Tales of the Aggronaut

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.

The Great Landrun

March 27, 2014 by Belghast

Joining the Circus

I have decided, that after the day I had yesterday, I am going to run away and join the circus. Not that I particularly want to be a part of the circus, and especially not since clowns have always freaked me the hell out. It however seems like the proper thing to do when you’ve had a day as bad as the one I had yesterday. Lets scan back through the annals of time to September 11th 2012, and “the event”. I had just returned back to work from taking a few days off for the death of my Grandfather, when a gross overreaction to a security scan gone wrong changed my life for the worst.

Yesterday was my first day back after taking two days off for the death of my grandmother. As I was travelling in I got a text from my boss making sure that I would be there. When I got in, things were bad. Seems as though a security scan gone wrong had locked up and was not essentially DDoSing our websites. So I spent most of the morning dealing with trying to triage our servers as the scan completed. Finally someone had to go in and force cancel the scan because it seems like things had hung up completely. I ended up spending a good chunk of my afternoon dealing with the fallout. Then on top of that we had a major GIS system release, that kept me there until after 5:30. Which doesn’t seem very long until you realize that I generally work 7 to 4.

Basically I was already not in the best shape after losing my grandmother, and to walk back into this shit storm… was almost more than I could handle. However I managed to soldier through and do the stuff that needed to be done to get through the day. Apparently this is what happens when I lose a grandparent… the world plots to destroy me. I feel like it is appropriate still to run away and join the circus. That seems to be the thing you are supposed to do when you have had a phenomenally bad day like yesterday. The only problem is it might be difficult to find a circus with wi-fi, so I guess I will just limp through the rest of this week and try really hard to recuperate this weekend. To add some icing to this cake, it seems like we need to go refrigerator shopping. While most of the food is still freezing well enough, we have reached the point where Ice Cream is no longer “icy”, but instead more yogurt like consistency.

The Great Landrun

Yesterday afternoon Landmark reopened and we were greeted by a slew of new servers and some completely new island names. Gone was my beloved Liberation/Pingo so I knew I would have to venture out and find someplace new to call home. I spent a bit of time popping between the tier 1 zones until I settled upon Liberation/Shield. Originally I thought I would only be in game long enough to stake my claim and then run off and play some Diablo 3. I was apparently wrong. It turns out that this time around we had to gather up enough materials to be able to craft our very own claim flags. By the time I landed on the island I noticed that the claimable land was already shrinking… and while doing a lot of complaining over twitch… I proceeded to try and gather the mats to make my claim flag.

With the founders pick, it was actually rather simple. The claim flag requires 7 elemental iron, 10 heartwood, and 10 sapphire. Before I really knew what I was doing I had gathered up the iron and the heartwood and only needed to find some sapphire. However a short run from the portal spire I managed to find a patch and get more than enough gems to finish my flag. I zipped to the portal which now has not only a forge but a sawmill as well as a brand new mailbox. I was shocked and amazed that I was able to make a claim within visual distance of the spire on Liberation/Shield. I proceeded to faff around for the next thirty minutes clearing my claim to prepare to try and rebuild Belgarde Keep.

Grappling Hook Lust

After I ate some dinner I popped back in and started streaming again. Granted like usual I am in with my friends on mumble and we are not necessarily talking about Landmark. However before too long the all consuming mission of Rae and I was to get back our grappling hook. Being able to zip around the map rocks, and NOT having it made me sad. So I popped around the map looking for a machine capable of making the grappler. Turns out it is the outfitters workbench that can craft it, and just southeast of the portal in Liberation/Shield has a really great claim. Serac has apparently poured through the creation of some of the better machines, and will hopefully serve as a nice outpost close to me for building all the stuff I need to build.

While it took damned near all night to find 20 elemental tin… since surface tin seems to be a rarity, I did manage to cobble one together before I had to go to sleep. The only problem… I had forgotten just how bad the Bronze Grappling hook sucked. For starters the cord is insanely short, so you can only grapple very short distances. On top of that it has always felt like it is far more random in its hook points than the later ones. All of that said… any grappler is better than no grappler. At least now I can dig my way into a hole with impunity, knowing that I can zip back up to the surface just by hitting E.

If any of the SOE folk are reading this… you guys should totally sneak me a prime grappler code under the table. I still want to know how those things work as compared to the highest tier grappler I crafted in Alpha, which I believe was Viridium. Another really amazing addition this time is the mailbox I mentioned earlier. Throughout the night I mailed several sets of “claim flag mats” to various friends who did not have the luck to start the game with the Founders Pick. With the massive run on land going on, I wanted to make sure most of them had the chance to claim a decent space while they were still available. Now if you were an alpha player… you are on your own since it is relatively simple to gather up the materials after getting in and seeing just how common Iron, Heartwood and Sapphire really are.

The Crusades

March 26, 2014 by Belghast

The Morning After

Yesterday was a trying day to say the least. The funeral for my grandmother was at the odd hour of 9:30, and to add to that it was 35* outside which made me cling to my leather jacket like a life vest. The wind that was blowing made the graveside portion absolute torture. When we got back to the dinner afterwards, we huddled around the coffee pot trying to warm up. I feel like it has been too long since I had been to a catholic funeral, because after going to mostly protestant ones over the last few years… it felt very clinical and detached from my grandmother. I am sure she would have liked it, being the devout catholic that she was, and the priest… however hard he was to understand seemed to do his level best to give her a proper sendoff.

Normally I am used to absolutely losing my shit at some point during the funeral service as loved ones recount tales of the deceased. This didn’t happen, either in the losing my shit variety or the recounting tales variety. It was a mass, just like every other mass I have attended… with the exception that there was a casket at the front. Nothing about the service felt like we were honoring my grandmother… instead it just felt like we were obeying a ritual. It is sad she is gone, but the positive of it all is that I think it is going to help my generation… the cousins to reconnect. We stood around and visited for a couple of hours in the church hall after the service.

For whatever problems my moms generation has had with drama… that seems to be completely absent from my generation. It was good seeing my cousins and finding out that all but one are living in close enough vicinity to be able to get together for dinner. My wife is already scheming to have some sort of a cousins day out at the zoo.. in part because the children of my cousins don’t really know each other… and that is a damned shame. I remember similar outings to the kiddie park etc, that let my generation mingle and get to know each other. While I have never really fit into my family, it seems like none of my cousins have really felt like they fit in either. I guess it is time for us to create our own brand of family.

The Crusades

I have to say I love everything about the crusader. I somehow got left out of the Reaper of Souls beta shenanigans, so yesterday was quite literally the first time I had played one. I have always been drawn to “tanky” characters, or at the very least sword and board oriented ones. The crusader so far does not disappoint at all. I have only made it a little way through the play through and I am already digging the look and feel and style. My friends seem to have a problem with the male crusader voice acting, but I dig it so far. So right now I am completely torn, I want to play my crusader so much… but I also want to complete Act V. In part because I don’t want the internet to spoil my fun. I can only go so long without reading tweets about D3, and sooner or later someone is going to spoil the ending.

Granted Blizzard games are not exactly high fiction, but I am trying to keep whatever I can about the game secret for now. Which is extremely ironic, considering I live streamed the entire evenings play. So basically… if you care about spoilers don’t watch. It should be at least mildly entertaining as within moments of starting playing last night, I ended up with two other friends joining me in my mission. Whenever Rae is in the channel it is always entertaining. As the evening went on we ended up with Tib, Waren, Drathis and eventually Tam in the channel as well. Granted our trio never really changed during the course of the evening, but suffice as to say that we were all somehow playing Reaper of Souls.

So far I am really enjoying the new content. I don’t want to dig too deeply into it as to create my own spoilers but the maps are pretty vast, and extremely detailed. The thing that I am liking the most so far is how almost every single dungeon has some sort of new event. These were my favorite thing about Diablo 3, but they just felt like they were to sparse or random as to whether or not you would actually see one. The amount of creativity that went into designing this acts traps and events is pretty great. There is also an amazing sub theme going on, that will make Frank Herbert fans excited, but I won’t go into more detail than that. It is not exactly subtle, but fans of the Dune series will pick up on the references.

Bounty of Games

Right now my big hope is to be able to get through Act five this week, and hopefully have my monk to level 70 to show for it. The primary reason I am wanting to push through the content is that if my math is correct… Elder Scrolls Online head start begins this Sunday. Granted this is the five day launch for folks who preordered imperial edition through Zenimax… but that is precisely what I did. I have been really looking forward to this game and I am amped to finally get in and make some permanent decisions. Like I have said before, I have been in testing of this title for over a year at this point and have watched it grow from something good to something great. The only problem is… it is launching super close to Reaper of Souls. So while I don’t want to abandon playing a crusader… I know I will at least for the short term. I intend to be in and streaming ESO from day one as I wander around and adventure on my Imperial Sword and Shield Dragon Knight.