Elder Scrolls Online

[Dollhouse]

Any old Titan-ites playing this? It'd be fun to team up with old COH folks.

A pretty good chunk of my old Pinnacle crew are all playing (myself excluded...not into high fantasy settings). They seem to like it. I don't think any of them have ever been Titan regulars, though.

[eabrace]

I enjoyed my time spent beta testing, but I just don't have enough free time to make it worth paying for the game at the moment.

[therain93]

Minor cross-post with the chat and server list thread....

The Elder Scrolls Online only has a single mega server for North America and no custom chat channels.  However, you can be a member of 5 guilds, so I have gone ahead and created a "City of Heroes Refugees" guild (affiliated with the Daggerfall Covenant).   Send an email to @therain93 and I can invite people.

[Nyx Nought Nothing]

Minor cross-post with the chat and server list thread....

The Elder Scrolls Online only has a single mega server for North America and no custom chat channels.  However, you can be a member of 5 guilds, so I have gone ahead and created a "City of Heroes Refugees" guild (affiliated with the Daggerfall Covenant).   Send an email to @therain93 and I can invite people.

Haven't picked up ESO yet, will probably wait another couple of months and maybe get it then. Some of the stuff they're adding looks fun and Zenimax is promising to restore previous, and even add some additional, guild functionality. i found some of the beta interesting, and loved the crafting despite not usually doing a lot of crafting in other games, but the last time i played it a few weeks before launch i kept running into broken quests and UI bugs.

Now while the whole starting out as a prisoner is mandatory in Elder Scrolls games i think the destined hero "you're the only hope for the whole world" trope at the very start of the game was sort of dumb. One of the things i liked most about the CoH storyline was how you start out as just another aspiring hero/villain and gradually become renowned as you progress. In my opinion ESO is a mixed bag, but if you're fond of the Elder Scrolls lore it's better than most MMOs out there.

So, anyway, if you're still playing ESO in another couple of months i'll probably see about joining that guild. 

[therain93]

I actually haven't been on in a few days because of personal life, but I've had 0 interest for it, which makes me wonder if many are playing (or saw the posting).

TESO is.....TESO...not sure I can describe it better, but I'll try.  I think you can actually ignore the whole main story line.  As you complete chapters, you level up "soul magic", but I find it relatively un-useful. Some of the other storylines in game (daggerfall covenant side) are pretty interesting, but not necessarily blow-you-away-amazing. Skill lines aren't necessarily sophisticated, but you're forced to make choices, which is fun.  Of course, there are some seemingly alpha skill lines, most notably people selling werewolf and vampire bites, which require then completing quests and those open respective skill lines.  I've actually avoided this and am consciously leveling up the fighter guild skills so I can specifically hunt those people ( ' :

Customization in the game is not all that sophisticated and theoretically you can solo crafting, i.e., build all of you own equipment.  There are "motifs" you can find that alter appearance, but when you boil it all away, it's sword and board fantasy, which doesn't compare to City of Heroes (in my humble opinion).

[Risha]

Just got this, and though the character him/herself can be customized a lot, I don't like the movement at all.  I really only played COH so I'm not accustomed to the WADS or whatever.  I like the arrow keys, but that is also the mouse hand and the mouse is used for combat.  If you use the mouse for movement, the camera (which isn't fixed, unless I haven't found the way to do that), goes all over everywhere, so when something attacks I was occasionally looking at the ceiling.  I died a lot.  I really hate using the keys and my character disappearing off screen or I see the side of it running left or right and not where I'm going.

So I'll be making characters for my upcoming books, and on now and again, but I currently plan on cancelling my subscription before my time runs out.

[KennonGL]

I played through Beta and for a couple of months afterwards.

Eventually gave up on ESO as I really, really, really hate the
"each guild has it's own unique store/auction house"

First off, the search routines in the store(s) were (are? no idea now)
basically worthless and/or broken.  You couldn't actually perform a
direct search.  Only "kind of" filter by type [and even that was sporadic]
and then hand scan page after page of garbage entries.

Then to make it even more fun, since you basically have to have several
guild stores, you're doing that hand search not once, but up to 5 separate times.

And if you want a cross-guild access?  Well that's in the PvP zones...

Basically it made crafting very unfun for me (and I usually enjoy having a crafter character).
Enough so that I eventually just gave up.

[Castegyre]

I'm still playing the game but I'm losing interest. My biggest problem with it is the overall design that ends in group or die. Most of the game you can solo or group as you wish. You may not be able to do certain dungeons by yourself, some require more than one person because of particular mechanics, but you aren't really forced to group to progress. There's plenty of other content to do. Then you get to about VR 10 or 11 in Craglorn and you're basically forced to group to progress at a reasonable rate. Not only that, but if you're trying to do content sometimes you have to group with people who are on the exact same stage of the same quest as you or you can't really help each other at certain points. If you want to get to VR 14 without having dedicated people to group with you have to grind. Grind is what many people choose to do instead of trying to do the content. Grinding is so prevalent that when you zone in to Craglorn grind group spam is a significant part of the zone chat you're going to see, more so than grouping for content a lot of the time. You can solo grind, but it's painfully slow when you're often getting a few k xp per pull and you need about 5 million to level. I don't mind grouping and I don't mind grinding, both have their place. What I do mind is the bait and switch of providing me a certain game experience and then changing the dynamic at the last minute.

There are several other things about the game that bother me like some of the shoddy world construction, the search function at guild merchants, and how close but totally not the world design is from traditional TES games. I can get over or around some of that stuff, though. There are also lots of things about the game that I like, like I have met many really nice people. I actually enjoy the combat. I'm not very good at PvP, but I enjoy Cyrodiil, etc. The game isn't horrible, but it does have a fatal flaw from my perspective that has me looking for an alternative.

[Lothic]

Then you get to about VR 10 or 11 in Craglorn and you're basically forced to group to progress at a reasonable rate. Not only that, but if you're trying to do content sometimes you have to group with people who are on the exact same stage of the same quest as you or you can't really help each other at certain points. If you want to get to VR 14 without having dedicated people to group with you have to grind.

Coincidentally I just got to this point with my main ESO character a few days ago.

I had fun slowly soloing through all the other VR zones (about 950 quests worth so far) and managed to get to around VR level 11.5 without any significant grinding.  Now I'm left with only Cyrodiil or Craglorn as viable content options.  As already stated grouping is hard to do in ESO in general so that makes Craglorn undesirable for me and soloable PvE content in Cyrodiil seems mostly "tacked on" as an afterthought so basically there's really only grinding or PvP as alternatives for me to hit the cap.  I'm not against grouping or PvP specifically - I'd just like a good way to get to the level cap without having to rely on those methods.

The good news is that the near-term switch from the "veteran" system to the "champion" system should make getting to the max level cap much easier without the need for required grinding.  At least that's its main selling point.  And there's supposedly another high level PvE zone already in the works that's probably intended to bridge the "solo to level cap" gap that currently exists in the game.  It's just going to be a matter of waiting for these.

[Risha]

All right, all of you must do better with the movement than I.  In any event, it's so painful for me that I'll be dropping it as soon as my free month is over, and probably a lot sooner.  I liked the idea, but I died all the time because I'm so used to moving with the mouse, and that's combat....