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Adventures in Customer Service
If F2P games have a major failing in my experience, it's usually in the area of customer service (CS). How can you expect a company providing you with entertainment free of charge to pour a lot of resources into CS? Apparently, IGG sees that as a flawed business model. I connected to the live chat option IGG.com and was in a chat room with a CS representative in about 10 seconds. I was able to state my problem (I can't connect to Aries server even though I have activated my Closed Beta key) and get a solution all in under 30 seconds. It was from the CS person that I learned that alpha testing had just ended and that Closed Beta was a few days away from starting. This was possibly the best CS experience I have had with any MMOG--ever.

Rock is a good example of the many quirky characters  in Wonderland Online.

Return of the Download
When April 9 finally did come, I discovered a new problem with WL. I could connect to the server, but I could not log in to play. I kept getting this error message that said something along the lines of "17:The member is." Yeah, that was all of the message I could see. The dialog box also had two options: Update and AFK. Clicking update launched a new box with Chinese characters. I figured out that I must need an update but that they had forgotten to translate the page for when you connect to the server and try to launch the game with an outdated client.

A quick visit to the WL website revealed that the actual Closed Beta client had been released the night before (we carried the news here at Ten Ton Hammer but I had not yet had a chance to read it). The auto-updater, it seemed, would not install the missing files, so I needed to either download the new client (another file of roughly 550MB) or the small little 2.1 to 2.2 patch (4MB). I patched up and was ready to go at 6:32pm Pacific time.

Check Your Watch
Now with the correct version of the client, I was ready to play, right? Right? No. Though the press release and WL website told me the Closed Beta would begin at 9pm GMT-5 time (that would be the Eastern time zone), it was not accurate. Though it was 9:32pm Eastern time, somebody at IGG just made a mistake. The beta started at 10pm Eastern time (GMT-5). I took this as a bad sign because I feel like a company should know what time it is.

The art in Wonderland Online uses vibrant colors.

Finally Shipwrecked
Discrepancies in our watches aside, WL and I finally got together. The new patch allowed me to run in full screen, though I would later learn that my native resolution or 1280 X 1024 would be a problem. And everything finally connected and let me log in to play!

The character creation process was simple enough but came with disappointments for me. I was able to scroll through the character portraits and read the text descriptions, but all of the statistical data from the website was not visible. So, I picked a male character who didn't look like a 5th grader (a sandy-haired guy in a duster) and hoped that my choice to focus on an agility-based build and my pick of element would be okay.

My customization options covered a bevy of hairstyles, and I could use RGB color sliders to achieve a very large array of hair, eye, and clothing colors. The whole time, I could rotate my character to see what he'd look like from various angles in-game. Done making my character, I entered the game world and experienced the shipwreck to get the whole game started.

My First, First Impression
Movement in WL uses mouse clicks. I was experiencing some lag with my character, which I attributed to it being the open of Closed Beta. I knew it wasn't my machine as my specs are well above the minimum required for WL:
Wonderland System Requirements
CPU: PentiumⅡ400
Operating System: Window 98/ME/2000/XP/vista
HD Space: 1.8G
RAM: 256MB RAM
Graphics Card: support more than DirectX 7.0
Sound Card: support DirectX sound card

I moved about the ship, trying to learn the user interface (UI) a little bit. I was disappointed to see that some of my UI tool bars were stretched off the screen.  Some I could move over, but others were fixed in place. WL did not like being in full screen at 1280 X 1024 resolution. As I moved toward the captain, I saw the announcement that the ship was sinking and that we should abandon ship. A sudden lurch in the ship sent me tumbling down some stairs. The captain and his crew proceeded to trample past me in their haste to get off the ship. I washed up on the shore of an island.

On the island, I quickly met another castaway, one from an accident over 25 years ago. He'd decided not to try to get off the island because he enjoyed his escape from the hustle and noise of the city. The elder castaway outfitted me with a short distance raft so that I could move from island to island. The most disappointing thing about the dialog on the ship and with this castaway was the poor translation. I saw all the errors typical of what most people jokingly call "Engrish": missing articles, misspelled words, and confusing word choice. I have to say that it looked a little bit like a translation job involving one guy and a dictionary. Scary stuff.

Parting Thoughts
After I got the raft, I explored the first island a little bit and then stopped for the night. I had not yet encountered any battles, so I left knowing I would return. I will certainly give WL a chance to impress me its battle system and hope that the translation gets better as I go. Look for my second Closed Beta Preview later this week.

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