TESO Shots

Today a quick post where I'm sharing some shots of TESO. My son took these and asked if I'd like to share them here. You may notice the colors pop more in our photos than the actual base game, we use ReShade. We hope you enjoy the pictures!

Morrowind (ESO)

Another hit of nostalgia in today's post! Morrowind is now part of ESO and I thought I'd share some of my thoughtd and images from my journey there so far. There is the new warden class, which totes along a pet bear! There is a new tutorial which lets you step off the boat as the familiar Morrowind tune plays in the background. We see some familiar places and faces, travel to the great Vivec city in Vvardenfell and meet Vivic.

Eye Candy

Today I'm sharing a stockpile of screens I took while playing TESO. Shame that things turned out the way they did, for us, it is a lovely game. I'll miss wandering around in this game, each starting area had such a different feeling, I had to try them all. Starting with a picture of the three of us- Heri, Nelf and I. It was nice while it lasted. 

TESO- First Contact (Update On Ban Appeal)

We finally heard back from Zenimax regarding my son's account, yesterday evening we received a phone call. I was relieved that we (re)gained access to it, the ban was lifted and time was credited to the account for the duration it wasn't accessible. It seems that support is getting caught up with backed up tickets. The reason he was banned? No reason, it was an accidental ban that never should have happened. I was given an apology as well. The support team member over the phone, which was the actual person to remove the ban, was very nice and we spoke about the game for a short time after mentioning I played. So all is well with the reinstatement.

My son doesn't want to play now. Which leaves me feeling real bad for him. When he was banned He and Heri migrated over to the new D3 expansion, Reaper of Souls. Heri felt bad my son couldn't play the new game with us, and so they teamed up on another game. And really, they are pretty happy with that for now. 

I suppose that is a chance a company takes when it doesn't properly process player reports and has lacking or backed up support- you take the chance of losing customers, even if you do help them in the end. For my son it is too little, too late. I can't blame him, honestly. If he wanted to continue to play I wouldn't try to stop him, his choice. He bought the game, tried a few characters out, was truly excited, he just inherited my old computer, he could play it for sure now. Ecstatic about it, then banned within two days. That was the kicker.

Me? I think it is a fantastic game. But I am not going to sub again until I see that Zenimax has things under control. That isn't just with support, everything related to the launch as a whole. I was given a direct email to contact in case anything happened again, which was a nice gesture, instead of going straight into another queue. It was much appreciated. I won't hold the whole incident against the company, but I won't forget it so easily either. 

I do wish The Elder Scrolls Online the very best. For now, no matter how much I really love the game, I think some space is required. For those of you waiting on support still, keep at it. Supposedly they are getting through the tickets, from what I understand they have been severely backed up. Hopefully everyone will be sorted out soon. There is light at the end of the tunnel...lol. Our wait was about days long.

TESO 27 Days In- Cancelling

Off into the sunset I go... 

I really wanted to write good things about TESO in this post, about how much fun we've had. Mostly about my journey through the teens and how the game progresses. My son started playing about a week ago, he's gotten to level eight. He was pretty happy to play with Heri and I, things were all peachy. The second day of his playing he was kicked from the game, no email, no word as to why. Apparently he's been flagged as spamming gold spam. No questions asked, no logs checked, simply banned. It has really gotten under my skin so badly I haven't even felt writing about it. I'm utterly disgusted and appalled at the way this whole situation has been handled.

Basically it hasn't been handled. Zenimax/Bethesda do not send out emails when you've been banned, you're left wondering what happened. You might think the servers went down or maybe your account got stolen. You have to contact them. Pretty sickening to be accused of gold spamming on your second day of playing. When you contact them, you do not get an update. You do not get any confirmation, redirected, and again, redirected to another email/form. Same deal with phone support.

The phone support is 24 hours a day, but we're guessing it is a contracted company, they just have no real idea about the product or how things work. They have zero power to help with anything, you have to really push them around a bit to even get a supervisor on the phone. Which accomplishes nothing, they have zero power to do anything else. I was told by one employee to take my boxed copy of TESO back to the store I purchased it from and to ask for a refund. Seriously? An opened box with a consumed key?! You work in a video game call center?! He was either very stupid, or he thought I was. This is the caliber of support and we're dealing with. Basically they can make tickets, that's it. Best bet is trying email instead, IF and when they get back to you. After a week of waiting, we still have no word. It might be in a queue, I can't tell because support can't tell. Nobody knows anything!

I had been playing alts so not to out level my son, I now have four three (the number just changed upon logging in again) days of free time left. I feel very jaded. Nothing of the sort happened to Heri or I, just my son. Though now we all feel cheated, my son and I feel ignored, helpless. We just blew a lot of money on this game. I am SO glad I didn't upgrade him to CE (which I regret doing for myself). Tonight I've cancelled, there isn't any reason to continue with this bull.

A pack of bots running through a quest area, killing everything in sight.

No matter how wonderful a game is, I honestly think this is a wonderful game (truly!), you can't keep people with horrible support. This is the worst I've encountered in my 14 years of playing MMO games. It is a red flag in my eyes. Things may sort out in time, after the initial first month rush. I don't care to find out, nobody cares enough to just give us some word on what's happening. I don't care to hand over any more money. First impressions are everything. Look back to many game launches, a lot of things stuck to the games name even if things evened out years later. Some never recover.

The game is great. It is beautiful. It does have bugs and too many gold farmers at the moment, but it also has a nice quest and story flow, a good feeling to questing, gorgeous scenery as well. It just isn't enough to keep me. Sure, they may reinstate his account in a few weeks, but he's already regretting that he wanted to play. We both are. We lost interest. We lost trust.

There are many people out there without these problems, but for now I'd advise giving the game a few months to smooth things out, seeing if Zenimax/Bethesda steps things up with customer support and relations, if they can stop the bots/spammers from ruining the game. Because they have, when legit customers get lumped in with them and left out in the cold to wonder, it hurts the game in a big way. You'll read this, you might not agree with me, but it will sit with you, you'll remember it. It might cause another reader to think twice on picking up the game. It has an effect in the end.

I cancelled my account this evening. Which is so disappointing. If you wanted my opinion, based on support alone, I'd say run as far away as you can from this game in the current state. I could get past the massive amounts of bots, the bugs, but I cannot get past a company who does not value and want to help customers, one that doesn't see value in keeping customers. In my eyes this is stealing, it is lazy, this is no way to handle a launch, the worst kind of thing you want to run into with any MMORPG. Word of mouth is a very powerful tool.

I know I may sound irate, which I am to a point, but I've not been out of line in any way. They got my money and left us high and dry. Simply put, I do not feel I can trust this company, nor do I feel this company cares if I stay or go. For those of you enjoying the game, I hope none of you run into the grief it has caused us. It honestly is a good game, a real shame, in our case as they lost two additional players. I suppose the gold farmers can make up the loss.

Upgrade Time!

Hope everyone had a great holiday weekend. I didn't get to play much TESO over the weekend, I had some issues with my computer and Dire had the weekend off so it was busy, in a good way. My computer was starting to give me enough problems to finally format, which seem to have halted for now, and my son thinks it was overheating. So a good cleaning and monitoring the temp seems to have helped. He's now inherited it as his, which it is still a decent machine, the only thing it really needs is an upgraded processor. But I've had it for a few years, I remember writing on this blog when I got it. So it isn't tooo old, as this blog will be about five years, this year. I didn't get it right when I started, heh.

Dire took pity on me and picked me up a new one. I have been wanting one for quite awhile! Last summer I was starting to realize I really wanted to upgrade before long. For the time being I beefed up the video card without having to replace the power supply, I threw in an GeForce GTX 550. I didn't want to put a ton of money in it but it is already much cheaper now I saw when I went to get the new card for the new computer. Good thing is it is still nice for my son to use it. I picked it up especially to be able to play FFXIV, which it did the job well enough to tide me over, it has done especially well with TESO. For the new machine I put in the GTX 770 TI, which the 660 still competes with it, or is comparable in many ways, but I just wanted this one more so. In the end it has some massive fans on it, didn't think it would fit inside but it did. It runs great, my games look so good, not a huge deal greater than 550, but combined with a new processor (well new everything), I get much better, stable FPS with the graphics cranked all the way up. I think that's the biggest thing I notice, a huge boost in FPS and no more hitching on games in populated areas.



So yeah, TESO looks amazing, runs amazing, and so does GW2. Those are the only games I've yet to play over the weekend. Yes, GW2 was one of the first to be installed. It is so easy to fall back into that game, poke around and play. Dire decided to play again. He's forgotten everything, which I couldn't believe. It was like teaching him about a new game. What I really appreciated about us playing GW2 was the fact that I didn't have to make a new character to be able to play with him. I decided to log the ranger on (necro might have been overkill with all those pets I haul around, lol) and group with him. Instantly scaled down to his level when I pop over to the zone, we quest and have fun, how much better can it get? What he's already done I can do later, I can just help him with hearts and we catch many events. The ranger can throw out some heals which helps too. I was very happy with this set up, I can take my favorite characters and still play with him even if I am not anywhere near his level. Well done, Guild Wars 2, well done. THAT is the biggest reason I wanted him to play this over other titles. We almost went back to LoTRO but he just is working too much lately to justify a sub.



I had a great time and I still play the game alone as well, it is a title I always seem to get sucked back into and it looks gorgeous. Plenty to do, plenty of puttering around to do, events and so on. For now it is a good place for us to be. He's starting over as a guardian, which suits him. I sent him one of every weapon to skill them up and see what he liked the most, I just knew he'd be using a 2h sword, lol.

Mostly TESO is getting the attention (little GW2 snuck in here and there, can't help it!), I play as much as I am able with my brother, Heri. Our bud, Rak, has played with us some with his alt but he is nearing end game with his main, sitting at 47 when I logged out (!! I'm only level 10 and 17). I love the faction switch but it hasn't been all roses.



TESO isn't easy on bad choices, especially in early game. I got so fed up I asked Rak to let me port to him at the city where you can respec. I had thought I wanted to do full plate and swords but that didn't work out as planned, and I had a very hard time because of it. The gold was hefty, but I had the amount. Getting there was a royal pain at level 8. I wasn't going to reroll either. So his help greatly improved my play. Being able to switch my points out and change bad decisions made things all the better for me. I think the developers should consider adding shrines to the starting cities, it would save a lot of frustration and give more freedom to these flexible characters we are creating, but might want to give a test run with before we decide a final path. The wrong choices can make the game really hard, which can lead to a lot of deaths, wasted gold on repair, rerolls, and eventually burn out. It is a slower leveling game so I can see burnout after getting too many choices wrong.

That is my biggest beef, besides no mentoring and too much phasing, which makes the game hard to play with friends. That's why I'm playing GW2 with Dire, honestly. If it had those it'd be pretty near perfect. Let's hope for the future! Besides that it is a good game, I'm still having fun. I had a fantastic time on my first character on the other faction (Daggerfall). I made better choices, and I think the quests seemed to flow a bit better, but I love this (Ebonheart) side. I am having an easier time this week. I want to heal some and using cloth is helping with mana issues, I decided to use staves, I just prefer range, which has helped also. No regrets on switching factions! Just regrets at what I thought I wanted to do and spreading things too thin!

That's it for today, I need to get some stuff done and then some levels before times gets away from me! Safe adventures!

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Eye Candy

Sharing some screenshots before I format my ol' hunk of junk. Meh, enjoy.

Fear me! Another neat emote /controlrod

Standing around, trying to decide if I should format tonight or tomorrow.

Map travel.

Some furniture. Like the style here for the Dark Elves.

A vampire! 

Moving along.

Heri and I in town on our white horseys.

Out questing.

Which way do we go?

 

Lava really hurts!

Volcano in background, merely for looks. 

Some combat.... I got stuck with an axe for a bit.