Why Elder Scrolls Online Is Losing Players More Than Ever

The Elder Scrolls Online (ESO) is a long running MMORPG by Zenimax Studios, and is celebrating it's 10 year anniversary this year. While anniversaries and big milestones such as this one are usually a time to celebrate, this year has seen a large exodus of players from the MMO heavy hitter. While this MMO is often snubbed in many ways due to its unique combat, it has retained a good sized player base and enough income to merit being ran for a full decade. But now it seems it's players are less than happy with it, and are beginning to leave and the game is showing the lowest population numbers in years, and many social outlets are both slowing and also showing posts about the game feeling more empty.

So, what is going on that could cause such a dedicated fan base to leave?

Well, that question actually has many answers. For starters it has been a well discussed issue over the last few years that the game has simply started releasing less and less content, for the same amount of money. A few years ago with the release of Blackwood we would see the last chapter release that followed the same design the game had followed to gain it's success from it's rocky start. A main chapter would release in June, then every few months we would get more content. Dungeons, Trials, sets, quests etc. would be released and that would keep the majority of even the sweatiest of players entertained. Many MMOs follow this model, because it allows for casuals to not fall crazy far behind, and also lets sweats to go as hard as they can then they get more stuff to do in-between major releases. Well that came to an end a few years ago, and with each chapter the players received less and less until now where there is a single small content updated between full priced chapters. Which is just not worth it, when the game is also not changing up the meta, so if you build is complete now it will be good next year just like it was last year. Which sounds good, except it gets boring, and when you're bored you leave.

Another big discussion is the over monetization of the game. The crown store has always been a shitpit filled with gambling the devs pretends isn't the worst design ever. In game mounts are boring an bland, and the mounts you have to gamble literally hundreds of dollars for are larger, brighter, and have loud awesome animations when you mount up. I have been screaming this for years, fuck that, and fuck crown crates. I have to GAMBLE to try and get an outfit or mount? Trash design, and on top of that when I started playing ESO right around the Summerset chapter, the crown crates did not have EVERYTHING that looks good locked behind them. The last time I watched a live stream for the ESO releases they turned off comments because the previous live stream upset them when they announced home tours and the chat erupted in anger. This time around they changed the battlegrounds, but out of the 2 hour stream 45 minutes was spent discussing crown store items. Hell, home tours is a thinly veiled way to capitalize on fomo and giving yet another show case for housing which a majority of homes are only available through crowns. Not to mention how much homes go up in price once they are rereleased.

These are only a few reasons why people have been leaving, other major topics have been

• negative reception to the new battlegrounds

• shortened guild trader times makes it too annoying to deal with

• devs changing the economy too much too fast, causing guilds to fail

• guild traders still existing, when an auction house works in every other mmo perfectly

• automated chat bans, ruining RP players immersion

• lack of endgame outside of trifectas

• lack of new content (meta has been the same for too long)

• lack of Cyrodiil updates

• latest companions are in crown store

• DEI companion story

Of course a lot of this is subjective. As well if you are a solo player you may not even notice less people, but looking at avaible charts the game is definitely in a bad place playerwise. Also, as a long time player, the game is in a bad place game wise. Honestly, necrom wasnt the best and the addition of the arcanist was something I though was just fucking stupid. A super class that was made to do everything better than everyone to allow new players an easy entry? Then the devs proceed to nerf it to fuck because meta players dominated too much? Then this chapter just sucked, bad story, shitty zone, bad events, and little to no endgame content. ESO used to have amazing stories, the base game even had good zone quests. The newest chapter quests are just fetch quests, and time killers, just filler garbage. Hopefully lowering player base will shock the devs into implementing better chapters in the future. I compare ESO to WoW. The War Within is fucking amazing, but we had to go through Warlords of Draenor and Shadowlands first to get here.