Done and Done

I have gone ahead and canceled my AoC subscription. I figure I may as well do it now, when I have been building up the steam for it all day on my off day. Before I get distracted by work and end up vacillating.

It says I still have a month left from my 3-month billing cycle. We'll see when it actually kicks in.

I've also deleted my payment option, because word-of-mouth horror stories are that Funcom has a tendency to 'accidentally' bill a second month out of you. Let's see them do that without a credit card number in their database.

(Ironically, I was able to delete my payment option without canceling the game first. I morbidly wonder what would have happened if I had just left it like that. Think Funcom has a backup database of this kind of info?)

I spent the first part of the day messing around with my HoX, enjoying the animations and setting things on fire and hitting them with a big pointy metal stick. Eventually, though, it felt like just going through the motions. Especially when I kept dying to accidentally aggro'ed extra mobs.

My original intent was to take this guy to go see the new dungeons. But as the hours passed, and I heard the lonely OOC chatter (one or two groups at most, looking for healer, ad nauseam), I began to seriously doubt the achievability of reaching the level, and getting a group together.

Then I remember, hang on a sec, I have a level 80, dammit. Do I really care if the mobs are grey, as long as I can get in? In fact, it'll make it even more convenient to tour around!

So I took myself on a tour of the Treasury of the Ancients, being spendthrift along the way (10 gold saved up) and bought myself 4 more colors of the 75s horses just for the hell of it. (It wasn't like I could afford any other kinds. The rest were all 50g still.)

While I went screenshot happy across the lands I passed, color me unimpressed with the Treasury. It was a little too big, and not very compact for a dungeon meant to be done solo. The structure didn't quite make sense and there was a lot of running back and forth between floors for errand quests.

The traps took me a little by surprise at first, because they were the only still-lethal danger for my max level Guardian. The spike traps weren't too bad. Catch the unwary a few times, then you learn to watch out for the holes in the ground. The rest felt a little gimmicky. Long twisty corridors of poison gas, and small gaps of clear air with demon minions that presumably aggro if you did it fair and swquare. One or two destructible magic hourglasses that slowed all movement to a crawl, so you had to shoot and destroy it, or crawl to it and bash it to pieces.

Perhaps it would have felt better at the correct level range (but presumably it would take a couple of hours with many repeat deaths) and in a small group, the experience might have been more fun (but this was meant as a solo dungeon anyhow.)

Tomorrow and the days after, if I can still log in, I might go and try and visit the Pyramid, Black Castle, the supposedly revamped Catacombs and so on.

If not, then well, done is done. I have a bare minimum of screenshots for old time's sake. I'd like to grab more, of course. More is always better. But yeah, for now, I am done with AoC, except for tourist-ing.

Looks like I won't have to justify paying for 4 MMOs until Christmas after all. WAR will take AoC's place at the table nicely, and we'll see if LOTRO competes for a budget stool after Mines of Moria comes out.