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Elder Scrolls: Online

I had a hell of a time logging in over the last stress test weekend. idk, that coupled with some of the game itself makes me a bit ... concerned that release is so short a time away.

Not that I'm buying it. I'll watch from afar.
 
I haven't logged into this beta yet, but my friends are all posting screenshots because the watermark has been removed. Is the NDA lifted then? If not, seems weird to remove the watermarking.
 
Haven't seen anything to indicate the NDA is lifted; at least, I wasn't presented with a revised set of T&Cs on opening it this time.
 
Yeah, I finally got it patched and saw nothing.

Server down for maintenance now. I've had a lot of problems with infinite loading screens today
 
Buddy Bradley said:
A few reviews are landing now, and it doesn't look good for Bethesda: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/02/07/hands-on-the-first-few-hours-of-elder-scrolls-online/
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The 2 I've read are spot on, imo. It's pretty enough. There's nothing glaringly bad about it. But it's just... a bit boring. There's no hook. There's nothing spurring you on, other than the vague hope that it gets better soon. I mean, it's a pleasant enough way to pootle around wasting a couple of hours, but that isn't worth the box price, and certainly isn't worth the sub. And even with the free 30 days I'm not about to spend £50 on a game I can only play for 30 days (because I can't justify spending £9 a month on something I know I'm not going to play endlessly).
 
I've got deeper into the quest in Mistral now, I'm level 5 atm. That quest seems decently interesting. There's a lot of running from house to house to speak to x and back again, which is a pain, because I like going out and killing things, but it's not as bad as it could be.

It's drawing me in a little bit more, but not enough.
 
Hit my first major bug, doing the rites of the queen quest. The queen just stopped moving and was utterly unresponsive so i had to abandon it. Forums suggest it's a common bug, and that the end fight in that quest is uncharacteristically hard anyway, so the bug probably did me a favour.

I'm actually starting to like it a bit :oops:
 
I haven't even managed to get out of the cell yet! :oops: Now every time I try to log on I'm held in a queue for half an hour. :mad:
 
I believe it was meant to end Sunday, but I haven't tried logging in today so I don't really know. Maybe I'll try to log in again.

I ended up by the time I went to bed (don't ask what time that was... seriously) wishing I owned the game :oops:

Dammit. I might get it. After all my protestations. We'll see.

Edit:

I can still log in.

Edit 2: It might end around midnight EST tonight.
 
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I'm getting it (so yes, my first post on this thread might have been a little hasty :oops: ). Fortunately my birthday is near the release date, so that's my birthday prezzie sorted! :D
 
Epona said:
I'm getting it (so yes, my first post on this thread might have been a little hasty :oops: ). Fortunately my birthday is near the release date, so that's my birthday prezzie sorted! :D
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My birthday is April, so it'll be a pressie for me too (going to wangle the Imperial edition) :D

moon said:
Why the sudden change of opinion?:D
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The change for me was just that as I got deeper into some of the quests (I'd say when I hit level 6 roughly) they started getting quite interesting, and I was getting more of the hang of it and enjoying just romping around.

The big problem for me in MMOs usually is that I'm generally a lone gamer so if there are massive spikes in difficulty for certain parts that require you to group with others I often hit a brick wall. I stumbled across one group dungeon this weekend, but it's an optional instance and not related to the main stories. I also kept dying at one particular point when trying to get through a difficult area to complete a quest, but there was a small group of people doing similar so we grouped for just 10 minutes to help each other fight through, then dissipated straight after. There were a couple of individual instances (as in, instances in the MMO sense and individual as in you're alone when you do them in a dungeon or similar) where the difficulty spiked but I was able to get through them with only a couple of deaths and with lots and lots of judicious kiting and running the fuck away :oops: Taking the nightblade's health siphoning skill and also slotting the first soul skill have been very, very useful.

I'll probably check out the guilds once I can... I think I'd like to be in a casual guild. There are usually ones where people aren't super-serious about people taking on specific roles when grouping, who are more about just helping each other get through content, or grouping to have a laugh in a dungeon where everyone will likely die several times, and just being a friendly face etc. That's my kind of thing, because as much as I can strategise and deal with high difficulty combat in certain games I've never been especially great with it in MMOs because I panic and start spamming whatever buttons my fingers reach first :D The more 'srs bsns' guilds and players don't appreciate that kind of 'learn to play properly, fucking n00b' stuff.

But yeah, my mind changed because - while it's still not the most exciting thing ever made - I was getting drawn into the story (TES lore ftw) and generally having a good time in there. It's very pretty, I was starting to get a rudimentary understanding of a couple of the crafting systems, and I basically just found myself wishing I could keep playing after the beta ended.
 
Vintage Paw said:
I think I'd like to be in a casual guild. There are usually ones where people aren't super-serious about people taking on specific roles when grouping, who are more about just helping each other get through content, or grouping to have a laugh in a dungeon where everyone will likely die several times, and just being a friendly face etc. That's my kind of thing, because as much as I can strategise and deal with high difficulty combat in certain games I've never been especially great with it in MMOs because I panic and start spamming whatever buttons my fingers reach first :D The more 'srs bsns' guilds and players don't appreciate that kind of 'learn to play properly, fucking n00b' stuff.
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Same here, the ones that take it all too seriously scare me. I want something that's fun to be involved in for casual grouping and assistance and having fun, rather than being yelled at because you don't have the exact right build or gear.

Edit: Oh I did actually set up a guild for the beta (with the imaginative name of "Urban Gamers" :oops: ), but for some reason couldn't add anyone to it. So maybe if there's another beta before release we could try that out!
 
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That sounds like a good idea. I did get a notification at some point which I think might have been telling me someone was trying to get in contact with me but it bugged out when trying to access it and it never came back. That might have been it. Hopefully that will be refined somewhat soon.

In MMO-related news: I really did love The Secret World - it was such an interesting concept, the combat was really refreshing and different, the story was fun, the setting was imaginative. I hit that brick wall when I got to the Blue Mountains region because it's really difficult and I didn't have anyone to play with. I was playing with someone else but they lost interest and didn't really understand the combat system (it's quite involved in terms of studying what skills to use together). So I stopped for a while. Then when I tried to install it on my new computer it refuses to play. Something to do with directx or something, but I think it's my gpu since this is a laptop and most games don't outright recognise the discrete card and only the integrated one - it seems like it was a step too far for TSW. (I haven't tried it with later drivers though - in fact I haven't updated my driver for a while now :oops:). It worked absolutely fine on my macbook pro though :mad:
 
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Vintage Paw said:
http://www.theouthousers.com/index....ne-playtest-the-good-the-bad-the-awesome.html

Decent review by someone who spent a lot of time in the game, rather than the first few hours/levels, and who doesn't play mmos but adores TES.
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That's a good review from someone coming to it from a similar perspective to my own. There was only 1 point in the review I think that surprised me - mostly on the basis that it's odd they didn't realise this before they played, even not being into MMOs it seems like fairly straightforward logic to me - and that is about not getting tons of loot from enemies. If people are getting full sets of armour and weapons from enemies it would devalue crafting, and break the economy. It's all very well to play Skyrim for a bit and fairly quickly have more money, armour, and weapons, than all the Jarls put together, but that's just not going work in a game where crafting professions and trading are supposed to be a large part of the social side of things.
 
http://www.reddit.com/r/elderscrollsonline/comments/1xog98/eso_discount_thread/

I just used the GameFly code and got the Imperial Edition for less than the standard price of the normal edition (i.e. 20% off). It appears it comes with all the early access and any race any faction stuff that you get from buying it through ESO's official store, as well as the Imperial Edition goodies. I saw a few people on white horses during beta so I expect that if you register your key to your account now you'll be able to take advantage of some things during any upcoming beta events.

Epona
 
http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/...Michael-Bitton-ESO-Its-The-Little-Things.html
Vintage Paw said:
http://www.reddit.com/r/elderscrollsonline/comments/1xog98/eso_discount_thread/

I just used the GameFly code and got the Imperial Edition for less than the standard price of the normal edition (i.e. 20% off). It appears it comes with all the early access and any race any faction stuff that you get from buying it through ESO's official store, as well as the Imperial Edition goodies. I saw a few people on white horses during beta so I expect that if you register your key to your account now you'll be able to take advantage of some things during any upcoming beta events.

Epona
Click to expand...

Cheers, I'll have a look at that!

Edit: Found a good article on crafting, something I found really fun:
http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/...Michael-Bitton-ESO-Its-The-Little-Things.html
 
I didn't get a chance to spend much time with crafting. I started with some provisioning because of the sheer weight of pork and so on you can pick up in Coldharbor, and some of those pies stood me in good stead when I went up against a couple of harder end-of-quest baddies later on. But I soon got annoyed by the sheer amount of ingredients I was lugging around so turned my attention elsewhere.

My first enchantment ended up being green, and gave me +50 armour, which was very nice. I put that on an amulet I was given for a quest.

I was powering through as much content as possible though so I didn't spend any more time gathering materials and learning some of the basics. I want to dawdle my way through once the game comes out, and have no problem at all spending hours, days, weeks in certain areas getting the most out of them. I hear the skill points really start coming in once you hit the teens, so spending them on crafting skill lines doesn't seem as much of a risk at that point.

I'll read that article. I've always fancied crafting in other MMOs but only dabbled and therefore never made good headway. In TOR it became prohibitively expensive (in time and money) to do it past a certain point unless you were doing it fulltime, really. I was playing with a buddy during my whole time with that game, and we split up the crafts between us so they complimented. But he wasn't as into it as I was, and it's something that takes an element of dedication. What I've heard about ESO's crafting though sounds promising. The lack of an auction house might be a stumbling block. If you're a member of a guild then professional crafters will emerge and you have people to go to to make things for you, but not everyone wants to focus on crafting to the point that you need to make the really nice stuff, so those not in a guild might start to have problems if there isn't easy access to some kind of trading system. I think they want to encourage chat box trading, but that can get mightily cluttered and chaotic, and you can't exactly browse someone's wares that way. You either have to put out a request for a very specific X or wait to see a very specific Y listed for sale. Maybe this is all covered in the article, I'll read it now :)
 
Vintage Paw said:
The lack of an auction house might be a stumbling block. If you're a member of a guild then professional crafters will emerge and you have people to go to to make things for you, but not everyone wants to focus on crafting to the point that you need to make the really nice stuff, so those not in a guild might start to have problems if there isn't easy access to some kind of trading system.
Click to expand...

There is already a large group of dedicated crafters and traders setting up a guild to make it easier for dedicated crafters to get their goods distributed without having to be part of a massive serious guild - making use of the '5 guilds per account' limit. The idea being that if you get good at crafting you keep a guild slot free, when you have stuff to sell or want to buy materials you join the trade guild, do your trading, then leave the guild. Others can then buy your goods from the trade guild for themselves or to distribute them via their other guilds. Apparently the guild store prices are set and if that is the case and the trade guild is well organised and well advertised, it could mean that even solo crafters can do well at a profession and sell their wares widely without too much hassle. There are ways and means for crafters to organise even without an auction house or trading post. Not sure how it will work, but the folks organising it seem to have it all thought out! I've already expressed interest as I love crafting.
 
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