I would suggest that the kind of competitive, active, engaged players OP is looking for have largely been driven away by poor development decisions, and cutbacks, and a strategy of trying to drive short term engagement through repetitive chores and events, quick reskins of old content, jumping around to the next "big new feature" without finishing the last one, long periods of total inaction between the major updates, failure to address performance and balance problems, etc.

I mean, at least since One Tamriel (I can't really speak to what things were like before that), eso has never been this ultra sweaty competitive game, but there absolutely used to be more of that kind of player around. Although this is not the only factor, a particularly noticeable decline has occurred since u35 and has only accelerated.

If, for the sake of argument, the game is not attracting the "right" kind of player, that's a design / development / marketing problem. Not a player problem.

And I mean some of us are still technically here, but we're just in a holding pattern to see if things get better. It's really hard to be invested in the game right now when there have been multiple changes that were received negatively, minimal new content, and tremendous uncertainty about the future.

Player population has felt the same as it always has been on Console. Something a lot of people never take into account are events like Midyear Mayhem or the current Dungeon one. Events for specific game modes draws most of the crowds into those modes and away from other areas, and when people see these areas empty, they think the game is dying.

And as more and more Zones are added to the game, the population is spread thinner and thinner among them. When Elsweyr was released, you could always count on a mob being at the ready to fight a Dragon. Now with Greymoor, High Isle, Blackwood, Gold Road, and Solstice out of course you'll be lucky to scrounge up half a dozen to fight one.

I see where you’re saying the fault lies on the players, but there are a lot of different groups of players here, and they are really all in conflict… or at least a seeming conflict driven by choices in how the game is built and the direction in which it’s going.

The Elder Scrolls series has always been solo content, so it’s completely understandable that you have a large soloist base here. However, the original design of ESO came from the ideas of DAoC, so there’s the PvP idea (and the original endgame was Cyrodiil), but like many MMOs you also have the group PvE crowd (and we can all say that the dungeon and trial team has been the only team consistently good). And then of course you have the players who prefer to play with fashion and housing and RP.

The issue comes from the fact that all of these groups have their own interests, and catering to one makes the others feel neglected. They even all overlap in ways that not everyone may expect, i.e. the endgame player who has all the dungeon trifectas and then spends the rest of their time playing dressup and dollhouses (and I know several people of that persuasion, myself included).

PvP has felt neglected for ages, particularly since it was the original endgame and now things are just stalling. It doesn’t help at all that the major things they’re doing for PvP (the new BGs and Vengeance) are falling flat among the PvP base, especially since Vengeance feels a lot more like “PvP for non-PvPers!” than a thing for the existing PvPers. Also, the various metas are really painful for playing, since you pretty well have to play meta to have any chance whatsoever. The PvP players have also been burned hard by dev comments, notably the infamous Rich stream debacle (which granted he was baited into) and the BG stream catastrophe (for which there is no excuse).

PvE has gotten a lot of good content recently, but their major issue is the balance right now. Like the PvP base, the fact that there is one meta to rule them all and playing anything else is not coming close to that power level hurts. “Play the way you want!” is not an option if you’re going for high-end achievements and only one setup is reasonably able to measure up. Yes, you “can” play whatever… if the rest of your group is fine with carrying you. In essence, the utter lack of balance makes it feel like they can’t play the way you want without being a toxic selfish [snip] who doesn’t care to work with others.

As for the soloists, they’re having a great time now. They want ESO to basically become as close to Skyrim/Oblivion/etc, but with more of Tamriel to see. They want more freedom, and balance is not even a question since they don’t play with or against others. Heck, you can mod in every godmode build you want in the mainline games and really feel amazing.

That’s the manor conflict: freedom versus balance. Notice that they’re not even opposite - most soloists wouldn’t care if skills were buffed/nerfed (beyond how it always feels bad to lose power). And the endgamers would accept the freedom a lot more if it wasn’t the Grand Canyon between the top two builds. But the devs dropped Subclassing and then said “we’re not going to listen to endgamers on what problems this could lead to, and then we’re going to focus on our template Cyrodiil mode for the rest of the year instead of trying to balance anything else,” which really exacerbated the issues and turned players against each other.

So yeah, I’m putting the blame on the decs here. Each playerbase has its own goals and they’re allowed to have them. Now yes, the soloists enjoy being able to get all the strengths and no weaknesses while balance requires choices to be made, but that’s why the devs need to be very careful with balance. We all do have to give sometimes for the good of all the players. But the way Subclassing was presented without any consideration of balance was the issue.

And this isn’t the first time, either. Every major change has had a big thread on the PTS saying what the devs were ignoring a major factor for one playerbase and offered suggestions about how to implement what they were trying to do without completely shutting out the one base. And ZOS always just ignored in and powered through, giving one set of players what they wanted and telling another group that their playstyle was wrong. Obviously that breeds discontent.

ZOS really needs to start discussing these major things sooner, so that any ground-level changes can be done with the most players feeling at least heard, and that way nobody feels like ZOS is telling them they are not welcome.

My main issue with ESO is its reward structure. Attractive rewards are mostly time-gated in the game or, more often, the store. Even getting things like crafting recipes are a huge time sink, it's all RNG. And while I was used to be a big spender on this game, I just can't justify it any longer.

To your point, "most people just do the daily crafting, run normal daily dungeon maybe once or twice and rest of the day is idling or decorating home" - yeah, that's all there is to do after a while. You can create a million alts - which I have - and do that on them. But after a while, it's just not fun. And seeing how content played out this year, I'm not at all optimistic about ESO's future.

My next big issue is performance. I have never seen a game, especially an MMO, with as many regular, wide-impacting performance issues as this game. I've played EQ1, EQ2, GW1, GW2, WOW, Wildstar, LOTRO, Rift, Aion, and this. This is the only game that I've played where pressing a skill doesn't result in the skill firing 100% of the time.

Combat changes in general are another issue for me. When I spend months making a build, dealing with RNG, and then it gets changed - well, I can only do that so many times. I really do like the combat, but I don't want to invest in experimentation because it's either not viable or will get nerfed. Subclassing basically made it so my DPS builds are either some form of Arcanist or Templar, with NB and my original class. Just made me realize most builds don't feel as fun or smooth as those.

My last big issue is ZOS themselves. The communication struggles really wear on me. Game's over a decade old and we still don't have a roadmap for where combat's going. The Devs rarely answer questions or provide status updates on things outside of patch notes, when it's too late. And when the devs do talk to us, it usually results in some sort of fiasco due to their caustic or out-of-touch comments. I should never walk away from an AUA thinking a streamer knows more about the game than the people leading its development.

There's just a lot of things I see that wouldn't be tolerated elsewhere in the professional world. The whole "alluding to" or "stay tuned" type of communication from the CMs just wears on me. I don't know why they keep doing it. I can't imagine going to my clients, having my statements and their format poorly received every single time, and still communicate in that fashion for multiple years.

Just burns me out after a while.

Dimorphus wrote:

It seems to me that most people just do the daily crafting, run normal daily dungeon maybe once or twice and rest of the day is idling or decorating home. Pretty much.

Now that the Undaunted event is over, I'll be back to logging in, doing the daily endeavors and crafting dailies, and logging out. Why? Because there's nothing else for me to do as someone who primarily enjoys story content, exploration, and questing. Nothing. I've finished all the zone stories. I've completed all the daily quest achievements. I know many of the zones like the back of my hand in terms of exploration. So yeah, until the writhing wall thingie, I'll be in and out. I might run a random, but that's it. I'm spending most of my gaming time elsewhere until the wall event.

Most of the times even during the prime time group finder tool is empty, asking from guilds for people to do harder dlc dungeons, vet pledges etc. gives no responses but as soon as someone asks for people to join daily random dungeon or fast and easy normal pledges few people wakes up. ESO player base seem to value fast and easy.

I like to play fun builds. I don't chase meta. I do normal DLC dungeons all the time - if it comes up as a random, I do it. I don't like vet content because in ESO it's just more button mashing. Therefore, I stick to normal dungeons. It's not a matter of fast and easy. I've done some of the base game vet dungeons. I can solo some of them. I haven't done the DLC ones only because I find a lot of them tedious (not difficult) on normal, so I have no interest in running them on vet. Plus, I enjoy questing/exploration the most in this game. This might sound crazy, but I prefer to do stuff I enjoy with my gaming time. You know, have fun. Not do stuff I don't enjoy.

tomofhyrule wrote:

As for the soloists, they’re having a great time now.

If that were true, the population wouldn't be shrinking. I'm mainly a soloist, and subclassing has done nothing for me except make normal dungeon pugs boring when other players have beam.

The soloist vs. group player vs. whatever stuff is silly. Most players straddle those categories. This imagined rivalry and playing the finger pointing blame game at another group (or feeling resentful of them) is just a distraction from the real issues with the game. But go ahead and keep blaming or sneering at other players who enjoy focusing on different activities than you do. That'll get the game fixed in a jiffy!

Anyway, there are all sorts of reasons why players leave and/or spend less time in game. The OP saying it's because they don't engage in activity X (where X is usually what the person making this assertion wants to do) is oversimplifying the situation. My interest in ESO started to wane when they cut back on the Q4 story DLC and then doubled down on it with the content pass. Some people who PvP are losing interest because of Vengeance or the effect of subclassing. Some people who do difficult end-game content are losing interest because of subclassing. There's a lot of reasons.

I agree 100% with this poster:

"valenwood_vegan wrote:

I would suggest that the kind of competitive, active, engaged players OP is looking for have largely been driven away by poor development decisions, and cutbacks, and a strategy of trying to drive short term engagement through repetitive chores and events, quick reskins of old content, jumping around to the next "big new feature" without finishing the last one, long periods of total inaction between the major updates, failure to address performance and balance problems, etc.

Truth.

Good to see that so many people gave so much to this threat already. But it is also a scary thing because the message here seem to be unanimous: ESO is not doing so well, even after all the major changes we are going downhill. And that is why we need to voice our concerns and hope for the best.

And I apology a little for my criticism towards ESO players. I did not mean it quite like so, but rather to point out that this game really lacks the people who are more challenge and competition driven because those are the people who creates the activity and hustle in games like these. And as so many here pointed it out, yes, the fault lies within the developers and the company. I would like to think that they acknowledge this and are ready to do something about it, maybe the resent changes in the company lines and the recent major changes speaks in that direction. We can only hope.

I admit that I am not the best to go into details on how to fix a game like this, I can only speak in general what I hope for and that is a kind of mashup of ESO and Wow on top of fixing other issues that has been long taxing the gaming experience. The reasons I will be renewing my Wow sub. again are the missing of action so mythic+ dungeons and some raiding mostly. If ESO would offer me that same activity and I mean both the game and the community that plays it, ESO would be all I ever need.

thedocbwarren wrote: »

I play this game like I play Skyrim or Oblivion. I could care less about PvP or group dungeons, etc. I want some story, some crafting, quests, story. That's it. I want to be able to explore, have some fun with the world and enjoy the lore and era. I like going town to town or enjoying daily quests and see all the different lands of Tamriel. I feel the other stuff really belongs in some other game and the blending seems a mess and incompatible. I joined ESO for the lore and something in the world of Elder Scrolls and also to full in the spaces between the current games. No idea if we Elder Scrolls VI in this decade or next but I'm unsure if I'll play large games in the longer future. I'd probably switch to that if it is released.

TLDR: I wish this game were more single-player and solo honestly. It seems to be trending more group and minimal content to make it maintainable with less resources.

Anyway just my playstyle and opinion.

I'm basically playing it the same way. Just with the add option of being able to RP with others, I couldn't care less about PvP, dungeons/trials or other generic MMO stuff.
Heck, if I could my own private instance for me and a couple of friends/fellow RPers, I'd probably even pay for that.

ArchMikem wrote: »

Dimorphos wrote: »

Good to see that so many people gave so much to this threat already. But it is also a scary thing because the message here seem to be unanimous:

So then my perspective was ignored?

If you see it that way. But what you mentioned does not explain the problems and lack of activity that other people here have pointed out. And I think the assumption (while it was not specified) here is that we are speaking about ESO PC situation since I think console side has been quite dead for a long time. So maybe your perspective is not that relevant? I don't know. Maybe every word describing something is not meant to be taken quite so literally. When I said "unanimous" I might have meant a ratio of 8 out of 10 or 9 out of 10 people as somewhat agreeing over these matters. I didn't count it that accurately.

I primarily play solo and I'm only in it for the lore, worldbuilding and stories. So, I'll only be speaking from that perspective.

By far my biggest issue, and one that needs addressing as top priority IMO:

- Lack of Difficulty Options: For me, it does NOT matter how amazing the story is, how well acted they are, or how evocative the world design is, if the combat is too easy, there is absolutely NO stakes. This is by far the biggest breaking of immersion for me. Every "boss fight" ends in a very anticlimactic way. Right now, I am currently at the start of the Daedric War story arc, waiting for Overland difficulty options to drop in 2026. And as such, my ESO playtime has been greatly reduced to just about 30 mins a day.

I think the game has plenty of solo content as evidenced by the number of solo-able quests to dungeon/trial ratio. There's just no ENGAGING solo content outside of Maelstrom and Vateshran. Majority of ESO players prefer to play solo anyways, let's give them more options and ways to enjoy the game.

Don't worry, you'll get responses from the same 5 people that will chime in with "there's no reduction in playerbase"

---

If you want a perspective from someone who is actually PvE endgame (I have most of the trial trifectas and have been part of groups that have set a number of record scores for our server), I lived through pretty much all of the bad updates - the horrible sustain nerf in Morrowind, Murkmire nerfs, Dragonhold nerfs and U35 nerfs - each and every time this happened the trial community got smaller and smaller, and while there was a resurgence due to Arcanist and competitive HA builds, at least on PS/NA that resurgence has largely worn off and the community might be the smallest I've ever seen it - endgame is a small enough community where everyone knows pretty much everyone else (or at minimum be able to recognize usernames even if you haven't played with them) and it feels like every single week I see someone I used to play with stop playing, or another trial guild end their prog - and while a reduction in players like that is un-noticeable for like, overland players, it's very obvious to this community, especially because those players rarely get replaced at the same number in which people leave, I.E a community that is bleeding out.

This causes a problem that even trickles down to the casual players - because there's hardly anyone left at the top, new or casual players who want to dip their toe into more challenging content don't know how to improve and there's very few people left to teach them. The combat tutorial kinda sucks, the build advisor is hilariously outdated, outside of overland the newer content is getting harder and harder with big damage checks due to the inflated power creep, etc.

I'm still logging in at prog time, but for me personally (and I assume many others who have given up), I'm getting really fed up with the direction the game is taking. If you're a solo quester you're probably happy with the game, if you're a progression PvE player or do PvP it just feels like we're getting one bad update after another.

The game has appeared to have completely shifted from a model around keeping it's long term and veteran players happy, to one that drives short term engagement and attracting new players - and while you need a influx of new players to keep the game healthy, ESO honestly doesn't do a very good job of keeping those new players around, meaning that there's been *several* instances of ZOS negatively affecting it's group of loyal players while trying to appeal to another that doesn't actually stick around most of the time.

Just my 2c.

Greed. They purposely left out crucial immersion stuff just to sell it later in expansions like Solstice. It’s exhausting. Back then when I bought the Premium Deluxe Edition, literally the highest tier available, thought I’d get the DLC dungeons too, but nope, they’re sold separately. Yeah, that’s enough for me. and when I saw Solstice, it’s not worth it. The value doesn’t match the price, especially in 2025. Yeah, they added choices that matter with some random encounter + furnishing stuff I guess lmao, but why wasn’t that in previous expansions? Skyrim and Oblivion already had it, it’s nothing new. So yeah, nope, it stinks too much, ew. im trying to play less and am moving to another game, enjoying the less stab in the back anti-consumer tactics, plus the graphics and animation are far superior, and thats the type of game i would gladly spend 90$+ on, you get what you pay for

The diversity of player types in ESO has another side effect. Most types do not mix. And if, as a company, you want to appeal to all your customers, there will be a lot who are disappointed and decide to leave.

And the ones that stay around in ESO are not here for any type of competitiveness or grinding, but for the world and the characters living in it.
ZOS has made the crucial mistake to focus on classical MMO areas like combat, PvP and Raiding. Most do not care. Most want quality RPG content, not MMO content.

The main issue is lack of vision and direction everything else is a symptom of this fact. This is a 10 year old game but based on the balance changes the last few years you would think this game was still in Alpha. We should be at the point where we have a few percent changes here and there for skills and that's it where everything is close to feeling right not sweeping massive changes to skills and abilities nearly every 3 months where nearly every patch has negative IQ changes that just don't make any sense and most of the time nobody even asked for that takes the wind and good out of every update.

Rkindaleft wrote: »

flizomica wrote: »

In terms of content repeatability, there is just hardly any at all if you have the associated achievements already. I'd happily re-run my favorite content frequently if there was any reason to do so.

If you’re looking to blame something for this blame AwA - it was a huge factor in ruining the replayability of the dungeon and trial content.

Before that update, the majority of progression style players would prog HMs and trifectas across multiple classes and roles in order to get the titles on multiple characters, but once AwA came out most people just get it once and then don’t go back.

For sure, I did the same thing - like getting Flawless Conqueror on every class was a challenge I set for myself many years ago. I still think that titles, even when they were more special by being character-specific, are a fundamentally very weak reward for hard content.

After taking my time to go through all these posts and using the help of AI to make a little summary here is what I have collected:

Main Problems:
1.Lack of challenge – Overland and group content are too easy or one-dimensional.
2.Meta imbalance – Limited viable builds; certain classes/subclassing combos dominate.
3.Endgame is underused – Veteran dungeons and trials lack incentive.
4.Content feels repetitive – New chapters/events often feel recycled.
5.Weak rewards – Loot and progression feel unrewarding; too much RNG.
6.Neglected solo/lore play – Story and exploration-focused players feel left behind.
7.Poor dev communication – Feedback not acknowledged or acted on transparently.
8.Ongoing performance issues – Skills not registering, lag, input delay.

Suggested Fixes:
1.Add scalable content difficulty (for all player types).
2.Balance classes and sets. Buff skill lines and sets that are rarely used and maybe nerf those that over perform. Different set/skill values for PVE/PVP.
3.Improve group finder and endgame incentives. Group finder is a great tool which almost no one uses.
4.Introduce fresh content mechanics and dynamic events. Frequent incursion events happening all around Tamriel with a theme fitting for the region in question and maybe some daily or weekly reward system to match this. We need reasons to re-visit all the regions of Tamriel.
5.Make rewards meaningful, and reduce reliance on RNG.
6.Add rich solo content and lore-focused systems.
7.Improve developer communication and transparency.
8.Prioritize performance fixes before new features.

And to conclude this all with my personal favorite:
Dungeon+ difficulty levels with new reward emblems/points system.

This gives a whole new meaning for the wide roster of older dungeons that can now be easily soloed even on vet. difficulty. It would take some work for sure, but they could even add new mechanics to the dungeons as the difficulty+ level rises and also environmental effects that you need to deal with. A time frame could also be added. (Yes, I am a fan of WOW's m+ system and see no reasons why they couldn't implement such a thing in ESO too).

Each level rewards color coded emblems and points based on challenge level. These currencies can be used to buy various cosmetics, houses, furniture, mounts, pets, costumes, visual effects, trade goods etc. Many people wish for better rewards and stuff you can get outside crown store but it always feels best when you have earned them!

All rewards are tiered and color coded (Poor → Common → Rare → Epic → Legendary), with visual styles and effects reflecting rarity and prestige.

This would greatly encourage and enhance re-playability, build diversity, and long-term goals for everyone. I think the general activity within the game would get a nice boost.