Server Attacks

I did try to keep the two pet-levellers working overnight, but it wasn't all that long before they had a disconnection, so a few hours were lost then, before I could get SirPerivale and CaptainScarlet back into action. Still, after that they were okay for a few hours.

There wasn't an opportunity for me to do anything more adventurous during the morning, so Cap was able to continue, switched back from the green drake to the higher-level pink one. The older computer got a bit noisy, as it does sometimes, probably because it had been switched on for rather longer than usual, so it was granted a rest for a couple of hours. The fans continued to be a bit whirry for a while, but thankfully calmed down eventually.

After lunchtime, the sorcerer Samael got in touch with Peri, and I asked him how he was getting on with levelling the pale blue horse - the answer, really, was slowly. He asked if I could level it up for him, which was fair enough, he really should have waited a few days and let me level it up in the first place before exchanging it for that level 24 green drake and a Stone of Shadow.

He was a little bit wary of trusting me with such a valuable thing as a level 27 rare pale blue horse, but the top-level DeathBringers player, the level 55 archer Lylja, vouched for me apparently, and I offered to loan him the level 24 horse I'd been working on, so that he'd still get a useful pet buff and not be risking much. He passed over the pale blue horse, plus four pan flutes as a bonus, and a platinum pet pill, in Randol, and I was ready to go back to work.

It was not very long after that, at approaching 2:40pm UK time, that all the Last Chaos servers crashed. It was the old story of timing out when trying to log in, and getting in only to find that half Randol's NPCs hadn't loaded, so that one reached the teleporter only to find that she wasn't there. I did manage to take Cap out to the Treants in Juno to try pet-levelling on them for a change, but that didn't last long before another disconnection... long enough to show that it is possible, if only for a change of scenery.

Ratel did come online in the early evening, and I warned him that it was a "don't start any expensive pots" situation, with the servers still unstable. "I might go to Proki a bit later, but no way are any of my mages venturing online until the servers are safe."

Sadly even using the Messenger system seemed to make disconnections more likely, so chat was a bit constrained; Ratty was slightly annoyed that he hadn't known about my birthday before reading about it on the blog. Peri seemed better at maintaining a connection than Cap; they were in a solo party with Ratty, and after a while only Peri was still there. Ratel later reported that he had had a "bad disconnection", but had managed to avoid dying.

Later, after Peri had managed to pet-level for a little while, SirDarth logged in, joined up with Peri for the solo party, and headed for that familiar back room in Prokion Temple. Before long, Ratel's archer, Jacqueline, came online, and we decided to team up in that room, as neither of us kills as quickly as a mage, so with any luck there would be just enough Orcs to go round. And so it proved - until Jacqui reported bad lag at just after 8:15pm UK time. A minute or so later Peri disconnected, and I couldn't log him back in - and then the message came up that the servers were coming down for "a quick reset". Jacqui immediately vanished, and two seconds later I got disconnected too. Not much notice of the reset, then. Looking on the forum, Aeria_ks1lent had reported that "Our network is under attack again. We are working on solutions for the issues right now." "Do not use ap items until further notice", a message in the shoutbox was warning.

Well, that was about it for my evening's entertainment; as usual, people were reporting in the shoutbox "already logged in" error messages, and "timed out", and getting into Randol only to disconnect 30 seconds later. And then the engineers were apparently hard at work, so I left them to it. Even at ten o'clock all the Auzura sub-servers were marked as down for "Maintenance", so there was no chance of doing any overnight pet-levelling this time.