Greetings, all.

Now that the public beta/stress tests are over, I found myself reflecting on my approach to the game and thinking forward to my plans for launch day.

I realized that for me, the #1 piece of advice I will give myself when the game goes live is: "It's not a race."

By which I mean, I want to remind myself not to feel as if I need to rush rush rush to that next quest, that next level, that next piece of armor, whatnot. I plan to be in it for the long(ish) haul, so whenever I find myself struggling with something, I will go on to something else, or just stop for the day. I think the beta weekend effect made me feel a bit pressured to "hurry up" so I could try more things out in the limited time I had.

So, what's your primary bit of advice you'll give yourself?

(And if your response is "don't buy the game" or something else negative, feel free to move along. )

If I was going to buy it and be there for launch it would be...expect the worst. That doesn't mean I think the game svcks or anything. Its just how everyone should approach the launch of a MMO. You wont be disappointed with server crashes oe bugs and such that way and might even be pleasantly surprised.

Dont craft gear, just wear dropped gear until level 20+

I would still craft gear, that way you don't have revisit earlier areas to level the crafting skill up to 20+

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My number one piece of advice would be as appealing it would be skip the tutorial island because you've done it 3 - 5 times. Do it!

Let your char make the build, don't worry about numbers and stats. At least on the 1st char. Enjoy the game as is, before addons.

Savour the flavour don't rush to be highest level.

:-) Go back to the starter islands so I have better gear when I hit the city.

Get your character right; too many times in the past, I've not properly invested myself in character creation. I skimmed through it, or perhaps I did spend a bit of time there, but not enough. A week down the line and there's something bugging me about my character; I've just spotted someone who looks great, and my pug nosed Imperial suddenly leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I have to reroll, it's either that or carry on playing with that unreachable itch on the back of my neck, bugging the hell out of me.

That will be the one piece of advice I don't ignore this time around. When my character is made, she will be checked, double checked, triple checked and finally signed off. I don't just want to be content or even happy with my Imperial; I want visionary perfection, or as close as possible.

Expect massive problems, expect much yelling and gnashing of teeth, expect the Sky to fall...zombies to rise. Expect Chat to be full of garbage, Expect Dragonknights will deathgrip every mob you're hitting away from you because they can! Let the wife go first and see what problem she has...Don't trust the wife! She never knows if that's how it's suppose to work or not.

Wait til mid may Dale...wait til mid may!

Find a guild.

Having a group of people in-game that you can group with regularly, and just chat with, will make the game way more enjoyable.

I couldn't agree more, Wooga.

I'm going to get into crafting, and the number one advantage a crafter can have is researching around the clock. It takes 6 hours by default to research a trait. That's 3 or 4 traits you can gain a day, and those are what will make your items worth making and buying. There's also a hireling skill crafters get, where every 24 hours they receive materials (some rare) via mail. From a crafting perspective, if you want to get ahead then you want to skill as quickly as possible to sink points into research and hirelings.

That means it's in my best interest to get a map of all skyshard locations, create a few different alts, and get crafting. But that's not the game I want to play. There's so much to explore, and so many quests to do. I'm going to have to work hard to tone it back at launch and take my time. I don't want ESO to be a numbers game, at least not until I've hit the level cap with one character.

My piece of self advice at launch/early access would be to be patient lol

Stock up on caffeine and advlt diapers.

Don't take days off from work, wait for a few weeks and see how stuff is. I love the game, but since I have played so many mmo's before, there is one general truth...servers might crash or something bad might happen. So if you wanna take some day off to no life in front of PC, do it once stuff stabilizes itself )

Be patient.

Don't try jumping into that pit the prophet is hovering over in the tutorial. There's no invisible wall...

thought about doing that too.

Whenever i will see idiots running around ruining immersion, i'll just tell myself sheogorath did it.

This is an MMO and for every problem fixed expect 3 more things to break. Learn to use Ignore...it will be your best friend until May 4th and then after that also. Take nothing personal and always bring a towel!

This was my first beta weekend and I am very much like you

I spent a good 45 minutes in the character creation screen perfecting my character's look. Once I got it perfect I took screenshots of all the sliders and sent them to my iPad so I'd have a reference. I even asked my wife to help me do a practice run recreating him. I want to still make him fast enough that I will be able to get the kickass name I have in mind!

One piece of advice I will be following is to join the fighters and Mage guilds right after cold harbour then go to the starting island.

What are ypu nuts?!! Its always a race, login game for three days straight, no shower, turn off phone, ignore family. Ding 50!

Seriously that will be like 25% of the pop come launch day..,

Lol!!! That was also my first character death...

Collect, collect, and collect some more. Take the time to go out of your way for that resource node, or explore a beach corner cause the chances of finding a chest are good and the value of using those resources later are priceless.

Also, as a personal preference, go heavy on passive skills when spending skill points low in level (after you've gotten a bar full of skills). Those passives make a big difference in combat gameplay almost immediately.

My best piece of advice is to COMPLAIN as much as possible to the devs.
Its what Americans do best! Eventually the game will mold to us!

Taking is slow and not getting involved early in AvA. I am avoiding the mmo crowds only interested in fotm builds in both pve and pvp. The RPG crowd from the TES series playing this game may suffer culture shock from the hardcoe mmo player base hitting this game. They will be using pvp min/max and even exploit builds very early on. When someone 1-2 shots you over and over again you will know when you ran into one of these builds. I will enjoy this game as an RPG game and slowly enter into more hardcoe pvp (which I actually do enjoy but prefer balance and fair play. I even reveal my builds as transparency offers the only real challenge. Secrets are for pansies). I prefer to level slowly as I'd like to enjoy several content additions and balance patches while still leveling my first character.

There will be people trying to hit max vet cap solely to benefit from current known pvp exploit builds and to become more powerful than the majority. This lack of self control and confidence in players is something I try to avoid at all costs. They are not fun people to be around. They are the players who scream and yell only for victory in vent chat and vocally let it be known that your one bad morph choice ruined the game for the entire raid.

I say this because I once was an old school rpg player early in the mmorpg days but the industry evolved into something else since and I once went along with it and was one of those players. I will never again make that mistake.