Auzura Crashes

The first thing I did in the morning after breakfast was to empty one character's inventory on the Cariae server, and then delete her. It was a tough choice, but "NorcaineMerchant" never did much actual selling, and just had the usual mixture of accessories, weapons, pieces of armour, production manuals, and oddments in her inventory. So, the storage space on that account had room for most of the armour, and a few other characters had their last inventory spaces filled, before that particular level 20 mage was deleted. The process takes 24 hours, but then I'll have an empty space, which I would hope to use for a new apprentice, to get the new +15 event weapons and hopefully level up to become, well, a mid-level character, suitable to take along to mid-level events.

Once that was done, RedRackham logged in, and made his way to the fifth floor of Maargadum Jail to spar with the death mask lancer there. He did this in duplicate - on Cariae-4 the drake was just about three-quarters of the way through level 44, while on Auzura-4 the drake was only about a tenth of the way through level 42. Red got a disconnection just after coffee on Cariae, but was soon back in action, and just after noon he started a pet experience potion, giving him double pet experience for three hours. This meant that by two o'clock, UK time, the drake reached level 45, ten levels above Red himself, and started getting even hungrier.

It was lucky that that particular RedRackham, using the pet experience potion, was on Cariae - the "Auzura servers are experiencing issues at this time" was an often-repeated announcement in the forum shoutbox just after lunch, from GameSage dinosue2. "We have urgent messages sent to the GM/PM team. We are waiting on word from them and have no estimated time of it being fixed. Thank you for your patience." Sure enough, not long after I saw that, Auzura's RedRackham got disconnected. I would have got a second pet-leveller going on Cariae, but unfortunately he would have been on the same account as the disconnected Red, and trying to log back in on that account just got me the "Error Message 1: Account ID already logged on." pop-up. That happens when a server crashes, people logged in are "locked in" until things are sorted out.

So, in the end it was SirDarth on Sarissa-4 who made the trip out to Maargadum Jail at around 2:30, and, after getting rid of the death mask soldier, started to spar with the lancer. His drake soon reached level 24...while over on Cariae, by the time the three-hour potion had expired, just after three, RedRackham's drake was the equivalent of over two hours into level 45. And in the shoutbox, the word was that Auzura's servers had finally been fixed....but I stayed with the set-up I had, which was just as well, as the "fix" didn't last.

SirDarth stayed in action on Sarissa until after the food break; by then his drake was two-thirds of the way through level 24, while on Cariae RedRackham's drake was almost a fifth of the way through level 45. There were disturbing messages in the shoutbox, however, about empty inventories on Auzura, not to mention the storage chest and Roy's merchant mart. The GMs were "working their tiny little GM hineys off" trying to find out what was wrong, the long-suffering dinosue2 reported. The advice was definitely to refrain from buying anything from the merchant mart, and also not to log out while using potions, as you might well find they'd disappeared when you logged back in.

Kaerella and RedRydeR logged in safely over on Cariae-4, anyway, and were able to spend the evening with the ancient grey mummies. BadFairy kindly used Recall to get us in there; NaOmi was already in action, mainly in the corridor, and was later joined by her Maurawan guildies, the mage cosma and the sorcerer theApt. When we first arrived the room was a bit crowded, so that, after trying moving a little further along, we ended up with Kae in that "onwards" corridor, and Red off fighting sphinx fighters. A night shadow, however, didn't stay very long, and soon Kae and Red were in charge of the main room, with Kaerella supplying people with the appropriate buffs.

BadFairy didn't stay late, as Tuffsen was feeling tired, so eventually it was just Kae and Red in the main room, plus a knight called FAROUK doing some pet-levelling in the corner with a screaming zombie; the Maurawan trio stayed in the corridor.

The shoutbox was pretty busy, with Auzura's problems; it had got up and running again as mentioned, but crashed again before too long, so the GMs and their technical experts had quite a time of it. It wasn't long before ten o'clock in fact, UK time, when Auzura was finally pronounced safe to visit again. Giovanna_X and dinosue2 had been kept busy with the stream of people enquiring why they couldn't log into, or indeed out of, Auzura, and I hope my contributions there were helpful.

Double pet experience was switched on at six o'clock, UK time, and the GMs were too busy to turn it off after two hours, so the two drakes benefited throughout the evening. Kaerella reached 80% of her level, 97, and RedRydeR managed to get pretty close to halfway through 96. By the time they logged out, Kaerella had gained, in all, 3.22% and 32 skill points, plus 8274 pet points, with her polar bear cub halfway through level 9, while RedRydeR had earned 7.07%, 33 skill points, and 9176 pet points. Both the drakes levelled up - SirFrancis reached level 52, while Red's drake reached level 45.