Zontick's blog

A first person account of a happening within PlaneShift...

Leaving Hydlaa on the way to the Eagle Bronze Doors, I encountered a mass of people at the intersection of the paths leading to Hydlaa, the house of Levrus, and the Eagle Bronze Doors. A dwarf named Omeror held Xiosia's symbol, and all were intent upon his voice.

Xiosia has been busy of late, blessing seemingly random beggars. So out of curiosity, I watched. It was not long before I became a participant in the antics from there - first, Omeror called for the blood of Tefusangs. Later on the path toward the Eagle Bronze Doors, Omeror instructed us to slay Ulbernauts in the name of Xiosia. This followed with bathing in the lake near the Ulbernaut nest around the gold mine. The lake turned red.

Then other creatures were slain; the Marfusangs on the way to the Eagle Bronze doors had the good sense to simply not be there. Trepors were slain.

All in the name of Xiosia. { Read more }

Sorry about the site hiccough. I personally apologize. Here's the explanation, for those interested.

As Cocky Dagger indicated here, BlueHost.com has been iron-fisted lately with overuse of resources... something that probably seems familiar given Linden Lab's recent Open Space server issues within Second Life. Yesterday, I got an email (as described here) and responded to it immediately. But it was already too late to assure continuance of service.

After working my way through the anger phase, I looked through the logs and found that there had been 1 error a day for the last month as related to the database - and this had to do with aggregation from other sites. This, I have found, is problematic with Drupal when on shared hosting - so I needed the site re-enabled to disable the module. You can imagine how easy that was to explain. I can too. Because I don't think I actually did.

So - two tickets later into Customer Service, the site is now back up.

And yes, I am working toward this being avoided in the future. It may be time for a dedicated server.

One of the more intriguing aspects of PlaneShift are quests. Quests can get one items, experience and trias (the local currency) - as well as opening up the opportunity for new quests. But it's still a beta, so dealing with the NPCs can be painful. They can be literal or not literal - and the inconsistency can drive one mad. Key phrases to say to NPCs to get quests are:

Can I help you?
Give me a quest


Once you get the quest, you will likely have to deal with other NPCs - a sometimes frustrating aspect of the game, though long time players do say that it has improved. Even so, you can be stuck with phrases that start with 'about' or 'xyz sent me', where 'xyz' is the person who sent you. Riddles abound - and those riddles are typically not found in a search engine. Thus, people have to actually think or get help. Unfortunately, I've seen the latter more than the former. Some people don't even seem to try. They immediately ask for the answer and typically ignore any hints you might drop. 'But what is the answer?', they ask. And someone with good intentions gives the spoiler away so that the person can run off to get the next quest solved for them. With non-English speakers, this can be understandable - particularly with riddles.

One of the better aspects of PlaneShift is that the developers frown heavily upon spoilers. Guilds, however, put their spoilers behind closed doors. { Read more }

As a first post as Zontick, I have to write about some things that trouble players in PlaneShift - some things which are exemplified in this thread on their forums. I didn't intend the first post to be out of character (OOC), but circumstance demands it.

The circumstances surrounding this are fairly straightforward. As with other Massive Multiplayer Online Roleplayer Games (MMORPGs), the Game Masters (GMs) hold inworld events that seem impromptu. I write seem since it would be expected that a lot of thought and planning would go into them. In this instance, the Goddess Xiosia visited a city and distributed gifts - some of which were the maximizing of skills in magic. I wasn't there for that, but I did catch it on the forums - and found it interesting at first. Sure, the event happened on the American clock - something that the Europeans were a bit perturbed about. It does seem odd that the game's site has an Italian designated URL would not provide for Europeans in at least an equal way, but since the project team is mainly in the United States there would have to be a bias. It's... natural. { Read more }