Let Me In ...
What happens when three members of the team suddenly find they cannot actually login to the game to do their work? For that matter, what happens when another member of the team suddenly finds they cannot login to the forum; in fact, cannot actually SEE the forum at all? And what happens when it all happens within just a few days? The truth is that running an online game, especially one where the team just cant leave it alone but desperately want to continuously improve it (sticking their fingers in the cogs would be closer), is never ever going to be a smooth run. There is always going to be that certain little Swedish gremlin that is going to wake up and smell the coffee when you really could do without his interfering ways.
In this case, something happened a few days ago that meant that people from Golden Valley suddenly couldn’t use the Portal to go to Independence, down south in the Freedom Isles. Actually, that wouldn’t have been too bad, but much to their surprise, not only were they they still standing where they had started, but they appeared to have changed and were now wearing the rather fetching Lincoln green of those southern folk. Very trendy, one might say, but the Golden Valley guards loitering round the portal finishing their sandwiches, just saw a flash of green, decided “that doesn’t belong here,” and went for it! Ooops.
Not to worry! Send a carrier pigeon to a rather nice lakeside town somewhere in Sweden and it will be fixed in a jiffy! And so it was. More or less.
Except, a certain musical member of the team, suddenly found himself stuck well and truly in his village green in the UK and nowhere near anything Wurm shaped. According to the error message, “You need to register an account ….” WHAT?????? Turns out that the Bard was not alone. A younger member of the team also had problems. And as the days went on, and the carrier pigeon was having to carry larger and larger bricks to DROP on a rather nice lakeside town somewhere in Sweden, it turned out that a rather older … umm, senio… er … more respected member of the team couldn’t get in either.
Meanwhile, the busy pigeon started knocking at my window to be let in. The message read “I can’t get into the &*£”&(*&$£&”*£*”£(*$&£$ forum.” Well, to the point, I suppose. So I lifted the bonnet on the forum and poked around in the engine, checked the points and the gap in the spark plug and cleaned a filter or two while I was there. Then I sent the message back. “You don’t exist, apparently, go away.”
Going by the speed of the pigeon as he crashed back into my window, I think he had been thrown at it. Okay, so that didn’t go so well. I wont read out the message here, but I was suddenly prompted to be a tad more proactive. And it turned out I was right. The forum had looked at the person trying to get in, had sent a message back asking for more details, didn’t get a reply so decided it had better things to do than chase an IP address halfway round the globe and slammed the door shut. Oh dear.
I soothed the ruffled feathers of the dizzy bird, gave it a tot of brandy (kept for purely medicinal purposes you understand) and sent a very short message to Sweden, hoping that the pigeon would not be downed by a brick coming on a return journey from a now thoroughly fed up person sitting on his Ikea office chair.
Well, Sweden has produced some fine sons, thankfully, and with the quick addition of a better Pigeon Navigation Control (DNS to the rest of you), and the discovery of a missing bit of lock lying on the office floor that should have been attached to the entry door, everyone was back in Wurm and on the forums and doing what they do best in life. In my case, that meant planting a load of trees round Glitterdale – well, you can never have enough trees, can you?
So, an interesting few days, and underneath all the excitement, quite a lot of work got done too! What a life we Wurmians lead!
