Dear ZOS,

I am fully aware that this thread will be closed soon, as per your Code of Conduct. Nonetheless, in the unlikely case that anybody will actually read this lenghty message, I want to share my reaons which led to cancelling my subscription for the time being.

I really do think that ESO has potential to be a fantastic game! Bugs and issues were to be expected, as all recent MMOs have been published prematurely in order to stick to overly ambitious release promises and/or to be ahead of other MMOs that are expected to be released soon. That's sad, but not at all uncommon, so I did not expect wonders here either. As it's ZOS's first MMO, I was prepared for ugly surprises, but I did hope, maybe naively, that you'd get to grips with the problems - fast.

There were a few fundamentally wrong decisions made by ZOS, though, which shattered my trust in your ability to resolve the problems before my sub time runs out. Hence the cancellation. Honestly, I hated to do that, but seeing that you took a serious amount of money compared to other games, I think it's not at all unreasonable to expect that customers are taken more seriously.
After all you decided to go against the trend and chose subscription/up-front only. You have to deliver on your promises, because subscription customers can expect more from their game than free-to-play "customers" can.


Let me expand on some:

Billing. While I wasn't personally effected and neither the price of the game nor the subscription fee hurt me, there were obviously serious issues, most prominently the fact that you sold a month for free in the package just to authorize or even charge the second month straight away, before letting people in.

Server locations. EU server, hm? What on earth made you think that it's a good idea to place something in the US and call it EU server? One might not be too far off wondering if the person in charge of that decision is entirely sane.
It would be justifiable during the beta. But at the time of release (or final beta weekend to be sure it works properly) there's no valid excuse for still having it standing in the US. And 7 weeks later there's not even a timeline for it? You can't be serious.

Grouping. There's not a single reason why people would want to group in open world. Due to the phases they will very often not even see each other, let alone help each other. It's the most grouping-unfriendly MMO in a long time, which very much defeats the purpose.

But the worst of all is the bot plague and hacks, likely caused by poor client/server design. The world is full of bots, the forum is full of reports, screenshots and even videos. (Until you decide to remove them to protect names.)
This has been going on for many weeks. Yet, nothing has been done about it, apart from GMs banning a bunch. (Ridiculous!) Or you're just not telling your paying customers, which you really should do. (see comms section below)
It has a serious impact on economy, ability to gather mats or finish quests. They essentially make EOS unplayable for anybody starting now (or rolling a new character). Obviously, this alone is a deal breaker for many players.

Now, I'm a networking and sysadmin guy in real life, and what's happening here seems to be a violation of rule number 1 in the 101 of basic networking: Never ever trust any data coming from the client. If any information coming from a client is processed and used in an un-sanitised manner, your design is fundamentally wrong. Seeing how fast the bots spread and what others have reported, this seems to be the case here, sadly.

This is not a single player game! Every bug which can be exploited, will be, and it will affect other players, who can't gather to craft, progress in quests or mini dungeons or find a level playing field in Cyrodiil, since hacks have been reportedly used there too.
Unlike others, I would never go as far as to suggest that you are tolerating bots. But if you are doing anything at all (we don't know), it's not good enough, sorry.

Yes, sanity checks will put extra strain on the server side, but if in this day and age your "mega servers" (most certainly large clusters in real life terms) aren't designed to scale horizontically and seamlessly, then there's another design flaw right there.

Comms. Yeah, which communication, anyway? Canned responses, often completely off target, or just blah blah without any real message in them whatsoever. That's what paying customers get here all the time. Please, rename "Customer Support" to something else, because you don't actually offer decent support here in the forums.
And, by the way, this forum software is absolutely terrible. But hey, you get badges for pretty much any imaginable activity. Awesome. (I can see how that would appeal to teenagers [no offence!], but then the game price may not be in line with that target group, which might put the rage in the forums about the current state of the game in perspective.)

Auction house. I fail to understand why trade guilds would be a good alternative. Ask in five guilds if everybody wants my item or can offer something I'm looking for? Browse all guild stores? Yeah right. Wait a month or two (if you have resolved the other issues by then), and the zone chats will overflow with WTB/WTS requests.

I'm wondering: Did you think subscriptions and a lack of an auction house would put off real money traders and bots, because its harder for them to render their farmed items into cash? It almost seems like you were that naive. Well, I guess you figured that now, too, and are dealing with a backlog of charges and possibly fraudulent transactions.

Changing release/maintenance schedules. Now, this is a minor gripe, really, but it shows once more that mismanagement is running the show. Of course there are many things that need to be pushed out of the door after initial release. So exceptions can be expected. But there were too many in the beginning. I wouldn't have been working in my line of work for 15 years with lousy and random forward-planning like that.
As a player who can only spend a couple of hours per week online, on average, I sometimes have to push things around in real life to make some game time available. It's annoying if that's torpedoed by a random exception release or maintenance (which are shockingly long anyway, like you're pushing out stuff manually to each individual server or virtual machine or whatever you use there?).
No, I'm not one of the "money back!" crowd, and I appreciate the 5 days game time you gave to everybody in April, but it's very annoying nonetheless.



To sum it up: I want to love this game, and the issues mentioned above aside, I really do! But it's utterly mismanaged. I'm losing trust (or have lost it, rather) in ZOS to solve this any time soon, based on my observations and -in my opinion- serious lack of communication following some terrible decision making.
I am not going to log in until just before my game time ends, because it's too frustrating. I will evaluate then, what the situation is like. Honestly, I'm not very hopeful that I will subscribe again before my game time expires. And once it's expired, it depends on how long you allow customers to revive it before characters and items are lost. If I have to start afresh, I will probably not bother.

It's not at all about the money. It's a matter of principle and a lack of trust. You're not supporting a product properly, which we had and have to pay for. I choose to no longer support you financially in return. I know it won't hurt you, but maybe the number of people doing the same will eventually open your eyes.

Give me a nudge when you woke up and tackled the issues.

(Sorry if this message comes across a bit direct or even sarcastic. I mean no more disrespect than you seem to show to your customers, for example in roleplayed support responses or by total lack of communication with them.)

Do feel free to follow up via email if you need clarification on some of the issues or have additional questions.


Regards,
A very sad Elder Scrolls fan.