Welp, I attended the End of Beta event that took place tonight. It was actually pretty fun. If you followed the storyline you'd end up in Howling Maw, where a General Goolash (a GB minime clone) would buff you to lvl 50 if you did pushups in front of him.

Throughout the event, basically every mob in the game spawned at various places attacking just about every base. Included with these mobs were renditions of General British as a modified Forean Machina. This was actually kinda neat, basically just like a beefed up Machina 'cept with the head of General British (reminded me of robocop). To go along with those, you also had regular General "Bane-ish" and Minime versions of General British to kill. I got to fight lvl 50 versions of every mob as well.

In the end the REAL GB (who you had to try to find) ended up dueling with Sarah Morrison on the Trinity Bridge in Valverde. Of course, that basically lagged out the game since everyone showed up there and the server shut down 10 mins after, with heartfelt thanks from Garriott and many of the Devs. GB never went down though No one in the game was resourceful enough to take him out unfortunately... unlike the UO end of game event, where Lord British was outed by a single player.

Basically, all the Bane base attacks were feints to throw everyone off while GB himself hung out in Valverde. A resourceful group woud've followed the trail to General Goolash, gotten the lvl buff and then hunted him down w/o getting distracted by the Bane attack. Oh well...

Anyways, was a great beta (one of the best Ive been in). A lot of stuff got done in the time I was there, a LOT of tweaking. Most of the time the game was very stable graphically and network-wise, so no problems there. EoB was well done and very creative. They seemed to put a LOT of work into it. It wasnt just "everyone go here and try to kill eachother".

In the end, I wished I would've had something organized within TG... but I knew most of us wanted to stay out of game until release - so I didnt push it. Nevertheless, it woulda been a awesome time. Kind of reminded me of the scripted events in MxO, which were basically the best part of that game. Hopefully they do it more.

On that note... I'll see you guys Tuesday @ 1201 AM CST. In the interim, I'll be doing a bit of recruiting at some of the TR support sites (the official beta site will be going down and NCSoft isnt making an official forum). Also, expect to see some leveling guides and a few tools you can use to help with the game. If anyone else finds anything similar, feel free to post em please.

Till then....