Kouyioue

More useful now that we can actually ATTACK FROZEN VICTIMS

Although I do agree. I haven't used magic since I only ever used it alongside puppetry and I barely use puppets anymore.

Mostly though: when I did use it, I always used it to just spam-detonate enemies that were immune to being frozen(torture for fun, basically).

One thing I do like:

It seems that background ambience and background music got separated in the move to 64bit. It's really nice hearing the birds and wind and ocean without also having to turn on the background music. I like it a lot and haven't had background music enabled in at least 9 years so hearing background ambience was a pleasant surprise. I just wish there was more of it because a lot of places are dead-silent all the time

Tailteann altar and Port Cobh sound so calm now with birds and ocean noise

Except Iria, Iria's background noises always played even with music muted. Not that it actually has many places with sounds at all.

Mismanagement of the pre-2015 forums in general.

Posts would often get deleted and people casually singled-out and followed around, censored here and there. On top of the one-sided (rape license type) policies where the faculty were allowed to do whatever they wanted to people and were not obligated to leave any explanations or warnings for any of the edits or trimmings they would do. In retrospect, one would think that they'd interpret those policies in a way that was sane and fair for the betterment of the forum, but instead they gladly did this stuff the heavy-handed-way and openly talked about enjoying it. The only reason the older administration behave better at all is because it is explicitly demanded of them now and not because they want to. Ala, and I quote quite directly: "figure it out loser because I'm not telling you why and I don't feel like I have to" every time a user asked the acting faculty about why they give no warnings or explanation. And there was even a policy in place where you'd get banned or heavily censored for criticizing these policies.

And like everyone else here, the funny technical forum issues with the pre-2015 forum. You had to log in twice, you had to click forum topics twice you had to post twice, etc etc etc. Just to work around the quirks of the very broken pre-2015 forums. That was fun times. We also had custom avatars !

Even if progress has been made, this place is pretty much 'damaged-goods' to most people and the advent of all of those other chat platforms already provided the safe-harbor from the nightmare this place was.

Well here's a gif compilation of the changes I've tracked so far. Each picture is around 20 to 30 minutes apart with the last three taken being about 12 minutes or less apart.

Right now I'm less interested in tracking changes right now and I'm trying to put all of my attention into catching and recording a hill forming//unforming rather than taking screenshots

At this time though.... Filia's desert has gone back to being (disappointingly) flat(I haven't moved the camera so I'm not looking behind me). So something tells me I might not actually catch another hill change today(real life).

One last remark: I finally decided to take a flyaround. It looks like the desert only forms hills near ME, a player. Everywhere I've currently flown right now is nothing but generic flat desert. I'm gonna go AFK in a remote (flat) part of the desert see if dunes start forming around my character

- - - - - - - - - - -

I'm giving up for today. I'm going to go with my first thought and assume that this is just a glitch and dunes only happen when the server is very newly-rebooted. I haven't seen any new dunes since I gave up earlier and my character has been in Filia Desert on channel 6.... all day...

I wonder if AFKing here in the desert will keep the hills from despawning?

In any case, I'll keep a character sitting in the desert for a while, hopefully someone besides me can actually SEE these hills and it's not just some freak glitch that only happens to MY computer

Edit: 2 hours later:
It looks like the hill I was AFKing on just disappeared from beneath me. Now my character is sitting on flat land.... But there are still dunes all around me if you still want to explore Filia Desert

Edit: 3 hours later:
It seems like the dunes move quite a lot actually. I haven't actually CAUGHT them moving because I don't pay much attention to the game window. But the dunes have indeed moved a third time

Tell you what..... I'm going to move my character high up into the sky, and keep the camera facing a direction and keep a screenshot folder. Every time the dunes change I will take a screenshot. At the end of the day I'll make an animated gif.

Edit 4: I took a lunchbreak and simply sat here the whole time staring at the screen while eating.
From my long term observations, Filia's desert looks like it's one giant, slow-moving rolling ocean mesh. You can't track changes by simply staring at it but if you were to wait 20 or 30 minutes between screenshots, you'll be able to notice that new dunes have indeed formed while the old ones either flatten out or increase a little. It's a VERY slow process

Edit 5: Sad to see but it looks like the hills are simply dying out, Filia is getting flatter and flatter. Let's hope I'm wrong and some new dunes form while I'm still observing this channel, but with how slow this desert moves it's almost impossible to guess if a dune is forming or going away.. Earlier in my (real life)day the changes were interesting but at this point(in real life) they all just look like they're going away.

Edit 6: HAH! I was probably wrong. The hills look like they disappear and form one by one rather than the other assumption that the entire desert was one giant animated mesh. I noticed that my game was shimmering in one spot so I stared at it for a while and noticed that one of the hills was verrrry slooowwwwly flattening back to nothing. I'll try to get a video recording of it happening if I manage to catch one of these incidents again