Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Play Log - TERA (NA) - CBT5 Weekend

So this is it... The last CBT for TERA before we go live. This weekend was also pretty enjoyable compared to the last one, especially near the end of the CBT where players all over had parties over just about every corner of the world. More on this later.

Weekend started off with me finishing up the Sinestial Manor. As it turns out: last time while I was trying to record footage during the run, my recorder crapped out on me and took the TERA client down with it. When logged back in, I was still inside the dungeon, but the story quest status got completely negated and I had to do the run all over again. Luckily I was able to find another group and we cleaned house pretty quickly.


Going a bit off-subject: I'm never using PlayClaw again until this thing gets patched up. I recently bought it so I could take videos with minimal recorder lag. And while it does do a decent job of recording with minimal frame drop, everything else about it flat out sucks. The removed a bunch of features from the previous version (2.0) and it likes to crash all the freaking time. Plus, lots of video save issues, audio de-syncs and more. I spent 24 bucks on this program and I kind of wish I didn't at this point. Guess I'll stick with Bandicam for now. Moving on...

I was actually a bit lost on what to do next, so I decide to quit for awhile. Around 9:30 PM EST, I received word that monsters were going to attack the city of Velika and I totally wanted in on that action. Most of my guild was ready for it, too. What we all weren't ready for was the HUGE amount of visual and network lag.


Turns out the little "invasion" was nothing more than a simple stress test to see how many enemies the server can handle. Not that I have anything wrong with that, but I really wish that would just call it a test instead of an event. Oh well.

There was another stress test held the day after, but it turned out more or less the same way. Only difference was that they sic'd LV42 unicorns on us (with the LV cap being 38, no less!) and set monsters to invade INSIDE the city. I had footage of that, but my recorder was crapping out on me again with de-synced audio and missing frames. (freaking PLAYCLAW.)



So many bodies... So many lives taken during the battle...


The warriors of Velika came out victorious, but whoever was spawning all the monsters had one last trick up their sleeve: A deadly army of...

...Rams?


I thought it was hilarious stunt until I realized they were capable of insta-kill.



Next day: Things start off pretty slowly with a new storyline leading to Cutthroat Harbor. First things first: Seek the Goddess for words of wisdom. The place were she hangs out was kind of trippy: bright lights coming from nowhere, gassy fumes in the air... and I managed to catch my Popori spacing out.


So after talking to the goddess, I head for the harbor to take care of some kind of conspiracy or whatever yadda yadda... I really just wanted to get to the next BAM hunt... and so I ran through all the zone quests as quickly as possible.

Clawrider. Now here's another BAM that gave me quite a headache. Fighting a clawrider was just like fighting an Ovolith, except with no poison strikes and unbelievably huge hitboxes. It took me out at least three times before I decided to switch my tactics up and re-glyph myself. Turns out that re-glyphing with reduced cooldown on Dash I was a good idea.


Another BAM down. That makes five BAMs defeated. It might be tough having to reset that list when OBT comes, but I'm ready and willing.

It was the last few hours and I was getting kind of bored. I was thinking about just ending my CBT5 weekend there, but I wanted to see what my guild was up to. Some of my guild mates were taking the time to accessorize at dye merchant so I decided to join them. I didn't pick out any new dyes, but I found out that my leather jerkin was available as remodel armor for only around 140,000 gold. I was so glad to find out my favorite outfit was available at that price, since a lot of the other remodel equipment costs 300k to 1 mil.

I asked a few members if they wanted to duel and they agreed. The few sparring matches we had were pretty one sided for the most part: I managed to take down players with two shots while another player was able to two-shot me. We even had a 3-on-1 (me being on the team of 3 against 1 player with +6 equipment) and lost by a landslide. I didn't realize how much of a difference that enchanting affects stats until then. I guess I really should trying upgrading my equipment some time. 

The minutes were just ticking away after those few matches. There wasn't much left on my mind except goofing off. TIME TO STRIKE SOME POSES.






Popori's are just so adorably awesome. I'm kind of surprised that there wasn't many players running around as one. I mean, how can anyone not want to play as an adorable little ass kicker?


About an hour left until the server shuts down and I was about to log off, but then my guild ran off to the middle of the city to check out a huge dance party that was going on. I had a lot of fun with this one:






I got some nice comments on this video, but I personally felt the camera work was a bit sloppy since I wanted to get close ups of almost everyone there, but so many people got in the way. Heh... I did three or four retakes of this video and felt this one was the nicest, even though I REALLY wanted to post the one where a bunch of players are repeatedly humping the boobie statue on their horses...

And so the server closed out at 3:02 AM EST... And with no closing or good bye messages from the GMs, either. Server simply went *poof* and turned off. This will probably be the last play log I do for TERA, as well (unless of course something really amazing happens.) so I hope you enjoyed reading and hope to see you all in OB.




1 comments:

Cyro-Illustrates said...

Nice write-up Mike!

This is the alter IRL ego of Cyroselle from the guild forums. Thanks for the link, it was fun to read about your opinions and experiences during the beta.

I'm also surprised there aren't more Popori, especially the huskies and pugs, you'd think there would be a lot more of those.

I hope to do a lot more exploring and play customization during the OB, along with learning to play a little better and trying out more instances, which I barely touched on during the CB phase.

See you then!

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