My only concern would be a division on the player base. That being said, if there are actually so many players leaving the game due to a lack of difficulty (as I keep being cited as a reason), would it really matter?

Iirc, they tried this once and it didn't do very well.

...If they didn't charge...

I'd definitely play classic eso.

Back in 2014, I loved vet overland questing because combat was at least interesting. I wish I could play all of the chapter storylines like that.

I remember playing my stam nightblade through cadwell's gold before the first difficulty nerf in 2014. He had very limited healing, so I would actually use CCs as crowd control like an Enchanter in Everquest. I had to respect the heavy attacks and stay out of red! Imagine that....

It was a slog back in the day. I am all for increasing overland difficulty, but it has to be implemented in a better way. What that would shake out to be once fully implemented, I cannot say. Something like GW2, where things mobs & players scale might be close.

I plan on using the difficulty slider but I voted no because it's not the difficulty that would keep me off of it. They could make it my ideal custom difficulty level, custom tailored to me, and I still wouldn't.

Because there's a TON of quality of life changes and gameplay features that I'm not giving up. Jewelry crafting, curated drops, housing, solo arenas, infinite archive, companions, Tales of Tribute, grandmaster crafting tables, the sticker book, searchable guild traders, etc.

This game has gotten far, far better in every other way.

No, because I remember what it was like pre-One Tamriel.

I hated always being over-leveled for everything just because I wanted to do every quest. I hated that you were limited to doing only a handful of group dungeons that were the right level for you. I hated not being able to group with people from other alliances to do PVE. I hated that you could basically only group with people that were very close to you in level, because otherwise you'd either be doing content that was trivially easy for one person, or content that was nightmarishly difficult for the other. I hated the fact that wasps in Craglorn were tougher fights than world bosses in Glenumbra.I hated that gear sets with bonuses that I would have liked to use for a build only dropped in a certain level range, making them unusable if you were lower than that level or worthless if you were above that level.

Yeah, there were some things that I preferred about how it was back then, but overall the game is so much better post-One Tamriel.

I had to stop playing for years until 1T released, since a Zone Story boss in VR2 Stormhaven was impossible for me to defeat.

I didn't play for very long pre one tamriel (I started about 3 months before it) but it was a genuinely worse experience. Even now I still think it might be one of if not the best update this game has ever had.

One Tamriel was the best change ZOS have made to the game in my view.

Before that I hated the fact that when new content came out I either had to start that content immediately with the result that when I went back to where I was at in the base game I had out-levelled it, or else I had to carry on the base game while I was at the right level in which case I had to leave the new content. One Tamriel fixed all that as well as opening up the whole world to all my characters for whom the artificial alliance divisions had no significance as a PvEer.

No way would I want to go back to the pre-One Tamriel world.

The old days weren't great in a lot of stuff. I'll pass experiencing those times again.

Why yes, these wolves that look exactly the same as wolves in this other zone are more damage spongy with the same mechanics without any logical explanation for why these wolves are stronger here than over there. Also if my friend is in a different faction the wolves are switched and I don't get to play with them in PvE land where war isn't the point...

One Tamriel saved this game full stop from being another generic mmo with imaginary barriers. I don't want to one shot things in old zones and I don't want new zones to take longer without logical increase in difficulty.

Also pre-one Tamriel only makes sense for forcing people into completing the main story, then Caldwell's silver and gold. Wrothgar was the zone that said nah we all gonna ball together. The game is designed for horizontal progression, it would be weird for each new zone to be more damage spongy with gear that is not necessarily better.

The Craglorn change was great imo, since you now had content that was more challenging and group focused, that could be cleared by a properly built player. The indication from ZOS that they would be bringing back smaller adventure zones sparks joy for me. Also I hope they continue to add fun world bosses, wandering bosses, and world events for players that are way past overland difficulty.

Creating a pre-one Tamriel server would be a waste of time and resources that could be spent on fixing bugs and adding more fun content to the game.

if?
but why would they do that?

Just to add again - ESO is not the same as WoW. It wasn't a cultural revolution in gaming when vanilla ESO released. It was the opposite, many people quit lol. The literal only good thing about vanilla ESO was some overland difficulty, which still wasn't done super well. I'm hoping the new opt-in iteration they're working on will bring that back, but bringing back a "classic ESO" server? Big ole nah fam