As I have picked up blogging as a result of cohost.org closing down, which was my previous outlet for publicly documenting stuff I was doing, I thought that it would only be fitting to dedicate my first proper post on here to one of the bots I ran on there.
“Tourist's Guide to Tamriel” started in April 2024 as “Postcards from Tamriel”, a simple bot that would overlay text on images from various locations of the Elder Scrolls Games. I wasn't really happy with how it turned out, so after reading a cool article rating the inns of Oblivion a new idea was born: Could I turn my bot into a sort of Tripadvisor for the Elder Scrolls games?
As with the Postcards I took the underlying data from UESP.net, by querying various location-related page categories and extracting descriptions and image links (shout out to the Mediawiki API).
The novelty of the bot should be its interactivity: Other people on cohost would be able to submit their ratings by commenting their scoring with the ⭐-emojis in the comments. One of the comments would then randomly be included in the post.
Overall, my scraped database contained a total of 8239 places from most of the Elder Scrolls games. Of these, 1854 were posted between April 28th and October 1st. Broken down by game the numbers look like this:
Game/DLC |
Posted |
Not Posted |
Sum |
Posted % |
Online |
869 |
4528 |
5397 |
16.1% |
Skyrim |
264 |
529 |
793 |
33.29% |
Oblivion |
249 |
494 |
743 |
33.51% |
Shivering Isles |
41 |
85 |
126 |
32.54% |
Morrowind |
225 |
391 |
616 |
36.53% |
Tribunal |
7 |
29 |
36 |
19.44% |
Bloodmoon |
33 |
50 |
83 |
39.76% |
Daggerfall |
37 |
73 |
110 |
33.64% |
Arena |
106 |
167 |
273 |
38.83% |
Redguard |
8 |
14 |
22 |
36.36% |
Shadowkey |
4 |
10 |
14 |
28.57% |
Blades |
11 |
15 |
26 |
42.31% |
Total |
1854 |
6385 |
8239 |
22.5% |
As one might see at the first glance, there are a lot of places in ESO. That's what made me add a line of code to the bot to run the random selection again if an Online entry was selected to balance things out a bit more.
In total, 443 of these 1854 received at least one of 619 ratings, with an average 1.4 comments per rated post – the one most rated place at 11 ratings is the Imperial City from Oblivion.
2166 stars were awarded by visitors for Tamriel's attractions. Since there was no limit on awardable stars, the single best rated place was the orc stronghold of Jathsogur with a whopping 380 given by a single review, with “one star for every wood orc” as our reviewer put it. For multiple comments, ratings were calculated as mean average and rounded down.¹ If we look at ratings between one and five stars, we observe the classic phenomenon that unhappy customers are most likely to leave a review:
Anyway, thanks everyone who enjoyed my silly bots in the past and especially those of you who helped their fellow adventurers decide which dungeon in Tamriel was worth their time. I'm currently looking into making a new bot posting pictures from everyone's favorite sci-fi horror movie that will go on bluesky and, if that should work, instagram.
What to expect from this blog in the future
I'm mainly going to use this blog as a kind of weekly update log on what I did for my many projects, as well as what I read, play and watch. The next thing however is going to be a proper introduction post to pin on the main page.
For comments and feedback just mail me at blog{at}germannukes{dot}de
¹Because I'm lazy and just did an int conversion