I won't make any excuses for ZOS. It is, first and foremost, a monetary strategy to create a sense of false sense of urgency to buy (from fear of it not being available in the future) and false limited supply. This is capitalism, which we accept overall until something better comes along.

On the other hand, they are just cosmetics. I took a long break and missed out on some stuff that would have suited my style. Ohh well. It prob wouldn't be very fun to the long term players to repeat the same events over and over each year to give a chance to new players to catch up (and that is the case for some events).

This game is not pay two win, yet. They are definitely aggressive with their monetary choices, hiring psychologists for example to maximize customer demand. But that's the world we live in today.

Why not talk about the worst offender? Daily login rewards mean that once you're logged in you may as well play a bit and are less likely spending your gaming time with other MMOs and giving them money you could have spent on ESO instead. The same is the intend for ingame events. You want that Indrik (we begged for something else for at least a year and still farmed the tickets), you better spend your precious gaming time with ESO.

Of course other MMOs do the same. Events and "encouraging" being in a guild is a well-tried way of keeping players when they get bored or tired or one change or the other angered them to the point where they think about quitting. When it becomes a chore, take a break, if the pay (event exclusives) isn't worth it, quit. Real friends will understand. This is how many multi-game guilds came to be.


One-time sales are something different, though. They imply that something is valuable and the resources are scarce, when it could literally be copied infinite times at the push of a button, and all the value lies in the design. A pink reskin of a resized ingame monster certainly has less value here than an all new model.

In the end riding a mountain goat, while having an airbrushed face and being followed by a pink blob of eyes and tentacles, is the same as carrying a $5000 purse that looks like someone glued some glitter on their grandma's shopping bag. Stuff like this exists so you can show off, buying it encourages them to do more of the same.

I disagree with many of the decisions ZOS has made about the Crown Store.

• Removing stuff seems unnecessary. It's not a physical storefront that needs to make room for new inventory. Yes, I know FOMO is a thing.
• Limited-time items are one thing. Expensive items are another thing. But expensive limited-time items, often right on each others' heels? I'm a collector, but I don't need that kind of pressure and I certainly don't have that kind of money. This situation actually strips all feelings of FOMO for me and leads to apathy about everything but the items I see as absolute "must haves" for a particular character. Even then, I've still missed stuff.
• Crown Crates and Crown Gems... I'm not even going to go there, except to say Crown Gem-exclusive items are especially annoying, because if you really want one, you need to not only buy crates, but hope you actually get bad drops from those crates so you can get gems instead. Lol.

I also understand the frustration about other limited-time items, like stuff from the daily rewards. I've missed a lot of stuff I would have liked to have.

But I can forgive these things, because as others have pointed out, all limited-time items are cosmetics.

I definitely understand this being annoying for people who like to collect stuff. I'm one of those people! But I also have a different perspective on this, because I used to be a WoW player.

On WoW, the majority of content was limited-time. Every year, an expansion would come out and everything before it was instantly irrelevant. The entire rest of the game was about leveling as fast as you could to get to "current content." 90% of the game was made irrelevant every year, with previous accomplishments becoming almost meaningless as soon as the latest expansion was released. Titles, mounts, and even entire questlines and massive chunks of story were removed on a regular basis. New players would be encouraged to skip as much as possible, and even those who wanted to play through the story of the game would find it confusing and disappointing because big chapters were missing. Players who chose to spend time on "pre-endgame content" were penalized even further because it took time away from doing content that was still relevant, i.e. the current expansion.

I'm sure this worked for some people; I mean, as far as I know millions are still playing WoW. But if you care about experiencing the storyline of a game, and seeing all the parts of an intricate world, it's absolutely not for you. I realized after several years that it wasn't for me, and it wasn't going to get any better.

With ESO, the limited-time items seem like a drop in the bucket to me, compared with everything else. Every other part of ESO is still relevant and still available. Sure, the newest zones are always the busiest, but people still team up to do everything else because it's still relevant and just as rewarding as the newest stuff. There is no "current content" in ESO the way there was in WoW, because in ESO the entire game is still current. During the stream today, there was even a mention of people who "haven't gone to Greymoor yet," which said to me that ZOS knows and understands that some players still aren't there, for whatever reason. Some people haven't even done anything relating to Elsweyr yet. I just got a close friend into the game last year, and she's still in AD territory where she started out, and loving it. In a game like WoW, her experience would have been completely different: skipping everything to get to the last zones.

I understand that others might not feel the same as me, but coming to ESO from WoW was like a breath of fresh air. There is no rush. Zero. I can still do everything anyone else has been able to do, even if I stop playing for a year (which I did at one point, because of real life issues). Minus small changes resulting from patches, I can still do every dungeon and raid, and every quest and zone, just as if it had been released yesterday. This is the exact opposite of WoW and it's like night and day. WoW made me depressed because I was missing so much. Talk about FOMO. Talk about a game being a job.

It could be so, so much worse than missing out on cosmetic items. Imagine starting on ESO and literally nothing but Greymoor was relevant. Whole questlines taken out because the zone they were related to is no longer "current." Sweeping changes to entire zones because the plot had advanced past them, and no new players (or "behind" players) can see what it was like before that part of the story happened, even if they aren't there yet in their own playthrough. Reading an epic novel where the entire first 3 quarters is just a Cliff's Notes summary and the rest of the book has random pages torn out, with only the last chapter intact.

This is why I can forgive ESO's time-limited cosmetic items, because they're absolutely nothing compared to what's still available. Granted, if I hadn't played WoW, I'd appreciate it less, but that's where I'm coming from.

Like I said, I understand that others might not feel the same as me, but this is my perspective on why time-limited cosmetics do not seem to me personally like a big deal. I still disagree with some of the choices they've made for the Crown Store, but I'm not playing Crown Store Online and I'm not playing Collect Everything (beyond building a distinct style for each of my characters). I'm playing ESO, and I'm sure as hell not playing WoW anymore.