Hello Bethesda! Been a big fan of your games and played Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim many times. I think they are amazing games. Skyrim especially seems to have this amazing mix of being a cross platform game that actually feels good on the PC, with nice controls, along with the amazing graphics.

Anyway to the topic of this post. When I heard of this MMO to be honest my first reaction was cautious scepticism. MMO's seem to be stuck in this rut of how things must be done, they all want to be the mainstream hero but there is only room for one of those. Right now I can only think of 5 different types of MMO- WoW style casual theme park, old school PvE games (SOE/EQ style games), mass PvP games (Planetside 2 being the latest), Runescape and EVE Online (it is far more than just mass PvP). So you can see as an MMO player there is not much choice.

My biggest fear is that instead of trying to become it's own game, this MMO will end up being a WoW style casual theme park. I'll give you a hint: there is already lots of WoW style casual theme park MMO's- WoW, Rift, Age of Conan, SW:ToR, Guild Wars 2, Warhammer Online, etc. If you make a game like this well prepare to be disappointed, because I guarantee it will just never be a smashing success. I guess to put it succinctly- "If I wanted to play a game like WoW I'd play WoW".

Here are some specific points of concern:

Quest hubs- tired of this. tired of not being able to explore. Sick of being pushed from hub to hub in basically a linear manner. Quest hubs are ok, as long as following quest hubs isn't the only way to level. This one I think you guys might get right, but anyway I would like to go exploring and come across some quests randomly. If I get bored of exploring then I can go to the hubs and follow them.

Life story quest descriptions- some MMO's are worse than this than others, SW:ToR is a stellar example of this gone horribly wrong. I don't need to hear the life story of the farmer to then kill 10 boars. Here's a quest- farmer yells at you to grab a wheel from town, when asked why he says angrily because his wagon's broke and he needs to watch it. Then when you return and he is now calmer and very thankful, that feels more organic and rewarding than him telling you in paragraphs why you must be the hero to venture to town and procure the wheel of destiny for him. Not *every* quest giver needs to be the friendly talker with English majors.

Messy combat- WoW came to this more and more and every game since tries to make combat feel more messy. Melee classes suffer from this the most. Basically combat feels like your pissing into a fan, every attack has AoE or applies DoTs or does CC and nothing feels like a simple slash to the face. Then you add haste, such that combat devolves into mashing buttons as fast as possible without really thinking about it. If combat in this MMO is similar to Skyrim then I don't think this will be a problem.

DPS rotations- I also don't like forced DPS rotations, when combat revolves around following a strict rotation it is boring. I played a warlock in vanilla WoW and I loved it. By cataclysm they had destroyed the self healing (because of resilience), tab targeting would destroy your DPS plus would be useless because of haunt and SB applied debuffs. I think maybe 2-3 ability combo chains might be fun, but if damage revolves around following a rigid, artificial DPS rotation and not actually paying attention to combat, that takes something away from the fun of combat.

Level up gradient- as you get higher level it gets slower to level up. I don't know what the level cap is but perhaps about halfway the time it takes to level stays roughly the same. It isn't that annoying but when coupled with the next point...

End game is all game- all the fun of the game is kept at end game. Levelling up then becomes this massive grind to get to level cap so you can start having fun. With the above point it seems that higher levels get further and further away with the last couple levels being those torturous trials of trying to find the fastest XP possible. Perhaps there could be a "mid game". A point where you can choose to stop levelling, where there is some fun group content, where you can earn some cool loot to help with later levels and where you can only earn a number of achievements if you stay at that level. Then playing the game isn't that rush to end game, mid game can be fun too. And those that like levelling can still do that.

Tier obsolescence- When a new tier of gear completely obsoletes the previous then it's kind of boring. WoW has a long history of making itself obsolete with every major content patch. When it takes such a huge amount of time to develop content to then make it totally irrelevant with every patch seems so wasteful. I can't really think how this could be fixed though, if raiding is a major feature of the game to get loot. A couple of items of one tier still being useful in the next might help but then...

Boring Stats- again WoW is a great example of this. Cataclysm made stat allocation on gear transparent. Every item tried to be cool so much that no item stood out. Stats are a given though and I fully expect them, just there should be those rare items that have something more than just +9001 [censored] and have that mod that makes them truly interesting. A life steal sword that steals enough to be useful? A trinket that lets you teleport? A cloak of limited invisibility? Special items are things people remember and done right they can also escape from tier obsolescence. But too many special items just makes them the norm. As for balance- if everyone has access to those items, even if they are hard to get, then it is balanced. Action RPG ideas can work in MMO's I think.

Anyway a long post but I hope TES Online tries to escape the WoW mould. Keep up the hard work!