An Eventful Day

I logged on unusually early this morning, so SirGalahad arrived in Randol on Tairen-4 at least an hour earlier than the usual "before breakfast" time. The only problem was, an announcement immediately appeared, to say that the servers were coming down in five minutes, to solve "stability issues", brought on no doubt by last night's maintenance and new patch.

So, I had to log out without doing anything; a swift check of the Last Chaos forum shoutbox showed that as usual people weren't happy with the short notice, especially if they had been using hour-length potions, though as one person said, doing anything expensive like that soon after maintenance is always a bit risky.

The patch itself only offered a "fix to the special characters in character names issue

", the forum's patch thread informed us, though we are promised that the "Easter Egg" event will start next week. "We are waiting on a number of bug fixes for everything ranging from pets to titans

", the post ended. How true...

An hour or so later all the servers except Cariae were up and running - apparently it was Cariae's problems that had led to the downtime, so that "A number of the Cariae gameservers are getting hardware makeovers again

". So, SirGalahad was able to log in on Tairen-4, and head for Maargadum Jail to resume his pet-levelling, slightly later than usual - but any Cariae pet-levelling wouldn't be possible for a while.

Cariae was still listed as "maintenance" after ten, so instead of Galahad and his horse there, ColonelScarlet and his level 37 pink drake made a trip to Merac's bandits on Katar-4. I had work to do downstairs - and my work continued into the afternoon, so that I had only an hour's playing time, in the end - for which SirDarth and Keerella went to Prokion Temple on Sarissa-5 again.

After a while a level 24 healer, lostuno, came into the circular room Darth was battling orc soldiers in, and asked to join the party, so that worked okay - not that Darth needed any healing, with his armour, unplussed though it is, and rate of healing. Before the time was up she reached level 25; I think it was her lunchtime then, so she had to go, but SirDarth continued a little longer, with Keerella remaining out in the hallway. In all SirDarth added 75.22% and 98 skill points, while Keerella levelled up twice, adding 169.50% and 89 skill points - Kee must have been out of range for some of Darth's kills, when he and lostuno were fighting at the far end of the room.

The food break had to be taken early, as the first of the low-level Mad Monster Spawns was at 4:30, UK time, on Katar-5. My level 31 rogue Memree went along, and was about the only person there when things began. [GM]Darasuum, as he has tended to do recently, didn't really get involved personally, but he spawned the monsters, along with the announcement for people to come out and join in, and he spawned the loot, about 9 minutes later.

Cariae was scheduled to run second, at 5:00 - but when I tried to log Karella on, I discovered that the Cariae server was still offline. Apparently there were times when people managed to log in there, but they found many items missing from their inventories, and empty warehouse storage... hopefully the the whole server would be rolled back to before the last maintenance. So, there was a gap in the MMS schedule, until 5:30, when it was Sarissa's turn. While I was waiting, I logged Kaerella in over on Sarissa-5, did a few quests, and farmed the sand golems for soft sand, so that she went up by 72.45%, reaching level 26, and adding 50 skill points. It was a surprise how quickly I killed things - but then, I was using that borrowed level 29 +15 bow.

The Sarissa MMS was very similar to the Katar one, taking roughly as long and being pretty much by the book. Hatzring was at 6:00, so that was a job for Kaerella again, this time at level 24, and with a much less effective bow, so I had to be a bit less ambitious, and, if tackling an elite sand golem, Self Heal had to be used a time or two. I'd say the turn-out wasn't as high on Hatzring; it took longer to get rid of all the monsters, and Kaerella managed, with less competition, to pick up more loot.

The low-level MMS on Auzura at 6:30 was a really strange one. When my level 27 rogue RedRider arrived two or three minutes before the starting time there weren't just one or two other people - the place was packed with a very colourful crowd. [GM]JediMike presumably had issued advance notices for people to get there, and can't have stressed the "low-level" bit, as there were many high-level people there. We had multiple waves, which was good, but the high-level types killed them so fast that the rest of us hardly had time to kill more than one or two salamanders, or whatever.

Egged on by some of the people there, Mike spawned a wave of screaming zombies and flutons; if Red had been carrying more than 1 skill point I'd have been rather annoyed, as the flutons killed me twice. Still, the loot was fairly generous, when it arrived. But to kill flutons, there must have been quite a few exceptionally high level players there.

For Tairen, RedRyder, on level 31, got there in good time, and teamed up with the other two early arrivals - the level 40 mage Aztecka, and the level 5 titan Exlibiris, whose main characters were unavailable to him on Cariae, so was just there for fun. While Aztecka and I both capped him, we spent the next few minutes killing the great horn beasts, and managed at least to get him to level 6. But where was the MMS? Exlibiris and I both enquired in the shoutbox, and the gamesage there promised to check up, as it was already ten minutes past the 7:00pm start time.

It took a while, but finally there was an in-game announcement: "Sorry for the missed Low Level MMS, in return, meet at coords 223 1123 in Juno on Tairen 5 to talk to the GM's and get special prizes!"

So, quite a lot of people joined us, and [GM]JediMike turned up, apologising. There had been a meeting, apparently, and the MMS had slipped everyone's mind. Mike seemed distracted, not replying to very much that was said and vanishing for a while. The first spawning of loot came eventually - with all the people there I don't know why we didn't have a belated Mad Monster Spawn, but we didn't. The loot was snatched up so fast that hardly anyone got anything; I guess Mike must have been in a bad mood, for moments after commenting that waiting twenty minutes and just getting a tool aid wasn't much fun, I got disconnected, presumably by him - and disconnected again after a few seconds, back in Randol, before my second re-logging got me back in safely.

I gather that a few individual effort scrolls were dropped, to live up to the "special prizes" billing, and we did eventually get some more drops, of the regular kind, so that in the end I guess we all ended up with roughly what we'd have got from a proper MMS. And Exlibiris invited Aztecka and me to look him up some time, when Cariae is working.

That had actually run so long and so late that it overlapped severely with the first of the high-level MMS events, on Katar - but I had to log out for a while, as usual on a Wednesday evening. I did however manage to get along to the Auzura high-level event at 10:00pm, taking Rage, my level 73 rogue, along. It was the new-style throughout-the-valley style version, and [GM]Kali, returned to us after a lengthy exile in another Aeria game, Shaiya, was in charge.

It all seemed pretty scary to start with, and Rage did have to run for her life a time or two - something that had to be done carefully, since the whole valley was dotted with high-level monsters that would attack if one got too close. Finally I was able to fall in with a group clearing one particular part... it must have been the last part to be cleared, in fact, as we missed out on the first wave of drops because we were still fighting at the time.

A lot of people seemed unhappy not to get anything, or very little, and Kali did spawn some more goodies for us, luckily. So, Rage survived, and managed to grab a few goodies, so it all ended happily.

The Cariae servers did finally come online at about 9:00pm, according to the forum, too late for the scheduled high-level MMS there. "Cariae servers are now up and functioning properly. To fix the problem we replaced the majority of the hardware on Cariae, and Cariae is now running the most advanced hardware of all the LC servers. We will be updating hardware on all the servers in the next month or so to prevent future issues such as this.

"

SirGalahad on Tairen did manage to get the pale blue horse up to level 37 fairly early in the evening, and in one of the gaps between the low-level events, he and Kaerella traded horses, so that she, like Kae on Cariae, Auzura and Katar, is now able to ride around on a rare blue mount. Her previous mount has now been passed across to MistressDomino, at least for the moment.