GaldorP wrote: »

Short version: I see no point in subscribing to an "MMOG" that revolves around playing another block of one-time completion solo quests of about 10-15 hours once every 3 months.

Long version: (Don't click if you can't stay long rants that reek of negativity)

1- Barely any changes or improvements to Cyrodiil PvP since launch. Performance actually only got worse after launch. Keep and resource capture mechanics are poorly designed compared to other Mass Multiplayer Online PvP games with capturable bases or districts.

2- The last two DLCs focused on telling solo story quests but aren't good at it (or at least not nearly as good as Orsinium was):
TG and DB were mostly 2 blocks of 10-15 hour solo quests with a new gimmick that had no impact whatsoever on PvP, group dungeons, or trials (I'm talking about the Thieves Guild Skill line passives which were an unnecessary addition to the Legerdemain skill line released over half a year too late and the "press x to brutally murder an NPC" feature from DB which is the opposite of good gameplay and also borders on the glorification of violence [there is no point in murdering people brutally; if you want to be an effective assassin you'd do it silently and unnoticed] and could/should maybe get the game on an index in certain European countries [games like Hitman, etc. were illegal in some countries])?
The new zones from TG and DB are smaller than Khenarthi's Roost.
Story in TG is focused on characters that we've never met before in the game and will probably not meet again after the 10-15 hours of TG quests. It also falls apart of you think about it, and - personally - what I expected from a "Thieves Guild" wasn't Disney-like family friendly content where every single member of the guild tells you a long story about their tragic past. I expected stories about thieves who steal stuff, get caught, murder each other if they have too, betray each other. They are criminals after all, and not all a happy family of good old friends or newly met friends in some sort of musical. The Orsinium DLC told the story of an entire area, a part of the world. It also had cheesy characters as part of the main story, but with all its side-quests it offered so much more than the TG Update.

3- Some endgame RNG loot mechanics are horrible. The player has too little control over what they get (Maelstrom Weapons and Orsinium Sets; to some extent boss set shoulders).

4- Crafting is too simple and trading with other players is very limited and time-consuming:
Very few rare items that have a market (mostly gold mats and chapters of the latest released motifs). Crafting is not complementary to dropped loot, it can completely replace it and requires no dedication. EVERYONE who's played for a certain amount of time (about 65-75 hours) will have a rank 50 crafter in all professions. Researching traits just requires logging in once every few days and staying with the game for a few months. There's no market for crafted armor (in the time it takes a crafter to make a set piece that crafter could have made more gold farming mats or grinding than the person who ordered that set piece is willing to pay; being a max level crafter is worth nothing 'cause 95% of the server is).
The Guild Store system is a nightmare for buyers who are searching for a rare item (45 minutes or more with the help of addons just to check if one of the main guild traders is selling the item). Any small guild on the server can steal the guild trader of the largest and most active trading guild on the server for a few weeks if they want to (which then leaves the large trading guild with 500 active veteran players without any guild trader for that time).

5- Grouping is only encouraged in fixed 4 or 12 player instances (I'd rather have more open content designed for groups or at least instances that allow for other group sizes but I guess that's a personal preference of mine having playing a lot of MMOGs that aren't WoW; but I think in WoW at least some group instances are a lot more flexible and scale to the number of group members now if I'm not mistaken?) and the group finder tool that's supposed to help you start groups with random other players is broken (that was one of the 2 features announced for DB that I was looking the most forward to: an improved group finding tool).

6- The original game design ideology of the "purified picture" that may not be spoiled by any user interface elements or technical game information (such as damage numbers, for example) still has a negative impact on how the game provides important information/feedback to the player and possibly has a negative impact on performance as well (the sheer amount of visual effects in PvP when every single player in a large scale battle has about 5-10 buff and/or debuffs on them which all need to be displayed as a visual effect on top of all the effects that need to be displayed already when all players use up to 1 AoE skill per second).