The ongoing Erollisi event in Everquest 2 has provided a coincidental but well-timed change of gaming pace. I was ill for the best part of four days from mid-last week; it just a nasty dose of flu, but it really knocked any ability to game seriously out of whack. I couldn’t sit still for that long as my back was aching and I slept way more than normal. So as the weekend neared, having something I could do in short bursts on a predictable schedule was much easier to enjoy than anything involving lots of reading, complex mechanics or frantic action-combat.
AFK’ing in a graveyard
Running the new public quest was my only real goal with the aim of hatching the candy egg to get the new familiar. I’m happy to say I achieved that on Saturday after eight tries (I think). I wasn’t that stressed about getting it, and certainly wouldn’t have wanted to juggle alts doing this – the emphasis was on “lofi”, relaxing gaming here.
Success!
It was actually really lovely to just have my character chilling a lot in the Commonlands, watching global chat, interacting with the more outgoing characters around me on occasion and then following the pack at the appointed time for a 5-10 minutes’ (or so, I never timed the actual quest) march across country following the departed.
The playerbase, as far as I have seen, is very good-natured at these events. The events by there nature are competitive to a certain extent, as the departed can only hold so many buffs granted by the roses you pick up. So characters are racing to click roses and to use them on the departed as the buff stacks fall below maximum. On all the runs I did, my character had the maximum participation and reward in all but one. There was the one time event where I logged in as the event was about two-thirds complete and I only got a ‘passive’ reward as a result. Otherwise it was easy to take part and fun to collectively progressing the event.
I do like public quests and I’ve written about them in several different games (EQ2, Guild Wars 2 and Rift). In this case there were specific circumstances why I focused on them and not much else. In later sessions I did fly around gathering the collectable ‘clickies’ for the event in the same zone and did some low-level crafting mat gathering on occasion. But it was quite the change from my more involved gaming style.
GamingSF 
I thought this was a pretty solid addition to the Holiday event schedule. The PQ they added for Tinkerfest was good too. They seem to be getting a good handle on how to make these things sufficiently rewarding to keep people motivated, sufficiently “grindy” to keep them well-attended and sufficiently succinct to ensure no-one has time to get bored. The generally good-natured attitude of the crowd is strong evidence that they’re pitching it just about right.
The new PQ on TEst is, by all accounts, none of those things yet but they have a few weeks to tune it so I’m hopeful it will be another fun outing when it comes in March.