Playtime: around 170 hours
Level: Veteran Rank 6 (10 ranks in total after level cap of 50)
Experience: All previous TES games, numerous MMOs including WoW, LOTRO, SWTOR, GW2, FF14 (old & new), WildStar beta, etc.
Playstyle: Story, group PvE, PvP, completionist.
Compared to many recent entries in the MMO market, ESO certainly stands out with some brave novel designs. They've done a better job than SWTOR in terms of story, world and immersion, and the MMO certainly feels more like a TES game than any other MMO on the market with the introduction of first-person view. There is a crazy amount of details put into the making of the game, ranging from random NPCs, exploration to consequences of decisions during questing (some of which you will be reminded of even many zones and levels later). However, it's also suffering from a bland endgame, similar to many recent releases, but that's less of an issue than its problem with management.
ZOS has been managing ESO extremely poorly. In a short span of two weeks, they have made more bad management decisions than Blizzard has made in years.
The game is extremely buggy, and feels like an unfinished and untested product. The progression of many essential quests are still broken even weeks after launch, and the devs have been extremely slow at fixing the problems. For MMOs like this, you'd expect massive patches that quickly solve player issues at launch, but that is not the case with ESO. The patches are small, and tend to solve only a small number of issues.
There are also many very poor designs that are now biting the devs in back. Whether it's unbalanced mechanics or poorly designed reward system that led to people camping bosses. Understandably, these issues appear to be of a lesser priority than game-breaking bugs, so don't expect them fixed anytime soon.
Then there is ZOS's handling of exploits that are potentially fatal to the game. ZOS has failed to take care of exploits reported during the beta, and as a result an exploit nearly wiped the game world. Then the messy banwave banned lots of innocent players (whose accounts were eventually restored), and lots of exploiters are still unbanned. As I write this review, there are still at least 3 exploits of similar nature in the public domain, and ZOS's reaction is anything but swift.
Some may say: surely these issues will be eventually fixed? While that may be true, what the recent events have shown is that ZOS has very poor management. As a result, they may not be equipped to deal with on-going problems a MMO may encounter, and I dread to think of the countless issues they'd run into when they release their first content patch, and when they eventually release some expansion pack. It's not about what's currently broken, instead it's about how poorly ZOS has been addressing them thus far, which indicates how poorly ZOS will address similar issues in the future with dreadful efficiency and messy effectiveness.
The game has a lot of potential, but the current management of the game is very disappointing. As a player, I do not find ZOS trustworthy or capable. Rather than sinking investments of time and effort into this poorly managed game, I implore potential players to look elsewhere, at least for the time-being. Until ZOS manages to prove to the playerbase that they can improve their game management, ESO does not deserve your patience or tolerance.
PS: Before anyone wonders why I've spent so much time with a this game like this, the reasons are simple - despite all its flaws I still enjoyed the story (once). Aside from that, I'm really just killing time until Dark Souls 2 releases on PC.