Back From the Abyss

Real life and technical issues have kept us away from Wildstar this past little while. The real life stuff wasn't all bad. Virika and I rode the NYC 5 Boro Bike Tour on May 4th. It was an awesome 40+ mile bike ride through every borough of New York, over bridges, through parks and ending at the Staten Island ferry. We had a good time and our team raised over $11,000 for the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation. This past weekend while most of you were hopefully enjoying time in the beta, Virika and I were re-upping our Wilderness First Aid certification which we need for work purposes. Not the worst way to spend a weekend but we've done it many times (every two years) and there is only so much fun you can have learning to make splints out of improvised materials.

The one night we were able to get into the game, we were unable to get a group going and the LFG tool was no help. The other nights were plagued with one or both of us having technical problems. It started on Friday for me. V got into the game easily, but mine wouldn't patch. Got a "Patch Failed" error many times with a link to some help files. Most of them involved suggestions like "run as administrator", disable background processes, turn off firewall, creating new "uncorrupted" user account, and flush DNS, etc. I tried everything (including the repair feature) to no avail. Virika screwed around in game doing crafting while I was freaking out chatting with others having the same problem on forums and in chat. I tried to uninstall the game and re-install which also sucked. Apparently, the game will not uninstall correctly if not fully patched:

Who were the two people who found this useful? I want to PvP them.

This was ridiculous to me. If the game won't patch and repair won't work what are you supposed to do? If this continues to be the case, Carbine really needs to come up with a functioning uninstaller. The thing that bothers me most was that when it finally started installing I really don't know what I did to fix it. The re-install problems began with trying to get the .exe file from the NCSOFT website and continued as the game tried to install. After an hours long comedy of errors, I finally got it to work. I checked my mailbox and then went to bed.

We played a bit the following night, but as I said we weren't able to get a group going. We did dailies and played around with housing. Last night, both Virika and I had the same problem again. After trying everything again, submitting a ticket, getting a generic reply, resetting our FIOS system twice... it miraculously started working again at around 12am. Grrr... got in, checked my mailbox and then went to bed.

Plan for tonight:

1. Leave work on time.
2. Make sweet potato & caramelized onion pizza with arugula salad for dinner.
3. PvP and run instances until Nexus itself learns to fear our names.

PS- I think we found an awesome guild for us! Will tell more when Virika gets her app in!