Asherons Call: Inside Turbine During an Event - An Undercover Report

Inside Turbine During an Event - An Undercover Report

First of all, a BIG thank you to Turbine for inviting a group of the fansite press people in for this event. We got to watch from Keth's perspective machine as he recorded the events on all 8 worlds to create an upcoming movie of the final act of the current event saga.

Also, note that we had to sign an NDA in order to participate, and what were allowed to talk about is strictly limited to what we saw on screen; and further, we were escorted to and from the restrooms to limit what we saw, presumably. [ed. Yeah, sure that was the reason *snicker*]

The live ops team set up on their PC's. Several people played the three characters, and sandra rand and Ken Karl acted as adimns. Keth was also present as an inviso admin to do the recording.

We watched on an overhead projection from Keth's machine, within hearing distance of the devs controlling the events. The intensity level was high both amongst the devs (whose catchphrase was "We love killing players almost as much as they love being killed by us"), and amongst the watchers (at one point, we took umbrage with one player who was perching safely atop the festival stone and shouted out, "Gaerlan! Kill David the Archer on top of the stone!". Gaerlan was only too happy to comply, and David was taken down first on his server :) )

On the first server, to our memory Thistledown, the crowd was slow to form. By the last server, Frostfell, the show started immediately because of the huge crowd buffed and awaiting the fun. Our projection wasn't tuned for text readability, so it wasn't until we were back in the hotel room checking Chain's COD post before we saw much of the event text, but we quickly picked up the sense of the event, and the devs were only too happy to help fill us in on details.

We also learned about the best laid plans of mice and Turbies. On the first server, some of the scripting didn't work as planned. Onthe 2nd an 3rd the poor Crystal Lord Sovereign forgot that he was supposed to be mean to the poor Isparians. On one of the last servers, a dev typo'ed one of his script commands and Martine's blast took almost a minute before Asheron reacted properly. Still, given the timeframe and complexity, it was a wonder to behold.

Some players bowed to Elysa. Some players bowed to Asheron. Most were only too glad to talk smack to Martine, and only a few knew who Gaerlan even was (Chain, you'll be ecstatic to know devs were heard to bemoan your prescient comments about Gaerlan's presence... "don't give it away", I heard :)

Darktide, of course, was its very own event. We took bets on how many arrivals it would take to start a pk fight... and the winner was THREE :) Oh, and Allan Maki wanted us to specifically point out that Ken Karl begged and whined until he was allowed to take over Gaerlan to lay some pk smack down on the DT server. Let's just say Ken needs to stick to o.O :)

Perhaps the evening's most surprising occurrence was on Morningthaw, where for some reason or another (choose your conspiracy theory; random number burp, out-of-component bug, whatever), mages managed to land a series of debuffs on the supposedly invulnerable Gaerlan (Magic Def of 1000!!!) and drive him from the field before he finished the planned carnage!

Oh, and what carnage there was. On the first server Gaerlan limited himself pretty much to war spells, but after devs and watchers complained, Gaerlan started adding ring spells and eventually some of the dev-only whoop-ass to is arsenal. The beautiful purple super-ring spell was especially awe-inspiring, frequently taking down rows of charcters in single shots.

At one point, we counted Gaerlan level up 7 times in under a minute while littering the field with corpses. Sometimes the whooping warcries went up in the Ops center when Gaerlan took down a particularly persistent or affronting player. After the David the Archer incident, any players on top of the festival stone were given target priority. One in particular was just a work of art; Gaerlan hit him with his special debuff which the devs explained as an automatic -250 to all stats... as the player realized what was happening and started to move, Gaerlan's war spell caught him and threw his body off the top of the festival stone. Later, the owner of the Staff of the Lightbringer on

Frostfell got 'in the face" of the viewers a little too much, and once again, the cry went up, "Kill him! Kill him!" Our bloodlust was satisfied a short time later :)

All the excitement was quite the unique experience; coming away it's very obvious that the devs love the game, love playing the game, and, indeed, love interacting with the players every bit as much as the players love interacting back with them. It was a short 3+ hours, that's for certain!