I Used to Be an Adventurer Like You: Fear of Missing Out in The Elder Scrolls Online

This study, presented at DiGRA 2025 by Moritz and Peltonen, examines how fear of missing out (FoMO) shapes player discussion on The Elder Scrolls Online's official forums. Drawing on roughly 8,000 to 9,000 forum documents, or about a million words, posted between April 2023 and September 2024, the authors apply LDA topic modeling to identify 50 discussion topics and track how prominent themes shift over time. The research centers on two questions: which themes dominate player conversation and how those themes change across the period studied.

The most prevalent topics concern feature requests, which account for about 8.8 percent of discussion, followed by general player experience at roughly 7.4 percent and game behavior moderation at about 4.3 percent. These topics cluster into broader categories including bugs and gameplay requests, events and game modes, combat, characters and cosmetics, and collectibles. The collectibles group, which encompasses market trading and Crown Store discussion, emerges as the category most closely tied to FoMO. Players display strong awareness of collectible mechanics such as drop rates, random number generation, and limited availability, and they frequently voice frustration over perceived low drop rates, tedious grinding, and unequal outcomes, while also developing personal strategies to manage these pressures.

Temporal analysis reveals that several topics peak in response to in-game events, most notably the 10th anniversary Jubilee in April 2024, which marks the highest point of engagement in the dataset. The authors conclude that FoMO substantially structures discussion and engagement around the game's collectibles. They also observe that some anxieties may prove unfounded when rewards are later re-released. The findings are bounded by the assumptions of LDA and by the publisher-moderated character of the forum, which may shape what players feel free to express.