Another Warm One

Thursday was another "phew what a scorcher" day in sunny old England, and what's more, I'd temporarily forgotten that I was liable to be busy downstairs for most of the day. Still, SirDarth and SirPerivale are always able to continue their work, so while the skill points and experience weren't being added to, at least the pet points kept rattling in.

The new patch was a pretty big one, and the full announcement confirmed that the big "Uncle Sam" style top hats are involved in the "Independence Day" event, as well as "Stars" and "Stripes". Unusually, the game reset some of its basics - the window size was back down to 1024 by 768 pixels, which, while that was the size of the first LCD screen I had, a few years ago, looks a bit small on today's widescreen monitor. It was easy enough to reset the size option, though. I'm not sure if it's just a reset of one's preferences or not, but typing by default goes straight into the text box now, without clicking or using "enter" - if you want to bring up one of the game's windows, such as the "D" equipped pet details, you have to involved the "alt" key as well. This is perhaps better than starting to type a message and not getting it into the text box, so that all sorts of unwanted windows open and close.

So, there was no morning trip today to Prokion Temple for MistressDomina, and no sunny afternoon with the Sphinx Fighters and Sphinx Speer Men for MrChuckNorris. SirPerivale did manage to get his horse up to level 36 by coffee time, however, so the final level is now under way. Darth's horse reached level 29 soon after that; as, with his current armour, Peri can only level a horse at the Berserkers comfortably from level 31 on, when it can give him all 30 levels of Armour Increase, the timing seems pretty good there. Once Darth's horse has been moved across to Peri, I think there was a guildie who was asking to have his current pet given a few extra levels...

In the early evening, I moved SirDarth across to the Auzura-4 subserver, as it tends to be quieter - and Peri took some time off, while MistressDomina made a belated trip to the Auzura-4 Prokion Temple. Despite the rather more popular time for playing, the Temple was generally not very busy, and both the "corridor room" and my favourite back room were free. So, MD settled in with her super skill pill, and got 262 skill points in the hour, plus 13.70% experience and 940 pet points.

Stavanic/Steve was online in Prokion Temple too, but he was in Auzura-3 and finding it a bit busy - he, as his level 20 healer GuildHealer, and another player had had an argument about who was ks-ing whom, and he returned as his knight to continue the discussion, though in a non-lethal way as it's not a PvP sub-server. The other player was gone by then, though. He asked me to check if a particular room, with just Mummies and one Orc Soldier, was free on Auzura-4, and as my hour was just ending, I was able to wander around until I found it, and assure him that, while I'd had a chat with a couple of rogues there, they were just passing through.

So he moved over, and got Darth to give him a solo party, while he used a ten-minute effort scroll, at least.

Steve has, it transpired, started a new guild, as well as the DeathBringers guild that SirPerivale is in; this new one is called FantasyWarriors, and he needed one of my characters to join, for the same reason that Peri is in the other one - so that he can transfer, via me, the guild master position from one character to another. As he'd used my storage titan Cyborg (obviously a teen titan) before to transfer items and pets, it was Cyborg he wanted me to log in.

So, his titan Fanfrit recruited Cyborg to FantasyWarriors - he made Cyborg a Guild Adviser, but he couldn't make him Guild Master. I knew that you needed a level 10 character to start a guild, but it seems that the minimum guild master level isn't just for upgrading, it's for all the time, so poor Cyborg, at level two, wasn't qualified to become GM. Still, Steve isn't easily stopped - he changed over to GuildHealer, who currently has custody of the level 34 mount I trained for him, teamed with Cyborg, and we went out to the Sasquatches. GuildHealer would apply the horse buffs, much as Chuck did once yesterday for Fanfrit, and then leave the party, while Cyborg did some killing - and killing level 12 critters at level two certainly makes you level up quickly! It didn't take very long to outgrow the Sasquatches; as long as the horse buffs lasted I was fine, even though Cyborg had only the starter armour and sword, and even after putting what he could into storage, was still slightly over the 100% for his inventory's weight, and thus a little low on dexterity. The level 17 Elder Werewolves were our next stop, once the Sasquatches were no longer red-named for me - I even managed to kill the level 27 Blood Wolf they guard a couple of times, though he was able to do me quite a lot of damage.

GuildHealer had a disconnection when I was in level nine, which slowed me down rather, but Fanfrit arrived after a few minutes, at level 10, and together we killed a few more Sasquatches until Cyborg levelled up. So then Cyborg was momentarily, successfully made Guild Master, before passing the position across to Stavanic, who has temporarily left Norcaine for it. Steve's guild enterprises seem pretty complicated, but then, so are mine, with my own guild, plus Adviser status in Norcaine, Rage active in DreamingRequiem, SirPerivale in DeathBringers, and now Cyborg in FantasyWarriors, to say nothing of the Cariae server's guilds.

Cyborg only had about 36 skill points in all, so was only able to get the first couple of levels of four useful passive skills. Well, I doubt if he'll go any further, unless Steve has some reason to power-level him to twenty. being level ten meant he could go to Lorraine to get his first "treasure chest" opened, and he was in luck there, he got five of the valuable Candy health and mana boosters. He had also picked up moonstone boxes, plus stars and stripes, along the way.

After that it was nearly logging out time anyway, so the plan was for SirPerivale to join SirDarth at the Berserkers. Darth however had two Pandora's Boxes close to him, jigging around anxiously, so they had to be opened before Peri logged in. Sure enough, the first one unleashed a level 50 Beast - the second one, which Darth was able to hit as he strategically retreated, just gave ten small healing potions. Darth's horse did lose 5 health before Darth managed to unequip it - he raced to the bottom of the hill leading towards town, but the Beast, as its equine target had vanished, didn't follow, and Darth was able to equip the horse again and continue working... while Chuck logged in.

Chuck rode down and dealt with the Beast, getting 77,600 gold this time, and then SirPerivale was able to replace him on the newer computer. It looks as if about three more hours tomorrow will see his horse reach level 37 - and Darth's horse should have reached 31 about an hour before that, so all is going smoothly on the horse-levelling side here. Except when people come along and kill the Berserkers Darth and Peri are sparring with, that is. That did happen a time or three today, once I saw the culprit, a rogue called Sp33dy, who actually got a Hand of the Guard drop from one kill. The weather forecast does say that things should cool down a bit over the next few days, so, once I finish the downstairs work tomorrow morning, hopefully I'll be able to do a bit more playing tomorrow.