A Typically Rough Start

Today's the day, 9/9/9.  DDO goes free to play.  I thought about staying up until midnight last night to try the game out, but instead went to bed 'cause I was tired.

I was up pretty early this morning, say 6:30, so I thought I'd get an early start.  Sadly there was no new information on the site, and I'd already read through the old stuff.  So...  I still had my DDO client installed, and my Turbine account was still active from playing the LotRO beta, but that's where I'm stalled.  I guess I need a product key to proceed, and there's no way for me to get one since they took down the ten day trial a few months ago.

I spent a few moments this morning reinstalling FRAPS 'cause I've thought about doing a video journal about DDO.  Perhaps in the styling of WoWHobbs, but we'll see how that works out.  I suspect I won't have the time to commit to such an endeavour.

UPDATE:   13:30 - The DDO site is down for maintenance, so I'm assuming the information will be available soon.
UPDATE:  14:30 - The site is back up, but it keeps crashing IE8 when I try to fill out the form.  I'm assuming there's a volume issue, but who knows.

UPDATE:  14:45 - The latest news on the launcher is that they are having volume issues so I guess I'll have to wait for this to work.
UPDATE:  15:00 - This is too broken for me to even bother trying.  I'll come back with the rush is gone and their servers are capable of the task.

UPDATE:  15:45 - Looks like the site is finally working.  I got my new account set up without any trouble.

I and took the time to make my first character; Ellenoir Fonce, a rogue as per my norm.  I took a video of the whole thing which I'll edit together later on.  So far so good though.  It's pretty cool that the rogue is classed as challenging to solo, no game balancing here.