Making friends online is a double edged sword .. it allows some level of privacy but then when an online friend disappears you are left without really knowing what happened.

Such is the case with our friend Jed .. we first met playing Fallout 76 but when that petered out, a bunch of us moved to ESO, and four of us became a close group (The coffee and murder club we called ourselves) that spent years adventuring and tackling dungeons. Spending that time together in ESO got us all through COVID and we four became close friends.

Jed was our glass cannon .. could dish out a lot of damage but usually was the first one to die in a battle. Jed brought a few quirks to his battles .. first off he was in his 70s so admittedly his reactions were a bit slower, plus he only ever played in first person so he'd sometimes miss NPCs or AOEs behind him .. and to top things off, he was color blind! Despite that he was a great team mate and got us through quite a few scrapes.

Our team of four spent a lot of time going after harder and harder dungeons, sometimes taking a few tries to finally overcome that last boss to share that exhilaration, and some dungeons we never did quite conquer. I was the tank, so was usually singularly focused on the boss, but knew when Jed would go down when I'd hear his "uhh". Luckily our healer was great at herding us cats and generally was there to revive him.

Jed was our "resident Brit curmudgeon", he'd sometimes irritate people when he'd get in a "discussion" about stuff, but he never meant any ill will. I think it was a bit of a badge of honor that he got banned from the ESO forums a couple times. He'd remind me that us Americans were the ones with the accent since they (the Brits) had been speaking the English language longer. So I'd be sure to practice my pronunciation of "aluminum", "methane", "schedule", and "beta".

Jed's character had attained grand master crafter and he was always willing to help others out in game. He'd log in every day to do his writs, dig up some treasure maps, and kick about if others were around as well.

But our friend fell ill .. and then fell silent .. he hasn't been online in our discord server and he hasn't logged into ESO in awhile now .. and we miss him dearly.

If you have read this far, perhaps I can ask a favor ... Jed was rightfully proud of how he decorated his sweetwater cascades house, and it's still his primary residence. Perhaps the next time you log in, you could go into home tours and search on "jedt" to find his house, stop in to visit his masterpiece, and perhaps recommend it as a way to help us say goodbye to a team mate, a friend, and a brother in arms.