ESO News April 2016 – Two Year Anniversary

This month, April 2016, marks two years since Elder Scrolls Online was launched on PC/Mac. ESO was released on April 4 2014, although people who pre-ordered were playing a few days before that.

So much has changed in the two years since those days. Craglorn, Imperial City and the Thieves Guild have been added, numerous bugs were fixed and the subscription model was changed to a buy-to-play model with an optional subscription called ESO Plus. You can read Matt Frior’s two year anniversary retrospective on the official site. Check out the one year anniversary reflection which came out at this time last year as well.

I should also mention the progress of ESO Academy too. We first got up and running in late 2014, and released in January 2015. It’s been really great to have the support of the ESO community. You are what keeps this site, and all of the other community sites and streamers, up and running! Thanks. We have been really busy here, mostly with other life commitments, but we do plan to update ESO Academy as much as possible, especially later this year when more time is available to us. It has been awesome to see so many comments come in and builds posted.

So, without further ado, here is some news.

Crafting Materials Node Scaling

ZOS is planning to change the way that node scaling works – this applies to Hew’s Bane and Orsinium where crafting nodes scale to your character.

We introduced scaled crafting resource nodes with the intent of making sure anyone could find useful crafting materials when they went to a scaled zone, such as Orsinium or Hew’s Bane.

 

However, since then, we’ve been monitoring feedback on scaled resources, and we’re actually looking at changing them slightly in the future. Currently, scaled nodes are based solely on your crafting passives; in the future, we’re looking at changing them to be split between your crafting passives, or your character level. We’re hoping that this helps both those characters who are leveling up naturally, and high-level characters who never craft, while still making sure that everyone can find the materials they need for both “the best you can craft” and “the best you can wear”. This seems a good opportunity to open up discussion of this potential change, and see what you all think of it.

 

Please remember that this is only something we’re considering right now; this is not a set-in-stone plan.

 

To provide an example of how this would work, let me introduce four characters.

• Alice has never crafted a day in her life, but has reached VR 16.
• Bob is a crafting alt – he’s got Metalworking maxed out, but isn’t even high enough level to weapon swap.
• Charlie is hardcore. Not only is he VR 16, but he’s also got all of his crafting passives purchased.
• Deborah is still levelling up, both in combat and in crafting. She’s just unlocked Rank 6 of Metalworking (meaning that she can now craft Calcinium equipment), but hasn’t quite made it to VR 1 yet, so she’s only able to wear gear made from Ebony.

 

The four adventurers crest a hill, and see two ore nodes. The one on the left is based on crafting passives, while the one on the right is based on character level.

• Alice sees an Iron node on the left, and a Rubedite node on the right.
• Bob sees a Rubedite node on the left, and an Iron node on the right.
• Charlie sees both nodes as Rubedite.
• Deborah sees a Calcinium node on the left, and an Ebony node on the right. If she were to get to VR 1 and return (and her friends hadn’t mined those resource nodes), she’d see two Calcinium nodes instead.

Once the nodes have been mined, when they respawn, they’ll randomly be selected to either base themselves off of crafting passives, or off of character level.

So while that seems complex it basically means that ZOS want to give crafters (with crafting passives) and non-crafters (no passives) the change to get resources suitable to both their crafting ability and their level.

This was taken from this post on the forums.

Tel Var Stones – Hakeijos?

On the forums there was a little hint that the Hakeijos and maybe some other items will be able to be purchased with Tel Var Stones in the future.

Hey folks! We hear the concerns about Tel Var stones, and with the next major update, we’ll be bringing in some new things for you to spend your Tel Var stones on, for a variety of price levels. We’ll go into more details about exactly what new things the vendors will be selling when we’re closer to releasing that Update, but… I hope they make it possible to buy Hakeijos with Tel Var Sstones some day.

Hajeijos are runes for enchanting which are only dropped randomly and can’t be purchased at this time.

This was taken from this post on the forums.

Incremental Patches

There has been a steady list of incremental patches after Thieves Guild (2.3.5) which you can check out on the forums patch notes section. These have mostly contained bug fixes and small changes.

The Future

We know that Dark Brotherhood is the next DLC, set in the Gold Coast. It’s supposed to be released around June 2016. There has been some suggestion that this is when Veteran Ranks will be removed, although this will probably occur some time after Dark Brotherhood in the second half of the year.

There is also rumours that all zones in ESO will be scaled to your character level like Orsinum and Hew’s Bane do now. This was hinted at in the Year Ahead article released early this year and also in the Tales of Tamriel podcast interview with Rich Lambert.

We hope to see many additions to ESO in the remainder of this year. We are really hoping to see some quality of life, or structural, changes in the future. These include an armor style preview option at crafting stations to visualise the many different armor styles, a detailed player housing system and the successful transition from Veteran Ranks to Champion Ranks.

Time will tell!