Off to try again...

hundejahre

I was one of the people who played this on day one and I enjoyed myself up until my first group. Up to that point I was having no lag and no issues, then everything ground to a halt. There was so much lag being in a group that it was unplayable. I hung around for a while but in the month or two I played this was never fixed and it really looked like the game was on the fast track to being gone so I bailed.

I've read about all the changes that have taken place, the original company going under and the new one taking over (though it sounds like the same folks under a new name to me), and given I can't stand EQ2 and am totally bored with WoW I figured it was time to give this a try again. I'm also running a much bigger better box so if I get the same lag as 2 years ago, so I expect to be as lag free as anyone can hope to be in this game.

So hopefully within another hour I will be joining any of you who are left playing, and maybe in the next 14 days I'll decide it's worth staying.

hundejahre

Well, looks like this isn't going to happen. When I tried to create an account it refused to let me, since I have the same name as a previous user (ya, that would be me). Of course I cancelled that account 2 years ago, it uses an email account I haven't used in over a year and a credit card number which I had to change since even after I cancelled my account the guys who use to handle the billing for this game continued to try and bill for 3 more months.

So I figued, ok I'll try and login with that old account and even though someone who never played can make a 14 day free trial account (which requires credit card information which, given how sorry the billing system was 2 years ago, makes me nervous) I, as a returning player from 2 years ago, am not entitled to a free 14 days even though I keep reading interviews with David Bowman where he says I should come back and try it again... for $12.95.

These guys got me once for way more money then they were entilted to, I'm willing to try the game again but they have to meet me half way. There's no way I'm giving them more money or a credit card number again until I know this is something I want to play. And since I very much doubt this is something they are going to fix I don't see myself playing.

hundejahre

Ok, my last post on this game. Against my own better judgement I renewed my dead account because I REALLY wanted to like this game when it first came out and I was REALLY hoping things had improved. So I toiled for almost an hour to reactivate my account, it kept kicking me back to fill in information I had already filled in and did a few other weird things but I finally got past all that. Then it ran through the patching system...

There are a bunch of things to checkmark, the forst of which is a request to use the new client for patching so I click that and proceed and it promptly has a fatal error, so next time around I click that off and it starts patching... all this happens in Internet Explorer by the way, which if it isn't your default browser you might want to make it so before even starting any of this because it really doesn't like firefox much. When it's done it asks if it can delete a bunch of files but warns to be careful because some of them may be personal files. Really I'm not making this up. Well it lists all the files and they all seem to be game files so what the heck, I give it a go ahead.

Then I launch the game which launches your internet browser so you can log in... which doesn't work for me because my default is still foxfire which it likes all the way up to the "Play Horizons" button which it just ignores. So I launch IE and finally get it logging in. I takes a long time loading things then quits with a message about account/password invalid. I look below and see why that would be, it's trying to use my old email account info, which is your login, even though I had put in my new (new being relative since I've had it 18 months) one into the system as default and login.

Ok, I get all that sorted out, again, and finally get to logging in. In this amount of time you would have WoW installed, patched, and have at least one character to level 10, maybe even an honor point or two.

I make a new character, get into the game, set my graphic specs high because I'm running a very nice box that can run WoW and EQ2 on max settings with no lag (happy birthday to me for the next 3 years). Even on max settings the game is kind of ugly, but that's ok since I remember I liked it fine 2 years ago.

I get out of the training area and hit the first town and LAG. There is ONE player in townbut the lag is aweful. I change graphics quality from highest to high to medium... doesn't matter, still lots of lag when in town or facing buildings. I get graphic glitches too, nasty ones.

I say to myself, maybe a nice clean system reboot will help. I power down and do a cold boot, log back in and same thing. The lag is as bad or worse than I remember it being 2 years ago on a much lower end box with a lot more people running around. True, I could turn the graphic settings lower and maybe that would help, but I really shouldn't have to and I'm not going to.

So total playing time was about 20 minutes. Total time to get it set up was several hours including the one gig download and a LOT of account annoyance. Cost $13 since they wouldn't let me do the trial (ya I probably could have faked my way into one, but that's not my style).

So... I'm not going to tell anyone else not to play this. I'm not going to say anything against people who still play and love it. But if you are thinking about playing, and especially about going back if you had a previous account, consider my experience fair warning about what you may face.

I'm not going any further with this thread, so if you post to it don't expect any response from me.

Flem

Sorry to hear about your trouble getting back into Horizons. 

I quite liked this game also but couldnt bear the bugs and stuff anymore (quit last Nov).  Earlier this year got an email to come back for a free month.  Logged in once, 5 minutes later logged back out for good.

Real shame this game had potential.