Easy to catch up with existing players as the existing ones are capped if they have been playing for a long time. gives newer players and infrequent players a chance to make ground.

There is no gap between subscribed players and non-subscribed players. Subscribed ones do have some perks but mostly are superficial.

As for number of players, who knows but zones are thriving with activity, particularly the hub cities.

Yes!! Do it. I think the game become more alive since One Tamriel coz everyone can play together.

You more or less need DLC which can be easily acquired when buying them all in a pack but whether it's worth starting now? I can't recommend it as they're starting to monetize from their costumers in more and more unscrupulous ways.

It also requires a lot of time investment. Crafting / researching gear must surely take about a year before you can do anything worthwhile with it. Gearing up in general can be complicated without any help because it requires you to already have good gear when trying to farm for it. PvP is also in an unacceptable state currently because it's either use proc sets or die.

It's a good game regardless of what I said but the future looks rather glum.

If you don't already own the game, then get the Gold edition. The game is worth it. From there you can decide to get the one DLC that isn't included or to subscribe.

PvP is at its worst with the current patch imo.
But there is no real PvP alternative for now, so yeah.

I played on PC from launch and quit little over a year ago, and just picked up from scratch on PS4.

The short version of the answer to your question: No, not really.

Catching up levels isn't that difficult, you get an enlightenment catch-up bonus and if you know the basics of the game you can be a lot more efficient than most newbies and quickly grind up. There's level scaling all across Tamriel now, so you can take your character to the best grinding spots right from character creation. You can also do the main quest in one go now, giving you heaps of skill points right in the beginning.

The issue is the community first and foremost, and the balancing issues / bugs if you are into PVP. The solo content is super duper easy, as in SUPER easy, so the fun lies in group content. However by now most players have a lot of Champion Points (aka levels), and they will flat out kick you from their dungeoning group with no warning simply due to your low level. ZOS introduced scaling so that low-levels can play alongside high-levels, but it seems like a lot of high-level players have a lot of difficulty wrapping their heads around this. Even if the dungeon is super easy and you have cleared it a million times before, max levels will kick you before you even get started. People look a lot at the number next to the character and somehow think it is indicative of how good you are at playing the game, and deem you a burden without you even getting a chance to prove the contrary.

So that means you'll have to grind up doing super easy and repetitive open-world PVE until you reach enough champion points for people to let you be in their group, but then you won't know the dungeon mechanics because you haven't had the chance to try them before and you won't have all the neat powerful gear that you only get from completing the dungeon, and your group mates will then complain that you perform worse than them. It's an uphill struggle, it's unfun and generally confirm in every way how humanity sucks, even more so in MMO-space. If you know a group of nice players already or join a mature PVE guild, you can bypass this though.

In PVP you'll find that you will get auto-killed by hats, rings and other pieces of clothing, as well as a heavy dose of lag and bugs that have been there since launch, completely unaddressed. On EU PS4 I'm pretty sure all the good/organized players have left already, because strategy is completely nonexistent. People will fight for 5 hours straight defending an outpost not even connected to your keeps and not defending emp, while the enemy meanwhile takes all your keeps and your scrolls. People don't resurrect, even though Soul Gems used for resurrection are easier to come by than ever and are nowhere near in short supply. In two months of playing, resurrecting everything I see (it gives XP and Alliance Points as well as helps your assault/defense a lot), I have 600 filled grand soul gems, so I guess other players have in the thousands - and still don't resurrect even though it's one push on a button. Group leaders will take their groups half-way across the map to perform a siege with just a single meatbag catapult because no-one, including leaders, can be bothered, which in turn means that the enemy has an unlimited number of respawns and you will eventually die horribly. If you find yourself being that one guy in the group actually performing the siege, no one will protect you while you are sieging as your team mates are off aggroing various NPC's, so you'll be the first to get slashed from stealth while the enemy is mounting a counter-siege. Obviously again no one will resurrect you but just stare at your dead corpse and the one siege machine on the battlefield before slowly realising what's about to happen. Even when you are initially deploying your siege machine, you know exactly how it is going to play out, but someone has to operate a siege machine otherwise the siege is 100 percent certain to fail.

You'll find that your faction might have the smallest online population, and STILL group leaders take their groups to go push both enemy factions at the same time, leading to your faction getting completely roflstomped. At that point the dudes responsible log off, leaving the rest to receive the beating from angering two enemies that are stronger than you, when ideally they should be fighting each other. You'll get ganked by people sitting in stealth waiting for hours to jump someone with no chance of self-defense, while you ride your painfully slow horse across the map for what seems like an eternity. You'll get rolled over by zergs of enemy players, who will then proceed to teabag you after a 20 v 1. You'll get hit by massive lag and fps drops so heavy that the game feels and plays like a slide show, and people will exploit various bugs so you don't get a visual cue to what is happening, and thus can't counter. Every bug and unbalanced skill or piece of gear is exploited to its fullest, at all times, and ZOS did very little to address some of the issues, and instead just added more for who knows what reason. PVP is a race to the bottom where you are now pigeon-holed into being scum to be successful. When people get killed by something clearly bugged and unbalanced, they instantly go and duplicate the setup, and that seems to be ZOS' idea of balancing: If everyone is using the same totally broken stuff, then that's fair and balanced. There are tell-tales of a mysterious bug-fixing patch on the horizon, I want to see it before I believe it.

You really have to be a certain kind of masochist to enjoy this game. That being said, there are quite a few of us still, heh.

The DLC will help you greatly, there's access to more dungeons, resources and also crafting stations with useful gear sets. I think you might be better off just buying the base game rather than the Gold Edition (I bought Gold, but kinda regret), and then when you've done it/feel bored with it/feel character progression is too slow, pick up a month of ESO plus - you'll get access to all the DLC and get some minor boosts to XP, but it isn't an absolute necessity. That way you haven't committed yourself to the game as much financially. Plus you get a monthly allowance of a special ESO currency for being an ESO plus member, which you can use to save up and purchase select DLC (some DLC is more long-term useful than others) and quit your subscription. Wrothgar is useful for open world questing and crafting, and Imperial City is a really nice blend of PVP and PVE with great rewards, loss-on-death mechanics and the constant risk of hostile players and powerful roaming NPC bosses adding a lot of suspense. You get a mount with the Gold Edition, which is nice, but if you get really invested in the game, you might quickly find that specific horse extremely bland and buy another mount. Generic horses can also be bought for gold earned in-game.

I hope this slightly sarcastic and overly pessimistic wall of text is useful, otherwise the short version is "no, not really worth it"

ceviceb17_ESO wrote: »

I've played ESO during the beta testing, liked it but due RL problems i had to stop before it releases.

So now i was looking further to it again. 2 years went by is ESO still worth for a newbie or i shall look further for a better online game?


How deep is the gap between paying players vs free?
How many players are actually playing?
Any chances i can catch up with high level players if i start now?


thanks in advance

if your just starting you will enjoy your time and will keep you busy and obbsessed for months. once your capped and try to dive into the deep end youll bump your head due to the shallowness of end game and meta builds.. you will get your moneys worth though. just dont look at it as game you will play consistently for years and become part of a long lasting community. guilds have heavy churn. and the end game guilds are full of elitist's with no social skills.

DannyLV702 wrote: »

I say give it a try without letting the forums influence you. We're all complaining but at the same time, we're all still here. I'm mainly a pvp player and still love this game a lot even though it has its downsides.

irony...

he asks the forums for advice and you tell him to ignore the forums, but still give him advice on what to do

User_Name wrote: »

..

thanks for the long post mate. I kinda was about to buy the gold version (gonna be cheaper than subs) but the more i read the more i feel like im gonna regret it..

yet i cant find something a good pvp game no matter how i try...hopefully this milking cow will drain soon so they can start work on a new good tes..

again thanks

It will take you months and months to get to CP cap but. So there is a huge divide between new and top level players.

Still worth it but.

KingYogi415 wrote: »

The proc set, heavy armor meta actually makes it easyer for new players to get into pvp. This and combination of the rising CP playerbase leaves old time pvpers reminiscent of a time when they could 1vx with ease without things like being on equal ground with cp and OP sets geting in the way.

Pretty sure a lot of the old time PvPers are reminiscent of around patch 1.5, before CP was even a thing.