Lagging in the Desert

My usual seven characters managed to log in for their half hours of attendance before coffee, with a fair amount of mining done; after that, CaptainScarlet traded the level 50 drake across to Rage, in exchange for her level 47 one, and various bits of loot, including what Kaerella got from "Simon Says" last night, were traded across to my merchant mage.

Then it was time to check how the Tomb of Theos was set; it was lucky I was busy on Auzura, as Cariae suffered a crash as ten o'clock, UK time, approached, and it took a little while for people to get back in. Not only was the Last Chaos USA website item mall having problems, at breakfast time the website itself was mainly down, with "no server" messages appearing, including in the "news" section of the game launcher...the forum shoutbox survived, I could see gamesage Giovanna_X's valedictory message before she did her "vampiress vanish" for the night, but not much else.

Anyway, the Tomb was fine, so MistressDomina was joined by Kaerella, and they went in, heading for the anubis spear men, and that first corner after the main spear man room. MD managed a "power hour" during the eleven to twelve dungeon time, using 59 experience boosters and adding 27.94%, plus 10 skill points. Including the kills before then, MistressDomina earned 28.16%, 13 skill points, and 1298 pet points, while Kaerella added 2.15%, 11 skill points, and 1141 pet points.

Over the lunch break they retired to the ancient grey mummies room. When they got back into action, they did fight the mummies there for a few minutes, and then ran back to the anubis spear men in good time for the two to three o'clock dungeon time hour.

As an experiment, this time Kaerella didn't do much fighting during the hour, just getting rid of sphinx fighters that were a bit near, or in the way when MistressDomina might need to go for the nearby third spear man, as sometimes the two on the corner don't respawn quite fast enough for her. This meant that I could concentrate on MD a bit more, so that she used terra spear more often - the difference in the end wasn't very big, but she did manage to use 60 experience boosters during the hour, so that she gained 27.83% experience and, due to Kae's smaller contribution, just 5 skill points.

Once the hour was over they both headed for the ancient grey mummies, for an hour or so; for the first few minutes, only Kaerella played actively, but when someone left there was room for both of us. By the time the afternoon ended, MistressDomina had in all gained 28.94% and 30 skill points, plus 2258 pet points, and Kaerella had earned 2.24%, 26 skill points, and 1356 pet points. During the "power hour" she had generally had her pet polar bear equipped, and it added a few percent.

After the food break, CaptainScarlet headed for Maargadum Jail to do a little pet-levelling on his newly-acquired level 47 drake, while, in a solo party with him, MistressSabina went out to the giants, on Auzura-6. For some reason she was still getting extra experience from them, but at around twenty to eight I started to get bad lag problems. It came and went, but sometimes CaptainScarlet wouldn't actually hit the death mask soldier, so that a "20" damage figure would float up off him, for up to a minute... and trying to move items around in Sabina's inventory just didn't work, until about ten seconds later.

MistressSabina managed to mount up and do a "(pet) village return", and once she'd sold her loot, things seemed to settle down, and she went back out, but half an hour later the lag was back, and other people in the shoutbox were reporting it, on all the Auzura sub-servers. In fact, whatever it was affected the website and other Aeria games, apparently. Again I managed to get back to Dratan City safely, and waited a few minutes... finally CaptainScarlet was hitting his soldier properly again and, since I did have an ignition run ready, I decided to take Sabina back out.

Luckily, things had indeed settled down, and I was able to continue for the rest of the evening session with the giants - and MistressSabina did reach the midway point in level 50 right at the end. In all she went up by 18.77%, plus 103 skill points and 1232 pet points.

By then CaptainScarlet had got his new drake more than a third of the way through level 47. He logged out so that MistressDomino, my merchant mage on Auzura, could get MistressSabina's latest loot, including moon cake ingredients. If the moon cake event ends with maintenance tonight, this is my last chance to sell flour, egg yolk, and lotus seeds - the first two of those are common drops and by now worth very little, but it would be nice to manage to sell the lotus seeds before the servers go down for their weekly rest.