“Fishing requires using the proper bait at the proper location. Your chances of getting a rare fish improve when more people fish at the same spot….”
Fishing
All posts by Teeg
How To Leave Khenarthi’s Roost and Return to Auridon By Boat If Your Game Is Bugged
Note: For most people, clicking on the boat behind Captain Jimila will allow you to travel back to Auridon. For those of us whose quest is bugged, there is no message to click ‘E’ to travel or anything like that. In fact, there’s no other quest on Khenarthi’s Roost and no clear direction on the “right” way to leave the island. If you’re like me and need the closure of leaving by boat to feel like you’ve completed everything there, this is how to achieve that.
Khenarthi’s Roost, the starter island if you choose to be part of the Aldmeri Dominion, has some great quests, but one thing has bothered me every time I’ve played it. When you finish the main quest on the island, Razum’dar gives you your reward, and many of the characters from the other quests are all there to congratulate you, including the characters you met when/if you did the Shattered Shoals quest.
In fact, the captain of the Prowler is standing there, with Raz and the rest to congratulate you and offer you a ride if you’re ready to leave.
The boat behind her is almost impossible to get into though, there’s no gangplank to let you walk to it. The timing of your jump has to be almost perfect.
Getting into the boat doesn’t do anything though. Even clicking on her after you get in the boat doesn’t start you back on your way to Auridon.
In fact, until today I had never figured out how to return to Auridon except to use a wayshrine. And it bothered me. So yesterday I posted in the Psijic Order to ask if anyone knew what I was doing wrong.
Thanks to their help, I finally realized that where you finish up in Khenthari’s Roost isn’t the end, even though it seems like it should be and the conversations sound like it is. Instead, you have to return to Sugar Paws, back where you first started on the island.
Here is what the map looks like, and where you need to return to after finishing up the main quest:
Bottom: You need to be here to leave
I hope this helps anyone else trying to figure the “real” way to leave the island. And a big thank you to everyone in the Psijic Order who helped me finally solve the riddle that’s bugged me since we were in beta.
Glenumbra Treasure Map IV
The Value of a Good Name
I have been a fan of the Elder Scrolls, Bethesda, and ZeniMax (ZOS for short) for years. When I first heard they were making an Elder Scrolls Online game, I rushed to sign up for the Beta, even though the computer I had at the time couldn’t really handle running Oblivion, and even Morrowind had to be at its lowest settings.
Thankfully, by the time the beta started, I had a new computer, a Mac this time, and eventually I was happy to join in the beta, get invited to the Psijic Order, and play to my heart’s content.
All of that to say, this is probably one of the few posts you’ll ever see on here that’s not favorable toward ESO and Zenimax. To be honest, I think they dropped the ball on this issue, and in my opinion, it’s something that needs to be addressed soon.
How It All Began
5:00 AM EST – Early on the morning of March 30, the Psijic Order (the group of beta testers who played on the permanent testing server) was buzzing with people waiting for 7 AM EST, when ZOS was scheduled to open the live server, in order to claim the names that they had used throughout testing.
The Live server was a clean version of the beta server, using the same download (plus an upgrade or two) as the beta server that so many (over 5,000,000 registered to beta test) had helped to test. All the beta characters were gone now and everyone was starting with a clean slate.
6:07 AM EST – ZOS had a habit of opening betas earlier than advertised, so people had been checking periodically to see if it was up yet. This time, someone comes back to the group to share that the game is finally open.
6:14 AM EST – 46 minutes before the game was supposed to be open. Wykkyd came back to the group to share that someone stole his name. He wasn’t the only one. With 40 minutes still to go before the game was supposed to be open, person after person came back to the group to share that their names have been taken. Although a few are names that someone might have taken by accident, several, like Wykkyd, are unique names that are well known either across the gaming world or through the social media one.
My Personal Thoughts On How This Should Have Been Handled
Keeping our beta account name wasn’t enough.
- At the very least, our account name should have been reserved as a character name – and I think that is true for anyone, whether they were in beta or not. Account and character names should be linked so that there are no duplicates across both game and forums.
- As soon as ZOS started allowing and sharing live steams, those names should have gone into a reserve that could only be accessed by having the right account or proving you were that player. Even if you had to wait a week, until things calmed down, for one of the devs to help and accept your proof of identity, it’s still better than knowing someone else is running around with your name and doing who knows what. For many of us, our main character names were not created just for this game, but they are names we are known by in many places.
- While starting early was appreciated during the beta, it was part of the problem when the game went live. Name-grabbers were able to take several well-known names before most people realized that the game had even opened.
- Most social media sites have rules for well-known names precisely because they’ve gone through this before. For instance, Facebook allows you to change your Facebook address once (after you’ve set one address) for this very reason. When they first started allowing personal addresses, you were supposed to be stuck with them for the life of your account, but in the first 10 minutes or so of allowing people to claim them, some of the most well-known social media names had their name claimed before they could grab it.
When you have had a nickname for years and across sites, the name becomes an extension of yourself. This isn’t just a playground issue of having another child take your toy, but more of an identity theft issue – the more well-known your nickname is, the more harm someone can do to your reputation by taking the name and behaving in ways that don’t reflect your character.
It’s even worse with ESO because of the way they use account names. When you talk in guild chat, you see the account name, not the person’s name. You see the same account names if you talk with them in the forums. And then, if you’re exploring and run into someone with the same name, your first reaction will be that you know that person.
What about if you first ran into someone in the game and they were behaving badly, shouting over chat, repeatedly asking you to join their guild, or even gold spamming. Then, you see the same name in a guild that you’re part of, or someone with that name shares advice or even asks a question on the forums. Now you’re likely to respond to that person as though they were the character in the game that got you so frustrated, even though it’s actually two different people.
@Alucard just informed me that it gets even worse. Having a friend request added by the person who owns the account name also adds the person with the in-game name!
The majority of the Psijic Order testers who had their names taken have not been able to contact anyone by that name in the game. So the characters were created, not by someone wanting to play that name, but by someone purposefully trying to hold the nickname of someone whose name is well-known.
It reminds me of back when the internet was so new and all, and people rushed to claim business names so they could then turn around and sell them back to the business at a significant price increase. The companies took the name claimers to court. The court listened to their case and decided that the companies had a right to own their name online.
Thoughts From Others
To close, let me share some of the discussion from the Psijic group after I asked for anyone to share their thoughts and experiences in preparation of writing this post:
@Alucard – I am frustrated that my main characters name was taken by someone who isn’t even playing that char (I was able to speak to them ingame and they confirmed this). This name is the same name as my account name for both Beta and PTS. I am beyond frustrated at this because I logged into the server at 6:10am the morning of early access only to find out that the server has been up for at least 10 minutes prior, a whole our earlier than we were told by ZOS. When I asked why this happened and no one was given notice of the early server start time I was given this response:
Greetings, comrade!
You absolutely may! We advertised that our game would be live by 7 am, and we were fortunate enough to have an incredibly smooth launch, which resulted in the servers opening a little earlier than advertised. Our goal was to have the servers open by the specified time, which is what we accomplished. If you have any other questions, i’d be more than happy to help!
@Wykkyd – And of course many people in Psijic know that my character name Wykkyd was stolen, and presumably parked by the person who did so. I’ve been waiting on a response for over a week now on the status of getting it back. Sometimes people go to absurd lengths to ruin things for others. Considering how “in the open” my name has been prior to launch, and even moreso afterward, I can’t expect to be anything short of intentional.
@Wykkyd – I’ve not received any response […] in over a week on my name issue. Email, forum PM’s… all seem to go to an empty cloud. Yeah, I’m sure it’s busy there. It’s busy here too and this is very important to me. I spent 2 hours defending who I was last night (loosely, I was trying to avoid most of the troll baiting) because my char name isn’t “Wykkyd” in zone chat.
Unmapped Bank in Stros M’Kai
If you go to the starter island for Daggerfall Covenant, Stros M’Kai, and look at the map, you’ll notice that there is no bank listed.
Because of this, more than once, I’ve traveled via wayshrine back to Glenumbra to deposit my stuff into the bank and then traveled back to Stros M’Kai to work on quests.
This morning I was visiting Port Hunding’s Open Market place in Stros M’Kai. I had just stopped at the Clothing Station and I was about to head to the Woodworking Station, but I needed to sell some items. Imagine my surprise when the NPC I clicked on wasn’t running a store, but had a bank instead.
If you look at the icons on the image above, you’ll notice Lurgonash gro-Dugronk (second from the bottom) has an image by his name that isn’t isn’t on the map legend I’ve shared before. My guess is that perhaps this was the original icon for banks and it wasn’t changed until later, but it was never corrected on this map.
Choosing a Class
Class
There are only four classes to select from in the Elder Scrolls Online, which really feels limited when you first look at them. Anyone who has played any of the one-person Elder Scrolls games or pretty much any other D&D style role playing game knows that selecting the class of your character determines how you play more than almost anything else in the game.
The original Elder Scrolls games were unique when it came to class selection because although they offered you the option to play traditional classes, you were also allowed to create your own class, combining the skills you were interested in pursuing to create a character that was uniquely you.
When I first saw the 4 classes, I was worried that ESO had left that option far behind, forcing us into the more traditional RPG roles of Fighter, Healer, Wizard, and Thief.
And at first glance, when you read the Class descriptions, that is how it looks.
Remember that yesterday I mentioned that you are really unlimited in how you play your character. Your sorcerer can wear chain armor if you’d like, and your knight can cast spells (and has one of my very favorite low-level spells in the game).
When you choose a class in most RPGs, you are determining the limits of your character. A thief isn’t likely to wield an axe, for instance, nor is a sorcerer going to wear iron. The Elder Scrolls turns class into a starting point instead, and I can determine where it goes from there. If I want to roleplay a traditional character, a sorcerer who only wears robes and carries a staff, then I have everything I need to be able to play that character.
If, on the other hand, I want to play a character from one of my favorite science fiction books, someone who doesn’t fit with the traditional character styles, I can also design a character to fit that description.
In my next post, we’ll take a more in-depth look at the early stages of each class and how race figures into the character equation.
Opening day of ESO
To Zenimax, congratulations on your opening day and thank you for making such an awesome game.
We who are about to die and die and die and maybe win…nope, die, and die, salute you! 🙂
And now for an awesome infographic with some amazing statistics that ESO shared yesterday:
Racial and Alliance Options
You may be wondering why so many of these posts focus on character creation. That is because Zenimax created an amazing character creation set-up. While the choices are far from unlimited, still there are enough options that I doubt anyone will run into an identical twin in the game unless they were made that way on purpose.
One issue I’ve run into while creating a character is that you can’t put a name in as the first step and claim it. You have to complete the creation before the game saves it as yours, so if you have a name you really want, you’ll probably be rushing through Character Creation to make sure you get the name before anyone else wants it. As time goes on, this likely won’t be such a big issue, but right now, it’s definitely something to consider.
Because of this, if you already know or have an idea of how you want the settings, that makes it much easier to just run through the creation and make sure you get the name you want on a character that looks as much as possible the way you want it to look.
With that in mind, today we’re going to explore the racial and alliance options when creating a new character.
When you first click on “Create Character,” this is the first screen that opens up. The game has randomly chosen a female Orc from the Daggerfall Covenant for me, but today we’ll look at all the other options.
One thing to keep in mind, if you purchased the Imperial Edition before the official start date (today), then you have the option to play any race with any alliance. As of today though, the only character advertised to be able to play in any dominion is the Imperial – and that’s only if you purchase the Imperial edition.
So What Are The Different Alliances?
There are three alliances in ESO – Daggerfall Covenant, Aldmeri Dominion, and Ebonheart Pact. Each has its own unique storyline and location. DC has desserts and netches (they look like giant jellyfish), plus two starting areas to explore, combined into one storyline; AD has wild monkeys, southern climes, and my favorite starting island, Khenarthi’s Roost; EP has snow, Bleakrock Isle, Davon’s Watch, and more snow. LOL EP has a good storyline too, I just get enough snow living in upstate NY, I’m ready for spring instead of more snow. 🙂
What about Races?
Races in the Elder Scrolls Online are the same races you’ve known and loved in the other TES games: Breton, Orc, Redguard, High Elf, Wood Elf, Khajiit, Argonian, Dark Elf, Nord, and Imperial.
One thing that I think ESO does well, perhaps better than any other Elder Scrolls game, is to make choosing a race an important part of your character selection. Since there are only 4 classes to choose from (we’ll look at those in another post), the racial benefits are what makes your character truly unique.
Use the racial benefits to help create exactly the character you want. Do you want a sorcerer who can also be sneaky? Look at the skills that a Khajiit would add and see if that’s what you’re looking for (She Who Explores – my character named for my blog, is a Khajiit Sorceress, by the way). No race has to be a certain class, so create a character that you’ll enjoy playing. As a hint, any class can wear any armor or use any weapon, so don’t worry about an ability never being used, even if you create an orc healer.
Which Races go with which Alliances?
Daggerfall Covenant –
Home of the Bretons
Home of the Orcs
Home of the Redguard
Aldmeri Dominion –
Home of the High Elf
Home of the Wood Elf
Home of the Khajiit
Ebonheart Pact
Home of the Argonians
Home of the Dark Elf
Home of the Nords
And last, but not least, the Imperial
Blessed Thistle
— Can be combined with Columbine, Cornflower, Dragonthorn, Emetic Russula, Mountain Flower, Namira’s Rot, Nirnroot, Stinkhorn, and Violet Coprinus.
— Can restore stamina, increase weapon power, increase speed, and ravage health.
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About the real Blessed Thistle
Latin Name: Centaurea Benedicta
According to the National Institute of Health, “blessed thistle was commonly used during the Middle Ages to treat the bubonic plague and as a tonic for monks.”
The tops, leaves, and upper stems are used to make a medicinal tea or the plant is used to make a poultice which is applied to the skin to treat minor injuries.
From Beta to Live – The final countdown
Recording some things for posterity while I wait for the Elder Scrolls Online to officially open at 7am EDT this morning.
I think this was the second invitation I received. I somehow managed to trash the first, probably during one of my mass purges of my email recently.
After every beta test was over, I’d receive a message that looked like this:
I sent a note the first time, explaining that I had a Mac and there was a message that the Mac client wasn’t available, so what should I do? The response was to write back every time saying that I had a Mac, which is what I did with each beta invite that came.
Each beta test without a Mac client available added to my eagerness to try the game, though. It was almost like waiting for Christmas before you learned to read a calendar as a child.
And of course, ZOS would send things like this out to tease me, reminding me of what I couldn’t play yet (remember I’d been waiting for a new Elder Scrolls since counting down the days to Skyrim and then realizing it wouldn’t run on either my old PC or my Mac).
I still remember the day I got my invitation to join the Psijic Order. I was still waiting for a Mac version, but now as soon as one was available, I knew I wouldn’t have to wait for the next beta test.
And soon enough, the Mac version was ready to play. On that day I’m pretty sure I jumped up and down in excitement and did a happy dance or two for good measure. 🙂
Once I could download the game, time went fast. I spent the first 10 days or so getting my feet under me, figuring out what was what and what was different than I was used to. Oh, and of course there were the bugs just to keep the game interesting. But, bug finding was why we were playing, after all, and it is kinda fun stumbling across a new issue the first time, especially if it’s a funny one, like falling through the ground.
It seemed like almost no time before we were getting ready for the last couple beta tests. The NDA had only recently been lifted, and we could now share what we’d been experiencing while we explored Tamriel. The only limit still left was a request for us not to run live video feeds during the week.
On the second to the last beta, we were allowed to invite a friend, and I had another friend who had an invite he wasn’t using, so I sent them to a couple friends I thought would enjoy testing the game out.
Two weeks later, we were on the last beta test and the end of testing was rushing toward us.
And then it was finally here, the last few days of testing and then a few days with everything closed while ZOS managed to finish up the things they needed to do before the game officially opened.
And now we’re actually here, the first day of early access is upon us, and Tamriel awaits. See you in the game!