This musing of me was brought about by an IRC discussion going on earlier this evening.The Elder Scrolls Online has been up for playing for the last many days now, because of the early release, and UESP has seen very few new users in response to ESO so far. I remember the deluge that came with Skyrim like it was only a few days ago, and not two years ago. Traffic was crazy to the site, and there was furious editing from many new users and anonymous editors, but with ESO, it’s very quiet still.There are a handful of new users around, including some of our forum users who have popped over to do wiki work as well, but the edits to the site are fairly few from new users in general. We have a handful of editors who are working tirelessly to create pages, but with that much work being done, which used to be handled by bot, they simply can’t focus on filling in articles themselves in addition to playing.Part of the reason for the slower traffic from new users could simply be from the amount of websites that have sprung up in response to ESO. I can think of a half-dozen new sites off the top of my head that sprung up just in response to ESO, not to mention the Elder Scrolls Wikia on the Wikia network, which has always been serious competition against UESP, simply because of its connection to the wiki network. When Skyrim released, there were two big sites to focus on for adding information to. UESP and TESWikia. Now, that’s simply no longer true, and that means that for UESP there are less users available to the user pool, as they are spread out thiner.While I believe that UESP is the best source for all things related to The Elder Scrolls, the competition is stiff. For instance, several sites also have a beautiful interactive map that is simply and intuitive to use and navigate. It lacks some features, like the labelling of locations that we have, and I don’t know how editable they are (frankly, I don’t know how easy to edit user-editable map is either, having not used it), but the point is, features that we once prided ourselves as being the only ones to posses, are no longer truly uniquely ours, and a search for “ESO Online map” doesn’t put us on the first page of Google. There’s competition out there, and while UESP carries all of the big features and traits to some degree, to completely discount a competitor as being a true threat to UESP’s ability to dominate the field when there are so many resources available would be a mistake.On to new users, it’s ignorant to assume that all people coming into ESO are Elder Scrolls fans to begin with, and are not just here because of the fact that ESO is an MMO would be ignorant. Word of mouth can work with the Elder Scrolls fans who are passionate about the series and have been around for years, because we’ve catered to those people, but ESO is new territory. MMO users are going to be looking for a place to dump information about ESO, and UESP isn’t necessarily at the top of Google anymore when you search for ESO related things.TESWiki, for instance, gets higher hits because it’s part of the Wikia network, and the simple fact that all these people familiar with MMOs contribute to MMO wikis on Wikia (because Wikia has all the bigger MMO wikis). That means TESWiki immediately has an advantage over us, because of the ease of just jumping from one wiki to another on Wikia.My question that all of this musing is leading up to is this: How does UESP need to change to make ourselves better than the competition in the MMO world?
This is new territory for all TES sites, so we’re all on roughly equal footing with ESO in my opinion, and we need to be above the others, just like with all the other games in the series, which we’ve managed to dominate in terms of online coverage.Change, whether major or subtle, needs to happen for UESP to remain a serious competitor in the world of MMOs.
