elder scrolls online Archives - Page 15 of 27

Nerd on Nerd Violence

April 30, 2014April 30, 2014 by Belghast

Hipster Glasses

Living in Oklahoma is absolutely insane sometimes. We have been having a string of 80 degree days lately, and it has been fairly glorious. When we went for our walk in the evening it would be in the high 70s and absolutely wonderful outside. Last night the temperature dropped again and this morning it is 48 degrees outside. I don’t like turning the AC and Heater off and on, especially for a short cold snap like this, so instead last night we simply piled the blankets on. I am so thankful for our cats , because Chloe our fattest and fuzziest cat somehow managed to squeeze between us and under the covers keeping us both nice and toasty through the night.

Yesterday I happened to snap the photo on the side on a whim. The previous day I had gotten some new glasses, so I snapped a photo to send to my wife to show her. Well yesterday morning we had some absolutely amazing looking skies. When I went to snap a photo I noticed that the camera was still turned the wrong way, and using the front facing one. At which point I noticed that it looked pretty cool to see my head surrounded by the halo of clouds. This is the first photo I have seen of myself in years that I actually kinda like. I have had a lot of issues with the way I look and in part it has been due to the weight issues I have had. Just like I am starting to get used to my own voice through all the podcasting I have been doing… I am starting to become more comfortable in my own skin.

The willingness to try something new as far as glasses go is probably just a side effect of this. I have literally work the same hair cut, and same glasses for damned near two decades. While they aren’t always the same frames they are as close to the same thing as I can get at the time. I like to keep things simple, and I have always reasoned with myself that this is in part because I am trying to not have to think about things. In part I think it is this lack of comfort in my own skin that had lead me to simply think it didn’t matter what I wore or what I looked like. I kind of dig the new glasses, my friends have been giving me shit about them. When I like something they say it is because I am being “ironic” or if I dislike something they claim it is “too mainstream”. That however will fade, and each of them has begrudgingly said that they like them as well.

Nerd on Nerd Violence

Since getting my fitbit I have done all sorts of little things to hack my life and try and add in more exercise where I could. While I have always parked on the roof, I’ve begun walking up and down the ramps from the 6th floor to the 4th floor where the skywalk is. As a result I have started noticing various vehicles and one of them has stood out. There is a green Honda “something” that has a cute little demon skull and cross bones on it and a “twilight girl” sticker. My feelings about that sticker have evolved over the last few weeks as I have passed it. I think we can universally agree that the Twilight series is pretty horrible. My wife had been given the books by a student, and she read them… then when the first movie came out we struggled through it. We both agreed it was a horrible idea and one we would never repeat again.

Thing is… somewhere along the line this morphed in culture from “twilight is horrible” to “people who like twilight are horrible”. As I have spent the last weeks walking past this car I had a revelation. This person is a geek, and they have proudly emblazoned their vehicle with something they obviously care about. While we might not like it, we have to respect the fact that they stepped up and announced that they loved something… anything. This is no different than my Doctor Who lanyard, or my co-workers collection of my little ponies, those things are just “socially acceptable” geekdom. At one point or another throughout our lives we have been picked on for those same geeky traits, and if you have not… then you’ve lived a truly charmed life. It just feels like picking on someone for liking a horrible novel, is fairly hypocritical.

The other night I friends and I ended up having a fairly epic discussion after I had stopped recording the podcast about the decision to completely jettison everything in the Star Wars Expanded Universe. As we started discussing it, the initial reaction was “how dare they” and it faded more into a “makes sense” as we started to recount the various aspects of the Expanded Universe. For each thing that we loved we managed to pull out five or six fairly horrible and badly written constructs from the comics, novels or video games. Most of it was no less “horrible fan service” than the Twilight novels. As much as I loved Dark Empire for example… you have to admit it is a pretty dumb story arc when it involves the fact that there are millions of clone emperors hidden throughout the galaxy. Not to mention the fact that while Luke spent an entire series of movies fighting the Dark Side, he decides to give in within a couple of comic books.

We are all guilty of loving something completely moronic that has no literary merit. So I say to the “Twilight Girls” out there… rock that shit and ignore the people who will hate you for it. To the rest of us… we need to realize that this person is a geek just like we are, they just happen to like different things. Geekdom is not a thing we own, there are no rules of entry. While I might rage on “Brogamers” and what they have done to my beloved gaming community… they have no less right to be there than I do. For us 30 and 40 something’s, who spent our lives getting excluded from pop culture… it really is not cool that we try and do the same thing to others. I am proud when I see anyone let their geek flag fly… even if it is not something that I particularly care about.

Prophet Loves Jewelry

I was all over the place last night gaming wise. I popped into Trove for a bit and streamed it, and I decided to do the same for Rift and show off our awesome guild hall. When I finally settled on a game and played for a bit it was once again Elder Scrolls Online. Over the course of leveling I seem to have completely ignored the main story. This is in part because you keep having to go back the harborage to keep accepting the next step, and for whatever reason I have simply not taken the time to do this. As a result I spent a good chunk of last night trying to play catch up and do both the level 35 and 40 main storyline quests. My big takeaway… is that at some point during his history The Prophet managed to knock over a jewelry store. He seems to have this endless supply of necklaces and rings.

At this point I am a stones throw away from 44 and I feel like I have barely scratched the surface of Bangkorai. Normally I do a pretty bad job of following quest chains through the zones in Elder Scrolls, but this zone… I have done worse than normal. I have objectives scattered all over the place some of them completed, others still dark and unfinished. I am getting cursed quite a lot because I cannot stop myself from charging packs of werewolves and vampires. I’ve had the “Sanies Lupinus” curse more times than I can count, but it seems to just go away on its own rather rapidly if you do nothing about it. I had one guy rather mad at me the other night named “Raper of Souls”, which was convenient since I had already paused to report his name. Yes I am one of those people… I report bad names, and do so on a nightly basis. I am not going out of my way to troll people who are trying to turn into a werewolf or a vampire… I am simply playing the game as I always do. Namely I charge first and ask questions later.

Thankfully we have plenty of werewolves and vampires in guild if someone needs to get bitten. Personally I would far rather choose neither and be a hunter. In fact I have already morphed my silver bolts attack to also effect werewolves. I’ve always had a love of werewolves, so in theory I would totally become one were it not gimped. Right now werewolf seems a bit underwhelming, considering all of its buffs only actually take place when you are in Crinos form. Yes I just called it Crinos form… I played a lot of Werewolf: The Apocalypse, so it will always be known as Crinos to me. Vampire on the other hand has all sorts of passive benefits that are active all the time, but the weakness to fire seems far more problematic than the werewolf weakness to poison. As a result… I am just walking the line between and hunting both equally. Though oddly… I seem to be going out of my way to save both werewolves and vampires in the storyline.

#ElderScrollsOnline #ESO #HipsterGlasses #NerdOnNerdViolence

The Achilles Heel

April 29, 2014 by Belghast

The Struggle

Most mornings my posts flow freely from my fingers as I sit here typing away at my keyboard. This morning however is not one of them. For whatever reason I feel completely drained of anything that makes sense. Over the weekend I spent quite a bit of it at a severe sleep debt, and I think for the most part I am still trying to recover from that. When I am in doubt I turn to my RSS feed, but after thumbing through the pages I have yet to really get the inspiration to write anything either. I am in a really weird place right now. I am still very much loving Elder Scrolls Online, but I also feel like most of what I say about it is just repeating something I said earlier. So instead I think this morning I will talk about the points that frustrate me. I’ve been more or less accused of being a cheerleader for the game, or at the very least our podcast as “full of fanboys”.

The Achilles Heel

For as awesome as the game is there is one massive and glaring hole in the game. It is simply too damned hard to group up with your friends. This problem is multi-faceted, but revolves around a few variables. Firstly content “trivializes” when you are five levels over the level of the actual mobs. This means you get no experience, gold or any other form of loot from killing the monsters. This also means that the experience that you gain from completing the quests is significantly reduced. While I have said that content is still relatively challenging a good deal over level, that also means you are taking risk with zero reward. This becomes a massive problem when a guild member happens to need a low level dungeon. The first time someone completes an Elder Scrolls Dungeon it is pretty much a given that there will be wipes. For the on level players this is really not a huge deal, but for the higher level players that have been drafted… it is pretty significant.

I feel like once I have gotten my 42,700 gold mount this will be less of an issue for me, but right now as it stands I am taking zero risks when it comes to my bank account. I am a stones throw away from the mount, and right now just trying to build up enough of a cap to afford a repair if I need one after buying it. By repair right now that means roughly 2000 gold each time I do it. This is always the problem as players age through content, trying to keep enough money inflow to pay for the money going out. Having mobs completely trivialize and stop being worth any loot is a big problem when I consistently out age the content of a given zone. Bangkorai for example is a zone that seems to cap out mob level wise at 43. I just dinged 43 last night and I have not even completely half of the content in the zone. This means that my need to turn all the black dots white on my map will easily cause me to stop getting loot long before I finish the content.

For a game that already has significant problems with bots hanging out in dungeons and farming bosses over and over, this is a hard problem to solve. My immediate suggestion would be to make the group-able level range something more like ten levels, rather than five. Encounters ten levels under you can still a challenge especially in a dungeon setting. That would also ensure that you gain loot the entire way through a zone, regardless of how much you manage to dawdle around. I realize the whole trivialization thing is not going to be an issue once I enter the veteran levels, however that is setting up the same problem every MMO has ever had. If the “real” game begins at 50, then why even have the pre-50 game. I don’t necessarily believe this, but I am playing devils advocate here. My problem is I happen to love the leveling game in every game I play, and the Elder Scrolls Online is no different.

Mixed Mode Grouping

Another huge problem the game has is that grouping is somewhat piecemeal as you level. You are constantly flowing between quests that allow multiple players to complete them together, and quests that require you to solo them in a private instance. Additionally the system is confused about players getting credit for things. You can simply ride by someone fighting a the last mob in a quest chain and accidentally get a quest completed, but when it comes to anything that requires gathering… each and every party member has to get their own items. This generally lends to frustration as you end up waiting around for respawns to allow the character that is lagging behind to complete that step in the quest chain before progressing to the next item. It feels like this whole system could have been better thought out. Duoing is a very common tactic for couples and friends leveling in a new game, and this game seems to support this extremely well at times, but really badly in a few cases.

Where this gets compounded is when a duo happens upon a solo instanced quest. Inevitably one of the members will breeze through the content, and the other will struggle. I’ve seen more than a few duos derailed by Doshia already in our guild, and I am sure as a whole it is probably even worse. The game has very particular skill check moments, and this ends up locking a single player away behind that quest so that they cannot progress further in a given quest chain until they solo it. What does the other half of the duo do at that point? Do they twiddle their thumbs and wait around for them to complete it… therefore putting more pressure on the member that isn’t quite able to grasp the fight as quickly? Do they wander off and kill random stuff potentially causing them to get ahead in level. These gates are awesome in theory, but hell on people trying to keep at the same level.

The Game Needs Mentoring

This game is in desperate need of mentoring. I realize at this point I have banged this drum so damned many times that the skin on it is close to cracking from the abuse. However I feel like every game is better off with a mentoring system. For those not familiar with the concept, mentoring is a system that allows a high level player to drop their level to that of the player. If you group a level 50 character with a 20 character, this functionally makes them both level 20 characters. Scaling always makes it so that the mentored down character is “better than” their level, but it works better than not having it. Generally speaking a mentored character receives loot as though they were at the level of the group and the difficulty is something similar to level as well. This is a magic bullet, and has worked to make every game that has it better.

This was my key point of frustration with the game when I heard it did not exist. It is never the right answer not to ship with both Bolstering, like you see in Cyrodil and mentoring. I have a maxim that is getting tired at this point… but it is no less true today than it was when I first started posting about it. Anything that gets in the way of you grouping with your friends is bad. These games are social experiences, and as such should have every possible tool to allow friends to group freely together. This game unfortunately has a ton of barriers between players. Firstly there is the issue of level gaps and trivialization of content, that I have talked about here. We also however have the frustration of not being able to group across faction, even for instanced content.

Globalization

Finally there is always the problem of region lockout, and while I can understand the logistical need to have both a North American and a European mega server… my hope is that at some point they will choose to merge them. I should not be penalized for having lots of friends who do not happen to live in the United States. What is happening in practice is that my European friends are simply accepting the fact that they will be having lag and rolling on our megaserver just to be able to participate with their friends. The concept of a region lock needs to die in a fire. In an era when we can communicate instantly across the entire damned planet, thinking of things in a country centric means just doesn’t fly anymore. Please note that this is not specifically an Elder Scrolls Online problem, but a problem with each and every game system out there. I am looking at you Sony and your players locked behind the ProSiebenStat.1 wall as well.

I have spent weeks talking about the things that the Elder Scrolls Online has done really right, so it is only fitting that I spend at least one day talking about the things that it has done “less right”. I am hoping with time they fix some of these problems, especially the inability to group with people in a meaningful way once things have trivialized. The answer that they would give us is that after level 10 we should be going out to Cyrodil… which is fine and good and an option I will probably start taking more often, but that is such a SMALL part of this game, that it just feels like a cop-out. You have created this amazing world, and crafted a really fun dungeon experience. Let me show it to my friends in a meaningful way, because right now I don’t want to run lower level content because it just isn’t fun trying to be the high level in a dungeon. Adding mentoring would solve almost all of the problems I mentioned other than the region lockout. Here is hoping that someday they add it in, before it is too late for the folks who were NOT in the initial leveling rush and will fall by the wayside as they realize they can’t do anything meaningful with their friends.

#ESO #ElderScrollsOnline #Mentoring

The City of Crows

April 28, 2014 by Belghast

The Second Year

This morning I am feeling more than a little groggy, but this isn’t unusual coming back into the working world of Mondays. Today I feel like I should be extolling you all with some great wisdom, considering this is the beginning of a second year of daily Tales of the Aggronaut posts. However I am pretty empty of anything that seems close at all to wisdom. So instead I am going to continue to ramble on like I always have and hope people are still willing to listen to it. Honestly at this point I am shocked and amazed that I still have a decent number of readers each day. I keep thinking that the novelty is going to wear off sooner or later. The biggest thing I do know is that I am helped in ways you won’t likely even understand by the fact that I do have readers to keep me honest.

I figure I will get the inevitable Monday morning plug of the Aggrochat podcast out of the way. I am honestly pretty damned proud of the fact that we have managed to record three episodes in a row in spite of some scheduling difficulties. In light of the fact that I am beginning my second year of daily posting, I am really hoping at this same time next year we can look forward to celebrating the anniversary of a year of weekly podcasts. I have a lot of fun recording these, but then again I also have a lot of fun recording my game stream whenever folks decide to join me in the mumble channel. One of the things I have always been about above all other things… is gaming with friends, and I guess a part of me is trying to capture that and bottle it in either podcast or game stream form. Though honestly the connections have been a little off lately as we’ve not run a dungeon together in weeks, so here is hoping this coming week we can all remedy that.

The City of Crows

In spite of not being able to really play much Friday night and having to program on an application most of Saturday, I seem to have made up sufficient ground most of Sunday. I started the day at 39 and working on the tail end of Alik’r and I finished the night dinging 42 and starting to make a dent in Bangkorai. Right now I am questing out of Evermore and something odd is going on here. The town is absolutely deluged in crows, and for those who have been through the Ebonheart Pact zone Crows Wood… I am beginning to wonder if it is for similar reasons. If that is the case I will be extremely happy, because I love all things relating to that Daedra. If not… it is at the very least a very cool and brooding locale, and thankfully a return to Breton architecture. There is a kind of beauty to the harsh Redguard landscapes… but their “cities” never really feel like proper cities to me.

If you are so inclined you can watch me faff about for awhile yesterday afternoon working on finishing a few quest chains in Alik’r. Unfortunately I cannot “100%” the zone, due to the fact of a few bugged areas that I will have to come back for. I am however happy enough to be moving on. The desert is gorgeous, but also very spartan… and I will be happy to be roaming around areas with grass and trees again. Bangkorai in general feels like a wrapping up of things. This could be in part because the finale of both the Mages Guild and Fighters Guild quests chains occur within the city of Evermore. I am rather happy with the conclusion of both to be honest, even though at least in the case of the fighters guild it took more than a few ziggzags to get there.

The Earth Forge

One of the awesome things about both quest chains is that they unlock locations that were previously unreachable. In the case of the Fighter’s guild you can then travel to the Earth Forge at any time, and I have to say… if they ever open up player housing… I am really hoping I have the option of getting a room here. The Earth Forge is pretty much my ideal location. It somehow blends a rocky pine filled mountain climate with the skeletal remains of a massive Dwemer machine. This pretty much combines two of the things I love the most in Elder Scrolls games in one place. If not I hope I can at least get a portal in my house to the Earth Forge, because I have a feeling I will be going out of my way to visit here regularly.

The Mage’s Guild quest line similarly opens up permanent access to the lost island of Eyevea that Shalidor once controlled. If you are into mages and such you should really like this place. In a similar fashion to the Freeport Enchanters guild in Everquest, you travel around the island through a series of portals. You can of course do it by foot, but the place is massive. From the architecture and the environmental details I would guess this area is technically in the Ebonheart Pact somewhere, specificially in Morrowind. The buildings are all mostly Dunmer architecture and the flora are mostly large mushrooms. The best part about both unlocks is that they now give you access to two new crafting stations per location, that each creates an extremely powerful set of gear. The only drawback is that each of them requires eight traits to be learned per item slot in order to craft them.

Grindless Crafting

Last night a discussion spawned in guild chat from one of our members talking about how much he disliked the way crafting worked in this game. First off I was shocked a bit, because I personally could not describe a better system. It is like everything I always wanted in a crafting system, and as I started digging into the reasons for why he didn’t like it, every point I brought up seemed to be something he enjoyed about it. Finally I got down to the root of the problem… he felt that leveling tradeskills was a painful undertaking. To some extent I agree, it feels like you are not making any progress, but then you learn that this is not the type of system you would ever “grind” your way through.

This is a negative side effect of the World of Warcrafts of the MMO world, in that it feels like you should grind your way through crafting to make sure you keep up. So far I have not really made it my missing to level crafting at all, but instead have simply played the game as I normally would. Multiple times a night I wayshrine back to a crafting hub, deconstruct any gear that I have gotten and go on about my business. As a result my Blacksmithing is level 28, and Clothing and Woodworking 24. Please note that the only thing I have ever crafted is sets of gear for myself and the occasional set of gear for a guildie. I’ve never crafted a single Clothing or Woodworking item at all, and those skills have both progressed nicely. This is the aspect of the game that I like almost more than anything else, crafting just happens as you play the game.

We’ve learned that the best way to level crafting is through deconstruction of gear. At low levels you don’t get very much of it to be truthful, but as you move through the game the amount of drops that you get increases wildly. Simply by playing the game and deconstructing everything you get, your tradeskills will more than keep up with where you need them to be. It is hard to get used to this concept, and that progression through the ranks of crafting is more about how you spend your skill points and less about raw tradeskill level. Mostly I just wanted to take a moment to address this today, just in case anyone else out there was trying to “grind” their way through crafting. If you are doing this, you are on a path of madness because crafting and deconstructing your own items is without a doubt the least efficient way to level. If you feel the need to “grind” at the very least find a crafting buddy. You get far more experience deconstructing gear that someone else has crafted, so if you both craft items and swap you will both end up better off.

#AggroChat #ESO #ElderScrollsOnline #Alik’r #Bangkorai

Point Paralysis

April 24, 2014April 24, 2014 by Belghast

Maybe I didn’t suck

For whatever reason this morning I am absolutely struggling to remain conscious. I feel like maybe I drifted into the “too much sleep” territory last night. We ended up with a heavily altered game play, in that when my wife got home last night we ended up taking our evening walk and combining it with some extra steps to go walk to eat dinner. This was awesome in that it meant that my playtime was not perforated last night by going out to walk, but I seem to have squandered the benefit by going to bed early. For whatever reason around 9 pm I got irrationally tired and after dealing with a few chores crashed out on the bed with two cats snuggled up beside me. Normally I get pretty much the same 6 hours of sleep every night, but last night I got a little closer to 8 hours and I feel groggy as hell.

Awesome thing happened yesterday, in that the podcast I was a guest on over the weekend published the episode. I feel humbled that I was offered to join in the fun, and the end result was really nice. I listened to it yesterday after getting out of our weekly staff meeting, and I have to say I was a bit scared to do so. I was worried that maybe I would have come off like an ass or something, but overall it seemed to flow really nicely. Every now and then podcasts will have a guest on that is abrupt and disruptive… and I am always afraid I will be that guy. Each podcast has a certain feel to it, and I was hoping that I was staying true to that. It is still really damned weird to hear my own voice, but after doing this streaming thing and our own podcast I am starting to get used to it finally.

Point Paralysis

Yesterday one of my guildies and fellow bloggers Werit posted a piece on something I think all of us have felt, that he calls “Skill Point Paralysis”. One of the big features of Elder Scrolls Online is that the game is not so much about how you play the game but how you choose to build your character. You can be damned near anything you can imagine within the frame work of the game. You want to play a spell slinging rogue, or a tanky archer? Sure you can build both of those in damned near any “class” as well. The problem is without a reasonable undo system, it gives a false sense of importance on every single skill point. It is a bit like playing a chess match and being afraid to make a move for fear it was the wrong one. I have had the benefit of playing this same character over a dozen times throughout the various beta test phases. Over that time I have refined exactly what I want to do, but still I will find myself with four points pooled up and not really sure where to spend them.

So I thought I would spend a few minutes this morning talking about the type of decisions I make. Essentially I tend to divide things up in my head into three categories: Active Attacks, Passive Buffs, and Utility. At the end of the day I can only have five active attacks on my bar at any given time, so as a result I tend to discount the value of choosing one of these. Also picking up a new active attack means I need to devote some time into raising it and unlocking the morph. After a point new abilities are not really as useful as old abilities until you can morph them. So that means I need to be committed to a new ability choice if I want to go down that path. I will occasionally pick up an ability if it sounds interesting, but if you notice in the above screenshot I have Power Bash at level 1… in part because I have not really used it much in combat.

Utility abilities are a special kind of actives, and I generally limit myself to only having one of these on my bar at a time. Sometimes these are survival cooldowns, self heals or group buffs… but most of the time I classify things into this category that are only “situationally good”. For example I love beyond love the Silver Bolts ability. However it is only really worth putting on my bar if I know I will be fighting Daedra or Undead… or now that I have the fighters guild rank 7 passive Werewolves. If it is an ability that I will use only 20% of the time, I greatly devalue picking that with my skill points. Sometimes however these abilities are useful for things other than their original intent. Even if you are fighting something other than the mob types mentioned above… Silver Bolts still becomes a pretty potent weaponless ranged attack if your character happens to be lacking one of those.

Always On is Awesome

The final category is where I tend to spend MOST of my points. If you look at the above screenshot I have every single passive ability that I can currently get in the sword and board tree. Similarly if you would look at my Heavy Armor and Imperial Racial trees their passives would be completely filled as well. If I have a useful passive to buy, I will almost always choose that over something else. Passives do not require me to change my play style to incorporate them in, nor do they require me to level them to make them truly useful. Instead they are a single pick that makes my character immediately and permanently better. In a game I will always favor something that gives me a permanent boost over something that gives me a situationally better boost. I like “always on” things, because if I can be awesome all of the time, it is better to me than being awesome some of the time.

Finally I have limited myself to a single tradeskill for the time being. Until the points begin to flow like honey later as I wander around the world collecting them… I have narrowed my focus to two weapons (sword and shield and two handed), three class trees (because really you want to cherry pick abilities between them), one armor type (heavy is the only choice I ever seem to make), racial tree, and a single tradeskill (blacksmithing). Now I will occasionally pick up some especially valuable picks like Soul Lock from the World tree, that gives you a chance to fill soul stones each time you kill a mob. Overall I have narrowed my focus to a specific set of abilities. The big thing I see players doing that gets them in trouble is trying to tackle more than one weapon at a time early on. I did not pick up a second weapon until 20 or so, well after I had the ability to hot swap between them. Trying to spread yourself too thin is something that will ultimately lead to making the game harder than it really needs to be.

#ElderScrollsOnline #ESO #SkillPoints