MMORPG Archives - Page 370 of 399 - 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.

Ding 60… and 90

March 25, 2014 by Belghast

The Rosary

While I grew up catholic, it has literally been years since I had been to the crux of catholic existence… the rosary. Somehow my wife who was raised Baptist has never actually attended one at all in the over 16 years we’ve been married (or two decades we’ve been together). Under normal circumstances this would have been a disorienting experience, but last night it was made doubly so by a weird quirk of the modern church. It seems as though there is a massive priest shortage currently in the church. Quite simply put very few individuals enter the priesthood in America, and this is really no big surprise given the negative image of the church over numerous sex scandals. I am not adding commentary here, just stating the fact that there is a massive shortage of priests.

As a result since the retirement of the priest I grew up with, they briefly had a priest designed to “reinforce catholic doctrine”. Father had many quirks, one of them was a refusal to have “special offerings” for the various causes of the Catholic church. Apparently lately there have been no less than three passing of the plate for various causes, so I can see why he refused to do that crap. Anyways since the reformer priest, they have cycled through a series of priests, none of them native English speakers. Each one seemingly harder to understand than the last one. The catholic church is thriving in other parts of the world… just not here in America. So when you take what would have already been a confused experience and add in severe language issues… it was all my wife could do to keep from laughing.

For starters each time the priest would say a “Hail Mary”, he sounded like he was bored with the prayer. As a result he would begin running his words together and mumbling. So this produced all sorts of interesting things. After the Rosary I got together with my cousins and we all compared notes on what we heard. I personally thought he was saying something about a “Roma Tomato”, one of my cousins heard “Fruit of the Loom” and another something about “flushing the toilet”. It reminded me of a time when I was at my wife’s church, and the preacher had an extremely thick accent. We kept thinking he was talking about “Bastard’s For Christ” instead of what we found out later was “Ambassadors for Christ”. The problem is once you hear it… you can’t un-hear it… and while I knew by memory the words he was trying to say, I had no less trouble making them out.

So long as he was sticking to prayers I knew I was mostly okay, but there was a period where because of his respect for my grandmother… he went completely off script. The words I did manage to grasp, seemed to be meandering and completely off focus. He was talking about how some people live to be 100, and most people live to be 60. Which I thought was an odd statement considering the vast majority of the people in front of him… were well over 60. Thankfully all of us managed to make it through more or less with a straight face. The only thing I am certain of is that we have a new florist. The shop we used to use is no longer in business, so we tried the spouse of a person my wife teaches with. She did an amazing job and produced two gorgeous arrangements for a more than reasonable price. It’s always good to have a florist at the ready.

Ding 60… and 90

Yesterday during the day I spent a good chunk of my time streaming and playing World of Warcraft. With the release of Reaper of Souls last night at midnight, and the upcoming headstart of Elder Scrolls Online… I really wanted to get my mage to 60 so I could perform the boost. Going into the day I was sitting at 57 so just a stones throw away from the finish line. I spent most of that time chain running dungeons, and if you are phenomenally bored you can watch almost the entire adventure on my twitch stream. A few odd things happened along the way. Firstly I ran into a guild called Combat Wombats… which in itself is not that interesting. What I do find interesting is that they are apparently not connected at all to the guild by the same name run by several of my blogger friends. I threw out a few names, and the two members of the guild didn’t have a clue who I might be talking about.

Second interesting thing is that I reached a point of equilibrium where I maybe didn’t suck at magery as badly. In fact for quite a while running these dungeons I was pretty damned high on the damage meters and overall damage done. I felt like I had grasped the basics of playing frost and was ready to move on to bigger and better things. When I dinged 60 and took the boost to 90 I went from being confident to being completely confused. In the 30 levels that I skipped over, I had more than doubled the number of buttons I had to keep track of. Firstly I found it extremely disorienting to have my hotbars completely replaced without being prompted. At least when I took the jump to 80 from the scroll of resurrection, it asked me if I wanted to have them rearrange my hotbars.

After deconstructing them and trying to remember what I had on each of the buttons, I realized that I had way more buttons than places to put them. This is the problem with boosting. In those 30 levels the way a mage plays changes drastically, and I am sure this happens for all of the classes. So while I felt extremely comfortable playing a mage before the boost, afterwards I felt like I was a complete and total “nub” again. I scrounged around and found a complete set of timeless isle gear between the banks for a few characters. Complete in the pieces of armor, as I was missing 1 ring, a necklace and two trinkets. However this took my overall gear score to 491 which I felt was better than most of the boostards would be. As a test I decided to queue for the first stage of Throne of Thunder.

While I was not the lowest dps… I was really damned close. There is so much going on, that I felt completely lost in trying to figure out when I should do what. I like all the other boostards did things backwards. After realizing I was in over my head, I did a little bit of research and I think for the most part I have a grasp on what my priority should be for casting. At some point in the next few days I will try the next part of the LFR to see if my overall numbers improve. I would run a few heroics, but quite honestly… I find LFR to be far less confrontational when you are not sure about how you are doing. I can almost always do better than the worst player, so that gives me the leverage to learn on my feet rather than being called out in a 5 man group.

Pugs Aren’t All Bad

I had another interesting incident happen yesterday, that is making me feel like I need to re-evaluate my stance on pugging. Starting to think that maybe I should even start trying to tank them some more. In all of the dungeons I have run on my mage to get to 60, I had very few situations where things did not go well. More than that, I have had a few incidents happen where folks have been genuinely awesome. Yesterday in the middle of a Lower Blackrock Spire run, I ended up meeting a pretty awesome druid healer. Throughout the course of the run we chatted back and forth, and when for no apparent reason half of the party bailed on us, we hung out for a bit while waiting on the queue to fill. She said she was waiting around on a call from the vets, and was hoping to get a few dungeon runs in the meantime.

Since she was on a timeframe, I told her that she should drop group and should be able to get an instant queue. She thanked me, and we went on our way… thinking that I would never see this player again. Turns out there were really only a few people queuing at that time of the day, and when the queue popped I was in another LBRS group with the same healer. We had a really good druid tank to work with, but he admitted straight up that he didn’t know his way around the zone. So I helped shuttle him through the content, giving him a few tips on nasty pulls. We wiped a few times, but overall everyone stuck with it and we managed to complete the dungeon. Over the course of the run the healer talked about coming back to wow and wishing she could find a good guild to run with.

After the conclusion of the run I gave her the spiel on House Stalwart. Went over our three rules, and a bit of background information. Once again I didn’t really expect anything to come of it, but within thirty minutes she had rolled a priest on Argent Dawn and pinged me for an invite. So as frustrating as pugs can be, I guess there are some genuinely nice players just trying to get through the game as well. I went into the dungeons not expecting anything more than experience, and ended up walking out with a new guild member. Considering just how many of my current guildies are people who I met through dungeon groups… I really should relax my anti-pug stance and give it a shot now and then. There are always going to be gems in the rough out there to be found.