What a CoPOut!

Oh man, today was unbelievably stressful. Forget Diabolos! Almost three hours of Assault partying and what did I have to show for it? 100 AP and a pair of Cotton Gloves.

Let me start by saying something didn’t go wrong, everything went wrong!

I formed a five-man party around 7.30pm, and eventually got tank around 8pm.

I headed on over to Dvucca Isle Staging Point (Caedarva Mire) for the Seagull Grounded Assault again, but our DRK and BST couldn't use the Runic Portal. We asked them why, and they both replied with "it says we don’t have the Empire’s Authorisation". We literally spent a whole hour trying to work out what the problem was.

They had completed the requisite Aht Urhgan mission, they had their Imperial Army ID Tag, they had their Periqia Assault Orders (they even proved this by pressing tab and bringing the orders up in Auto-Translate) and they said they had all the Staging Grounds. They tried zoning, logging out, rejecting and reaccepting the mission, and we knew they could use the Runic Portal, as when we all went back to Whitegate, we saw them enter the Runic Portal and go to Caedarva Mire without the Mission Orders.

So, we were stumped. They could use the Runic Portal, they had the Mission Orders – what was wrong? Teila put shouts out in Whitegate, and people responded with "it can only mean one thing: they don't have the Mission Orders" – but they did, they had proved it with Auto-Translate!

There was one thing left: a GM call. I logged a "glitch" with the GMs and 27 calls later (this was around 9pm), GM Buuren appeared and greeted me very politely, saying "I understand that you wish to report an Assault glitch, Kixxi?". At precisely that exact moment, both party members who were "glitching" turned round and said:

"Oh yeah, umm, we don’t have Dvucca Isle Staging Point, LOL"

Could they have timed it any better? The whole time we had seen them go to Caedarva Mire, we had assumed they had gone to Dvucca Isle Staging Point. They had, as it turned out, gone to Azouph Isle Staging Point instead, even though we had said it was Dvucca and asked them many times.



Very embarrassed, and feeling like I must have appeared to the GMs as another whinging player who "couldn't get in" to something, I had to bow and apologise for these people who had dared to use "LOL" at the end of their confession, and we went to reform the party.

By now, our NIN was very impatient (understandably) and insisted we go the moment I got us back to five. I grabbed us a WAR and we headed on over and just as we were about to enter the Assault, the NIN DC'd. Perfectly timed. To my surprise though, he came back! We entered the mission, finally.

Inside, we proceeded as usual, except for some reason I really struggled to keep Excaliace under control. I managed to stop him outside the first Crab room whilst the others took out the Arrapago Crabs. It took forever as a five!

Now at the start of this Assault, there are six rooms, three on each side of the tunnel. Three have Crabs in them, three are empty. Excaliace will run into one in each pair, either the empty room or the full room. Two of the three times, he ran to the empty room, meaning we could bypass two very long fights.

But, no. The NIN pulled every Crab in all three rooms despite us yelling in Caps. That wasted over fifteen minutes of the Assault. Next came the Pugil tunnels, in which they left a Pugil behind, so I couldn't bring Excaliace through. I asked again and again and again for them to come back but they didn’t. After everything that had happened, I was getting mighty frustrated.

Eventually, the Pugil caught wind of Excaliace and he pegged it full tilt back down the tunnels. I chased him, brought him back, and the same thing happened. After using more Caps, they came back and got rid of it. We then proceeded to the Doomed tunnels whereupon we were told we had ten minutes left on the clock.

I kept Excaliace halted whilst they killed all the Debauchers (Doomed) and as soon as the last one was dead, I began bringing him in. Fiddly as it was, I got him to the final corridor with a minute to spare; we were going to make it. With ten seconds on the clock, he stopped, having got too close to one of us. We moved away and the Rune of Release appeared with the Chest, but the split second I touched the Chest it read:

Mission Failed.

It was so close, I actually managed to get the ??? Gloves from the Chest before we were thrown out. I took a second for this to sink in (seriously I ask, how can literally everything possibly go that wrong?), before unnecessarily swearing in the party chat and on the linkshell. It was really wrong of me, but I was so annoyed that I had wasted an entire evening on this game.

But the badness didn’t stop there, no. We tried to reform, but after what seemed like forever getting us back to a five-man party, Teila realised she couldn’t get another Imperial ID Tag, so I had to disband on everyone as we had agreed that Akashea, Teila and me would do this together.

This was just after 10pm and all I had to show for a night's unbelievable cock-ups was 100 AP.

Before I logged, I went to Port Windurst and picked up a brand new Linkshell. Akashea came up with the good idea of creating a separate shell for our CoP members, which, if more than anything, will stop us from overflowing the Linkshell with CoP banter, and prevent me from hogging the /lsmes any further!

I named it CoPOuts - best I could come up with, and it's nice and red.^^