Thursday, July 22, 2004

These Lands Are... Not So Eternal

A funny thing happened yesterday. I was just about to log on and play a little Eternal Lands, when I saw a message: "Can't connect to server : ( Press any key to retry." Well, that's a little weird... so my next step was to take a look at the EL website and see what's up. Turns out, the power supply on the EL server blew out, frying the hard drive in the process. Well, surely there's got to be a recent backup right? Wrong. This little message on the front page was my first clue: "Oh, and what backups?". As is turns out, the most recent non-corrupted backup was from February. Take a look at this archives on this site if you want proof, but I didn't even start playing this game until March and I didn't even really get to any good levels until very recently. So, as far as the backups were concerned, I didn't exist anymore. To tell you the truth, I was sort of happy to be able to start over from scratch, not entirely happy with my character's development.

I must have been the only one. The message boards exploded with a thousand posts from unhappy people how had spent too many hours of "work" building up their character's stats. A lot of people even vowed to immediatly stop playing the game, never to return again. Then, something even weirder happened: A debate on whether or not everyone's character's should be "reset". OK, so maybe I did something wrong and was accidentaly reading the posts from the game's developers with my head up my ass, but, to me it didn't look like we had a fucking choice! A whole lot of people went so far as to admit that they couldn't play the game anymore because they couldn't stand not being higher level than everyone else. "Now the n00bs are going to be just as strong as us!", they cried in utter despair, the thought of not being able to lord their high stats over the unwashed masses literaly making them cry tears of blood. So fucking what? If you're so god damned good at the game, you should be higher level than all the "nOObs"(god I hate that term) in no time at all anyway. I guess a lot of people just didn't see it from my angle, and those people are no longer playing the game, thank fuck.
But, for every person that slit their wrists when the server burned up, there were five people who were excited, no, exuberant to be getting a chance at redeveloping their characters. And shit, did they start right away. It might as well have been a race. One that, I might add, is still going on without me as I write up this post. I have to admit, I happened to recreated my character only minutes after the server came back online, and I was one many clammering from rock to flower harvesting all they could to be up much needed experience. By the time I logged off, I was up to level 18 overall, and was notching up quite a few various skills.

Sure, before the crash my overall level was well above 30, I was mopping the floor with goblins, and I had even joined a guild. But, it sure is nice not having to deal with that stupid Hellspawn perk anymore. Confused? Play the game, you'll see. Just don't get in the way of the power levellers, and don't become stronger than those who want to be the strongest. It will only anger them, for there can only be one, and that one can not be you. The fuckfaces have spoken.

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