I have the opposite feelings on this game than you. I love the fact that not everything is hand fed to me, and I actually have to try and work for items/quests/dungeon completion. I'm so sick of easy MMO's, where I get max level in a week, or have the best gear in a month. I am absolutely in love with ESO, and I'm super excited to see what new content we'll get in the future.

Korah_Eaglecry wrote: »

The way the games PvP feels..It doesnt even feel like your typical MMO PvP.

This is DAoC PvP, which is something GW cloned to huge success. This is typical MMO PvP, but feels uncommon if the only MMOs you've ever played have been WoW and WoW clones.

DJ_Pandatripp wrote: »

I have the opposite feelings on this game than you. I love the fact that not everything is hand fed to me, and I actually have to try and work for items/quests/dungeon completion.

This is what my point is, though. It goes back to the days of MMOs requiring so much of a time investment that they became more important than life, if you wanted to fully enjoy that MMO. Many modern MMOs give you things easier (up to a point - whenever you hit the endgame wall it becomes an old-school grindfest), yes, but it's because most people who play games these days realize they just don't have the time to get that invested in video games anymore. This is why MMOs and RPGs in general have become more pick up/play/reward in 1 hour game sessions than they used to - they wanted to appeal to that wider audience in order to have greater success, and in order to do that they had to give the average person who games a few hours a week (instead of tens of hours) more "fun" value (which is just the reward center firing off, so trigger it more frequently with increased loot drops and leveling rates to keep the average casual gamer giving you money for more) for their time.

I know I might offend some people by saying this, but I want to acknowledge that I too used to be this target audience I'm about to describe, so understand I am labeling myself as well - the only people that can *really* get into a game like this, are people where their RL is so cruel to them that they can somehow justify spending that much time on a video game. Essentially, major rejects and nerds. Which is what all video games used to be tailored to, which is why they used to be so much deeper (because major rejects and nerds have nothing but time to spend escaping their life).

Of which I used to be.

I remember having bad days in school and coming home to RPGs with NPC friends who made me feel special and guildies who needed my help, and feeling okay with life. But it was wrong, because it isn't real. In order to survive, I as a major reject nerd cannot turn to a game to sink their life into, I needed to find a way to deal with the crap hand life had dealt me. Which is something I wished I had figured out sooner, but nobody bothered to tell me.

Escapism is always tempting, but it is always bad, because it is too easy to get caught up in the escape and leave the life that caused us to escape to rot and become worse.

Please understand I am not saying this to anger people, though I understand it may do that - I am just stating that I come from a background similar to what many here had (as far as RPG experience and reasons for RPGs go), and games like this are just...

It isn't that this game is designed poorly, it's that... well. It's the kind of game I would love to be able to responsibly justify to myself playing. Because I could see myself wasting the rest of my life on it, but that is exactly the problem - the investment it demands is too high. It takes itself and its world so seriously, and demands so much of the player as a result, that it just isn't possible to enjoy a game like this "in moderation". It is not designed that way. In that sense, I am not saying it is "bad" because it's broken, but it's "bad" simply because it's bad *for* people. It demands too much for what it does in return.

It's the same reason DnD got a lot of bad rep when it was new. It was so hardcore that it literally consumed and ruined lives. I know this will make me sound like an old man for saying this, but games like this... I would love for them to be able to work out in some way. Because they are beautiful and it would be amazing to have the time to be able to get fully invested in a world that is so different from our own. But now that I'm older and wiser and try something like this out, it shows me how wrong I was in my youth to ever get invested in games like this. It offers nothing of value. It demands far too much, consumes so much time, and gives nothing of real benefit in return. It is just a massive time sink, a lot of what we make out of life is based on how we spend our time, and games like this simply rob people of massive amounts of time, and give them no real-life benefit in return.

It just sets people up for bad outcomes. I wish I had known that when I was younger. It isn't that this game is bad, it's that it has the potential to be so good at what it's trying to do well, that it's bad for people.

And part of me wonders if we'd even be able to explain something like this to a caveman. I think the answer to that is "no", because it's non-essential, it doesn't even improve quality-of-life in any way, it is just a drain on life (which to me explains why some of the weirdest people I have ever "met" in life have been in MMOs, who honestly remind me a lot of some drug addicts I have had to deal with through the course of my career), and gives nothing of value in return.

Take care, kids. "Fun" is tempting, but life is not a playground, and games like this are made by people who are two steps ahead of you, carefully setting bait, hoping you'll continue to pay month after month to waste away in their virtual world and never figure it out.

Its good that ESO is back to the basic's of you have to put a little effort into the game. (I am just reading forums did not play beta but once) So its a fresh start for a lot of old school players that like a challenge.
Giving you the best of everything quickly is not a challenge at all. When you have to think a little get creative with your mind is a good thing, but so is sunlight
I myself have ben I the hardcore gaming world and managed my time very well
still had time to go out with wife, spend time with my family in RL so its all in how you manage your time.

Also, being given levels/loot faster as opposed to something like this where you get it much more slowly is not less of a challenge. It's simply time investment. Getting good at something like "Super Meat Boy" or any fighting game is time investment, but you also need to have precise timing, twitch reflexes, high levels of muscle memory for consistent, flawless execution, etc. etc. Games like this lean more towards time investment than human skill requirements. More downtime between mobs due to increased time on regeneration is not skill, it is time. Slower leveling rates is not skill, it is time. Longer runs between questgiver and quest are is not skill, it is time. More time required to get a high-level piece of loot is not skill, it is time. It feels valuable because of all the time invested, but do not confuse that with skill.

There are also higher latency concerns in MMOs than in other competitive online games (though I do discount CoD here because that game has terrible netcode which negates a lot of the skill factor, think something more like Counter-Strike which is zero-computer assist and is LANable), which means human input requirements can't be placed high enough to be properly challenging, because even 200ms of latency is enough delay to create inhuman error. There is a reason I can eat and play games like this at the same time, they are not "challenging". I may die more in this game than a casual MMO, but that is regardless of eating/drinking at the same time or not - being more "punishing" does not mean it demands more of the player, it just means it makes the mundane take more time to do.

Next to none of this requires a lot of thought, reflexes, consistent execution, or anything like that. It's 99% time investment at best. Saying it is challenging because it takes a long time is like saying sitting on the front porch to watch the grass grow is more challenging than taking 15 minutes to get off your duff and mow it, because it takes longer to wait than to do something.

snowmanflvb14_ESO wrote: »

elder42 wrote: »

Melian wrote: »

It sounds like this is more about your personal issues and prejudices than about this game. No offense...

I wouldn't say these things about "WoW" in its current form or something like "Secret World". It is very much this game.

That is because WoW was designed for the casual player.

Again, that is the core of my point. For some reason "casual" has become synonymous with "a disrespectful person", when in reality "casual" is synonymous with "someone who has other things to do with their life outside of video games, but wants to enjoy video games anyway". The only reason hardcores dislike casuals is because casuals have made most games more rewarding for less time investment, but again, the only people that would sink that many hours into one game for a pinch of reward are people who are not better spending that time in things that provide actual rewards with tangible value for equal or lesser time investments (especially when done in comparison to RPGs - the time it takes to beat a hardcore RPG could teach a person to read, write,and speak a new language - yet most gamers would spend more time each week with the hardcore RPG than in learning the new language, assuming one were engaging in both activities in their life at that time).

The fact that MMOs in particular can be made to suit a casual or a hardcore based on the simple altering of one database entry (ie. increase XP gains by 1000% in a hardcore RPG game, you now have a casual game) shows how non-skill they actually are. If it was skill, then a disabled person would have a more difficult time doing it, but when a "hardcore" game can easily be made "casual" just by taking one number and moving the decimal a few points to the right, it means I could be terminal and succeed at the game whether it was "hardcore" or "casual", because it has a very low level of skill or challenge, it is all about how long it takes for the grass to grow.

100% agree I used to spend 40+ hrs a week on games and I just don't have the time anymore, I consider myself a casual gamer now spending hopefully 10 hrs a week on a game , I love ESO for all its worth such an amazing game, but the leveling is moving so slow, and it's frustrating because it seems like I'm going nowhere in the game

I can certainly understand how it would feel like being very old school to a lot of players. They certainly have removed a bunch of features that newer MMO's have had.

Fortunately they forgot to add in the most hard core feature, level and item loss due to death. EQ and such were absolutely brutal with level loss. And good luck getting your body and items back if you lost them in a hard place.

SirLee wrote: »

I can certainly understand how it would feel like being very old school to a lot of players. They certainly have removed a bunch of features that newer MMO's have had.

Fortunately they forgot to add in the most hard core feature, level and item loss due to death. EQ and such were absolutely brutal with level loss. And good luck getting your body and items back if you lost them in a hard place.

Yes, I remember having to form groups of naked people to do zergfest corpse runs. I do not miss that. Not one bit. But there is definitely a group of people who will read that and go "yeah that should still be in these games, but they were taken out because casuals would not like it". Because somehow that would be "challenging", and not just "a waste of time".

It's too easy; it's too hard. It's too much like other MMO's; it's not enough like other MMO's. It's too hardcore; it's not hardcore enough.

The fact that the game has the general whiners that plague most MMO's confused this badly on what to complain about shows that they're doing something very, very right.

AstroCat wrote: »

Look it's too bad you had a hard time balancing your hobby/life priorities and had escapism issues but don't lump your experience onto everyone else.

I have a career, kid, wife, house, tons of other hobbies, etc and I'm finding ESO a blast. I've been gaming since the 70's as a hobby, a hobby not everything in life, and no D&D didn't ruin my life, sheesh who are you Tom Hanks!?

I have no problem logging in a few hours here and there at night a few times a week, maybe getting in a longer session sometime over the weekend.

I'm finding ESO's immersive gameplay exactly what I am looking for, I'm totally done with the grinding, mind numbing, instant reward goofball mmo's trending today.

For me ESO hits the groove for an mmorpg, and has zero chance of ruining my life in order to have fun with it. It sounds like there is more going on for you up and beyond just ESO. Good luck with your future gaming hobby life decisions.

This to me sounds a lot like people who smoke cigarettes and get angry when someone talks about how they quit smoking because they realized it was bad for them.

Let's just be honest, MMOs are terrible for people.

I am an avid world pvper and I think it's ok the way things are.
You forget there will be many TES fans out there who will just play this because its linked to TES.
Lots of these types of players would not like to be harassed constantly in PVE and thus would quit reducing the money to make a better game for the rest of us.

As for being too old, I disagree many people do not like the way modern MMOs are going, before 'wildstar' for example was generating more positive hype than ESO but now? people mostly see it for what it is, just a regurgitation of all the 'modern' trends that you see in the frontline mmos.
Maybe it was time to take a step back make things harder, more immersive.
That said the game is not that hard it just does not hand everything to you on a silver platter. Which is brilliant.

I'm so glad ESO brought 'the days back' in a way! I thought it would never happen again, and I truely hope they will keep their visions.

Today's world is all about rushing...quick, quick to the end while looking for new things to rush to on the horizon. Getting pretty toys and things that bore or decay quickly ....what new is there to get...consume and consume more...one hardly stops for a moment to really enjoy the moment and connect.

ESO is somethings that catches you and keeps your attention, brings you in the moment ...it is amazing, and you acknowledge that by saying you are 'afraid it will rule your life'. But that is entirely up to you...not something outside of you. If something is so delicious you can't stop eating it you won't blame the food for giving you the belly ache. You dose it, you enjoy it bit by bit.

There are these in the world that keep 'value' forever, the 'authentic ones'.

Bloodmonarch wrote: »

WoW players will never truly embrace ESO, simply because it isn't WoW. They will play for a while and then either go back to WoW or move to the next major title, and shout for WoW features to be included in that game.

WoW player here; love ESO. Wouldn't play it if it was anything like WoW. Why would I pay extra money to play a game just like the one I already pay for?

As to the OP, I'd say an MMO is as hardcore as you make it. There are players of any MMO (this included) who will be considered hardcore players and those who will be very casual. A good MMO caters to both and everyone in between.

Thete wrote: »

Bloodmonarch wrote: »

WoW player here; love ESO. Wouldn't play it if it was anything like WoW. Why would I pay extra money to play a game just like the one I already pay for?

Yep..probably should have expanded that generalization a bit ...."WoW players that want all WoW's features in ESO" will never embrace ESO even if they are included. Look at rift, a very good game in its own right that took all the good parts from WoW and improved on many. With better gfx you'd expect it to be a huge hit....but no-one plays it.

If players have put many years into WoW why would they ditch it to play another version of WoW, with better gfx and a few other improvements. The answer is....they didnt

Yes pretty please, let's not dumb down the game just because other players cater to mediocrity.... leave us at least one game? Go play some wowclone