I did a very stupid thing.
Crown sale hit. I went all in.
Day after Christmas, I renewed my Plus.
I guess we're up to two stupid things now because I decided to try out a group guild that plays on Gray Host. Or is that a third stupid thing?
Bottom line - I've just paid 130 dollars for an online game whose performance is not just beneath beta-quality, not just beneath release quality, but cannot be regarded, by any objective standard, as a release shareware product.
What's strange - yes, it gets stranger - is that I last tried the main CP enabled campaign years ago, just prior to the release of Morrowind. Was with a guild called The Pact Militia. That server was so bad that the raid leader was calling out skills and ultis predictively, often seconds in advance of the merge in the hope that some of them might go off. So I quit the game.
Oh, I came back and have played for years in non-CP. Yet, somehow, I thought that certainly the game would improve over time. Nope. It's worse.
And all of that would be okay. Lots of folks don't like Cyrodiil. Plenty of people just love doing their storyline quests - like my mother used to refer to the soap operas she'd watch as "my stories" - decorating their houses, filling out achievement sheets on their characters, fighting bots in dungeons and such. Fine.
Just stop calling this an MMO.
It's not.
Yeah, I could go back to no-CP. Problem there is folks have fled this game en masse. The population of other servers, even in prime time, can be astonishingly low.
Or maybe they didn't flee. Could be they saw a bizarre and intense beam of light....followed by a deep voice that told them, "Apex mounts....what you seek are Apex mounts...oh yeah, and motifs too."