Wake up, Earl! Stampede!!!

I witnessed something very strange (to me anyway) last night.  My first order of business for the evening was to take my brigand from Gorowyn to Antonica.  I had slacked on working up his harvesting skills… a fact I discovered when I tried to do the gathering portion of the Dwarven Work Boots HQ.

I made the journey to Antonica and was in the process of swimming to the underwater grate that leads to the Peat Bog so that I could work my skill up high enough to harvest the nodes in Antonica when I saw the zone shout.

There was a GM in the zone attempting to start some kind of an event.  He was calling all adventurers between the levels of 10 and 20 to come aid him with a task. 

I never actually got to participate in a GM event through my 8 years of playing EQ.  I tried on several occasions.  I remember sitting in Kithcore one evening when a dark elf walked up to me and started chatting.  Through the early parts of our conversation, I quickly realized that this wasn’t just a player being friendly… it was a GM trying to initiate an event.

How the word got out, I’ll never know.  One second I am sitting there alone with the GM and the next, the numbers in the zone were well over 200 and people were crowding around, spamming on top of each other to get their voice heard and, when that didn’t work, trying to attack and kill the GM.  After a few moments of that, the zone crashed.

One other time, I was trying to participate in the event to cleanse the Karana’s from the plague.  I had been there to witness the ceremony that plagued the Karana’s, so I was anxious to help with the clensing.  I happened to arrive in the zone, which was largely empty, for another purpose and noticed someone was zone emoting.  I tracked this person down and quickly realized what was about to happen.  Before it started, however, the zone was again filled with people.

The GM this time was going to pass out a limited number of items to be used to clense the zone.  I watched the hundred or so people cut in front of each other, crowd as close to the GM as they could, spam chat, and do everything they could to make sure they got an item.  All the while, I sat quietly where I had been the whole time hoping that he would remember I was there and had been there from the start.

It didn’t work that way and the event proceeded without me.

The only other GM events that I was a part of was when I was a guide in pre-Luclin EQ and got to play some of the parts.  During those events, just as during the live events on my play server, it was mostly a feeding frenzy of high levels trying to gain the loot and, if they couldn’t get it, trying to crash the zone or kill the GM’s so that no one else could have it either.

When I first heard the shout last night, my first thought was, “Get out of the zone fast!”  Fortunately, I was nearly there, so I just kept swimming and zoned over.  I figured the stampede would begin soon and moving through the zone would become a nightmare.

By the time I had maxed my harvesting skills, a good 30 or 45 minutes had passed.  I zoned back out and started heading out to see if I could gather the nodes for my HQ now.  As I was running out to an area near the Oracle Tower, I had the GM emote again that he was looking for adventurers between levels 10 and 20 to help with a task.

I continued my harvesting and eventually was able to update my quest.  That done, I headed over to Thundering Steppes to knock out some of the level 20 class armor quest for my wizard.  I am embarassed to admit that, at level 29, I had yet to do even a single piece of that armor and that it is all an upgrade over what I am currently sporting.

I completed the first piece and gated back to Baubleshire.  I completed my turnin in The Elddar Grove and bought a ticket in Qeynos Harbor back out to Thundering Steppes to do the second piece.

By the time I completed the second piece, my Call to Qeynos hadn’t refreshed yet, so I started the run back.  I zoned into Antonica to the call of the GM again.  Now, well over an hour had passed since the first call.  I checked the zone list and only noticed 5 or 6 toons of the level range he was asking for present.

I ran to the city by way of the North Qeynos Gate and it was kind of sad.  Here stood a lone GM with a very small following of level appropriate characters standing around him and 20 or more high level characters standing around begging to be allowed to participate if they mentored someone.

I don’t know if there just weren’t enough low levels on or if the zone shout had gotten lost in the almost ceaseless spam for LoN that were going on last night.

I checked the clock to see if I had time to log on my level 14 guardian to come play along, but the hour was starting to get late and I hadn’t slept much this past week.  From the look of how things were progressing, I thought it unlikely that this event, whatever it was, would begin any time soon.

I ended up asking a couple of people if they knew of the event and the reaction was almost universally, “No, but it would be a waste of time.  The rewards aren’t ever that good.”  When I replied with, “Well, what of the fun-factor for just participating in something like this,” you would have thought I was talking in gibberish.

I guess the fun-factor is still lost on a lot of people.

Pity.