Didn't see a thread for this yet so thought I'd put it up.

http://elderscrollsonline.com/en/news/post/2014/02/11/creating-eso-dark-anchors

I tried on 2 different browsers (Opera and Mozilla) and am still unable to view any content on the official site, due to being caught in an infinite age-gate loop. Not sure how to get around that, but if anyone could suggest why that is happening and how to avoid it so that I can read the article linked above (and any others), I'd be most grateful.

EDIT: Ignore me, it's now working. It wasn't earlier, it wasn't last week, or the week before, or the month before that, but the minute I actually post that I am having a problem and ask for help, the problem disappears. Bloomin' typical

Wow, that looks awesome. Totally psyched for malcolm mcdowell as the VA for molag bal too =P I always thought he had a good evil voice, not sure if he can pull off a demon voice though.

Definitely looking forward to finding these things in the game.

I really liked this feature in Rift and I'm glad that ESO got it as well. I just hope there is some randomness to them here as well.

Delete your cookies next time, that should fix it.

Having now read the article: They do indeed look awesome.

I do hope though that they are not going to be the ESO equivalent of Oblivion gates - ie. fun for the first couple then get tedious to deal with after a while. I once tried an Oblivion playthrough with a personal objective to deal with every single Oblivion gate that I could find - by the time I'd done around 40 I was about ready to throw my PC out of the window and I gave up. Yes I know I didn't have to close them all, but I wanted to see whether it was possible without suffering some sort of emotional breakdown (it isn't, at least not for me!)

I hope that Dark Anchors don't make me feel like that after a while.

The first time I saw one of these, I said "why do all the anchor chains go to the same location in the middle?"

I understand it was probably done because of game mechanics, but the whole idea of shooting multiple anchors into the ground is to attach it to the ground in multiple locations. To me it just looks silly in it current design. Aesthetics aside, I am glad this kind of game content is in ESO. It is just another incentive to explore.

The dark anchors have set locations, but to be fair, so do the rifts in RIFT.

I wouldn't like to see dark spots all over the map this was a huge problem in Oblivion you'd get huge dark spots and barren wasteland where the gates once were it was a huge eyesore looking at them.

No mate, the rifts can pop up pretty much anywhere (except the cities ofc) and at any time.

Nah they are beautiful. When a rift opens, depending on its elemental type, various effects happen. For example the air will become different and tainted depending on the element, an earth rift will spawn huge rocks and minerals in the area, a fire will have lava dropping from the sky etc. Plus if a rift remains open for long, invasions start to happen and monsters from the rift travel through the map attacking settlements. But when they close, the area is like the rift never existed.

Watch them on the map. You'll notice they don't appear just anywhere. They have set spawn points, which are randomly active. Having a lot of them gives the illusion that they can appear anywhere, and I applaud them for the implementation to achieve that illusion, but if you watch it for a while you can see through it and witness the rhythm of the internal mechanics, like lifting the hood of a car and looking at a running engine.