Home Is Where, When You Go There, They Have To Take You In. Ha! Lies! : Riders of Icarus

I'm sure absolutely no-one is wondering why I haven't posted anything about Riders of Icarus for a while. Even if athey have, no doubt they're assuming I've forgotten all about it in the slow-time frenzy of WoW Classic.

Actually, no. I'm still keeping up with my dailies in Guild Wars 2, I found time to log into EverQuest II to do the first of Yun Zi's new quests and I would have been logging in to RoI for my daily half-hour afk session too. If I could.

So what's stopping me?

 Error 602. That's what.

A few days ago, after downtime that officially lasted eight hours, Riders of Icarus slipped it's moorings from the safe harbor of Nexon to dock at the mysterious port known as Valofe or VFun. All the passengers who'd pre-registered should have gone along for the ride but quite a lot, including me, seem to have fallen overboard somewhere along the way.

My account transferred correctly as far as I can tell. I can log in to it on the VFun website and I have a Valofe ID. I was able to download the Valofe installer as required and install the full game. (The Steam version still seems to work but it now goes to a blank account with no characters).

The launcher also works but there's a discrepancy between the version I downloaded and the current version the launcher wants to patch. This is a known problem, aknowledged and apologized for by the new publishers, who do seem to be trying to sort things out.

Unfortunately, the fix they have suggested, which involves downloading the corrupted files directly from their website, doesn't work for everybody. Including me, naturally.

The latest advice is to submit a ticket, which I have done this morning. They even put up a template telling you exactly what information they need to try and sort the problem out for you.

It includes your characters' names, something most people presumably have no difficulty in remembering. I only have two characters, one of whom I have been looking at every day for several months. Do you think I could remember either of their names?

This is the downside to making up names off the top of your head in dozens of MMORPGs. Also of getting older. Fortunately, I have a blog.

I am scrupulous about never naming my characters in anything I write and always blurring or cropping their names in any screenshots I use. I have a thing about names and privacy. It's ridiculous but there you go. No chance of finding my characters' names from a post, then.

Very much not how I'm feeling about the move.

Because I illustrate so heavily, though, I take thousands of screenshots. For most of them I hide the UI but often I need some text or a pop-up window to emphasize some point I'm making in a post. I edit the names out of the pictures you see on the blog but I save those as separate files and keep the unedited originals in another folder.

I was confident the names would show up somewhere. It turns out I took a screenshot of the first one at character creation so that was easy. The other, my Trickster, the one with all the good stuff, was harder.

I don't have any shots of her from when I made her and RoI's UI doesn't include the name of the character anywhere. I checked the chat box in some of the shots but the game always refers to the character as "you" so no joy there.

I tried the shots I had of NPC dialog but RoI didn't seem to be one of those games that includes the character name in the quest text. I was starting to think I'd just have to tell VFun her class and level and hope that was enough, when I came across a shot of the her talking to the space cat back in May or June.

For some reason the cat did use her name. Probably because he's from space and doesn't know the local customs. Yay for cultural diversity!

As soon as I saw it I thought "Oh, yes, that's what she's called!" I had an inkling I'd named her after Dora the Explorer and indeed I had, although if I said her name I very much doubt anyone would make the connection.

Anyway, it's done now. All I can do is wait.

 I hope the new publishers can sort out their mess because I'd hate to lose all that great stuff I did absolutely nothing to get and paid absolutely nothing for.