Friday 20 November 2009

The Morning After


We are certainly living in interesting times, after the mammoth patch last night - a lot of the game just isn't working properly today, though an emergency maintenance at around 9:20 this morning did put a few things right. Aeria's poor product manager, Aeriaks1lent, is left with egg on his face, as people gently enquire how so many dumb things could have escaped the attention of the GMs and gamesages when they tested things out on the beta server, but most of it probably isn't his fault, it's those wacky developers over in South Korea who have demonstrated rather low levels of care and competence.

It turns out that, for "game balancing" reasons, the devs changed the level requirement to create a NightShadow from 90 to 100, leaving the games masters blithely spouting the wrong information; some stuff, such as skill point costs of skills, have apparently defaulted to the original Korean game's higher numbers, and weird things like event weapons suddenly not being transferable have hit us. Pots are behaving strangely, with either their colourful animations continuing after use or no repeat use allowed. The WASD keys sometimes move one's character, and sometimes don't - and typing them when using messenger chat or merchant mart apparently causes you to move about too. Some seals on items aren't working, and character stats for evasion etc seem to have changed for some classes. Items that one should not be able to trade, such as party recall cards and berserker potions, can now be traded freely. Some people can't log in without getting an error message. And so it goes.

ColonelScarlet did manage to log in before breakfast, though at that stage there was only one non-PvP sub-server per server; I think he is managing to pet-level okay, and by lunchtime the pale blue horse reached level 26, but the Colonel's fighting animation is a lot slower than usual. He had to log out for the emergency maintenance at 9:20, UK time, but was able to return half an hour later, with a new patch to download.

Assuming that I do want to try a NightShadow, one thing I needed to do today was delete a character from the same account as Barbarienne over on Cariae, so I logged on as the Cariae version of the titan MrChuckNorris, and transferred most of his stuff, and the guild master position of the one-man guild Ironic, across to the healer NoWurries. One of the stupid bugs/changes presented itself, though, as I found that his event weapon could not be traded, or put into storage. It couldn't even be dropped or put up for sale with Roy! So I had to take a screenshot of that, and put a post into the "bug report" thread for Episode 2 on the forum. So, while everything else has been moved out, when the 24 hours grace end, poor Chuck will vanish, and take that sword with him. Luckily his incarnation over on Auzura should still be fit and healthy; the Cariae one never did anything beyond getting to level 20.

I didn't want to risk a main character this afternoon, particularly with people reporting that things like health potions were not always working, so my level 8 healer over on Katar, Barbarienne, had a session, mainly killing jaguars. Merchant Geres has a quest for collecting jaguar teeth, which is repeatable, and one addition I am in favour of is that the rewards for that quest now include 2 skill points, as well as 500 gold and some experience. However, other minor quests I did didn't have any skill points involved. Staying on the positive side, just a "mouse over" of one's inventory shows the details of an item, you don't have to click to select it first... and items of armour, and presumably weapons, people sell in merchant mode seem now to include the line about "able to use an extreme stone", though this may not be 100% infallible.

Barbarienne went down into Merac to visit ColonelScarlet, to get a little gold and also three accessories to add a little to her attack and evasion, and was then able to buy some better armour. Since Barb got the errand quest from Lorraine to visit Bant in Dratan, she ran out to Prokion Temple while she was on that map, and got that location onto her memory scroll.

By the end of the afternoon, Barb had got halfway through level 9 - and ColonelScarlet had moved past the halfway point in level 26 for his horse.

After the early evening food break, it was time for Kaerella on Cariae to go back out to the giants; I don't know if it was a bug, but the solo party I applied to join never responded. There was a disconnection, but I was just standing in a safe place, out of reach of the locals, checking my email at the time. When I logged back in, and HarD, who I'd been chatting to also reconnected, she kindly gave me a solo party, which improved things - but it wasn't to be a long session, as Damor logged in. By then, Kae had just added 0.78%, 5 skill points, and 159 pet points.

Damor had made a Night Shadow, and suggested a team-up with Barbarienne for the Tomb, so I went there, entered, and the Night Shadow, Merun, used a book of teleport to join me there. We weren't over-ambitious, we stayed at the start and fought screaming zombies, rather than rushing further in to find some bosses, and things worked okay, though as Damor, er Zenderfly, um Merun, hadn't yet plussed his armour, Barb did sometimes end up doing more healing than archery.

The NS skills did look rather cool, I must say, with purple beams of magic - and Merun at one stage told me to stop attacking one zombie, as he had made it his slave. And indeed, it did attack other zombies for us, though it was slightly difficult to make sure I didn't target our helper. The lighting in the Tomb isn't too good in places, but I think Merun's "slave" had a purplish tinge, which helped.

However, before long we both got disconnected, which is a shame when one has paid 303,000 gold to get in... and Merun hadn't had a chance to add the entrance's location to his memory scroll. Barb had added 0.25% experience since the last time I'd noted it down, but a monster spawn or zombie invasion may well have happened since then. Still, 3 more skill points probably came mainly from the zombies, and the 30 pet points would definitely have done.

Merun still had me as a party member when he logged back in; Night Shadows actually spawn in Egeha rather than Randol, so he decided to go off and do some work there. While the opening skills don't cost any skill points, Merun will, apparently, need 900 at level 93, which means some heavy-duty sp farming. He told me that a new Night Shadow comes with ten golden magnifying glasses in his inventory, as his starting armour needs to have its seals identified, which is a nice touch.

Kaerella then logged in over on Katar, and while I checked the forums, and indeed worked on this blog report, did some mining. One bug, out of the many, that had been mentioned on the forums was that mining hammers now have not 7200 endurance, but 0 - but this didn't stop mining an ore vein from producing the regular number of quality, imperfect and flawed stones. And after that, Barbarienne on Katar went out to the jaguars a couple more times, and got up to level 10; she also ran out to the Mad Monster Spawn location, to add that to her memory scroll.

The good points of this massive addition of extra content seem to be, as I mentioned, that you can see if a weapon or piece of armour someone is selling in merchant mode has had an extreme stone used on it, and that moving one's mouse over something on sale or in one's own inventory brings up the full description without having to click on it. And, um, some quests give a skill exp reward. That's about it.

Now that I know that there are no new low-level special skills to learn, Katar's Kaerella will be free to start power sp farming, but that wasn't really an option today, with pots not always working and disconnections stalking around. An unscheduled maintenance is, it seems, tentatively scheduled for later this evening, so there won't be any overnight pet-levelling again - though, even with his slower attack animation, ColonelScarlet should have got the horse past the halfway mark in level 27 by then.

Ah well, a "Morning After" does tend to bring its own headaches.

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