Ok, Closed beta 1 finished on 6/20/06 and beta 2 began on 6/21/06 to last 24 hours. Huh? I'm not sure what they are doing with the second one since it still looks like the first closed beta. Maybe they are doing something with the servers, but I have no idea.

Oh well in any case there's not much to report as it really is a repeat. Kill, pick up loot, go to next mob, wash - rinse - repeat. UI is still the same, information is still skimpy, and typos haven't changed. What more can I say. And I'm supposed to do a review on this later.... sigh.....!

As I thought, Hero got off to a really shakey start for a closed beta. First on the list, I wasn't able to download the client till yesterday morning. That was a blessing in disguise as I've been home six weeks now. That's a whole other story and it involves depression.

Start up was later in the evening though, around 4:30 pm I think. I actually got in around a half hour later since they were having login problems. Then once in I had problems getting a character created. Finally, I was able to get into the actual game play. That's when the fun really began! The lag hit like a ton of bricks and everything was running 5 minutes behind the client / server return.

Because this was happening, you couldn't figure out if there was a problem with the UI or just the lag. Things on the client side weren't bad such as moving around, but interaction with the environment was a matter of guess work. Things were making noises and you had no idea what till you realized later that other players were killing mobs, but you weren't seeing them.

There were moments when things cleared up enough that you could actually do something, which helped me get to level 3, but in all it was a really frustrating evening. At one point they even screwed up their forums which got a laugh out of me, since I knew what they had done, and had done this to my forum. This morning I received notification that the servers were down for maintenance due to yesterdays problems and would not be up till 1:00 pm central time. We shall see what happens then.

When next we report I hope to give you some actual game information.