Why Elder Scrolls Online's Bugs Are More Enraging Than Bugs in... Second Life (Comment of the Week)

Lots of conversation last week around what it would take to upgrade 17 year old Second Life, with an intriguing point of comparison made by longtime virtual world user Jumpman Lane, who contrasts SL's performance with that of a 6 year old virtual world:

I just recently returned to Second Life after 3 years of playing The Elder Scrolls Online (fun game). I'll say this about the performance of SL vs that of ESO:

I really don't mind SL's issues, lag, whatever.

In ESO I [played] player vs player and it was a highly competitive environment. Death is frowned upon to say the very least. Killing someone involved tbagging, hours of arguing, 1v1's, and feuds that lasted YEARS.

But that's not why he's taking a break from Elder Scrolls Online for SL. Here's why:

I quit ESO and came back to SL due to PERFORMANCE.

ESO is a game that the better you got at it, the worse it played. Tiny often insignificant bugs, unnoticed by newer players completely ruined the experience.

I'm a Grade 2 Grand Overlord in ESO right [now]. It took 21 months to achieve that Alliance War Rank (the highest) on my PvP toon. It takes untold hours of theory-crafting (thinking up ways to create a viable "build" using all the tools available class, race, gear etc), testing, dueling, and actual FIGHTING in Cyrodill (PvP zone) to actually get good at that game.

THEN...then, because of constant quarterly changes, some bug gets introduced and you literally can not play the game as well as you could the day before an update was issued. I quit.

Occasionally, some bug or lag or SOMETHING will happen in SL and I'll go into an instant white hot rage (cause a bug will get you killed in ESO lol).

Yet, I'll immediately calm down because it's just not that serious in SL. I'm not going to end up cussing a guy out for the next 3 hours because of something that happened (I died) because of a bug in SL.

It's a bit of a relief. I'm calmer. And... I'm very happy to be back in SL. If performance is an issue in Second Life, I just don't see it as something I can't live with.

That's really a worthwhile point. The fact that SL is an open-ended virtual world without a traditional MMO structure, with experience points and character death and so on, means that bugs are not as often the infuriating deal breakers that they can be in an MMO. (Then again, ask SL players and content creators how bad the bug that broke the gacha system was for them.)

That to one side, Elder Scrolls Online has about 3 million monthly active players (extrapolating from recent figures), vs. SL's 600-700,000 MAUs. So while an MMO structure definitely makes players more likely to get enraged by a bug, it does seem to help bring in more players -- and keep them there longer.

Comments

[Alicia]

It's the content that keeps and grabs new people. MMOs will always have that and more, whereas SL's content gets tiresome way sooner than anything.

Another issue that the person didn't bring up was drama. There is drama in every MMO, no questions about that one. Drama can be created from the devs not fixing bugs that should've been fixed, the players' own whining that the game is too difficult, and so on. Now, where it pertains to SL, the drama is amplified a thousand fold as people can become "keyboard warriors" or even spread rumors to ruin a person. Just like RL, right?

So, is SL a way to escape RL?

In a way, yes, and most certainly no. People try to create role-play communities, etc. in SL, but that is most certainly ruined the moment the drama starts to take over. Drama, being power-tripping owners and mods, cliques, spiteful individuals, etc. So, can a person learn how to act and behave in real life via SL? No, they can't. Why is that? That's right folks, if you're a selfish piece of crap in real life, then you're carrying that over into SL. Vice versa if you're the opposite of what a selfish, backstabbing prick is.
Everything starts with real life. Everything is learned at home. In all my years of being in the MMO world, nearly twenty years to be exact, has a bearing on anything, it's that the vast majority of the drama and toxicity I've encountered was not on most MMOs, and certainly not IMVU, but rather SL.

[Jumpman Lane]

ESO has a lot of players because ZOS (Zenimaz Online Studios) has great IP, namely the Elder Scrolls franchise to build upon. Every quarter they come out with new content, that is indeed beautiful and it's NEW.

Where ZOS fails is endgame, most particularly high level endgame game play.They know their game is buggy, and that portions of it is broken. They're NOT inclined to fix these bugs because they only affect a small percentage of the 3 mill or so players that log in every day. New players could play for years and not even notice. The very best players in ESO are quitting in droves.

For me it came down to this: PvP is broken. I can't PvP. So what am I supposed to do. QUESTS? I could play Skyrim (an Elder scrolls single player game) and have more fun. and I did for like a month.

If I just wanted to chit chat with my friends I could do that better in Second Life. (Which I am lol).

Drama has never been anything I shied away from in Second Life. I mean, when someone crashes a sim JUST because you happened to be standing on it kind of makes anything short of that, not seem so very toxic at all. I got over drama YEARS ago.

[Jumpman Lane]

Oh, one last thing. Most of the folks who stick around in ESO are SCRUBS. They are not pushing leader-boards in PvE (player vs the environment. They go to Cyro (player vs player zone) and get CLIPPED.

The top-tier players in the Elder Scrolls Online are looking for something else to play, somewhere else to be.