kieso wrote: »

Because they all suck big donkey balls except for GW2, and I just got a bit bored of that game.

Rezzy64 wrote: »

(TL;DR)Some Game History about me:

Most of the MMO's I used to play (Ignoring my short play through of WoW) were all "Free to Play" MMO's. I played most of them without having to spend much money on "Cash Shop" content and had multiple successful characters and guilds despite playing them in fairly badly maintained games. I've always been a player that tries to make the best with what I got. So despite the large amount of bad things I had to deal with as a F2P gamer, I generally enjoyed what was presented to me in the games and did not get frustrated with much. My mentality at the time being, "Well if I wanted to complain about the quality of the game, I would first need to be paying for the service that I'm complaining about."

Soon my "F2P" games changed way too much, most of the changes the games went through were small content changes here and there, just the normal stuff that just about any MMO would do, but by strange coincidence (almost too coincidental if you ask me) the F2P games I enjoyed for a pretty long time took on incredibly large changes. Rebuilding every class from the ground up, scrapping popular maps in order to put out level efficient ones, applying more and more focus on the usage of the Cash Shop, creating classes that were merely gimmicks. It got really tiring. I slowly dropped every MMO I was playing and when my favorite one which was also the last one I was playing finally applied the patch that made all my well established characters into completely different play styles, I found myself unable to play any of the classes I once enjoyed. They literally found a way to make the game unplayable for me. So I stopped playing MMO's for about half a year.

Being invited to ESO beta was like opening up a whole new world to me. I'm a pretty intense fan of the Elder Scrolls games since "Morrowind", and I was craving a new MMO to sink my teeth into. However the thing that attracted me to most of the MMO's I played was aesthetic and cosmetic conditions. I cared very heavily about how my character looked. How powerful a piece of armor or weapon was not as important to me as looking good. In fact a couple of characters I played in other MMO's were well known for their deceiving appearance, meaning that they're armor and weapons were often low quality, but I chose them because of how they looked. I often made my characters much more powerful in ways that were not visually apparent, so it was quite common for me to walk onto a map and be laughed at because of my gear appearing low level but then those same players would often be surprised and even chased off of the map because my characters were in fact not weak at all.
The moment I started playing the ESO beta, the first thing that made me incredibly excited was finding out I could make incredibly powerful armor and also customizing the appearance of the armor into any fashion, mixing and matching was a beautiful thing that I had never seen before in an MMO. Most MMO's I played before ESO involved class dictated armor. If you were a Rogue, you wore Rogue armor, if you were a Warrior you wore Warrior armor. ESO said to hell with that, and that was a beautiful thing for them to do.

ESO allows me to do everything I used to love about my older MMO's but ESO does most of those things better. My other MMO's felt like games, but ESO feels like a world. There are locations that I go to because... I just like them. Yes I am that Veteran Rank 3 player running around in "Stros M'kai" with the level 1-5 players, because it's a beautiful area. Sometimes when I'm riding my horse down a road in "Auridon" I will tilt my camera angle up so that I can view the landscape and see the moons travel across the sky.
My characters that I've built (three so far) are all relatively unique. I don't follow builds or well known skill combos, I just look over the skills and come up with a build based on what I personally think would work. So far that's actually working for me. The "Play your Way" theme is no joke, the first character I built with out any help is quite competent in higher level activities. I mean I'll admit, participating in Beta gave me a taste of what to expect ahead of time, and coming up with my first character's build on a skill calculator also gave me a slight edge to figure out what would work together efficiently skill wise, but still when I build my characters, I do what ever I feel like and to hell with anybody's opinion. ESO is the only MMO that has ever given me the ability to do that and honestly it's quite liberating compared to the MMO's I used to play.

The other thing that makes this game a must play for me, that actually has nothing to do with the game play specifically, my family plays ESO. I'm not joking, after beta closed and the game was released, my sister started playing the game, her boyfriend and close friends started playing it, my sister had this idea to build a huge family guild and began to convince my father, my stepmother, and myself to play the game. My Stepmother started playing it and she has become absolutely obsessed with the game (in a good way lol), and then about a month or two after my stepmother started playing I began to play as well (mostly because she was playing it every day and I was really feeling the pressure to play the game since she came to me with every question she had about the game because my sister is harder to contact). Now we're trying to get my father to hop onto the game, and we are so close to getting him to start playing the game, but he's a very stubborn person, but I know he'll pick the game up pretty soon, he's feeling a lot of the pressure I did before. So I do play this game because it has (no joke) become a family activity for us. I'm very serious when I say that ESO has brought my stepmother and I closer together, I've learned so much about her recently just because I play alongside her in ESO.

The last thing I want to say is that, this game is improving. I believe in this game, everything it has currently is better than any MMO I've ever played before, it has so much room to expand and do great things, and I want to be here to see where it goes (even if that is a swan dive straight into the asphalt). The player base for this game is wonderful as well. Part of playing so many F2P games is learning to ignore immature players, it's not an option, it's a requirement. ESO though has such a clean player base, it's not perfect but who cares when the majority of people on the game just want to enjoy the game like everyone else and use the game to relax/escape rather than to instigate/troll.
I can get over the down sides of this game pretty easily, because I believe in the concept that the game has to improve because if not it will just fail. I'll report bugs, minor annoyances, and take sides on issues such as ChP debacle, but there's no reason for me to get frustrated over such things, because the anger is not going to change those problems. What will change those problems is time and money, otherwise the game will just fail and I'll move on to something else.
Though the positives and enjoyment that I get from this game currently out weigh the negatives to me, so I'll play away until they do something really bad which I doubt will happen.

phermitgb wrote: »

why do I play ESO? honestly...

because it's come the closest, mechanically and conceptually, to my perfect MMO. Mind you, ESO is NOWHERE NEAR perfect, as far as I'm concerned - it's seriously lacking a few key features (more tools for player-designed entertainment, customizable housing, larger regions, better structure for grouping)...but it's still closer to fulfilling all the key features I've always been looking for in a fantasy MMO than any other.

WOW was fun, but too cartoony, too flippant, and the people were AWFUL for the most part (there are always some good guys around WOW, but pound for pound, they were vastly outnumbered by the dregs of humanity)

I *LOVED* city of heroes - but it was superhero (not fantasy), and the story wasn't particularly gripping. Also, it doesn't exist anymore

LOTRO - I *love* this game, partly for the atmosphere, a lot for the environments (LOTRO is nothing short of GARGANTUAN in scope), but mostly for the people. The community of LOTRO is by far and away the best bunch of people I've ever met online

sadly, the game itself is pretty boring, so, again, it scores high on a couple of points, but really, moment-to-moment gameplay, and fighting especially, are pretty much a drag

Guild Wars 2 - guild wars 2 came pretty close to a nearly perfect MMO - an astonishing mix of really vivid fantasy environments (a really compellingly designed fantasy world is HUGELY important in an MMO for me), a really smooth movement interface (making an MMO where you can have working jumping-puzzle games is something I've only seen work in GW2), decent graphics overall, and a host of really nice anti-grind features (privately instanced resource nodes, a separate bank solely for crafting mats, xp gains from almost everything)

but combat was just a BIT too fast - I really need about another half-second of response time - GW2 combat was fast and furious, but a little unsatisfying, because it took just a hair too long to realize what was happening, pick your response, and activate it

but mostly, GW2 lost me for bunny-gnomes with auto-turrets. Good lord but I hate Asuran Engineers. I hate engineers in general (I DETEST magi-tech), I hate cutesy animal characters, I bear a long lasting hatred of gnomes in almost every fantasy genre ever made...and somehow, GW2 took 3 of the things I hate most in this world, and made it an integral part of their world. Damn you GW2!!!

NEVERWINTER - mechanically, nearly perfect to play. Fighting was visceral, but just a bit longer, long enough for me to react while still feeling very actiony. Sadly, most of the rest of the game was crap. The dungeons were sad, the environments were interesting looking but very tiny feeling, the classes were painfully limited, the visuals for characters were sub-par (although the environments were reasonably pretty), and the stink of Perfect World was all over it (I also play Star Trek Online and while a tolerably fun game as a distraction, the f2p cash-shop has basically consumed most of the game content).

then comes ESO - a world I'm familiar with and have always enjoyed. *reasonably* well realized. Excellent visual style, *some* gorgeously realized fantasy environments (Alikr, morrowind, oblivion - some other regions were a little disappointingly mundane forests, but still), nice graphics (still not as smooth as I'd like - I'm still having issues with my gtx 780 underperforming ONLY with ESO which is driving me a little nuts), a really engaging single-player story experience, and a near perfect pace for combat - plenty of actiony things to do, but enough time to really revel in what you just did AND react to what's about to come in

All in all, ESO has managed to hit most of the marks I've been looking for in a fantasy MMO, while managing to avoid making any unforgivable mistakes. It's still lacking in a lot of areas, but as long as we don't add gnomes, guns, or unforgivably intrusive cash-shops, and as long as we don't *** out game design to store gimmick items, I've got a standing sub and I can come back and enjoy ESO in whatever amounts I like.

thanks for asking - dunno if anyone will read this far, but it's a slow day at work...