Elder Scrolls Online is incredibly overrated.

I see a lot of talk about ESO being this savior of MMOs and I just roll my eyes now. I have played ESO a fair bit, I've gotten the adventurer and hero of Tamriel titles, and I've 100%ed all chapters except for Greymoor. I used to be of the opinion ESO was really good, and with my small view I didn't see it on the false pedestal people like to put it on. I want to show why I think ESO is horribly overrated right now. I also want to say I'm judging ESO by itself and not as part of the Elder Scrolls series.

Character building is awful. My first experience was maxing a sorcerer then realizing I couldn't even be a fire mage. Even after I maxed a dragonknight, I wasn't a mage, I was a melee warrior who went for only damage. I don't mind the idea of having open classes capable of multiple roles, but these classes are so open yet have so little variation in their spells, your class skills have no consistency, your skill line meant for damage may have less useful spells for you than the tanking skill if you're going for damage. Your weapon choice means way more than your class in defining your role, but your class means more in defining the numbers you're pumping out. 

Then you add all the random armor skills, guild skills, and building a character somehow feels overwhelming when you're not even given that many relevant options. I kinda get they want the openness of Elder Scrolls character building with the consistency of standard MMO classes, but this is so bad. The shitty part is if they really wanted that, they could've done it. 

Have three classes for stealth, magic, and combat, and have weapons determine subclass. Honestly I can't even tell what they're trying to do with the class system.

The one thing that really made me quit was the game's monetization. Ignoring the cancer that is most of the crown shop, the content per dollar ratio is incredibly bad. If you don't go for a sub, you're spending 65$ a year if you want just questing content. if you're not a subscriber, you're probably not buying the dungeons anyway since their value has been notoriously bad.

 Let me just say, the value of buying expansions is horrible. Vvardenfell had a good map, so did Summerset and a crafting skill line you need for endgame, but Elsweyr is where I drew the line. Elsweyr had a tiny map with a new class. I already stated how I feel about the classes in this game, but Elsweyr felt like I was ripped off. 

The excuses from people were hilarious too. "It's small because we're getting southern Elsweyr later this year." Nice, I get less from this to get what I should've gotten now in another DLC I have to pay for. ESO plus is the argument most people use for this game's shitty monetization. With a 15$ a month sub and a 60$ yearly expansion, I'll start comparing this game directly to World of Warcraft. WoW has waaaaay more content per expansion than ESO, even if you take into account that WoW doesn't have yearly expansion and more like, 2.5 years per expansion, it still beats out whatever ESO puts out in that time. Since WoW and SWTOR requires a sub and ESO has bonuses for one, if you compare an expansion and a DLC a year to WoW's expansions, it's still short because of WoW's updates. 

Mechagon and Nazjatar are comparable in size of an ESO dlc, and still beats them in repeatable content. Maybe this point is just me, but paying for a WoW expansion feels like I'm actually paying for content, while paying for an ESO chapter is an "Ah shit, here we go again" moment.

People like to meme on WoW's store mounts, but in ESO if you own every single piece of DLC, you have about 5 mounts to work for excluding the 30 indriks they've been pushing out as event items. The first time I played WoW, it was a major breath of fresh air to create a mage and realize the number of unique spells in one specialization of mages are equal to the entirety of an ESO class's abilities plus a weapon skill line. 

It's baffling how people can put ESO on this pedestal among the gods when it's just mediocre.