I hope this is sarcasm because because nothing said was right. I barely quested the entire weekend yet I still leveled up. Hmm and I had a grand lonely adventure too.

So companies are paying them for advertisemant, not the user.

You need to learn the difference between "making a profit" and being free. News is always free, these scabs panicked when their bottom line got hit causing them to lose all credibility.

I dont see NBC begging me not to go to the bathroom during this next commercial break and watch their wonderful ads. If they did about 20 million people would turn it off, and rightfully so. You dont do that, one of western societies pillars is that news is always free, regardless of how much money media companies make. This is basic stuff here. Hence this site is a joke.

It's an opinion article by a journalist for that site. There are no lies in it. It just comes at it from certain expectations. Expectations we are free to agree or disagree with. Plenty of potential customers will be looking for these expectations to be met so it's perfectly fine for an article to point out they are not being met, whether or not we agree or disagree with these expectaions.

To point out the broken quests and the conflict between being the lone hero and 15 other guys piling in on stuff is perfectly sound. Some games work more to limit this by instancing the bandit camp to a group or individual if you sneak into to kill a chief. ESO doesn't. The former would be better IMHO.

That was an excellent review in that he touched on probably all the major weaknesses of the game, but it was rather one-sided-I think there is a lot of great stuff in the game he just didn't mention.

Gotta love google and the search option in that ars technica web, did a quick search and the guy that wrote the article doesn't have any other articles at his name. What we can call, a new dude. Most probably got hired recently, and he wanted to show that he could get lots of views on his article. His article couldn't even be found on the web's search.

I've come around to extreme skepticism on professional reviews. For most AAA games they are uncritically positive. For MMOs they are very conservative and negative, and for indy games they tend to be harsh.

I'd like to have reviewers who like the genre of game that they are reviewing - shocking, I know, but not common. A number of the negative ESO reviews start out with some variant of "I never played ES games" or "I always hated ES games". This is the mark of a site whose reviews should not be taken seriously - because the question is whether a given concept is executed well, not whether it should have been a completely different experience. (e.g. judging a light romantic comedy as if it was a serious drama.) Many more reviews - including the fawning AA ones I mentioned - are remarkably shallow, with few hours invested and a very primitive grasp of the mechanics.

This isn't about seeing a review that doesn't match my sentiments. It's about lazy and incompetent game reviewing in this particular case, and as a (sadly) common practice. For non-MMOs I rely on users, particularly those in forums like this - e.g. people sympathetic to the game. Sadly, that's tough in MMOs because for some reason fans of other games, or burned out people in general, seem to swarm around to apply blanket hostility to all games...

Lol at the comments there:

This person formed their opinion based on reviews rather than trying it...how obtuse can someone be?

Although I've never heard of Ars Technica, they apparently hold some weight with Meta-Critic if their Alexa.com rank is used as an indication. I hope these people don't give their rating based on a stress test.

You should seriously rethink your position.

Internet news sites get the same way money as classic media outlets - via advertisemants (let's keep out the fact, that a lot of hard-facts media outlets don't make profit but are beeing fed by a larger parent company. And those don't do it for public service).

The difference is that ad agencys give the classic media outlets money based on nebulous things like american nielson ratings, while they only pay for clicks and views on the internet.

Sites like Ars Technica don't ask for money, they just ask you to let them earn money from advertisers. You don't have to watch, just focus on the news. Like the tv news outlet could not say how long or if at all you've been watching their commercial breaks.

News have never been "free" nor been a public service.

But I do agree with you on the use of Adblockers. I'm not convinced that making money based on a large number of viewers leads to better journalism. In my opinion it just tends to lead to click-bait articles, and soft news.

..and after having read this review, it's a complete hatchet job. The review starts with a long discussion of why he hates MMOs and everything that is wrong with them. He then valorizes everything about the single player ES experience - being lonely, all of the tricks that it's possible to do in a single player game, etc.

None of which is technically possible in a MMO, which he doesn't like. And he doesn't. The technical discussion is shallow, full of toss-off lines that aren't even correct (e.g. he projected the tutorial island geography onto the main game). He ignored crafting and PvP completely, It's a review that could have been written without playing the game at all, and I'd be surprised if he bothered to reach level 5 or spent more than a couple of hours playing. I'd even bet that he had most of the text written before he logged in.

I actually agree with much of what the reviewer has to say. He's not damning the game only pointing out it's not really TES but a licenced MMO hoping to pick up a ready made audience. Those of you that are jumping up and down in fury, I'm guessing, are devoted TES players of long standing who desperately wanted online Skyrim. You were always going to be disappointed coming at it with such lofty expectations. I'm not a TES devotee and will measure this game once it's release with no pre-conceptions. One thing I can say at this stage however is that this is not Skyrim Online.

Enjoy.

You're severly missing the point entirely. If they block people from even accessing their site due to the use of ad blockers, they've already proven that the amount of clicks they get is in fact > than reporting the news professionally. Hence I'm about as prone to believe anything they say on their website about as much as I am to lick a table saw in operation, with my tongue. You're 100% wrong that news has never been free. It always has been, it has been corrupted over time to become a money making juggernaut, like all things in a capitalist society, but was not always the case (ie see what are now the major news conglomerates in the 1950's) and a person is perfectly capable of getting it from sources that are not driven by greed. These are the facts.

Server costs are minimal, and from the looks of the "reviews" we typically get on such sites, you're dealing with hacks of the 1st degree tarding it up to get a few more clicks. Where does all this money go? Surely not on quality.

I find it even more hilarious that people defend this crap just because the site in question probably falls under their bookmarks. I'm not going to rethink my position at all, if you like having your news dictated by which client pays the most ad money, be my guest.

And also, this argument has been beyond ridiculous. On a forum where every day there's no less than 5 topics on the front page about this game going F2P, were debating something as readily available as the news being free because of ad money?

To my knowledge if they do not charge you for it, ITS FREE, quite a concept I know, and one that should be burned on to everyones brain by now, but apparently not yet.

Oh, I read this review earlier. It's a shame, because the reviewer himself seems rather articulate, as you would expect from someone who does written reviews, but his expectations and agenda were a little off putting. The entire review from start to finish was a constant comparison between your average MMORPG and past Elder Scrolls games; it's reviews like these that leave a bad taste in my mouth, because instead of reviewing the game on it's own merits, he was simply pointing out how this game isn't like X or Y.

Leave your Skyrim and World of Warcraft expectations at the door, play the game for what it is, and perhaps that way you won't be disappointed; heck, you might even have fun!

They blocked adblock users for 12 hours. For reasons they explained the day after. It was an experiment and it failed, they admitted as much. So they stopped doing it.

http://arstechnica.com/business/2010/03/why-ad-blocking-is-devastating-to-the-sites-you-love/

A lot of sites were experimenting in different ways to adress this problem of lost revenue without alienating their customer base. Polite or less so warnings of all sorts, the classic paywall and probably a lot more.

I was speaking in general for news sites on the web. But the same principle applies to every news site you're going to visit.

It's alright if you dislike Ars Technica. They're owned by Condé Nast and as such don't suffer the same hardships as truly independent blogs.

On the contrary. There is no money making juggernaut with the news. Most of them don't make money, they loose money. Especially in television. The reasons that they are still alive have nothing to do with actual news.
Every newspaper, every tv station or special interest blog needed and continues to need to pay their journalists.

Most of them layed off people and shifted focus on yellowpress themes - because many more enjoy watching the unicycle riding village idiot juggling with chainsaws than reading boring stuff 'bout global finance.

We all read our review sites and if we like\trust our sites than what they say will carry some weight.I've skipped a fair number of movies based on reviews. Though I know my reviewers, they tend to not like goofy movies like Scary Movie and such, so I don't look to them for opinions on that style of movie. I trust HardOCP.com for my hardware reviews, and they heavily influcence my buying decision. Of course, If you're Pro AMD and they review your product badly or in some cases, don't give it enough praise, then the AMD fans calls them Nvidia\Intel lackeys! If they don't give a nvidia product enough praise, they get called AMD fanbois!

I think it's easy to get lost in all the hype and buzz whether it's good or bad hype. 10 million people love ESO, 11 million hate it. That doesn't make ESO a failure and it doesn't make the 11 million who hate it wrong. What I have always hated about the gaming community in general, which is more of young people problem, is that everything has to be so Black and White. I played RIFT, got to around level 20 and didn't like it. It just didn't do it for me. The game didn't svck!!! It wasn't OMG!! WoW clones!!! I just didn't make the connection. And when people asked about it, that's how I described it to them. Here's what I liked, here's what I didn't like. When reading the general chat while playing it seemed there was too much "This game svckS!" or "This is the most awesome game in the history of man!" Personally I don't know that either view is wrong per se, it was that the two views then needed to fight it out chat on why they were right.

Really?

http://elitedaily.com/money/the-worlds-10-largest-media-conglomerates/

That said, Im done with this pointless debate. I was bagging out a website some people like, big deal. It was just done to prove a point, and apparently twisted some panties.

That said, many media corporations have afforded themselves the finances to branch out into countless other revenue streams by simply giving the news away for free. If online sites like the one question cant manage, its Darwinism. That is all.

Or maybe you should go get your head examined?

Why should someone leave their past experiences with TES games or other MMO's "at the door"? It's fair to compare aspects of this game to other ES games, and even more fair to compare it to other standards of popular MMO's. In fact, such comparisons have helped ESO become a better game, otherwise we'd still have ESO game without first-person perspective, adventure zones, greater world interactivity etc.

This......

Sometimes I have to wonder if people claiming to be die-hard fans of the Elder Scrolls ever played the series. So, a few major problems with this review:

1) If he wanted the feeling of loneliness, he knew damn well that he wasn't going to get it playing in an MMO. This is a non-point, because the feeling of being alone in the Elder Scrolls universe was always due to you being the only player.

2) The game does let you pick a direction and walk. If you're too eager to follow markers, you won't experience any of the benefits of exploration. I loathe reviewers who can't grasp the basic mechanics of the game they're playing.

3) *gasp* Levels! No Elder Scrolls game has ever had leveled content! Except Morrowind!

4) The reviewer acted as though the beta were not just a final build but a "publicity" build. Everything about this screams that he wasn't even able to qualify for the press beta, so he's decided to place his amateur rant online. Complaining about bugs, regardless of how close we are to launch, is second only to PC Gamer's "in-depth preview" where the editors only played their characters to level 7.

Short version: utter tripe, bad writing, awful "review" before the game is actually released.

I'm not forcing you to. I'm saying that if you enter this game with a clean palette, you're less likely to be disappointed.

That's exactly the impression I got. This article was written in the author's mind before the launcher finished downloading.

ZMO could have designed the game so that serious quest moments were instanced so were were alone or in a small group instead of having it happen on landscape or public dungeons. This in the opening levels of Conan, is what happens. I'm in an entire instanced city when I have a quest objective. I'm very much alone. I don't have 16 other players crouching in the shadows evesdropping on a converaation and if I get spotted by guards they aren't all smeared by a posse of passing players.

ZMO chose not to go that route. Instead we're all the lone hero and at any moment there's so many lone heroes trying to do everything that quest objectives don't trigger. So no - no-one 'knew darn well' anything.

I don't know what game you were playing, but all my major quests were instanced. That also has nothing to do with phasing issues.

This is an MMO. There are going to be other players. If you thought that every single quest would be solo-instanced, I'm sorry that this was a revelation for you, but that should never have been an expectation. If you want the single-player experience, they've already made that for you.

The link points to corporations making a lot of money with a lot of things. There is nothing that points out that making the news has become profitable again.

I thought we were talking about news, not media corps in general. If that was the case from the beginning, my posts were wrong.

But rest assured, you didn't twist any panties here. For a moment I thought you were interested in the facts behind the decisions. Silly me, I know.

I saw nothing wrong with this article, don't agree with all of it but don't disagree with all of it either... Defending the current state of this game does the game no good at all..

Problems this game has

1. Instancing/phasing--- Well known issue and still broken. This causes a lot of the problems and complaints right now, from groupers to solo adventurers who expected this to be working.. This is why quests break, this is why immersion is breaking etc etc..

2. Tiered-- They do state a lot just venture and explore, but the fact is that is not true... The zones are isolated and tiered, it is hand holding and your locked into a pin, with deadly fish or other mundane terrain blocking your path. Also the dungeons or areas of interest are all tied to tiered questing, if you happen upon one in the middle of the map prior to doing the ones closer to the city first, you are in for death for the creatures are way higher level then you... So it gives this "train" feeling to the zone and why we get complaints.

I think these 2 things if done differently this game would have more high rated articles than bad. I also believe we would have far less complaints from potential customers than we do today. These two things have been done well in other MMO's and players know it for they and I have played them so why in the world not this one? A game that needed it more than the others due to the franchise name they are labeling this game. Instead what do you get from the developers a priority on the "staring island choices" , that is what they spent all their time on between beta's was that!@?!

I for one find this way out of touch with their game issues. To make this a high priority than other things in this game that was wrong, I think also angered a lot of potential customers, especially the groupers.

I like the game, has a lot of good but these two basic things if not fixed soon after release unfortunately it will lead to it's demise.

Not everyone is going to love the game, that's okay. I don't like football. I find it boring. That doesn't make it a bad or flawed game, of course. But it would be damned irresponsible for an editor to have me write a review of a game. I would write that it was boring and should have more punching and explosions. That's what this is.