Deathknell

[MongoJerry]

At this point, I noticed a mage named Earthon from one of the guilds I know to be a good friendly guild. I didn't know him personally, but I had posted these adventures of Neriad tales on that guild's website, so I took a chance that he'd recognize my name and suggested to him that we party up. I was glad when he accepted, since I figured it'd be a lot less tedious to do these early quests in a team.

We passed back and forth along the perimeter of Deathknell, picking off wolves, bats, and skeletons. It was at this point where we found our first bottleneck. Wolves and bats were plentiful, but skeletons were scarce. About a dozen players were spread out along the area where the skeletons spawned, and many times there were nasty races to see who could tag a newly spawned skeleton first. I was glad that I had teamed up with Earthon, so that we each got quest credit for the skeleton kills of the other. While I realize that this was the first day of the release and therefore it was probably as bad as it will ever get, I still hope that the developers can add more skeleton spawn points. There's plenty of room in the forest and grass areas surrounding the town for skeletons to spawn.



While killing bats, wolves, and skeletons, it was funny to see the many Mini Diablos trundling after other characters. (People who bought the Collector's Edition get their choice of a special pet -- a Mini Diablo, a Zergling, or a Panda bear).

We turned in our Scavenger Paws and Duskbat wings, and we reported back after finishing off our twelve skeletons. We then got two more quests.



The first one was to clear out spiders from a gold mine nearby. We ran into another mini-bottleneck here, but it wasn't nearly as bad of a bottleneck as it had been in beta 2, since the spider respawn rates had been increased greatly. Still, I wish the developers had taken my suggestion and doubled the size of the mine. The four or so groups who were working the mine kept running into each other and sometimes fought over spawns.



The second quest involved collecting boxes of equipment in the buildings in the Scourge section of town. While completing this quest, I realized what the Blizzard developers were trying to do with this area. They're running new players through examples of the standard quest types. First, you have your "Kill X number of mobs" quest. Then, you have your "Kill X number of mobs to collect Y number of items off them" quest. Now, you have your "Collect Y number of items and you don't have to kill anything if you don't want to" quest.



Then Novice Elreth expands the horizons of the new player a bit by giving a minor "different" kind of quest. OK, it's still a collection quest, but at least the ending is different. The player is supposed to kill an undead mob named Samuel Fipps (Aha! Our first named mob!) and bury his remains in the town's graveyard next to those of his wife, Maria.

Earthon and I headed toward the camp where Samuel Fipps roams only to find about half a dozen other players gathered, waiting for him to spawn. Ouch! Another bottleneck.

While sizing up the grouping possibilities, Fipps spawned and was immediately tagged by one of the waiting players. Other players joined in and helped that player kill Fipps, and I hoped that meant that several people in the camp were in the same group and would all get quest credit at once. If so, I figured Earthon and I could invite the remaining people into our group and we could all kill Fipps on the next respawn.

And right as Fipps was about to die, my game crashed with the automatically generated error report saying something about a problem with the file, Sound.mpq. Oh, well, I thought. It's a beta.

Wait a second...



I took the game crash in stride, but when I logged back on, I found something that infuriated me. I had to wait for the server queue again because of an error on Blizzard's part? That was ridiculous! On top of that, I had a partymate standing there not knowing what was going on. Can you imagine if this were an instance party situation where someone has a game crash and holds up the whole instance party for 10-15 minutes, all because of the realm queue? There has got to be some mechanism put in place so that people who disconnect or crash can get back on in a reasonable amount of time. All I can say is thank God I'm not using my modem connection with it's periodic disconnects anymore.

Luckily, the queue moved faster this time than it had in the beginning, so I only had to wait seven minutes to get back. This meant, of course, that people were leaving the server more frequently, and I should have made the connection that something wasn't quite right.



I came back on to find the camp less, well, camped. There were maybe two or three others in the area, all of whom were kneeling down looting chests and bodies. Fipps spawned while Earthon was on his way back from doing some other random quest, and since the other players in the camp didn't attack Fipps, I figured I would take my chance. The fact that the other players in the area were all kneeling and not attacking should have again triggered something in my brain.

Earthon and I killed Fipps, and while I was looted the body and took screenshots, the server decided to start a major lag hiccup. People could use general, guild, and party chat, but no one could fight or loot anything. It kept going for a few minutes, let up for a few seconds (long enough to kill another mob), and then froze again. The only thing more painful than waiting for the lag to go away (or for the server to decide to reboot) was listening to the whining on the general chat channel. I in turn vented my usual sarcastic charm on the channel and got a whisper from Silvergade who had read my Adventures of Neriad beta tales.

Silvergade: you arent the neriad that writes the forums? (sic)
Neriad: Yep, that's me!
Silvergade: sure
Neriad: Unless I owe you money.
(pause)
Neriad: lol. Was that "sure" sarcastic?
Silvergade: sarcasm yup
Neriad: Ah. Well, if you wouldn't believe what someone tells you, then why ask?
Silvergade: just to see if they would try to deceive =P
Neriad: lol
Silvergade: the real neriad was a night elf female character
(pause)
Neriad: Ah, yes. Very true. Of course, the real neriad who was a night elf character was also in the beta which no longer exists, right?

I got a kick out of the exchange at least. Oh, and Silvergade? /wave

The server finally crashed completely, and I checked on it every few minutes. Most of the time, the server didn't show up on the realm list. When it did show up, the game usually hung while trying to retrieve the list of characters. One time, it actually got the list of characters, but it hung while trying to join the game world.

After about 45 minutes of this, whatever was wrong with our server apparently spread to all of the pacific and mountain regional servers. Or, at least, the pacific and mountain regional servers stopped showing up on the selection screen. After a while, a message came up that those servers were in the middle of a restart that would take about half and hour to complete. I'll give Blizzard credit for one thing. That's just about how long it took.



I was one of the first people back online when the server came up. I saw I hadn't picked up Samuel Fipps's remains during the lagfest, so I killed him again and grabbed the remains. I then killed the other named mobs near him and ended up getting some good pants and gloves. I guess it pays to farm named bosses even if they're only levels 2 and 3.



Maria's gravesite lay in the main town graveyard, and I buried her husband's remains there as instructed. Again, I have to give credit to Blizzard for creating a nice starting tutorial area. Here, a new player is being taught how to recognize a significant quest-related feature (i.e. mouse over it) using a quest with a simple but nice storyline.