that resulted from the dupe bug or the broken vet dungeon exploits. I wont go too deeply into details, but some things in the game economy are priced far less than they should be, to this very day, because of those issues back then. Waiting three weeks to fix a game crippling FPS bug that lost half of your PvP playerbase is the shining example of how inept your problem resolution department is. This is the kind of thing that should have been worked on 24/7, hotfixed every hour until it was solved, not waited on and sat on for "developmental cycle time." You lost a lot of trust from me and from other players like me with that failure. Its still not 100 percent fixed btw, thought you might want to know. Also your GM's seem to not know how to kick/ban players that break in game rules. Seriously, we see the same offenders day after day after day after day, with the same reports sent, day after day after day, and they are still there. Why?

The console port - 1/10
This gets its own category, you pushed it back six months, some people are still waiting in preorder, and there is still no date for its launch. No communication since you said it was delayed (the original launch date was supposed to be around the same month as live launch). I gotta be honest here Zenimax, people are pissed off about this, have been for a while. When it comes to taking our money you seem okay with that, but we arent as patient with these things as you might think. We paid for a service as yet unrendered, and it is becoming tedious. Even a little update would suffice.

Developer/Player relations - 2/10
- Gina and Jessica are great gals, and they work pretty hard on the forums, but that is all we ever get. Beyond the occasional forum mod locking a thread or enforcing forum rules, we never get any direct developer communication, and the communication we do get is lacking in details (I know it isnt the community managers fault, they can only say what they are told they can say), but you guys need to get in here and interact and really get a feel of what is going on. YOU ARE LOSING YOUR PLAYERBASE ZOS. This by itself is the one greatest resource you have to improving our trust and faith in you. We get promised so much, told so much is fixed, and then its not, or its pushed back, or its broken worse, and you never say a word. I dont mean reddit either, you should be here on these very forums you used to talk to us every day on back in beta, communicating what is going on today, what issues you are working on, how we can help you in whatever way we can, and just feeling like it is a community/developer relationship we can get into the mix with. I understand you might feel the forums a little hostile, but if nothing else, they are hostile because you havent talked to us since Beta, and we are always in the dark, waiting, and waiting, and waiting, and waiting, on things you promise or say youre doing, but then do something else, break it worse, etc. Talk to us, ZOS, and not just through Gina and Jessica, get your leads in here once a week for a sitdown for a couple of hours or something.

Value of Service - 4/10
- This game has a cost of 60 USD for the software, and 15USD/mo for subscription. This game is, frankly, not worth half of that in its present state. There are free to play MMOs in better shape than this game, there are Pay to Play MMOs in MUCH better shape than this game. The only saving grace this game has is that its an Elder Scrolls game and the brand loyalty and love for the franchise, the potential of the game itself, has such promise, if only you would harness that, reread this entire post, and really get a feel for that. Make me feel like I should be THROWING 15 dollars a month at you, instead of sitting thinking "eh, maybe I should unsub, this isnt worth it anymore" every month.

Total Rating - 46/100, one of the lowest ratings I have ever given, and the lowest I have ever given for a game I put real money into. You have potential Zenimax, your players want to love your game, we do, we WANT YOU TO SUCCEED, please hear these words, take them to heart, and wow us. Show us you mean it. Your subscriptions may very well depend on it.

Sincerely,

Rylana, 20 year MMO veteran and Sanguine Beta tester, lover of the TES franchise since it began.