The morning after Murder

You may have noticed in today’s note on the WAR Herald that the Night of Murder live event has come and gone. I just wanted to give you guys a quick recap of my experience with the event.

There’s been quite a bit of hype and debate surrounding this event, starting with the entertaining PR/marketing campaign that Mythic utilized to promote the event around the WAR blogosphere, to a variety of mixed reviews of the event itself from those very same bloggers.

As usual, Syp over at WAAAGH! has a great recap of the pros and cons of the event that I’d recommend you check out, too. As a side note, there’s a reason I keep linking to this guy, and it’s not because I’m kissing his ass or anything. He’s both entertaining and prolific, I tell you — not only does he blog about 5x more regularly than me on WAAAGH!, but he also runs Bio Break, his “other games” blog, which I’m steadily becoming addicted to as well. Damn you, Syp! :p

The general theme amongst the participants was that the event was entertaining, albeit too short compared to prior live events. Clocking in at barely nine days, I think it probably left a lot of people out in the cold. I had an amazingly busy week last week (as you can probably tell by my sporadic blog posts), so I wasn’t able to participate as much as I’d wanted to. I still managed to get the Elite reward on two out of three characters that I was attempting the tasks with, but I left the event feeling a little disappointed with both the short duration and the dependence on specific tasks to complete the entire task list.

A quick overview of the event’s task list reveals a mixed bag of PvE and RvR/PvP feats to accomplish:

1. Complete the Marked For Death quest 10 times
2. Defeat 20 Marked Monsters
3. Kill 25 Enemy Players
4. Assassinate 1 Member of Each Enemy Career
5. Murder 10 Keep Lords
6. Participate in an Elf Scenario
7. Gain a buff from a Shrine of Khaine
8. Kill 15 Players of Each Enemy Race
9. Assassinate 5 Enemy Guild Officers
10. Assassinate 1 Guild Leader
11. Throw the Skull of an Enemy Player 5 times.

The majority of the event tasks were pretty straightforward to complete, but very first task was the one I had the easiest time completing at the beginning of the event became the one I was counting on to get my hands on the Elite reward… and never managed to complete on my main.

The first day of the event, I ran my rank 32 Swordmaster through scenarios for a four-hour span or so, and completed the bulk of the tasks, except for #2 and #5. Either way, it was enough to get to the elite reward, so I was content. Folks in alliance chat were all yammering on about how easy the live event was to complete. Huzzah.

A day later, I started the tasks with my 23 Engineer, and found it a little slower going as Tier 3 scenarios on Skull Throne are not only slow to pop, but also often very imbalanced population-wise. Getting to the elite reward with my Engineer took a couple of days, but I was satisfied with it (until I heard through alliance chat that the renown bonus from the rewards doesn’t even work right now… doh.)

Lastly came my 40 Warrior Priest. He’s decked out in decent gear, and generally does well in Tier 4 scenarios, so I was feeling quite confident that I’d be able to complete the tasks without a hitch. Of course, I was wrong as usual. I got sidelined with a metric ton of work last week, and really didn’t have much of chance to play again until the the weekend. My hopes hinged on getting scenarios to spawn, and they weren’t cooperating.

I wasn’t feeling the desire to go hit the oRvR lakes as I didn’t have the time to commit to a full-raid — I get interrupted quite often so scenarios are generally easiest for me to participate in, unless I can plan a good several-hour sit-down where I can fully concentrate on an RvR raid. There is no “quick and dirty” RvR in WAR, other than scenarios (if they decide to pop); everything takes a long time. And seeing as most of the time people are taking undefended keeps whenever I happen to show up, there’s really no RvR, or even much of a challenge. And that wouldn’t help me with these event tasks, anyway.

So I waited for scenarios to spawn. Skull Throne is one of top servers in the game in terms of population, but for whatever reason (probably due to it being Valentine’s Day weekend and no one was around), scenarios were painfully infrequent. The first day I attempted the event on my Warrior Priest, I got into two scenarios in two hours, lost one and won one, and completed the Marked for Death quest twice… out of a possible ten times to complete the task at hand.

The second day, as Order was busy raiding the Inevitable City (for at least the 3rd time in 10 days… this is getting crazy), the only scenario available was The Undercroft, which didn’t spawn once in the entire time I sat there waiting. I gave up and played my Swordmaster instead, figuring I’d give it another go the following day.

The third day, I got into one scenario in nearly two hours of waiting (which we lost badly, being outnumbered 10 to 6), and got very tired of alt-tabbing to a browser to read the blogs while waiting for a scenario to spawn. No progress at all on the live event. Someone in alliance chat even mentioned that for whatever reason, everyone was playing in Tier 1 that day. Go figure. All of this was compounded by the fact that you can’t queue for scenarios from your capital city (why??!), so I had to stand around Dragonwake doing absolutely nothing, when I could have at least been emptying the hundreds of auction items out of my mailbox and relisting them all… one by one. :/

I ended up logging out and playing the BattleForge beta instead and actually enjoying myself (which I’ll discuss later in the week.)

At this point I had completed about 80% of the event influence, putting me somewhere between the Advanced and Elite reward. I didn’t have the time or energy to go and hunt down the 20 marked monsters for task #2, so everything was hinging on completing the Marked for Death quest ten times. Which ended up not being possible to complete. So here I sit, just shy of the elite reward on my main character, and the event is suddenly over. Sigh. If I could have just had an extra day or two…

I don’t know what exactly was going on with Skull Throne, but being unable to complete live event tasks because people aren’t participating in scenarios (the only day I got into full Tier 4 scenarios was the very first day of the event, on my Swordmaster) seems counter-productive to say the least.

I wonder if last Friday’s T4 scenario hotfix had anything to do with it… naaah, that’s not possible. They test these things, right?

Anyhow, here’s to hoping that the next live event — Bitter Rivals — is a little better planned out.