Haemish's Rant on Player-Driven Events:

On Saturday, October 21, at 2:00 PM CST, the Karana Council of Guilds hosted a Low-Level Open Arena Tournament in the Freeport Arena in West Freeport. Haemish MacLennan of the Silver Daggers, headed up this spectacular event, which saw many entrants, all of whom won much glory and honor.

However, I must report on some parts of the event which showed a complete lack of respect and honor. Soon after the level 1-3 events ended, the contestants in the arena, most level 4-7, as well as myself and the referees, of varying levels, were attacked by 3 individuals who I will name on this page. Brasse, reportedly of the Eternal Wrath guild, Saffaroth (52nd ranger) and Kassanova (35 Warrior), both of the Legacy guild, all teamed up and attacked the group trying to run the event, and the contestants. At one point, I was thrown high into the air twice via Gravity Flux (for about 900 points of damage total) which, in another situation, might have been a fun ride. A good number of our contestants died, as well as some of our referees and volunteers, who were in their teens. While no one reported any loss of experience, the problem this caused goes way beyond any experience lost. A good 20-30 minutes were spent clearing these disruptive influences out of the arena, and another 10-20 minutes were spent in ordering the event and getting us back on track.

Much later, we had some more disruptive influences enter the arena, some of whom would repeatedly run in and hit the contestants in the middle of a contest (this was done by Ryanthefat and Hein to name a few), or try to disrupt the event anyway they could (by disarming the referees or attempting to interfere in the events). On 3 separate occasions we had to calm major disruptions, either by attacking and killing the person disrupting the event, or talking over the sharing of the arena. One of the few reasonable people who wanted to use the arena at the same time was Cappa of Tengoku no Chu, who wanted to use the arena to fight some friends, and who tried to do whatever he could to negotiate with me so that he would not disrupt our event, even to the point of donating prizes.

I want to say that our referees and volunteers did an excellent job of keeping our event orderly, which included keeping me alive during the first disruption. Pippi, Shadex, Zymeck, Belce, Cassia, Chewintar, Rastaman, and a whole bunch of others jumped in as soon as I was attacked the first time and protected me, when at least twice I was quickly knocked to 2 bubbles of health. If they attacked anyone who was not causing enough trouble, or were at times perhaps overzealous in making sure that the events were not disrupted, I want to personally apologize to anyone we offended in our attempts to keep the events orderly. I'm sure we were a little bull-headed in our efforts, and I'm sorry.

With that said, I must express my distaste at the persons who did choose to disrupt our event. Particularly puzzling was that one of the disruptions was caused/aided by Saffaroth who donated prizes to the event, and who I appointed as one of my "bodyguards." Both Saffaroth and Kassanova came back later and apologized to me for their disruptions, which took a lot of courage. However, their excuse was that, they were "bored" watching the events, and just "wanted to have some fun." They even went so far as to say "someone else put me up to it." The reason I point this out is to make sure any who read this understand what these disruptions did.

Our volunteers gave up their time to do this event. Sounds simple doesn't it? But let's examine that: I personally spent 11 hours the day of the event, sitting in one chair, killing my back, to put this event on. I don't know of many of our volunteers who didn't spend at least 6 hours sitting at their computers, watching fights they couldn't participate in, gaining no experience, no items, and hurting NO one else in the game, all to make sure that 42 people of level 1-15, and anyone else who wanted to watch, had some fun in this game that didn't involve the repetitive levelling and item gathering that so many people complain about in EQ. Many gave up not only the time they used on that day, but the time it took them to get the items they DONATED to the event, which were some truly impressive items. The only return any of these people got was the recognition for doing so, both to their guild and themselves, and the satisfaction of a compliment on running such a fun event (and there were a good number of those). When you disrupt an event like that, you cause frustration, disappointment and anger in the people running and participating in the event, i.e. you diminish their enjoyment of the game.

Here's an analogy: If your main fun in the game is levelling and gaining items (which if you enjoy it, is perfectly acceptable), and you spend 4 hours camping 1 mob for that extra-special item (the Ancient Cyclops, for instance), and he finally pops. You jump up to attack the beast and get your item and BAM! he is kill-stolen. Your 4 hours just went up in smoke. You sit down and wait again. 4 hours later, he pops again and he's stolen again. AAAAARRRGGGGHHHH!! It can make you crazy, huh?

Now let's say that while you have fun levelling and gaining items, you quickly saw that that could get really boring, really quickly. So you decide I'll run an event, and get people excited about it, and I'll put up a story about it on Everlore.com or EQVault.com and have people read about it. This should be FUN! And it is! It's great fun running and participating in events like Tournaments or the Walk Across Norrath, or storylines, or Guildwars, or Newbie Troll Runs or Human-Sized games of Archon on the Chessboard in Butcher's Block. And those who enjoy these events have just as much fun as the person mentioned above who enjoys camping items and leveling. When you disrupt those events like I mentioned above, you do the same as KS'ing a mob from an item camper or a leveller. You diminish the enjoyment of EQ for someone out there. You cause events that should have taken 8 hours to take 10 hours. Two of the volunteers who helped run this event did so only 2 days after different doctor's appointments, through whatever pain they had, just to make this a fun event for those involved. The participants were all of much lower level than those who decided to disrupt the event, making it a case of bullying lower levels (though not as bad a case as my previous bad history with the Raving Lunatics at the last tourney I ran).

The only justification for this from the disruptions themselves were that they wanted to have a little fun. I hope they did, because they did so at the expense of a little of the fun on my part. I think Karana is lucky in that myself, and people like Pippi, Cassia, Belce, Dogedme of the Seekers of Knowledge, Junun of Storm's Justice, Jzonn of Avenging Crusaders, Shadusanator and the whole crew of Darkwater Clan, Shadex of Brethern of Arcane Fist, and many others on the server, including the members of the Council of Guilds, are too hard-headed and too committed to making fun, player-driven events to let people like this dissuade them from doing events on EQ.

Now I don't think that the disrupters in this case were particularly mean-spirited in what they did. But I think that they should reflect on their actions and try to realize why this upset me and most of the audience members of the tourney.

Verant has stated to me on another occasion that they will not help in anyway with player-driven events, up to and including NOT punishing or warning those who make disruptions such as this, unless they are actually witnessed doing something that goes against Verant policy, such as KS'ing, Ninjalooting, corpse-camping, etc. What make events like this doubly difficult is that the things that Verant WILL punish people for in the game are those things which deal with experience, items, and camping. Instead of fostering player-driven events such as this by protecting them from disruption, and aiding the organizers to make the event even better, they act like the 3 monkeys: See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. Only by doing so, they also do the reverse: See no good, hear no good, say no good.

The Council of Guilds was founded on the principles that all guilds and all individuals are of equal value, and deserve to have events that all can enjoy. Karana needs events, plain and simple. Let's help each other out and make sure that all events, whether you wish to participate in them or not, can be done without disruption.

If you'd like to sound off on this rant, please do so on the Council of Guilds Events forum, or if you'd like to sponsor an event with the Council's help, do so there as well.