Reveling in the Night

Hey, I streamed again. Been a while. Might do some more – not promoted, don’t wanna have to move my time slot again and all that. But ’twas fun.

I figured, last night of the Night Revels, I might as well get some video, so Comic and I headed out to Delera’s Graveyard to tackle hordes of undead. (Not “hoards” – that’s what I do with cosmetic pets. Speaking of which, I finally got the rustie, so now I have ’em all!)

We had a grand old time slashing our way through the four original Revels quests – Under New Ravagement, Snitch and the Lich, Haverdashed, and The Kobolds’ Newest Ringleader.

Found out shortly into questing that my voice wasn’t coming through over the stream; turns out that when you disable talk in OBS, your voice over DDO won’t come through either. And I really didn’t want to leave my mic open because I’m still fighting the Rocky Horror Superflu that went through our cast, so I was coughing and sneezing a lot, plus the mic picks up every last rattle and rustle every time I open a cough drop.

But it got to be too much of a pain to remember to push-to-talk both places, so my apologies for any flu-ridden sounds… and the fact that I didn’t talk much. I usually try to keep the witty banter up to make the stream interesting (whether I succeed is a matter of opinion), but sore throat + weak voice made that kinda tough.

Anyway, we were plowing through undead and raking in ings… and then, suddenly, I couldn’t move and my connection status went yellow, midway through Getting Ahead in Lordsmarch Palace. I told Comic that I thought I might be crashing. He didn’t answer, so I thought maybe he couldn’t hear me. Typed in guild chat that I thought I might be DCing, and found that all seven* Flower Sniffers currently online were having the same issue.

* – Actually five of us, but Shin was tri-boxing.

Didn’t take long before we crashed, one at a time. And then some real fun started. I rebooted DDO and decided to fire up the stream again too… so the second video features numerous unsuccessful attempts to log back in. I also played the intro video, because it seemed like that would be less boring than making people watch Even stand around on the login screen. And I introduced all of my toons.

Turned out to be a Thelanis thing; Khyber had a bit of a hiccup, but not nearly as bad, and the other servers were fine. Waiting for everything to come back up again seemed to take forever but was actually maybe 15-20 minutes, and when it did… strange things were happening. Upon logging back in, only Comic ended up back where he’d been at the time of the crash. I was next to get in and found myself on the Bridge Between with a no doubt very confused Life Shaper. Seki’s wizard was next, landing on the Heart of Wind. All three of Shin’s toons wound up on Korthos. And Slvr never made it back on at all.

I had to reset my bind point – somehow in the kerfuffle it got changed from the airship to the Faerun Hall of Heroes – but Comic and I were back in Lordsmarch Plaza shortly. This time, things went off without a hitch, and we traded in our ings for some goodies afterwards. Of course, the only thing I really wanted was the Doomspherelet, and I’d gotten that the first night (thanks, Abs!).

In totally unrelated news, I was both glad and sad when I read in the U33 release notes, “Numerous minor typos have been corrected throughout the game” – glad because editing is what I do, so typos are anathema to me… but sad because I feared for the future of my very favorite typos in the game.

Tower of Despair just wouldn’t be the same if Horoth didn’t try to summon his Soliders of Shavarth. So Slvr and I ran ToD tonight, and I’m happy to report that Horoth’s minions are still Soliders, and still from Shavarth (which clearly is a plane that’s solider than Shavarath). I was also pretty happy that, while Slvr played with Nyth, Even killed the shadows so fast that she spent a lot of time just kind of hanging out doing nothing while she waited for more to respawn.

And in totally unrelated but VERY IMPORTANT news, it’s Movember! That means that the DDO team is raising money for men’s health. You can meet the team, find out their motivations, and donate at the DDO team Movember page.

Turbine Senior Community Manager Cordovan is participating in Movember again and also raising money for Boston Children’s Hospital via Extra Life, which benefits hospitals in the Children’s Miracle Network. You can support his efforts, along with the LotRO team, via their page on Extra Life.

Remember, no donation is too small! Both are GREAT causes. And if you can’t afford to donate, you can still help out by sharing the links!