Wow! Been several months since I updated this page… One would suppose nothing had happened. But it’s not really the truth. Perhaps it’s just because this page is mostly for myself. And I really doubt anyone reads it much =)

But anyway. Most of my MMO-activity since last post have been mainly SoG. I’ve done a lot of work on the map (http://sog.houseofkenja.com/map/). But it’s mostly on my dev site and haven’t really been published yet.

Apart from that I found one of the golden eggs ( pics in the gallery) that should result in a life time account for Dark and Light… With less than a week before release I still haven’t heard from those guys yet. But then so has nobody else apparently.

Of course Dark and Light was supposed to be out already. A month ago. But some issues made them postpone it. Just before they where supposed to shut down SoG I had acquired myself a barony (Mathang - provided by the nice people from SDA) and I spend some time online making sure I would keep it. Mostly because at that time it was said you would transfer your title into Dark and Light. But then SoG was prolonged two weeks and DnL was delayed a month. And finally the title inheritance was dropped. So basically SoG died that day anyway.

From there on I have played a bunch of boring trials of MMOs. Not really worth speaking much about since I didn’t stick around much in any of them.

But now Dark and Light might finally be released. They are running some stress tests on the new server cluster as I write this - with some nice big failures to check off in their test reports. And on sunday us pioneers should be released into the lands of Ganarath… Just enough time to get a dummy map up of DnL with basic functionality… But I have a blog that talks more about that…

Well. I’ve been playing the game for awhile now and everything considered it’s going great… Except…

Well. I’ve joined a guild - Age of Judgement - because it looked like the most interesting around. But apart from the initial spark of activity from when people could actually play the game the activity level of the guild has gone down drastically to a level where I hardly see or interact with anyone from my guild. But so far there are no obvious alternatives and in any event I’m planning to give it a bit more time.

As for the game there has been lots of issues. The servers are still plagued with stability issue and players are getting locked out of the servers for short or longer periods due to various bugs. But them most of my time has been spent mapping the 3 kingdoms we currently have access to - the result of which can be seen on my SoG site. Still lots of ground to cover on that but I’ve started to wind down to focus on other issues now that I have most of the towers plotted in.

So far I’ve been involved in to major events. The current story line has revolved around getting a major town rebuild. As a requirement for that a bridge needed to be rebuild. The first attempt split up the player base into language communities. Some had to follow a number of dwarves coming from Al-Drifa while others - including the english speaking - had to protect areas along the route. The event was a total disaster. But not because we happened to loose the event.

What happened was that along the route the dwarves where killed by players who had turned traitor. Specifically a light side guild called ‘The Seventh Phoenix’. But as I understand it mostly light side players where protecting the dwarves. And since lights can’t kill lights it was impossible to defend against a light side guild attacking them. Also the communication was disastrous. At least at the english event area we heard nothing of what was going on even tho there was a lot of other languages being used on the event channel. So basically there was a lot of confused people standing around trying to defend an place from larger and larger waves of high level dragons.

The second event was almost equally confusing. The event was a second try to rebuild the bridge. This time each language community got a dwarf each and had to protect it from one spot down to the place where the bridge is to be build. There was a number of feature characters (FC) at the english event. And they tried to do some role playing to ease the event along. But it was hardly perfect and at some points they even broke the IC/OOC barrier. But along we went.

The dwarf we where to protect turned out to be dark side so us light side players where not allowed anywhere near him for most of the event. We went down the road and cleared it easily. I think at some point the dwarf got killed in the confusion. But he was quickly resurrected. We quickly made it to the chasm where the bridge was to be build. But then what? No information was given and the only english talk on the event channel was from a FC on the side of Dragoon taunting us and said we had won this battle. But at no point did we hear from ‘our side’ of the event what was going on. Instead we could decipher from another dwarf that spoke french that she seemed to think the event was over and the ones who had protected her had won at least.

In the end I left and it seems that 3 or 4 dwarves made it successfully to the end. So at least we get to move on with this story arch.

But why the traitor guild still claims what they are doing it for the good of everyone is still a mystery. I personally hope the event coordinators have not spilled the beans on where they are taking the story to whoever they have tried to recruit for this event. But instead the people of that (or those?) guild(s) who right now seem to be on the side of Dragoon have been convinced by the role playing of some FCs that they are doing the right thing… If the latter is the case we’ll see if they have been mislead. But the point is I really hope the event coordinators does not offer all the OOC answers to guilds who they are trying to participate in less popular roles of events. If they do role playing is never going to be very earnest in this game.

Well. Looks like there is some interesting things going on in the world of Ganareth. If the game will turn out to be any good is still hard to tell tho.

Well the launch of Settlers of Ganareth has come and gone. But actual game time has been severely limited in my end.

When we pioneers where allowed into the game late last monday it all started with all of us having a bad ini file we needed to delete so the patcher would get a new one that wouldn’t crash the game client. The good thing about that is that we tickled into the game at a relatively low pace and allowed us to at least play for a while. And get back in as the random client crashed happened.

But then the pressure on the login server increased. In addition to 8881 pioneers (give or take) a number of normal Settlers attempted to get into the game (and some reportedly with success - even though they where not supposed to get in until the day later). And as the pressure climbed the login server buckled.

Since then the normal settlers have all been allowed into the game. But the login server never stays up for long. So getting into the game is quite a battle in prime-time. As of this writing I haven’t been online from home since the initial hour or so monday… But then I wasn’t home all tuesday.

As for my initial impression of the game? Well… I’m not sure I have one really. The game client is buggy. But the UI seems to be sufficiently customizable to be usable. But UI settings are not saved if you crash. So you need to quit the game yourself to get it saved… Quite risque since you don’t know if you can get back in.

Apart from that with only 4 FXP levels under my belt I am still only a citizen. I have no class/path skills and I’ve still not really formed an opinion on the game yet. I will say - however - that the scale of the game seems huge. I haven’t been off the n00b island yet. But just flying around on my dragon I managed to get lost right away. I guess some more ingame time will eventually make me more comfortable with my surroundings so that won’t happen so often.

In any event I’ll be making the character page for aspiring caster-of-some-sort ‘Eldarath’ and his pet dragon ‘Catherine’ as soon as I get back into the game and figure out how to make screenshots