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Creating The Great Tyrian Adventure: Legendary Edition

It has been three season’s that the Gaiscioch Family has entertained the masses of Tyria through our massive events. Our goal has been to bring the community together by providing fun and interactive events in the games we enjoy together. It has been a blast to command during these events and the events have taught me how to lead more effectively. I have also made many long lasting friendships and look forward to many more events in the future.

I got to sit down with the mastermind behind these events, Benjamin “Foghladha” Foley, and ask a few questions about his ideas and where he came up with the prizes for the most recent season of the Tyrian Adventure: Legendary Edition.

Q: Just how long have you been organizing events like the Great Tyrian Adventure?
Believe it or not my first public community event wasn’t in an MMO at all. It was in a old PC game called Vampire the Masquerade: Redemption back in 2000. For nearly a year I ran a twice a week campaign called “Death in Prague” where I was the storyteller and walked people through a 6 part story I created for the series. Over the course of the year I ran over 600 people through it and even PlanetVampire by Gamespy picked the series up and gave me a section of their site for it.

I finally closed my campaign when I first got my hands on Dark Age of Camelot. That’s when I began hosting massive dragon hunt events and Realm vs Realm events. Each time getting more elaborate and grander in scale. Since then I have created the Battle for Badlands, the Telara Saga, and now the Great Tyrian Adventure. I’ve been an entertainer at heart since birth. I find the most enjoyment in games by entertaining others.

Q: What has been the most challenging aspect of running the Great Tyrian Adventure?
As with any large scale event, the biggest challenge is getting the word out. For this season we relied heavily on traditional social media to spread the word and also employed the help of ArenaNet to spread the word through some carefully timed facebook and twitter messages. In addition, we began promoting the event an hour before the start of the event. The result has been spectacular, bringing in over 300 people per week to the event series.

The other major challenge has been covering all 4 timeslots with leaders who have experience leading massive public groups. The stress involved with running a complete public group is drastically different from that of a guild group. You never know what type of person is going to show up to test your patience. These events are a real test of character.

Q: What was your inspiration behind this season?
I won’t lie, the prospect of Elder Scrolls Online on the horizon played a big part in our decision to go all out this season. Historically the Elder Scrolls games have hit the communities we’ve been a part of hard. With Skyrim we saw a 30% population drop in our community event series over night. I wanted to make sure that this event series was special. We don’t know what the future holds but we did want to show our appreciation to those that have called Sanctum of Rall home and have weathered the storm with us since it opened. We saw this as our last chance to say thanks to a lot of people that will likely be spending time in Tamriel and wanted to make sure they knew that they were appreciated. Maybe even encourage them to keep in touch and continue playing.

Q: Can you share what prizes you awarded this season?
Most definitely! This season we awarded the mystic forged weapons: Courage, Ilya, Dreadwing, Titan’s Vengeance, Stygian Blade, Phoenix Talon, The Anamoly, The Crossing, The Vision of the Mists, Immobolus, Wings of Dwayna, Spirit Links, Melendru’s Gaze and Volcanus. The precursors awarded were: Venom, Rage and Rodgort’s Flame. The legendaries awarded were: The Bifrost, The Flameseeker Prophecies, Incinerator, Meteorlogicus, Kudzu, The Minstrel and the mother of all legendaries, Eternity. In addition we awarded 4 commander compendiums, 18 20-Slot Bags, 135 Exotic Weapons, and 39 Sets of Exotic Armor. All in all the total trading post value was calculated at over 30,000 gold.

Q: The Great Tyrian Adventure is well known for passing out some pretty awesome loot. How do you come by so much awesome stuff?
Relationship building and building an army of like minded, big hearted people. For season one we used our friendship with the developers at ArenaNet to acquire 100 in-game Guild Wars 2 T-Shirts, as well as, an extra character slots for 5 lucky participants. In addition RaidCall, our voice service partner, donated a few gem cards for some lucky players. The vast majority of the prizes however were crafted, gathered, and donated by the members of the Gaiscioch Family. All of the season 3 prizes have been created by our team. Just in the past month I have logged more than 62,000 donations in our system of materials, gold, and items. The big hearts of the Gaiscioch family keep the vaults stocked and keep the prizes on the epic scale.

Q: Are you planning on continuing the Great Tyrian Adventure for Season 4?
Certainly. We are actively looking into ideas for our next season that appeal to our audience and also helps our server grow and thrive. Some of the ideas we’re playing with involve both the guild mission system and world vs world.

Q: WvW? What brought this idea on?
Since its inception the WvW system has been out of our reach for events like the Great Tyrian Adventure. This was largely due to the queue system and the highly competitive nature of the beast. However due to some improvements made by ArenaNet and the change in landscape on Sanctum of Rall we feel it’s time to bring this adventure to the WvW battlefield.

Q: What has been your favorite memory of the Great Tyrian Adventure?
Well nobody can forget the “Incident” in Fireheart Rise. So the lake below wasn’t as deep as I thought it was and I lead 100 people to a very quick death off a cliff. People still today give me hell for that. Regardless the key here is that every single person that was there remembers that moment. Epic memory creation was successful even if it was an epic fail.

Published: February 28th, 2015   |  3,553 Reads

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Kyla Rose
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