Elder Scrolls Agony

I have been playing ESO for a little while now.  I played multiple BETA weekends and I have been gorging on the "5 day advance access" that went into effect last week.  Yum!  Beautiful world, fun quests, great combat system...all in all, a very satisfying experience.  So, don't get me wrong...I am enjoying the game.  Very much.  I had misgivings about paying a subscription fee, but I was frequently reassured by friends that it was worth it because they fixed bugs faster and corrected problems better than non-subscription games.

Yeah.  Not so much.

 The free access period is up and it is now time to play on the time I purchased.  And the game sucks.  SO BADLY.  I am experiencing tons of lag, multiple errors, frequent boots, and an inability to even log in.

I even got this lovely error message.  I had not messaged anyone. Not a soul.  I was minding my own business attempting to explore with the huge lag and then this little gem popped up.  Spamming?  ME?  

I have been using the "bug report" feature quite a bit too.  I had some idea that the BETA version of the game would be quite buggy ( which it was) but that when they went to wide release, many of these issues would be addressed in some way.  Some are.  Many aren't.  There are still many quests that are dead ends as you are unable to progress due to bugs.

And yet...that, I can forgive.  Because this world is so lovely.  Every time I see someone compare this game to WoW, I want to cringe.  For me personally, the cheap, cartoony graphics of WoW were a deal breaker.  I never made it a couple of hours into my free trial once I saw what the graphics looked like.  I want something like....well...like this:

A lush, beautiful, detailed world that is a feast for the eyes.  I love exploring because interesting things are around every corner...provided you can actually get there without lagging out or being booted.

(this is an Argonian town...I love the design choices they made!)

I am truly enjoying this game...when it works properly.  So you can imagine how frustrating it is that the first day I am playing on my dime...on MY TIME...the game has completely blown up and gone to hell.  And I cant actually play.  I cant log on most of the time without getting an error. If I can manage to get in game, the lag is excruciating.  My character froze during combat and promptly died.  Opening a chest...impossible.  Looking in a bookcase?  Try waiting at least a minute or more before you find out what is there.  

Worst of all, I have discovered that every time they run a patch, I am forced to uninstall and reinstall the entire game from scratch. The "repair" function doesn't correct the issue. I have been working with the tech support on this and the best they can come up with is for me to uninstall the game and then reinstall.  THE WHOLE GAME.

That takes a minimum of 6 hours even with my super high speed internet.  6 hours.  Every time they patch.  There have been three of them since Friday....so that means I have wasted almost an entire day doing nothing but reinstalling this game.

And that could be the last straw.  As much as I am enjoying the game...as fun as it is and as beautiful as the graphics are...this nonsense of installing the whole game over every time they patch is just a little insane. 

The lag/log in issues/being booted/bugs....all of it....I thought I could ride out with the assumption that it would get better over time.  But it takes a PATCH to fix issues.  And every patch is a wasted day for me, apparently. Waste of money...waste of time....just a waste.