Living in the Era of Robots

It's as if the gaming companies don't care anymore; hey, Microsoft and Zenimax, I am talking about you! The bots are running rampant, as the in-game-video I shot back in Aug shows... only now it is even worse than it was when this video was shot, two months ago.



Since I published Welcome to The Elder Scrolls Online: Home of the Scammers, Cheaters and Bot Farmers, back in July, in which I outlined the problems of bots in great detail, prices for a large number of the raw materials farmable in Tamriel have seen a sharp decline. Kutas, Tempers, Ore, Ancestor Silk and even alchemy reagents like Bugloss have plummeted in the last two months.

Yet when I made the post and share it with the community, the community lashed out at me, called me a whiny bitch (as well as other, even less appropriate, names). Yet the things I outlined as long term problems with the Bot Farmer advancement (bots becoming mobile, farming other nodes once considered harder to come by, becoming combat ready, and even expanding their farming areas, saturation of the market, prices falling, etc.) are now starting to ruin the game for everyone, as I predicted.

I love this game. It is one of the rare games that I have actually played for such a long period of time, so consistently and even sunk some money into it without balking about microtransactions. But let's be honest... the game isn't really flush with fresh, new content for those of us who have been playing since the week the game dropped.

To make my point, consider that the Summerset chapter took only about two weeks to play through. New dungeon releases are done the day they drop, and the upcoming Mirkmire DLC will likely only take about a week to complete (it's so, so very small). Even PVP in Cyrodiil is repetitive, take a keep/lose a keep, take a farm, mine, mill/lose a farm, mine, mill...

If this game isn't repetitive, I don't know what is. And they way they combat this lack of new content is to make some achievements in the game repetitive. Take the Summerset Dailies; you have to do the Summerset Delve Dailies 20 times to get the achievement so you can buy a stupid waterfall housing item. So what are they doing to "extend the gameplay"? More repetition.

Making any given task be something that you need to do many times over a long period of time doesn't make it interesting, it just makes it boring.

So really, for a Tamriel Veteran, like myself, and the many other Tamriel Veterans, all with just about every possible class/race combination we can fill our max number of character slots up with, we habe two options; one play repetitive end game content until the new content is finally released. Or we can farm resource nodes to make gold in the game. Gold that is needed to spend on the really expensive stuff that is constantly being released in the game. These are our two options for filling the long periods of time between DLC, chapters and dungeon dropping.

Yeah, yeah, yeah... events... they give us events. Those seasonal events are just more repetition. How many plunder skulls does one need? How many times does it take to breathe fire before the novelty wears off? How many Hollowjack motifs does the average denizen of Tamriel need to feel complete?

Zenimax has proven time and again that they are not interested in protecting the community from toxic elements in their world. If it doesn't hurt them in the only place they really care, their financial bottom line, then they are not going to fix anything. They are actively trying to ignore the problem we face every day, not showing an iota of care for the community; something I call Active Ignorance.

And yet I'm the one still being laughed at by the community for not appreciating being treated so poorly by a company I have financially contributed to over the last three-plus years.

So before I put the controller down and walk away from Tamriel forever, I am calling on the community as a whole, no matter how unlikely it is to happen, to take action in two parts:

Part One: The Social Media Campaign:

It's time to let both Zenimax and Microsoft know that we want them to correct the problems with BOTs once and for all. Automation belongs in Clockwork City... and nowhere else in Tamriel. Reach out to both Xbox Support and Zenimax through you social media connections; use TESOnline and XboxSupport to post your disdain for BOTs in the game and hashtag your post with #EndBotsNow  #EBN  #TESO  and #ESONOBO (for Elder Scrolls Online November Black Out; detailed below).

Part Two: The Elder Scrolls November Blackout

This part of the action is to perform a month long blackout in Tamriel for the entire month of November. What does this blackout mean? It means the following;

• No purchases of crowns
• No purchases of items from the crown store (houses, costumes)
• No purchasing from the luxury furnisher and golden every weekend
• No purchasing bag and bank space
• No purchases or renewals of ESO Plus subscriptions
• No purchases of items from other players
• No purchases of items from guild stores
• No listing of items to sell in guild stores
• No grabbing Zenimax's piddly daily login bonuses; how many poisons, foods and potions does any one character really need?

Basically, if we can show that enough of us are done with their active ignorance regarding the BOT problem in Tamriel, then maybe, just maybe, either Microsoft or Zenimax will take action against the 

BOTs in Tamriel. Or maybe they won't. But we won't know if we don't try.

But then... Maybe... Just maybe.

But then again, maybe I will just garner more ridicule from the community I am quickly falling out of love with.