My cunning plan to leave two characters overnight in the Discipline guild hall came to nothing, as there was an emergency server downtime last night - I don't think that there was a patch to cure any of the many glitches, instead what we got was a "partial rollback", to undo Aeria's blunder in allowing the Battle Books to have a ludicrously high price, 5.2 million gold each, when sold to an NPC. This was a known possible bug, as it had happened to the German version of Last Chaos some weeks ago, but Aeria were completely taken by surprise, and dithered over what to do, before deciding that they had to take all the extra gold out of the game by doing a rollback.
As the rollback was, at least, only "partial", the experience and skill points earned yesterday remain, thankfully, but loot picked up has vanished - which includes the lavish amount of goodies picked up at "Storm the Castle" last night. I thought I was doing exceptionally well with heaven stones in Prokion Temple, picking up five of them during the day, but they all vanished too, sigh...and I'd managed to get a few of those platinum drop boosters from the gift boxes too.
Aeria_ks1lent, the product manager for Last Chaos, is trying to make it seem that it's all our fault, of course, when it's an Aeria bungle, with a little help from those useless Korean "developers". Personally the only Battle Book I ever owned came as part of the package when I bought the Scra-Chi "human tribe" cat-like pet over on Cariae, but everyone suffers. I spent 3599 aeria points on a "75% rebate Super Rocker" package yesterday, and of course that package has vanished, while the ap are still gone from that particular account. It looks as if I'll get the ap back eventually, in theory, but not the bargain-priced package. The package in on offer again - but I currently don't have enough ap in the account to buy it! Apparently some people have lost their entire inventories, and a lot of pets have gone missing, so that people have to submit to the slow and unfriendly "request tracker" system.
So, another day of Aeria shooting itself in the foot, then. I was busy for the morning and first half of the afternoon, so Memree and MistressSabina just stood around in the Discipline guild hall, trying to get back some of yesterday's "gifts". And Zenderfly, back from a holiday, got in touch, suggesting a team-up in another Aeria game, Grand Fantasia.
I couldn't start playing until mid-afternoon, but once I was free and my client had updated, Zen, or Taldea, carefully and patiently shepherded me through the first seven levels of Grand Fantasia. The level cap at present is 60 apparently, and Zen's main character, a healer, is already level 33. What strikes me about the game is how friendly and colourful it all is, ideal for children too young for a more grown-up game like Last Chaos or Guild Wars - and yet how difficult and complicated it all is to master. Taldea said that she had had to do a lot of reading up on the game to advance, and I'm not surprised, it doesn't strike me as intuitive at all. Your sprite needs to go and mine some ore? There's no hint about how that might be done. There may well be some way of knowing how one is progressing through a level, but I never found it, and as for which icons should be dragged into which pop-up windows, well, you're on your own. There doesn't even seem to be a figure in your inventory showing what you have equipped.
The plan is to try some more sessions, but it is definitely not something I'd wish to specialise in. I might log in to attempt to get my sprite some more training, and maybe try to reach level 8, if killing baby dragons still gives me useful experience, but Taldea is going to have to be patient with me. On the positive side, I found that running GF didn't harm the LC window, minimised - once I closed Grand Fantasia, I could bring the Last Chaos window back up, to see what soon-to-vanish or unusable Christmas gifts the latest boxes would give.
The evening session involved RedRyder in Katar-1's Prokion Temple, using the Elizabeth's Enhancement buff. There's a handy room where mummies spawn along with just a single orc soldier, and nobody was using it when I arrived, so I avoided the soldier, and concentrated on the mummies. Before long, though, I was suddenly killed, one-hit by, I assume, a single crossbow shot. It was Suprgrl2 who did it, which rather surprised me, as previously I'd found her friendly and helpful. I had to go back to Randol to get the "Elizabuff" applied again, and when I got back I whispered to her something along the lines of, "Sorry if I've offended you, but why did you 1-hit kill me?" She apologised, and said that she had mistaken me for someone else - and while she was busy then, as someone she had been fighting was wall-hugging and she didn't want to let them get away, she'd come and give me something in a few minutes, to make amends.
So, all was well, and I didn't get pk'd again, though a few red-named people with the big "X" to show they were in player-killing mode did run past. I assumed Suprgrl2 might hand over a memory scroll or two, since I'd had to use one to return, or maybe some medium health potions - but what she traded to me a bit later was a pair of resurrection scrolls, and they sell in town for at least ten million gold each. So, a very nice gesture. I guess it is about time that Red started to have a res scroll active, though I'll start with the "beginner" ones, which have to be used before one passes level 35.
Anyway, I kept slogging away on the mummies and a few nearby ghouls - and if I failed to avoid the orc soldier, though I can kill them easily enough, I hurried back to the lobby to break aggro. It was a pretty long session, as I kept going until the three-hour "Elizabuff" expired; since ghouls and mummies don't give much experience, RedRyder just added 22.68% on that score, which meant 36 more guild points; however, it added a rather useful 512 skill points, so that, if I do another three similar sessions, or their equivalent, Red will have over 2000 unused skill points by the time she levels up to 26, which comes under the heading of "a good start".
The forum shoutbox was a busy place all evening, and there weren't all that many gamesages around. Apparently a couple of the most popular ones have been among people banned lately, so strange things are happening behind the scenes. A lot of people were complaining about the item mall packages they bought yesterday having vanished, while the aeria points used to buy such things had not been restored; it seems that the GMs are working to get the ap back to people, but people who had had a restoration were complaining that they'd got the wrong amount. Personally I wonder if people whose purchase of that 75% rebate package had been rolled back may actually get the rebate, of 75% of the original ap purchase price, in a week or two, which would be fun, if they have by then had the entire purchase price refunded.
Luckily there weren't any big events scheduled for today, as the GMs have their work cut out trying to sort out the fallout from that rollback. Strangely, as I was logging out, rather early at around nine o'clock UK time, an announcement came up that the APAC happy hour was starting, with that most unwanted of boosts for sp-farmers generally, 50% extra experience. Normally that's in the early hours of Friday morning, as far as we are concerned. As the "read more" links for such things are still just returning us to the website's front page, it is difficult to know what is up with that.
MistressSabina had been providing a solo party from the guild hall on Katar-1, and RedRyder went back to join her. The santa hats may not be much use at present as they can't be moved between characters, and most other things vanish from one's inventory when a character has to log out, but the platinum drop boosters are worth a little effort to acquire, and it makes a change from pet-levelling.
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