Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Let me start off this review by saying that I LOVE, LOOOOVE TES games. I loved them ever since I first played Daggerfall (before all the patches that made it playable), and played Arena shortly after I finally finished Daggerfall. I have been following TES very closely from that time on. Heck, I even liked Redguard, and everyone I know tells me that game is terrible. So I was extremely excited and ordered the Imperial Edition from GMG as soon as I found a 20% off code (I had to buy two copies, so I did not want to shell out that much for an MMO with a monthly subscription fee). I have been playing this game for a while now (remember Imperial Edition gets a nice head start option), so I think I can finally give a decent and most importantly spoiler free review of this game. Early access actually started off pretty well. The character creation is great, and both my wife and I were able to create the avatars we wanted. We also quickly jumped into a friends guild - and that is where our first surprise came... EVERYONE in TESO can SEE your ACTUAL account name. In fact adding a "friend" to your list, gives you their actual account name. My account names are always weird and have nothing to do with my real name, but my wife usually uses a combination of her first, and last name. Meaning everyone and their grandmothers knew they were playing with a female. This lead to a lot of people (even those from our guild), that would start asking her where she lives, her age, and if she was hot, etc. In fact a lot of "friends" that we met in TESO had their names and year of birth as their account name, since they were not warned that this name will be so freely and publicly available. Heck, some people even had their state in there! I kid you not, one of the players I met had FirstNameLastNameStateDOB as his user name. What an epic fail in this day and age to not CLEARLY warn users about something like this. After we got out of the "newbie" areas, the game started to really lack polish. A LOT of quests were broken, requiring you to re-log and hope you get in the instance where the quest is working. The best part is that while you re-log, you can actually experience a character rollback. I completed a quest, only to re-log and find out that I never completed it. These random rollbacks had a very major impact on the game for us. We all lost money, experience, time, and most importantly LOOT and materials... Moreover, a friend that was playing with us re-logged only to be greeted by characters that were not his. He called it a night after that. The issue was fixed the next day. That's right... There was some database linking error and the poor guy literally (temporarily) lost access to HIS characters. Not a big deal, since it was only the second (or third) day of playing, but this is unacceptable. The game was taken offline for a good 10 hours (or more), and everything appeared to be fixed, however after playing for a few more hours we ran into broken quests once more, and more harassment for my wife due to her very obvious account name (that we petitioned to have changed with no response so far). While I first loved crafting in this game, it involves quite a large chunk of time AND inventory management, making it lose its charm rather quickly. Want to research and improve something? Well that will take 6, 12, 24 hours real time. You do not have to be on for this, but that is QUITE a time commitment. My biggest problem with this was when I started research on an item and logged into an alt. Came back a few hours later only to find that my crafter got rolled back and never started the research... So I started the research again and went to sleep, ONLY to log on the next day and find out that he was ONCE AGAIN rolled back to before he started the research. That was quite infuriating. Now lets move on to the inventory system... Which is downright terrible as it gives you only 60 bank slots total... That are shared across ALL your characters... 60 SHARED bank slots is a joke, since one crafter can easily fill those! Everyone in our guild is simply rolling alts as an alternative bank, and I personally have 4 characters with full inventories as my bank mules... I have people in our guild that have to use spreadsheets to keep track of who has what materials, and that is a pretty big design fail. Either give each character 60 bank slots, with 10 shared slots on top of that - or increase the shared number of slots to 120+. Speaking of crafting, most nodes in the game are guarded by NPC's, and since they are not instanced to your character - it means that other players WILL run up to the node while you are taking care of the mob and steal it, quickly running away as you finish the mob. This gets even worse in dungeons. The best loot I have seen so far is either crafted or comes from a dungeon chest (not the dungeon boss). This means that you (or your group) can be fighting said boss, and some idiot can go loot your chest... So you get NOTHING. To make things even better, if you kick said ninja looter they stay in the dungeon with you and are free to continue ninja looting... What is this? I don't even.... The game is not all bad however. It does have some epic parts! You can become a vampire or werewolf, heck you can even get impregnated by a wasp and give birth to a waspling that will follow you around (and protect you), thinking you are its parent. My most "OMG" experience so far has been riding through a forest and having my horse make a nervous neigh, only to find that it was scared of a wolf that was fairly close by. That is pretty epic and really made the world feel alive. The quests and instancing also get an honorable mention. Although it is still a very theme park like game, I really enjoyed some of the voice acting and quests. The heavy instancing also makes it possible to feel like you made a real difference on the world. Moments like that aren't too common, but they add a lot of extra to the world, making it truly feel lived in. Finally lets move on the Pièce de résistance, and the reason why I am giving this game such a low score (I would actually give it one star had it not been for some awesome moments). As of right now, there are two HUGE issues in the game. Widespread duping (and it will get a lot worse when people find out how easy it is), and the client is being trusted with a LOT of things. I will not be saying exactly what, but a simple HEX EDITING program is ENOUGH to allow one to speed hack, teleport, have unlimited rolling AND dodging... Meaning PvP in this game is about to become utter garbage. The PvE is affected as well, but PvP is completely shot. Apparently ZeniMax did not learn from the folks at Cryptic after they had plenty of issues due to keeping so much clientside. Google "mmogfails" and read up on their disaster. Unless TESO acts fast, I can see the same thing happening here. Also check the comments section for more info. I can't post links in this review. I think I will give this game some time to mature, maybe a year or two, and play The Secret World and Guild Wars 2 in the meantime. Both are buy to play games, and do certain things better than TESO. The story in TSW is the best I have seen in any MMO to date, and GW2 does most other things better than TESO. As a bonus, neither game allow you to cheat and gain a huge advantage over legit players. Sorry Bethesda, it really pains to give you guys a two star review - but certain problems with the game (mostly due to poor design choices) really hinder its enjoyment for the Mitchell family. WHY... WHYYYY trust the client in this day and age? As a side note, I want to comment on how terrible ZeniMax support is (and not just because they haven't responded to my wife's account name change request after multiple days). My acquaintance (a 62+ year old retiree that I sometimes do computer work for) was BANNED from the game due to a "TOS violation". After multiple (failed) attempts at contacting support, he finally got a reply and was un-banned after an "investigation" took place... He is now literally done with the game. You lost a very big fan there, and it was all due to sloppy work. Not nice ZM/Bethesda... Not nice at all. I hope that you enjoyed my unbiased, spoiler free review of TESO. Now I would like to make a request of you, the Amazon gaming community. If you downvote my review, can you please post your reason for doing so in the comments section? I have posted nothing but our honest opinion and experience of/with the game, and would like to know why I will be getting downvoted (and I know those are coming)... Unless you work for ZeniMax damage control that is, or never bothered to read my review and are downvoting simply because of the way I scored the game. Than feel free to ignore my request. Anyway thanks for taking the time to read my rather large piece, and see you all around! 4/11/2014 UPDATE: Please check the comment section. There have been some interesting developments after I published this review. 4/18/2014 UPDATE: WOW, I didn't even notice that I started getting helpful votes. I really wonder how that happened. I was sure that this review would be forever buried and tagged as unhelpful. 4/18/2014 UPDATE 2: Oh I see. The dupe finally got out and people started looking a bit deeper. Honestly I am surprised it took this long, since anyone messing around in the guild bank had a pretty high chance of figuring out how to do this. We discovered it by accident and made a forum post about it... Only to have it deleted. Shortly after that it was all over guild chat and people were duping Grand Soul Gems and more. I honestly thought the dupe would get out that same day, but apparently I was wrong. 4/19/2014 UPDATE: Seems like ZeniMax introduced another bug into the game. This one will allow you to get unlimited mail (chests) from your hirelings. I simply don't know how to react to the way they are running things. 4/19/2014 UPDATE 2: Earlier today I received an e-mail from a reader that asked to remain anonymous. This e-mail contains instructions on yet another dupe, and this one (like the original) will allow you to dupe everything. I just tested it out and can confirm it works. The author informed me that this exploit has existed since launch. I think I am going to call it quits with ESO. I don't want to reward incompetence with money, and most importantly my time. Consider this my final update to this review. I will be doing the only thing ZeniMax understands and speak with my wallet. Honestly, it seems to me as if ZeniMax is simply using the PC crowd as beta testers for their console release of the game. It is my firm belief that TESO will be buy or free to play within a year of its launch. My guess, sometime in early 2015, probably a bit before April. I would also like to make a request. For the last few days people have been sending me quite a lot of ESO bug reports and issues. I want you all to know that I have no impact on them getting fixed. Please don't e-mail me regarding this game. Edit: 5/18/2014 UPDATE: Although we no longer play The Elder Scrolls Online, I want to point out that ZeniMax DID in fact charge us both right out of the gate for an EXTRA month (on TOP of our "free" month of gametime). We were charged an extra $15 when we entered in our CD-Keys. This is unacceptable! After a few e-mails with ZM, the money was refunded back to my credit card, but that is yet another example of ZM's incompetence. Thank you for your time, - Sam