Asherons Call: My ACPL3 Journal

My ACPL3 Experience

by Ibn Schachabo

ACPL for me started on Thursday night, when apparently some of those who attended the live event at Turbine saw me at the Midsong Festival Stone and cheered. Or booed. Or something.

Friday morning I drove to Providence airport, TF Green in Warwick, to pick up Reska. But the traffic out of Boston was nightmarish and I realized I was going to be late, so I tried calling the airport and Reska's airline to get him a message. First off I discovered that his flight was actually getting half an hour EARLY to add insult to injury. Then I tried having him paged with my cell phone number.

And what's the name of the customer you want paged?

Uhh... Reska. (I had his real name, but not with me.)

Is that the first name or last name?

Uhh... last name. (Sure, let them page Mr. Reska.)

And your name sir?

Uhh... Ibn. I-B-N.

In the end I don't think he got the message. But I found him at the airport eventually, and we headed up to the hotel.

Got in and ran into Salmoneus and a pack of people that I didn't know (although I recognized a couple from last year or the year before) but I guess several of them were Cult of Feh members? At any rate we all went over to the nearby Joe's for lunch.

While we were there a couple other groups of ACPL'ers came through. Saw Less, Dwynna?, and someone whose name I didn't catch. Then a larger group including Ravlen, Maggie the Jackcat, Ned Cleversun her vassal, Ophelea and Surfal, Lizzie Borden of Leafcull, and I think one or or two others? I'm going to be forgetting a lot of people and for that I apologize, I am generally terrible with names and faces.

It was very cool to finally meet Ophelea and Surfal! They, Rav and I went back to the hotel and hung out for a bit, until we drove to Turbine where folks were meeting up to go see Reign of Fire. Met Maddy on the way out, who was hanging out with a group of people including Kelyn who STILL lives near me even though he moved. 8)

Ran into Thyell and another Turbie whose name I didn't catch at the Turbine entrance, but he was cool enough to go back in and say, "Hey there are people here," since we didn't want to wander in, see something we weren't supposed to, and have to be killed or have our memories erased or something.

We started gathering for the movie, I saw Huxter and Payson and got to meet Ken Karl. We all (30 of us or so?) drove out to the Randolph theatre to see Reign of Fire. Before we left Turbine we found out that the teaser had just been posted, so we got them to print it out for us and while waiting for the movie to start people were passing it around.

What was fun was people trying different pronunciations of "Schachabo". My personal favorite was Reska's "sbababababo". For those who care, I pronounce it "Ska-KA-bo".

This month's teaser? ROCKS.

The movie though I think disappointed a lot of people. We were expecting a dragon vs. humans war flick, instead we got a monster hunt movie like Predator or something. I still liked it, but I was disappointed.

Sprinted out of the theater because I had half an hour to get to Logan airport in Boston to pick up Optim Shi. Made it in time... and found out that his flight was half an hour late. A weird cosmic balance since Reska's was half an hour early.

Picked up Optim and drove back down to the hotel and decided I was waaay too tired to hang out at all, so I drove home. A lot of driving.

Saturday. Robert Aluvsun, my roommate, and I got up and headed out. Per Ophelea's instructions we hit a grocery store on the way out and picked up a cake for Ravlen, who turned 23 yesterday. There was a birthday card going around and being signed too, and it turned out to be prophetic, but more on that later.

Got to the hotel and was astonished at the check-in line, but then there was a lot more to do at check-in (the swag bags for one) and a LOT more people this year. Double last year? Something like that? It was NUTS.

Got the hotel restaurant to hold on to the cake for us and then said hi to people eating breakfast. My terrible memory proved itself again as someone came up to me and said, "Hi, I'm Jason Booth." I looked at him and thought, "Hmm, he does look familiar, but... oh well I must just be wrong," and said, "Hi, we met last year."

It wasn't Jason Booth, it was Kwip. 8)

Laughed and met up with Adonai (my patron and a good friend for decades) in line. After check-in we said hi to a few people, or maybe we just sat down and looked at our swag bags, I don't remember.

We got short opening speeches by Allen Grey and Troop and saw a video that started with the Midsong event and then had a lot of AC2 footage. I believe before the Q&A was also when we saw a teaser video for the July event. THAT was cool (and should be posted on the Zone soon if I heard right) and showed Elysa sitting by Asheron's bed, Martine sitting alone in a hall, and Gaerlan preparing for something BIG. IIRC that video, as well as the June event videos, were put together by Keth al-Sheth who I think I used to work with here or something. 8)

We moved on into the AC Q&A, and I'm hoping someone someone took notes because my memory is like one of those... things... that you use to strain things out of water... I forget the word. I believe the one answer everyone remembers was Ken Karl saying, "Microsoft sucks."

One thing that I was really impressed with was the LACK of negativity. I remember the Q&A at the first ACPL, it was right after the original Shadow Armor nerf and the introduction of hollows IIRC and MAN there were some bad feelings there. Not so much this year.

Then door prizes were given away, video cards, add-in boards, other cool things.

Lunch. I was going to with the the CoD crew (all names I already mentioned plus Quendor and his "imaginary girlfriend" [which was one of the funniest introductions I got all day]) but there wasn't enough room for me, Robert, and Adonai, so A and I sat with Jason Booth, Justin Quimby, and Luke... Luke from Turbine. Later we were joined by a couple Frostfellers. It was really cool.

Later we busted out Ravlen's cake and sang him happy birthday, and we got a pic of him, Ramen of Cragstone Farms Catering, and I all wearing chef's hats. (Ibn's had cooking trained since Nov 1999!)

Whose Drudge signups. Ravlen, Pure Evill and I were disappointed to see that our fourth teammate didn't attend this year, so we inducted Robert Aluvsun and... ack, Jane? Was that her name? Well we inducted them into Team Undefeated. Yeah, maybe we had a little hubris. 8)

Sat down for more giveaways before the AC2 demo. Which I don't believe I can talk about, except to say they are NOT forges, they are workshops[/B], and they are not factions, they are [b]kingdoms. That was also from the AC2 Q&A. Let's see the best quote from the AC2 Q&A was Azeraphel saying, "Those were huge stones, those were Jessie-sized stones." I can't make this stuff up.

Whose Drudge. The prizes had been ramped up -- these insanely high-end Nvidia and ATI cards. Unfortunately, even though we got a lot of laughs, we did not win. I didn't get to see the winners' sketch (I only got to see two or three of them) but I heard it was hysterical. I know Reska and the artist who made the silver olthoi were both on the winning team, not sure of their teammates though. Several of the devs also danced to Wierd Al's "Yoda" which was great. The judges announced two "MVPs" in addition to the winning team, one was a guy who wore a black cloak and played a virindi, the other was Ravlen who stooped to the level of PUBLIC NUDITY for our sketch. (A Virindi killed him, he ran back with no shirt, he died again, ran back with no shoes, you get the joke. Heh.) I'm pretty sure we would've had to produce an actual miracle for them to award it to us a third year in a row, but no hard feelings -- now there's no pressure for next year. 8)

Oh, and speaking of Ravlen? The birthday card we got him? Shows a guy running naked into a party, the caption was something like, "Jim takes the phrase 'Party Naked' too literally." Cosmic balance.

There were more door prizes and then the giveaways for the charity auction -- a hooded faran robe, a signed hoary matty robe, a silver olthoi, a few other things IIRC. (My brain was nearing shutdown state.) We thanked all the organizers and helpers and got ready for the beta account giveaway.

They gave them to EVERYONE. EVERYONE! OH MY GOD.

I can't say anything else about AC2.

Afterwards we hung out in the lobby taking pictures making plans. I was SOOOO HUNGRY that I couldn't think past "need food need food need food need food". A few folks ended up going over to Chili's for dinner. After dinner it looked like we were breaking up into smaller groups, no monster party like last year, and there was still a couple of hours before Sal's pub crawl. Robert and I were crashing hard, so we decided to call it a day, said goodbye to the folks at Chili's, and headed home.

GREAT day. HUGE thanks to MS, Turbine, and all the organizers and volunteers.