Clearly, ESO isn't the only MMO to suffer from a lackluster main story. Why do MMOs feel the need to have main stories, anyway? I was talking about this with a couple of people on IRC the other day, and it really just seems antithetical to the entire concept of MMOs, especially ones with subscription fees. When you tell players that they've beaten the game, it's not such a huge stretch for them to then conclude that they're done with the game. Even setting aside the fact that the main story in ESO is just an uninspired rehash of Oblivion, the fact is that the game didn't need a main story to begin with. Not with all the stuff they could have put into the game in its place. Things like the Thieves Guild, the Dark Brotherhood, the Companions, the Morag Tong, the rest of the fucking map, etc.
And before anyone starts with the "But Saddam, you're practically complaining about the weather here; the laws of physics literally state that all MMOs must do these dumb things" or whatever, there already have been some exceptions. There's RuneScape, for one. Don't laugh, I'm being quite serious. Granted, there's a lot that game did that was really weird, and the main reason I quit playing it some years ago was that Jagex was basically just fucking it up, homogenizing it, "fixing" things that weren't broken, replacing their old animations and art styles with terrible cartoony clichés, all that awful stuff - so it's quite possible that the game is currently shit. But it didn't hit you over the head with a stupid overarching story when you began playing, and it didn't force you to linearly travel between zones completing all the content as you went. Most of the regions of the world were available to low-level players, and they all had their fair share of low, middle, and high-level content for players to partake in. If you were bored with one area, you could - wait for it - go to another area, and still continue to progress normally. I know, it's mind-blowing.