We were looking forward to SOELive. It was a chance to take a long weekend, have some fun, spend some quality personal time together, and hang out with fellow gamers. How we both wished reality had lived up to expectation, instead we departed Las Vegas this morning thereby skipping the last full day of panels, the banquet and "Breakfast with the Devs" we had paid for. But you know what? We are more than ok with that and are very happy to be home.
We checked-in on Thursday afternoon and the experience was pretty miserable from the beginning. The staff was disorganized and didn't know the answer to basic questions. The "SWAG' bag was incredibly disappointing: a plastic zombie mask, Planetside 2 console thumbstick covers, Landmark post-it notes, an Everquest 2 sticker, and an Everquest print that was curled in the non-branded gift bag. The "SWAG" was so underwhelming as to be laughable.
The Thursday night keynote was pointless. First they let everyone stand in line for over an hour, rather than letting people wander in, sit down, and get to know people at their table and surrounding tables. Instead, people stood in line in a muggy, hot hallway for a very long time sometimes talking to the people next to them in line, sometimes not. The opening keynote no longer spilled the beans about expansions, instead it was tired people in uncomfortable chairs, crammed into a hotel convention room listening to bad jokes, Smedley listing off words (some of which were inappropriate for the family friendly atmosphere SOE wanted to foster), and no real information communicated.
Thursday night disappointment over, woke up Friday morning to a Twitter feed full of expansion details being vomited by press who were given all the details earlier in the week. Was so not pleased that I logged off Twitter so I could get the details at the Everquest 2 keynote, you know the whole reason we went to SOELive in the first place. The keynote was great. Jeff Bard was incredible as Jeff the Bard. His five minute Bard Song recapping the events of the Everquest 2 was phenomenal. Holly Longdale and the other developers presented an incredible expansion, Alter of Malice, that we are looking forward to diving into. The second panel of Q and A was also informative.
After the keynote, I spoke to one of the SOE employees about the press leaks. I was told that Sony was fine with media leaking information prior to people who paid for tickets to SOELive getting the information first. Media is more important to Sony than their actual gamers, those that paid to be at SOELive. Sony may be happy with media leaking information but what they fail to acknowledge as reality is that bloggers, like me, share how they were treated at events like SOELive and that information is shared with people that may consider going to future events. Sony should be wise enough to know that media is a fraction of their audience that has the proverbial "paper and pen" these days and should have required that all media stories be held until after the appropriate keynote was held for attendees of SOELive.
The first full day ended there for Everquest 2 fans if you weren't interested in attending the evening drinking parties. To be honest, I outgrew those activities before I graduated college and had no desire to watch fellow gamers make fools of themselves. We discussed going home over dinner and came to the conclusion that made far more sense for us than staying and being miserable. Sony starts everything late, keeps people standing around in lines for far too long, and there is no excuse for a Fortune 500 company being incapable of hosting a well ordered and punctual event boggles the mind.
We drove home first thing this morning and I don't miss the convention. I can watch the whole damn thing practically from the comfort of my sofa, without drunken fools and cigarette smoke. I was looking forward to meeting and talking to developers of the game I adore but they were hard to find, impossible to have a conversation with because if you saw one a lot of people wanted to get their say in. In the years to come, we will watch from home and not miss the insanity.
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