alliance of awesome Archives - Page 5 of 5

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.

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?

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.