The times that I do play the game, the world is always full of people, but I have to bet that a majority of this is coming from a small amount of people using the shop. What a crazy amount of money.
The thing I dislike about MMORPGs is that they always have the same problem, and its always because the game is an MMORPG:
The whole game feels like an amusement park.
The scale of buildings and hallways is always comical. I always have to wait in line for a dungeon/raid/boss/NPC, etc. NPCs always feel like theyre there for a photo op and everyone is always crowding around them.
I wish that MMORPGs could add a feature where I can play in my own “channel,” where the only other players that appear on my screen are ones I have invited to my channel. Because some MMORPGs are appealing to me, its just I don’t like the crowds of ten trillion people all doing the same task “only a hero can do.”
Private servers are sometimes a thing. Otherwise I’ve heard ff14 is stellar as a solo game.
Iirc that’s almost how it was in Guild Wars 1. There would be common areas (towns and outposts, the places without danger/ennemies) and each time you ventured out of them and into the PvE world, it would be a new instance only open to you and your group.
I remember when Star Trek Online redid the map for Deep Space Nine and it was so much better because it stopped being comically large. The downside is that it’s a little bit possible to bump into geometry (in particular, the spiral stairs are a little awkward), but the change was 100% worth it.
(They also made a huge improvement re-doing Earth Spacedock, but it wasn’t a location we were intimately familiar with from TV and they changed the layout significantly, so the wow factor wasn’t as directly attributable to fixing the scale.)
Too bad they seem unlikely to fix Starbase 39-Sierra, Deep Space K7, or any of the other older social hubs any time soon.
Not terrible for a 10 year old game.
I started playing it about a month ago.
Fills a nice void of solo podcast game. No mmo experince before because of dislike of group activities but most content is soloable so far. Enjoy the world and can drop in and out for however long.
The subscription honestly didn’t feel overly necessary. Bought it as have been enjoying the gameplay loop.
Could have caught me at the right time in life 🤷
subscription is mostly useful for infinite resources bag space, and free non-recent dlc access too i guess
and most content is indeed soloable, only time you need to interact with people is in some DLC dungeon and some veteran dungeons, and mostly just to listen to/explain boss rules so you don’t die every 10 seconds
My secondary bar is healing/ oh there’s other people nearby.
If end up seeing people just throw shields on them and heal as an arcanist. Love how versatile that class is.
Historically RuneScape has filled that gap
Might be worth your interest
Its been awhile so maybe things have changed. When I tried it out it basically took everything I enjoyed about these games and scrapped that to make it work as an MMO. Somehow Im the main hero but had several dozen people jumping around me at all times. All agency of character choice was gone, along with half the possible skill sets. Every quest had one way, maybe two ways, to complete them. It was no longer I could sneak or bribe or negotiate or fight or pickpocket or trick them into fighting someone else or use a spell to mesmerize or put them to sleep or poison them or whatever else came to mind with my incredible multitude of tools. It was just dull.
once you stop seeing ESO as an Elder Scrolls game, and instead look at it as an MMO set in the world of the Elder Scrolls - it gets really fun
even for lore fanatics who don’t see ESO as canon it can still be fun to run around areas we haven’t seen since Arena! Sure, it probably won’t look like the real thing once we get TES: Elsweyr or TES: Black Marsh, but it’s the best we’ve got right now, and with the current lighting fast development of TES series a lot of us won’t live to play those games
I tried to get into it a number of times, and the three major things that always wear me down are, first and foremost:
The obscene lack of difficulty in overworld content (next to running completely gearless or taking on group content/bosses solo to create an artificial sense of risk or danger). Most enemies are so easy that you never need to maneuver or use your full array of combat abilities. You end up mashing the same two or three hot keys on every single enemy while your HP remains at 99%.
The weird choice of classes and themes that do not accurately reflect what The Elder Scrolls has always been about. Rather than building classes based on my preferred weapon class, skill sets (Sneak, Lockpick, etc.), and magic classes (Alteration, Restoration, etc.), I have to be locked into a holy javelin-chucking warrior of light, a lightning-slinging daedric sorcerer, a fire magic dragon warrior with wings and spikes growing from my back, or some other weirdly themed class that didn’t need to be a core archetype in the Second Era. Like, fuck man… Base classes could have easily been born under the Warrior, Mage, Thief, etc. and then built upon from there.
The absolute clusterfuck of major/DLC quests that start the moment you walk into town or pass an NPC. It feels like navigating a fever dream as a new player, and it’s overwhelming. A thousand tangled threads and no room to breathe. Even the main quest no longer has level requirements at each stage, so the Prophet will bid you goodbye and immediately call out again the moment you leave the cave. It’s an absolute mess.
I could go on, but these are the worst three.
That quest bloat is no joke. I ended up mainlinining the main quest then started following a fucking flow chart to have a vague sense of progression.
The chart in question: 
