seems to be light on merchants this year. THe merchants that were at the festival have been great for people. Still wondering why odoff never showed. :(

Thanks for the info Kynlee. It answers my questions in another topic.

Chad, player of a few

>> Yes, I'm well aware of time constraints as I contribute as much of my time as most GMs. Sending a Tweet out that everyone is busy, there will be little to no merchant work shouldn't be too difficult.

I think you are operating under a false assumption that someone is running around touching base with everyone to determine their schedule and what they are (or are not) doing today. Given that, as near as I can tell, each GM does in fact make their own schedule (for the most part) and that these schedules are potentially subject to regular change I think it could be a challenging and difficult task indeed. Also keep in mind that most GMs are off site and aren't necessarily even accessible when they aren't on-line.

Sure you could make it a big deal and put a lot of tools and process in place (overhead) to facilitate this. Or we could allow the GMS more flexibility and the freedom to spend their available time doing the things we would like to see them do vs. spending more of it managing administrative tasks.

Just my two silvers worth. And yes I was hanging around on-line most of yesterday evening as well.

-- Robert

* Wyrom was just vaporized!

>> how does checking in for 2 seconds to say I'm not working tonight not give them freedom?

Your statement presumes that everyone knows this up front or early on. that there is a central communication point that is utilized for this sort of communication, that it would be effective given the real life commitments of some of our GMs, and additionally that someone else is sitting around monitoring to determine if no one is going to make it that night so they can send out a tweet.

>> Wouldn't it improve the festival to know when a night is going to be light on merchant work?

At what time do you make this determination? What if it wasn't known at that point in time? There was merchant work done last night, how many merchants does it take not to be light?

It would have been nice to know that things were going to be slow but I think you are oversimplifying the amount of effort it would take or how effective the process would be. It's easy to point to this one thing and say "you could do better" but there are likely hundreds of things that the GMs could be doing / checking up on / communicating (many of which they are doing already). At some point if you pile on enough little things there are just too many to reasonably do - especially for folks that do this as a hobby and don't work fixed hours / assigned shifts.

Maybe they have all of the above in place just like you'd like to see but... the person who monitors for this had to work late last night.

-- Robert

* Wyrom was just vaporized!

Let me just clarify something. The team assisting in this event had completed 90% of required hours by Monday morning. EVERYTHING since then has been GM's going above and beyond offering services for people. Gm's are under no obligation to work on any given night, they get in their time when they can. We certainly try to comuunicate when we will be around as a courtesy (as well as when we won't if it is 100% certain and known in advance), but again it is not required. This festival is an added responsibility to GMs participating. Do not forget that they must still maintain their requirements in their particular area of responsibility.

~Zoelle~

My interest in a new pattern is for personalizing some lock picks.

-- Robert

* Wyrom was just vaporized!

Personally, I think focus is going in the wrong direction.

This was a free event. There were no restrictions to come and go. You could do whatever you wanted, in the game, and if something happened you could have dropped what you were doing and attended. If you weren't in game, there are a number of resources available to see when something IS going on, and the above applies. I could understand the complaint more if it had cost money or even silver just to attend the event, but that's not the case.


So, take this as my way of saying, "Thanks." Not just for the merchant hours that we did get, but for all the hours of time spent coding up those scripts that were submitted by the players, or thinking up their own. I enjoyed ever bit of the festival. Hope to see y'all next year!

>I could understand the complaint more if it had cost money or even silver just to attend the event, but that's not the case.

it's not a free event in the way free events are offered to all of Prime. I believe based on the confused posts at the beginning that many have upped their subscription level to attend the event, which is offered to Premium every year as part of the Premium subscription, which costs $25 more than a Standard sub.

Why asking for more communication, especially when a rare service is offered, is beyond your comprehension is beyond my comprehension.

Why you infer that I am not thankful for GM efforts because I have a complaint is also beyond me. If you want to see my thanks, you can look at my contributions to the fest item list and consider the time put into that, as well as related item pages. If I see a way things can be done better, I'm going to say it. I have suggested several solutions to several different issues, I don't just lob complaints and insults.

I think discussing the issues is more going in the right direction than every post being hugs, kisses, and rainbows, which are nice, but don't really add to progress.

If GM Zoelle does not have time to respond to posts on the boards during the fest, she should feel free to ask someone else to do it.

Let me just clarify something. The team assisting in this event had completed 90% of required hours by Monday morning. EVERYTHING since then has been GM's going above and beyond offering services for people. Gm's are under no obligation to work on any given night, they get in their time when they can. We certainly try to comuunicate when we will be around as a courtesy (as well as when we won't if it is 100% certain and known in advance), but again it is not required. This festival is an added responsibility to GMs participating. Do not forget that they must still maintain their requirements in their particular area of responsibility.

~Zoelle~

I'm curious, how many hours were required for this festival? And are those hours split between Platinum and Premium?

tl;dr The festival was awesome (lockpicks are amazing) and a small player-experience request: can you please give idiots like me a monsterbold "the festival will be closing in XX minutes and you will be escorted out" warning. Also I'm looking to buy the stuff I ran out of time to from the festival (list below).

This festival has been a super highlight for me. In order of jaw-dropping moments:

1) Wearable Lockpicks. The moment I found these, I think my heart skipped a beat and there was a huge grin on my face. Seriously, the best! Bonus kudos for making lockpicks that were interesting enough I'd wear them on not locksmiths (that golden key? Yeah, Lorminstra worshipers!) I absolutely was delighted to get my skeleton key unlocked before I hardly knew what the scripting was on these things. HUGE KUDOS.

2) The dancing sandals and belt merchant person. I'm sorry that I got excited about you unlocking sandals and so I bought them and then 10 minutes later we all realized they were broken. Your patience to sort it all out with us and communicate clearly and calmly was amazing. I half-imagine you were flailing at the keyboard trying to reduce the damage and yet you showed no signs of losing your cool. So kudos to you AND... these sandals are amazing. Combined with my aforementioned lockpick, I can now swing my hips and make my key dance along my waistchain akin to a hoolahooper. Ya'll are the best.

3) Gem pattern alterations. I've been dreaming up some warrior sheaths for my characters (Its past time I get some made for my army of alts) and I'm so happy to see so many new patterns around to customize our characters with! But what really did it for me, was how funny the merchant offering the service was the moment any boy expressed an interest in her. I was laughing so hard! Your lightning rounds towards the end were also strangely exciting as we all tried to focus and get ours done quickly so just-one-more-person would get one too. Oh! And now that I have a scarab-shaped pattern - every time I die I'll make sure to drop a scarab-shaped chrism on the ground and see if I can scare anyone! *gleeful cackle*

Okay, with all the happy and thank yous out the way, a moment to reflect on the "I'm an idiot" part of the post title.

My sense of loss is quite keen
As I tried to spend all my green
I thought sprites would last longer
But as I casually wandered
They threw me out, so mean!

---

I've had a pretty stressful work week, coupled with my birthday being this week but I've been too exhausted to really celebrate and I'm a fairly indecisive person to begin with. So I wandered the festival a bunch last weekend and then off and on each night I got home from work. I hadn't really found much time to sit down and create a shopping list and buy it all.

So when I got home not-too-late tonight (yay, work crunch time relaxed when I fixed our project's build process at work) I sat in a merchant room and pulled up the wiki and made my shopping list. When I realized, in horror, how much money I wanted to spend, another adventurer gifted me the silvers to buy it. That was insanely nice of them and was really going to cap my week off nicely.

I had my list in hand, silvers to spend and now I just had to race from room to room. I kept hearing hints the festival would end tonight - which I mostly thought meant merchants would be done and the festival grounds would likely close up over night as GMs turned off shops. My last festival (and first one since returning) was the Teras isle one which culminated in a very fun invasion that I missed because I thought the shops would close instantly. When they were still around the next day I felt like I had made a mistake and should have done the invasion instead of shopping.

So... this time around I hung out with folks and enjoyed their company and then got a little anxious and went to finish my shopping. I got about halfway through my list and at 9pm (pst), got kicked out of the festival.

I was a tad shocked. Then mad... at myself.

But I have a small suggestion/request that MIGHT help others avoid a similar fate in the future!

Can the GMSs pretty pretty pretty pretty please announce in monster-bold in game that the festival will close and everyone will be escorted out in XX minutes? Like IRL when you're at a store and they're like "the store is closing in XX minutes, please proceed to checkout"

I felt like I had a shopping cart full of goodies (950k or so) and was waiting in the checkout line and then was asked to abandon it and leave. :(

Yeah, it was my fault. Yeah, I shouldn't have assumed my teras isle experience of merchant shops being around for another day meant all festivals would be. But, gosh darn-it, I had already decided to buy stuff and that's a whole new kind of loss for me. It's the "I'm an idiot" level of longing.

In other news, my list of items I still had to buy (and would gladly buy from a player at face value - like if someone has buyer's remorse.. (especially the lockpicks!! omg, I love them and I failed to buy a full set for myself. I'm dying on the inside over my mistake. I didn't buy right away because I didn't know if I could afford to).

10 some wing-tipped jet black leather shoes (10k, foot, <2-4 lbs)
25 a pair of golden imflass coins (25k, sleight of hand tricks)
25 a nacreous blue waterweb sphere (25k sleight of hand tricks)
25 a gold-strung dark walnut lyre (25k zested instrument)
25 a bone-inlaid black ash ayr (25k zested instrument)
95 a thin golvern-hued porcupine quill (95k)
62 a twisted mesille hairstick (62k)
75 a twisted teak splinter suspended from a leather thong (75k)
125 a curved vaalin fishhook (125k)
95 a sea urchin spine threaded through with a slender silk ribbon (95k)
125 a splintered animal bone suspended on a suede strap (125k)
17 a gnarled mistwood twig suspended from a laje-hued silk ribbon (17k)
5 a sleek steel knitting needle (x10 to give away to other locksmiths)
20 a tiny golden key attached to a platinum ring (x10 to give away) 2k = 20k
1 a long ebonwood toothpick on a length of copper string x10 (to give away) = 1k
12 a sharp rosewood thorn suspended from a mithril chain x2 = 12k
7 a pair of blood-stained calipers 7k
1 a patchwork leather toolkit 1k
2.5 a small round mirror framed in mother-of-pearl 2.5k
2.5 a knobby leaf-carved stick 2.5k
2.5 a square alum-backed mirror 2.5k
5 an ice white kohl stick (5k eye liner)
a moon-shaped snowflake obsidian (x6 for sheath)
30 about face - investigate cameos (5k cameo, 25k holder?)
~800k total

-- Player of Aquarrist, whose full shopping cart full of goodies is still somewhere inside the circle of trees.

Unless someone gets you handled before then, Nicolao has both of these and will happily pass them on:
- a pair of golden imflass coins (25k, sleight of hand tricks)
- a nacreous blue waterweb sphere (25k sleight of hand tricks)

He'll at least be around on Wednesday 930-1030 ET at White Haven for Service Night, likely before then as well, and I'll keep an eye out for you.

Gavrien has your ayr but when I asked that collection of neurons if it was up for grabs, he thumbed his nose and said something pointed and crude, so I'm betting that's a no.

---
Cendadric says, "Hmm, a most impressive weapon of note. I'll give you 110 silver coins for it."

you miss the point. You have to be glued to electronics to know if something starts happening. If it is during the week of a fest, I am going to assume a festival is going to pretty active during the hours of ~8p-12a, as has happened to many years. If the fest is going to go on hiatus for a night, I'd rather not be near a computer or my phone at all.

It's not that hard, and it would improve festivals. I'm probably just as tired of the "GMs have lives" post as Wyrom is of the "slap in the face" post. Players have lives, too, players donate their hours, be it through player groups, wiki, or other means, too.

Again, for this fest it was all about one service for me. If they're going to limit some services to once every five years, then more information needs to be given on exactly when those will be done when they are finally approved. Of course this could all be solved by not having completely arbitrary ridiculous restrictions as well. There's another solution.

I don't really have a dog in this particular hunt, but over the course of the exchange a rough idea started taking shape.

I wonder if it might not be possible to create an in-game mechanism for characters to input their 'short list' of must haves. When 'standard' merchant services or events are planned that include a character's short list an email / direct tweet / SMS message / (insert favorite means of notification) could be generated a week (or so) before, and again day of.

That way, barring any unforeseen life events that disrupt the services planned, we would know where and when to focus our attention. And, side benefit, characters registering their short list could turn into both a great research tool for the staff, and a great marketing venue for Simu, with just a tweak or two.

Doug

>> When 'standard' merchant services or events are planned that include a character's short list an email / direct tweet / SMS message / (insert favorite means of notification) could be generated a week (or so) before, and again day of.

A few points Doug:
- I think we already have this on the google calendar for 'planned events'. It does require that you review the calendar periodically though vs. having a message pushed to you.
- This creates additional overhead for the GMs who then have to come up with all the 'key word' services for each and every event (in advance) so that they would be able to match to people's short list.
- Merchants already announce, tweet, etc. when they are doing services. Real time vs. at the start of the day though (which I find more useful personally - I use the calendar if I want to know about 'today').
- This assumes that a GM / Merchant knows if they are going to do their specific service(s) today. I get the impression that much of the time GMs are living their lives and trying to get their 2 hours plus in at some point during the week. "Maybe I can squeeze it in this evening if the baby goes to bed on time? If not, I'll try and do it early tomorrow morning before Yoga, or worst case I'll squeeze it in Friday eve and have a late dinner".

There is no comparison to the communication in place today vs. 5+ years ago. It's waaaaay more awesome and accessible (and not saying that you are indicating otherwise - just bringing history in for context). There are scheduled events (which are on the calendar) and then there are events that 'will have things happen during the event'. I think the mix is good but do agree with the point that for super rare / high demand services that there is some clarity. In the case of gem cutters, these were offered over a number of days so I don't have a gripe about how they were handled on any specific day. For services that are only going to be offered once (e.g. 5 slots the entire event) I would like to see clarity on when and where those will be offered (and generally speaking, we get that clarity when it is possible for the GMs to provide it).

-- Robert

* Wyrom was just vaporized!

First - thanks for clarifying your idea in great detail. I definitely have a better feel for it!

I state what I think the inherent flaw is one more time and then I'm going to move on to other things! :-)

>> Day of the reminder is sent, just to lock it in everyone's mind.

This still assumes that specifc GMs are able to commit to being available today for each and every service that shows up on your MERCHANTLIST. I show to ServiceNight for White Haven just about every single week at the same day of the week and time but... I still miss about 1 in 10. That's fine for me because we have other officers that can step in. Depending on the service I don't know that each and every GM offering has a backup GM or that we can expect that because GM A was originally scheduled to be available Tuesday night at 9 pm that GM B (the other GM that can do this service) will also be available that night.

For calendared events GMs usually do show up when scheduled (although sometimes there are misses there as well). For week long events offering many services, you are likely going to have a lot of misses.

Not saying it can't be done or done well - but you'd probably need to start with paid staff on fixed schedules vs. folks doing this as a hobby in their spare time.

-- Robert

* Wyrom was just vaporized!

>You are viewing this completely wrong. If you don't WANT to be playing GS, then don't play GS.

I want to play GS if the fest is active. If it's not, then I would do something else. The pool closes at 9, the movies have a schedule, I cannot have my phone or computer at the ready for either to get announcements. People do things that take them away from twitter announcements. I'm sorry the concept is so hard for you to grasp.

It's prime time, during a fest. If nothing is going to happen, then a little communication shouldn't be so hard.

No thanks 10x on the plat.

>Otherwise you're always going to lose out to the people who do put in the time and effort.

lol, you have no idea how much time and effort I put in.

> could be generated a week (or so) before, and again day of.

The game has a Google Calendar set up. I use it to keep track of things. My wife and I use google calendar to order, well, our entire lives (kid'd bday parties, work events, vacations, trips, etc...). If things are planned in advance, and being maintained, this is a great, existing mechanism to leverage for this kind of communication. Calendar events are usually platform agnostic, and most people have smartphones, where you can customize alerts. Seems like low-hanging fruit.

>I want to play GS if the fest is active. If it's not, then I would do something else. The pool closes at 9, the movies have a schedule, I cannot have my phone or computer at the ready for either to get announcements. People do things that take them away from twitter announcements. I'm sorry the concept is so hard for you to grasp.

Why do you play GS then? Is it purely for the merchants? Do you only log in for events? This seems kind of a backwards way of playing GS. You should be playing for the game, and the merchants are a neat extra experience that happens from time to time. I am not sure what has caused this to be reversed for you, but perhaps you should give some serious thought as to why you even have an account at this point, if you really are only interested in playing when merchants are around. The GM/merchant interaction should be the smallest part of your GS experience.

You also keep trying to say we're not understanding your reasoning, and in a way you're right. Like I pointed out previously, your reasons don't make a lot of since. That's why some of us keep questioning your stated reasons.

Again, as I pointed out last post, if you're not willing/able to put forth the effort to watching for the announcements for merchants via both in game and out of game sources, then you need to accept that your chances of getting the work over the people who are is going to be very slim. Just like you stated, you have things in your life you'd rather be doing then standing around waiting for a merchant. That is ultimately your choice. But if you choose to not be in the game and watching for announcements where they are available, then you must deal with your losses.

In the end this is all really moot. It seems, to me at least, that your interests lie less with the game itself, and more with merchants and alterations and other such things. I don't know why you would care more for rare GM based interactions then actually playing the game, but to each their own. I just find it really odd that you profess these complaints, as I have a feeling if you'd opted to actually go do the things you say you wanted and a merchant did show up, with announcements, you'd still be upset because you missed it.

I honestly don't see how the GM's can win in this case.

-Gid

>I honestly don't see how the GM's can win in this case.

I honestly didn't even bother to read anything but the first and last sentences of your post, because it's just a waste of my time. It's not about winning, it's about improving the festival experience.