The End of the Aradune Experiment

We absolutely, 100%, gave it our all.

We braved the long log in queues, trying to log in as soon as we got home from work and waiting the two-three hours to play an hour or two before bed.

When Darkpaw decided to vastly expand the number of people who could be logged in at once, we patiently waited the ten or fifteen minutes it would take to simply zone. Running to an experience zone could take awhile, but we did it.

The night before last, we joined an Upper Guk group and tried to make our way to our camp outside the Lower Guk zone. We were (inevitably) trained at the zone and had to zone in to LGuk. The press of people at the LGuk zone, waiting for a group, bounced me out again. Eventually (ten-fifteen minutes later), zoned through into another train. Most of the group was stuck in transit. Then the game crashed and neither Kasul nor I could get back on.

I logged in yesterday morning to rescue Nashuya from LGuk. Everything worked fine and great then.

Last night we decided to forgo grouping and just find a nice camp spot in the Ocean of Tears to get some stress free levels away from the crowds.

I was not able to get my character from North Ro, through the Freeport Sewers, to East Freeport. Crashes, perpetual hangs, I finally gave up.

Kasul was thinking the exact same thing I was thinking — if we lived in Asia, or didn’t have jobs, we could easily get the premium play experience by playing off-peak. But this isn’t the case. We live on the US east coast, and we have regular day shift jobs. We are pretty much forced to play in prime time if we want to play at all.

This morning I rescued my SK and my tag-along boxed mage, Dunkela, from the Freeport Sewers without any issues. I’d been playing Dunkela when Kasul wasn’t available on my second account, with the eventual goal of allowing us to go anywhere and do anything, with tank, healer and DPS covered.

I then camped them out, near where Kasul camped his shaman out last night. My level nineteen shadow knight, and my level twelve magician. Maybe, sometime…

Last night, after we’d given up on Aradune, we logged in to our trial run characters on Mangler. They were fine. No issues zoning. Kasul has no interest in continuing with his Mangler cleric, but he’d made a troll shaman who was level six. Still too low to group with my 15 SK, so I remade my magician, Dunkela, on Mangler. Kasul powerleveled me for a few minutes. Kasul had to remind me several times that places like Field of Bone and the Plane of Knowledge existed on Mangler — even in the couple of weeks since Aradune launched, I’d gotten used to focusing on just my home city of Neriak and the places I could easily run to.

But the Field of Bone is a thing, so we went there. A high level shaman was PLing a DE mage in the Pit, and clearly mistook me for his mage friend, as he dropped a lot of high level mobs on us — by accident. He realized his mistake and buffed up Kasul and my water pet and we were able to get a lot of levels in the hour or so before the buffs wore out. Kasul ended the night at eight, and me at six.

Darkpaw Studio head Jenn Chan wrote a mea culpa about all of EverQuest’s recent difficulties, which came along with a week or 25% experience bonus.

The experience bonus is nice, no doubt, but what I really want is a nice gaming experience during prime time on the Aradune TLP server. It’s what brought us back to EverQuest, and it’s the one thing we will not be able to achieve.

We will continue our story on Mangler, where the bleeding edge is well beyond where we are (though honestly, it is also way beyond us on Aradune, where things are bought and sold for hundreds and thousands of plat and level 50 players are already twinking their second or third alts).

Maybe we’ll still be able to have a bit of fun and raid the classic EQ zones once more 🙂