My duo of pet-levellers didn't last long last night, as could perhaps have been expected. I logged SirPerivale and CaptainScarlet back in at their normal bright-and-early time this morning, but again, they were plagued with lag, and disconnections followed after a few minutes. I did try again a bit later, at around what would during the week be breakfast time, and they managed to keep going; by around nine in the morning, UK time, Peri's drake was a third of the way through level 21, while that pale blue horse that Cap has been working on was slowly approaching the half-way mark in level 36.
Normally, that is the final level, but I think it is about time I sold another horse, rather than just passing it on to one of my newly-levelled characters, so I'm thinking of going on until we reach level 38 this time, which would allow a mount to learn one extra skill, "horse crying". It's not anything I've ever found useful, the ability to attract nearby monsters, but there are people who like to have it, or, from a different skill, a bit of extra health while riding.
The theory was that with any luck the lag would settle down while America is asleep - though that is what I thought yesterday, with disastrous consequences for MistressDomina's skill point total.
This morning I actually saw an in-game announcement: "ATTENTION: We are aware of the lag issues and DC's. Please visit the forums for up to date information. Thank you for your patience." Not that there was much information on the forum, but, it shows willing. That seemed to be the only GM-spam message in rotation.
After coffee, it was time to send Galahad and JohnWellington to Prokion Temple on Auzura-3, on the general feeling that their armour was strong enough to keep them alive during a disconnection, even if a number of Orcs kept bashing away on them. John went first, and found, not surprisingly, that the back room was free, so Gal followed. It wasn't long before John had a disconnection, though - things had suddenly gone very laggy for both characters, with items not being picked up and Orcs not being hit, though naturally the Orcs could still hit us. Galahad survived, and, after the usual series of failures, I finally managed to log John back in, so that he was able to hurry back. They both fought the Orc Sergeants and Orc Axemen there, and it went well - though Gal got a disconnection at a quarter to twelve, UK time, and, for a change, a few minutes later John got the old "run out of memory" error, so the session came to a slightly premature end.
Galahad had added 9.15% experience by then, and 150 guild points; JohnWellington got 12.90% and 145 guild points. They got 87 skill points each, too. On the guild point front, another dual session like that will be enough to get Discipline's total back up over 5000, enough for the "expension of the guild" skill. Luckily that sort of guild skill doesn't require the guild master to sacrifice any skill points.
Ratel was happy, he had been doing really well on the Baby Apes in Egeha, and looked set to overtake MistressDomina soon, if he hadn't done so already. He has had absolutely no problems in Egeha, getting plenty of gold from drops, and a useful shield for his future use. Apparently the Grand Gold Dragon did show up at one point yesterday, unsurprisingly, but he was in a general "solo party", and a level 96 party member came across to deal with it. At 11:30 this morning, my time, presumably an hour later for him, he was confident enough to start another three-hour Blessed Iris and 30% elixir. He had sold all his heaven stones from last week's quiz at 3.5 million each, and spent the proceeds on three large crit potions, so the plan was to use them during his three hours, so that he cut through the Baby Apes like a knife through butter. Indeed, at the end of the second hour he reported that he was on the 98% mark, and then levelled up shortly after.
So, plain sailing for Ratty, though my pet-levellers in Merac, which was probably just as quiet as he was finding Egeha, did continue to get disconnections every few minutes, despite of course not using any skills. "2.3 mil accumulated so far, and eight armour pieces", he reported to Cap, soloing the Berserkers after Peri had another disconnection. And soon after that Cap had another disconnection himself, and I gave up on Last Chaos - until the time for the regular weekly Quiz approached. Would our connections last long enough, or would it all descend into chaos?
CaptainScarlet tried some pet-levelling in the evening, and disconnected before long; when I managed to get him logged back in eventually, he did manage to stick around for a while. That was on the older computer, while on the Vista one I was busy in Guild Wars again, mainly cleaning out the Northlands in Pre-Searing - not that the four boss Charr dropped anything rare, but it gave my level 14 ranger a little more experience and some useful loot.
I logged Cap out at about 8:15, UK time, as it is always a good idea to restart the game before the Quiz - and couldn't get back in, timing out every time. I couldn't log Kaerella in, either. Restarting the game brought up the announcements, and for a change it wasn't just GM events and item mall bargains, we had "Network Issues" as the latest item, and following its link got us to a forum announcement, "Network Issues Explained", by Aeria_ks1lent, LC's product manager, saying in part:
"We first noticed a large influx of traffic early Friday (9/4/09). We attributed this traffic to our exposure at the PAX expo as outlined by Superman0X . The initial assumption proved to be false and the cause of these issues turned out to be malicious and targeted in nature. We began to suspect malicious intent early Saturday morning as the unusually concentrated traffic failed to abate. Our suspicions were confirmed this evening (9/5/09) when we received a threatening email and set of demands from the malicious individual who is behind the attacks on our servers. Before and subsequent to this discovery we have made a number of changes to our network infrastructure to mitigate the outages on Last Chaos. We continue to monitor the situation closely and make improvements to our security and network configurations. We will continue to work tirelessly to solve this issue and bring back Last Chaos to the stable game you have all come to know and love.
"With your support, we will overcome this obstacle. Last Chaos was one of the most popular and fast-growing MMORPGs before this attack and we will be even more successful after it. Prepare yourselves for the fanfare of events and fun that will begin upon the elimination of this current threat.
"See you in game!"
All of which puts a different complexion on things. For a start, it gets rid of the "Ah well, once PAX is over everything will be back to normal" assumption, sigh... Some people in the ShoutBox were having a hard time believing it, but it makes a heck of a lot more sense than the idea of tens of thousands of people at the Penny Arcade Expo relinquishing their current games and all logging in to Last Chaos en masse, and thus overwhelming the servers. Denial of service attacks, usually from the sinister "botnets" of infected computers, have usually been aimed at large commercial websites; they are sent so much traffic that they crash, and then the owners are told to pay up if they don't want more of the same. To target a game like this seems especially nasty - it does seem that Last Chaos is the intended target, and any problems with Aeria's other games are just overspill.
Well, CaptainScarlet had got that pale blue horse almost three-quarters of the way through level 36 before he logged out; and about an hour later he finally managed to log back in. There hadn't been a Quiz, which was just as well as most people wouldn't have managed to get there, and those that did would probably have disconnected halfway through. SirPerivale logged in again too, and that's the situation at the moment, but with the situation as it is, I doubt if they'll stay there very long. At the time of writing, Peri's drake is a little way short of level 22, and Cap's horse has just passed that three-quarters mark.
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