Cariae Crash

I went to log Galahad in over on Cariae-4 for some pet-levelling, only to be confronted by the dreaded word "Maintenance" against every Cariae subserver. So, poor Cariae's troubles were not over, and the shoutbox was busy with people being told that yes, the server was down, and no, there was no estimated time for its return. Various forum threads reported that people had lost their entire inventories, or items placed in the merchant mart, or just all their gold and rare and ultra-expensive armours. Had there been, would there be, another drastic rollback? People were resolving to try other games, or at least to move to other more reliable servers - apparently Cariae has been losing a lot of its higher-level regular players lately.

When I did manage to log SirDarth back in over there, I wondered, would he will still have those platinum blessed irises he won last night - and will Kaerella still be a quarter of the way through level 65? Apparently the disconnection came with no warning, so that people were running expensive pots. The server must have come up again at least once for people to know that their inventories had been ravaged, before disappearing again - it was a messy business.

Cariae was up soon after eleven, UK time, but in the shoutbox the gamesages were advising people not to log in there, until it was known if the server was stable - and two hours or so later, the advice was still that it wasn't fixed.

My morning session involved SirDarth and Keerella on Sarissa-5, and a trip to the back room of Prokion Temple. Things were nice and quiet there, so by the time lunch was approaching, SirDarth had added 42.80%, along with donating 350 more guild points to Discipline, and Keerella was 26.69% up, donating 53 guild points. They had each earned 225 fresh new skill points.

After lunch, Memree and Kaerella over on Tairen had their own session in Prokion Temple. As the place was busy on the "main" side, we ended up in the mirror-image back room. Kaerella did start out picking up the loot, but after a while the two orc soldiers got fixed on attacking her, so she just stood and ignored them, as the experience for killing them is small and the skill exp tiny, and Memree did all the work, including taking any orc axemen or orc sergeants off Kae if they attacked her. It was another useful session, with Memree going up by 10.72%, which added another 238 guild points for Discipline, and Kaerella adding 9.16%, and 35 guild points. And their skill point stashes increased by 207 each.

Aeria's joint product manager for Last Chaos, Aeria_ks1lent, got into the office a little early, as one would expect with the Cariae problems, and was able to put up an explanatory post in the forum at 8:44am, Pacific time, or 4:44pm for me. It seems that while the majority of Cariae's server hardware had been replaced, as he'd told us, they had hoped that the old hard drives would last out until tonight's regular maintenance. Unfortunately, it looks very much as if they gave up the ghost early. "Our Data Center is in the process of copying over the data from the previous HDs to the brand new HDs as I write this. The estimated ETA is about 4 hours from now,

" so hopefully the Cariae servers would be back online at around 9:00pm UK time - just four hours before the usual maintenance downtime starts. Everyone, Aeria staff included, is hoping that no new rollback will be needed, it seems.

So, there was no Cariae playing for me today. The main evening session went back to SirDarth and Keerella on Sarissa-5, who were again able to take control of the back room in Prokion Temple - not that it's the only back room, it's a big place, but it is the one I favour. I did have a visitor for a while, a knight called tonino40, who was a bit over-ambitious, as he wasn't wearing the 30/32 armour set - in fact I don't think he was wearing the full 25/27 set, I'm sure there were some 20/22 items included...and he was using dual swords, so didn't have a shield to boost his physical defence rating.

Tonino40 didn't respond to my initial "a dangerous room" warning, just kept on fighting, often choosing the orc I was targeting. Well, he did ks a lot, but one had to admire his ambition, he even had the beginner skill and experience pills, the pssp and pbi, running. I gave him the divine shield buff when I could, and attempted to take any extra orcs he attracted off him, but inevitably he did die once... he used a resurrection scroll right away and continued, but did have to run for his life a few minutes later, pursued to the doorway by angry orcs. I hope he found some orcs that were more his own level after that.

By the end of the session SirDarth had got comfortably into level 34, adding 58.95% and 531 guild points, while Keerella had reached level 27, having gone up by 39.22% and 80 guild points. They each added 236 skill points. Kee was able now to put on the vanishing boots and tiara, so she is now wearing the whole +10 set, for a physical defence stat of 702, so she ought to be able to take on the loot-gathering duties now.

A little later SirDarth went to Merac to see what quests were available; a couple of errands earned him 8.08% more experience, and he also has quests to kill pilferers and bandits, and berserkers. While I was there, since one of the errands took him to the "column of magic", Darth continued along the road and got the bandit-fighting pet-levelling spot I've been using on some other servers onto his memory scroll.

Keerella spent all but one of her latest stash of skill points at the Master Mage skills trainer - all her passive skills are maximised now, but there are still four general skills, including the personal dungeon one, that still need a little work. She too got a quest in Merac, the first one there, which will involve killing butchers; there were no new quests in Dratan, but there was just time for her to kill enough ramians, alias death goddesses, and clever foxes of the desert to complete two outstanding quests, so that she gained another 12.90% and 71 more skill points.

Kaerella had been in Randol to provide the solo party for Kee's brief desert expedition, so when a special trivia quiz was announced at the arena, hosted by [GM]Cara, she moved over there. The first ten questions Cara answered herself, as they were general information - the other ten were general Last Chaos knowledge, and if enough people didn't come up with the answer, she would spawn a fluton or a patriarch botis.

I logged Kae out, and brought in MistressFelicia, a level 2 healer on the same account who had really only been created to supply Kae with a Juno NPC scroll (as Kae's creation was before those were introduced) - a character below level 15 can go into the arena without being killed by other players, though the monsters can still kill her. Kee did attempt to help fight a fluton, but some black-hearted titan was running around killing people instead of fighting the monster, so she respawned back in the middle of town, and hurried back to watch from a safe distance.

Once the questions were over, [GM]Cara spawned some hands of loot as a general reward; MistressFelicia was already in the arena quite near to one pile, which was handy as the lag then didn't really allow her to move much. She was able to pick up some useful large attack and defence potions, skill point boosters, and item drop boosters, roughly four of each. Kee ventured into the arena to a different pile too, but got maybe less than half as much. Some little dear did kill her, but not until the loot had gone, thankfully. Afterwards, Felicia traded her acquisitions across to Keerella, so that Kee will be able to sell them some time soon. There's nothing like some free loot to bring an evening to a satisfactory conclusion...