My complaint:
Zenimax Online Studios (ZOS) released a game approximately 7 years ago as part of the Elder Scrolls franchise, called Elder Scrolls Online, this is a vast MMORPG which is vastly free to play through game pass and other sources, however they charge a monthly fee for people wanting to subscribe. The fee is approximately £10 a month, and unlocks most DLCs, access to more inventory and bank space and 10% extra XP. The only reason people subscribe to this game is for the ‘craft bag’ – which is an add on to the inventory to store your hundreds and thousands of materials and crafting ingredients you may find. It is impossible to play the game without the craft bag if you are a seasoned player, as bank and inventory management becomes impossible, having only 250 bank space and 120 inventory space once fully maxed out. So this is how they trap people to paying for the game (craft bag), otherwise, we wouldn’t even bother paying the monthly fee and we would just buy the DLCs we wanted with in game currency which you can buy with real money. The game has become very much ‘pay-to-win’ in terms of PVP and PVEPVM.
However my real complaint is in the performance of the game. And how they can continue to charge people when it’s in the worst state it’s ever been in. I can play for about 15 minutes sometimes before I get booted, and none of my skills and buttons work 90% of the time in PVP. The developers mock us as a community for complaining about the state of the game, but all they care about is the ‘crown store’ items which people can use real money to buy things with, mainly cosmetic items and items that have no real advantage in game.
As time progresses the game becomes even more unplayable. This game started gathering issues around 4 years ago, but up until the last year it has been manageable – you could kinda deal with the lag, poor performance and super overpowered sets and weapons they brought in with new DLCs up to now.
Zero customer service (i’ve been playing since beta and I’ve never had an actual human respond to me, always the same automated response) and any bugs that get reported do NOT get fixed unless they affect the crown store. There has been a bug on console now that has lasted for about a year that causes the screen to freeze for a second when you swap weapons for example. This is just 1 of hundreds of bugs that occur every day in the game for people paying the privilege to encounter. It makes the game un-enjoyable and frustrating.
My real question here is, is there some sort of tradings standards for online gaming? Is there certain guideInes they must follow? Surely they can’t get away with this for any longer. They make millions off of their player base and surely as part of the monthly cost you would expect them to improve the game in terms of performance, not make it progressively worst. Who would you even go to about this? I’ve tried complaining to ZOS, but all you get is the same automated response.
All you have to do is go on YouTube and type in ‘eso performance’ and you will be flooded with videos outlining some of the issues. How can a big company like Bethesda, now owned by Microsoft, allow ZOS to get away with this, let’s call it day-light robbery, for so many years?
Suggested solution:
Fix the darn game or stop charging people to play a game that doesn’t work.
