Under false flag

Bugs, lag, game inbalances, griefers, idiots, the life of a MMORPG player is full of annoyances. And one gets used to nearly all of them, and plays on regardless. The only thing that makes a MMORPGer really crack up is: Not being able to play.

Everquest had a rather bad weekend. The Friday morning (PST) patch introduced some really serious bugs. 4 hours later all the servers had to be brought down. The server downtime thread was updated every hour (good!) with the news that the servers were still all down and they didn't have an ETA for them coming back up (bad!). The first servers then came back up over 24 hours later on Saturday. The last servers will come up on Sunday morning (PST), 2 days after the bad patch.

Of course a weekend without servers is bad for business. SOE is trying to calm down their customers by giving them each 3 free days of playing, plus double xp from Sunday to Tuesday morning.

But I had already broken down on Saturday morning. I reneged on my earlier decision to wait for the European release of WoW. I had found a website which sold WoW access to Europeans. Game as possible download (didn't need that, the beta client worked), and the seller was setting up the account for me, so I didn't need a US credit card. Bought a 60-day game card as well, and so I'm all set for playing WoW. Worked like a charm, in less than 24 hours, and totally anonymous as far as Blizzard is concerned.

Right now the plan is to play both games for a while, until I really had enough of EQ2. I'll have a lot of time for playing in my end-of-year holidays starting on Tuesday. Sooner or later I'll ditch one of the two games, and right now it is more likely that it's EQ2 which gets the boot.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:30 PM Permanent Link