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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.

The Gospel of Faff

March 18, 2014 by Belghast

The importance of pee

I just thought the sub heading would be humorous, but really it heralds some good news. Yesterday my Grandmothers kidneys started working again. Apparently when the body is dehydrated they completely shut off. The body is all “nope!” no one can have any moisture at all. This apparently was the last crucial step before she was mostly out of the woods. She is still in pretty bad shape, but they have been waking her up periodically to make sure she is responsive. They are keeping her mostly sedated however so she will sleep and rest. All of the hospital staff have been impressed with just how much of a fighter she is.

So I want to thank all of you for your thoughts during the last few days. This is the woman who at least gets half of the credit for raising me to be the person I am today. I didn’t go to daycare, I went to Grandmas house, because she was local and available… and more importantly willing. We’ve always known she is strong, but this whole episode just proved that to any shadow of a doubt. So while we are not in the “all clear” yet, we are probably up to a 70% chance of her making it out of this little episode unscathed. I am sure she will need some therapy after laying in bed for several days immobile.

The Gospel of Faff

This word has been in my vocabulary since I believe high school but I don’t really know how exactly I picked it up. So when I encountered the Godmother of Faff, I latched onto it with both arms to represent a certain game play style. However the more I use it, the more it seems to draw confusion among my friends. Sometimes it gets misread with a certain “self flagellating” connotation, or if you are Scary you apparently read it as some kind of shorthand for flatulence. So I thought I would spend a bit of time this morning clearing the air about all things faff. Since this is essentially British slang, I felt we had to go to the official source… the Oxford dictionary.

So there is the definition, copied and pasted via greenshot from the oxford dictionary website. The thing is… this leads one to believe that it is a bad thing. I tend to take a much more zen approach. “Faffing about” is just another in a long line of words used to describe enjoyable but often purposeless activity. I’ve used many versions of this over the years. I’ve “piddled” and I’ve “dinked around” and occasionally “goofed off”. I had a bit of an odd childhood, in that my mother to some extent lived vicariously through me. She wanted me to do all the things she always wanted to do… but never could afford. So as a small child I was drug through a series of activities like piano practice that I had no real interest in, but felt no less obligated to do.

As a result I felt like I never got to just be a kid, without purpose or direction. When I was allowed that time I savored it. Now as an adult, I am really cautious about anything that places undue burden on my “free” time. While I feel like Godmother and I probably use the term “Faff” in different ways, our viewpoints are very complimentary. For me “Faff” represents a play style of allowing myself to get lost in the minutiae of little things that happen along the way. It is a freedom of not having to have a goal or a focal point for the evening. That I have permission to log into a game and “mess around” for awhile without necessarily having a tangible reward at the end.

So as I have begun to stream my game play when possible, I have brought this same idea there as well. I am not doing something important or grand, but instead just doing what I always do. I log into mumble, into a special channel called “Bel is Streaming” and then proceed about my normal business and what happens… happens. Sometimes I do something really interesting, other times I just piddle around leveling. Last night for example I recorded one of my normal Onyxia and Tempest Keep clear nights, where I run through characters through Onyxia and the two that can solo Tempest Keep all in search of mounts. Sure there is purpose there, but it is not the kind of big overarching and soul crushing purpose that you feel forced to do it. Before last night it had probably been three weeks since my last mount farm night… and I am perfectly okay with that.

As is the way with Faff

I had every intent last night to play some more Heroes of the Storm, however that simply did not happen. Sometimes you get caught up in doing the things you are doing and next thing you know… it is bedtime. Part of the “Gospel of Faff” is accepting that this is going to happen and being somewhat okay with it. Some people thrive on goals, and lord knows I have a bunch of little ones. But for me it is the journey that is so much more important than the destination. I think in part that is why I have enjoyed The Elder Scrolls online so much. The game presents before me a whole bunch of rabbit trails that I can get hopelessly lost following. It is arranged in a way that keeps me from being able to “quest efficiently”. WoW has made me really good at gathering a bunch of quests, and doing them all before returning to the hub to get more.

The freedom to wander around and get lost in the process of leveling is a really awesome thing. While World of Warcraft is a really on-rails experience most of the time, I am trying to embrace ways to play it where the objectives don’t matter nearly as much as the journey. This is far more about my mental state while playing, than what I am actually doing. However I am trying really hard to always endulge the rabbit trails. If my addon alerts me to a rare mob in the vicinity… even if I am on my way to some important objective I try and pull myself from the path to try and track the foe down. As a result I end up seeing things I may have never seen before in the process. I had spent most of my time playing WoW trying to avoid the quagmire that is Kalimdor, and now I feel like I am trying to embrace it.

Heroes of the Storm

March 17, 2014 by Belghast

Odd Weekend

With all the excitement of the weekend, yesterday I needed to just recharge a bit and do a bunch of stuff around the house… namely lots of laundry. My wife got up early yesterday morning, as she had planned a trip to Dallas for the day with friends, so this left me completely up to my own devices all day long. I ended up sleeping in until around 9:30 at which point I did my FTL Steampowered Sunday play, and the subsequent blog post. Then it was lots and lots of laundry for several hours. I feel like I might be coming down with something, so I really wasn’t much more useful than that.

On the Grandmother front, she is doing as well as could be expected. She woke up yesterday for a bit before they sedated her again. Her kidney functions have not returned, but she was severely dehydrated. They have a nephrologist coming into the hospital today that is going to look at her and see what they can do to stimulate activity. Once the kidneys start working again they will be much closer to “in the clear”. Mostly they think she just needs to rest and let the body do its natural recovery. She is a really tough woman, so I have faith that she is going to pull through this. Her vitals all look okayish and seem to be improving by the day. so here is hoping time is really all she needs.

As far as the sick cat, she seems to be doing much better. She was extremely needy of attention yesterday, and her appetite seems to have returned. For the majority of the week she had not eaten much of anything, so yesterday whenever she acted hungry I was opening a cat of food for her. I think she ended up eating five different times yesterday. She had lost quite a bit of weight over the course of this ordeal so while I will taper back her feeding eventually… for now I am just happy she is eating. She demanded attention, which is good… because while she was sick she was pretty scarce. Preferring to just lay down on the couch by herself instead of wherever we happened to be in the house.

Elder Scrolls Final Beta Weekend

Since this past weekend is the final beta weekend before launch in a few weeks, and since we had been given leave to stream whatever we wanted… I did as much playing and streaming as I could fit in. All told I think I streamed a little bit over four hours, split up between four different videos. Most of the time was spent faffing about on my Orsimer Dragon Knight in the Daggerfall covenant area. I closed the weekend sitting a little bit away from thirteen. However because of the absolutely illogical pattern I followed I know I missed a good number of the quests from the first area of Glenumbra. I would love to say that the beta weekend was completely smooth, but it seemed as though a lot of the systems were bugged out. Dark Anchors for example seemed to spawn, and then just stay active even after the forces had been defeated and a player got credit for destroying them.

One of the systems that was completely new to me, were the Dark Fissures. These are essentially mini versions of the Dark Anchors and can just spawn almost anywhere around the map. Think of these as “soloable” Rifts. I say soloable in quotes because really unless you are prepared to take on boss level monsters they will be pretty freakin hard. I defeated two of these and did so just barely. If you go into them make sure you have your health potions hotkeyed and ready to go. The awesome thing about the Dark Fissures is that they seem to drop really awesome stuff. The final one I closed out yesterday evening dropped a level 12 blue fire staff, which I am sure would have been awesome… had I used staves. If the beta weekend were going longer I would have tried to find that a good home.

Heroes of the Storm

I know I mentioned this the other day, but I am still pretty pumped that I am in the Heroes of the Storm technical alpha. One of the really cool things about it is that it is completely sans-NDA. This means that I can stream the hell out of the game, and I intend to. I recorded a few videos over the weekend, the first of which was just me playing around in practice mode working on the weekly quests for getting victories with heroes from each of the franchises. The second video however I dipped my toes into cooperative mode fighting bots with other players. I have to say I found the jump in AI to be quite extremely between practice mode and cooperative. I earned enough gold through the various quests to purchase two of the cheaper heroes Muridan and Raynor. At some point I hope to pick up Falstad, because while he is in the free to play rotation currently… I am sure this will change similar to how it does in League of Legends.

Right now I am enjoying the game far more than I ever did League. Basically it has all of the aspects of league that I really enjoyed… namely fighting people with awesome champions, and none of the aspects that I didn’t like. League build path was always an enigma to me, and I tended to play champions that I could use the same build on over and over. League gameplay is far more nuanced, but Blizzard has done for League what they did for the MMO genre. Streamlined, simplified, polished and created something that the masses can latch onto. Instead of a huge list of items for you to purchase, you build your character by making a few simple choices. In the beginning at least all of these are either or choices like “survival” or “damage”. Over the course of the map this ends up building a semi-custom champion.

However once you reach level 8, they open up these choices significantly. While playing Muridan yesterday there was one of these levels where I had five different choices for how I wanted to proceed. Each choice causes you to give up other options with no real way of getting those back. For me… a player that found the item buying system of League completely unfathomable this works so much better. For a player who wants a deeply nuanced and unique approach to each match… they are probably still going to favor League. The champions as a whole feel more well rounded than League champions, in that they have a wider “kit” of abilities and the option to choose between two different “R” attacks really seems to help this.

The place where the game really shines is in their map creation. At their core, each of the maps is essentially “Summoner’s Rift”. That said each of the maps has a unique sub game to them, while League tries to do this with the various map types… it simply does not work as well as it does here. For example in the map shown above Blackheart’s Bay… you have a really awesome coastal city/pirate theme going on. When one team collects enough doubloons they can turn them in to call in a bombardment from the pirates on the enemy team. In one map the mini game is all about controlling two shrines which allow you to waken the Dragon Knight. When you do so the player transforms into this unstoppable juggernaut perfect for diving straight into towers and destroying the enemy resources. I have only played the game a little bit, but I have to say I am deeply hooked.

Gamer Hangout

Another odd happening this weekend is that I ended up participating in Beau Hindman’s Gamer Hangout show. I’ve been friends with the members for some time, and there was a week where they had asked me to join in the show… but I until recently I simply did not have a camera. Now you will be able to see the WHY I didn’t have a camera. I have always been pretty closed with separating the real me from the gamer me… so it took quite a bit of courage to appear on camera like this. I am always far more comfortable behind the scenes than being out front and animated. What was cool about the show is that in essence they based this week on one of my blog posts.

It just happened to be where I was available to join in and chat about it. While most of us only actually got through two different games on our list, we somehow managed to talk over an hour about them. They have apparently extended an open invitation for me to participate more in the future, so I guess that means I did not completely make an ass of myself. My office is a pit, and if I do this more often I think I would want to rearrange things some… however that involves me cleaning and moving and not sure how likely that is to happen. It was really enjoyable, and the other folks were great. Was very much an odd end to an odd weekend. I just wish that youtube would not have picked a thumbnail of me talking for the video.

Being Bad at Mage

March 12, 2014 by Belghast

Big Damned Beta Weekend

This coming weekend that leads into Spring Break here in the United States, represents the last public beta weekend before the 4/4/2014 launch of the game. Now the beta client you will be getting to play has a significant number of changes in it. For point of reference the one that was used during the last public beta weekend was from early December, and lacked a ton of the polish changes that have gone in since. As a result even if you had completely written off the game based on past public beta experiences… you really owe it to yourself to patch the game up and give it another go this weekend. While December doesn’t really seem that long ago, what has happened between now and then is what I like to refer to as a “hallelujah” build… aka the one that fixes so many bugs and makes the game feel nice and tight and polished.

So many of the quests that have been perennially bugged out during the beta weekends should now be fixed and working smoothly. In many cases this involved subtle tweaks to the flow of the quest to make it work more reliably. Additionally this build is the one that introduces mob collision and the ability to skip the starter island. The mob collision seems to fix some of the complaints about “floaty combat” that players have made, and the combat animations themselves have tightened up considerably as well. There are still a number of features missing that are in the private test build, but overall I think players will have a more enjoyable experience. The game is very much an Elder Scrolls experience, but unfortunately if you were hoping it would morph into a standard MMO interface… that has not and likely will not happen.

Another cool thing about this weekend is with my dabbling in twitch streaming with my “Bel Faffs About” series, I recieved an email from support saying that I could stream the entire weekend if I wanted to. Granted we likely have quite a bit of things to do over the weekend, and Saturday since it is going to be nice out we hope to go out and do some photography. However as much of the weekend as I can, I will be streaming out my gameplay. I am not sure at this point if I will be starting a fresh character, or picking up where I left off on my Orsimer Dragon Knight from the previous beta. For those who have not already tested the content, they are asking each of us to start a new character and test the new starter experience sans islands. It works pretty well but is considerably more difficult since at the level you fight some of the encounters, you really don’t have a full set of gear yet.

Technicolor Voxels

I am still very much learning this streaming thing… and I feel like I still have so much more to learn. I was having some issues with FFSplit, namely in the inability to stream Trove. So after a suggestion or two from friends I loaded up Open Broadcaster Software overall I like the way it is set up, and it seems more intuitive to me. However it has copious amounts of settings, and I made the mistake of just accepting the defaults. The above video is passable at times, but pixellated as all get out anytime there is action going on. After some tweaking I improved the results with the WoW stream later in the evening. Additionally I am noticing that I really need to drop the volume of the game by about half so that I am not fighting to speak over it. I was honestly being fairly quiet last night… and I need not to do that.

It had been awhile since I had patched up Trove and played around on the server. With all the excitement over “pretty voxels” and Landmark… my enthrallment with Trove’s simplicity fell by the wayside. This is one of those games where if you stop playing for a bit, you are absolutely shocked at just how much has been done the next time you play. One of the coolest things from the above video is when I find a tree fort in a higher tier zone, and go hunting for the mushroom king that rules it. Last time I played they did not have real “dungeon bosses”, and they actually do hurt significantly. I cheat quite a bit in that the community chest was stocked full of rainbow weapons. However in my travels last night I did manage to pick up an upgrade that looks like the gun from Portal.

The gunslinger class is extremely fun, and it feels more responsive at times than the Knight does. Granted the Knight was their “first class”, so I figure at some point down the line they will apply a round of tweaks to make it feel more unique. If you watch through the video, you can tell I am heavily addicted to using the “rocket jump” attack, that shoots your character up into the air. I am one of those players that jumps constantly, so this only adds to my enjoyment when I can hurdle over big obstacles. One of the things I never could find however was the snow biome full of robots. I am wondering if they made robot parts significantly harder to farm, by only making them drop off punch bots and the dungeon boss robots. I will try doing another stream soonish with fixed settings to make sure the pixelization is gone completely.

Being Bad at Mage

So as I said above, by the time I got around to streaming World of Warcraft last night, I had tweaked my settings significantly. While the gameplay in WoW never includes the kind of spastic jumping that Trove does, it seems to be smoother and not pixellated. I continued my quest to push my Mage to 60. Night Elf Mage is pretty much the least possible “Belghast” character in existence. I have always had a problem with Night Elves, and I do not do amazingly well at “Finger Wigglers” as I call them. That said I have this silly idea that I want to get one of every class to the level cap, and I figured the only way I would actually do this is by using my free boost to 90 on a Mage. Traditionally the characters I was least interested in playing were the Mage and the Priest. When I accepted a scroll of resurrection some time ago, I made an instant 80 priest. So that just left the mage, that I have never really managed to level past about 20.

Firstly I am fundamentally bad at playing a Mage. I know this. I had been using Frostfire bolt all this time… because it was “the prettiest”. Really though the animation does look amazing as compared to the stock Frostbolt… so that meant it had to be better right? Wrong… apparently it is a spell that no self respecting frost mage would ever cast except in the rare case of a mob being frost immune. Last night oddly enough I had one of the best mages I have never known watching the stream. Helkim was commenting over twitter, since I fail at using Twitch chat and gave me the realization that I should never press frostfire bolt again. Sure enough my damage went up to respectable levels in dungeons… viva la shorter cast time!

Towards the end of the video someone took the bait. I made this channel on our guild Mumble server called “Bel Is Streaming”, and since my friend Drathis has no self preservation instinct… he decided to join me. Within a few minutes several other friends had popped into the channel, and I think before too much longer we had all pretty much forgotten I was streaming. As a result you guys get a glimpse into what our mumble sounds like on an almost nightly basis. This might be confusing to the listeners because we end up often times playing completely different games, and there will be cross conversations going on about each. Everyone else in the channel that was not me, was playing Diablo 3 torment mode I believe. If I did not have this burning desire to get my mage to 60… I would likely be doing the same. Basically I decided that I would far rather level a character to 60, than level tradeskills to 600.