Bay 12 Games Forum

Now they're quietly restoring some of the banned accounts. According to one of the reps, all the bans were done manually, which makes me wonder why they didn't bother to properly review the accounts in the first place. They've wasted time fixing their fix, and they only have a bunch of frustrated players to show for it.

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Meanwhile, there's a ludicrous problem with botters and gold spammers, yet there's been no statement or action by ZOS

MMOs are an odd place.

While on one hand these things are very annoying and detrimental to the player experience... they do, however, bring money into an MMO.

Maybe, but this doesn't seem like a game where anything is freakishly out of reach for most players in terms of gold, there's not a lot to spend it on, and I've heard large amounts of gold are easily and quickly earned at veteran levels. How many people would quit all together if they couldn't buy gold? Then there's all those fraudulent and stolen accounts to deal with. But my point was that ZOS doesn't care about the player economy as much as they claim to.

@Putnam: The Provisional House is exactly as physical as these forums on which we contemplate the nature underlying the Provisional House. I've never suggested otherwise.

I'm not sure what argument you're trying to make with the rest of your post. I only brought up Baar Dau, etc. because if you're going to dismiss the accounts told within the Sermons as things attributable to a Not-Quite-The-Vivec-We-Know, then we have to dismiss a fair amount of the lore for things which are very real and observable. Granted, dismissing the Provisional House entirely means it can no longer be an example of breaking the fourth wall, but dismissing the Sermons means we have to re-investigate some fairly fundamental things like the destruction of Vvardenfell.

We do have a solid account in the first novel where the dreamsleeve briefly stores the memories of the recently deceased before the souls pass on to Aetherius, similarly to how deleted data lingers in some form before being overwritten and passing into human memory.

@HugoLuman: "Curiosity is an odd thing. It is a bright path surrounded by brambles." We can hope, however, that the Loremasters recognize what torture their amusements are, and quit being such obnoxious biters on the path to enlightenment.

Except for Sotha Sil's Clockwork City being consistently called "The World-Mechanism" in Online.

Lore introduced in TESO is new enough that I haven't had time to go through all of it yet. Might you link sources for my elucidation?

The entire concept of Amaranth. Besides, how is it fourth-wall breaking to... introduce something new to the lore?

Where is Amaranth associated with the dreamsleeve?

Quoting myself from earlier: "Notice that it's never explained in detail how Vivec made the Provisional House, yet Vivec loves to talk about the things he's done." Vivec does a lot of things in the Sermons that are never explained in detail and left open for metaphorical interpretation (for another example, see Muatra and all the associated innuendo). There's been plenty of time to clarify these incidents, yet they never have been, in-character or out-. Independently, they're a bunch of obscured oddities that might be dismissed as mere poetry. Collectively, they show Vivec manipulating creation in ways that, as far as I know the lore, would require that he have access to the underlying framework of creation; Vivec's CHIM. He recognizes creation's underlying reality (the dream) for what it is, and liberates himself from it sufficiently to be able to change it in ways that affect him inside but not outside creation. Similarly to how stage actors can break the fourth wall to recognize that they're within a play and can manipulate the play, yet continue to act as part of the play. Vivec most certainly broke the fourth wall of the Aurbis, but whether or not he found our world on the other side is uncertain.

Introducing new lore does not generally break the fourth wall; this is a particular instance where it does.

The Metaphysics of Morrowind, for the curious.

"leading to some control over [the universe]"; like having access to the CK or something similar? The dream is a universe within a universe (a story), the dreamsleeve belies its underlying nature (computer-like), and Vivec found a way to manipulate it. Notice that it's never explained in detail how Vivec made the Provisional House, yet Vivec loves to talk about the things he's done. This suggests he didn't make the procedure to make the Provisional House, but rather that he found the tools in the "non-spatial space filling to capacity with mortal interaction and information, a canvas-less cartography of every single mind it has ever known" (Sermon Nineteen). Which is to say he searched the internet to find the tools used by the dreamer(s) to create the dream.

Also, "Simply put, as the Gods cannot know joy as mortals, their creation, so mortals may only understand the joy of Liberty by becoming the progenitors of the models that can make the jump past mortal death." In other words, game creators can't know what it's like to be game characters despite having created them; similarly, game characters can only understand their existence by attaining awareness of the computer on which they exist.

Granted, it's never explicitly phrased that the dream is a computer game, but the lore is open-ended and metaphysical enough to allow for such an interpretation. And it doesn't necessarily have to be our universe or our CK that the lore could be referring to. Also, C0DA.

Speaking of which, we apparently have a new C0DA: During a period of the Second Era, horses were known to (de)materialize on command. Game becomes lore.

Also, no love for Julian Lefay?

How was the Provisional House created?

Fourth wall stuff is laaaaaaaame :I

Fourth wall was broken when the Provisional House was introduced.

*snip*

The problems with how they handled this maintenance would be that they gave us no in-game warning until it was 15 minutes away, they gave us no time estimate until several hours in, they said nothing about a large-ish patch until several hours in, and one of the community managers repeatedly kept posting a message to the effect of "server is still down", which is absolutely useless when the same thing is effectively stickied at the top of the forum and trolls everyone into thinking something useful is being said. They really need to hire a PR person who knows how to provide useful, non-confusing information.

Dragon breaks were invented to explain the Warp in the West. At least, I'm not aware of any references to non-linear time until after Daggerfall.

Edit so I'm on topic: Played through multiple betas, enjoying the game more now that I'm not rushing through it.

Again, game limitations. If they took time to depict magic being used in non-combat faculties outside of text, it's a safe bet that players would want to interact with those magics in meaningful ways, sucking time and money away from developing the actual gameplay parts of the game. Those would be better off in a true sandbox game that's not limited by combat heavy quest lines, but that doesn't describe any of the games we have so far. Seriously, the games are not good depictions of the daily lives of non-adventurers.

And the Mages' Guild was expressly founded on the principle of bringing magic to everyone. Source: Origin of the Mages Guild.