Today has been a challenging day! UPS and Amazon were in disagreement as to the status of my copy. Amazon said bad weather caused it to be declined and UPS said it was on target. After a while it did arrive. I rushed home from work and immediately threw the CD into the drive to install. Unfortunately, nobody informed me that installing was currently the wrong process. It put a separate EQ2 on my computer that just didn’t seem to work. I went to my old client and logged in with that. I was in!

Much to my surprise I found out that there were already level 90 characters on Oasis. Now I am an old raider so I know the pressure to get levels done immediately. There is nothing new there but I never anticipated someone being 90 before I ever logged in! No big deal, though, we all banked a lot of collection quests so there is an advantage there. I left my guild hall and ran over to the collection turn in person and handed mine in. No ding… It seems that your AA slider is left in the default position of 100%. Ouch… well so much for my head start.

Oh well, not that I’d let something like that get me down! Obviously nobody got to 90 with collection quests alone, I hope. Some of my guild mates are already in the 82 to 85 range so I do feel a little behind but it isn’t a big deal. They’ll catch me up, they always do! I hit the wizard spire and head out to the new frontier! The first quest I see is offered by a gnome. When will these little bastards stop beating me to places? Rodents everywhere I swear! He wants me to go talk to a bunch of erudites and I agree.

Running around Paineel proves to be a pain (no pun there) since everyone else on the east coast just got off work as well. I’ve been through a lot of expansion launches and I know what happens. I certainly don’t expect this to be a lag free experience. Not for a week or so at least! I am doing okay completing my quest until I simply cannot get one NPC to recognize me. No matter what he just can’t find my character so I decide I’ll just explore while lag rages on.

This leads me to jump into The Hole (who wouldn’t?) and enjoy that a bit. It quickly becomes clear that level 80s should not be in The Hole and I decide it is best to return to the guild hall and start fresh since I have no idea how to get out. Unfortunately, I don’t end up zoning and am booted to desktop. From there I was no longer able to log in but Amnerys put my fears at rest and told me it was a minor login issue. I take the time to make dinner! I’m going to need to fuel.

After dinner is prepared I try again and make it to the expansion! Things went a bit smoother and I logged in to begin my new life in Odus. It has been a long time and (I believe) an alternate reality since Ferrel has been there so she was a bit perplexed. That’s okay, though, we found someone from Qeynos to give us a quest in addition to that gnome and got under way. The first thing I noticed was the wonderful multi-quest helper! No longer am I limited to one quest and I love it. That alone was worth the cost of the expansion.

I start to travel about the Sundered Frontier and work on the first quests I find. These are mostly just run around and become familiar with Paineel quests. I expect nothing less. I’m enjoying the beauty of the city and the fact that the NPCs are no longer invisible to me. Things are looking up! I spend my AAs and put Ferrel back on track. It wasn’t long before disaster struck once more! I run by a player with an outrageously long name and suddenly I drop to desktop. Before I ever manage to get back in the server drops and everyone else knows my frustration! Mwahaha!

Unfortunately the Oasis server never seemed to manage to come around. That is okay though. That generally happens when your entire player base tries to log in and play in two zones. Day two will go smoother I’m sure!