Upon finding other players, run the other way

Ah, sweet home Thestra. Now that I am back, let me regale you a tale of why Vanguard will remain dead forever: Players are assholes.

But let us start at the beginning. I showed up at Wardship of the Sleeping Moon to do a couple quests and was trying to figure out where to single pill some 3 dot Troglodytes from the Leth Verael ruins when I receive a tell from Fryloc: ‘Hey come heal for our group.’

I explained to him that I have been away from the game for a long time, but he says ‘you’d be the second healer, it’ll be fine’, so I hop into the riftways and end up at the Seawatch Coast stone, in River Palace chunk, Qalia. As I am rounding the palace, Fryloc starts demanding I ‘come rez’ right away. Well, what the hell do you think I’m doing? It wasn’t immediately apparent how to get around the palace to where they were. One of the party members mused, ‘Rent a griffon?’, one of the things I was apparently supposed to ‘just know’ despite not playing seriously since launch in 2007.

Horses: Apparently only idiots use them.

I worked my way around where the rest of the group seemed to be, but aggroed a 3 dot level 34 cat that was in stealth.. I hadn’t joined up with them yet so I decided I’d just lose the aggro and come back. It put a poison DoT on me through my ward that I didn’t notice, so as I ran away I was bleeding HP pretty badly. This Fryloc guy comes running out and says ‘follow me’, while also picking up a cat on him in the process. I died to the poison DoT, as he did immediately after.. reaction?

Well, they had been dying repeatedly before I arrived, so it was all too much for good Fryloc. He rage quit the group(and as /who yielded, the game) practically as his body hit the ground. Then another person left, then I left. Thanks for making me cross the world, pals!

I suppose them repeatedly dying before I arrived should have been a sign. Maybe I was a bit too anxious to accept a too-good-to-be-true offer of ‘it’s no big deal, just show up’ when even things like ‘just show up’ are steeped in years of undocumented knowledge and expectations of an inbred populace.

I died one more time to cats trying to get my corpse back, but was able to get both corpses before Recalling. I could have pretty easily made it back to the stone and gated back to Wardship of the Sleeping Moon, which I’ll need to do anyway, but nothing says ‘to hell with this’ like Recall.

I noted that Fryloc’s tombstone didn’t seem to be there which means, with how fast he logged out, he must have eaten the XP loss by summoning. Hell yes.