The Elder Scrolls Online » Discussions


Hello, my name is The_Lex, and I am an altaholic

Tags: #ESO  #elder scrolls online  #Altoholics Anonymous  #Don't Judge Me 
  • Member
    January 24, 2019

    It's all about inspiration. What inspires you?

    It has been a while since I've posted here. Sorry about that. As many of you know, I love ESO - not everything about it, mind you, but it's currently the only game I play. I started out as a beta tester and then played for a while on PC. I ended up dropping it due to performance issues and other interests. I came back at console launch and played on Xbox extensively. I had nine fully maxed characters, 940 champion points, and regularly ran through trials with various guilds. Seeing several of my TV friends switch to PC, I decided to leave all that behind and start afresh on PC last November. I am now 360 champion points and running trials...some normal, some vet. But, I came to a realization....

    I am an obsessive altaholic. 

    I currently have five fully leveled characters and three lower leveled ones. I was looking at my character list, intending on getting some professional help for my addictions, when it finally dawned on me. Inspiration. What inspires me to play ESO like I do? The answer to this riddle finally shed light on my altaholism in both ESO and any RPG (single player or otherwise). 

    What inspires me the most can be summed up as follows: I like to take a character from level 1 and build his/her skills, gear, and combat rotation so that the character will be viable in all forms of end-game content. Once I get a character up to that point, I roll a new one. This is what really inspires me.

    Do I like questing? yes, absolutely.

    Do I like lore? Oh, yes, and I have strong leanings on some of the finer points.

    Do I like exploration? You better believe it. ESO allows me to see amazing things.

    But nothing gets the juices flowing like building a character. Taking a little nobody, and watching him stand over the corpse of a disgusting Sea Sload in a 12-person trial. To accomplish that end, I have amassed a great deal of knowldege about gear sets, game mechanics, active and passive bonuses, and how all that interacts with each other. 

    But that's me. What about you?

     

    What inspires you? It doesn't even have to do with ESO. What inspires you i nyour favorite RPGs?

  • Mr.
    Member
    January 24, 2019

    Great question. What inspires me are stories and characters. I can't properly enjoy an RPG until I come up with a strong character I like or the game itself gives me a character (The Witcher, Mass Effect...). I sometimes spend hours on a character concept and end up not playing it or saving it for later, and sometimes these character concepts develop into my own "private lore" for the world/game they're created for; this happened on both Skyrim and New Vegas and, to a lesser extent, Oblivion.

    It got to the point where I bought a bunch of ancient nordic mythology and story books to draw inspiration from and expand my Skyrim stories and characters and, for New Vegas, a bunch of Western movies, music, a whole lot of Quentin Tarantino, geography of West Coast United States... Shit, if (when?) I decide to delve deeper into Caesar's Legion and Caesar himself, I might have to start reading about Hegelian dialectics, though I'm not looking forward to that (not a big fan of modern+ philosophy at all...).

     

  • January 24, 2019

    Mr. Edd said:

    Great question. What inspires me are stories and characters. I can't properly enjoy an RPG until I come up with a strong character I like or the game itself gives me a character (The Witcher, Mass Effect...). I sometimes spend hours on a character concept and end up not playing it or saving it for later, and sometimes these character concepts develop into my own "private lore" for the world/game they're created for; this happened on both Skyrim and New Vegas and, to a lesser extent, Oblivion.

    It got to the point where I bought a bunch of ancient nordic mythology and story books to draw inspiration from and expand my Skyrim stories and characters and, for New Vegas, a bunch of Western movies, music, a whole lot of Quentin Tarantino, geography of West Coast United States... Shit, if (when?) I decide to delve deeper into Caesar's Legion and Caesar himself, I might have to start reading about Hegelian dialectics, though I'm not looking forward to that (not a big fan of modern+ philosophy at all...).

    And here I thought I'm the only one like this... cool to know I'm not alone)) Though I'm not much into the pre-made characters like in The Witcher, they greatly decrease the replayability of a game for me. Mostly because one of the things that inspire me the most is creating characters. Not building them from level 1, but building their story. Turning every playthrough into a novel of sorts. It's what would make me do research and spend more time on it than I'd spend on the game itself.

  • Member
    January 24, 2019
    I only wish that archery were a great skill tree and not be the offbar to melee.
  • Member
    January 24, 2019

    Noodles said: I only wish that archery were a great skill tree and not be the offbar to melee.

    They've been buffed. Quite a few bow builds nowadays in both PvE and PvP (tons in PvP). They won't put up the same numbers as melee, but that's to be expected. There's a risk/reward to being in the enemy's face as opposed to a distance, at least for game play purposes. 

     

    EDIT: In fact, I build my stamina warden to be a bow build. It turned out well. I changed him out because I prefer the tanky brawler types.

  • Member
    January 24, 2019

    Excellent topic, The Lex :) I suppose I'm kind of similar as to how you describe yourself, except at a much slower pace. I guess that means I'm not an altaholic, though, because I don't normally make a character until I can see the the whole journey in it's entirety. So I can't imagine ever filling all my character slots up anytime soon - one character is a commitment I tend to see through to the end, doubly so when I can't see a way around the variety issue.

    I really enjoy the creation process and thinking the character through, and I guess that's why I'm in my current rut - I conceived of an Orc Warden to be a shaman type like Zbulgat the Wild-Walker back in October and was stoked for it but couldn't commit to it fully. At the time I had the whole thing planned out - what quests to do, where he'd live, what he'd wear, and what he'd do end-game. That inspiration would have provided fuel for months on end, as it has done with Sir Paws, Hadlanter, and Breyja. But, idk, one or two of those pieces were missing and so I couldn't follow the muse. By the time they slotted into place, the muse had fled leaving me feeling unfulfilled. I guess iit kind of left me feeling resentful towards the game...? Hard to describe, but I hate the Crown Store practice of dictating when I can have something I want - made even worse because we predicted it, if you recall. I wanted Iceheart Arms Pack and Frostcaster but, apparently, we are only allowed those things during the depths of winter - never mind that's it's cold all tuskin' year in Wrothgar :D

    So right now I'm waiting for the muse to return and inspire something I can achieve that doesn't include waiting until Christmas to get what I want. When that happens I'll be balls-deep again. I can imagine me really wanting to fight a dragon so I'll likely be returning to do trials, like as not the Elsweyr dlc will give me the drive to experience MoL, too. 

    Lol, so yeah that's what inspires me: A character, a build, a house, and story-arc fully fleshed-out that I can then go and make happen which will cause me to enjoy the proces of acquiring the gear. One character then has a lot of variety - run dungeons for gear, break that up with story quests and exploration, break that up with decorating... Plenty to keep me enthusiastic and fulfilled for many, many hours :D

  • January 24, 2019

    Cool topic. I 've always been mainly an mmorpg player and had the same issue of altoholism to some extent and the reason is pretty much the same as yours. For me when I create a character the whole point is the journey between being a lvl 1 noob with all the farm, questing, exploration, grinding, raids, pvp, crafting, xp etc until finally geting to end levels/game. 

    You can imagine mmo-rpgs as a small extension of real life simulator in a fantasy world setting, like in real life you have to work hard (most of the times), meet people, make friends, make foes and in general try to make progress, improve yourself and be successful this is what you do in the game as well. If you think about it there are simillarities between the two and that is also one of the big selling points of mmo-rpgs. If a day was tiring or went to shit some people might aleviate this a bit by doing something cool with their character in game like killing a raid or geting an item. This was also something that inspired me to play mmorpgs. Playing mmorpgs was and still is one of my go to thing to get motivation and do things to improve myself in real life as well and this is a more healthy way to use them.

    That being said my altoholism was kept in check even if I didn't want to because everyone knew I was playing healers as main characters since I was quite successful with this class and in 90% of my game activities with guilds/clans, real life friends I was with a healer and played other classes like nukers/assassins mostly in pvp. A healer's life for me. :P

    For non online rpgs the only ones I play at the moment are Oblivion and Skyrim my motivation is probably to roleplay something and create a character with a certain level of story and purpose and also a character with cool gameplay mechanics. Although I never go too hard on roleplay because Skyrim roleplaying needs quite a bit of mental flexing so I keep it simple there just put in a few simple rules and follow them until I 'm done with a character.

  • February 6, 2019

    I'd say I also prefer the character building aspect, only I am incredibly indecisive; I have erased characters that I had spent more than 20 hours with because I second-guessed some perk or skill investment which in my next playthrough I took up again anyways. I may have a problem.

  • Member
    February 6, 2019

    Thanks for the feature, and the pic on the home page looks great!

  • February 6, 2019

    From long ago, since I started playing TES games (2011), I started with TES IV Oblivion, my first character was a concept of an average medieval, kind of a one-handed and shield warrior, with some mysticism and dark-arts features and skills and with some speech-polite plotery and merchant features, with time along years that character improved from his appareance to more polished features such as skills and personality, changed his name vary times (but not many just like 4 times) along the way, until the full character develop I have right now.

    So what I want to express right now is the first character I created on TES worthed for creating other different characters, due I enjoy creating characters with at least a small short story or concept of it, why the first character worthed for creating other characters?, this is due that character was the first step for a large story-project I'm developing, the first character is named Stentius Tereno, I love Games of Thrones series/books, my project is to write a story with Game of Thrones structure, in terms every character is part of a big context. So there are many characters I have created, so even right now I dont have installed TES V Skyrim (due I'm in process of mod installation), even If I have not the game the characters still there as concepts and will back when I return to gameplay.

    I have vary characters all of them are part of that large project, started with one first character, I tend to play this way in terms of creating characters, even in ESO but at ESO the characters are just aspects of other characters like quite some relatives far away ancestors.

    Also characters improves and polish through time, I have some really complete.

    In abstract I create characters just based on my story-project oh and in the way I enjoy gameplay, as I have read this post and about the description of altaholic I'm not one, as you said The_Lex and Duvain being an altaholic it might have to do with enjoying character progression in terms of gameplay