First Night of Open Beta

By all means it was looking like the first night of open beta was a success. There was only one server up and it was stuffed to the gills. Stuffed so much in fact that it seemed to be causing a lot of lag and hanging between screens. The only way to get out of the eternal loading screen seemed to be exiting out of the game through the task manager. This happened to me a number of times last night.

It happened so much that my character, Friendly, the level 9 Warcaster got toasted in the process.


Bye Friendly! Here's what Friendly looked like:


He had a really sick sword that would proc this poisonous green cloud whenever he made a critical hit. I loved fighting monsters near crates because it would bust open the crates at the same time with the damage. haha! TIME SAVER!

So the end result of this of course was to test out True Games/Petroglyph's customer support. I filled out a ticket and got a response within the hour. I have sympathy for the support people staying up for the open beta like that! I guess within the industry staying there during open beta launch is pretty standard fare? Or maybe it was funneled to some guy's e-mail at his home? This is the type of stuff Friendly thinks about.

Anyway. I got a nice note saying they've received a lot of feedback and that Thursday morning all characters were going to be deleted. They also threw down 1,000 mytheon coins for my troubles. They also said that the open beta contest period had been extended due to the extended downtime they were taking do a complete database wipe. SO, it's looking like people have until 2 May now to download and try the game out to be entered into the contest to win the goodies (also looks like they added in some Mytheon hats/shirt swag combos to the prizes as well).

From my point of view, this is all positive. Character wipes, problems, and issues during beta are pretty much expected, right? This is all good information for them I'm sure. (hint: add more servers!)

There was a character wipe in closed beta as well. It's just kind of how it goes with betas. On a personal level what I noticed was that on my second go around with the game, the controls felt much less "wonky," and I kind of figured out how to move better. There always seems to be a period of time where the controls feel a little uncomfortable to me when I start a game. Right click to move? WASD moves the screen? All these things became a little more comfortable to me over time.

So, I'm interested in hearing how your experiences were!

OH, one more thing: Since I was stuck on the loading screen so much I got to screenshot a few of the hints haha. Here's a stitch-together graphic of them:


Learn something new everyday! Now I just need to figure out this merge combo thingy. hmm.

Keep throwing the stones!