Pacing

My TESO customer support drama finally had its happy ending. A full 23 days after I had filed my ticket, every stolen item and every stolen gold coin had been restored to my account. Not without asking me for stuff such as my Paypal transaction ID for the purchase of this game, which had happened sometime back in February, without any instruction on where the fuck I would even find it. Not without sending two satisfaction surveys before the issue was even close to being resolved. But we got there in the end. I honestly didn't think they'd manage.

This is also where my adventure in TESO ends - for now. I'm 68% into the third veteran rank and I've lost all interest and motivation. Having to complete at least a hundred quests in order to gain another level is tedious, having to kill 32,000 monsters or enemy players to achieve the same goal is a sick joke. Don't get me wrong - I love the setting, the characters, the questing and everything, but the overall pace is so, so very awful, it kills whatever fun I used to have on there. Frankly, I was looking forward to exploring the remaining two thirds of the world, finishing quests here and there, discovering dungeons and what have you.

But not like this. Not when finishing an entire quest line rewards with with anything from .5 to 2 percent of a level-up. Not when fighting a single veteran level enemy is annoying, two of them is tedious and fighting three of them at a time is downright impossible without exploiting the horrid and broken shield bash. I know, I know, early days, WoW had its problems when it was new... god, I'm so tired of that nonsense. I get that shit every single time I point out another MMORPG's flaws.

"The wow servers died a lot at launch. The wow ingame support was crap. Wow this, wow that." Yes. Wow launched nearly a decade ago and the only competition it had was stuff like Everquest, Dark Age of Camelot and Ragnarok Online. Blizzard never anticipated the insane amount of players WoW attracted. This whole thing was unprecedented and there was nothing like it.

It's fucking 2014 now. There is no excuse for setting up the "European Megaserver" that hosts hundreds of thousands of European players all at the same time in the fucking US. Not in a game with a fast-paced realtime combat system, where you're supposed to manually block and dodge enemy attacks, which is annoying during the early morning hours and fucking impossible during prime time. There is no excuse for displaying people's user IDs in public chat and allowing everyone an infinite amount of login attempts whilst entering wrong passwords over and over again, requiring zero authentification whatsoever. There is no excuse for outsourcing your customer support to the cheapest, shittiest bidder you can find, so when you file a hacking ticket, it'll take an entire two weeks for a response, which reads like, "I have noticed your ticket is two weeks old. Does your problem still persist?"

But that's not even the point. What really annoys me about this whole "Well WoW wasn't perfect either" nonsense is how WoW didn't have any serious competition. What were people supposed to do when the WoW servers went down? Cancel their subscription and go back to Ultima Online? HA!
Today there are how many AAA MMORPGs out there, all of which offering more or less the same stuff you get in TESO and the vast majority of them costing no monthly fee whatsoever?

YES, all new MMOs have problems and flaws. That doesn't mean you're not allowed to point them out and criticize them. Especially in a day and age where quality MMOs like Guild Wars cost nothing aside from the price for the game key, whilst TESO charges 15 bucks or whatever the fuck they pay with in your country, every goddam month.
And don't take it from me - look at fucking Metacritic. And while some of my colleagues still insist that this game is oh so fucking great and should be rated somewhere between 80 and 90 percent, because non-existent customer support, constant lag and server problems and the world's dullest and most frustrating "endgame" should not influence the fucking review scores for some reason, the world has moved on regardless. The players, AKA the folks who dare voice their opinions without having to fear that certain big publishers will refuse to sponsor them, have rated this mess an underwhelming 61/100, many of them have moved on, waiting to be disappointed by the upcoming WildStar.

Look. I don't hate TESO. I think some aspects of it are pretty great. I fucking love the pvp. In fact, I'm tempted to resub when patch 1.1 goes live and the experience for killing enemy players will be doubled. Because I'm pretty fucking great at killing enemy players. But great pvp alone isn't enough to make me want to pay a monthly subscription fee. And their new multiplayer endgame, Craglorne? Bunch up in teams of 12 to face extremely difficult challenges in order to obtain endgame gear, which will become obsolete with the next content update? This is exactly the kind of shit that made me unsubscribe from WoW.

So what do I want? "Progress", feeling that my character grows stronger, the possibility to play any way I want and a carrot on a stick, where the fucking carrot is ultimately obtainable. You know, the kind of thing Diablo 3 is doing right now. Yes, I'm comparing games across different genres here, so fucking sue me. Both of them try to keep me playing as much as possible after reaching the dreaded level cap. Diablo rewards me with infinite paragon levels and a seemingly infinite amount of cool items. Last night I have found an amulet, which doesn't only make my character immune to poison - poison fucking heals me now. It's fun, it's unique, it feels powerful without being game-breaking. TESO rewards me with a new veteran rank after 20something hours of grinding boring quests, which results in one extra skill point (I have well over 150 of the damn things and don't know where to put them anymore) and some slightly better gear. New veteran rank weapons literally get 2 more points of damage than weapons from the previous veteran rank. There are ten of those super-exciting ranks (12 when patch 1.1 goes live) and that's it. You're done. Those veteran ranks themselves take an eternity and a half to obtain and provide no sense of progress whatsoever. And the means to obtain them are all equally unattractive. I don't care about ultra hard group content in an Elder Scrolls game, I don't wanna spend entire days questing to gain half a level and eradicating the population of a small country to gain a rank-up isn't very attractive, either. And again, even if I did - what then? Two points of extra damage on my new sword. Wheeeee!

Flaws, bugs and problems aside, I had a whole lot of fun for the 150 or so hours it took me to reach level 50 in TESO. If nothing else, the leveling content is more than worth the initial price for the game, even if you never touch it again. I don't regret playing it. Not at all. But I'm not paying a monthly fee to be part of a dreadfully slow "endgame", which provides no fun, challenge or sense of progress at all. Some of the content they've announced for the coming months looks tempting. Thieves guild, Dark Brotherhood, that stuff is always great. I just wonder if anyone will be around to play it.

-Cat