A Late Start

The week's maintenance did finally happen, a day late, "to make sure everything was up to snuff"... and when you tempt fate with a line like that, you just know there are going to be problems, right?

MistressDomino had managed to sell most of her Wednesday-farmed Wendy Bear pieces by the time the servers went down - 73 out of 111, so that was just over a million gold, at 14,500 each again. The remaining 38, just four different pieces, will just have to be either put away for a year or scattered around town. MD did actually sell four moonstone boxes too, so 195,000 gold each for them must be about a viable price... perhaps a bit lower if I want to sell them more quickly.

Anyway, SirDarth and SirPerivale logged in pretty early, with pet-levelling in mind. The gamesage TygerMist was in Randol, asking if anyone could form a party with her - and indeed it did seem that the party-forming system had been broken. So, I suppose it wasn't too surprising to find, next time I checked the computers, that the servers were down again for more maintenance.

Whatever the issues were, they were pretty serious, and the servers stayed down for some hours while the Aeria people worked to try and sort things out. The shoutbox was pretty busy for such a normally quiet time of day, for sure. Soothing messages like "GMs are just fine tuning a few of the bugs that popped up" would appear from gamesages, and be quickly washed away by the tide of other comments.

Finally, at 9;22, UK time, our main man, aeria_ks1lent, appeared on the shoutbox with the announcement that the servers were back up, so Darth and Peri quickly logged back in, and got back to their pet-levelling work. It wasn't long before Darth's pony reached level 8, and by mid-morning Peri's drake reached level 32. As it isn't going to be made into a mount, but rather take over as Rage's pet when her current horse reaches level 37, it doesn't really have to go much higher at this stage, but hey, it keeps Peri out of mischief.

Peri's "school uniform" armour cover, with the +1 bonus that using the "bonus books of melding" to meld them to his armour gave, can't actually be set to last a whole lot longer, as after 30 days it will disappear...hopefully not while he is in mid-battle with a Berserker. Today the countdown reads "expires year 11, month 6, day 25, time 0", but how that translates into real time I don't know. Darth's cover was applied relatively recently, and its message is "expires year 12, month 1, day 27, time 13"...

So, there was plenty of time for pet levelling, and by the time I was ready to plunge in more actively, Peri's drake was two-thirds of the way through level 32, while Darth's pony was up six levels since his last visit to the animal trainer, on level 13. It was at that point that the first plonker of the day came riding along, a knight in the "Italians" guild, "mrok" by name, who, as well as enquiring after the Grand Red Dragon, took the time to dismount and kill our two Berserkers before riding off. Peri did actually, in my haste to type, call him a "ploinker", which sounds even better somehow!

MrChuckNorris, my level 50 warmaster titan, and Rage (or more accurately "RAGE", all capitals), my level 60 ranger rogue, headed out to the Sphinx types, finding the place deserted, as it has tended to be lately - but it wasn't long before SugaRush turned up, in search of a few skill points. Not that she could have got very many, as she didn't stay long. I chatted with Ratel, mentioning MistressDomina's marathon yesterday, but it was only later when he switched to Thabitha that he discovered what I'd assumed he'd known about, the drop in experience freezing from 100% to 50%. He was not pleased, as that does rather mess up his plans for a number of characters,

My next visitors were DEATHKNIGHT7000, an assassin-type rogue (so she was wielding twin blades, rather than a crossbow like mine), and an archer called BADHEALER, who it soon became clear was along as her "minder", killing any second Sphinx Fighters that got involved. She soon got bored, and "mobbed" the Sphinx types, attracting around a dozen of them at a time, and inviting me to pick them off one at a time, which certainly speeded up my experience gain - though, I suppose because she'd been their initial target and was pretty high level, they didn't drop much.

Badhealer asked me what level I thought she was, and, knowing she was pretty high for around there, guessed level 90 - it wasn't exactly easy to tell as she was wearing armour with the Wild West style cover. I wasn't too far out, she was level 96. At my level she was fighting Screaming Zombies, she mentioned... well I have been there, but with the unreliability of Snare I can't say I fancy soloing them yet, and these joint outings with Chuck are more about levelling him up really.

After they left, who should appear, arriving cross-country rather than at the back end where people set their memory scrolls, but Ratel himself, escorting a level 40 archer called Chelsea.. They were doing okay fighting the Sphinx Fighters, but I messaged Ratel that, as long as Chelsea was at least level 40, I could transfer party leadership to Chuck, change the party to Combat, and team up with them.

So that's what we did. Perhaps as they'd not arrived from the tent end, they tended to stay in the Sphinx types' respawning area, which was okay for Ratel and Rage, but a bit dangerous for Chelsea, who didn't have our armour level, and sometimes wasn't 100% alert, perhaps she was being distracted by a television in the room, or a cat in need of some attention. She did die two or three times, but was using scrolls to avoid the bad side-effects.

We made a pretty efficient team, generally, with Ratel's (and Chuck's) buffs, Chelsea's Slow Shot and a bit of healing, and so on, and Ratel certainly kept going for at least half an hour beyond his usual log-out time. But then he had to go, and Chelsea left soon afterwards; I changed the party back to Equal to give Chuck a little more of a boost, and went on for a few more minutes, until it was time for me to log out too.

Chuck had gone up by 31.49%, and Rage by 24.32%, so those are quite useful and substantial figures; they each added 19 skill points, while Rage's horse gained 2210 pet points. It was time for me to get this blog sorted out - once I'd logged SirPerivale and SirDarth in for some more pet-levelling of course. It looks as if Darth's pony should reach level 14 tonight; Peri's drake won't reach level 33, but should only be an hour or so away from that. Let's hope that tomorrow morning things are running a bit more smoothly than they were today.