I'm having a rather negative experience playing ESO in 2025.

Frayton · June 26

Desiato wrote: »

This is life in a very casual raiding community. I have never seen an endgame community as chill as this one. But as a result, players are always coming and going. Tri/hm cores constantly fall apart or can't progress for this reason. I did a long stretch of vet trial gf pugs and as a result have joined countless trial discord communities and most fizzle out pretty quickly. Not because things are too hard though. It's because it's a casual game with a casual adult audience with rl responsibilities.

Spot on. I don't know why some endgamers get offended when I say ESO is a casual game. There's nothing wrong with ESO being casual. It is what it is.

Bubosh · June 26

@Vonnegut2506 from 26k peak players since u46 to 15k+/- peak in less than a month (if you go from u46 release day and individually click on each day after the release of the update you can see the daily peak for each day which is my point and and also the lines on the diagram showcasing the drop of that value i pointed out by showcasing the diagram and these numbers, reading it wrong or stating it in different ways is differently to "my info being called out as false by you and @Desiato btw.) that amount there is dropping right now each individual day, I don't know what your guys problem is to read that out so wrong lmao but I don't care also if you want to stick to rather illusions then you do. You can enjoy the game in its state but arguing about actual proven numbers is just childish and silly, nice day to you

and to all these ppl tagging ppl with full fantasy numbers like " you gotta multiply this number by 5x or 10x" or statements like "this will be only 20% of what the actual player base is like and so it doesn't mean it's a trend" you guys just proving you are in denial of acceptance and you rather being up full out speculation numbers instead of accepting facts and numbers. Stop being so defensive only because you like the game, the game is in a very bad spot right now in terms of population had been already since longer but with u46 it got worse. That's all it and my statement again and still the same but I will leave the space for others now instead of tagging ppl with speculations and false info like a lot defensive ppl here doing. Enjoy
@Desiato also for you again it's in fact correct, I suggest you to check out each individual day again yourself after u46 release on the steam chart table so you can see it better if the diagram wasn't showcasing the downfall of the peak player number well enough and btw I wasn't at all talking about any other platforms but if you wanna also believe a trend is only a trend on one platform for the game and won't be same for other platforms, then you can believe so, total nonsense your statement in my opinion

.

Rungar · June 26

nobody bought the expansion and its summer. Id wager the numbers are alot better than they should be....That sais i still see alot of players around in my travels.

manukartofanu · June 26

I think many people still haven’t understood or learned the lesson from the Arcanist’s OP state and other changes that were supposedly made to drag newcomers straight into late-game content and have them clear everything they could never even imagine. There’s simply nothing left in the game now that feels worthwhile to strive for or play for. People with multiclasses are finishing up whatever they wanted to clear, and by next year — even if the content is good — there might be no one left to buy it, because people will have stopped playing by then. It’s already an irreversible process. Next time, they’ll have to introduce something even more OP than the current multiclasses just to get people to come back for a little while.

And by the way, for those analyzing Steam charts: with the game’s pathes in April–May, a problem has appeared — when exiting the game, it remains marked as running in Steam and keeps counting playtime. I don’t know if this affects everyone, but I know for sure that people are talking about it. Overall, it doesn’t bother players since it doesn’t affect anything except the total hours played, but it does directly impact the supposedly active population shown in Steam Charts — those numbers are now inflated. And now we have no way at all to know how many people are actually playing — not even through Steam Charts. The numbers there are now inflated.

Nemesis7884 · June 26

Pixiepumpkin wrote: »

Dude, ESO is no where close to being the 2nd best MMORPG, certainly not 1st place. WOW and FFXIV smoke the living heck out of ESO in player numbers.

I wrote 2nd biggest western MMORPG - Everything big besides WOW that is an mmoRPG and not a shooter or something is Asian

Pixiepumpkin · June 26

Nemesis7884 wrote: »

Pixiepumpkin wrote: »

Dude, ESO is no where close to being the 2nd best MMORPG, certainly not 1st place. WOW and FFXIV smoke the living heck out of ESO in player numbers.

I wrote 2nd biggest western MMORPG - Everything big besides WOW that is an mmoRPG and not a shooter or something is Asian

https://mmo-population.com/list

ESO is nowhere near number 2 for daily players. The 25 million ZOS constantly brags about means nothing because most of those people are not playing, outside of the hundreds of thousands that have multiple accounts.

I am sure ESO is doing ok, but its not even remotely 2nd place for MMORPGS, regardless of how you break it down.

sarahthes · June 26

Pixiepumpkin wrote: »

Nemesis7884 wrote: »

Pixiepumpkin wrote: »

Dude, ESO is no where close to being the 2nd best MMORPG, certainly not 1st place. WOW and FFXIV smoke the living heck out of ESO in player numbers.

I wrote 2nd biggest western MMORPG - Everything big besides WOW that is an mmoRPG and not a shooter or something is Asian

https://mmo-population.com/list

ESO is nowhere near number 2 for daily players. The 25 million ZOS constantly brags about means nothing because most of those people are not playing, outside of the hundreds of thousands that have multiple accounts.

I am sure ESO is doing ok, but its not even remotely 2nd place for MMORPGS, regardless of how you break it down.

You do know that website you linked uses Reddit posts to somehow calculate game populations, right?

https://mmo-population.com/about/

Let's all post in the ESO subreddit, that will surely increase the game population.

Nemesis7884 · June 26

Pixiepumpkin wrote: »

Nemesis7884 wrote: »

Pixiepumpkin wrote: »

Dude, ESO is no where close to being the 2nd best MMORPG, certainly not 1st place. WOW and FFXIV smoke the living heck out of ESO in player numbers.

I wrote 2nd biggest western MMORPG - Everything big besides WOW that is an mmoRPG and not a shooter or something is Asian

https://mmo-population.com/list

ESO is nowhere near number 2 for daily players. The 25 million ZOS constantly brags about means nothing because most of those people are not playing, outside of the hundreds of thousands that have multiple accounts.

I am sure ESO is doing ok, but its not even remotely 2nd place for MMORPGS, regardless of how you break it down.

READ

WESTERN mmoRPG

Stuff above is either not western or no traditional mmorpg

moo_2021 · June 26

manukartofanu wrote: »

I think many people still haven’t understood or learned the lesson from the Arcanist’s OP state and other changes that were supposedly made to drag newcomers straight into late-game content and have them clear everything they could never even imagine. There’s simply nothing left in the game now that feels worthwhile to strive for or play for.

PvP.

You can't clear PvP. It's the kind of activity with least effort for development and highest replay value, if they put more focus into it.

manukartofanu · June 26

moo_2021 wrote: »

manukartofanu wrote: »

I think many people still haven’t understood or learned the lesson from the Arcanist’s OP state and other changes that were supposedly made to drag newcomers straight into late-game content and have them clear everything they could never even imagine. There’s simply nothing left in the game now that feels worthwhile to strive for or play for.

PvP.

You can't clear PvP. It's the kind of activity with least effort for development and highest replay value, if they put more focus into it.

Agreed, PvP has huge potential here. But in its current buggy and laggy state, it just can't retain a large number of players.

katanagirl1 · June 27

I agree with just about everything you said, though I don’t have any healers and don’t particularly care for BGs. I do like my arcanist but I didn’t subclass her after the update. That class is the only one I can play in heavy combat that doesn’t hurt my hands.

Previous updates might have killed one class in my army of alts when something got nerfed, or made me have to regrind skills or gear. Subclassing would make me do that for ALL of my characters, and why would I want them all to be the same? I wonder if they did that purposely to create even more busy work for players knowing that they had less content.

moo_2021 · June 30

manukartofanu wrote: »

Agreed, PvP has huge potential here. But in its current buggy and laggy state, it just can't retain a large number of players.

It's no longer that buggy and laggy outside of cyrodiil.

But the disparity between pvp builds and pve builds has been growing more and more apart. It's not good for attracting new players.

The_Meathead · June 30

moo_2021 wrote: »

manukartofanu wrote: »

Agreed, PvP has huge potential here. But in its current buggy and laggy state, it just can't retain a large number of players.

It's no longer that buggy and laggy outside of cyrodiil.

But the disparity between pvp builds and pve builds has been growing more and more apart. It's not good for attracting new players.

Even Cyrodiil isn't laggy (for me) with the sole exception being when Ball Groups or especially two of them are present.

I'll go hours without a whiff of lag even in some heavy zerg moments, but I know immediately when a Ball Group has entered the scene because things suddenly get a little "sticky." The only time I see a "slide show" is when multiple Ball Groups are in close proximity.

That said, the population caps are intentionally kept super low to prevent the Servers being overworked, so you're totally correct in your end assessment. Even if it had the draw, it couldn't support a massive number of players in its current incarnation inside a single Campaign - which is what most of us would want.

Hopefully Vengeance indeed is a road map for how they address this, but it seems really obvious that dialing back something with Ball Groups and their number of calculations inside such a dense area is at the top of the problem list.

Nydarisa · June 30

I specifically left Steam because I dont like Steam - not all players that leave Steam, leave ESO. Plus, as others have said, the charts look better than what is being implied!