ESO support's job is to try and get you to give up on getting assistance. They won't be direct about it. If it's not something the first person you get can solve within a couple minutes, they begin a war of attrition. Every. Single. Time. If an admin sees this and doesn't like it, look at my ticket history. All of it; don't ask me for a ticket number.

They probably have a severe metrics problem, overemphasizing total number of tickets solved or something like that. In a way though, I get it. Probably a whole lot of people asking a whole lot of stupid questions, making it too expensive for support to be good, especially for a subscription-optional game.

You can check ticket status without contacting them and getting put at the back of the line: https://help.elderscrollsonline.com/app/account/overview

I understand that they may bombarded with tickets but they still must respond in a timely matter because this is not a free game. They charge an admission fee in the form of requiring you to purchase the game before you can access their environment so I expect some manner of advanced support.

ESO/Bethesda has a filtering mechanism in place in the form of the questions they ask you before you can place a ticket; if you can't find an answer in the automated responses then you can place a ticket. I understand this isn't foolproof but it helps to reduce the number of tickets that require human intervention.

If they wanted to prioritize tickets they could separate tickets by whether the user was a subscriber or not by giving a higher priority to the subscription pool of tickets. Prioritizing is done by companies all the time by using the level of service agreement you have purchased but regardless of the ticket priority all tickets warrant a response.

I know it its a pain to read through or listen to every ticket that comes but it has to be done. I had a user contact me when their PC stopped during boot; I asked him what the problem was and the user said the screen displayed "Press any key to continue". I said just press any key and he said that's the problem, what's the any key. I will admit I had to put he user on hold for a minute while I laughed but I did get back on the call to tell him to press the "a" key to continue the boot process to which the user thanked me and ended the call. I thought an any key issue was an urban legend but it's not. I had a user tell me that neither their PC or monitor would power on and when I went to her office I saw that her surge protector which was in plain sight was turned off. I turned it on and everything started to which said to me "oh, I was wondering why my desk lamp wouldn't turn on". You can't make this stuff up but they all required a response.

Also, my ticket was escalated to a specialized group and I have not heard from them in 2 weeks now. An escalated ticket requires attention and a response to which I have received neither. Telling a customer that dropping a ticket in priority for responding to a Technician's request is ridiculous. The ticketing system in place here doesn't work correctly because it reformats all my responses to a barely readable format whether I enter them into the ticket directly or respond via email (Outlook client or email provider website). Since the ticketing system doesn't have a preview, I must update the ticket first and then update the ticket again if the ticket wasn't formatted correctly. I have not experienced this with any other vendor and I have dealt with dozens.

This is a great game which I like to play and hopefully one day I'll get proficient at it but the Customer Service needs to improve and from looking at various forum posts, it seems that I'm not the only one who thinks so.

Speaking of the forum, you're supposed to gain access to post when you purchase the software which didn't happen in my case, I had to open a support ticket but even without that ability the forum proved invaluable by helping me to solve issues, find workarounds or that some issues have no immediate solution or workaround and you just have to deal with them.