Arunei wrote: »

Lord-Otto wrote: »

craybest wrote: »

Greymoore has been my favorite chapter so far. I know it has issues and many people dislike it for it, but to me, it's the most interesting one, love the story, loved the MOOD, and the music. I wanted to have something on a darker tone for this game. and neither Summerset or Elsweyr did that for me.

I can understand you liking the slightly darker tone, fair enough. But the story? It was Elsweyr with vampires. The "twist" couldn't have been more obvious if ZOS wrote you a letter revealing it.
Are you sure you're not just happy with the tone and therefore elevate the story to a ranking it doesn't deserve?

People are capable of liking things other people don't, regardless of how shallow or bland someone sees something. Is it really so hard to believe someone's opinion on something as subjective as this differs from your own? No one's opinion on how enjoyable something is or isn't is right or wrong compared to anyone else's, and being somewhat patronizing to them to try and make them see how their opinion is wrong is generally not going to be very effective.

But Greymoor is objectively badly-written. Lemme give you an example.
"Two girls are walking through the woods. Lightning strikes the building, both boys die."
This is a bad story. Even if I subjectively like it, it's still a bad story. Same with Greymoor. You can have your own opinion, but the reasoning behind it is the important part.

I can't comment on the quality of Greymoor writing, as I have simply "not felt" this chapter to have personally gone through it. Keep in mind however, this is the first chapter without former head writer/loremaster Lawrence Schick who left the company after Elsweyr. He was one of the last original "OG" team members:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Schick

Part of my lack of interest of late has been extended burnout from the continued march (you might call it a "grey" march) of the quarterly cash shop investment schedule. Specifically, Zenimax has been making minimal investments in the game necessary to basically push the Crown Store and gamble boxes as a form of actual content for some time now, and at this point the cracks in that strategy are looking more like canyons.

There is a certain point where you keep raising the rent for the same old dilapidated building without investing proportionally in new carpets or cabinets or other basic structural and functional amenities where people just throw their hands up and move on. The last couple years have felt to me like an experiment in just how far you can push people with price increases and lack of investment in actual content and innovation before they finally reach that tipping point.

To continue the housing analogy, look at how long it has taken them to add anything actually functional to the player housing system (it is still largely just cosmetic). Yet they have been charging between $50 and $140+ for a single "home" in-game, with proportional high price points for every little bit of cosmetic fluff. That is what I mean by a minimal investment strategy. The marked lack of in-game earnable rewards vs. cash shop exclusives is also totally out of balance with reasonable industry standards. A million shades of Indriks sadly does little to mask that deficit at this point.

Other new features they have added recently like the Necromancer class and vampire update have felt haphazard and cobbled together out of broken or poorly thought through mechanical components. I can't stand the clunky behavior of the exploding skeleton bombs or the jarring and conceptually ridiculous laser beam tethering me to my bone piles instead of cool skeletal hands coming from the ground or something that would have required just a little more effort and investment to pull off, and the new vampire stuff feels equally incomplete. That aspect I admit is only my personal take and largely subjective.

Many have pointed out however that the best thing modern ESO has going for it is lack of competition. I feel that harshly negative perception overshadowing the things ESO gets right is 100% due to this low investment priority structure on the part of management. This problem is systemic to modern capitalistic society in general; we all know this to be the case. That doesn't make "everyone else is doing it" any more of a solution or a viable excuse, however.

We are living in a toxic pandemic culture of shortsightedness and yes greed, where the people at the top are not only disproportionately rewarded for much less they actually bring to the table in terms of generating any real value by being there, but also who appear to never be satisfied with the wealth they already have and crave only more and more and more personal wealth for the sake of it without end, all while the rest of human civilization languishes in increasingly extreme poverty to facilitate it, compromising the very means to generate that wealth, to the point companies (and countries) begin to cannibalize themselves in an effort to cash out even more in the short term.

Gone it seems are the days when making the best product you can as a function of personal passion and pride is the goal of going into business, all while making a nice profit for everyone in the process. This ethical and cultural standard of exceptionalism has been apparently abandoned and replaced by a sort of all-consuming material nihilism that permeates every aspect of culture and human psychology, where the goal unto itself appears to be simply the generation of more and more quarterly revenue for the few, and short-term value extraction at essentially any cost, even the long term compromise of the value of your own IP.

Instead of chasing the folly of never-ending quarterly spreadsheet increases and money generated out of thin air, pushing the wealth extraction paradigm as almost a new religion with new and more convoluted AI-based marketing and psychological tactics employed to aid this morbid modern culture to suck the life blood from its own veins like suicidal vampires, I feel corporations (and the mindset of the few pushing them in this direction) would do better to practice a little restraint and recognize the benefit of actual investment in the health of the game and the community as a whole.

This means more than hyping up a new Crown Store showcase on Twitch every month.

But as they say in Avatar, "no one can teach you to see."

Sylvermynx wrote: »

[Quoted post was removed]

You mean there's always someone to offer criticism? Greymoor by far has been the least popular chapter to date and the story is indeed a rehash of Elsweyr.