A Kiwi in online worlds: Southern Armada Vanguard Week One

I just re read the previous post and it probably came off a little more harsh than intended. In fact it came off way more harsh than intended. The important point was that I trust the leadership of SA to do the right thing. I have been following you guys for the last 5 years. I'm not going to stop now.

*note*
I just had a chat in game with Kez and I had to explain that last post. Halfway through the conversation my PC rebooted (of course, my 5 minutes online was up). Now I have a policy, I dont re write stuff once its live. I do spend a lot of time re thinking what I am about to post and often I will put something into draft and look at it again a few days later. But once I have put it live it doesn't change. There are a lot of reasons for this, but for me it comes down to you have to stand by what you say and going back and editing something constantly just feels wishy washy to me.

However, that last post does leave me feeling like it needs a re-write. I'm not going to but I am going to add a caveat. My intention with that post was simply to make the point that there are potential issues with the new system as it stands. I stand by the examples that I wrote, I can see them being possibly divisive and possibly causing issues for some players. What I didn't emphasis strongly enough is that the Guild leadership are a great bunch of guys. they have been doing this for a long time, and in the case of Kez since pretty much day one.

I have worked my ass off to help get Ausguard.com off the ground and a large part of that was because I wanted this guild, its officers and leadership to play VG with me. I wanted you guys back in a game that I knew you would enjoy and would challenge you. I wanted to help create a community where SA could both be a part of the community and stand out from it as an example of what an Aussie guild can do, what we can achieve without having to turn into 7 day a week hard core assholes. I didn't do all that work over 18 months to turn around and screw with the leadership before the game goes live.

I have said this before but I believe that its worth saying again. The leadership in SA is easily the best of any guild I have ever heard of, worked with, been a member of or even heard rumors of. They are guys and girls who put aside their own precious free time in order to do work for the greater good of the guild as a whole. I absolutely trust the guild leadership to do the right thing. They didn't create this system to make it work just for them. Much like the Sigil decision to do away with the Official forums, I may not agree with every point they put forward for doing so, BUT I am willing to step back and give the new system support and give it a try.

I trust that if there are some things in the new Guild system that don't work, they will be looked at, examined for the best thing for the Guild over all, and if they don't work, they will be modified or done away with.

So, thats been said.

The first week of Vanguard and goddamn it I am cursed. The gaming gods appear to look down on me and whenever a new MMO is released they reach down and put the whammy on my PC. This happened last time with WoW. I moved house about 3 days after WoW was released and then had to wait for about 3 weeks before Telecom (may a curse be on them forever) could supply me with a DSL connection. Its possible that may have contributed to my feeling of disconnection from WoW in general.

This time, even tho I have been playing this game for the last year in Beta, I have developed a severe problem with reboots. I have had this random reboot problem for about 2 years. Some days its really bad and I boot every 30 minutes. Some weeks it doesn't happen at all. However with the release of VanGuard to live I have started to lock up and then reboot roughly every 7-9 minutes. I am currently spending more time waiting for my PC to finish the boot, and then logging into VanGuard than I am actually playing the game. On top of that about roughly 1 in 2 reboots results in a death for me.

60 divided by 9 = 6.6 boots an hour
4 hours of play time 26.6 boots a night
26.6 divided by 2 = 13 deaths a night, no wonder I have no cash

I am at the point where I need to start grouping to progress and with my machine in this state I simply cant. It would not be fair to a group to have me disappear every 7 minutes and then take 3 minutes to get back into the game. I have replaced every bit of hardware on my PC with the exception of the disks (I've never come across a disk failure that will cause a full hard reboot), the mother board and the CPU. I am replacing the motherboard this week and I am desperately hoping that this will cause the whole reboot problem to go away. If it doesn't I'm stuffed until I reach Sydney. I cant afford to replace the CPU as well, so I will just have to live with it. Its also possible that the fan that was supplied with the CPU is horribly underpowered and I may have a heat issue. Again cant afford a custom heat solution to experiment with to try and fix the problem.

However, having said all that this is the box I have sitting next to me desk. All in pieces all still in original packing. I am shipping this to Sydney and this will be my new PC:
Intel E6600 Dual Core 2.4GhZ (I'm going to Overclock this to at least 3GhZ, more if I can)
Zalman 9500 Custom Fan
8800GTX 720
Gigabyte DS3 Mobo
2 Gigs PC 6400 RAM
2x 200GB SATA 2
1x 160GB SATA 1
Creative Wireless keyboard and mouse.

With a few other bits and pieces that is going to be my new PC. Unfortunately I will have to wait for that to get shipped, then wait to find a new apartment, then build it, then wait to get broadband connected then patch before I can play again so I will be off-line for, at a conservative estimate, at least a month. I haven't been disconnected from the web for that long in about a decade.

Now there really isn't a lot of new stuff here. I'm only level 10. I haven't managed to get to any dungeons or really get deeply into the game yet. I would be playing a lot more if it wasn't for the reboots. As I cant really do a lot in the way of XP'ing I'm working on crafting as much as I can. Apart from losing the credit for the work order you are doing when you crash, at least I'm not affecting anyone else.

I wandered though the first 10 levels and ran into the Giant Gargoyles again. For the life of me I cant remember what these guys are called. They are funky looking beats when you are fighting them tho, they way they fly up into the sky and pounce on you from the air!.

I have probably died more at the hands of the Forest Stalkers than any other MOB due to the huge amount of reboots I have had in this zone. Not the zones fault. My POS computers fault. Where oh where is that damn motherboard.