Why are people freaking out over pre-order bonuses, of all things?
I haven't seen nearly as many complaints about that as I've seen complaints about the triple-dipping of buy the box plus monthly fees plus in-game microtransactions.
For those who are concerned about the pre-order bonus, a few of those bonus are especially troublesome. In particular, the "place any race in any alliance" and "exclusive imperial race" bonuses. These are troublesome for a couple reasons:
1) Using world of warcraft as my basis of comparison, play any race in any alliance potentially has massive pvp implications. In some cases it would be a huge advantage. Few people mind cosmetic things like vanity pets, but this reeks of selling in-game advantages over other players for cash.
2) Forever for the life of the game, the most central race from elder scrolls games lore is going to unavailable to anyone who didn't buy in early, nothing they can do about it? MMOs are games people play for
years. But, if you happened to not be around during this particular couple month window, too bad for you. Seriously, that's the plan?
3) We don't really believe that zenimax will honor their claims. #2 is obviously not going to happen. Players will complain, and management will see an opportunity to make money, so previously exclusive content will be made available. This means that people are paying now for an exclusive benefit that will not be an exclusive benefit. Those people are going to be unhappy with 6 months from now anyone can pay $5 to get what they paid...checking prices...apparently $80, in order to allegedly be one of the only people who would have it.
4) #1 and #3 set terrible precedents. If people can pay for unique races, and exclusive race/faction pairings, that's not quite pay to win in the sense of buying artifact gear, but these are definite in-game benefits that are available for cash. Do you really want to play a game where in-game benefits are sold in the cash shop? If they've done it once, why would they not do it again? If they claim now that pre order stuff will be exclusive but then make it available to anybody, that means they lied. And some of us are anticipating that they will go back on their promises. If they're lying now, why would they not lie again? Other games have fallen due to lack of integrity and excessive greed on the part of the company running them. Even companies that have started out with good ethics have sometimes fallen into this hole. Here, eso is looking kind of sleazy right out the starting gate. If they look sleazy already, what's it going to be like a year from now? Do we really want to invest out time playing a game that's looking sleazy already and is likely to get worse?