We went into the Darkening Depths with barely a torch to light the way; unsure of what we would encounter and a list of quests to complete. About an hour later, the council of goblins lie at our feet  and the Darkening Depths was vanquished.

This dungeon was much longer and drawn out than the Realm of the Fae, but if you are simply doing a boss run, you’ll only have to do the lower portion. That cuts off about 15 minutes of time or so. The bosses in DD are much more strategy oriented however. Watch out for pools of bad (fire or whatnot) and setup a kill order before you jump into the bosses… oh, and listen to the NPCs when they tell you to “Get him out of the moonlight!”

Head start is now over and RIFT is now officially live to everyone – boxes are on the shelves. RIFT launched with 99 servers which is absolutely insane for a new MMO. Hopefully this doesn’t thin out the population to much. Needless to say, it seems like we need more people on Corthana. The population gets a bit thin in the late evening Aussie time. If you are reading this and still on the fence about playing RIFT, you are truly missing out on the next great MMO – jump in and join us!

The guild is doing very well. We have several people in their high 20s and even one in his 30s (Kahz, – that was a lot of cloth!). Along with our old timer core we picked up a group of folks who even switched from Defiant to Guardian to join us after Wolfsbane’s initial overcrowding. One who shall remain unnamed is freakin nuts with the tradeskill alts.

In actual game news, SU stomped Realm of the Fae without blinking. We smashed through it three times in one day (twice in an hour) and knocked out our guild quest, which subsequently got us level 2. Yay us! I don’t know about everyone else, but RotF was extremely fun. And we proved Riftstalker is most certainly a viable tank spec!

So here’s the deal, Wolfsbane is extremely popular. And by “extremely popular” I mean forever queue times. Granted, this is going to be common right here around launch, but 5 hours is too much. Consider that fact that this is around 2pm JST (4pm AEST) – the Aussies are still at work and Wolfsbane is the unofficial oceanic server. That means the times could get even longer!

So we’re thinking a server switch is in order. Corthana is the newest PVE server so this is probably our best option. We’ve got a thread open discussing the situation. So far it’s 2 – nil on opting to switch to Corthana.
Update: We’re going to switch to Corthana as our server choice. I’ve got a lot of updates to make around the interwebs about it. Sorry if you started a toon and actually got somewhere with it on Wolfsbane. Here it is 7PM AEST and Wolfsbane still has a 2 hour queue time… and this is just the headstart! We have a whole second launch to contend with!

TL;DR: Scarlet Underground will be on the Corthana shard

… and not a minute too soon! Less than three hours to go until headstart begins… and I finally finished the bulk of the website work! The forums have been set up and themed to match the front end. Oh. My. God. It. Took. Aaaaages! Seriously, it was the most meticulous work I’ve ever had to do in web design. But you guys are worth it! Of course, I still have some minor tweaking to do. Enjoy the forums guys; personally I think they look great. If you find anything out of place, please comment or post in the feedback forum. The next step is getting a Mumble server going.

I’m off to bed for now… I’ll be getting a late start to the headstart – I’ll be online and burning the level grind in about 8 hours from now. Those of you who get on right away – feel free to save a little coin to buy the guild charter and such!

Reminders: we are on Wolfsbane, Guardian-aligned. Also, download the Mumble client. It has far less lag and normalizes volumes way better than Ventrilo.

With just 15 hours until the headstart (that’s 4am my time, ugh!) – 5 days 15 hours til official launch – I’m smashing through as fast as I can to get Scarlet Underground ready. The forums are now up and ready for posting although they are still sporting the default look. I will be spending the rest of today cranking out a prettier forum theme.

With that, everything is technically ready to go. Feel free to start registering in the fourms. Please use your in-game names so I know who to approve and who is a spam robot. By this time tomorrow I should be getting close to creating our guild in Telara – hopefully I’ll have five people online to do so.

The resurrection of the website is coming along great! I’ve got the blog front-end nearly finished and looking quite handsome! There are still a couple things I need to fine tune and then it’s on to the forums. I hope everyone finds the new site fancy – please leave your comments and concerns.

On to RIFT news: The official server list is out. Wolfsbane made the cut. We can now officially declare it our new home. Also, the headstart client is available for download. If you preordered from Steam or D2D, you already have it – you simply need to patch. Everyone else needs to visit the RIFT website to start their download. Headstart will be here in just 26 hours!

Update: The front end functionality is complete! Made with WordPress, it features a ton of great functions. Follow SU news by subscribing to an RSS feed (to the right) and even read it on your iPod, iPhone, or iPad!

Welcome, everyone, to the revitalized home of the Scarlet Underground. The site is under heavy maintenance at the moment so expect to see things changing constantly and possibly some nasty errors occasionally. Don’t worry, the dust should settle in a few days or so.

To anyone who has been eyeballing RIFT, Scarlet Underground will be making a home on the Guardian side of the Wolfsbane server. Look up myself, Aalwein, or my wife Daryah if you would like an invite once the guild is formed. Remember, the headstart begins in less than TWO DAYS, so get your pre-orders in! Steam, Direct2Drive, and Trion Worlds all offer digital downloadable pre-orders, including Collector’s Editions.

See you in Telara!