The Elder Scrolls Online

[Falconeer]

Why isn't there a an ESO subforum? I mean, seriously, we've got GW2 and D3 but no ESO?

Because everyone bar a lone holdout will have quit within six months.

Will have quit in *two* months. And there isn't enough people playing this right now to begin with, as opposed to GW2 and D3 at launch, or even The Secret World.

Is it worth 60%? I paid 35$ on G2A.com (it's 44$ now) and it was definitely worth that price. Not sure I would have bought it at 60$ but I might have based on what I know now.

Is it worth the monthly fee? Hard to say since we haven't exhausted the free month yet. Right now the novelty of the exploration and above average questing and storytelling (for an MMO) is keeping some of us hooked, but as noted multiple times the gameplay is far far far away from being original or new so I wouldn't be surprised if it ended up wearing me out pretty soon. So far I only spent 35$ and surprisingly enough it's a lot of bang for that buck.

[Stormwaltz]

Ouch. Stay clear of this quest, I guess.

http://jestertrek.blogspot.com/2014/04/new-mmo-blues.html

(I normally read this guy for his EVE blogging,he's on the current CSM.)

[Comstar]

There's a dupe bug, involving stacking multiple items in the guild bank. Guild banks shut down today, but Reddit tells me the bug has been known and reported since Beta. 100K gold is being sold for $15 buy spammers, so it seems to be wide spread and common knowledge. If you didn't cheat, good luck at having fun in PvP vs the people who did who have gold plated items now. Next patch will fix it, but I doubt their logs show enough of anything or they have enough GM's to ban the people who abused it.

[amiable]

I do enjoy the PvE gameplay but no honest person can claim that this game is not a buggy mess.

I've been so vexed by the repeated wipe of my bank that I haven't even gotten to how horrendous the class balance in the game is, I went to AvA yesterday and one of the first groups I encountered were 5-7 sorcerers who had an ability that allowed them to blink a large distance and afterwards be immune to crowd control.  This ability had no cooldown. 

Considering that they haven't even gotten around to fixing the utterly game breaking bugs and the dupe exploit it's going to be 6 months until they even look at stuff like broken abilities.  How did this game get released in this state?

[Samprimary]

the ESO dupe crisis was frontpage news today on reddit and, as i scrolled through it, google news.

How did this game get released in this state?

it is a combination of elder scrolls plus mmo. it was destined to be the bug singularity.

[waffel]

I think it's kind of a throwback, keep some of the tricks of single player TES games in place. Instead of the console command for free gold (player.additem 0000000f "1000000") they hid it as an easter egg!

[Miasma]

Doesn't really seem popular enough to have its own forum, even the thread only gets bumped a few times a day despite it just releasing.  Also they now love D3 instead of hating it so don't dare mock it.

Ouch. Stay clear of this quest, I guess.

http://jestertrek.blogspot.com/2014/04/new-mmo-blues.html

(I normally read this guy for his EVE blogging,he's on the current CSM.)

Quests like this are very frustrating but make up about 1/20 of the total.  It's very odd, for the most part they made them such that you won't get frustrated by other people.  Loot is shared so long as you get a hit in, most spawns if items you need everyone can loot.  But then you hit a quest where once someone loots the object it disappears and you have to find another, those are chaos since there are so many people running through the zone right now.  It's like they just didn't think about what the initial leveling population would be and thought "oh if we put down like 15 spawn locations it will be fine".  It is not fine.

In a similar vein - the game has world bosses, you find their camp and you need a few people to kill them.  You don't really need to group since so many people are streaming through the zone you can just wait a few minutes and other people will start showing up and mill around until there are enough to kill the boss.  Well I have now seen two different world boss camps where instead of just spawning, a weak minion summons the boss through a channeled spell.  Remember how I said earlier that just landing a hit on mobs will give you credit?  This means that people are trained to immediately rush the mob before it dies when they see a bunch of other players.  You can have ten people standing off to the side waiting for this poor bastard to finish summoning the world boss, all /yelling not to touch the mob and without fail some guy comes along, panics and attacks the mob.  So the worldboss just can't get summoned and no one gets credit.  Even worse the second camp like this the guy summons the boss, then summons minions and if you kill the boss before the minions you also don't get credit!

Dupe bug, wow.  I wouldn't be surprised if it was reported in beta, there are a lot of bugs from beta.  There are critical quests which have been broken for over a week preventing people from advancing their main quest lines.  They are not very fast at fixing bugs.  When you deposit stuff in the bank items won't even stack, it's terrible, you wind up with ten slots of 12, 7, 34, 22 ingots of ore.  You also can't stack them within the guild bank, you have to withdraw, stack, re-deposit.  Maybe they'll fix that garbage at the same time, I would laugh if the dupe bug somehow took advantage of that.

[Samprimary]

the front page /games post: I don't know how much of this is hyperbole but if it is not, jeez

Some of you may already be aware, but a game breaking bug has hit ESO that allows characters to duplicate stacks of materials in their bank. It is so simple, in fact, that it is possible to do it by pure accident. I will not explain this exploit, but it is the first result of googling "ESO Item Dupe".
Players in full legendary gear, billions of gold (From duping mats and selling them to vendors over and over), and so much more. Money, items, etc is completely worthless.
People are completely panicking that Zenimax will have to drop a nuke, but nobody knows what they can do to fix the problem. The closest I have ever seen to this bad was GW2, but it was stopped way quicker and ArenaNet doesn't mess around and banned everyone involved.
Unfortunately this bug has been well known for over a week now (Actually, since launch!) and it's ramifications are so bad that there may be no way to really recover without something drastic. I believe simply banning people isn't enough.

[KallDrexx]

One of the comments on the reddit thread was that people screenshotted and reported this back in Beta 

[Rendakor]

Of note, I think this is the game with the widest gulf between what critics are saying (IT SUCKS) and what the players are saying (ABOVE AVERAGE TO VERY GOOD) that we've seen in a really long time. There are reviews just savaging it, like in PC Gamer, and it just bears no relation to the way people seem to actually be playing it. And I'm not in a fanboy bubble. The worst I'm hearing from people is that it's merely decent.

There was a similar reviewer-gamer gap with Sim City, but it went the other way.

Also I'm kinda glad to hear about these awful bugs. I was getting close to buying this when I've got no time to really commit.

[Paelos]

Yep, this is starting to look how we expected now.

[Miasma]

Since there is no real AH, and therefore almost no real economy gold isn't actually that useful.  It's like their stupid/lazy decisions are reducing the impact of their incompetent/lazy testing.  A greater impact than gold would be people duplicating the high end crafting mats that turn whites->greens->blues->purples->gold.

Another rookie mmo mistake.  Run a query once a day to see if anyone has an impossible amount of gold.  If any bug report comes in with the word duplicate that's now your number one priority.

[Signe]

True.  I can't see myself playing this after a couple of months unless they add an AH or equivalent and fix things like crappy inventory and buggy quests.  So far I haven't come across a quest that would stop the main quest line, but I've had quite a few that started out really fun and ended in frustration because it was broken.  If I get to a high level and find broken quests that stop my progress, that's probably a quit forever for me. 

[amiable]

A greater impact than gold would be people duplicating the high end crafting mats that turn whites->greens->blues->purples->gold.

This is EXACTLY what happened.  With many of these mats being sold to unsuspecting players.

[Signe]

Allegedly, the disappearing inventory slots will be fixed when the servers come back online.  If you want to replace the items you lost, you have to contact support.  Amiable already told us how well that works.

There was even a video on the item dupe exploit.  So simple.  It's fixed but I enjoyed the music from the video.  Oh, evidently it's fixed because guild banks are now disabled.  Yay for clever fixes!

[Surlyboi]

From what I understand, it's not completely fixed, but we'll see.

[Miasma]

Unhappy camper right now.

There is an idiotic bug that would be trivial for them to fix right now on the main quest line, it has been around for a while now.  All they would have to do is change a distance variable.

Because of this bug you can't finish the very last quest.  Because you can't finish the very last quest you can't move on to the veteran stuff in the other factions' zones.

I am standing here with a couple dozen other naked people playing a mario jumping platform plus praying game.  You have to 'shoot' a fire to light something basically.  It does not work, people have found out if you do an idiotic jump, than another jump and mash the button that it might work once in a while.  The second jump kills you, thus the nakedness, because there is gear damage in this game.

On top of that there is another bug where when you respawn you die right away again.

The servers have also been unstable the whole weekend so every tenth time you die things will not load and you have to f4 and restart.

All they would have to do to fix this is change whatever variable says "must be within 100 metres" to "must be within 200 metres".  The number of people cursing Zenimax's existance in this zone is substantial.  These are the people who are one notch below hardcore who will make or break your game.

As an extra special bonus, the next room on the main quest line that breaks all progress also has a bug for many people.

[Tannhauser]

Sorry to hear that, hope you can get that worked out.  Also, how is the leveling speed?  Grindy?  Too fast?  I'm a casual player and thought it was a bit grindy.

[Falconeer]

This is one of those games where I don't even know what level I am. I just don't even pay attention to it. You get skill points regardless of levels (through skyshards and completing quests) so you unlock new weapons and skills even without leveling up, and if you care about quests and you follow them you'll be overleveled for pretty much all of them anyway. So, I can't answer your question as "grind" is a subjective concept, but I'd say that getting to 50 is pretty easy and quick (people were 50 in 17 hours and my friend did it in a week) if doing it fast is your thing. If instead you want to just enjoy the ridiculous amount of quests and stories, you'll get there without even noticing. Seriously, the "episodic" nature of the quests reminds me of Dragon Age more than Elder Scrolls, or any MMORPG. I am playing short sessions of one or two hours, long enough to complete a quest line, and it feels very casually satisfying.

[Miasma]

I managed to finish it.

If you play as an explorer and do the whole zone you are always at a good level.  If you just grind you will feel like you are under leveled.

It took me I guess three weeks to do 1-50 and while I played a lot a huge amount of that time was spent gawking, banking, exploring etc.  Like falc said it's really up to you.  If you play it to grind it will feel grindy, if you forget what level you are until your screen goes all bright and swirly when you ding it won't feel grindy.

[Miasma]

All right, I managed to finish the main quest line(s).  All is forgiven.  I can't hold a few bugs against such a fantastic game.

Also, John Cleese's character is absolutely amazing and I hope he lives forever.  During the tutorial zone I though it was a one off short cameo appearance but he's actually there throughout the whole main story line(s).  A couple of orders of magnitude at the end.

Sorry for the parenthesis but it was needed.

[tmp]

So, allegedly a friend of a guy from another forums contacted customer service about getting banned for no apparent reason, and was told that their auto-ban system is bugged and that it banned a bunch of people that did not trip any of its warning flags. This is getting better and better

[ajax34i]

All they have to do now is copy SWTOR's auto-customer-service-reply-droid.

[Setanta]

From one of the guys on bittah.com:

I submitted a ticket to report a quest bug that was stopping me processing in the game. Only to be banned, then i get an email apologising for the ban and getting unbanned. I reply thanks to the email as a curtesy only to be re banned

 

[Lakov_Sanite]

So what I'm getting from all this is the game is a must buy.

[Paelos]

So what I'm getting from all this is the game is a must buy.

Game of the Year potential.

[Lantyssa]

Brilliant!  Any ticket sent to a CSR results in a ban.  They can do away with their CSR department with that system.

[Samprimary]

mmo's always have the most tumultuous honeymoon periods.

[Goreschach]

This was less a honeymoon than a one night stand.

[amiable]

John Cleese running around in the last zone making pithy comments is definitely very awesome.

[Falconeer]

The bugged quests, the customer service disaster and most importantly the duping fiasco are really, really bothering.

Then again, a vast majority of players, me included, didn't encounter any of these issues except for a few bugged quests out of several hundreds working ones and are just having an unsuspected very good experience. So while the issues are there and they are major, I doubt they are, or will be, having a role in determining this game's success or failure. Give it a few weeks and it'll all be forgotten. The game will then have to prove if there are reasons to keep playing after the free month or not.

[ajax34i]

I think it's just bad UI design.

Their "ban" button is right next to their "answer ticket" button.

That's all.

[amiable]

Probably the best and most comprehensive review I've seen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ov3B26h12C4

[waffel]

I guess there is another dupe bug where if you alt+f4 during loading you get double in-game mail.

[Paelos]

That review pretty much pointed out that the game was terrible except for pvp.

Any game that fails that hard at grouping isn't long for the subscription model.