Catastrophic Rollback

Extra Life is Go!

aofa_banner_trans This morning team alliance of awesome has been streaming for awhile by the time I write this post.  This means the Extra Life marathon has been kicked off and the thunderbirds are go!  So I highly suggest you tune into the Alliance of Awesome team and see how all is streaming.  I personally won’t be coming on until significantly later in the day where I plan on playing a brand new Secret World character named “Belstream” on the Arcadia server.  I’ve gone through the character creation already and am sitting at the very start of the New York zone.  I went Illuminati this time, because with all of the “conspiracy” floating around in the gaming community it seemed rather fitting.  The Secret World is one of those games that I love but don’t end up playing all that often.  I am a lifetime subscriber, and I still consider that money well spent.

One of the interesting challenges today is trying to fit in the recording of a podcast around the various stream times.  Kodra and Hiddenwings stream before our normal recording time, and I stream almost immediately following it.  I will be going from 11pm EST to 3am EST, and then after me is I believe Scarybooster and then finally Cav will be finishing off the entire process.  From what I understand both Stargrace and Braxwolf intend to do the entire 25 hours…  so during a lot of the stream there will be multiple channels on Team AofA that you can be watching.  When I last tuned in, Stargrace was streaming some Divinity Original Sin, so you should see a wide variety of titles today.  I personally am mostly going to stream MMOs.  I had originally planned on streaming some Destiny, but with my current frustration with the game that probably isn’t the best idea.  Maybe going to substitute in some Rift Nightmare Tide if it is behaving.

Catastrophic Rollback

rift 2014-10-24 23-19-33-340 The last few days I have been sick, as I said in my blog my lungs pretty much betrayed me.  As a result I spent a lot of time sitting on the couch poking around in Rift Nightmare Tide.  Over the course of Thursday I watched one and a half seasons of American Horror Story, made it about half way through 60 and made some significant progress on several different tradeskills, finally crafting myself a nice set of blue weapons.  Then something bad happened.  When I was working on my blog post yesterday the Faeblight server was completely offline, and while I thought this was odd I just went on with my business of writing a normal blog post.  Later in the day on twitter I heard that Laethys, Faeblight and Wolfsbane were all offline and that there had been something that happened to the hardware for that server cluster.  When I got home the server was back online, and I logged into my character only to notice that I had lost an entire days worth of play time.  My character was sitting back at 1% experience into 60… pretty much the point at which you normally zone into the zone.

A thread on the forums confirmed the issue, that there had indeed been a rollback.  The goofy thing is it seems to be an uneven rollback.  I have all of my Planar Attunement experience gained, as well as all of my Minion experience.   My character however was completely rolled back, including the fact that I no longer had the spec or macros that I set the day before when I started to level the character.  The biggest problem is… I spent a lot of platinum training various skills… and all of THAT seemed to be missing like I had in fact trained the skills but had nothing to show for it.  As an IT professional I have had things like this happen to me too.  A backup is only as good as the time you need to restore it… and it is often times impossible to tell if a backup is actually going to work correctly.  Having been in the shoes of these folks before myself…  I feel generally horrible for the stress that they are going through.  Supposedly Faeblight is hit the worst and they are having to manually go back through logs to try and figure out what all was actually lost.

rift 2014-10-24 20-43-08-161 I can take this with a grain of salt, knowing that sooner or later Trion is going to make things right for me.  They always have in the past, and I have a feeling they will during this time.  I mean this is probably the most catastrophic rollback I have experienced since the ill fated launch of Horizons back in 2003.  Unfortunately rollbacks were something that happened during those days, so we accepted it at face value and moved on.  Rollbacks these days however are almost unheard of, and as a result the players on the forums are out for blood.  There are some players who had power leveled themselves to 65 and maxed out several of their tradeskills… and all of that effort was completely lost.  I am super thankful I have been playing the expansion extremely casually at this point.  All of this said I am certain that Trion will make things right in the end, the biggest frustration for me was setting back up all of my hotbars and my new spec again.

ArcheAge Update

archeage 2014-10-13 06-17-56-723 I have not been playing much of late, especially with all of the other games on my plate.  However I felt like I needed to post an update.  I have been pretty down on ArcheAge as a game from my pretty horrific experiences with the Alpha/Beta community.  In part I think a lot of those early players were Streamers and did horrific things to other players to entertain their audiences.  I can remember one incident where I had to cross a bay in a rowboat, and folks were lined up trying to capsize and subsequently drown us as all of the little newbies tried to cross the open water.  Coming back and playing on the Naima server at launch…  I have to say I have not experienced any of this non-combat griefing.  I have gone afk in town numerous times, and have not found myself pushed out into a bunch of mobs and dead on the ground…  this was something that happened constantly in alpha.

The game is still compelling, but I have yet to actually make it to the contested zone levels this time around.  I am still in my early 20s, but I hope to make a push at some point to see just how the open pvp areas feel.  If the early game is any indication, maybe the production player base is more reasonable than the barbaric alpha playerbase was.  I can deal with danger, and I can deal with the possibility of death…  what I could not deal with was the constant jackassery that I experienced in the alpha community.  This is still not my primary game, especially with all of the exciting things happening in FFXIV this week, and the launch of Rift Nightmare Tide.  However I still have a large number of friends playing the game, and it has been nice to pop my head in and talk to people I have not seen in years.  Unfortunately the guild I was planning on joining imploded this week, and has been replaced by another one.  So I will have to make the necessary inroads to get invites there.  Also unfortunately it seems they might not be as casual friendly, which would be unfortunate… because for each of the serious players I know playing the game, they have a couple of not so serious friends that are also playing with them.

#ExtraLife #Rift #ArcheAge

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