Aibreán 2014
(April)


Cead Mile Failte!

Welcome to this month’s Ceannard Notes! Are you ready to set foot in our new home? Are you staying with us in Guild Wars 2? Either way we've got some cool things to share. This month marks the launch of Chapter 5: The Elder Scrolls Online officially. It also just happens to be a special month for yours truly ;). Lets go ahead and get started with some Gaiscioch Family News.

Gaiscioch Family News

Coming May 2014
Getting Ready for DoubleUP Charity Event

It's that time again, time to prepare for our launch of the Gaiscioch DoubleUP Charity event. We will be aiming at gathering 400 stuffed animals for our partner charities that get shipped to their facilities and distributed to kids in need. I will be opening the floodgates on May 1st and you can begin placing your orders to help these wonderful charities. It appears this year we've got Dr. Seuss related stuffed animals available so I'm sure these will be popular among the kiddoes.

At a Digital Newsstand Near You!
The All-New Gaiscioch Magazine Has Arrived!

Be sure to check out our very first issue of Gaiscioch Magazine. Quite a few members were involved in the creation of this epic 68 page digital magazine. We truly hope you enjoy it. It is now available for digital viewing. To all those that helped make this possible, Thank You!

Gaiscioch Magazine - Issue 1
http://www.gaiscioch.com/magazine/

Looking to help us out for Issue 2?

We're preparing the issue to launch in June so between now and then we'll be collecting previews, reviews, guides, and random thoughts to publish in this edition. We're especially looking for folks who would like to cover some non-opinionated previews of various games including but not limited to:

  • Archeage
  • Bless
  • Wildstar
  • Gloria Victis
  • Pathfinder Online
  • Shards
  • Camelot Unchained

I may even be able to set up an interview between you and a game developer for the article. We are looking for a general overview of the game, it's features, and who's behind it. Most importantly is what does this game bring to the MMO table?

Additionally we are collecting screenshots, game reviews, recipes, guides, and pictures of Gaiscioch members in various locations for our Gaiscioch In The Far Corners section. Please send them to magazine@gaiscioch.com for review. We look forward to seeing what you all come up with. I hope you enjoyed the first issue and we look forward to producing the second.

Monday June 23rd, 2014 @ 8-10PM EST
East Coast Gaiscioch Family Reunion - Atlanta, GA

Join me on June 23rd at 8:00PM EST at Fado Irish Pub in Atlanta, Georgia for some socialization and good times over a pint. This will be our first time traveling to the east coast for this event. Be sure to join us and meet some of your favorite Gaiscioch personalities. Will have Gaiscioch patches available for purchase for $10 each. Proceeds go to making more patches :).

Fado Irish Pub
273 Buckhead Ave.
Atlanta, GA 30305
http://www.fadoirishpub.com/atlanta/

Saturday, April 5th, 2014 @ 5-6PM EST
Gaiscioch Family Summit Pubcast - April 2014

Join us for the monthly Pubcast on RaidCall: 1101 on Saturday, April 5th, 2014 as we discuss first impressions of Elder Scrolls Online during week 1, our official campaigns, the upcoming changes to Guild Wars 2 in April and the release of the Gaiscioch Magazine.

Feel free to bring comments, questions, and feedback as we'd love to hear it.

Elder Scrolls Online

Launch Day
Let the Games Begin!

Ok, ZeniMax Online is just pure evil. They have announced that 5-day head start will begin March 30th at 7AM EDT. That's 4AM PDT my time and ClubGaiscioch doesn't end until 2AM PDT. The odds of me having both eyes open at 4 AM is next to none, and if they are open I probably would be short on patience and quick on temper, two things that should never be seen at a launch party.

So, we will be forming up the Gaiscioch rooms between 9AM - 12AM PDT. Invites will take most of the day to send out so by the 31st hopefully everyone will have their invites. Please note that you must have a character created to receive an invite. So if you get a notice saying that your ESO ID is incorrect yet you're sure it's right, log into game, verify it (after you create a character) and you will be re-added to the invite list.

Important Notes About Your ESO ID:

  • You must include @ in your ESO ID. Mine would be "@Foghladha"
  • ESO ID's are Case Sensitive
  • Please get your ESO ID from the Social Pane (Press "o" in Game) Only. The account manager page can list a different ID. For example in the final beta mine said "Foghladha" on my accounts page but in game it was "@Foley". Be sure to ONLY use the User ID from the live client by viewing the social pane.
  • A character must be created to receive an invite. Otherwise the game returns an "Account Not Found" message.

About the Family in ESO:

  • Gaiscioch will be focused on Ebonheart Pact Faction Only. If you choose to play any other faction you will not be able to group with the majority of our members. You will be limited to grouping with anyone else who chose to play that faction. It will be lonely. We simply can't divide our attention between 3 separate factions and keep the same level of activities going.
  • We will declare our Campaigns for each Faction on Friday, April 4th. Before then be sure to Guest on other campaigns. Changing your home campaign will cost you alliance points. We want to make sure we are all part of the same one.
  • Do not play rival factions against our family. We want to avoid the "spying" issue at all costs. Anyone caught on the wrong side of the field will be removed from RaidCall and the in game roster. This is by far the most toxic issue for guilds and almost always leads to bad things and lots of drama. Simply don't do it.
  • You will receive 2 invites at launch. One to Gaiscioch, and the other to your Core Room. Please accept both.

For more information please read our:
Elder Scrolls Online Family Overview

The Website Progress Report

I am happy to report most systems are operational and functional. The leadership / participation engine is operational and some basic objectives have been entered for you to claim as you adventure with other family members. We will be expanding the list of objectives as the game moves forward and other group based activities are discovered. Soloable objectives will not be listed in this system and all leaders are required to have 3 additional (4 total) Gaiscioch or Tuatha members in their group to be eligible to claim leadership for an event.

The invite system seems completely operational and is working perfectly. Notifications get sent out every time we invite someone or if there was a problem with your account. This should make for a fairly smooth launch. Be sure your ESO ID is updated with your live account information.

Due to some of the complexities of the Crafting System in ESO we will only be listing crafting materials for the immediate future on the marketplace. I will be working on a custom system for ESO to allow players to request items. The crafting system in ESO has over 100,000 unique items and unfortunately many of them share the same name, which completely breaks the existing marketplace system. It will take a major revamp of the marketplace to allow this to work correctly.

For the Explorer system we have plans to build a mod that allows x/y coordinate mapping. When it is finished we will enable the discovery system to enter locations of shards, caves, events, and so forth. It is my hope to have a Google Maps enabled guide to zones using Gaiscioch gathered information much like what we did in RIFT. This all relies on the ability to create and use the coordinates mod.

Quick tips & tricks

Let's face it, ESO is drastically different from every MMO you've ever played. It’s UI is minimal, there's a complete lack of nameplates or a minimap. It feels very foreign and a lot of times lonely. Have no fear your fearless leader and a few others have plans to help make ESO a bit more friendly to our members.

We have plans to build some addons that will bridge the traditional with the innovation and allow you the option of experiencing ESO with a more traditional approach. These will take some time to create, so I wanted to take a moment to give you all some tips and tricks to make it a little less mind blowing in your first moments.

Improve All Skills Without Using That Weapon or Armor

This is a neat trick I discovered in the final beta. If you equip and kill 1 enemy using each weapon and wearing one of each type of armor you will unlock all the weapon and armor lines. Then switch to your prefered weapon of choice and armor of choice. You will notice your other skills leveling as you advance without even using them. At the end of Beta my Bow skill was at rank 8 without even using a bow aside from the first kill to unlock it. This will allow you a broader scope of skills that you can use as you advance.

Settings to Improve Your Experience

There are a few settings I would highly recommend to make it a bit more traditional. Under interface you can disable autohide on your skill bar to make it always show. Additionally make sure to turn on health bars for all enemy npc and players. This will allow you to tell the difference between friendly creatures and hostile creatures. Lastly be sure to turn on Auto-loot. With these changes you should have a bit easier time adapting to the new interface.

Elder Scrolls Online Events
Foghladha's Event Lineup For Elder Scrolls Online

While I can't speak for everyone, I can let you know where I plan to be spending my time leading events. I will be moving my Tuesday PM and Saturday AM events to Elder Scrolls Online. Feel free to join me for either of these events. In addition there will be several others leading day to day activities. Be sure to tune into the calendar on http://eso.gaiscioch.com/ to learn more about activities going on within the family.

  • Tuesdays @ 6-9PM PDT: US Primetime ClubNight in AvA
  • Saturdays @ 12-2AM PDT: OCX Primetime ClubGaiscioch in AvA

Don't let the AvA part scare you off for this event, everyone over level 10 is welcome to come out and join us. I will be focusing on discovering caves, finding important locations, and helping players become familiar with the mechanics and terrain of Cyrodiil. These will be mostly PvE based with some PvP thrown in. I plan to run them this way for the foreseeable future so that we can have large scale family events that cater to all. Plus it will provide a very friendly way of leveling up as a family.

Top 10 Elder Scrolls News For March, 2014

  1. Join Gaiscioch this weekend in ESO Beta!
  2. Launch Times for Early Access Etc.
  3. Beta Test This Weekend
  4. Emperor PvP
  5. MMORPG.com: Elder Scrolls Online: ESO's Addon Conundrum
  6. Top 8 Beginning Questions Asked in the Elder Scrolls Online Beta
  7. ESO discounts on extended Subscriptions
  8. Great tip and very Informative info (Must Watch)
  9. End Game (Veteran Ranks) - Playing at other alliance zone
  10. Downloading ESO

Elder Scrolls Links of Interest

Guild Wars 2

The Road Ahead

There's been a lot of concerns, comments, rumors and questions about Gaiscioch in Guild Wars 2 after the launch of Elder Scrolls Online. Just in the past 3 weeks I’ve dispelled rumors about our departure countless times.

We are not leaving Guild Wars 2,
We are not leaving Sanctum of Rall

I can not state this enough. Gaiscioch na Rall will remain in Guild Wars 2 as long as the Sanctum of Rall server is online. If the day comes that ArenaNet turns Sanctum of Rall off, we will be leaving as well. But until that day, our presence in Guild Wars 2 is a tribute to Roger "Oldroar" Rall and we will not compromise his memory or legacy. We will remain on Sanctum of Rall through thick and thin. Years from now when people think of Sanctum of Rall I want them to think of Gaiscioch.

Population Worries

I know many of you have voiced concerns with our population once the migration to ESO begins. I won’t lie to you, it's not my style, population initially will dip when ESO goes live. It dipped when Skyrim came out, it dipped when Oblivion came out. There's nothing we can do to prevent that regardless if we're going there or not.

The good news is we're not alone. This is going to happen to every guild, in every server, across every game. Entire Guilds will choose to leave Guild Wars 2 to go there and that will leave a lot of their members in the wind. This is the optimal time for players who normally wouldn't have crossed our path to learn about our community.

I suspect within the first month we will replenish the population we lose from ESO. Additionally we may even gain some members that have been playing ESO with us and would like to try Guild Wars 2. As it stands right now we comfortably fill a 500 person guild with a 7 day activity afk rotation. We likely will be able to extend this to 14 day activity afk and still maintain the 500 person room. As time progresses we will have many new faces and things will be back to normal. It's just going to be a bit of adjustment as players decide which game they plan to play. It's just going to take a little while for the dust to settle and get back to business as usual.

Great Tyrian Adventure Season 4

We will be experimenting with a format that will be described below but we likely will not restart the Tyrian Adventure until after July. The summer time is the middle of conference season both professionally and in gaming, and it's going to be very difficult to schedule around my absences. In the mean time we will be running Missions & WvW and replenishing our loot vault in preparation for season 4. Likely we will kick it off shortly after PAX Prime in September. The summer is always tough to schedule around. This will also give us some time to get more content into the game and hopefully add some additional fun events.

WvW Season 2 begins!

As many of you know the face of WvW has drastically changed on Sanctum of Rall. The players who originally made life miserable for us in the early months have long since passed and freedom has taken to the battlefield. Don't let the scoreboard hinder your ability to have fun. Talk to any of our leaders and you will hear a story the score does not equally share. Every time we step on the battlefield we topple twice our numbers, take what we want, and generally have the enemy running scared. We've even had offers been thrown at us to transfer to our enemies’ servers exceeding 6,000 gold.

The scoreboard however is representative of 24 hours and for many of those hours our WvW scene is without leadership. Players flock to the field as soon as a commander appears. We bond together and make things happen. This is a great time to get involved in the WvW scene as there’s a lot of opportunity to learn and no worries of queues.

As season 2 kicks off we will be fighting an uphill fight. We're in a bad place when it comes to getting transfers to our server. We are in the higher price bracket being the top of our league standings.This pretty much makes it impossible to get new players to our shores. So we are without a doubt going to be in for one heck of a fight. The good news is that you're part of a community that loves an uphill battle. Come join us for some fun times and let’s show our foes that Sanctum of Rall may be down, but we are certainly not out.

New Commanders
Opportunity Knocks And Our Commanders Answer!

With the change of battlefield and various players taking the initiative to step up and lead we are proud to announce our latest round of commanders on the battlefield. We are pleased to announce the addition of FinalFAB, Terafer, Soren, Elchanan, Kooz, and Rylssa to our official family commander lineup.

Please be sure to support your commanders and keep an eye open to the event calendars to attend their events. As always we thank them for their support and look forward to supporting them in the future.

New Update
April Content Pack Brings New Features

This patch looks to be one of the largest patches to date. Prepare to experience Guild Wars 2 as never before! The April 2014 Feature Pack is the first release to focus exclusively on in-game features, and it's bringing in brand-new systems, improvements to existing features, balance updates, and more!

This patch appears to be the start of some really exciting changes bringing the best features of Guild Wars 1 into Guild Wars 2. The new trait system is very familiar to those of us that played Guild Wars 1 where you will get skills as rewards or pay to learn them from Skill Trainers. We can keep those fingers crossed for some skills you can only get off certain creatures. Hopefully this will bring skill hunting into Guild Wars 2, one of my personal favorite parts of Guild Wars 1.

Not all of the information has been revealed yet, but so far from the few hints they've given there appears to be some massive improvements to the game on their way.

Learn more at:
https://www.guildwars2.com/en/the-game/releases/feature-packs/

Guild Wars 2 Events
Foghladha's Event Lineup For Guild Wars 2

I am happy to present my event schedule for April. I will be hosting 2 events per week in a mixed format. Both events will be 3 hours in length and start the night with a speed run through the guild missions open to the entire server. Participants will be expected to get waypoints on their own time and we will not be waiting for people to run across zones to complete them. I plan to have the bounty, challenge, rush, and puzzle completed in under an hour. Upon completion we will head out to WvW and cause as much damage as possible as fast as possible. It is my hope that this format will be successful so that it might serve as a template for Great Tyrian Adventure season 4.

  • Thursdays @ 6-9PM PDT: US Primetime SORC Missions & WvW
  • Saturdays @ 11-2AM PDT: OCX Primetime: SORC Missions & WvW

Top 10 Guild Wars 2 News For March, 2014

  1. Few more materials needed!
  2. Massively.com: Flameseeker Chronicles: Guild Wars 2's season finale doesn't quite soar
  3. Guild Wars 2: Traits Unleashed: Forty New Traits and More!
  4. WvW Shining time
  5. Massively.com: One Shots: Off the Grid
  6. New Event: WvW Home defense
  7. Massively.com: Guild Wars 2's Battle for Lion's Arch has begun
  8. Guild Wars 2 Guru: Update Notes - March 4th, 2014
  9. Guild Wars 2: Get Ready for WvW Spring Tournament 2014
  10. Guild Wars 2 Update: Game Update Notes - March 4, 2014

In Closing

I just want to say that you all have made the last 12 years of my soon to be 36 year life a truly wonderful experience. Thank you all for being a part of this little family. We've shared some wonderful adventures over the years, pulled each other out of some dark times, and inspired one another to be the best we can be. I look forward to sharing many more adventures in the coming years. The next month is going to be pretty exciting. Just remember to be patient and have fun. As always, things will smooth out over time and will start getting back to normal.

Slan Go Foill!
(Goodbye For Now)

Benjamin "Foghladha" Foley
Ceannard De Gaiscioch Treubh