Your defence of this game has descended into embarrassment. Why are you so passionately denigrating the legitimate concerns of people voicing their opinions in this thread?
Noting that these concerns aren't even unique to them, they're widely reported short comings of ESO. Now whether someone throws that opinion out there to dismissively wash their hands of that experience with some closing remarks, or are a genuine attempt to bring those short comings to light so perhaps the developers can rectify them, is neither here nor there. Everyone gets their say if they so choose.
You said in your rant that the animations, although admittedly poor, are not the end of the world. In that you affirm you don't know the difference between average developers and good developers. Because Blizzard before all else make a game feel solid, responsive and visceral in exactly all the ways you would expect it behave when you smash a monster in the face with a sword or throw a fireball wildly through the air. They nail it. Average developers overlook this in the same way you just have, they get it 'good enough' or dismiss it's importance altogether. What are you left with? those very same complaints of the combat in ESO, of being floaty and disjointed, because the expected responsiveness and feedback from within the game just isn't there.
Then onto my own situation since you seem so sure that every game should exist within a vacuum, especially in the MMO genre. Well between time & money, people's resources are finite, therefore no such vacuum exists, this game is very much in the same competitive space as every remotely similar game out there, online or offline.
So with that take my apprehensions. I own Guild Wars 2 already. So this game, or it's supporters would have to make a very strong case as to why I should not only pay the premium in buying it, but why I should subscribe to it at a monthly price, when at any point I can just go play Guild Wars 2. Then perhaps you want to force my hand and say well a game I'd be willing to subscribe to over a buy-to-play title? Well, World of Warcraft is where we are then at. Why would I subscribe to ESO over WoW? why would I place my time in ESO when I have something I know to be a better realised experience on offer?
Now. Is this all to say ESO is a bad game? not by a long stretch. But what many would hold and have said time and time again in the months gone by. Pay-to-play is entirely the wrong market for ESO to place itself within. Free-to-play and buy-to-play games of higher quality are in the same competition for peoples money and time as ESO. I'd personally be far more inclined to buy it if it were buy-to-play, but the way it's setting itself up for a fall I'm sure the next time I find myself playing it will be when it goes free-to-play. Call that facetious if you like, but you know where struggling pay-to-play games end up, there is no reason what so ever to imagine anything more than limited initial success and a decline post launch for Elder Scrolls Online.
