The Morning After

Wooof. End of Beta was fun.

See, excitement and fun is what you make of it. I've read umpteen posts about people sulking because they found the event not-fun, and boring, and so-on. Now granted, if you were unable to log on, or had some kind of updater problem, or black-screened or blue-screened and so on - then I feel your pain, technical problems always suck.

But if you were online, same as me, then welp...

Caveat: A travel power always makes movement much easier in such events. Heck, it makes movement convenient at any time. Let's see, if you were in the beta before me, you most likely would have gotten a 10 level bump. I got my Brute to level 17, and only took my travel power at 16.

So if you weren't interested enough in CoV beta to play a character up to level 14 and a travel power, especially when you know there's an end-of-beta-event coming on, then imo, tough noogies.

Look, fun is what you make of it. I logged on early in the hope of avoiding the worse of the connection crowd, and it seemed to work. I had very little communication with the outside world, just a few SGmates who weren't communicating much on chat, think they were on TS and I was too lazy to go start it up.

Where would you logically think an end-of-beta event would start? A place with the maximum number of people, right? The Atlas Park of CoV, no? Heck, just try to zone and you would see like 10 zones of Mercy Island, so that would probably be the smartest place to be.

I'm boggled by people who thought that the event would come to them. You search for these things, morons. I guess they were all spoonfed, and have never done a telescan quest before. :P

I decided to stop and take up roots in MI8. It seemed far away enough from the first few instances, so that if the devs logically began in order from MI1, they would spend some time there before getting to MI8, and there would be enough time for me to be in the zone and hear the broadcasts.

Once the portals started going up, the word was put out all over broadcasts and it was hopping time to go fight 'em. So what if they were level 40-50 Longbow? One hit on 'em and you know they scale as giant monsters. Otherwise there would be more dead people all over the ground. If you were so wussy as to not even TRY hitting them, then well, yea, all you can do is whine.

We beat down portal after portal, and you got to start knowing the spawn points. North end of the island, just a little NE of darwin's landing point, and so on. People were shouting out /loc coordinates and landmark directions, given a little coaxing and teaching to do so. "HERE!" "WHERE's here? use /loc to tell us."

Then the Agents showed up. We got Agent Polpol in Fort Cerebus, and Agent Simpson was eluding us forever, before he went down.

And then the news went up that Statesman was here, so of course, all of us dogpiled over and beat him up but good. And then Manticore showed up, and Miss Liberty and Back Alley Brawler and unsoweiter.

Now the moment Manticore mapservered us, and we all logged back on, MI8 suddenly became really really quiet. No more hero sightings, no nothing. Some people went back to fighting portals. Well, sure, if you take joy in that, that's a way to have some fun.

Me, I wanted to go and look for more heroes. So what do you do? You switch zones, duh. Have some fucking intitiative. If your zone is quiet, go look for others and hope you randomly bump into something. I was using the base teleporters, which involve a lot of superjumping from the spawn point, to the points heroes were commonly sighted, to the base portal, to the SG teleporter, and repeating over and over.

If you didn't have a SG teleporter, as they said, you could have just camped the damn ferry or the chopper or whatever. There's a Port Oakes ferry. Easy enough to switch to PO and back again to different Mercys and just broadcast about any hero sightings? And/or to hop to the zone points to see.

I found Synapse that way, and had some real good fun with him. It's a shame I missed Positron, but oh well, you can't have everything. War Witch and Ravenstorm, I don't quite care not seeing. Would just have been nice to see Posi. :)

What I like about this event is that it is different, and yet personalized for each player. Everyone would have seen a slightly different view of the events, from their own perspective, and have shared memories of different heroes where a whole bunch of villains came together. Just like Natural Selection in a way.

Of course, having the freedom to do this, also means that a number of morons would just sit in a deserted quiet zone and whine that the mountain never came to Mohammed and that your event suckz0red the fux0red. Sheesh, grow up, people. Opportunities don't just come at you, unless you like, win the lottery in the billions to one chance, you gotta LOOK for the opportunities.

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Now, it's the morning after, and I'm stuck on CoH Updater again. Rofl. I've been so carried away by CoV that I hadn't bothered to update CoH, and now Issue 6 has hit and nothing is working right. Connecting #285 and counting.

Ironically, my CoHTest folder is working perfectly and lets me log onto Test server fine.

I have copied what they said to copy, and deleted checksums, but it's just not working very well yet. Probably 100,000 other people are trying to do the same thing. *sigh*

The copy tool alas, is NOT working perfectly, and I can't copy my level 50 over to test out my planned ED respec. Which sucks.

So I have pretty much nothing to do CoH-related except read boards and type blogs until either my Live updater starts working, or the copy tool works.

Oh waitaminute, I just figured something out. I haven't disabled my fucking router, like I did for the CoV download, maybe that's the damn problem. My software firewall's down, but not that.

*crosses fingers* Let me try that now.