It’s Sunday afternoon about 2 p.m. and I’m sitting on a bus heading back home from Las Vegas. Another SOE Fan Faire has come to a successful end and a bus full of tired staff are mostly dozing in the bus seats, or listening to their MP3 players. If the traffic doesn’t get too bad, we should be home around 8 p.m. tonight, so everyone is settling in for the long haul.
The Fan Faire went really well. This was my second Fan Faire as a SOE employee, my third in total. Last year I had only been with the company for a couple of months, and although I participated in a couple of discussion panels, there wasn’t one solely dedicated to tradeskills. This year however we had a specific tradeskill discussion panel and I had the main responsibility for deciding what information to present and putting it together. That was a bit of a challenge for me as I’m terrible at public speaking, so I put together a few slides to speak for me, outlining a couple of the new things that people can expect in the upcoming game update, and then talking a bit about the main tradeskill feature of the expansion: tradeskill missions. These will be little instanced missions that tradeskillers can group up to complete, and, while they’re pretty simple in theory, should be an interesting change of scene for tradeskillers, particularly ones who don’t get out adventuring much.
In general Fan Faire is an interesting and somewhat odd experience. It’s great meeting all the people who play our games, and putting faces to the names I’ve seen in game or posting on our forums. This year I met up with two friends I’ve known since I played EQ in the very early days – we probably became acquainted around 2002 or 2003 I would guess, but we’d never actually met in person or even spoken direct voice to voice. One of them I knew would be here but the other was a complete surprise and it was great to meet both of them at last after all these years. It’s also slightly strange sometimes to meet these people you’ve only known as their in-game character and discover that, in person, they’re not actually the dark elf you’ve always pictured them as. It’s not that I actually thought they were dark elves, obviously, but lacking any other visual image for them, their character was the most familiar way to picture them in my mind. Of course, when they first met me I was an evil dark elf too, and that’s definitely not the case in real life either, so no doubt they felt a similar adjustment of mental images.
Besides these two old, old acquaintances from way back in “the good old days” I also had the opportunity to meet a lot of newer acquaintances, and meet again some of the people I had met previously from last year’s Fan Faire and similar events. Brasse, best known from www.thebrasse.com and now also working for MassiveGamer.com, dressed in her fabulous bearded dwarf costume, is practically an icon of Fan Faire and always a delight to talk to. Calthine from Allakhazam was as always an inexhaustible whirlwind of energy running around interviewing everyone she could find and taking copious notes. Niami Denmother from EQ Traders Corner, this year wearing a beautiful renaissance style costume for the closing banquet, helpfully supplied tired SOE staff with bundles of Denmother’s Trail Mix to keep our spirits up and our energy high. Rijacki from EQ2Alchemy, Tamat, Bludwyng and Autumnkiss from Allakhazam, Dellmon from the EQ2’s Day podcast, entire guilds out in force such as Tapiolan Sankarit and the Legion of the White Rose, and so many more that if I listed them all it would turn this article into an essay. There were also many new faces to meet, not just EQII players but players of our rapidly growing number of other games, and perhaps we will meet again at next year’s Fan Faire.
I took lots of photos and so did other people, and there are already lots of photos up on the official Fan Faire site. One of the cleverest things I saw at the final banquet though — besides some of the costumes, which were creative and very impressive — was a gift that one guildmate had made for another in the Legion of the White Rose. It seems that guild member Lairia is well known for being absolutely unable to resist picking up collectible “shinies” any time, any place, any type. So her fellow guildmate Steeldragon presented her with a “real life” version of a collectible in person! It was a handcrafted gift, you might even call it tradeskilled, so I was particularly impressed, and took a photo. You can’t see it easily from the photo, but there is a little LED light inside too to make it really sparkle. They informed me that their table banner was also tradeskilled, using “commission crafting” (guild member Pantheros arranged to have it, and a cloak, professionally made).
The main social events of the Fan Faire were the welcome reception on Thursday night, the karaoke party on Friday night, and the closing banquet on Saturday. The main excitement was of course John Smedley’s address to the community on Friday night, announcing the names and details of the upcoming EverQuest and EverQuest II expansions, and previewing some of our upcoming new games such as FreeRealms and DC Universe Online. We got to see a lot more live gameplay in both of these and they are definitely looking very exciting, and already full of much more content since the last time I had an opportunity to see a demo. During the day, the game designers such as myself either sat on discussion panels or hung around the Legends Lounge chatting with anyone who happened to come by. Many of us also had other tasks assigned, such as helping to set up the “game room” computers that were used for running some of the gaming competitions, and for people to just generally log in and catch up with their game of choice; or helping to set up and pack up the many displays and computers involved in the events. For most SOE staff it was a non-stop work weekend from the time we woke up till the time we gratefully passed out in our soft hotel beds, and we are looking forward to a well-deserved day of rest when we get home. My main regret, besides simply not having enough time in the day to spend as much time talking to all the people I’d love to have talked with at more length, is that I was so busy with the EQII-related events that I didn’t have time to sit in and listen on any of the panels I wasn’t involved with, such as the ones talking about our other games! Once we’re all back at work I’m hoping to catch up with a few of the people from the other teams to learn a little more about what I missed. Although EQII is my main game, I’m always very interested to see and hear what our other games are up to and I try and chat with the folks I know from other game teams from time to time.
The best part of the Fan Faire was as always just getting to talk to the folks who play and love our games and hear what they’re enjoying, what they’d like to see in the future, and what they think would add more fun and excitement to the game. It sounded as if all the tradeskilling players I spoke to were very excited by the concept of the tradeskill missions and related rewards, and now it’s up to me to gmake sure they’re not disappointed!
Emily “Domino” Taylor
