Let the Games begin

I can play the open beta since yesterday morning. My beta key verification took more then 10:30 hours... while GOA published it would only take around one or two hours (plus one additional hour to be able to access the patcher after that). GOA seriously dropped the ball on the open beta - epic fail! And while many more can play now, their account creation is still down! So someone without an account at war-europe (or someone who forgot the password) is still locked out. Despite what GOA said & promised, information is still vague and sparse on what is going on. Probably they have major problems they don't tell us about and need to work on all fronts to be able to manage head-start. One thing for sure, if they screw that one up as well, things will go up in flames. IMO the best thing they could do is to screw the flash website so many users are moaning about and present themselves with a clean & slick new account interface for headstart - one that works, and fast. We'll see about that one...

My Black Orc is now rank 9 and i really enjoy the game, its a lot of fun. The greenskin starting area has a great feel and humor to it. My character feels like hes developing, i gain a new skill every level. One thing that is very enjoyable: Quest rewards are nearly always useful. You get rewards especially designed for your class and some drops are items that can be repaired into something useful for your class as well. Good stuff!
The graphic options need more possibilities for fine-tuning and i really hope they'll add a switch about the ugly texture blur from eg. mountains far away. If your computer can't handle it thats a good approach, but if mine can i want to see all the beauty. I had no problems with lag. The servers run very stable, only crashed once on me. The client is very stable as well, only time i crash is if i try to use one of those Supa Chucka (sp?) ballistas.

There are still some annoying bugs that Mythic needs to iron out. Major annoying ones are "Your target can’t be attacked" and "Target out of range" ones. Also the UI sometimes acts weird. Yesterday i could not socket a talisman, after login today it worked while doing exactly the same.

Crafting skills seem ok, but not that innovative. I tried Apothecary and Cultivation... its ok and you can craft stuff you can actually use. I think I'll stick with the combination for release as well.. crafted some funny potions (will write about crafting more in detail later).

Tips of the Day:
#There are small tabs at the inventory bags you can adjust what kind of items you'd prefer to go into that bag. Very neat! As you can see in that screenshot money is easy to come by so far. I only sold a lot of crap i found and was questing.
#There is also a keybinding to "Toggle UI" (hide UI) for nicer screenshots. I missed that one before and it only worked after i bound it new - standard is left.shift-Z which did nothing for me. *shrugs*