The Day After

I mentioned in the October 16th entry that during Barbarienne and Keerella's stint in the grave room at the far end of the Tomb of Theos "The gamesage ADISA also came in around then, but didn't stay long. I imagine she is a little high level for that room." I would have gone into the witness box to swear that she said something along the lines of "Don't worry, I'm not here to report anyone for wall-hugging", or words to that effect, but today Zenderfly informed me that she did in fact warn people to stop wall-hugging or they would be reported and banned, sigh. The forum posts about wall-hugging do generally say that it is game masters rather than no-good busy-body gamesages who have to be obeyed when they give such an instruction, but if I'd read the remark correctly, Keerella would have moved to the perfectly safe new location that Damor had moved to a few feet away, and that would have been the end of it.

Here's a quote from the forums by SupermanOX, one of the senior game masters, about wall hugging: "Do we ban everyone that does it, or has done it? No. Do we even ban those that do it frequently? No. We realize that this is a game flaw, and have requested that the dev's fix it. However it has been around so long, and is so common that we basically ignore it. So how can you get banned for it? Well, if a GM shows up, and tells you to stop doing it, and then you do it again, right in front of them... well, you might get banned. So the answer is yes, you should not do it, and yes you can get banned for it... but only if you want to make an issue of it."

Why Zenderfly, seeing that Kee hadn't moved, didn't tell me to move her, I don't know, but she assures me that the ban only lasts a week, though a repeat ban would be permanent. As you can imagine, I am a bit annoyed with her. And Barbarienne certainly won't be in any Tomb team-ups until Keerella is restored to us, that Combat party boost is just too useful. So, a week during which I don't get to use any expensive ap-bought items is okay from my point of view, but less good for Aeria's balance sheet.

On Cariae that particular account has almost all my best characters, except for Barb; however, on Auzura it's a pretty minor quartet, and mainly means that my low-level knight CALM, with all the spare quest items and transformation scrolls, is unavailable.

While there is a lot to like about Last Chaos, its community, and the events the game masters put on, the dark side is the "I ban because I can" attitude, and the way that any mentions of bannings in the shoutbox or the forums are quickly removed or prohibited. My rogue Rage was in a pretty promising new guild, where the guild master and one of the advisers were good friends offline as well as on. As it is only the guild master who can freeze or unfreeze the experience gain of members, while they farm skill points, when the guild master wasn't available he let his friend log into that account when needed to make the changes - and for that the account got permanently banned. They don't even let a guild adviser become the new guild master, so the guild itself was left in limbo, and that was the end of that.

I suppose the job of an Aeria Games game master is a bit boring and repetitive. with all those Request Tracker tickets to deal with, and that the power to mess with the paying customers gives them some amusement, but they really ought to behave better towards the people who supply the cash for their salaries, rather than banning people for the flimsiest of reasons. It can be heart-breaking to see in the shoutbox somebody from one of the poorer countries of Eastern Europe saying that they play in a local internet cafe, but because other people do too, the GMs thought this was "suspicious activity", and down came the Ban Hammer. There was a mass of bannings a few months back when Aeria sent out "gift codes" to most accounts, and then banned people who had multiple accounts and dared to use what they had been sent, gifting the packages to their main account, and with the Halloween codes recently, a youngster in the shoutbox was panicking because he had quite innocently done that with the two codes he had received, and already used both the Power Potions involved. Whatever is the point of "criminalising" one's paying customers?

Well, anyway, some pet-levelling got done this morning, and then after coffee over on Cariae-4 RedRackham headed for Prokion Temple. The rogue Karella was, um, not available, so I couldn't do a Combat party team-up, but luckily my level 21 archer Karanne had Prokion Temple on her memory scroll and, despite weak armour, was able to run to the room with Red, assisted by the Divine Shield buff, and, in an equal party, boost Red's experience gain usefully. She levelled up twice; while Red was still two or three percent below his new level the old computer "ran out of memory", which it tends to do after a while, but I didn't close the program, and even while in limbo, Karanne continued to provide the necessary boost - and added another 12% experience herself, I discovered when I logged her back in.

RedRackham reached level 35 just as lunchtime approached, which was handy; Cariae may have avoided the usual server shut-down at 11:10 UK time, I can't be positive as I made sure to stop fighting for a few minutes around then, just in case my characters could stay in-game. Red added 24.91% and, as did Karanne, 116 skill points.

After lunch Karanne spent her skill points rather easily, while RedRackham used 60 of them on Canid Fence 2 - and then they both headed for Prokion Temple on the PvP-enabled sub-server Cariae-2, where Red brutally attacked Karanne eight times, I think, to take his Good/Evil rating down to -155. Back on friendlier territory Karanne had to do some PvE-type dying to get back to the start of level 23, so that she can earn some more skill points without levelling up - she then got about eight skill points in her own right, before logging out. She joined Norcaine earlier, and Damor 50%-froze her experience gain.

We do actually have 50% extra experience and skill exp running for a few days at present; in many ways it would be better to have double one or the other, so that one could choose to play a character that needed either the levelling-up from experience or the skill points from skill exp. It does speed things up, at least, though some people complain that it reduces the likelihood of getting good drops, and it certainly does cut back the amount of gold that monsters let fall.

So it seemed like a good idea to return to the Katar version of Kaerella, and do the werewolf and little treant quests for Hunter Dranore a bit more, until Kae levelled up and the werewolf quest stopped. Kae also did the personal dungeon "Hunt the Balrog" quest a couple of times, and went out to Velpist Temple in Juno until she reached level 17. A trip to Prokion Temple out in Dratan's desert came next, where a kindly titan called LordCashe gave her the Battle Roar buff, which was rather useful while fighting the level 17 Ghouls and the level 19 Mummies, both of which were able to do her a fair bit of damage - and tended to snack on her poor hatchling too.

For some reason Auzura's usual five o'clock UK time "Mad Monster Spawn" has been put back a couple of days, though the US-time servers are still going ahead. They'll all be starting at ten o'clock by UK time, rather than rolling from one server to another; I doubt that it is a deliberate attempt to thwart people who like to roll along from one server to the next with it, I'm sure one game master can handle Cariae, Katar, Hatzring and Sarissa all at once, it isn't as if they do any fighting, just unleashing pre-programmed waves of monsters, or doling out similarly undemanding Hands as rewards. Ten is a little late for me, but if I manage to get this blog finished and published before then, I suppose Barbarienne can go out there on Cariae and risk another resurrection scroll or two, before the night's final bit of pet-levelling. RedRackham has taken over the training of the pet horse from Galahad now, and it is moving through level 34 quite well.