Just got this email regarding my free Anarchy Online account:
UPGRADE TO SHADOWLANDS FOR FREE!
Special offer! Upgrade your account with Shadowlands prior to February 7th with no client fee! Notum Wars included! You save EUR 19,95 / $19,95. Subscription fee as low as $7,95 per month.
So I can get the expansion for free, but I will still have to pay a monthly fee. AO is bound and determined to get me back as a regular customer. I like what they are doing.
I am almost there. Almost.
As I was drifting to sleep, my thoughts turned to my WoW session from earlier. I found a few things interesting:
1. I don’t like to solo, I hate to solo. If I had my way I would always group up with someone I know. I solo because of my schedule and the fact that everyone I know that plays, outlevels me by a large margin. Unless the game has a productive way to group up, most of them would rather do high level stuff then slum with me (in general).
2. Playing my Shaman in a group was a completely different experience than playing solo. I had to try things in a whole new way. Skills and spells I rarely used, became important. Skills I normally used a lot, became unneeded.
3. WoW still has some really odd problems. When we were fighting a group of mobs, my brother told me that all the mobs and I disappeared from his screen. On my screen he appeared to be frozen in a combat pose and his pet was not moving either. Eventually he said he was fine, but it did not appear to be any different for me. Then the mobs starting fighting nobody, so I joined in as I could tell from the text it was him fighting them. We did this for a while and then his frozen character moved some, looted mobs that were not there any more and then froze again. Later he called out for help and I noticed from his icon he was low on health. Not seeing him, I selected his icon and healed him. This went on for another 5 minutes or so and eventually things returned to normal without either of us relogging. This sort of thing is unacceptable in my book, I hope it’s not something I have to deal with again.
My brother talked me into questing in WoW with his alt. In the matter of maybe 3 hours I levelled twice and am now level 26. Imagine that. Had fun the whole time too, but I am damn tired.
Amazing how much more fun these games are when you have some company.
Now, about that break…
And I’m an Altoholic. Seriously, I have toon commitment issues. I don’t play all that often, so logic would dictate I choose one character and focus on it so eventually I can get to the upper levels. In reality, I get bored after a while and start a new character.
I may find one that I can keep playing for a long time, but that is pretty rare. My current character selection window in WoW has 8 characters. Rogue, Mage, Warlock, Shaman, Hunter, Priest, Druid, and a Warrior. Highest level is 24 and the rest are around level 10-15.
The first step to fixing a problem is to admit you have a problem. This probably isn’t really a problem, but it does tend to make me cancel a game after a while because I burn out on all the low level content. So it is a problem for me.
What is the solution? Play games with only one character slot like FFXI or SWG? Well I played them both. In FFXI I kept changes jobs so the same thing happened. I burned out on low levels. In SWG, well lets just say I was never really into that game in the first place. So I guess one character slot is out.
Perhaps the problem is that I am addicted to the fast levelling the lower levels offer. I think this may be the whole problem for me. Which makes me wonder what I would feel about playing a game with no levels. Would I have no incentive? Or would I focus on something else? Is levelling really what drives my MMOG gameplay?
What can I do to fix this? Delete all my characters but one? Maybe do some soul searching to determine what is the most fun for me. Or am I making too big a deal out of this? Perhaps I need to take a break.
I went into a local game store today to get a copy of Pirates! and it was sold out. Bummer. I’ll have to try again later.
Since I was there I thought I’d see if they had any copies of World of Warcraft on the shelves. Nope. The empty spots were there, but no boxes.
Everquest 2? You bet. 12 copies. On sale. $34.95, hmm.
I logged in, tried to check my mail. Could not get my mail – “Internal Mail Database Error”. Auction House not working. Cannot enter an instance. Cannot log out (had to Alt+F4 to get out).
Bah. Guess I’ll go out now and try playing later tonight.
Well, he writes anyway:
I am sure that many of you are wondering what has been going on with the World of Warcraft servers, as there was another period of extended downtime during peak hours last night. I want to be as candid as possible with you, in the hopes that I can both shed light on the situation and reassure you that we are doing our utmost to ensure that these problems get fixed.
Last night, we took down 20 realms for emergency maintenance. The boat between Menethil Harbor and Auberdine was disappearing intermittently, dropping players into the ocean and crashing the servers. Passengers on this boat who were disconnected and tried to reconnect would crash the server yet again when trying to log on. We knew that this was unacceptable and immediately took down the servers when we discovered the problem in order to implement a fix. That occurred at 6 p.m. PST, but unfortunately, complications arose while we were testing our fix, and we were unable to bring those servers back up until more than a few hours later in the night.
Players on these same 20 realms also experienced service interruptions earlier in the week, following last Thursday�s extended server maintenance. While last night�s downtime was unrelated to the issues in the days prior, this is no consolation to those of you that were unable to play. Therefore, in addition to the three days already credited to these players as a result of the server issues earlier in the week, players on these realms will be receiving an additional four-day credit to their accounts. The credit will appear as a total of seven free days on your current billing statement (or on your trial period for those who recently purchased the game).
I want to take this opportunity to say that we will do everything possible to ensure that unexpected downtime like this does not occur in the future and that if it is necessary, we will do everything possible to give you better warning and keep you informed. In the future, we will avoid doing maintenance during peak hours, unless no other alternative presents itself. When complications occur that could impact your playing time, we will provide that information as well. We failed to do this last night, and I assure you that we are making changes to ensure that we do a better job of communicating with our players next time.
I want to extend my personal and heartfelt apology for the problems that some of you have been experiencing on our servers. We remain committed to delivering the best possible service for you and will continue to work around the clock to ensure that we provide an experience that you and I have to come to expect from Blizzard games.
Sincerely,
Mike Morhaime
President, Blizzard Entertainment
I know that levels have been a part of MMOGs for a good long while now, with a rare exception, but I am sick of them. I guess the devs think they need those small rewards to keep people playing. Everquest has levels and it was/is popular so all the rest of them have to copy it, I guess.
I logged into WoW last night after a few days away. I looked at my XP bar and noted that it was just barely into level 24. That means I have two levels before I get any new skills. I just did not want to get started again. I felt the treadmill weigh heavily upon my gaming soul. I started to think of playing the game as levelling and it made me sick. The magic was wearing thin.
Had a chat with an in-game friend and he put me focused back on the fun. He encouraged me to just pick a quest and “get into” solving it. Have some fun, forget about XP and your level, it does not really matter. So I decided to try one of the quests I had not yet done because it required I run into enemy lands and I just didn’t feel like it before.
I gave it a go, had some fun exploring and avoiding the other faction guards. Eventually I found the area I was looking for and after about 30 minutes of strategic pulling and killing and moving through the area I was able to reach my objective. My heart was pounding and I had a smile on my face.
I didn’t level (still 24) but I also did not look at my XP bar the whole time. I had fun, so that was all that mattered.
SOE has released an Everquest 2 offline character creator to the general public. I played around with it some last night and was mildy impressed. I felt the customization did not have a lot of obvious effect, but at least there were lots of races to choose from.
Still, better than the meager choices World of Warcraft gives you.
World of Warcraft has announced some details about the recent server upgrades. I have snipped the important stuff below.
Last Thursday we made our first such upgrade. 20 of our 88 realms were moved off of the original hardware and placed on a new hardware configuration. These 20 servers initially performed very well, up until we reached our maximum concurrency Friday evening. The high population numbers uncovered an issue in the new backend shared infrastructure. This issue caused some players to experience severe lag and disconnects on a few of the realms, making them virtually unplayable.
In order to stabilize the affected realms and allow as many players as possible the ability to continue playing, we lowered the population caps by 30%. This stabilized the realms to the point where 70% of the players on the realms in question could play, but it also resulted in large queues.
The problems were attributed to high concurrency numbers on individual realms putting extreme stress on the backend infrastructure. We were able to address this problem by implementing additional hardware into the infrastructure this afternoon. This additional hardware has allowed us to stabilize the affected realms, and thus increase the server caps. We will continue to monitor the performance throughout the evening. If we notice any of the performance issues starting up again we will lower the population cap level enough to stabilize performance.
They also announced a 48 hour free time extension:
We do appreciate your patience and enthusiasm about playing World of Warcraft, and we regret that you faced periods of high traffic this past weekend that caused some of you to have a poor game experience. So, due to the extended nature of the server issues, we will be providing a free 48-hour extension of play time. As with previous extensions, this will show up as free extra time on your current billing period (or on your trial period, for those of you who purchased the game recently). We hope you’ll bear with us as we continue to work hard on implementing changes for long-term stability.
This brings my free time up to 8 days.