Mr.Mattress said:
Really? I have to buy a Horse after I buy the game? That's ridiculous!
I was thinking about buying it, but I certainly won't now.
Incorrect, horses are available for purchase using in-game currency, albeit it's expensive to get a mount (similar to buying training in WoW, where for a lot of characters they would have to basically be saving up from the beginning to buy one when it became available).
In this particular case it's the direct result of whining on the part of certain players in the beta. The basic idea being that the people getting the Collector's Edition are saved some grinding time, and get a slightly different looking horse to show "hey, I spent money and supported the game". This is why a digital CE upgrade was made available so people could buy the CE advantages later if they didn't want (or couldn't afford) the CE up front. The horse appearing on it's own seems to be a direct response to further whining from people who say "don't want the Imperial Race" or the "Explorer's" benefits and just want the horse, so one with a palette swap was going to be put up for individual purchase.
To be honest, I do not much care for the fact that a game running off of a subscription model has a micro transaction store at all, that strikes me as being a recipe for disaster, and something that shouldn't be considered compatible with the typical game+subscription model, which I largely prefer as an alternative to cash shops for reasons I could explain again but would get well off topic.
To be honest people shouldn't be concerned about the mount, that's pure fluff, and honestly mounts have been coming with Collector's Editions seemingly forever now. "Old Republic Online" had it's CE speeder, different pre-order places gave people different "Siege Mounts" for "Age Of Conan", etc. They should probably be paying more attention to the other benefits:
The two major advantages of pre-ordering the game are access to The Imperial race, and what they call "Explorer's Pack Benefits" which allow you to play any race in any alliance. The competitive/PVP structure for ESO has 3 sides, each with 3 races with some attempt to balance them out, as each race has their own distinct set of racial abilities which they unlock and advance as a character progresses. Deciding you can say play a High Elf (perhaps the best offensive magic race) in The Ebonheart Pact (Argonians, Nords, and Dark Elves) when part of the point seems to be their lack of a dedicated "mage focused" race (Dark Elves are focused on being hybrid types at the best), represents a huge advantage, and one that will probably become more pronounced as guild-based PVP becomes more frequent and various buff-granting territories are captured and held. People with this ability are going to be more valued, and of course throwing a few specialists from one alliance into another can have a much bigger impact on overall balance than you might think. One point of concern I've had with ESO is what seems to be something of a lack of serious endgame or large-scale PVP testing. I have yet to see their raids/PVE endgame, and what PVP seems to be going on is pretty much run of the mill without the real metagame aspect of that being tested. The Imperial race (which our article writer calls "boring") is something only recently available for testing, and as such there hasn't been much large scale comparison of the race to others at the high levels. It seems fairly mundane, and perhaps even a bit "boring" (sword and shield exps boost, extra health unlocks, etc...) until you consider that the final ability is a 10% chance of doing a 4% lifesteal (ie give yourself 4% of your damage as healing) on all melee attacks. That has the potential to either be kind of pathetic, or really, really, broken, it's hard to say because it's not like we've seen large scale public testing (some people might have been able to, somehow, but not like this would need to be testing). It doesn't sound like a lot on it's own, but like all abilities it all depends on what other things you have going on in your build, and depending on how that stacks with later abilities, enchantments, equipment.... you could be looking at something that give the Imperial a decisive advantage over other races, especially if you work this into an already self-healing tank, or use it to augement a siphoning heavy Nightblade build, with the sword and shield gain boost and durability boost the race seems to designed to lean towards the former which arguably means what could very well be the best tanking race in the game is an exclusive.
In short, I do tend to agree that this is a little touchy, especially in a subscription based game. The Horse is arguably just cosmetic, and frankly everyone who plays is doubtlessly going to wind up with a mount. The other perks... not really.
They are also giving CE buyers an EXP booster item, Rings Of Mara, which are designed for small groups. The idea is you give one of the rings to another player you group with, and both of you get more exps while you play. If there is a cut off to how long this functions (like with The Secret World's exps booster items from their pre-orders) it hasn't been mentioned so I'm guessing "no". Given that this is a game where skills level up and it seems like it can mean as much as "leveling" this here could represent another really big deal.
That said I did pre-order ESO, I don't like a lot of things it's doing, but I'm frankly getting burned out with a lot of other MMOs, and from what I've seen in beta this might keep me going while I wait for something better to come out. The other big MMO I had my eye on was "Wildstar" (had problems with their beta running right though, and never got answers from their support).
At any rate ESO will get it's chance to 'wow' me after Beta, it's actually fairly decent, but has some serious drawbacks and more bugs this far into beta than most MMOs (this is comparative, I do a lot of betas, I expect bugs). It could be a blockbuster potentially but that would depend heavily on these plans for "constant, development and new content" which it seems almost every MMO promises but few deliver.
The major point of this rant is that yes, Bethesda *does* seem to be getting pretty greedy, and rapidly approaching a "worst case" with it's business model. It's just that people are looking at the wrong things, the horse is nothing, to be honest I'm kind of shocked so many people whined about that compared to the other things which have far more of a tangible, in-game effect, one of which seems custom designed to pretty much blow factional game balance out of the water.
