On day 2 I heard two statements:
1. Faceless claims they weren't racing but were raiding until 7am.
2. Faceless claims they went 50/50 on pos medals but no way they did.
Now that we know there were bonus pos picks open, I actually kinda believe faceless now. They eventually did get just as many medals and they weren't necessarily racing, just getting the most out of pos while they could.
What I do not see is a lot of amtrak hoorah-ing about race wins this time. We even all agreed to decline any sort of bling bling here. A little trash talk sure but we all kinda agree it wasn't a real race like server launch was. So more just lingering shit talk than anything.
Our plan was to get 60 storms keys so we could piggy our full first 72 into Agnarr. We were all committed to staying up as long as we could to try and get that done because it's important to us to get into PoTime quickly. Plane of Time is actually fully instanced content, so it doesn't actually affect Faceless if another guild gets there first--but it does affect us negatively if we aren't starting our first time lockout ASAP. We got it done about 3 days in (75ish hours), which is well within line for my assessment of what I wanted out of the first week of PoP.
For some background, I ran this same process on Agnarr. On Agnarr we had NO competition for Storms at all, other than like...one guild sniped a couple minis early in day 1. Most of Agnarr just chose not to be in Storms at the same time as us. Once the smaller guild left Storms on Day 1 we weren't even able to keep a 5th pick up, so we only had 4. I think eventually the 4th closed out and we only had 3. Our Agnarr guild isn't the zergmonster that Selo Faceless is, we had like 65 "humans" raiding PoP launch and a number of boxes. With basically free reign in storms it took us
30 hours to key 60. So I had bad feelz that with an active contest with Amtrak it would obviously be much slower probably for both guilds.
When I actually zoned in and saw all the picks, I knew that neither guild could mathematically cover them all, and they couldn't. I spread small forces around to a lot of the picks and kept a few larger forces in picks w/you guys, mainly as a sort of honey trap hoping to keep you guys more focused on those picks than all the uncontested ones. But even w/that strategy we had like 3 picks we never set foot in, just didn't have the numbers (we only used our first 72 crew to do storms, the rest of the guild was doing a whole separate progression launch night focused on doing the raid stuff.)
So by time, we ended up finishing 60 by 8 hours or so, from like 10Pm ET to 6AM ET. Then we went to bed. Our original plan left 12 of our 72 unkeyed for BoT, and a number of those guys decided they wanted to keep pushing for their keys since all the weird picks were still up, and there was no one contesting them. I think we ended up getting like another 8 keys before those people went to bed too, but our "organized" Storms farm w/the goal of keying 60 took 8 hours.
The way I see it whatever happened with the picks took 22 hours off of my time to finish PoP.
