In The Elder Scrolls Online, players have always complained about “fakes,” that is, players who pretend to play a different role in the dungeon than they actually are. This mainly applies to tanks and healers, but now fake DPS are being reported as well. However, they are usually just bad.
What’s the deal with fakes? In ESO, fakes are a big problem. These are players who sign up for dungeons in the automatic group finder and specify the role of tank or healer, even though they are actually specced for DPS.
Why do they do it? Because tanks and healers are in much higher demand than DPS classes. Thus, damage dealers wait much longer for a group than tanks or healers. The plan of the fakes is to apply as a different role and then hope that the rest of the group will somehow carry them through.
Of course, you don’t necessarily need a tank in many instances. Especially with a good group and in normal mode, a tank is often obsolete. However, it is unfair to those who are honestly waiting in line in the group finder. Or when things get tough, having a tank is a relief.
Does it work? Often, such rounds end in chaos and frustration. Because while a somewhat strong group can manage the first bosses and encounters, it usually becomes too much towards the end of the instance and you wipe repeatedly.
Then it usually comes to light that the tank is actually a DPS player and hardly knows anything about their craft. By the time that comes out, all parties have wasted hours of their lives that they will never get back.
A major annoyance, as an angry player recently illustrated on reddit. Not only was his fun ruined, but he was also insulted by the fake tank because he, as a healer, wasn’t doing much damage:
I was in the unholy grave to grind and found it a bit strange that our tank had a health of 16k, but I had seen dungeons with worse stats and thought maybe he had a build that just worked, so I thought it would be fine.
Player QuietLittleVoice on reddit.
No, it was just a DPS who didn’t bother to wait.
Only when we got to the “Keeper of the Kiln” did his true face show.
As a healer, I was working overtime, so I had to deal many heavy hits to regain Magicka. As a result, I got the aggro from the boss, got one-shot, and then the group fell apart.
After the fifth wipe, I had enough and told the guy to leave and play his role. Then he said: “LOL explain to me first how a level-400 player can deal so little damage.”
…I am a healer.
Fake tanks are therefore a problem, as our author Larissa Then noted in her own article, for which she received much support from the community here on MeinMMO.
Now DPS are also branded as fake-DPS, even though they simply have no idea
What are fake-DPS? Following the reddit post about the audacious fake tank, another ESO player published an anecdote about fake-DPS on reddit:
We were farming Banished Cells I, both CP160+, so it should have been quick and easy. Even with the DPS we got at level 35-45, this dungeon should be pretty familiar at a low level. Anyway, we noticed early that this DPS wasn’t doing much damage.
Player El-17 on Reddit.
In fact, he was losing quite a bit of health, and even the trash took longer to defeat than it should have. We noticed he was taunting the enemies. We tried to tell him to do DPS and let the tank do his job, but he kept taunting. And he ran ahead and pulled the enemies. Meanwhile, we weren’t doing a lot of damage. It even got to the point where our real tank swapped some of his abilities just to boost the group’s DPS. This guy actually presented himself as a DPS and then spent the whole dungeon acting like a wannabe tank.
The best part was when I saw him use a healing skill ultimately.
Curiously, it seems there really was a guy who had so little knowledge of the game that he registered as a false DPS. So not necessarily a liar. But instead of bashing the guy, many users in the reddit thread chimed in and tried to explain the matter.
According to their opinion, it was likely an inexperienced newbie who had never played an MMORPG before. Therefore, he probably hadn’t heard of the roles the holy trinity of MMORPGs and simply built a balanced hero like in a solo RPG. Therefore, he used the tank, DPS, and healing skills that might have even served him well in solo play.
Overall, the general sentiment among the users was that ESO would benefit from a little dungeon tutorial explaining the roles and why you shouldn’t just stroll in but should properly optimize accordingly.
But perhaps such additional quality-of-life features will come in 2021 as part of a new update to The Elder Scrolls Online. So far, however, we unfortunately know little about the new chapter in ESO 2021. What we do know and what speculations the community has can be found here on MeinMMO.
The problem with lying players is, in ESO, such a huge annoyance that it even affects beginners wrongly. Have you had experiences with fake players?
