[Megathread] Elder Scrolls Online

[Ghostpanther]

This sounds an awful lot like an opinion. Bugs can be fixed, I personally love the combat, and there will be addons for the UI. As for being bored in 2 months, it all depends on content patches.

Considering the ridiculous hype train that went along with games like GW2 and SWTOR, I find the harsh criticism of ESO endearing.




Also, you seemed to have fairly positive things to say about ESO until the Imperial Edition came out and you found it offensive (which is entirely your perogative, I just find the 180 odd). I'm sorry the Imperial Edition ruined your enjoyment of the game, but there's no need to bash it.

I do not think there are rules on this forum which says you can not bash a game of a thread. As long as you are not disrespectful of the poster to the point of name calling, etc. And people do change their opinion about a game after a while. I wanted so much for ESO to be appealing to me. I was excited for it when I first saw the info released. But after playing the beta several times, no way will I buy it. Has nothing to do with the bugs in beta ether. Those I expected.

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It is still one of the cheapest forms of entertainment. The posts where people complain about having to spend $180 a year to play the game are also rather amusing. So we can break it down.

$15 a month is roughly 50 cents per day. So that means if you buy a bottle of soda from a vending machine every day for work you are spending $260 at work on sodas (52 weeks in a year x 5 day work week x $1 for bottled soda). Stop drinking so much soda and you can afford to play ESO.

It is very cheap enjoyment. But a game has to give me a lot of enjoyment and I need to feel like I want to play it often enough to justify a sub. SWTOR and GW2 were well worth the purchase price. But no way were they worth a sub. I do not like throwing my money away.

[Deleted]

This is a false statement.

No, it's not false. You just didn't understand it. I just didn't make myself clear. But it's not false. We'll have to agree to disagree, but read on, maybe I'll make myself more clear.

You can sorta quantify fun, it's just extremely subjective.

That subjectivity is exactly the reason why you can't quantify fun.

Are you going to tell me, with a straight face, that someone driving a two billion dollar Veyron is provenly having more fun than someone watching a ten buck movie, and that having 200 million times more fun? No, of course not. Because money doesn't matter. Fun, and in this case the "worth" of a game, has nothing to do with it's price.

The only thing having to do with money here is the difference between people who a) have enough money not to care, b) just don't care about money to begin with regardless of how much they have, c) people who have very little money and thus can't not think about money, and d) people who only are about money, regardless of how much they have.

Basically, it's not about the game. It's about people and their lust for money.

Erm...k. So you're going over how people have different valuations for things. I don't get how this in any way undermines my post...

If people value money on different levels, then you can't evaluate the game using money as a metric, because it will in no way match how people would find it, seeing as though their view on whether money has any worth is completely different.

I don't see what's confusing about this.

What I'm trying to say is that it is a disservice to this game, and every game, to start talking about money, when money truly is an absolutely and utterly subjective metric. Perception is reality, and if people keep chanting a mantra long enough, a mantra such as "it's not worth it", a mantra that so easily comes up when assigning a monetary value to the game, especially when there's a "paygate", and when talking about B2P vs F2P, the perception will be that the game is not worth it, and that'll suddenly become reality.

[Deleted]

It is very cheap enjoyment. But a game has to give me a lot of enjoyment and I need to feel like I want to play it often enough to justify a sub. SWTOR and GW2 were well worth the purchase price. But no way were they worth a sub. I do not like throwing my money away.

It depends on a number of things. How many hours/days will you play a month? If you aren't spending those hours/days in the game, what will you be doing instead? How much money will you spend doing those different things?

Personally, anything that i play more than twice per week, is worth $15. I pay that much to rent a place so i can play football with friends, twice a week!

For example, i would gladly pay a sub fee for GW2. I join in once/twice a week with my brothers to do some pvp and a random event. Ive spent a lot more on that damn cash shop...

[Deleted]

If people value money on different levels, then you can't evaluate the game using money as a metric, because it will in no way match how people would find it, seeing as though their view on whether money has any worth is completely different.

What I'm trying to say is that it is a disservice to this game, and every game, to start talking about money, when money truly is an absolutely and utterly subjective metric. Perception is reality, and if people keep chanting a mantra long enough, a mantra such as "it's not worth it", a mantra that so easily comes up when assigning a monetary value to the game, especially when there's a "paygate", and when talking about B2P vs F2P, the perception will be that the game is not worth it, and that'll suddenly become reality.

Isn't the majority of gaming an utterly subjective metric though? I mean, in this thread, we've had things like "Terrible graphics" "Boring quests" "No endgame" - now some people would think those are tangible things, but they're not, they are all opinion, there is no right and wrong, there is no metric by which we can measure even something like graphics - because of the wide difference in PC setups, drivers and then just comparable experiences. Almost everything about games beyond the technical barebones is subjective, as with any entertainment or art form. 99.9% of the content on forums like MMOC is subjective opinion - which still makes a perfectly enjoyable discussion.

How do you truly objectively talk about how good a game is using a universal metric? Is that ever possible?

[Deleted]

That subjectivity is exactly the reason why you can't quantify fun.

Are you going to tell me, with a straight face, that someone driving a two billion dollar Veyron is provenly having more fun than someone watching a ten buck movie, and that having 200 million times more fun? No, of course not. Because money doesn't matter. Fun, and in this case the "worth" of a game, has nothing to do with it's price.

I think the point is not about comparing different individuals as it's a subjective evaluation, but the guy driving the Veyron can asses (completely subjectively) if he gains enough more enjoyment from owning and driving a Veyron compared to going to watch a movie for 10$ to justify the cost of the car.

Of course this is a very far fetched example, but let's put it this way: Someone can think ESO is good enough to pay 15$ a month for it when compared to what the competition in the MMO market is offering, he might be fine paying 30$ a month for the game too, but for example if the subscription was 50$ he could think that what ESO is offering is not good enough for the price asked and he wouldn't pay for the game. This assessment is based on his enjoyment of the game, how much money he has and how he values it and how much he enjoys what the competition in the MMO market is offering.

[funyroger]

Off topic: When exactly Veyrons price sky rocketed to 2 BILLION dollars?

[Deleted]

That's the individual decision. If the person in question feels that their 15$ investment in the game is returning at least 15$ worth of entertainment to them.

But in most cases people without a MMO mostly buy other games.
Imagine someone playing WoW all the week long, paying 140€ sub over a year. Instead he cancels his sub but buys bf4 premium for 70 €, AC 4for 50 € and three other games for 50€ each. So one person pays 140 sub, but instead of paying a sub he might play 5 other games for about 300 € over a year.

This is true for me. Whenever i didnt play WoW i bought other games for a lot more money.

This is an individual choice. For me paying a sub was even cheaper.

[Deleted]

Off topic: When exactly Veyrons price sky rocketed to 2 BILLION dollars?

It's a full diamond Veyron!

[Deleted]

But in most cases people without a MMO mostly buy other games.
Imagine someone playing WoW all the week long, paying 140€ sub over a year. Instead he cancels his sub but buys bf4 premium for 70 €, AC 4for 50 € and three other games for 50€ each. So one person pays 140 sub, but instead of paying a sub he might play 5 other games for about 300 € over a year.

This was for me the case. Whenever i didnt play WoW i bought other games for a lot more money.

This is an individual choice. For me paying a sub was even cheaper.

For me it's different, since I quit WoW I spend about 10-30 euro each time there is a seasonal Steam sale which gives me a few great games that last me a long time. Yearly I would estimate it's around 100 euro and I don't even have the time to play them all. I have still games I haven't touched that I bought the last summer sale!

Just for example I got the Witcher 2 Enhanced Edition for only 5 euro and I had an amazing time playing it for about 2 months and I can always go back to it without any additional cost. That's value for money in my eyes and sets the bar very high for any game that requires me to pay 13 euro each month.

[Deleted]

For me it's different, since I quit WoW I spend about 10-30 euro each time there is a seasonal Steam sale which gives me a few great games that last me a long time. Yearly I would estimate it's around 100 euro and I don't even have the time to play them all. I have still games I haven't touched that I bought the last summer sale!

Just for example I got the Witcher 2 Enhanced Edition for only 5 euro and I had an amazing time playing it for about 2 months and I can always go back to it without any additional cost. That's value for money in my eyes and sets the bar very high for any game that requires me to pay 13 euro each month.

Well i am not like you. If i wanted to play Witcher 2 i would've bought it once it was released. I have enough money so i'm not waiting two years until the game is cheap.

Another issue is that i am a lot faster consuming games than you are. Witcher 2 lasted only two weeks for me and i have no intention at all at going back. It is a single player game where as a MMO has a completely different experience. You might play it as a single player game but i think you miss out on a lot of content, especially coordinated PVP andPVE.

But that is just my opinion. I like MMOs you seem to be more like a casual solo gamer.

[Tekkommo]

For me it's different, since I quit WoW I spend about 10-30 euro each time there is a seasonal Steam sale which gives me a few great games that last me a long time. Yearly I would estimate it's around 100 euro and I don't even have the time to play them all. I have still games I haven't touched that I bought the last summer sale!

Just for example I got the Witcher 2 Enhanced Edition for only 5 euro and I had an amazing time playing it for about 2 months and I can always go back to it without any additional cost. That's value for money in my eyes and sets the bar very high for any game that requires me to pay 13 euro each month.

So we're now comparing single player games to MMOs.

I'll gladly pay a monthly fee for any MMO if it dishes out new content on an acceptable time scale.

[Deleted]

Well i am not like you. If i wanted to play Witcher 2 i would've bought it once it was released. I have enough money so i'm not waiting two years until the game is cheap.

Another issue is that i am a lot faster consuming games than you are. Witcher 2 lasted only two weeks for me and i have no intention at all at going back. It is a single player game where as a MMO has a completely different experience. You might play it as a single player game but i think you miss out on a lot of content, especially coordinated PVP andPVE.

But that is just my opinion. I like MMOs you seem to be more like a casual solo gamer.

I agree it depends a lot on the player, that's why the value is subjective. I used to raid in WoW 4 evening a week for 4 hours, plus an additional 1-2 hours a day for dailies, dungeons, AH etc. If I invested the same amount of hours/week into The Witcher 2 it would have lasted a much shorter time for me too, but my schedule, my free time and the part of it I'm willing to devote to gaming has changed during the years. Personally I think at the moment I can get much better entertainment during my 20-30 hours of gaming a month by spending the equivalent of a monthly subscription during promotions on Steam and other similar services.

So we're now comparing single player games to MMOs.

I'll gladly pay a monthly fee for any MMO if it dishes out new content on an acceptable time scale.

I'm not comparing them directly, but only in the context of how much entertainment per money spent I get from a MMO compared to some other way to spend the same amount of money. If you get more enjoyment from a MMO that requires you to pay 13 euro a month then from for example 5 F2P MMOs you play sporadically or 2 games you bought during a Steam sale then obviously for you it's a good investment of your money. That's what I was talking about all along, that you can quantify the "fun" a game offers you by compering it to other products that offer you a similar level of enjoyment for more/less money.

EDIT: Just to set the record straight, I like ESO a lot and I'm pondering if I should buy it and pay a sub, but there are some aspects that are still unknown like:
- the quality of end game PVE
- what will the meta game in Cyrodiil look like after people get used to it (GW2 looked good on paper too, but it turned into a game of keep/castle flipping with a few ups and a lot of boring running around avoiding each other)
- to what extent they plan to monetize various aspects of the game
- the frequency and quality of updates
That's why I'm still on the fence and waiting to get a better picture if the game has enough value for me to invest my time and money instead of spending them on other games or save for a 2 billion dollar Bugatti Veyron made of diamonds

[vizzle]

Eh, friend convinced me to buy ESO. (Damn you Semaphore!) Hopefully I'll enjoy it in the higher levels/PVP, since beta didn't impress me much.

Will I have to download a new client or will the stuff I have from last beta weekend update on its own when the game comes out?

[Deleted]

Eh, friend convinced me to buy ESO. (Damn you Semaphore!) Hopefully I'll enjoy it in the higher levels/PVP, since beta didn't impress me much.

Will I have to download a new client or will the stuff I have from last beta weekend update on its own when the game comes out?

It'll update from the beta.

[Deleted]

Eh, friend convinced me to buy ESO. (Damn you Semaphore!) Hopefully I'll enjoy it in the higher levels/PVP, since beta didn't impress me much.

Will I have to download a new client or will the stuff I have from last beta weekend update on its own when the game comes out?

They posted in the beta forum that you're able to update the beta client to release version. Can't give you a link since they already shut the forums down

[Thotor]

Point is, if we're trying to make everything about money, then none of us should be playing any games. None of them are worth their price if this is the logic we're going by. You can't quantify fun, especially when we're talking about a monthly payment that gives you potential fun for 24 hours a day for 30 days straight. Now, if someone says "well I'm not having fun in the game", then it tells me absolutely nothing. How do I know it's not his or her fault? What if they don't even know how to have fun?

That's were your logic is wrong.
If you two game for the same price, which would you pick ? The one that is more fun obviously.
If you have two that you find equally fun but one has a lower price than the other, which do you pick ? the lowest priced. Why pay more for the same fun ?

Price/Fun ratio is a per person value that is true but it is nonetheless a valid argument when buying a game. And it is not related to how much money you can spend.
Here is an example : the South Park rpg game. I find it really fun after watching all videos/stream but $60 is too much compared to the what the game provides. (beware that is a personal opinion).
The same applies to MMOs with monthly fee. It is a valid argument to question oneself, is that game worth my $15 a month ?
There is nothing with that.

I often see people comparing that to pack of cigarettes (or other non-game value) but that's the wrong way to approach. It is really not about what you can pay but more on the value you get for the money you spend compared to what is available on the market.
If you pay anything without that kind of logic, you are indirectly promoting bad business behavior for game companies.

[Sharuko]

I still find the payment system argument mind boggling. If you can't afford $15 a month on entertainment, you shouldn't be wasting your time on MMOs. If you can but don't want to, then don't. There are 50 other MMOs out there that don't require you to pay anything. But the people that feel it is worth it to them, will pay for it. This little F2P crowd love to constantly push their agenda on all games and people. I would understand that if there were no F2P games available, but there are. It reeks of entitlement.

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I often see people comparing that to pack of cigarettes (or other non-game value) but that's the wrong way to approach.

Who the hell are you to tell people how they should approach it? And how they should spend their money?

[Deleted]

Here is an example : the South Park rpg game. I find it really fun after watching all videos/stream but $60 is too much compared to the what the game provides. (beware that is a personal opinion)

And this is the problem; there's no point in having a discussion and making blanket statements about a game "not being worth the price" when whether it's worth it is absolutely subjective, and the people having the discussion on these forums do not represent the global population who are about to buy the game, at all, in any way; never have, never will. Forum users are a specialty click within the gaming community, and an incredibly small minority.

It would be fine, if such hyperbole and anecdotal bullshit was confined just to these forums, seeing as though the people here don't represent a single drop in the ocean, but it's not. It becomes a statement that is picked up by people, and then spread to their friends, and in the game, and so on. That's how the poison from forum cesspools finds it's way into games as well, and a game that was fun to enjoy with people who had the smarts to make up their own mind is suddenly ruined when those people start reading too much into the opinion of two or three terminally ill with a case of can't-give-a-shit who spread their bile onto the forums.

Now, you throw money into the mix, and it validates the statement of the game not being worth it, as now those people can say shit like "oh it's a great game, just not worth $60" and "sure I'd buy it, if it cost $10", giving a backhanded compliment while shitting on the game. Then people read this and are all like "oh hell he knows his money, he must know what he's talking about, hence this game is shit, I'll skip it."

There's just absolutely no reason to talk about the price of the game, because it's a complete dead end when you do; you say "well, the gameplay and graphics aren't good enough for me to pay $15 monthly fee for it", and then someone else thinks "well, I can scratch my ass and come up with $15, so who cares?" You could just say "in my opinion, the gameplay and graphics aren't as good as game X's, and as such I'd rather play that one." No need to bring up your own, unique, personal, subjective valuation of money.

If we go down that road, then you should look at how much you're playing. I mean, if you've got a job, you can take your hourly wage as a start off point. Now, being that this is your free time, it's at the very least 1.5x to 2x as valuable (here in Finland anyway, if you do overtime at night and so on.) But, since I'm sure you value your free time a lot more than that, you'll come up with a pretty high figure for an hour spent on this game. All that money, wasted.

Instead, you could pick up a game you'll finish in four hours, and you'd have all that free time to spend again. Like, I don't know, making money doing overtime or something.

I still find the payment system argument mind boggling. If you can't afford $15 a month on entertainment, you shouldn't be wasting your time on MMOs.

Amen brother. I'm starting to think it's a cultural thing, this fixation over money, as it sure as hell doesn't seem to be that way within my circle of friends here. We buy each other beer, food, and whatever. We give each other loans whenever. Wasted 20€? Who cares. It's just money, it's meant to be spent, that's how an economy thrives.

[Tekkommo]

I still find the payment system argument mind boggling. If you can't afford $15 a month on entertainment, you shouldn't be wasting your time on MMOs. If you can but don't want to, then don't. There are 50 other MMOs out there that don't require you to pay anything. But the people that feel it is worth it to them, will pay for it. This little F2P crowd love to constantly push their agenda on all games and people. I would understand that if there were no F2P games available, but there are. It reeks of entitlement.

Agree with this, I like sub fees for MMOs.

I don't play any F2P MMOs as I think they are all crap, but I know for a fact if I did like any of them, I would probably spend more money on it per month than the standard month sub fee.

[Deleted]

The payment idea is ridiculous as when I play a mmo for 15 euro's and play that alot then I don't buy other games and in the end the 15 euro's is cheaper then what I would have normally spent. Besides that, I play a mmo for atleast 20 hours a month so that's like 0,75 cents per hour of enjoyment? That's not much, one beer that I drink in 2 minutes costs me 2,4 euro's here. I also know that I will probably not play the game for 20 hours a month as that is probably the fewest I play (I don't play wow anymore outside raiding but I still get my 20 hours a month) so in the end I might easily make 40 to 60 hours a month that means I have like 25-50 cents an hour? That is not much compared to almost everything else.