The Mind of David Krider

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.

I wrote a post a month and a half ago in which I was waffling about getting back into Elder Scrolls Online. They had announced that they would be adding “subclassing” (or more accurately, multiclassing), which I thought was intriguing. I had kept everything as it was when I stopped playing. I left the door wide open to walk back through.

Their big patch came out, and I updated the game and tried it. Sure, it launched with a content expansion, but the new zone, with its new mythics and new sets and new achievements and all the rest was secondary to me. I didn’t pay for that. All I cared about was subclassing. I was going to see how that worked out before I dropped money on the expansion.

Now, you can’t just start using other class skill lines. You have to re-level them, even if you’ve maxed them out on other characters. And they level at half the normal speed, which I already thought was tedious. So I got to work, running dolmens in Alik’r and running around Spellscar in Craglorn. I used my high-level training gear for a 66% XP increase, my Mora’s Whispers mythic for another 25%, and scrolls for an extra 50%, 100%, and even one 150% buff.

I spent the next six hours in the game doing nothing but grinding. I finished three skill lines that were almost maxed on a couple other characters, just to unlock them for subclassing, and I got three skill lines fully leveled and morphed. I was working on one more, and had just gotten the last skill to level IV, ready to morph all the skills and level those alternate styles, when it finally hit me.

This wasn’t fun to me. This is the whole game; this combat. This endless click-click, click-click, click-click to the timing of an invisible one-second world clock. The net effect of it is like DDR or Crypt of the Necrodancer or something. And I wasn’t enjoying it. Still. I’ve always thought that the combat was the worst part of the game, and nothing about this has changed.

On top of this, the stress of needing to get all of these skill lines leveled and morphed, and then to follow the emerging meta build how-to videos, and then to take my new builds into old content to see how they were doing and how well I could manage it, and then to start taking it into new content and running down all the new collectibles and achievements… It brought back all the community-gatekept anxiety that was the reason I stopped playing six months ago.

So I quit.

I removed myself from all my guilds. I removed all my non-IRL friends. I left all the Discord servers. I stopped the subscription I had just signed back up for. I uninstalled the game. I quit following all the ESO streamers on YouTube and Twitch. I scrubbed all the videos about it in my watch history so that the algorithm would stop recommending them.

And I gotta say, for the record, that it’s been unexpectedly liberating. It’s been a huge load off my mind. (And I could use the extra bandwidth, let me tell you!)