This weekend the Discord was super active with folks talking about their blog and various related topics. I am traditionally super bad at following any sort of social media or chats over the weekend. I barely respond to instant message or text either because I am generally engaged in something that takes all of my attention, either that or running around. This weekend we went out junking for a bit which was extremely fun, and got this amazing ice cream at a “from scratch” sort of place a town over. I had English toffee and my wife had cotton candy and both were phenomenal to eat while we roamed around looking through the various junk shops. I mean they are all labelled as “antiques” but really… if it isn’t a junk shop I am not terribly interested in looking at it.
We had a few more people sign up for Blaugust which is awesome. If you have not done this and are at all considering it… please fill out the form link and join us in this madness. Onwards to the new blogs… one of which has yet to get complete set up but we are going to mention her anyways.
- Alli – To Be Determined… but think the name “The Parent Trope” was chosen via the discord this weekend.
- Void – A Green Mushroom
One of my favorite things this year is seeing us spread out. We’ve got several sign ups that listened to either the Massively OP Podcast or Geek to Geek and then I am seeing other interesting references showing some word of mouth from folks I am not sure if I even know who they are completely yet. The other thing I find interesting is several of the comments are written in a way as though they think maybe I don’t know who they are. If you are a long time reader of my blog and a regular favoriter or commenter regardless of the venue… blog, twitter, wordpress reader… I promise I know who you are and am super happy anytime I see you pop up in my notifications.
It isn’t often that I link my podcast from the weekend in my Monday morning post but maybe that is a thing I should do more often. This weekend it is directly related to the sort of weekend I had, namely it is a show where we largely talk about Elder Scrolls Online and our recent renaissance with that game. At this moment myself, Ash, Tam, Kodra, Void, Neph, Thalen and Lyle are playing it more or less in various states of “active”. I believe ToadChild and Eliyon are also playing as well but I have not really seen them online… either that or not as a name I would recognize them as. We have a pair Miko and Uldane14 that seem to be leveling together in Morrowind because their levels stay synchronized but never respond to guild chat so not sure who they are.
One of the things you have to realize about House Stalwart in Elder Scrolls Online… is this represents the last great guild that I tried to build. That is not to say that I have not done my fair share of recruiting for various guilds and continue to do so to this day. Stalwart on ESO however was my last guild building experiment where I attempted to get all of the people who know me and all of the people they know together in one room… and over night blossom into a guild of like 150 people at the launch of the game. We had folks that I knew from various games I had played, folks who worked on said various games… lots of members of the blogging and content creation community including Dulfy for a bit because we had bumped into each other during the alpha. It was a massive thing and so long as folks were willing to abide by the three tenets they were welcome.
The only problem with that is there are a large number of people in the guild that I do not remember at all. In fact there was at least one person I kicked recently that was the ex-husband of a good friend of mine who left her under some seemingly shady conditions. When there is a situation like that I tend to punt the spouse as a precautionary measure just so at some point in the future there isn’t a moment when they are both online and forgot that they were both in that same guild. Anyways this is not at all what I intended to be talking about this morning, but suffice to say there are a lot of people in the guild and since you can technically be in five guilds at once… not many have left. I have two guild slots left, and in truth one of those could be easily pruned in a pinch because I think we only used it as a private extension of the guild bank.
The thing I actually wanted to talk about this morning is how my opinion has shifted in relation to a topic from this game. When it first rolled out I remember myself being extremely frustrated by their version of the Auction House system. I had gotten used to games like World of Warcraft that had overarching global Auction House systems that allowed you to within moments search everything that was available for sale. It felt extremely efficient, but in hindsight it also has lead to practices that I am not quite so down with like the various gold making schemes that involve playing the Auction House and looking for bargains. This isn’t my jam… because I don’t really have that day trader instinct and as a result it always just seemed to unnaturally inflate the price of things making it harder for me to get what i wanted. I remember receiving threatening messages in game from a bag making cartel when I dared to break their agreed upon price point and sold some bags for less to move them quickly. I told them if they didn’t like it… buy my bags and relist them but otherwise I will do whatever the hell I want.
So for the uninitiated instead of an Auction House system, Elder Scrolls Online has a series of Guild Traders that are located throughout the world and in clusters that can be found in most towns. I tend to personally refer to these areas as Traders Row and in most cases they are fairly close to the Wayshrine making it easy to pop over and check them. Now each Trader is bid upon by various guilds in a blind bidding scheme for a fixed bid cycle, and then that guild is charged a weekly rate to maintain the guild store. I have no real first hand experience of this other than one of my guilds regularly has an active trader somewhere in the world. When your guild has a trader you have the ability to sell items on the guild store to anyone who happens across your trader and decides to open the inventory and purchase something.
This has a lot of interesting side effects… namely that all traders are not created equal. The traders that are in higher rent districts for lack of a better term… areas of that have higher churn from the player base tend to have much higher prices. So I am sure over in Summerset, the brand new expansion the prices of items on those traders would be artificially inflated to account for the fact that in order to win that trader… the blind bid that guild had to put up was likely extremely significant. Now the inverse is true as well… if you find some trader in a backwater area that isn’t even a main city… the items you find on that vendor are likely going to be extremely cheap. This creates a cycle of being able to find bargains… if you are willing to go do the leg work. There is technically a search engine for items… but it isn’t very complete and requires that people be running an addon that updates the pricing.
Instead what I did on Friday night was spent roughly two hours popping around from town to town looking for deals. I was ultimately trying to complete the Dwemer crafting set, but in the process I also completed the outlaw weapons and the rest of my mercenary armor pieces. This process involved taking a way shrine to what I thought I remembered as one of the main towns in a region, making my way to the traders row and searching each of the vendors looking for any of the items I currently was hunting for. What should have been tedium… honestly felt pretty enjoyable. Each region has its own feel and its own group of people that prefer to frequent it. For example like I have talked about how Shornhelm is my home in this world… there seems to be people that feel that way about almost every city.
Over the course of several trips to various guild traders, I found myself noticing a lot of the same names hanging out around them. It feels like a trader may anchor a guild to a location and with it gives the world a tangible destination feel that has been lacking from other games. The world is massive, but it also feels lived in… populated with players who happen to prefer one area to another and go there to deal with their “upkeep”. Just like I preferred Iron Forge for years… and later the Dwarven Quarter… you can prefer Elden Root to Daggerfall and it is perfectly okay because there is nothing that you can get in one location or other other that makes one superior. I guess that isn’t entirely fair… given that you need to go to a faction Capitol to get your Undaunted dailies but that really isn’t that big of a deal.
In a game with instant travel… it has been interesting to see how many things are there to keep you connected to one location over another.
