I've played dcuo, neverwinter and some mobile mmos, but eso is the best i've ever played. pve is amazing, i've learnt so much mmo slang in eso, the music is also amazing.

pvp is fun and it requires strategy and coordination, you choose who you want to be, you could be an assassin, knight, warmage etc. In the end, it's all about teamwork, that's what makes eso pvp fun.

Balance is not that great though, from stamina having better sets then magicka or tanks/dps who can take so much damage and yet still deal alot of damage, many things are breaking balance, but i'm sure @Wrobel will achieve balance next year.

Best MMO and the only i play

ESO used to be my favorite MMORPG, until they announced the introductiion of the crown crates.

Only played two MMO's.

1.GW2 (still play)
2.Obviously, Elder Scrolls Online.

Well, considering this is the second I've ever played, I'd even go as far as saying it's in the top two! But seriously, I only played D&D Online for a month or two, and it was ok, but very different from the ES solo games I was accustomed to so it didn't thrill me. But I'm definitely hooked on ESO.

At this point in time ESO is the only MMO worth playing despite all it's flaws, there have been some other games in the past I have like better and played them or years, hoping to do the same here, but the cheating that is allowed to go on in ESO is really starting to kill this game for me and my friends.

I am old enough to remember when there were no Personal Computers, and a UNIVAC 120 Made by Remington/Rand took up almost a room by it's self, and watching games grow through the years from simple text base to stick figures on a monochrome screen to the awesome games we have today and they at still evolving.

ESO: Number Two Never Looked Better

In the modern MMO genre (i.e., not counting MUDs, MUSHes, multiplayer FPSs, etc.), aside from ESO, I've played Asheron's Call 2, Star Wars Galaxies, Lord of the Rings Online, EVE and Guild Wars 2.

When the Guild Wars 2 Beta Weekend Events came out in the summer of 2012, I was still plugging away in LotRO after getting bored of EVE (PVE to PVP, yo). I was interested in GW2 because it focuses on bringing players together without forcing them to group or punishing them for playing solo if they prefer. It was during that very first BWE that I realized I had finally found the best MMO for me, and it has remained my favorite game ever since.

ESO has a newer engine, first-rate art and sound, great writing, beautiful maps, Elder Scrolls lore (I've played Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim and loved them) and a combat system without autoattacks that rewards players for approaching warfare as an art form. It is, in my opinion, the very best Elder Scrolls game so far.

Unfortunately, it suffers from a single-player zero-sum design mentality which dictates that players must compete for everything in the open world: kills, resource nodes, even quest items. The result is an open world which is most enjoyable when no other players are around, and where the most logical thing to do upon seeing another player is to run the other way.

On The Turning Away

In ESO, as you add more players what you end up with is a barren, farmed-out wasteland offering nothing to do but wait around a ridiculously long time for respawns or move on to the next farmed-out wasteland. It's as exciting as chasing the fleeting banner of the Ante-Inferno -- but with standing around instead of chasing. And no banner.

ESO is a game in which friendliness is punished. Not a good design.

Contrast that to Guild Wars 2, where spawn rates and difficulty scale to the number of players present, and you never have to fight other players for resources or quest objectives. In GW2, the more players, the better it gets.

GW2 is a game in which friendliness is rewarded. Best. Design. Ever.

GW2 has also had level scaling from the start, meaning you were never consigned to an "End-Game Ghetto" when you leveled up. You could always go back to any zone, even starter zones, play there if you wanted, still get good loot and still enjoy the camaraderie of playing alongside others without having to race them to nodes or objectives.

ESO is now adding this with One Tamriel, which scales everyone up to allow essentially the same thing, but goes a step farther to allow lower-level players to play higher-level content, which is something GW2's level scaling doesn't do (it's just downscaling). This is a brilliant move and in one stroke eliminates a lot of the problems that came with the unimaginative, crusty old MMO mechanics ESO launched with.

Meanwhile, GW2 has been suffering from a long content drought which itself is a lingering effect of an ill-fated "living world" model that generated an entire year of one-shot events that can no longer be played, leaving nothing more to show than some now-unobtainable swag, events you can only see on YouTube and a bunch of smoking craters. Not a good design.

So for now, ESO is at an advantage, and it's where I'm spending my MMO time these days.

The Road Ahead

However, in the long-term, ESO lacks repeatable content in the open world. Once you finish all the quests, bosses and dolmens in a zone, that zone is "done" and doesn't offer any reasons to return. Thus the end result still becomes an end-game ghetto, just one with softer edges. Due to its repeatable dynamic event structure in every zone, GW2 has the advantage in the long-term. Even if repeatable content becomes boring, it can at least be replayed, whereas one-shot content doesn't even have that going for it.

One Tamriel is a huge step forward for ESO and creates a strong foundation for future content. When I heard it was coming, it gave me much-needed hope for the game's direction. But ESO (the game, not the players) is still unfriendly and needs to shed its single-player skin if it is to truly succeed as an MMO.

Do These Things...

1. Eliminate unfriendly PVE mechanics like competitive resource nodes and quest objectives, and scale spawn rates so it's not possible to walk through empty delves or other areas just because a single player walked through them ahead of you. The game does appear to scale spawn rates to some extent already, but it clearly needs adjustment. Overall, redesign ESO to be more enjoyable, not less, when more players are present. Reward spontaneous cooperation. Please the crowds.

2. Convert existing one-shot content to repeatable content and add more repeatable content to open world zones. Add dynamic events that change based on what players do. Give players a reason to go back and use existing maps more efficiently. Breathe life into a lifeless world. Keep us coming back for more.

...and ESO may finally become my favorite MMO.

If not, hey, Number Two still isn't shabby, but I know ESO has the potential to be Number One.

I would love to see that happen.

Played a lot of mmorpgs over the past 15+ years . so which is the best is hard to decide they all have been good in different ways.
I am really enjoying ESO it is the best I found lately although on a topical note the recent news concerning the introduction of crown crates leaves me very apprehensive of its future and any future investment from me.

I do know every mmo I have played over the previous 5 years I have enjoyed but also have ended up leaving due to the publishers introducing similar things , cash shop RNG crates, so at moment I am playing it day by day and waiting to see how it turns out.
Seen these box's and other similar cash income methods ruin too many games, sadly these revenue income methods seem to be coming the 'norm' in western published games.

To be honest I still play some games on their original asian servers, I live in the UK and surprisingly i find most have far better servers, better ping etc, the only down side is the language barrier, some of these games are p2w, but that's clear from the start and some are grind to win, but I know were I stand and I like that.

It hard to find a game from western publisher that does not have gamble, cash shop RNG systems in it these days and with ESO I thought I had found one, until the crown crate announcement.

So in short I do like ESO it is a great game, but from experience of so many other games I can foresee greed for easy monetary income drastically changing the game in a bad way.

lordrichter wrote: »

1. For me, I like that other players can change what I encounter in the game when I come across something. The other players should impact the game. If they kill a monster, I should not need to kill that monster. If they pick a plant, I should not be able to pick that plant. That is MMO. To do what you suggest in #1 is placing too much "solo play" into the game by creating a pocket of "ME" that surrounds me everywhere I go. If I want a pocket of "ME", I can easily play games like Fallout 4 or Skyrim, where I am the only Important in the world and everything and everyone recognizes it.

Ironically, a "pocket of me" is what ESO already offers. In ESO's open world, other players are competitors rather than allies, because there's only so much to go around. In a zero-sum world, you're better off alone.

That's why ESO cannot be my favorite MMO, and I'd wager that's also true of all the players I see running away from other players everywhere I go.

If you want to see the opposite of a "pocket of me", play Guild Wars 2, where everything I suggested has been that way for four years, and where players playing together is the norm rather than the exception.

Compared to that style of play, ESO is truly "the soulless one".

WoW's last two expacs ruined their game.

GW2 is okay but I dislike the diminishing returns.

ESO feels much more rewarding when I play it now. It will be perfect for me with OneTamriel.

The only thing missing is Spellcrafting.

lordrichter wrote: »

Competition is not a pocket of "ME". The "ME" mentality expects that when you get somewhere, there is always something there for you because you are Important. You are the Player. If Player goes to the store to buy bread, there will always be bread there. In life, someone else can buy the last loaf of bread before Player gets there. This is how an MMO should operate, at the core. This is how ESO needs to work, at the core.

I used to think the same way before I discovered there was something better. MMOs don't have to be like "life", and asserting as much doesn't carry any weight other than that of one player's opinion. It's not a rule.

We can disagree on whether MMOs should be zero-sum games, and that's fine. But zero-sum games don't scale well, which is a very real problem for ESO that's about to get a lot more real when One Tamriel puts more players in the same zero-sum space.

When a store runs out of bread, people go to a different store. When a game runs out of fun, people go to a different game.

That's life.

jedtb16_ESO wrote: »

UltimaJoe777 wrote: »

jedtb16_ESO wrote: »

been playing games online since the early '80's

this has it all....

a bit more polish needed, sure.

I don't think the internet was around back then... In fact, computers were in their more primitive form back then lol

troll?

the net started around '69

Yeah but it wasn't available to the general public. I'd love to see someone try and hook a Spectrum 48k and a tape player to the net...good luck with that :P

Majic wrote: »

lordrichter wrote: »

1. For me, I like that other players can change what I encounter in the game when I come across something. The other players should impact the game. If they kill a monster, I should not need to kill that monster. If they pick a plant, I should not be able to pick that plant. That is MMO. To do what you suggest in #1 is placing too much "solo play" into the game by creating a pocket of "ME" that surrounds me everywhere I go. If I want a pocket of "ME", I can easily play games like Fallout 4 or Skyrim, where I am the only Important in the world and everything and everyone recognizes it.

Ironically, a "pocket of me" is what ESO already offers. In ESO's open world, other players are competitors rather than allies, because there's only so much to go around. In a zero-sum world, you're better off alone.

That's why ESO cannot be my favorite MMO, and I'd wager that's also true of all the players I see running away from other players everywhere I go.

If you want to see the opposite of a "pocket of me", play Guild Wars 2, where everything I suggested has been that way for four years, and where players playing together is the norm rather than the exception.

Compared to that style of play, ESO is truly "the soulless one".

the problem with GW@ is and will always will be. the lack of anything meaningful combat . it is Zerg based game play reliant on nothing but you and your abilities. its why ESO failed miserably in this department as well. they tried a hybridization of GW2 combat. its fine for the front end of intruduction to MMO's but the game mechanics and roles have to evolve. Gw2 end game is boss zerging and dungeons are almost as bad

Other than ESO I played only WoW as an MMO and I would choose ESO over WoW a hundred times
I guess it is the lore, and the fact that I played other elder scrolls games that makes ESO my favorite game now