Day Four: This Time It's Personal

SirPerivale and CaptainScarlet were able to get back into Last Chaos towards the end of yesterday evening, and settle down to a little late-night pet-levelling... but the next time I checked, there had been another mass disconnection, and once again the forum ShoutBox was rather full of annoyed would-be players, GameSages spamming reassuring "thank you for your patience" messages, and the occasional harassed Games Master.

So, both computers got a nice night's rest, before the usual early start on the Saturday morning. The ShoutBox seemed quiet, so Peri and Cap risked the trip back to Merac and, thankfully, were able to start their work.

Ratel got in touch in the morning, and we were discussing whether it would be safe to put in another three-hour stint in the Tomb of Theos today. We came to the conclusion that, if the problem was based on Aeria sharing their broadband access with the current "Penny Arcade Expo" convention, or "PAX", then since that was in Seattle, any problems would be later in the day when the US had woken up, so an afternoon trip would be safe enough again, just as MistressDomina and MistressBlaze had farmed the Sphinx types yesterday without problems - that was my big mistake.

So, after lunch MistressDomina logged in, and got her next armour pieces from MistressFelicia, who had managed to retain all her loot and experience from her fox-fighting adventures, then got the titan pieces changed into their mage equivalents and upgraded to her usual levels. The gloves she could wear at once, though she was a whole level away from being able to put on the shirt and skirt.

Chuck had logged in too, ready, but Ratel, when contacted, informed me that he was already in the Tomb with the archer "Tanger", or "TangerificHeals", so Chuck wasn't required. So Chuck logged out, and CaptainScarlet went back to some pet-levelling.

MistressDomina entered the Tomb, where Tanger and Ratel were fighting a Screaming Zombie - actually, Ratel seemed to be doing all the fighting. I stood politely waiting to be invited into the party, until Ratty asked for help, and so I started to use Terra Spear on the Zombie and we soon finished it.

Looking back I think Tanger must have been having lag problems even then, but innocently Ratel and I both started Blessed Irises and the 3-hour elixirs for that extra 30% experience gain; I started a large crit pot too, and gave one to Ratel to try as well, reasoning that if it increased the damage he could do, I'd benefit as much as he did.

We did manage to kill a few Zombies, but before long Tanger vanished - so Chuck did get the call-up to join us. Luckily I didn't start any pots on him though. Soon it was MD's turn to lag out, though fortunately not when she was in battle, though Chuck and Ratel both remained unaffected.

Since we did have the expensive pots running, and, well, surely it was too early in the (US) day for anything bad to happen, MistressDomina went back again - it's lucky that admission to the Tomb is set to a bargain rate of 1.4k gold per level, instead of the more usual 3k. But this time her luck ran out, and a massive lag spike hit her mid-battle, so that, while Ratel was frantically urging her to run for it, and as far as MD's screen was concerned she was safely against a wall with about 300 health left, Chuck's screen showed her slumped dead in the middle of the corridor.

Strangely, the disconnection wasn't quite complete, as after a while the window with the option to use the resurrection scroll popped up, but despite hitting the "yes" button and opting for the nearest spawn point, it never actually worked, and in the end I had to log her out. Her stats window already showed that she had lost over 500 skill points...up 7.88% on the experience front, plus a few pet points, but down by 509 skill points - which works out at 2% of what had been her total number of unused skill points.

A forum thread says "it appears we underestimated the volume of interest that would be generated from PAX", which seems a bit of an understatement. I thought initially that Aeria must be having massive success with inviting people there to try out the game, but it seems that someone in Aeria had got greedy, and hired out Aeria's bandwidth to PAX, so that there wasn't enough bandwidth left for us loyal players - or maybe they genuinely thought PAX's usage would be too tiny to affect us and were just doing PAX what they thought was a minor favour. A bit of an "own goal" there by Aeria. "We have experienced some strangeness with some of our games due to high load", indeed...

Various attempts to log back in didn't get very far - at one point SirDarth was standing right next to MD close to the teleporter in Randol, though she'd disconnected some minutes earlier. And Darth disconnected as soon as he clicked on the teleporter. An attempt to log in with Cap looked promising, in that Randol seemed to be occupied and there were still merchants there, but moving towards the teleporter, the place grew strangely empty, with the non-player characters missing, which is an infallible sign of a disconnection or "lag out". The ShoutBox was as usual very busy.

When I checked later in the afternoon, UK time, Ratel was making use of his blessed iris and elixir in Egeha, fighting the baby Apes, which seemed a bit risky and expensive to me, but he assured me that "as long as I don't use teleport here, I'm fine." I wish he had been able to use it in the Tomb when MD was dying! As for me, I just logged Cap and Peri back on, and sent a "contact us" email to Aeria, to see if I could get back the pots wasted. The response came through after only two or three hours:

Dear Player,

We are currently experiencing issues with our servers and we are sorry
for the inconvenience this has brought you. Since you have lost some
items, we have gifted you with the following:

1 MP Stealer, 1 HP Stealer and 1 Platinum Adrenaline.

We hope you enjoy the items and will work hard to ensure greater
stability in the future.

- Team Aeria

That does look like a "form letter" sent to anyone who complains, as the items aren't anything like as useful as what I lost, but it's a reasonable if impersonal gesture, I suppose.

The game continued to be "up" but with frequent disconnections, and it was often hard to get back in, with "timed out" or other error messages. Once I logged in and only the Katar server was visible, but the attempt to start a first character on that account brought a couple of "timed out" messages at the creation stage, and then more when actually trying to start the character in the tutorial dungeon, followed by a black screen when the dungeon should have loaded for quite a while - the game was clearly still in all sorts of trouble. My new knight did finally make it into the dungeon, and killed a few skeleton types...before being disconnected. In the ShoutBox, GM SupermanOX was saying "Well, I am sure that there will be things learned from all of this, and that we will be reviewing how we host our services"...

It seemed pointless to keep on trying to connect, and even if I got in getting disconnected after a few minutes, so the bulk of the evening was spent playing Guild Wars, getting a couple of characters to the main mission hub in "Eye of the North", recruiting the hero Olias for one of them, and having a look round. It's certainly a lot bigger than Last Chaos's few relatively cramped maps, and with more modern standards of texturing, with a huge variety of items... but LC retains its own charm, and the co-operative player-versus-environment side of Guild Wars seems to have faded right away. If you want to do missions alongside other players, basically you are out of luck, which is hardly "massively multiplayer".

I did manage to log SirPerivale and CaptainScarlet back in at the end of the evening, but how long they'll remain in Merac this time, I have no idea...