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Community creators Woeler and Alcast have just launched an all-new website, ESO-Sets.com. Working together, they have created a new location to find information about ESO's many item sets. We're thrilled to see the new site, so we reached out to both Woeler and Alcast to get the inside scoop!
There are many great community-driven websites currently available online to Elder Scrolls Online players. What inspired you both to come together to create a new one that focuses on ESO's many item sets?
The two of us have been playing this game for years, and we both set up our own websites with content focused on The Elder Scrolls Online previously. We already had a lot of contact with each other before we began this project, mostly because we had similar content on our websites and knew each other from the game, so we thought it was time to collaborate and create something new for the community. We felt that many of the other set websites are sometimes not up to date and do not perform well on other devices, such as mobile, so we took the challenge upon ourselves to set our website apart from all others.
You could say this is our pilot project working together, and if this works out, there might be a few follow up projects. ESO-Sets.com is now in its beta stage, and we have already received a lot of constructive feedback on our announcement videos and the eso-subreddit. Of course, this is just the beginning, we already implemented a few suggestions people made and will continue to improve it.
Designing and building a website like this is no easy task. How did you go about planning and eventually putting together ESO-Sets?
You always start with a concept, a model. Figuring out what types of 'things' or 'objects' you are dealing with. In our case, we had to come up with these. They are things like sets, armor pieces, crafting locations, builds, etc. Then you can define their properties (what kind of information they contain) and their behavior (how do they interact or relate to other objects). Then you can start programming.
The website is based on a system that is called 'Laravel', which comes with a lot of handy tools allowing you to focus on the logic specific to your project and not the trivial stuff like routing and database connections.
Planning usually came down to spending long evenings and nights on Teamspeak.
Did you have to manually enter each individual set? That could mean a lot of work!
Some parts of the website wereimported through a database. So we had most of the set bonuses already, but all the other additional stuff like descriptions, unique set items, locations, motif styles and so on had to be entered manually. This is a work in progress.
We love that so many people from the community have already sent us reports if they see a bug or something wrong with a set, and we have set up a bug report page on each set that it sends a notification to our discord, making it possible for us to act fast and fix it.
What sets ESO-Sets apart from other ESO community sites?
The site's design is unique, it's easily accessible, and it works 100% on mobile. It also has many unique features, and we plan to keep adding new ideas from us and the community.
Just to give you a few examples:
- 100% mobile ready
- Fast bug/typo fixes due to our report function
- Fast updates/integrations when new DLC/Chapters get released
- Advanced search functions
- Unique categories
- Certain sets have links directly to the builds where the sets are used
- Instant bug report function directly to our discords
- Direct feedback can be given on our discord
- High interactivity with the community
- Unique Wordpress plugin that can be used to directly link sets
- Unique API for developers of other projects and Discord bots
What updates and improvements are you planning to make in the future to ESO-Sets?
Like we mentioned earlier, we received a lot of feedback from the community and already implemented some of their suggestions. In addition, we also plan to implement more things like these work-in-progress features:
- Advanced search functions for certain types of armor, for example poison
- Reddit set discussions archive directly linked to our website
- Special unique descriptions for sets, how they work, and what's special about them
- Videos for set showcase directly linked
- Comment section
Once everyone is happy with the website, we will officially take it out of the beta stage. We will definitely let you know when that happens.
The website currently features builds created by the both of you and links to your individual websites, but are there any plans to link to other community builds, too?
At first, we want to get all the suggestions and improvements onto the website. However, we are already talking with some content creators to implement their builds into the website, too. The Plugin, which is already implemented for sets on both our websites, can also be used by other content creators if they choose to do so.
We will, however, also make sure that the builds featured on the site are of a guaranteed quality.
What has been the ESO community's reaction thus far to the launch of the new website?
AMAZING. This is probably an understatement. When we released our videos and the Reddit post, we got so much positive feedback towards the website. And because people have already seen that we implement new features and fix typos as fast as possible, they are even more excited to see what is coming next!
You're both well-established creators within the ESO community. What advice do you have for newer ESO creators who want to create and share their own content?
Focus on the positive and reply to constructive feedback and questions. Consistency is key. It takes months, if not years, to get a stable audience.
Any final words for the ESO community you'd like to share?
This is our pilot project, but you can expect more things in the future! We are both very grateful that this website has already been received so well, and we will continue to improve it until it is the go-to website for sets in The Elder Scrolls Online!
Thank you to both Alcast and Woeler for answering our questions. We can't wait to see how ESO-Sets grows with the community. Don't forget, you can check out the new site at ESO-Sets.com and find more ESO content on Alcast's and Woeler's own websites, too.
If you've enjoyed or even created something unique based on The Elder Scrolls Online, we'd love to share it! Send it to us on Twitter @TESOnline, Instagram, Tumblr, or Facebook.
