Cooperharley wrote: »

<snip> Another, slightly more negative reason, is that the reward structure in ESO is notoriously bad. While the game itself is pretty incredible, a whole half of end game (cosmetic collection) is negligible or not even present due to over-monetization. Update 40 and Necrom have surely improved on this by offering in game earnable mounts, but there’s only so many reasons to run content - people many times in all MMOs continue running content for achievements and cosmetics, but all of the cosmetics are just in the store. <snip>

Not to mention the reduction in repeat runs with different characters as a result of account-wide achievements.

There were several mentions of Rimmen in this thread, so I thought I'd check it out. Was nice to meet some new players.

Don't understand why anyone would play ESO on Steam...the Cache/ subsystem issues causes a endless amount of problems....it's much more stable to run the game on it's own launcher

I play on PCNA. I've been a MMO player and beta tester since the early days of UO and EQ, including the ESO beta. I've been in dying games, some of which had their death forecast before they even made it out of beta, Wildstar and Jumpgate being two unfortunate examples.

Meanwhile in ESO, at least on PCNA:

- I log into Vivec City every day and there are always plenty of people.
- I see new players joining and asking questions every day.
- ESO still has a large, healthy online community on Youtube, Twitch, fan pages et al. I don't see a ton of "jumping ship" videos and other signs that a game community is dying.
- I can drop an Elder Scrolls reference anywhere on social media and people instantly get it. ESO and ES games in general are well known.
- My main guild doesn't recruit in chat because we don't have to. We have more than enough new people joining every week that we stay full or nearly so. This goes along with the constant flow of new players.
- Even during events that crowd players into a few maps, I can still go to any map and find other players via zone chat to help do things like world bosses.
- I've heard secondhand that ESO is one of Bethesda's biggest moneymakers, and ZOS certainly has plans for at least a few more years to come, so they aren't planning on going into maintenance mode any time soon.

So NO, ESO isn't dying. Not even close. There are certainly plenty of ways it could get better, but overall, it's in better shape than many other games out there.

If you lived in Ali'kirr and rode in the 5AM dolmen traffic to go harvesting every day, you would have no doubt it's not on life support.

*Looks around at the significantly and constantly increasing player base.*

*Wanders off to find something shiny.*

Rohamad_Ali wrote: »

If you lived in Ali'kirr and rode in the 5AM dolmen traffic to go harvesting every day, you would have no doubt it's not on life support.

I don't think counting bodies in what's arguably the most trafficked newbie leveling hotspot/trainride fits the bill here.

I've ran that train before, and not a single interaction occurs between any two players outside of playing follow the leader from wayshrine to wayshrine.

If all zones were clones of that, it would still be meaningless.

I'm more concerned with meaningful interaction with players in the game. Grinding XP can be done solo.

Meaningful to be more pointed would be:

• Enough players to drop Queue times back to reasonable.
• Enough players to populate once healthy rosters of large guilds, back to "good".
• Enough players to provide a significant improvement over the scarcity of items in traders, above the current state limited to just a few main places now. (items once were abundant across MANY locations).
• Enough players to provide a healthy community of Roleplayers as there once were back in the day. (Even though it never was my thing in ESO) - where are they now.
• Enough players to see Guilds having events (I recall seeing this often at one time and would just hang out to see what they were doing or eavesdrop in on the chat).
• Enough players to dilute the predictability of familiar names at our favorite hangouts. After all, it's the excitement of meeting new people that keeps things fresh.
• Enough players to fulfill zone chat crafting requests.
• Enough players where we don't have to decide what platform is struggling with population - an unequivocal "All platforms are currently healthy" should be the goal.
• Enough players to see all the things listed above occur simultaneously as it once was.

There's a number of items that I'm sure a lot of you could add to the list.
Ultimately the game is still enjoyable for me, but I can not ignore the fact that it's more desolate than I can recall from any year prior, and the areas in which I prefer to spend my time are in a shape that needs addressed while salvageable.

ZOS is hopefully focussed on retention like any good business. Sure, we can have a million people leveling in Alik'r all day, but it means very little if they don't stick around.

When the devs add more and more zones to the game, it spreads the population out more. Just because one hub looks a bit more sparse now doesn't mean the game is dying. Those players are somewhere else.

Non copium response, no the game is not on life support, but it should have 7-10 times more playing it with what intellectual property it is.

ImmortalCX wrote: »

New World was/is eso like. But eso has 20x the content and !ore. Is New World dying?i cant imagine anyone picking that over eso.

I wonder what new ppl trying eso for the first time experience? What are the turn offs?

Wow is the biggest most successful mmo, and what eso lacks in comparison is vertical progression. If they could figure out how to create vertical progression, it would have a more serious feeling end game. Every expansion in wow added a ton of new raid content.

My gut feeling is that alot of ppl play eso like a sp game and have fun for a few weeks. But its a casual experience and they evertually quit because not enough carrots.

I’m glad that ESO doesn’t have ongoing vertical progression! I really hated that in SWTOR, which I was told had many similarities to WoW in end game stuff. The grind for BiS gear in that game was awful and then an expansion raises the level cap and makes it all for naught.

I much prefer games like ESO where I can switch between playing and working on different characters, or even take a break from the game as a whole, and when I come back, they are still max level in decent gear (although what is BiS may have changed).

dk_dunkirk wrote: »

ArchangelIsraphel wrote: »

(PS5 has a lower population than other platforms overall)

Why do you think you know this? I've searched many, many times, and I can't find any concurrent player counts for the console platforms, like you can with Steam on PC. On top of that, someone else on another thread said that Steam accounts for less than half the installs on PC. I saw one article a long time ago that sales of ESO were highest on PS5. That's a data point, but it doesn't translate to a concurrent player count.

Everything I've read in this thread is based on personal experience and anecdote. Just above, we have one guy claiming that PC has twice as many people as console, and another guy claiming that Xbox has twice as many people as PC. All just because "they know." As someone who deals with large data sets on my job, no one "knows" anything until the statistics bear it out.

So how does anyone credibly claim to know anything about how many players are on each platform? It seems to be something the ZOS likes to keep hidden, and I understand why. If people could see one platform pulling ahead, given that it's an MMO, everyone would jump ship for it, and the other platforms would wither and die.

The last I heard from various developer comments indicated that the three platforms (PC, XBox, and PSN) were about the same population. They never give out numbers, and it is nigh impossible to assess from inside the game.

That said, I would expect that, all other things being equal, the Playstation population should be higher than the XBox population, just because Playstation has the larger market share.

dk_dunkirk wrote: »

https://mmo-population.com/r/elderscrollsonline shows that ESO is the 11th most popular MMO in the world at the moment. Why are we even having this discussion at all?

It is a Thing here. Used to be that it was more common, with threads popping up time and time again. It became a meme for a while.