Saturday 19 June 2010

Triangle Balls and Screaming Zombies


While RedRyder on Hatzring managed to sell her soccer balls late in the evening, it took a while for the golden balls to go as well - she had to go most of the way through the night for them to go, even though, surely, golden soccer balls ought to be worth ten times what the regular type sell for. But when I checked, everything except a single large defence potion had been sold, and Red's supply of gold had moved from 595,690 to a more encouraging 47,300,890. Which was the general idea.

RedRackham went through the night levelling his drake. For some reason the game tends recently to get ornery after a long session without any camera movement, so I had to restart it for him at breakfast time. And that, currently, involves using the Task Manager to close a "not responding" program. Still, RedRackham was soon back in action, and continued through the morning and through the lunch break - by then the drake was well into level 25.

The main morning session, however, involved RedRyder again...though this time not at level 24 on Hatzring, but at level 38 on Sarissa, so the triangle balls were dealt with rather more speedily. After using the Juno NPC Scroll to teleport out to Hunter Dranore. RedRyder got into the usual routine of racing round the triangle, dealing with each of the three triangle ball spawning points in turn, and by lunchtime had got over 170 soccer balls, and 8 golden soccer balls. Red stayed logged in over lunch, so that whenever I checked up on the drake-levelling, she could take the opportunity to shoot another ball. And then, before logging out, she transferred her loot to MistressDomina.

For the afternoon session, I decided it was time to head back to the Tomb of Theos, this time over on the Auzura server, where I needed to get my archer Kaerella up a level, to 87, so that she could start to wear the whole of the 85/87 armour set. I'm still being held back by the failure to find her a level 85 +15 bow - but if she teams up with Rage, my level 92 ranger-type rogue, this isn't a problem.

So, Rage checked in, and teleported to the Tomb entrance to see what the condition was - and found it set at about 90% towards the easy end, which seemed quite good enough. So Kaerella joined her, and in they went, to find the place pretty quiet.

For the first hour, Kaerella used one of the new level 61-90 platinum blessed irises, but I soon noticed that this wasn't giving her three times the experience Rage was getting, it was more like just 50% more. The Auzura server was having a double skill exp and experience "event", probably left running from the previous evening. So, I didn't bother to use any further pbis after that... Rage used a crit potion to boost her rate of critical hits for the first hour too, but just took things as they came after that.

During that pbi-enhanced hour Kaerella added 21.37% experience; there was just time for a little under a second hour before the early evening food break, and another 11.35% came in then. Rage added 4.64% over the two hours, which just shows that level 92 is rather longer than level 86, and they each got 12 skill points. Rage's drake went up by 1537 pet points, and Kae's drake, SirFrancis, added 941 pet points.

After the break the campaign continued. An all-server "happy hour" was due to start at six, UK time, and run for four hours, with 50% extra skill exp and experience, and it began promptly...the only downside to that was that it actually decreased what we were getting on Auzura, but it was still useful, and it wasn't too long before Kaerella levelled up at last. Before the end of the evening both drakes reached level 39, too - Rage's drake added 2923 more pet points over the evening, and SirFrancis went up by 1635. Kae's attack speed is a little slower, and generally she started to attack each screaming zombie a little later than Rage did.

We continued after Kaerella reached level 87, and in all she went up by 35.33% during the evening, while Rage earned another 6.46%. They each got 17 more skill points. There were a few other players in the Tomb by now; a low-level character got power-levelled by a friend, another rogue was busy fighting masses of zombies at once, helped by a health stealer and a mana stealer, an archer was carefully soloing the zombies and using quite a few health potions...but we generally all had enough targets, and stayed on top of things.

Back in Randol afterwards, Kaerella was able to trade her old 70/72 armour set across to MistressDomina, my level 67 mage. MD already had one 70/72 set, the one Rage had worn, but that one was generally +13, while Kae's averaged out at more like +14...so MD passed the rogue set across to my titan, MrChuckNorris, and kept the better set for herself, as mage armour isn't as strong as its titan counterpart. At around half a million a piece, Collector Ryl converted the armour into the new classes - which meant that MrChuckNorris increases his physical defence from 1894 to 2349, and MistressDomina's armour goes from 1633 to 2117. I guess they will soon be teaming up in the Tomb themselves, though MD may still need some 24-hour platinum refining stones to boost her defence. Once she reaches level 70 of course, she can learn Chaos Nova - she has plenty of skill points for all its levels, and any other skills that come along.

I'd been keeping an eye on the forum shoutbox during the afternoon and evening, and trying to be helpful there. The gamesage Faenwyn had put in a marathon session - at one point she was just about to leave for a bath and then some shopping, but she got bogged down for quite a while longer. In the evening, the Cariae server had another of its crashes, so it was very lucky that I had decided to play on Auzura. The crash had its own legacy of problems, with as usual some people losing items... people who had been in parties were "stuck", unable to join a new party because the server thought they were still in the old party, and even the advice from the GMs to log out for 15-30 minutes didn't always seem to sort that out. The crash had ended the "happy hour" bonus on Cariae, though that over-simplifies things...people in the shoutbox were adamant that they and their guildies weren't getting their 50% extra, while the GMs that Faenwyn contacted were sure that the bonus was still running, and got a bit annoyed with poor Fae for relaying the complaints. It was probably the old problem that people needed to relog to get back in touch with the bonus, which isn't too clever if you are in some place that was difficult or expensive to get to. [GM]Ozymandias actually logged in and fought some appropriate-level monsters to check that things were working properly again.

MistressDomina on Sarissa logged in to do some selling, later in the evening, and, as has tended to happen, someone bought all the soccer balls before too long. A fair price for them on that server seemed to be 200,000, so selling the entire stock brought in 35,800,000 gold in one go. That still left the golden balls, which I'd priced at 1.95 million each; I'd learnt my lesson from the other servers, and not converted any tens of soccer balls into the golden variety, so I had just got the nine of them I'd picked up.

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