Report from the Everquest Fan Faire in Baltimore
by AllaKhazam


I had a great time at the Fan Faire in Baltimore.  For those of you who, like me, wondered what the heck you could do for an entire weekend, I wrote up a review of what went on.

Friday:

The faire was held at the Baltimore Airport Mariott.  I definitely would not recommend this hotel to anyone traveling to the Baltimore or Washington area, but for the purposes of the fan faire, it was fine.  At noon, they set up tables for the players to register at as they arrived.  When you registered, you received a tag which you wore around your neck that listed your game name and server.  For the rest of the weekend people tended to refer to each other by their game names.  Of all the people I met over the weekend, I doubt more than a handful knew my name was anything other then Allakhazam, and I don't think I learned the real names of too many people either.  Of course, that was the point.  This was a chance to take the Everquest experience and move it into real life for a while.

I think the idea for Friday afternoon was that people would register, check into their rooms and then go out and explore the area for the afternoon before the official cocktail party started at 8:00.  Instead, people just filed right into the lobby and the hotel bars and began socializing.  Everquest players are a social lot.  We spend hours in the game grouping with new players and chatting with friends and strangers.  The fact that this was now face to face didn't seem to matter.  Everyone just started to go around and introduce themselves to the other players, usually hooking up with others from their server that they could meet with later in the game.

It was amusing to see the look of bafflement on the faces of the hotel employees as an entire hotel full of people started to talk in a language that was, and yet was not quite English.  "I was buffed and sowed and ready for a good camp when I crashed and went linkdead"  Huh?  "My guild ran through fear in  three and a half hours"  You did what?  "I love to spend time in Misty buffing newbies and giving out plat and bronze"  Umm, yeah.  We all knew what we were talking about of course.

Much like when you are playing EQ, time seemed to fly by.  People shuffled between the hotel lobby, the lobby bar and the hotel sports bar, meeting people as they went.  Beers were drank and food was ordered and people and conversations just came and went. You got used to quickly scanning the name tags of the other people to see what server they played on and whether you recognized their name from the game.  At 8:00, they opened the convention room in the back and everyone went back there as well.  While this was part of the official event, it was not meant to be anything other than a continuation of the socializing that had started earlier.  By the end of the night, many people had found new friends and headed downtown to continue the partying.  I headed back to my hotel room to get some sleep.

Saturday:

This was the formal, more organized portion of the event.  The doors to the convention area were opened at around noon and over the next hour more than 1,200 everquest players made their way in and grabbed a seat.  Most were dressed in jeans and such, but there were a few who went all out and came dressed in costume.  At 1:00, Cindy, the person who organized the event for Sony, stood up and introduced the luminaries who had come there from Sony.  Along with a number of the people who had created and designed the game, there were also quite a few GMs and Guides there to meet and talk with.  There were also representatives from several of the more popular EQ websites, like Baelish from Caster's Realm, the guys from Everlore and EQ Stratics and, of course, me.

They then started the first challenge.  The players were organized by server and then split into groups of 10.  They were then handed a packet of materials and told to hunt throughout the hotel for Verant staff wearing an NPC tag, hail them, and try to solve their quests.  The group that was able to gather the most quest rewards was given an in game item, so as you can imagine people were really intent on solving the quests.  The quests ranged from puzzles to riddles to searching for items or other NPCs.  It sounds a little odd in the telling, but it was well done and quite entertaining.  More than one person remarked that the quests for the fan faire were often better than the actual in game quests.

After the quests were done, the faire split into various smaller areas.  Different rooms had different Verant employees who held question and answer sessions on various aspects of the game, such as quests, the magic system, weapons, etc.  I stayed in the main room where they were going to demonstrate the dynamic quests.  We watched while a GM created a character called Fluffy the Bear.  This bear then teleported into Misty Thicket on one of the live servers and the quest was on.  The premise was that a halfling, played by another GM, stood near the Rivervale entrance and yelled that his pet bear had gotten sick and rabid and was missing, while the bear tore through the part of the zone near the Runnyeye entrance.  One player was supposed to volunteer to help bring the bear his medicine and lead him back to the GM.  We watched the screen from the bear's perspective, and of course the minute the bear saw a player hundreds of players started to screamed "kill him".  Bloodthirsty group.  The player they eventually recruited to feed the bear did a great job of roleplaying, and it was a lot of fun to see this from the inside perspective of the GM playing the bear rather than the player and to read the /shouts and other comments that were going on throughout the zone.  The room about lost it when right after the player got his reward, one of the other players asked him if he got any "phat lewt".  Unfortunately, they only had time to run the quest on two servers before the next part of the faire started.

The final event of the afternoon was the trivia contest.  For some odd reason, Verant didn't want me to participate in this, but I did get a look at the questions and boy were they hard.  This time the players were split up by class, and then split into 10 person groups.  Each group was given a list of EQ trivia questions and given 45 minutes to try to answer as many as they could.  The winning group got in game items for their characters.  The questions ranged from naming every zone in Norrath to naming every Two Handed Slashing Weapon in the game to naming every level 1 spell.  Even the most experienced players were often stumped.

Once the trivia contest was over, we were kicked out of the convention room to let them set up for dinner.  By now, you had met a whole group of people from your server and well as a whole group who played your class.  There were plenty of people to talk to and plenty to talk about.  As with the day before, it seemed like the day had just flown by.  Dinner was served after about an hour wait.  This was standard banquet fare, probably prepared in the back by Chef Dooga, but nobody really came there for the meal.

After dinner, I took off to drive back home to Philadelphia, but many others continued where they left off and headed back to the bar for more socializing.  All in all, everyone who attended seemed to have a great time.  I know I did and I would recommend to anyone that they consider attending future fan faires.