Post by Toby on Feb 20, 2009 6:58:51 GMT -5
short summary: this year as an alliance we gathered together ingredients (people started in December!), planned like nuts, fought off nasty guilds and hosted a district for CNY! This info is important, as we hope to repeat this next year!
Thank you again to Kai and all other organizers, ingredient hunters and volunteers.
Sum up from Kai from old forums:
"OK, so event wrap up, or what we learned on the day we hosted it. We did decide on announcing it publicly for the publicity, though we didn't really recruit while doing this (it seemed crass and rather pointless since all attendees had guilds already). We let the organizer do most of the spamming of the local chat and alliance chat since they were responsible for counting down to when they had to get to work anyways (though to be honest I did ask a guildie to pick up part of this job after about 12 hours).
Sure enough picking the district ahead of time was a bad idea. In the first one or two visits by the celestial the number of districts practically doubles!
So two things happened to us when we picked ours out a couple hours early. One was that we had competition from another guild that settled on the same one, and they were kind of pushy and ugly that they were hosting, not us. We got pushy back... (they were a guild called MILF though, with a pink beaver on their cape. Feel free to despise them >.< ) Not how we want to promote our image so lets find a way around this next year
Second was that on the 2nd ox visitation, the alliance members who were just logging on could not get into the district. It was at max capacity. After all, the new districts are made only when the lesser ones are basically full. This was really tense for us. We stayed for that go round, but knew we had to leave all those who were AFK so that the live people could get in on the fun.
End result was that we moved to a Japanese district. The Japanese are not really fond of Chinese things, and apparently that includes this holiday. We located one were both the monastery and the boardwalk were virtually empty so I recommend that next year we just go to a Japanese district from the start and walk in and broadcast the alliance to see if anyone else is there, if so move on.
Something else we learned involving organizing the ingredients:
The day before I had Toby hold all the ingredients and give me 1 of each on several of my characters and some others who volunteered. Doing this ahead of time, while things are quiet and there's no pressure is something I can't recommend enough! You don't have to run over to storage anymore and you don't have to sweat as you hand stuff off either. You can put the items in inventory in the exact order of the dishes. Then whoever is holding the whole visits ingredients becomes the organizer for that visit.
About 15-30 minutes the organizer for that round needs to put out a call for helper volunteers - and needs 4 of them most likely, 2 at a minimum. We stood over by storage and gave each volunteer the set for one chef. 4 volunteers plus the organizer lets you have one person by each chef so there is no running and panicking. If you are short on people (and the 2nd visit is at a time when most people are asleep) then you group it so that any running is between two chefs nest to each other. Chef Tian (desert) is next to Reun (salad) and Chef Jiong (soup) is next to Yan (appetizer), then do Chen (main course) for the 3rd person.
The two attempts made without this organization went badly and were nerve wracking on the organizer. We shouldn't put anyone through that again! The organizer is under enough pressure getting the volunteers next to the right chef in the midst of extremely busy chat channels. People had a fair number of disconnects during the event, so consider who has a reliable connection as a preferred ingredient holder volunteer whenever you do this again.
Well there's the tips, and why some things worked better than others. I hope we can do this again, cause it's a great holiday. Since chat is gonna be flooded with questions about the event anyway it's nice to get us all together and enjoy it as a nice big group!"
Japan 6!:
Thank you again to Kai and all other organizers, ingredient hunters and volunteers.
Sum up from Kai from old forums:
"OK, so event wrap up, or what we learned on the day we hosted it. We did decide on announcing it publicly for the publicity, though we didn't really recruit while doing this (it seemed crass and rather pointless since all attendees had guilds already). We let the organizer do most of the spamming of the local chat and alliance chat since they were responsible for counting down to when they had to get to work anyways (though to be honest I did ask a guildie to pick up part of this job after about 12 hours).
Sure enough picking the district ahead of time was a bad idea. In the first one or two visits by the celestial the number of districts practically doubles!
So two things happened to us when we picked ours out a couple hours early. One was that we had competition from another guild that settled on the same one, and they were kind of pushy and ugly that they were hosting, not us. We got pushy back... (they were a guild called MILF though, with a pink beaver on their cape. Feel free to despise them >.< ) Not how we want to promote our image so lets find a way around this next year
Second was that on the 2nd ox visitation, the alliance members who were just logging on could not get into the district. It was at max capacity. After all, the new districts are made only when the lesser ones are basically full. This was really tense for us. We stayed for that go round, but knew we had to leave all those who were AFK so that the live people could get in on the fun.
End result was that we moved to a Japanese district. The Japanese are not really fond of Chinese things, and apparently that includes this holiday. We located one were both the monastery and the boardwalk were virtually empty so I recommend that next year we just go to a Japanese district from the start and walk in and broadcast the alliance to see if anyone else is there, if so move on.
Something else we learned involving organizing the ingredients:
The day before I had Toby hold all the ingredients and give me 1 of each on several of my characters and some others who volunteered. Doing this ahead of time, while things are quiet and there's no pressure is something I can't recommend enough! You don't have to run over to storage anymore and you don't have to sweat as you hand stuff off either. You can put the items in inventory in the exact order of the dishes. Then whoever is holding the whole visits ingredients becomes the organizer for that visit.
About 15-30 minutes the organizer for that round needs to put out a call for helper volunteers - and needs 4 of them most likely, 2 at a minimum. We stood over by storage and gave each volunteer the set for one chef. 4 volunteers plus the organizer lets you have one person by each chef so there is no running and panicking. If you are short on people (and the 2nd visit is at a time when most people are asleep) then you group it so that any running is between two chefs nest to each other. Chef Tian (desert) is next to Reun (salad) and Chef Jiong (soup) is next to Yan (appetizer), then do Chen (main course) for the 3rd person.
The two attempts made without this organization went badly and were nerve wracking on the organizer. We shouldn't put anyone through that again! The organizer is under enough pressure getting the volunteers next to the right chef in the midst of extremely busy chat channels. People had a fair number of disconnects during the event, so consider who has a reliable connection as a preferred ingredient holder volunteer whenever you do this again.
Well there's the tips, and why some things worked better than others. I hope we can do this again, cause it's a great holiday. Since chat is gonna be flooded with questions about the event anyway it's nice to get us all together and enjoy it as a nice big group!"
Japan 6!:
