Alas, my friend, alas!

....it's time we all took a serious look to the stars for inspiration

Iccotak wrote: »

BlueRaven wrote: »

Content wise, Greymoor and southern elsweyr had problems. Bringing back Sai and Lyris from the (possible) dead felt like they jumped the shark. And the Greymoor storyline in general was just flat, as if even the writers did not care.

The game feels to me like it’s winding down. The developers are basically non-entities, not even appearing on eso live anymore to field softball questions. Even the director feels like he is giving up. And remember player reps? Only Gina and Sarah seem to show any enthusiasm.

Perhaps they are more interested in that new IP they are producing, but to me, from customer service through the game creators, it feels more and more like a game run on the cheap by people who don’t care about it.

Not a great way to hold onto players.

I actually agree to some extent - hopefully the Microsoft deal can improve things with resource management
It's great to see they addressed the quality of life issue facing gear & storage - seriously it is such a relief.
But I think they could be doing better with their year long narratives especially for retaining players, not just getting new people to try it.

To be clear I've played the game from late beta up to Season of the Dragon. I have not played Dark Heart yet.
imo the Daedric War storyline was one of the best narratives and I think a major reason for that is it had more time to develop.
The anticlimatic story boss fights aside (which is a discussion on a different thread) Having three zones and three storylines interwoven into a finale was just an overall better experience.
I liked that more than two full stories with a very rushed finish that Elsweyr had, it felt too rushed and needed more time to develop the story. They could have filled the middle section between Northern and Souther Elsweyr.

I am a Beta player as well.

I don’t mind continuing story lines myself. The morrowind->clockwork city->summerset story line was fantastic. Maybe the best I ever played in an mmo. But Greymoor and The Reach feels like they were stretching what should have been a single chapters story. And Greymoor’s story by itself is so poor...

I don’t know, I have grown very cynical about the game and Zos in particular. Also Matt’s recent post about Mac support soured it greatly. Personally, it really feels like I am continuing playing eso through everyday momentum then actually wanting to play.

Some of my core group isn't playing as much, but there is mainly 2 reasons for that:

1. Performance issues, especially in difficult content. Trials are an impossibility for some in my group because they keep getting kicked or the game freezes, so she basically can't participate. In harder dungeons, one of my other core players gets kicked every other boss fight. And in VDSA, server performance bogs down so bad by round 7 that finishing the arena is a pipe dream. And PVP is also mainly an exercise in frustration.

2.Beyond performance issues, there is no love for the combat system that rewards quick-twitch skills and muscle-memory driven button mashing and emphasizes trying to maximize short-duration buffs over all else. Some people may find that fun, but many don't think its all that great, including myself and many in my group.

The ones who stick around more have done so mainly to enjoy the storyline, housing, or scrying. We still get together to try to get through a hard dungeon, but if we experience too many issues (glitches, lag, getting kicked) we just go do something else.

Overall, IMO, Eso needs a big time server/engine upgrade. There is a TON of fun content to do and I know if the game was less frustrating to play, some in my group would be more engaged.

What are friends?

Some people I know who play the game don't actually play the game, they even admit as much. I don't blame them really because once you've done a piece of content once, no matter how good or bad it is, you no longer need to do it again unless for grinding set pieces or crafting motifs. There are also issues in the endgame content people enjoy, and last night I got disconnected when I arrived at the huge battle at Castle Roebeck. It almost seems to be common place now for me to get disconnected in Cyrodiil and then suffer through 4-5 different kinds of error messages just to log back in. I want to PVP but it's just so difficult to enjoy now.

After finding this thread I thought I would look at my friends list and the amount of offliners for over 6 months is scaring me. And also with conversations I have had with current friends that are heading down that path. It's discouraging me when I really want to keep progressing in my free time with the ESO community.

Please zenimax do something about retaining new and old players in your game

yes a looong time ago. so they where the smart ones

Yes, many of my friends have moved on or are barely hanging on. Many guilds are disbanding or dying... It's a mess.

Sure thing, for me it started hard with elsweyr and each broken patch after that like a snow ball. Greymoor was a second big one and no wonder it will continue like that with such an "amazing" management / prioritization.

Yep my friends list used to be 30/50 players online. Nowadays it's only a max of 10 (generally).

On PC EU raiders pretty much all encountered each other and everything has been completed or almost. New content wasn't that appealing nor hype generating hence many just wandered off into the mist.

As for PVP (I switched from being an avid PVE player)...well you all know what happened and things don't seem to be resolved in a satisfactory manner and content is stagnant, so most of my PVP buddies stopped all together.

Monetization has been a big let down too. The fact you can't do housing properly without a subscription just puts the cherry on the cake for me.

On hiatus.