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Trion (the company behind the English version of ArcheAge) can’t seem to catch a break. They were having lots of network latency on the servers (enough so that they ended up with overlapping properties because of server confusion!), so they started a cycle of unscheduled maintenance.

On a Sunday.

It’s now Tuesday, and they still have a few servers down, but most of them are going again. Lucius (where Smudge and I are) came back up Monday night, and it was interesting to be in an area that usually has a half-dozen+ people standing around and be the only one. Things started filling in, but it was still much less busy than I’m used to. I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to see Marianople with only a few people in it. I might have been able to enjoy the scenery rather than watch my machine struggle.

One of the things that’s been in our quest log for a bit is a… tutorial quest for trading with the other continent. If you’ve seen my previous posts, and the trouble we’ve had with that, you can see why we haven’t done the quest, even though the quest complete is comparatively easy. Just getting into the port at all is a complete, even if you don’t live to complete the run. Anyway, with things fairly light for the moment, we decided to try it now, before all the gankers were present. The voyage took a little time, but we got in and got to turn in the trade packs (lots of Charcoal Stabilizer! yay!). And just after we did so, a large ship full of reds came in and charged for us. We ported back home.

In the more normal news (before being interrupted by the server downtime), we’ve actually been questing in the first of the PvP zones, and haven’t been bothered much. (One red tried to kill me in town. He thought he’d be far enough out of range of the guards, but I wasn’t and they reacted to the attack on me and killed him in about four shots.)

I’ve completed crafting Gau’s level-34 set, and am just beginning on mine. The thing is, past level 34 gear we need different components that are largely beyond us. We’ve set up an aquafarm (yes, you can farm corals and the like too in this game), to get some of the ingredients, but the alchemy skill required is crazy. We may be stuck at this point, gear-wise, for a bit. The next project is getting a farm tractor anyway. It’s slower than using the ship, but carries two additional trade packs, so it should make Smudge’s trade runs for money more efficient.

Meanwhile, we’ve also been spending some time on Neverwinter lately (the best bad game). On Sunday, Smudge was on an alt and found a big world dragon fight in a mid-level zone that hadn’t been there before, and called me in. I managed to find the list of these fights (there’s five) and we went through them. Looks like they’re from the most recent module, and they added them on to various existing zones, starting in the 20s. The early ones have the monsters rated as ‘skulls’ (instead of a level), which generally means everyone is normalized to a baseline level equivalent (though higher levels still have gear and ability advantages).

The last one…? Hoo boy, the challenge ramps up, and the last one in the set is tough. We had a fair number of people in the fight, and they were needed. I died twice from not being quite fast enough, but since you come back very close to the fight, I got back in and helped finish it off.