The Mind of David Krider

Elder Scrolls Online launched way back in 2014, if you didn’t know, and Zenimax has plans to put the ‘underdog’ MMORPG on your radar.

The Elder Scrolls Online has enjoyed a bit of a second wind recently, with Lambert and game director Nick Giacomini telling me at Gamescom about how the much-hyped Oblivion remaster replicated the effect that Amazon’s Fallout TV show had on Fallout 76.

Source: ESO dev “befuddled” that some still don’t know the decade-old MMO is out

In April, they made the announcement that subclassing would be coming to the game, which is a total game-changer. For months, I’ve attributed the bump in the numbers (below) to that announcement, and people coming back to get their characters ready for it

ESO Bump

If this gaming journo wants to attribute this bump to the Oblivion remaster release? And compare that to the Fallout TV series’ effect on Fallout 76? Uh… no?

Fallout 76 Bump

The Fallout TV series bump was a 6x multiplier for engagement, if only briefly. The Oblivion remaster bump — if that’s even what it was — was only 1.2x.

So much for a “resurgence.” User activity levels are at 7-year lows in the game. I quit last December, and while I keep tabs on what’s going on, I’m glad I re-re-retired when I did. By all the complaints on the forums and Reddit about bugs, lack of depth, and poor rewards, this year’s “content” has been a disaster. So now they’re going to have to come up with something to redeem the brand in the next content cycle, with a studio that’s been cut to the bone. It’s going to take a miracle to salvage this game.

I’ve documented my love-hate relationship with the Elder Scrolls Online for quite some time. To summarize the current state of the game, I think they’ve dug themselves into a pit, and they keep digging. I don’t think they’re going to be able to dig out. Combat was accidentally designed to be a very-highly skilled game of timing and patterns. At its core, combat in ESO is almost a Dance-Dance-Revolution kind of game. Or, even more precisely, almost a Crypt-of-the-Necrodancer kind of game, with very-precisely timed pre-clicks to be made with every move to the “music” of the global cooldown.

I stopped playing last December. I got back in around June to try their new subclassing system, which requires re-grinding class skill lines, and I almost immediately got re-burnt-out with the whole thing, and re-re-retired. If you review the Steam chart for the game, I think a lot of other people did the very same thing. However, I’ve been continuing to read and post in the ESO forums and the dedicated subreddit.

The ESO subreddit is… exactly what you’d expect from every other fan-service subreddit. The discussions primarily focus on screenshots, questing, and lore discussions, and typically avoid the technical side of combat in dungeons, trials, and PVP.

The ESO forums, on the other hand, are largely driven by true believers. As with any serious fandom, some of them are extremely knowledgeable and have long memories, and can make sense of things in an historical context the way few others can. Some of them defend the game from any criticism, as if their personality depended on it. A few of them post many, many times a day, and seem to weigh in on every topic. Everyone on the forums knows their names. Everyone on the subreddit knows their names, and mocks them.

The worst of the no-life posters is Silverbride, the unmitigated queen of the forums. In 30 years of the internet, on message boards and social networking and game chats and even IRC, I’ve never seen someone who is so uninteresting, and yet so active, so afflicted by “main character syndrome,” and yet so obtuse to the irrelevance of their “contributions” to the discussions. And if anyone even breathes a disparaging remark about her, they are “actioned” by the mods. It’s as if she’s the golden child of the forum, and has led to much speculation that she’s a plant, an employee, a girlfriend of someone important, or otherwise tied in on the backside with the company.

The problem on the forums is that there are rules to cover literally everything, but they are so vague that you can never be quite sure if something you say will fall afoul of them. I’ve been “actioned” a few times for things that honestly mystified me. One time, I made a defense of the developers of the game, and it was taken so out of context as some sort of offense that I still don’t understand what happened. This is not uncommon, but it’s also against the rules to talk about mod actions, so there’s no pointing out how stupid and unfair the mods can be either.

I’ve just been actioned again, but, to be fair, I strongly suspected I would be when I typed the comment. The discussions of interest on the forums right now are about implementing crossplay. People have wanted it for years. It’s going to take a monumental effort to implement it in this old game, but Zenimax Online Studios has finally said they’re committing to it.

I referenced an article that said that the recent Microsoft layoffs — which cut ZOS’ unannounced space MMO and the head of the studio — also caught a third of the ESO staff, particularly the ones helping to “keep the lights on,” and pointed out that this grandiose effort would now have to be done with less people, specifically the ones that would be required to do the infrastructure work.

Crossplay is being called for most vociferously by console players, who say that they are having hard times getting queued for dungeons, and that PVP on their servers is about dead. They want to join with the other players to have enough people to make it interesting again. They must be right, because I don’t think anything but the threat of losing the console players would be enough to get ZOS to invest in doing it.

Our hero, Silverbride, fears the idea of implementing crossplay, because it apparently poses an almost certainty that it will cause name collisions between servers, and would force her to have to rename her precious, carefully-crafted, solo, role-play characters. She also thinks that there’s so much competition for the trader spots that it would break guild trading or something.

After this comment, she immediately created a new discussion with a poll asking people how they thought the name collisions would impact them. As if she’s important in the process. As if the results of that poll mean anything to the devs or the people running the game. As if that’s a scientific way to gauge reaction.

This is why it seems to people like she’s tied to the company somehow. Why else would someone have such a certain air that they were somehow single-handedly steering the course of a Microsoft subsidiary in how they mange the direction of their development efforts?

In response, I posted what’s quoted below. My comment was deleted entirely from the discussion, and it was clipped out of replies that quoted it.

I think my remarks still stand.

It was a stupid thing to say, and it could not possibly be true. There’s no way that she plays as much as she says she does, and “never seen a single trader not being used on PCNA.” That’s absurd. It happens all the time.

Other people commented back at her that other games have gone through this transition, and character names wind up getting a little icon or flag next to them to indicate which server they came from. I thought it was clever. It seemed that most of the other commenters also thought this was an elegant solution. So the whole issue is a nothing burger.

Here’s what Google’s AI says when I ask “Who is Silverbride?”

I gotta say it nailed it.

So I decided to stop playing their reindeer games, and leave the Silverbride circlejerk once and for all. And I have to say… great success.

This has also greatly reduced my desire to keep up with the game through the subreddit. I think I’ve finally gotten the last of this game’s hooks out of my flesh.

These days, I’m pretty eaten up with Fallout 76, but, as an MMO, it’s not even half as deep or wide as ESO, so it’s almost impossible to obsess over. Don’t get me wrong; people do, of course, but that’s the subject of another post.