EQ2 Guide Guest Editorial - The Pickup Group  

Guest Editorial - The Pickup Group

SOE Fan Faire 2007===

The Pickup Group

A Disheartening Tale from SoE FanFaire 2007

by Sutures Woundmender

Twas Friday afternoon at the Rio, and I was showing off the photo of my journey to Kunark to the Japanese EverQuest II Community Manager. Momochi is the most personable person you will ever meet, and lots of fun to talk to. Maybe that is why she didn't have too much trouble talking me into signing up for the EQ2 power-leveling challenge.

The challenge, was to take your group of six and race to level 20. Each team had to be Arasai starting in Darklight woods. Time limit was 2 hours. The action would take place on a beta server, but not separate instances. This would definitely add some difficulty, as all the teams would be contesting for mobs. Since neither my wife nor I had guildies at FanFaire, we'd signed up to have four others join us. There were two times to play, and we requested the 10am. We had our strategy all planned out, and were sure of ourselves. (But I forgot about how pickup groups usually go.....)

The next morning, we oozed out of bed early (after a long night of partying) so that we could get to the event. At 9:40 there was already a long line waiting to get into the game room. Ten minutes later, we spotted Momochi walking toward the room and we flagged her down. She showed us where we could find the names of our teammates, and that's where the problems began.

We explained to her that we needed the 10am time, but were put into the 1pm time slot. Since we were covering panels for Allakhazam, that was the only time we could do it without missing something important. After some shuffling, we had to tell them to scratch us off. I met up with a friend from my old EQ1 guild near the end of the line, and decided on another activity to do instead.

Fifteen minutes later, the ever-smiling Momochi happened by again. She had been looking for us. I explain that my wife had gone back to the room to upload a blog, and I was waiting to register for a prize drawing. She takes me by the arm, and tells me on the way that there was a no show, and a team needed me. We find the team, and I found myself in line for the challenge.

The team started talking strategy, and it seemed we are all thinking alike. I was actually starting to get optimistic because we even agreed on what classes we needed and had people that played those classes. A couple of us had even run toons through the noob quests recently, and knew them very well. Things looked good at this point.

Then I noticed that it's past the start time and there are SOE employees looking at screens, each of them on cell phones. They appeared bewildered. Looking at my cell, I discovered that we've been in line 25 minutes. Added to the 20 minutes outside the game room, and that made 45 minutes of twiddling my thumbs.

After a short while a staff member addressed the contestants. They are having trouble with the server, and expect it to be fixed soon. Twenty minutes after that they told us that the beta server is a bust, and they are going to put us on a live server. Forty minutes later they told us, “Sorry, we are unable to get this event going. Stop by the information table after 2pm, and we'll have something for ya.”

I left to eat lunch, and make sure to get to the “Rising into Kunark” panel to record some footage. As we waited for the doors to open, Momochi displayed a sign saying that the challenge is back on, and that my group needed to be there at 4pm. I checked my schedule to see what panels were scheduled, and there is one that I'd have to miss. Rumor had it that someone back at the home office had messed up the server. Also, something happened that supposedly caused multiple terminals to have the same DNS or MAC address, which is supposed to be impossible.

Fast forward to 4pm. There was yet another delay as they clear the group on the computers. We were missing a group member, so we grabbed another random guy to fill the spot. At 4:15 we were finally getting to terminals. More small delays follow as people weren't following directions.

Ready, set, go! We started out on the game plan pretty well. We all dinged five together as we stayed on task with very few hiccups. We decided to go ahead and kill the NPC in the cave six times so that we'd all get the quest drop. Despite that, when I did a /who, we were still ahead.

Then we started getting into the quests at the next camp. Problems began as everyone was trying to kill quest mobs before other groups got them, but in the process we got spread out. Group mates started to miss updates or XP as we scattered too far apart. We'd have to take time now to kill a couple extra mobs to get updates for those that fell behind. Still it didn't seem like a biggie at this point, as we were still getting xp for the kills.

Then we got to the fishing quests. I mentioned that we should skip those, but it got spammed away in the chat clutter. Besides that, some were half done with it, so they wanted to finish. This is the first time I started feeling the effect of a pickup group. I checked the /who, and despite this delay, we were still doing well. Well, except for one guy that had fallen way behind. He was always the one out of range for updates and heals. He would die often because my inquisitor couldn't get to him. Also, if I ran over to heal him, then I missed updates and xp. My request for him to skip a quest and come join the group fell on deaf ears.

As we started into the quests at Wanderlust Fair, we seemed to be ahead. Only three people in the zone were level ten, they were all in our group, myself included. However, I was very concerned that our rogue player was still only level eight. Then we got the ten minute warning. Chaos begat chaos as everyone started pulling... EVERYTHING. Deaths happened when there were too many people to heal. People were out of range again. So much for a game plan.

“Time!” said the timekeeper.

The wait began as they started the tally. I was at level ten, and nine percent on the bar, which translates to 10.09 toward our score. I overheard that our rogue was only at 8.45. Ouch. We ended up at 57.49 which looked to be good for third place. Then we saw the heart breaker. A team with no level tens, had everyone at level 9. The tally went up at 57.68 and I had to resist the urge to strangle the rogue.

Next time, I hope to have a guild group there. Fourth place... respectable but disappointing all the same.

Sutures Woundmender was our videographer at Fan Faire and plays on Antonia Bayle.

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