The Elder Scrolls Online: General Discussion Options

[Renee]

Acadian: Yes, I was thinking about the Glass Cannon thing your lass has always had going on. Especially with not having Strength or Endurance touched in Oblivion. Interesting that you came up with a solution of several Buffys (Buffies). That must be really fun to have others see her in different outfits throughout the day.

mALX: Our Slovenian comrade's wife had a girl last year, named Eva, and they're trying for another as far as I know. So it's not all bad news there. I did a lot of PM'ing with him over the last 2 years, trying to help him through their loss in 2017.

I think if he comes back, he'll be surprised to see I'm playing an MMO! Heck, maybe he'll join us.

Grits: Okay, so there are full RP "rooms?" Or servers? Or is it just one big party? I'll probably arrive as myself when in safe zones (voice), but once my character is out in the world I'll switch to text because I don't actually speak as I'm gaming much, except to laugh and YARGH!! and make random noises. When I play Oblivion especially, I'm frequently laughing at NPC conversations, but this probably wouldn't always be appropriate when other gamers are present.

Is there any truth to the stereotype of "12 year-olds screaming into their mics?" or has ES:O been around for long enough that most of the crowd is mature?

I don't get the song monkey added, but maybe it'll make more sense later.

This post has been edited by Renee: Feb 5 2019, 02:22 PM

[Acadian]

ESO on PC has no built in voice. Team Speak and Discord are popular programs that many on PC use for voice. Chorrol has a small guild of us who are in Chorrol and we have a discord channel that some of us sometimes use during our monthly guild meetings. You can belong to up to 5 player guilds but don't need to belong to any.

Servers. Playstation and XBox have their own servers. For PC, you need to choose either North America or Europe server (PC NA or PC EU). Chorrol's guild is on PC NA. PC Chorrol players who live in Europe (like hazmick) chose PC NA to be with the majority of us. Only problem with choosing the farther server is slight degradation in connection. Your choice seems obvious then: PC NA server.

So, as a PC player, unless you intentionally join others you know on a specific private or guild discord / team speak channel, all your communication with other players is done via typing into a chat box. You can set differing options for your chat box to screen out as much or little as you want. Ignoring the chatbox and playing just like a single player works just fine.

Really, any level of 'mmo' play works fine from full cooperative big dungeon raids to pure solo just like in Oblivion or Skyrim.

Player vs Player in ESO is totally optional and you never have to fight another player ever if you don't want to so no problem there.

[Darkness Eternal]

Is there any truth to the stereotype of "12 year-olds screaming into their mics?" or has ES:O been around for long enough that most of the crowd is mature?

You know the thought just occurred to me that I never encountered anyone in that age group while playing ESO and I’ve been playing for almost two years now. I heard them in the background but most are older players in thei early twenties. Hell I even did a trial with a retired veteran! Most are mature people and the community are always willing to help you out. Time to time you’ll come across unpleasant folks arguing in the group chat but that’s in Eastmarch

I’ve heard more twelve year olds and younger on Fortnite, however.

[TheCheshireKhajiit]

Same, Khajiit has never encountered anything like that. This one will say again that he has never had an unpleasant experience when having to deal with another player.

[Grits]

Text chat comes with different channels including the whole zone, just the small area around you, your guilds, a temporary channel for your group while you’re in one (which you will know when it happens), and a way to have a one-on-one private conversation with a specific person. You can adjust your chat window to only show certain channels. For example I have a window that only shows the Chorrol guild chat for when I want to tune out everyone else who is playing but still want to see if a Chorrolite needs help or wants to go do something fun. People who are doing a serious RP tend to use a private text chat channel (guild, group, or whisper), go to someone’s house where they won’t be disturbed by random people, or use one of the less busy public channels. This will probably not make sense until you are playing, but it will make perfect sense then.

In the early days of Playstation voice chat I always turned it off as soon as I entered a zone because it was a noisy mess of fools and background noise from open mics. I haven’t played on PS4 in a while, so I don’t know if it’s better. As Acadian said, voice chat is not built in to the PC ESO experience, so you’ll only have to speak out loud and hear people who you’ve chosen to interact with on their Team Speak or Discord (or whatever) channel. And you will not find me trying to imitate Jerric’s voice on there.

Sometimes you will find a bunch of people standing around in an out of the way place, looking like nothing is happening. They are probably setting a private channel on fire with their RP. This happened to Jerric outside a chapel in I think Bangkorai. A guy was standing on the steps in a hands-behind-back commander pose, facing a whole group of people. Jerric had a quest inside the chapel. So he walked up and stood at the edge of the group to see if anyone was going to tell him something. All was quiet, so he walked up around the side of the group and behind the commander to go into the chapel. There was nothing to stop him from running straight through the middle of them except that he is not a jerk. RP in the wild can get disrupted by random people.

There are apparently places that people go for pickup RP, I think one is a tavern in Riften? And lots of guilds who organize events. My Orsimer furniture maker Pog got zone-chat invited to a wedding once, which was fun. The actual vows and whatnot were on a private chat that he couldn’t see, but quite the party broke out in zone chat afterward.

[mALX]

@ Renee - The Inns in ESO at night (especially on Friday or Saturday nights) are a good place to watch an ongoing RP among a group of people going down. They seem to be a standard meeting place for group RP's to take place.

The universal type color for RP is a light purple/violet color; so if you see that color in your chat box it is someone near you RP'ing. Every time I've been in an Inn at night I've seen that light purple text in the chat box. Some of them can get really interesting = like the one Grits saw above! I would be more interested in an RP like that than any of the romantic type ones I've seen.

But if you prefer to just play solo and have your own Roleplay in your game like you did in the single player games; you can do that too. Like Grits said; you can ignore the chat box; or set yourself up a chat box tab that filters out everything but "Whispers" (personal messages from someone that only you and them can see) - or just Chorrolites chat like Grits does; so you can hear what our friends here at Chorrol are saying to each other and friends can still reach you = or if you really want to immerse your self in solo gameplay you can set your character into "Offline" mode so no one can see when you are online.

I've been playing ESO since June 2015 and have not yet done every quest in the vanilla game; or completely finished every questline in all of the storyline DLC's that have dropped = that is how much content this game has!

And you don't have to PvP if you don't want to. There is dueling all over Tamriel; but I've set my "Social" settings to refuse any challenges automatically so I don't even have to answer any challenges. Other than that; the only places you will find PvP is inside Battlegrounds or down in Cyrodiil (both of which you have to actually choose to go to).

[ghastley]

Note that Chat and Social settings are kept for each character, so if you roll more than one, don't forget to set them again on the new one. The defaults have you see all the chat, and not automatically decline duels. You won't automatically accept either, but you'll have to hit the "decline" key manually. There's a lot of other per-character settings, but those two have most effect.

If you have friends then you'll see when they log on or off in the chat box. Fellow Guild members are not automatically friends.

[mALX]

Also, one I learned the hard way = the default settings won't stop you from killing an innocent; so while you are learning the keyboard signals = it is really good to change that setting to "can't harm innocents" so if you accidentally whip out your blade trying to jump around an NPC in your way or blow off a spell in the bank = you don't end up having the guards after you,

(but if you join the Dark Brotherhood; you have to revert that setting back to the default again, lol).

[mALX]

*snip
mALX: Our Slovenian comrade's wife had a girl last year, named Eva, and they're trying for another as far as I know. So it's not all bad news there. I did a lot of PM'ing with him over the last 2 years, trying to help him through their loss in 2017.

I think if he comes back, he'll be surprised to see I'm playing an MMO! Heck, maybe he'll join us.
*snip*

Maybe someone else's memory is better than mine = last year someone tried to download ESO on their PC and couldn't because of the whopping toll it takes on your hard drive space = was that Lopov? (or who?)






This post has been edited by mALX: Feb 5 2019, 09:52 PM

[Renee]

And you will not find me trying to imitate Jerric’s voice on there.

Argh, dangit!

Hey thanks for all advice/info folks. I am glad I read it all because it prevents me from committing some sort of roleplaying faux pas. The purple text box thing for instance, I might have glossed over that in whatever online documentation ES: O provides.

ES: O sounds really fun though, like everyone who plays it nowadays is really into it.

I'll be finishing up Skyrim's Main Quest, just because I'm rather goal-oriented, and 2019 is THE YEAR I'm finally going to finish the MQ. After that I'll show up in Tamriel. Maybe I'll just show up though, surprise everyone.

mALX: It's possible he was the one trying to download ES: O on his old laptop (which is from 2010, and he gave it to his mom I think). He got a new Lenovo this past summer though. That one should have been able to run & contain

This post has been edited by Renee: Feb 7 2019, 02:12 PM

[mALX]

And you will not find me trying to imitate Jerric’s voice on there.

Argh, dangit!

Hey thanks for all advice/info folks. I am glad I read it all because it prevents me from committing some sort of roleplaying faux pas. The purple text box thing for instance, I might have glossed over that in whatever online documentation ES: O provides.

ES: O sounds really fun though, like everyone who plays it nowadays is really into it.

I'll be finishing up Skyrim's Main Quest, just because I'm rather goal-oriented, and 2019 is THE YEAR I'm finally going to finish the MQ. After that I'll show up in Tamriel. Maybe I'll just show up though, surprise everyone.

mALX: It's possible he was the one trying to download ES: O on his old laptop (which is from 2010, and he gave it to his mom I think). He got a new Lenovo this past summer though. That one should have been able to run & contain

Oh, okay! Don't worry about the chat box = you can't type in purple by accident; you would have to set it up so your typing showed purple. I just had to look it up because I didn't know:

To turn your chat box type purple for roleplaying you would type /e (e standing for "Emote"). That changes the color of whatever you type to purple.

There are some other type colors that are automatically set up in the system when you load your game that you access using similar commands:

White = talking to anyone in your zone = only people within a short distance of you will see it

Red = yelling to anyone in your zone (only people near you will see it)

Aqua Blue = Whispers (seen only by you and the person you are talking to)

Orange = group chat = only the members you are grouped with can see it

Green = Guild chat = This is the default color for Guild chat; but I changed our Chorrolite Guild chat to pink so it stands out from any other chat colors.

Really light green = Guild Officer chat = You will only see this if you are in a guild and the Guild Master or one of the Officers is sending a message out to the whole guild.

(Yellow is the color of the system. If the system is sending you a message = those messages will always be in yellow).

But you have to tell the chat box to change the color of the text for what you are about to type:

In ESO, the Chat Box is actually your command line (kind of like using the Developer's Console Commands in single player games via the Tilde key)

You type in commands for either the Chat Box itself (telling it how you want to talk in there) or to command your character (tell them to sit, sleep, eat, wave, do jumping jacks, etc) - or to talk to the game maintenance people and let them know you need help.

To do anything in the chat box you type a forward slash and the command like this:

/say = to talk in the chat box in white colored type to just the people near you (in your immediate zone) - this is always good to use if you are in trouble and can't escape a dungeon or something; because the people that see it are already in your vacinity.

/yell = turns the type red so you are yelling at everyone near you

/whisper = to speak to just one certain person

Or to use emotes = whatever you type is what your character will do:

/eat
/drink
/sit
/sleep
/wave
/bow
/nod
/leanback
/laugh
/sweep
/rake
/flirt (I bought a "Personality" that modifies this command so it is really fun)
/dance
/faint (this one is hilarious!)

(etc). There are a ton of emotes built into the game that you can get your character to do; and the list gets bigger all the time; plus you can purchase some using Crowns or in-game gems).


If you are having any problems with your game you can type /bug to put in a "bug report" or if you get stuck between two rocks you can type /stuck and immediately a Dev will send your character to the nearest wayshrine = but charge you for the intervention.

I don't use the "/stuck" because they charge in game gold for it. It is much better (and free) to find the name of someone in either your friend's list or Guild roster and "Travel To" them (or if you own a house or apartment you can travel to it for free too)

But that Chat Box is your way to do all kinds of things in game; not just chatting with others. The first thing I did after leaving the tutorial dungeon was to test out all the emotes and pick favorites out.

I've also got an "Add-on" (like a mod) that works like the "Personality Idles" mod from Oblivion = whenever my characters are idling they will do various idle animations randomly from a list of ones I've chosen.

Before I narrowed the list down; my character was meeting Acadian's character for the first time and she suddenly started acting sick = then puked right on Buffy. That was Acadian's first impression of the game, (I immediately removed THAT emote from the list of emotes she could randomly use, ).








This post has been edited by mALX: Feb 7 2019, 06:06 PM

[ghastley]

I don't use the "/stuck" because they charge in game gold for it. It is much better (and free) to find the name of someone in either your friend's list or Guild roster and "Travel To" them (or if you own a house or apartment you can travel to it for free too)

This is a good reason to get one of the free Inn Rooms A.S.A.P. - You can go back there to regroup from absolutely anywhere, whether you're stuck, lost, or just overloaded with junk and don't have a banker or merchant. There's one in the main city of each Alliance. If you create characters for all three Alliances, you can have one of each, and because they're account-wide, use them all. Morrowind chapter (now a DLC) added one in Vivec City, and Summerset added one, too.

As well as travelling to a player, you can also travel to their primary residence. However, leaving that can put you back where you came from.

[mALX]

I don't use the "/stuck" because they charge in game gold for it. It is much better (and free) to find the name of someone in either your friend's list or Guild roster and "Travel To" them (or if you own a house or apartment you can travel to it for free too)

This is a good reason to get one of the free Inn Rooms A.S.A.P. - You can go back there to regroup from absolutely anywhere, whether you're stuck, lost, or just overloaded with junk and don't have a banker or merchant. There's one in the main city of each Alliance. If you create characters for all three Alliances, you can have one of each, and because they're account-wide, use them all. Morrowind chapter (now a DLC) added one in Vivec City, and Summerset added one, too.

As well as travelling to a player, you can also travel to their primary residence. However, leaving that can put you back where you came from.

Agree with this 100%. Those free Alliance rooms are just a little bare hotel room when you get it; but they are priceless when you need to travel out of a situation; (and can always be decorated as you go = not to mention a bunch of fellow Chorrolites who would be more than glad to send you some furnishings! )

[ghastley]

Agree with this 100%. Those free Alliance rooms are just a little bare hotel room when you get it; but they are priceless when you need to travel out of a situation; (and can always be decorated as you go = not to mention a bunch of fellow Chorrolites who would be more than glad to send you some furnishings! )

Oh yes, furnishings. One of the more annoying things about ESO is that a beginning player can't make much in the furniture line, as the most basic items will require skills you don't have. You'll be able to make a bedroll, and you can easily get a crate for a table, and a stool to sit on.
Unna as a n00b
But then you have nothing to put on the "table" until you get a few more levels, (or a gift).
The same a bit later
That mug requires rank 5 in metalworking if you want to make your own. The least requirement for any drinking vessel is rank 2, so you need some crafting experience before you can do anything. Getting to sleep on a raised bed, rather than on the floor starts around rank 4.

[mALX]

Agree with this 100%. Those free Alliance rooms are just a little bare hotel room when you get it; but they are priceless when you need to travel out of a situation; (and can always be decorated as you go = not to mention a bunch of fellow Chorrolites who would be more than glad to send you some furnishings! )

Oh yes, furnishings. One of the more annoying things about ESO is that a beginning player can't make much in the furniture line, as the most basic items will require skills you don't have. You'll be able to make a bedroll, and you can easily get a crate for a table, and a stool to sit on.
Unna as a n00b
But then you have nothing to put on the "table" until you get a few more levels, (or a gift).
The same a bit later
That mug requires rank 5 in metalworking if you want to make your own. The least requirement for any drinking vessel is rank 2, so you need some crafting experience before you can do anything. Getting to sleep on a raised bed, rather than on the floor starts around rank 4.

Yes, this is why friends in game can be such a great help! All of us have a bunch of furniture we no longer use that we are trying to find room for; and have turned some of our houses into warehouses to hold it all, lol. I recently bought the Coldharbour Estate just to store a bunch of stuff I don't have a place for, lol.

[Renee]

Nice! Thanks for all info. My gosh, this sounds a little overwhelming! Fun though. I think it'll be fun, right?

Do people make test characters for online games, or is that not as necessary? Every time I've tried to roll a test in the SP games, I always wind up getting sucked into full roleplays.

[Acadian]

You can have multiple characters no problem - up to 8 right out of the box with the ability to buy 'slots' for more if you want to.

A character's class cannot currently be changed so that is the biggest initial decision - and class choice is pretty important.

You can also not change a character's alliance but that is not very important.

Skills, morphs of skills, attributes and (for higher level characters) champion points can all be changed at will for a bit of in game gold.

Race, name, appearance can all be changed for real money.

[ghastley]

Do people make test characters for online games, or is that not as necessary? Every time I've tried to roll a test in the SP games, I always wind up getting sucked into full roleplays.

Test characters aren't really a good idea, because of the amount of grind involved in MMO. You need to invest a lot of time finding out if a character works before you really know. So I have one of each race, two of each class (or more) so I can do things with a better-suited character when appropriate. That does mean doing stuff over again with another character, but daily chores become more efficient after a while, and don't get too tedious. Some get played more, some less, but if they make changes in the game, at least one of mine benefits, and another character may start seeing more play time.

However, the PTS is the place for disposable characters. They periodically wipe everything, or do a fresh copy from the live server (approximately alternating those). So if you have a build that you're not likely to want to keep, do it there. You can create a character at a high level, instead of building them up, and find out quickly if it won't work. That's assuming you can factor out your own lack of practice with the game.

The PTS requires a second install of the game, as the client is synchronized with the server. Only do that if you have space for it.

This post has been edited by ghastley: Feb 11 2019, 03:17 PM

[Renee]

I am experienced RPG-er. Been choosing classes since the '80s (and sticking with them) in dice-roll games, so I'll be good there. Arena has classes too, it's all fine.

Weird that we have to pay money to change face though. Really weird. Never heard of anything like that before!

What is PTS?

[ghastley]

What is PTS?

PTS = Public Test Server.

You can download a client for that if you have the regular game. You get to try out the new content for a while before it gets into the main game, as an ongoing beta test. Periodically, the character info from live gets copied across there, so you're often playing with your own familiar characters, but there are alternate periods where everyone has to start from scratch with new ones. For that situation you can create a maxed-out template character and assign their skills and attributes in chargen. Or you can start a zero-level one to try out the new features as a starter character if you prefer.

Elsweyr will be there before it goes live, and if they don't have enough pre-orders, they may invite extra players to check it out. I got an invite for Summerset, and I still don't have that. When it went live, I lost access to the chapter on PTS, too.