[2021] Alright... I think I'm done.

Everything I'm about to say is a true story, and it happened over the course of the last thirty minutes. I logged in tonight after a long christmas, with the kids finally in bed, ready to do some grinding. After five minutes of loading screens, I'm in Ramsgate. My bounty tracker says i've already collected my daily fountain coin flip, even though i haven't been on for two days. Time to restart.

I take another five minutes to load the game up again. The game lets me toss a coin in this time and get my four bounties. Sweet. I go to the middleman; my cell isn't quite done but I have enough ace chips. I hit X and then Square, same as always. "Purchase complete"... What? Oh sh*t. I just spent five hundred platinum on a second cell combining slot. Sure wish there was an extra confirmation step or that the buttons needed to do that were at least slightly different than the ones used to speed up a cell. But hey, that's fine, maybe it will come in handy when cells 2.0 comes out. It's only five dollars, right? And besides, I should have been more careful.

I attempt to back out so I can go look for collectables and redeem my slayer link. The middleman menu screen disappears, but the background doesn't change. The middleman and I stare at each other awkwardly. I can't move. No buttons I press snaps me back to third person. I'm stuck. Oh wait, it's ok. I can pull up the menu. I'll just jump into an island real quick, the other stuff can wait. I queue up for Coldrunner Key. I wait for the game to find a server. One minute. Two minutes. That's alright, I get up to grab a drink. I come back just in time to load in.

Then the lag. Oh god, the lag. Behemoths teleport from one side of the combat area to the other without warning. I try to throw my axe, but it takes a full two seconds to register the input. Wait, did I just hear the 'downed' sound effect? I'm the only one fighting this behemo-- oh wait it's me, the sound played before my character model could catch up. I guess the Skraev hit me when it glitched to the other end of the stage that time. That's alright.

Ok I finally managed to kill it with the help of some strangers, also who seemed to freeze and then teleport around. Oh well. I did what I could to help. Let's go back to Ramsgate, then maybe the next island won't be so bad. I load up ramsgate. One minute thirty seconds to find an instance. Must be busy tonight. I time out during the loading screen and exit the game. I load it back up. Five more minutes of loading screen and I'm back in ramsgate.

Time to redeem my slayer link and -- Wait... I get to the link screen and the bar is empty. But I just finished grinding it out to level four the other day with my buddy? It's probably just a visual glitch. I press x to see if it gives it to me. There's the Pangar loading icon. Two minutes later... Nothing happens. It's still empty. No rewards screen. The button has changed though... "Send link invite". Ok, I guess I just don't get my link rewards... Again... For the second week in a row. That's ok.

I run around ramsgate to grab collectables and get stuck on a snowman. It's fine, I'll just try to load into an island again. Two minutes to find a server. Loading screen. I time out again.

I sit there on my ps4 homescreen and look at the time. It's been 25 minutes since I first booted up Dauntless tonight. I find myself somehow more agitated and stressed than I was when I sat down. And now here I am, on reddit, waiting for monster hunter world to download. Because all I want right now is a finished game that works correctly. And Dauntless, as much as I love it, cannot give me that anymore.

Someone let me know if it gets better. Until then... I think I'm done for a while.