March 2014 - Tales of the Aggronaut

The Dragon Knight Comes

March 31, 2014 by Belghast

The morning after

Yesterday was a really exciting day, and today I am in somewhat of a stupor from all the festivities. As I talked about in my last couple of posts, yesterday was the beginning of the Elder Scrolls Online five day headstart. Thing is this is definitely not my first game launch, in fact there is rarely a game launch that I do not participate in… but this one just feels more personal. I’ve known various people that have worked for various game companies, but this one is just different. Elder Scrolls is a monumental franchise for me, and I started my fandom back with Daggerfall. However never before has one of the people who I hang out with on an almost nightly basis… part of the creation of something I love.

So more than anything I wanted this launch to go smoothly, for the health of the guild and the health of the game in general. The launch of a new guild in a new game is an extremely stressful time for me. Trying to get all the people going in the right direction is a challenge but more or less things seem to have gone extremely smoothly. We’ve only had a few people who did not heed my bajillion posts about faction, and ended up rolling the wrong one. I feel bad that they essentially have to start over now, but by being the wrong faction they will never be able to group with the rest of the guild. This is one of the few confusing points, in that characters can live in multiple guilds… but functionally you can only group with your own faction.

The Dragon Knight Comes

It’s odd for me to try and be objective about a game launch, when I have been playing the game in one form of another for over a year now. The fact that I have played as much of it as I have, and that I still want to participate says as much as anything I could. I’ve spent a lot of time in the “3 month mmo club”, but for whatever reason this is different. Since I have reported so many things and watched them get fixed in subsequent builds, it feels as though I have more at stake here than I have in the past. As of logging out last night I was just a little shy of dinging 11. Honestly getting to level 8 or so is really easy, but from there on it slows down considerably. Additionally for most of the day yesterday I was trying to stay in lock step with my friend Audrae.

The problem is I am fundamentally bad at questing as a group. I am all about doing hard objectives with friends, but the piddly little things, it is rough to stay in step. At one point yesterday I had to take an extended break, and I laid down for a bit. When I came back we had no Rae, so I am guessing she fell asleep as well. I piddled around after that, did a few things, grouped a bit and killed a world named mob as well as ran some other friends through Bad Mans Hollow. At this point I am feeling very tanky, and my survival is probably as good as it has ever been in ESO.

Once I leave Glenumbra I will finally set out into mostly untested territory. The characters that I have made it past the first real zone on were all Ebonheart, so for the most part Daggerfall Covenant will be fresh. Towards the end of beta I purposefully tried to test only the early content, as to keep the later stuff fresh for me. It was wierd, that so many people struggled to figure out what path they were going to take, or how they would create their character. For the most part i have created “Belghast Sternblade” the Dragon Knight over a dozen times scattered among various beta tests. It was the one character that really spoke to me, so I kept returning to playing it over and over… never tiring of the game play.

Guild is Hopping

I will admit, when the betas opened up a bit more and folks started breaking out some negativity regarding the game… I was a bit concerned to say the least. There is a fairly significant threshold of 50 members of the guild in order to open up the Guild Store. There was a time where I wondered if we would actually be able to hit that in House Stalwart, but apparently those fears were completely unfounded. As of this morning I am looking at the guild roster and we have 65 accounts in the guild. The place is absolutely hopping and at this hour of the morning there are already a half dozen people in and playing. Apparently all the work trying to make sure this was happening paid off, and I am starting to think about the various things we will be able to do if we even maintain half of these members at veteran levels.

Thing is… this is just the Imperial Edition and folks who ordered direction through Zenimax. There will be another batch of players starting Tuesday, and another batch starting on the 4th again that didn’t pre-order for whatever reason. As a result I still expect the guild to grow significantly. When all is said and done we might be sitting around 100 members, which would make this one of our largest game launches in House Stalwart history. The thing that is helping this time around is the Alliance of Awesome. This has helped to funnel so many new and good people into Stalwart for the beginning of this game. At this point I am going to have to start figuring out what the final guild infrastructure is going to look like, and who I will tag to be officers. I tend to treat each game as a unique animal, and just because someone is an officer in one game does not immediately mean they will be in another.

Since we have a blended “family” going on right now, I also feel it is crucial to reach out and tag people from all the various camps, as well as the traditional stalwart folk. So far I have to say everything seems to be blending nicely. I was talking yesterday that while a lot of us know each other from twitter, this was the first time we had really been in the same guild. I am thankful that everything has gone so smoothly. For at time yesterday we had a dozen or more people hanging out in the “Bel is streaming” channel on mumble, and later today I should be posting the various stream segments up on youtube and adding them to the Elder Scrolls Online playlist. However in the mean time you can go to my twitch streams past broadcasts tab to see them all. All in all I think it was a very successful launch day, and one of the more successful ones I have experienced. The real tests will be as they start adding more players.

Elder Scrolls Launch Day

March 30, 2014 by Belghast

Steampowered Sabbatical

Normally this morning you would have been reading about my misadventures playing a new to me game from my steam backlog. However we are taking a week off from that feature, mainly because I knew I would be busy this morning with something else. However we will get to that later, and the reasons why I got up at 5 am this morning to be prepared for it. Instead today we are going to talk about a few games and the highlight of my day yesterday. For awhile now I have been doing the “Bel Faffs About” thing where I stream a game as I play it, and invite people into my “Bel is Streaming” mumble channel. The usual suspects are my guildies who come online and are entertaining so that I don’t have to.

Yesterday I got to hang out with some of my favorite people from twitter, namely @Gypsy_Syl, @NexusRangers, @GameByNight and after awhile the very awesome @TipaDaKnife. I got to hang out the longest with Syl and it was a blast. The only problem is I am so used to listening to her talk about video game music thanks to the amazing Battlebards podcast… it was a little weird to be talking about anything else. Everyone was great and it made for a fun afternoon, even though after getting up at 4 am I was quite a little slap happy as the night went on.

Mithril or Bust

Yesterday we played a lot of Landmark as we hung out, and the missions of the day were really two fold. Firstly I wanted to try and finish my work on gathering the resources for the Mithril pick. Currently this is the highest in progression you can go as far as mining, and thanks to the changes they made to the Founders Pick being able to harvest ANY tree… there is not a resource mining or wood that I cannot consume. The other mission was to be able to craft the rest of the basic machines for my claim so that others can use them. One of the odd things that was different from alpha is that there are both public and private machines. The private machines are labelled as “Refining stations” and allow you to work resources at a progressively better rate, returning more finished materials than went into creating them.

For some time now I have felt a little bit bad for grabbing such prime real estate, but not having done anything on it but clear the ground. In the above screenshot you can see the foundation for Belgarde Keep from the spire, so it really is a very short run away. The problem is as I progress through the crafting tiers I am in constant need of stone. Yesterday at one point I decided to dig down in the desert for as long as I could and harvest as much stone as I could. Unfortunately that happened to be exactly the same time @GameByNight decided to use the “teleport to friend” option. I had been down there long enough that the ground above me was respawning leaving us essentially trapped underground. Thankfully the evac to safety option works remarkably well.

What you are seeing in the pictures represents roughly 350,000 stone worth of building. I managed to gather 200k doing my “big dig” and poured another bit into it over the course of several trips. Sometime soon I will have to do another one my grand harvesting missions and try and make some more progress. Essentially I am building a greatly scaled up version of the building I created in alpha. I am changing up the design significantly but not the overall building type. I like big open air temple like spaces. Essentially I am building much the same type of structures that I used to build in Minecraft. The smooth tool and the ability to craft curved shapes is nice, but I really prefer straight and chiseled edges.

Elder Scrolls Launch Day

Watch live video from Belghast on TwitchTVLast night I went to bed seriously early for me, after having gotten up at 4 am the day before. I had heard rumor that the servers would be opening this morning for the Elder Scrolls Online slightly early, but was not certain that was going to be the case. I ended up waking up about 4:45 and by the time I made coffee and got upstairs, there were a few other guildies also sitting on mumble waiting for things to open. Sure enough a little bit after 5 am CST I was able to log in and create Belghast Sternblade for real. Thing is… it did not take me terribly long on the character creator because I have created this character literally a dozen times now throughout a years worth of testing. I am a simple person, and tend to create the same basic character in each game that I play. So I managed to get in extremely quickly and create the guild long before anyone else logged in.

Watch live video from Belghast on TwitchTVSince early this morning I have been hanging out in the “Bel is Streaming” channel as lots of other people have popped in to join me. Honestly far too many to list here, but it has prove to be a really enjoyable and entertaining day. I will be exporting the stream to youtube eventually but here I am posting the various twitch links. If nothing else they are fun to open up and listen into our conversation in the background like it was a podcast. I am for the most part live streaming all day long. While this is a headstart, this is one of the smoothest launches I have participated in. THis folks is why they had us stress test the hell out of stuff during the weekend betas, and every indication shows that they learned a lot of information. The mega server tech seems to be holding up and scaling well.

Watch live video from Belghast on TwitchTVRight now I am having a blast, so if you have access to the House Stalwart mumble server, pop by and say hi. I plan on going right back to the game, that is open in the background and continuing my odyssey. However I wanted to take a moment and make my post before it got any later in the day. Hopefully you all are having as great of a weekend as I am.

Elder Scrolls Online Headstart

March 29, 2014 by Belghast

Prelaunch Countdown

At the point I am writing this blog post we are roughly 24 hours from the launch of Elder Scrolls Online. If you are really curious about the exact time… someone has created a page dedicated to that… with Europe Final Countdown playing embedded of course. Last night I made it to bed at a normal hour… or at least normal for me, but this morning my body conspired against me and decided that 4 am was time to wake up. While I had not planned this, it is actually going to feed into my idea of being up for the launch the moment the servers open. So tonight I will be heading to bed early, and trying to wake up in time for the launch in the morning. I normally get up at 5:30 in the morning during the work week, so really this will be good in the long run since Monday will not be quite so hellacious.

I have to say at this point I am completely amped, but also nervous. One of my favorite and least favorite things about a new game is pulling together the guild. It is always a struggle to make sure everyone is rolling in the right place, with the right faction. There are always opening day adjustments as you shift this thing or that, and trying to deploy the logistics to be able to get everyone moving in the right direction. This is by no means my first launch pulling together a guild, and likely it will not be the last either. No matter how much experience I have in making things work… I still get the jitters hoping it all goes off without a hitch. SWTOR was without a doubt the smoothest, since we were able to create the guild before launch through their web based tools, but even then there was plenty of confusion among the folks that were too lazy to sign up before the guild placement happened.

Elder Scrolls Online Headstart

I thought I would devote this mornings post to getting everyone ready for the big event. There are several things about this launch that should make things significantly easier. Firstly there are no servers to worry with, there is the North American mega server and the European mega server. I do not however know if characters cross over between the two. We will be focusing on the North American mega server for this, and I am hoping that our European friends will have decent lag there or even be able to roll there at all. Have I mentioned how much I hate regions in video games? House Stalwart will be aligning ourselves with the Daggerfall Covenant, as was decided in a poll that ran some time ago. This means that in order to play with the guild and group easily, you also need to roll Daggerfall Covenant. Guilds span factions, but it is logistically impossible to group together at low levels if you are of two different factions.

Thanks to the preorder bonuses however you will be able to roll any race in any faction. If you did not preorder, then grats… if you want to play with the bulk of the guild you have to play either a Redguard, Breton or Orsimer. Really if you were interesting in this game at all, you should have preordered to long before this point to make sure you could have that very important preorder perk. Those who did preorder… I am sure we will see plenty of elves in our guild as a side effect. Most of the people I know going cross faction classes are doing so in order to play a Bosmer, Dunmer or Altmer. I personally will be rolling an Imperial because it is the race that best fits the character of “Belghast”.

Getting Invited to the Guild

As I said earlier, my goal is to be up at the time the servers go live and get the guild created asap. One of the cool things about Elder Scrolls Online is the fact that you can friend people at an account level. The easiest way to get invited to the guild is to friend @Belghast, as the game uses a system similar to twitter. My goal is to get several people who can do invites in the interim and then deal with creating a formal “officer” structure later. Additionally I will be using the Alliance of Awesome Reddit thread to organize invites for the “new to Stalwart” crowd. For those who have access currently to our mumble server, I will be streaming the launch tomorrow in the “Bel is Streaming” channel. So that is a really quick way to get invited is just to pop into the channel and ask for one.

The only other real decision looming on the horizon is what campaign we want to choose for Cyrodil. There is a thread up on the Elder Scrolls website listing the various campaign names. At this point they are all named after the iconic weapons that you get in the Elder Scrolls series by doing quests for the various Daedra. As a result some of them are going to be far more popular than others. I would imagine that Wabbajack would fill up before any of the others, thanks to the fond memories of Sheogorath. Other names will appeal to the “sounds cool” crowd, and Auriel’s Bow will be full for the “I pick whatever the first name is in a list” crowd. Right now I am thinking either Volendrung or Dawnbreaker might be good options. Both are iconic weapons, but also not as iconic as say the Wabbajack. However this is something we can decide later.

Big Easy Summary

Where?

Daggerfall Covenant Faction
North American Mega Server

How?

When?

Servers go online at 7 am EST 3/30/2014

If you have any questions feel free to post them here, or over on the Reddit Thread, or via Twitter, or ask them the day of via Mumble. It is my goal to make this as clean and orderly a process as possible. There are always some issues with any game launch, but hopefully thanks to the copious amounts of stress testing we have done to this game… it will go nice and smooth.

Communal Harvesting

March 28, 2014 by Belghast

A Circus with Wi-Fi

While yesterday was considerably better than Wednesday, it was still pretty freakin stressful. It just seems that after essentially five days out of the office so much crap has stacked up that I absolutely have to deal with. I keep threatening to run away and join the circus, but I don’t think anyone really takes me seriously at this point. Afterall I would have to find a circus with wi-fi and fiber… because really satellite internet sucks. My boss asked me what exactly I would do at the circus, and I guess probably the easiest role to play would be “bearded lady”. All I would really have to do is cross dress… and I guess I could deal with that.

Yesterday I managed to get over 10,000 steps with my fitbit for the first time so that is a little bit of a personal goal met. In part we only managed to do this because we spent most of the evening shopping for a refrigerator. The problem being that our house has one of those damned annoying “over the fridge” cabinets. This means that we have a fixed amount of space that we can slide one in. Problem being that if the numbers are not lying horribly… everything is about half an inch too tall. We think actually the fridge we are looking at will fit just right, but if not we might have to do some “day of arrival” modification to the cabinet. I was going to try and doctor this with a dremel, but yesterday one of my friends suggested a hand planer. The fridge is still mostly functional (except for ice cream) so I think we have a little bit of leeway.

Bigger Claim

I made it home well before my wife last night as is usually the case, so I ended up popping upstairs to play some Landmark. In truth I first tore apart my computer and installed a brand new Geforce 750 ti 2 gb superclocked card that arrived. It dropped into the machine without any issue, other than a little bit of confusion windows 8.1 had when I first booted up. However as I was re-downloading the geforce drivers it seemed to magically right itself, so I am guessing behind the scenes windows was doing something. I love my wife dearly for not balking at me wanting to pick one of these up, but overall she is super supportive of my obsessions just as I am of hers. She also got a care package full of jewelry yesterday, so she also got something nifty in the mail.

I have to say that if I thought Landmark looked amazing on Medium or High, it looks all the better on Ultra. My early evening obsession was in getting the two claim extension flags crafted so I could expand my hold on Liberation/Shield. With the help of my good friend Rae I managed to gather up enough Elemental Tin to craft two of these flags. Thing is… while applying them I realized that the upkeep costs are not weekly like I assumed, but daily. Before adding my additional claim flag the upkeep cost was 300 copper per 24 hour period. Adding one claim flag doubled this. So while I don’t really see a problem harvesting 600 copper per day (and you can keep a stockpile of 5 days worth on your claim), I am not sure if I really want to do 900 a day and add the second flag. So right now I will just sit on that for the time being, and if a friend needs it to expand their claim I will mail it their way.

Communal Harvesting

When I finally got home in the evening from our whirlwind tour of the various appliance stores in town, I sat down with the purpose of working on upgrading my tools. However my friend Rae and my friend Lethbridge were already grouped together in search of the illusive “thistle seeds” that only come from a super rare desert tree with purple flowers. One of the coolest features of the Closed Beta that was not in the previous Alpha incarnation (at least that I know of) is the way grouping works. If you and I are grouped and in the same area… essentially you have to be in visual distance of each other… when I harvest you get a copy of everything I loot, and when you harvest I get a copy of everything you loot. What makes this awesome is that while someone is harvesting one node, you can pop over and harvest a completely different node and share the benefit.

I am not entirely sure if this is a “feature” or a bug, but Audrae was way more progressed than me tool wise. She and I played early in the evening, and then two hours later when I got home from the fridge-go-round she was still playing. During that time she had progressed to a tungsten pick, and as we wandered around the their two zone looking for these trees she was able to harvest… and therefore transfer a copy to us of much higher materials than we could ever do on our own. Essentially this means you can leap frog your friends over hurdles by wandering around and harvesting with them. So while at the time I could not harvest the tungsten and gold, I could do iron or stone or a tree and still be somewhat useful. Towards the end of the evening I arrived with a lot of help at the same place she is in the progression: Tungsten Pick and Gold Axe.

Currently we are tag teaming the harvesting of cobalt in trying to get those picks, as well as wandering around the “old growth” forest biome looking for the illusive “Ancient Rootstock”. This then gets refined into Vital Heartwood which is used to craft the haft of the Cobalt Pick we now lust after. At this point honestly we are mostly focusing on item progression, and at some point soon hopefully I will have compiled a stockpile of materials to begin rebuilding “Belgarde Keep”. The new version will be considerably bigger as I have two claims to work with now, but for the most part I plan on using the same sort of construction. This means I am going to need millions and millions of stone, which luckily I am getting while I wander around the world harvesting other things.

In the curious footnote department… I noticed that in closed beta the loading screen has now completely dropped the “Everquest Next” verbiage from the logo. It is now identified as “Landmark” and so is the client itself. I am wondering if this is an attempt to start trying to clear up the confusion of how this connects to Everquest Next as a whole? They have been up front about their intention that this is a completely separate game, that will share tech with Next, but have its own objectives. So I guess this is the beginning of trying to divorce the two brands in the minds of the players.