This game was supposed to be the next big thing: It wasn't.
I've been playing the game since early beta, Fan of TES franchise since Morrowind, I've sadly seen the decline and the dumbing down of the franchise, at first in Oblivion (which was still extremely enjoyable) and afterwards in Skyrim where the game was dumbed down enough to apeal to the console crowd and thus making millions and putting to light a sad fact about nowadays gaming: The easier and dumber it gets, the more people will like it.
The Elder Scrolls online takes the same path as Skyrim, taking it to a whole new level in the desperate attempt to make the franchise popular and as available to the maximum amount of players possible thus diminishing the quality of the game.
The game itself is extremely easy to play. You can only use a maximum of 5 skills at the same time, cookie cutter builds are easy to obtain and easy to use (some people still manage to suck big time at the game though, don't worry). End game content was unexistant at launch and there are now 3 12 people raids as well as 1 4 people raid for end gamers to be "entertained". Any seasoned MMO player will have an extremely easy time playing this game and will also likely leave it quickly when he realizes that the game rewards never match the difficulty nor the effort put into the encounter.
Zenimax Online Sutdios itself as a company is a joke. Don't get me wrong, the people working there are awesome and really feel passionate about the game which is why I'm still playing it, but the people making the decisions must be complete **** with no sense of Public Relations and/or Customer Relations, they keep making game changing/game breaking patches and have NEVER EVER made any gesture towards their player base in order to compensate them for all the changes they make and all the time that is lost by the players who worked towards goals that end up disappearing.
After 8 months of running, the game is virtually rebooting, Zenimax is calling it Elder Scrolls 2.0. Imagine Final Fantasy XIV had kept milking their player base during 9 months instead of closing the game and relaunching and you'd have a better understanding of what is going on in the game. The players who where at end game where cheated by Zenimax to continue playing since the company claimed their advancement would be tracked and that the new system would reward the players accordingly so that they wouldn't loose advancement, but it was a lie. The advancement was tracked but during the reboot, the company is simply planing to put all the players at the same level regardless of their advancement (and this is not the first time they do this). The worst part of it is that the implemented system actually helps players who haven't cleared late game content to advance faster than players who are at end game thus giving them an advantage over dedicated players.
Despite all this, the new system actually looks good, it's just a shame that the company behind the game and the people making the decisions care so little about their PC players who are just beta testing the console release where they plan to make millions like they did with Skyrim. When you look at games with much bigger infrastructure issues like League Of Legends, there always is a lot of rage towards the company when the game isn't working but Riot Games at least tries to make it up to it's players most of the time, ZOS isn't about that, they are about money.
This game was supposed to be the next big thing, it might still be with the new update, I'm hoping it will since I'm still here, still paying, still believing in it, but the company behind it is probably one of the worst if not the worst in the MMOG industry...