After three solid days of trying to do this on PC NA, that is my question. Some background: I’ve been playing ESO roughly since launch, with a period of high activity, then kids appeared and things slowed way down, and when the Jester’s Festival came around this year I hopped back in.

I always did PvE because I don’t have a lot of time to spec out my toon multiple ways to accommodate both PvE and PvP. But with this 5 year thing, I wanted to give PvP a try, and I love the 5 companions and I wanted to get the Tharn pages. I’ve played PvP in other games, it’s definitely fun. The Cyrodiil campaign is really excellent. And up until now, I had high regards for the ESO community as well. Everyone is pretty collaborative, and apart from a handful of jerks who spout off in zone chat, life as a player is pretty good.

I did what I was able to spec out my DC 50 CP200ish magplar, following some online guides. I did some grinding to get skill points to balance out my attacks. It’s not the best, but it’s the best I could do under the circumstances with the time I have at my disposal.

Upon going into Sheogorath, which was the campaign I joined because it was open at the time, AD have overrun the entire map. I spent the first part of the evening getting killed and no quests done. So I joined another map as a guest that had a ton of DC on it. I started doing some quests in Bruma, and then I found AD and EP people teaming up and holding down the houses with the turn-ins. In one of them, they somehow got siege equipment inside. There were like 6 or 7 people in each house, killing people once they appeared at the door.

So we tried to rally and get in the house. I got 16 people in a group, we got buffed and got our ults up, and went in, and did not make a single dent in any of them. We tried a few more times, and then we gave up, some people logged, some went to find other places where they would be able to do and turn in quests.

Asking for help in the chat, or complaining about the situation, mostly got derisive responses from people I assume to be seasoned PvP players, incorporating all of the usual critical “carebear” style tropes I’ve seen since the first days of WoW. There were a few exceptions, some of whom came and actually helped. Those guys were also unable to extract the quest campers.

I view this as an exploit that goes outside the intent of the game. If the AD or EP came in and tried to take the town, great, let’s rally and fight back. If I get killed on the road or in town, fine, that’s the design. It’s a PvP zone, and I accept that. But groups of elite players using the door lag, seige equipment, and heavily geared and buffed toons to deny access without any risk to self is ridiculous. And it’s reflective of the toxic atmosphere that the ESO PvP culture appears to be fostering. They aren’t playing to win the game, they are just making sure I can’t play because I’m a lame “quester”.

Right now, as I write this, a Twitch streamer named t***p is being obnoxious to and killing questers unless they pay him a “questing license fee” of 500g to let them stay and play (which I probably would have paid if he stuck to it), and everyone in the chat is derisively mocking the questers whether they pay or not. They are saying that PvE are old people and lame. As an “old person”, I take offense. The PvE crowd also calls PvPers “talentless kids”, which the people in chat also pointed out, and I saw that a lot in zone chat, e.g. “when mommy gets home they’ll have to log off”. Is this the community ZAM intends to foster and support? People trying PvP for the first time are not lead down a path of building teamwork and strategic prowess, they are doing the same kind of stuff they do everywhere else and being mocked and tortured while they do it.

ZAM personnel, you all designed and promoted an event that celebrates the Five Companions. I love that. I really love the central quest line, so I wanted to get all of the pages, and I wanted to experience new things in the game that I hadn’t tried before. I was excited to do all of it. I thought that your intent in providing these incentives was to get people to try out content that they maybe had not experienced to date.

Based on discussions in the form, chats, and reddit, it is now my understanding from PvP players is that the PvP event is not designed to get PvE players into PvP, but to provide fresh and easy meat for PvPers to rack up tons of kills, and stream their exploits on Twitch killing loads of PvE players while fans cheer them on. That is the perspective many of them have shared.

So, with all of that in mind, this is my question: what the hell are you guys actually trying to achieve? I really want to know. Because if you want to broaden the enjoyment of the game for your customers by giving them incentives to try new content, speaking as a long-term consumer of your product, you are failing to provide a positive first impression of that content. If your intent is to feed the PvP community with players they can repeatedly gank and mock, who don't have the gear or skills to handle the zone, I'd suggest telling us all that up front. That way we're going in eyes wide open.

I was more excited these past two weeks about ESO than I have been since it first came out. As of today, I’m just disgusted, having been repeatedly mocked just for expressing my negative views about what I believe to be an unfair and unintended exploit, even though I support PvP in general. Instead of exploring PvP and finding another supportive community of like-minded players, whose ranks I would have been happy to join, I got to view the dark underbelly of the community, and at the end of the day, I did not find the experience enjoyable.