Screen shot is of someones annoying boat. The fact that they own a boat is great. The problem is that they parked it RIGHT on top of the riftway (that red column in the back end of the ship). When you port in, you end up getting a ‘you are on a boat wee’ compass that shows up and if you’ve never been to this particular area before, it’s annoying. Have a little curtsey and park your boats some place else! Like NOT right on the riftway. Shesh.
I began my slow trek to 50. On some advice of a friend I made my way to Tehatamani Harbor, although I’m too low to get most of the quests there the area DOES have a fantastic story. The chunk itself is located in Qalia, bottom left hand area. A little piece of land that juts out into the ocean. It’s beautiful. There’s a group of people who belong to the Lucent Circle hanging out, they have a little camp all set up. The very first introductory quest gives you a necklace (well, it gave me one at least, two choices of them) and as you work on tasks for this group of people, you can combine the shards (rewards from tasks) and upgrade your necklace. I’ve only done the first few quests so far, but the necklace is already an upgrade for me.
The Lucent Circle is made up of Paladins who are there to right wrongs and do all that good holy stuff. Apparently they have opened recruitment to anyone who wants to help, and not everyone within their ranks are happy about that. The Lucent Circle is there to fight against the Tehatamani Empire. Basically like an old Robin Hood story, the Empire steals artifacts from other cultures and takes them for their own. They ransack and pillage civilizations and cultures, amassing great wealth. The Tehatamani are at war with the Vakrin, who were the last civilization that they stole from. They managed to get some sort of sacred artifact that gave them huge powers that they shouldn’t have.
The first task sent me to learn a little about their history, and then head off to some pyramids in the distance that were surrounded by snakes and bugs. Apparently their grounds keepers are on holiday and they want me to kill the diseased creatures. I did notice a raid mob also pathing around the pyramids (or maybe it was just a group mob, I forget what so many dots over the mobs heads mean now, it was at least five) and I stayed well clear of them. I killed 12 creatures, learned my history lesson, and upgraded my necklace. I love these types of quests, and the story is pretty good. I need to earn more rank with the Lucent Circle, so I picked up the next round of quests. They’re level 46 though, and I’m level 43 which means they’re red to me. They want me to kill more creatures, and I think I should be able to do that easily enough. I’ll need a few more levels before I advance too much further, so I’ll have to find some place a little lower to gain some experience. The next round of quests sends me back to collect some vials of liquid and take care of 100 of the icky creatures that surround the pyramids.
The kills all net me faction with the Lucent Circle as well, and there’s some nice heroic gear on a vendor if I turn in tokens to them. We’ll see how it goes!
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If I thought I’d devote enough time to the game I may eventually look into a server transfer for my Dread Knight because I really don’t know that I’d be up for starting fresh. A former RnH guy did suggest a guild to me on Xeth but I play so infrequently that I just haven’t bothered yet. No sense joining a guild then not playing the game for several months.
I like that it’s not blocked off (as annoying as it is to me personally) because being able to have ‘invisible’ walls is annoying. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t be able to park a boat where his is, technically it’s in the water. It’s just so huge, that it covers the riftway which is on a little jut of stone from the docks. It doesn’t mean I can’t use it at all, it’s just a personal annoyance. Not really up to SoE to solve those for me. ;)
Not sure about other servers, but Seradon has a great population. My guild alone has 588 members as of this morning, new recruits every week, and 7-20 people on nightly. Can’t speak for other guilds or servers though.
On the other hand, any developer worth his salt should know that a segment of the population will, if able, intentionally be a pain in the ass. SOE should simply make a radius of X meters around important features such as NPCs, Riftways, etc. where you cannot park your boat. Problem solved. SOE, forward my check to…
I keep wanting to at least get one character to 50 but I have such a hard time staying motivated in Vanguard with such a low population on Xeth, and I don’t know that I want to start all over again on Seradon or whichever server actually has players. I don’t even have a guild at the moment because the Vanguard chapter of Revelry and Honor pretty much died off.