Well the Olympics have come and gone and I had a great time.  Here’s a wrap up to the event.

I said in my last post that I hoped that it would be more than a tele-scan but less than a full fledged scavenger hunt and that’s right where I think the event fell.  You did a traditional tele-scan to find letters and then used your letters to build words off a prescribed Nation themed list.  The more letters you were able to use in words, the better you finished.  The half-elves took first in this event, Gagnon was able to split off early and start unscrambling words rather than tele-scan on his mage which gave us a great advantage.  A few small nits to pick, nothing serious … I’d put it in the feed back department.  The unusable characters and the wildcards were a bit frustrating.  In an event like this I’d rather the luck be in the finding the letters and the skill in the word assembly, wildcards take away from that.  Additionally the wildcard letters were in fact just re-purposed unusable letters, and not all of them, which made it one more complication to try to keep straight while looking at the jumble.  Other than that I think the event was a challenge and a lot of fun.  I hope that if this sort of event becomes more common then the people deciding how many of each letter to scatter look at the letter frequency within the words they select rather than looking at standard English letter distributions as we have some things that skew the results (for example H is far more common in the race names due to the word “Half” all over the place than it is otherwise in standard English).

The final event was the Pkill, where I expected to be splattered quickly and often.  As it turned out, the event was a King of the Hill event where you earned points by staying in the designated room.  If every team had strategized to stay in the room as long as possible by not attacking anyone we would have had a terribly boring tie but thankfully that didn’t happen.  Of course, fleeing and returning quickly were vital to a good strategy.  If you killed a PK then trying to keep them from CRing was useful, but if it took you out of the room to do it, then you were only trading off them for you and at no net gain.  PFs didn’t need to cr or even respell, so it was just rush back.  PKs had some advantages like being able to shove people out of the room, but it really wasn’t a deciding factor.  I was taking 2-3 people pretty routinely and it wasn’t until Ceir started bashing me that I was having trouble at all … I mean a pk circle causes you to flee and return, but oh well 🙂  All in all a lot of fun, I killed Creemore just because he figured he’d get picked on, so I didn’t want to let him down.  A lot of the TSers present seemed to attach each other with great relish, perhaps a little pent up frustration from many long meetings!! 🙂

Congratulations to everyone who participated, and thanks again to all the immortals who invested time in preparation for this event, particularly Eisengrim and Gonnil who hosted events and managed the herd admirably.