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Alliance of Awesome

June 7, 2014 by Belghast

Multigaming Community

On January 31st a few interesting things happened. Firstly Sony Online Entertainment released the alpha for Everquest Next Landmark… now just known as Landmark. More importantly this set a chain of events into motion. For some time there has been a group of loosely affiliated guilds and gaming communities tugging on essentially the same pool of players. So we might end up getting this mix of players for a specific title and then having a similar mix of players for another title down the road from this huge twitter/g+ gaming community pool. With Landmark this reached a bit of a head and someone was brave enough to stand up and say it was silly. In the opening days of Landmark, since there were no guilds (and still arent for that matter) each of these communities opted to start a chat channel. The problem is this left some people joining as many as six different channels at a time.

Scarybooster proposed a simple idea, that we all agree to use one common chat channel, and with that the Alliance of Awesome was born. It started simple in scope, but from there Zelibeli and I kinda ran with it and over the last four months we’ve built a rather large loosely connected gaming alliance. Currently we have five different groups in the AofA community: House Stalwart, Multiplaying.net, Combat Wombat, Mercy Gaming, and Dark Religion. Lately I have been talks with Liore about maybe having the already awesome Machiavelli’s Cats community join the fold as well. I have to say so far that over the last four months things have indeed been awesome. For the most part everyone has seemed to get along swimmingly and I’ve watched this group of disconnected pieces merge into a community in every sense of the word.

A Simple Idea

One of the big problems with being habitual multigamers is the fact that guilds are often transistory and it is hard to constantly muster a new batch of people to play whatever game is coming down the pipe. Additionally since not every game will end up being ideal for everyone, this means you have massive amounts of fragmentation as folks leave a given game for something new. The idea was that each individual guild would take responsibility for the reigns of the games that they were most into, and then that way as gamers we would have access to a good and familiar guild regardless of the game we choose to play. Over the coming months I would like to see this formalized into a sort of Rosetta stone for who has which guilds where and just how active each of them are.

The problem is that since we each have our own guild identities, it felt odd to constantly ask players to register an account on a new forum for each group. As a result we tried a few different things to have a shared neutral ground between the communities. The first of these efforts was the Alliance of Awesome reddit… and while it worked well enough, it caused as much frustration as it solved. Then I stumbled onto Anook and it seemed almost perfectly suited for us. It offered public and private forums, an events calendar and was more gamer social network than private site allowing folks to link everything up to the games they are streaming into the shared hub… or in the verbiage of that network a “nook”. This also lets the bloggers in our midst share our posts easily on the nooks blog, and so far that seems to also be working well.

A Unified Approach

Over the last few months we have been melding significantly. Elder Scrolls Online launch for example was the first real “Alliance of Awesome” foray, and while we still kept to the branding of House Stalwart… it was very much a shared occasion. With the launch of Wildstar, we had no real forerunner guild wise that looked to be taking up the reigns. Instead we opted to drop any specific guild branding and simply go with the “Alliance of Awesome” for our guild name. Honestly I have to say it feels very natural and I can see eventually we may drop the individual guild monikers and just do things from that standpoint.

The biggest problem I forsee moving forward is the fact that right now we are still very much utilizing two completely separate voice servers. A good chunk of the House Stalwart guild is still very happily playing World of Warcraft and doesn’t really care about any other game on the market. The rest of us are pretty nomadic, but we still are far more used to and comfortable with mumble as a communication platform. Multiplaying, Dark Religion, and Mercy Gaming have all standardized on a Teamspeak 3 server run for free by the ever amazing Saia. So I would really like to make a move to trying to use that as well and simply dropping the mumble. That said this feels like a landmine because I have no clue how to convince the WoW-only contingency to abandon mumble and make the shift over to Teamspeak 3. Also I hate to abandon Mumble myself until they have done this, because while I am not playing World of Warcraft on a nightly basis I still hold the guildmaster position and get called on to resolve issues. I want to make sure I am reachable by folks even when I am not in the same game.

Shared Ethics

The other rough spot is that we need to come up with a shared set of rules and codes of conduct. For years House Stalwart has followed a simple “three tenets” approach, and relied on guild leader and officer judgment to fill in the gaps. Zeli tends to favor spelling things out, and considering the large volume of people she has dealt with not completely organically connected… I can totally see why this would be a good thing. After years of trying to “keep things simple” but then having to deal with explaining nuance… I am starting to favor Zeli’s approach to be honest. I hate writing rules, and as such that’s why I came up with the somewhat ambiguous three that we use. I figured that using common sense folks would realize what they meant… problem is not everyone “common” is the same. The further away from the same core of friends you get, the more confusing the interpretation becomes.

Going forward I think we are going to have to just agree upon a shared set of rules, and I think so far the batch Zeli came up with for the Alliance of Awesome guild seems like a great place to begin. The biggest thing I hope out of this is that we are a living community. That we will continue to grow as we adopt other awesome people from twitter, anook, g+, or that we happen to stumble across in game. Also I hope that we do in fact get the Machiavelli’s Cats community to join the fold, and keep finding other like minded groups to rally to the cause. I would really like Alliance of Awesome to not only have an ostentatious name, but also have awesome actions to back it up. I want us to be part of the solution in the games we play, and not part of the problem. I would love to see us better each of the gaming communities we are in.

Giving Back

File:Child's Play Logo updated.png One of the things that Zeli and I have been talking about lately is that we would really like to enter Alliance of Awesome in this years Child’s Play marathon. Far as I can tell this will take place on October 25th, and the idea is to have 25 hours of live streaming for charity. I have wanted to participate in this for years, but I thought it would be more interesting if we signed up a whole bunch of streamers from the Alliance of Awesome community and have one shared channel for the purpose of the event. We have quite a number of people who stream already, and it would be awesome to give each of us like a 4-5 hour block of time to play whatever the hell we want to.

Also lately we have been holding a lot of events in various games. Right now Wednesday nights are “Faff About in Cyrodil” night, and those are pretty much only to anyone in the Alliance of Awesome community. Additionally we have been holding a Thursday night “League Beginner Night” to let folks ease into the League of Legends game. So far both events have been a blast and I would love to see them grow beyond the small number of people that we have. I am sure we will be doing something similar for Wildstar, especially with the focus on grouping in that game. I can only see the community as a whole getting better. So here comes the thing I am sure you have all been waiting for. If you are not already a member of the Alliance of Awesome community… head over to the website and join our nook. We don’t have any real requirements for membership other than wanting to be around a bunch of awesome people, and striving to be the “white hats” in gaming. If you have a large community, track down myself or Zelibeli and we can see if the entire group would be a good fit for us as well. Growing up as an only child, I always wanted to be surrounded by friends… and on the internet I try my damnedest to surround myself with as many awesome people as I can. So far I think things are going pretty well.

Clinging to Past Glory

June 1, 2014 by Belghast

Twilight Zone

Yesterday I am pretty sure a rift opened up and somehow transported us to another universe. I would think that it was one or two limited events happening… but the entire freaking day was bizarre. For starters we were supposed to go to a wedding with some family at 1:30 in the afternoon. From the moment we woke up, my wife had text messages waiting from her family wanting to know if we were on the road yet. We have no clue why they were wanting us to be on the road at 8 in the morning… for a 1:30 wedding, but apparently they did. So I go out, get breakfast, write yesterdays blog post and go shower. We leave the house around 10 am, which we think is pretty damned good for a 1:30 wedding. While in transit my wife texts them saying that we should be there somewhere between 11:00 and 11:30.

You would think that the same family that was concerned that we were not on the road at 8 am… and continued to text all damned morning wondering if we had left yet, would be happy to know exactly when we would arrive. NOPE! We get up to my wife’s mothers house and no one is there. My nephew-in-law at some point ended up behind us, he was returning from working an early shift at the prison and was coming home to change. He was literally the only other person there, we had no clue where anyone was. Finally we get a text back stating that they are at a garage sale and that they have our least responsible aunt in tow with them… and her adopted daughter… and her hyperactive child. So quickly what I thought was only a few people ordeal ballooned into a massive family group. At this point I was wishing I had begged a way into just staying the hell at home and playing Wildstar… which launched yesterday.

Shortage of Chicken

Our family keeping to the insanity of the day decides that we are going to go eat before the 1:30 wedding. They pick what appears to be an extremely busy restaurant, roughly 15 minutes away from where we were at the moment, but in the same town as the wedding. Problem is we have a party of roughly a dozen people in a very small town, just a few minutes after noon. I remark before we go on this journey that there is no way in hell we are getting out of the restaurant before 1:30 as it is a little after 12:30 when we actually arrive and get seated. To make things even more surreal… most of us end up ordering the Chicken Strip basket. Apparently they assumed no one would ever order that… because they only actually had a dozen chicken strips. So we set about with the waitress to do some complex math and steal a chicken strip from each 3 strip basket trying to somehow divide the “loaves and fishes” enough to feed the family.

Somehow STILL we ended up short on chicken strips, but that doesn’t really matter considering the moment we got our food… we needed to ask for to go boxes and go pay out. Our family knowing that we were under a time crunch… apparently decided to talk incessantly instead of eat. I knew I was under a constraint so I scarfed away until I managed to down the two chicken strips and a basket of fries in record time. Everyone else walked out with food barely touched… so I am still wondering what the hell the point of eating before the wedding was since literally no one but myself and my nephew-in-law who also ate rapidly in silence, managed to get done with our food. I went to pay out as everyone else attempted to load up their stuff and get on the road. I don’t know where we are going… so I opt to follow my mother-in-law who takes us on another one of her “shortcuts” that end up taking twice as long to actually get anywhere.

Clinging to Past Glory

So at 1:40 we arrive at the site of the wedding, which thankfully was a very untraditional one. Due to some rain and some technical difficulties they had yet to get anything underway. Ultimately we arrived at just about the perfect time. One of the things you need to know about Oklahoma and our culture is that we absolutely worship at the altar of High School football. I am using the global we here because I could give two shits about sports in general, and the sportcentric culture made my own high school days miserable. Given my size I was constantly recruited to the football team, which I wanted nothing to do with. However I am very much not “joe everyman” when it comes to my area, and the majority of men eat, sleep and breathe football. In fact the entire reason why everyone was showing up for this wedding was the fact that it was being held at the local football stadium… with the 52 year old groom wearing a football uniform and the 38 year old bride wearing a prom dress. There were lots of jokes being made about “Redneck Weddings” but I feel this was a missed occasion, as it doesn’t get much more Redneck than this.

If you have never attended a high school homecoming game… then this won’t make much sense to you, but traditionally each of the candidates for the homecoming queen are brought in one by one in a convertible of some sort that has been decorated with their name and grade on the side. To keep with the homecoming theme of the wedding, each of the bridesmaids were driven in similar fashion. The thing is… normally in a homecoming game when one candidate reaches the center of the field the next candidate starts behind them. They say a few words about the candidate and them move on to the next one. The bride in this case had written long rambling walls of super personal text… which when read by a male announcer just came off as surreal. The thing is it took me about three bridesmaids to figure out that the announcer was not the person who wrote the text originally.

At first I seriously thought he was just rambling off the cuff, and as such could not figure out why he was going so slow. In all seriousness this phase of the wedding took roughly an hour. Each bridesmaid arrived in a car that fit their personality with a song playing in the background picked out by the bride. I fully understand the whole “her special day” aspect but it was 85* in the hot sun, on metal bleachers. She could have had a little common sense and kept things brief. Today I am fairly sunburned thanks to this madness. What made it even worse is the fact that she had roughly ten different bridesmaids that she had written two to three paragraphs about as they rode in. Once they had all arrived the bride came in packed into a Rolls Royce. When they opened the door it was like there was this giant poof of dress and tiny little arms sticking out from it.

groom_running_in

In what feels like the textbook definition of “clinging to past glory” the groom arrived by running out of a giant football helmet. This is a tradition here for high school games that the entire team runs out of one of these insane inflatable helmets and then runs through a paper sign held up by the cheer leaders. They asked all of the guests of the wedding party to go down on the field and make a “spirit line” as they call them… and then slowly the groom lumbered out onto the field breaking through the sign, having to stop a few times before making his way to center field where the rest of the wedding party was waiting. I can’t say anything though because there is no way in hell I could jog from the end zone to center field without damned near collapsing, so the fact that he made it in good time while squeezed sausage casing like into a football uniform is damned impressive.

My niece captured a better picture of him actually breaking through the banner. From there the wedding ceremony finally proceeded and after all of this setup… it actually went pretty quickly. They did the standard “sand” ceremony thing that has become so popular lately at weddings. Which I guess is fitting since it is a fairly blended family. This is the fourth or fifth wedding for the groom, so in part we were shocked they were making such a big ordeal out of it. The ceremony itself was proceeded by a preacher wearing a referee uniform, and every so often during the ceremony another ref would step up and throw a flag on the play. The preacher and the ref would confer for a moment before the second referee would give a ruling. Since it took them three years apparently to get to the point of actually having the wedding, one of the flags throw as for “delay of game”. It was cute little thing, but at that point we had been out in the hot sun with no shade for over an hour and most everything had lost its mirth.

All told we were out there a little over an hour and a half, but I feel horrible for the folks who didn’t arrive at the last minute like we did. In fact during the ceremony it rained a few times, and was raining before we arrived so not only did the early birds get cooked in the sun, but they also likely got drenched. We were surprised just how big of an ordeal it was, but I wish the bride and groom the best of luck. They certainly provided a memorable occasion, but one that was extremely strange to watch. While all of us have deep Redneck roots… you don’t expect to see a wedding in a football stadium. However I guess for some folks, the football stadium is their church, so only fitting that folks get married in it. As interesting as it was… I would have gladly stayed home and played Wildstar instead. Unfortunately part of being a responsible adult is showing up for this sort of thing even when you have zero interest in being there.

Peafowl on the Play

To add to the strangeness of the day, while driving back home we stumbled across this walking through a field. For those not familiar with Oklahoma… I guarantee that the peacock is very much NOT a native animal. In fact this was not even in someone’s yard, but instead in a random field out in the middle of nowhere. I assume the little guy is a pet and had wandered a bit too far out of his domain. Later on my wife posted this picture on facebook and found out that apparently it is in fact owned by someone in the vicinity, and that another person sees it almost every day when driving home. Seeing this however just seemed to underline just how strange the day was. Today I am meeting my mother for lunch, and I am hoping that we have a much more normal outing.

Finally Chua

Finally after all the madness I got to come home and play some Wildstar. At this point I had done nothing but create a couple of characters to reserve my names on Evindra the Role-Playing server. I of course created Belghast the Chua Engineer, and really it is the animations that make this game enjoyable for me. The most adorable thing so far is the dogpaddle animation when you try to swim. I managed to get far enough along to get my robots… and I love them so much. The game itself… I am still not just head over heels for. It has improved drastically since switching from Deadlocked to Steer… and it works so much cleaner. Deadlocked involved toggling back and forth between mouse look by clicking your left mouse. The problem is I always forgot to do this before entering a dialog with an NPC. So I would have to escape out, click off mouse look and then re-enter the NPC dialog box.

With Steer it works so much better in that if you are moving or in combat… you have mouse look on. If you are standing still, it gives you back your cursor so you can interact with NPCs or any other window. This addon alone greatly improves my enjoyment of the game, and makes the entire experience rather enjoyable. I feel like Wildstar is like a much better World of Warcraft. This is no slight to either game, because I still feel like WoW does an amazing job of what it does. However Wildstar seems like it might give it a run for its money. Out of the box I feel absolutely overwhelmed with the amount of things to do in every zone. The game just oozes complexity, and in part this is what made me dislike it quite a bit in beta. It felt like I was entering the game and already at a disadvantage and trying to catch up quickly in learning what everything did. I look forward to playing over the next few days and seeing exactly how much I do enjoy it after a week.

Contemplating Red

For a moment or two last night I thought that maybe we would not be recording an AggroChat this weekend. When it came time to do the recording, it was just me and Ashgar with no sign of Rae. After a bit I found out that even though he was travelling… Kodra would be available roughly an hour later than our normal start time. Additionally I managed to convince Tam to join in the discussion as well, so before I knew it we had a full team ready to go. The thrust of this weeks podcast is a discussion about Transistor… or at least the other half of the discussion we started last week. Be warned this podcast is spoilerific once we start talking about transistor… however we give you fair warning before hand. Prior to that we discuss Wildstar quite a bit as well as other games we had played last week.

I call this one Contemplating Red, because once we delve into Transistor we discuss the nature of the character of Red, the Transistor and the way the game treats gender roles. In the time before we started recording, Kodra wanted to know if we could talk about whether or not Transistor was a deeply sexist game. He was concerned that I might shy away from the topic, but I gave him the flag to go ahead because while I don’t want to necessarily dwell on controversial topics… I don’t want us to shy away from them either. I think in the end we all reached a point of peace with the themes of the game, and after bringing all of our thoughts to the table… realized the entire game was so much deeper than any of us thought. The end result is I am even more in love with this title. If you’ve beaten the game, I highly suggest you listen and share your own thoughts either here in the comments or over twitter.

#StrangeWedding #Transistor #Wildstar #AggroChat

Faffless Wednesday

August 7, 2015May 29, 2014 by Belghast

Banging Doors

Well it happened again last night, I was woken up by one of our cats banging on the closet door. The problem is after I finally got her crackhead self settled down and up into bed with us… I once again was completely wide awake. Problem is this time it was at 12:45 when it started, so there I lay in bed at 1 am completely unable to get back to sleep. So I sat there for a bit, finally deciding to get up and go upstairs and play something for awhile to hopefully tire myself back out again. The game of choice was Defiance, but I will go into that more later. I managed to get to a state where I thought I might sleep around 2 am, but the rest of the night was extremely fitful.

According to fitbit I was awake 9 times during the night. I have no clue what is going on with me that my body keeps thinking I am fully awake at any point I wake up. I have always struggled with sleep, and as a result cannot nap for fear of not being able to sleep that night. This whole waking up in the middle of the night and not being able to get back to sleep thing that has plagued me the last two nights is brand new however. Right now this morning I feel mostly normal, albeit a little sluggish… I just fear for what this will mean as the day wears on. Yesterday was rough since I had been up since 3:45, especially about 2 pm or so it became torture to try and do anything productive. I might have to start resorting to taking a sleep aid, but I hate how groggy they make me feel in the morning.

Faffless Wednesday

Last night for whatever reason we simply did not have a good turnout for our normal “faff about” in Elder Scrolls Online event. It could be that people were just busy, or it could be that the Wildstar servers were up for some reason yesterday and folks are anxious for the head start coming Friday. In any case there were just three of us that showed up with the purpose of doing the event, so we decided that it was really too few to do a dungeon, and too few to really do anything meaningful in Cyrodil. As a result we just kinda piddled around doing our own thing and chatting back and forth. PK and Delevax joined the rest of us on mumble and we hung out while playing. I have not really as much time to play Elder Scrolls Online that I would have liked.

Lately my weekends have been scattered with little landmines of not being able to play anything, and then last weekend the amazing single player games Transistor and Wolfenstein: New Order got my devoted attention. At this point I think I am about two hours away from finishing Wolf, and transistor was a punch in the gut… but a very good one. I had been looking forward to Wednesday because I knew I would devote myself to playing nothing but Elder Scrolls Online, even if the “event” didn’t happen. I have to say I love the veteran content, and more importantly I love that mobs are once again difficult. There were always a couple of types of encounters that were painful for me… I am looking at you Harvesters… but for the most part I had reached a place where I could steam roll in entire packs of mobs. There were several late game public dungeons that I solo’d my way through, so my skill level with the game had reached a point where it was simply greater than the challenge.

Veteran content reset that equilibrium. I literally can get my ass kicked by a mudcrab if I happen upon a pack of three, and even in the case of two at a time I have to use Green Blood to heal myself while dealing with the second one. I like that the game instantly became a challenge again the moment I completed the storyline. The result is that while I do the Aldmeri Dominion content, the game feels fresh to me since I am having to relearn how to manage tough encounters. Last night I finished up Kenarthi’s Roost and moved on into Auridon. Since this is the content I have done the least, I am really enjoying winding my way through elfland. I’ve decided that I really like the Bosmer… I was talking last night with Euron that they remind me quite a bit of the Witch Elves from Warhammer Fantasy. As much as I want to dislike her, I have to admit that Queen Ayrenn is pretty awesome as well.

Figuring out Defiance

I wrote yesterday mornings blog post at about 4 am, and then proceeded to faff about in Defiance for the next hour until 5:30 when the alarm normally goes off. During that time I think I finally figured out how to enjoy the game. There was always something I liked about it, but the experience just felt lacking in some way. Like I didn’t quite grasp how the questing system worked or how the world exploration worked. The first change I made is that I started playing the game with the Xbox 360 controller. While it controls competently with the keyboard and mouse, everything feels like it just works better with the controller. I guess this is the side effect when you develop a game for consoles, but I am slowly getting used to playing an FPS with a controller. I find the lack of focused aiming to be far less of a detriment that I thought it would be.

Secondly I had a major epiphany while playing as I stumbled across and Arkfall. I started treating this game like it was Rift, in that so many times in Rift I just spend my time ping ponging from tear to tear closing the Rifts. Doing this so far has been worth a ton of experience and my Ego rank is slowly climbing. Additionally you seem to get some really good rewards for doing it, and I am starting to bump into other players as well which makes the experience overall more enjoyable. I always felt like the thing that was lacking was that I didn’t really have anyone to play the game with. I am hoping as this game transitions from “buy the box” to “free to play” that folks will start filtering back in. It might just be the recent time spent playing and FPS, but I am enjoying the game quite a bit. Therein lies the problem however… I simply have too damned many games to play.

League Beginner Night

Tonight I’m Playing League of Legends. Once upon a time in House Stalwart we did these league beginner nights, when we coaxed new players to League of Legends onto mumble and did some vs bots or custom 5v5 gameplay. The purpose was to ease folks into the game and let them soak up some of the knowledge of a few of our more veteran players. When the Alliance of Awesome folks started talking about League, I figured it was a good time to try and resurrect this concept. So tonight I will be playing some league and hanging out on mumble with folks while doing it. I am just hoping to get in some practice playing Braum, but if not I will probably default back to Wukong, Garen or Darius. I would actually love to play some Varus since I have yet to do so since picking up the PAX skin. If you are interest in joining up check out the Anook event, the goal is to start around 9 PM CST to make it doable for the West Coasters. There are technically only a couple of people signed up, but I know we will have a lot more just from word of mouth.

#ESO #ElderScrollsOnline #Defiance #LeagueofLegends #LoL

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.