It is Labor Day today in North America, similar to the May 1st holiday that is celebrated in most countries around the world, so I'm not expecting an update from Hyperion. The soonest we'll hear from him is tomorrow when he might have some news about the character database. We'll see.

Don't get your hopes up that the game is going live tomorrow. That is not what he said in his last update and you can read the post below this one for more details.

In the mean time I've played a few other games, after all it's been 2 weekends of down time since we last had 9Dragons to play. I would have died of terminal boredom without something to do in the evenings. I started out with GuildWars because a few of the Restless League were working on that. The game is not free-2-play but there is a 10 hour free trial, so I got started with that.

Earlier this year I was playing Aika during the great GameGuard Disconnection Event and I've discovered that Aika is a direct rip-off of GuildWars. Characters, mobs, scenery in Aika, they all come straight from GuildWars. The two games even have the same painfully slow jerky movement speed for the characters, and in the end that is what turned me off Aika. It has turned me off GuildWars too and I doubt I'll go back to that game even if the new installation of 9Dragons is a complete failure.

I decided to try a GamersFirst game just to get some experience with their games. I downloaded Sword2 and started to regret it 3 hours later when it was still downloading. That is one bigass game. The total download time with updates was over 6 hours, and I only spent 5 minutes playing it. That has to be a new record for me. I'm told that you either love that game, or hate it. You can put me in the "meh" category.

One thing I found out though is there can be password problems with G1 games. The password you used to build an account to gain access to the forums can be too long for the password field of some of the G1 games. I had to change my password and knocked two characters off the end. That's only a small Oops! but it shows that G1 isn't always paying attention. I had this problem with Sword2 and I'm told it affects Knights Online as well, which was the next game I tried.

Knights Online or KOL as it's often called is a Swords and Sorcery MMO with a huge number of servers to choose from. I went to Ronark2 at random and I'm probably the only English speaking person on the server. A few descriptions in the server list might be nice.

Character movement speed is slow but there is a sprint mode. If you spam that while using the WASD keys to navigate you can get to your destination in about one-third the time needed to walk. I'm playing a Ranger/Archer type because that character type can melee as well when that would be more useful, like 9Dragons it depends on the mobs. He also has a small ability to heal and that makes the grind time a little longer.

The time needed to rebuild hit points or energy is excruciating long. That is one of the minor disappointments with KOL. I can chat in the IRC channel while I wait for HP/SP to rebuild. The party system can be used to complete quest kills quickly so people are constantly spamming each other with party invites, even if you aren't going after the same mobs. One of the character classes has a teleport skill too, that draws you back to them and the mobs they are working on. I find that so freaking annoying that I checked the "no party invites" box and now I'm grinding alone.

Lastly, the most highly annoying problem in KOL is the number of auto-grind hacker bots out there. There is an auto-target function with the Z-key and it's really useful for Archers, but a lot of players have combined that with speed hacks and damage hacks and they can take over a grind area. They obviously aren't grinding in quests, they are just taking XP from mobs, quickly. If one of those guys is grinding in your quest mobs you can forget about that mob for now. Best just to move on to your next quest mob and hope for the best there. I can't imagine what PvP looks like in KOL.

I posted about the hackers in the 9Dragons forum at GamersFirst and a KOL forum mod answered. They know about the problem and are working on it. "Working on it" obviously doesn't include banning people using the hacks because G1 Admins obviously aren't even looking. Maybe they just need a GameGuard style system to solve the problem but whatever, I would hate to see those guys invade 9Dragons.

So what have you been playing? Real-Life? Lovers and Losers? Daddy? Monopoly?

- SpearDriver