A Pale Blue Screen

Cariae's Kaerella and Barbarienne, plus Auzura's MistressSabina, started the attendance half hours today, and were followed by Auzura's Kaerella plus the Twisted guild members MistressDomina and Rage, who all did a little mining to pass the time. Then SirGalahad completed the set, also mining some stones, and CaptainScarlet was able to start his pet-levelling for the day, getting past the halfway mark in level 48 for his drake before lunch.

MistressDomina tried killing a fox at the end of her session, to see if by any chance last night's double skill exp was still running - and found that not only was it still on, but we had double experience as well. My theory was that, instead of switching off the skill exp happy hour last night, a GM had turned the double experience on by mistake...

So, it seemed a good idea to let MistressSabina have a morning session with the giants, while RedRackham logged in on Auzura-6 to provide her solo party; he was on, in Maargadum Jail, just long enough to get his horse into level 33.

Double experience and skill exp doesn't actually add a huge amount to MistressSabina's experience and skill point gain, since she already has the doubling effect of the Elizabeth's Enhancement buff, and the maximum, without individual boosters, is 150% extra, but it did help things along a little, and Sabina added 14.74%, 87 skill points, and 864 pet points. Picking up 22 assorted weapons got her inventory weight up from 60.68% to 147.62%, rather too close to the 150% maximum to allow her to pick up anything else, so she had to make a trip back to Dratan City to sell things. She went back out and got some more drops, so that in all she earned around 9.4 million, before lunchtime came along.

The plan for the afternoon was for Kaerella and Barbarienne, over on Cariae, to have another session with the ancient grey mummies, but when Kae reached the Tomb entrance and checked with Tomb Guard Atum there, the condition of the place had fallen to 60%, which would have made progress rather slow, so instead I logged in my level 44 version of Kaerella on the Katar server - only to find that the double experience and skill exp had been switched off. A check on Auzura confirmed that it wasn't just a matter of different rates on different servers, it was entirely gone.

So, in the end RedRackham went back to Jail, and MistressSabina made the party with him again, and teleported out to the giants again. This wasn't a very long or intense session, but Sabina got another 4 million's worth of weapons, along with 9.59% experience, 62 skill points, and 711 pet points.

After the food break, MistressSabina briefly returned to the giants, mainly to use up an ignition run, adding just 1.87%, 12 skill points, and 137 pet points - but then I wanted to check the condition of the Tomb of Theos on Cariae-4 again, so Kaerella logged in over there.

The Tomb had been reset, thankfully, and was at 80%, so Barbarienne logged in too, and my pair of healers headed for the ancient grey mummies room, in time for the last half of the five to six o'clock dungeon time hour. We continued there - but Kaerella's computer got an error, and the entire screen went pale blue. Luckily Barbarienne was able to heal her a bit and kill the mummy that was still attacking her in-game, but the only thing I could do was restart the new Windows 7-running computer, and have Kaerella hurry back to the Tomb.

The price of admission had been cut today from the usual 3k per level to 1.4k per level, so Kae still came out ahead, and the problem didn't recur - a web search for "pale blue screen" revealed that this was a known problem with the particular graphics card and Windows 7 64-bit, and luckily a hotfix had been made available - at www.megaupload.com/d?=ENGNXGQ0. So I downloaded that, and made preparations to apply it later.

By the end of the evening, thanks to double experience being our event of the day, Kaerella had earned 3.82%, 47 skill points, and 4190 pet points - enough to take Cariae's SirFrancis into level 54. Despite having her experience gain halved by the guild freeze, Barbarienne added 3.19%, which took her into the start of level 111, and 47 skill points, with the polar bear cub reaching level 22.

The forum shoutbox had been fairly busy today; there was a special "watch advertising videos to earn aeria points" deal going on, which unfortunately didn't apply to us non-Americans, but did rather overwhelm the Aeria billing server, with all the tiny transactions it generated, so that people were unable to buy aeria points. It's easy to be wise after the event, but someone ought to have realised that there would be a massive amount of traffic generated by that. And now the weekend approaches - what new delights await us?

Once again, CaptainScarlet had kept going, levelling Auzura's SirFrancis; by the end of the evening the drake had passed the 80% mark in level 48, so he's still a fair way behind his Cariae namesake. Tomorrow's event is scheduled to be some double pet experience, so that ought to help move things on to the next level.