WoW Journal - Day 9

Day 9 is a Saturday, and I play most of the day. That gives me the opportunity to do the census at different times. At 8 am the server is rather empty, with 62 Horde players online. At 10:30 am this has gone up to 220 Horde players. In the afternoon at 4 pm there are 538 Horde and 914 Alliance players. And that doesn't diminish much in the evening, where at 10 pm there are still 503 Horde online. Seems that Runetotem like the US servers has an Alliance to Horde ratio of nearly 2 to 1. Not well balanced. On the other side a closer look at the census reveals that the Horde has more higher level players, 22 of level 35+, with the Alliance only having 7. On both sides the highest level player is level 46 now.

The census in the morning reveals one principal weakness of localized servers. You need to build them big enough to withstand the big population peak at prime time, but if people from only one time zone play, you get times where your server is hardly used at all. Okay, you can patch at those times, but it is still rather inefficient, and a waste of hardware.

With all that playing today, I don't really level much, ending up at level 23. But I get my cooking skill up to over 50, so I can now make food which gives +4 to stamina and spirit. First Aid goes over 100, to wool bandages. And smithing to 150, where I can make my first blue piece of armor, the Shining Silver Breastplate. That is I could make it if I had any idea how to get Iridescent Pearls. But there aren't any on the auction house, and I haven't come across any from mobs yet.

So I spent much of the day running around on different Barrens quests, or to mine copper and tin there. I then do quests in Stonetalon Mountains, because I have a Ratchet quest leading me there. With all the Ratchet quests I've done by the end of the day, I'm now considered as "friendly" there. Nice, I like positive faction.

A good hour or so is wasted looking for a quest giver named Ebru. Yesterdays Wailing Caverns expedition had me get a quest shared by another player, and I need to return to the quest giver I never met to hand it in. Problem is I just can't find him. He is marked as a yellow dot on my map, but I don't see him on top of the Wailing Caverns cave entrance, nor inside. I fight my way down, but can't get below the initial point either. After an inquiry in guild chat it turns out Ebru is in a mini-cave between the cavern roof and the cave itself. The cave mouth is formed like a head with a mouth and eyes, and the quest giver is in the right eye. Bloody hard to find, no wonder I didn't have the quest on my first Wailing Cavern trip.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:43 PM Permanent Link