I've just wasted the best part of a day trying to get the Tabula Rasa trial to work.

While a lot of what I have read (or more to the point, haven't read) about TR hasn't convinced me that it's what I'd consider a perfect MMO, I'm a sucker for anything with lasers and aliens in it, so TR looked like it could be fun for a while, at least. So I dug out an EU trial key and set about downloading the trial.

First set of problems. For starters, it took me the best part of two hours to track down a trial-key. I almost gave up at this point, but sheer bloody-mindedness drove me on. Now I'm signed up to a random Italian gamesite, more spam for my spam-mail account. While all this was going on, I was trying to download the client. There could have been a download link on the game website, or on the main NCSoft site, but no (actually, while digging through the depths, or rather shallows, of their technical support page, I found a link to download the client. But that was six hours after I'd already downloaded it.) So I downloaded the client from one of the big game-related download sites (Gamers' Hell I believe). Inside a .rar file whose only purpose was to include a .txt saying where the download came from. Cheers guys, for fragging up another 700mb of my hard drive just for that. On extracting the file, it turned out to be corrupt, so I ended up having to delete it anyway. At this point I decided it would be easier to waste trial time downloading the client direct from the NCSoft account management page, so I put in the trial key (which worked, at least) and downloaded the client from there. Four hours of trial time lost, not that it would matter.

So, the client was finally downloaded and my account was active. Time to forget all the hassle involved in getting to this point and sit back and enjoy the magic of trying out a brand new game.
Oh, installing Tabula Rasa naturally installed NCSoft's launcher program with links to every other game they have ever made. I hate this kind of aggressive marketing, but I won't dwell on it right now.

So, the TR logo pops up, the loading bar slowly fills, and up come all the usual mindless animations reminding you who made the game (as if the logos plastered all over the rest of the software weren't enough) and then a rather cheesy intro movie. That was all I got to enjoy of Tabula Rasa, because the next thing I saw was a blue screen. Another couple of hours wasted on searching tech-support forums (unofficial, there don't seem to be any official ones), the web and NCSoft's crappy tech-support page, with another four blue-screen crashes along the way, and I gave up.

This experience left me with quite a few thoughts.

For starters, every time I interact with NCSoft, I'm reminded how good Blizzard are at dealing with their customers. On two separate occasions now, I've played through a trial of CoH and CoV, and I would have happily subscribed for at least a few months, but I was thwarted by NCSoft's arcane billing system. I think this is possibly the only case in my entire life where I was fully willing to give someone my money and they refused me any sane way of giving it to them.
Product support isn't a patch on WoW either, although here I don't think Blizzard can take all the credit (apart from that of making a lovely piece of software which has never crashed on me during four years across multiple systems), since the WoW community is so huge that there is a deluge of information on the net on every aspect of the game, no matter how peripheral or arcane it is. Alternate config suggestions for your cfg file? Check. Fixes for pretty much any issue involving any kind of hardware? Check. In depth guides to everything to do with fishing? Check.
With Tabula Rasa, all I could find were two or three threads regarding crashes, to which the answers were mainly variants on "ur PC sux, loser, go play another game".

Another though I'm left with is how out of touch developers (and publishers) are getting with the gaming market. I've played games all my life, and I'm always looking out for new games to play. However I'm grown-up now and I can't afford to throw away two grand on a dedicated gaming PC, especially when I'll only use it a few hours a week. Since getting a laptop for work, I'm not sure I could face the physical limitations of a desktop PC now either - I need my PC for a lot of things (like occasionally blogging here for example) and I move around a lot. Having to lug a desktop around with me from country to country just isn't practical. My laptops, however, even the brand-new work one (which of course I'm not using to play games on *shifty*) basically can't play anything that has come out since WoW. Which is starting to get on my nerves, as I've already played and replayed pretty much every decent game that has been made up to that date. So, once again I find myself in a situation where I want a product, I'm willing to pay for it, but the people making the product don't want my money.

On a final note, I'm also struck by what seems to me to be the arrogance of the Tabula Rasa sales team and the lack of foresight of the developers. The sales team apparently don't see the need for offering free trials (so people like me can find out that their software doesn't work on my system before handing over €45) and the developers don't appear to have bothered to put in some simple checks which come back with a "your machine can't run this program for X reason" rather than just blindly attempting to run and crashing on any machine that isn't capable of meeting the software's demands.

This says a lot to me about Tabula Rasa, although I don't think I get the same message that the person involved intended.

Anyway, I've rambled on long enough for today.

Eight months between posts, that's probably somewhere in the top 100 biggest delays between blog updates... What have I been up to?

Well, I found a job for starters. In journalism, no less. I'm enjoying it immensely and it sure is a nice change to have a steady wage instead of living from translation to translation.

Other than the new job, the rest of my time has probably been spent on World of Warcraft, which is a real timesink. While, amazingly, I still enjoy playing it after around three years, I feel fairly relieved that my subscription has run out. It's just too easy to open WoW up every time you have some free time, thus sidelining everything else indefinitely. Plus now that everyone I used to play with has either joined another guild, switched to another server, or quit the game entirely, there is no real social aspect to it anymore. Not being able to do instances, probably my favorite aspect of the game, didn't help either.

PvP might have been an option, but I've never really cared for it much in WoW and, while I'm generally quite good at PvP in general, I need to put in a lot of time to keep my reflexes and mind sharp. Considering I can't even commit to a couple of hours for an instance, that doesn't seem likely.

My highest level character, Erdamion, is still the guild leader for Spirit of the Wolf. I tried to find Clearbreaze/Tripp/etc, the only other active remaining member from back when the guild was alive, in order to pass on the torch, but had no luck. Looks like SotW will indeed die with my characters, as I predicted back when I joined. Ah well, it outlasted a lot of larger guilds on the server, as well as outlasting the people that were mainly responsible for its collapse. But that's another story for another time...