Ultima Online: Memoirs of a Counselor, Part Two

Some of my fondest memories are those pre “global que”. During this time, a counselor was assigned to a single shard and those were the only calls they had to respond to. During those times there weren’t near the calls, so we would spend our waiting time in a guild hall.

We were always told to go out and interact with the players. It was great fun to go out in small groups and find a group of people and talk. Many people had never seen a “robed one”. They would always ask if you could teleport them somewhere or do some other special thing, which we were not allowed to do. We would pick different towns to visit and sometimes just walk around finding a roleplayer to talk to.

We also had some regular visitors that would come and see us in the guild hall. I remember one special visitor called Scary Ghost. This person walked into the guild hall one day as a ghost and only once did we ever see him as a live person. He became a real friend. One day after we had become regional and I had left that shard I got a call to an area and there he was out on the sitting porch of Blackthorn’s Castle. We had a great visit and I broke the cardinal rule and we exchanged icq numbers. We have been friends ever since.

Sometimes even seers would come in and visit. You always had to wonder when some odd creature would come walking into the building and then start following you around.
Those darn quacking chickens were a give away too hehehe.

I remember the morning well…we were doing our normal thing and one of the dev members or gms, I don’t remember which now, popped into our irc channel and told us they needed help. We were told the global que would be going live in like 30 minutes and it still wasn’t tested. There was instant panic. There were about 10 of us that were paired with a dev member or gm. They would put in a call and we would answer it. The another call and another answer. This was wild and crazy right up till the last minute and then it went live. There were no manuals so a couple of counselors started right in putting that together. But life was different.

Once the global que happened all things changed.. From that point on we had no time. We were always behind on calls. The same amount of counselors now had 3 shards to cover and it was stressfull and just not fun. We no longer had time to visit with the players. We had no time to do anything but answer calls. We were supposed to keep the call times down but well, I just didn’t. From my first day, it was important to me to leave the player happy and satisfied. If it was a tough call, it was not unusual for me to be there for an hour or even longer. I felt like I had failed if they weren’t satisfied when I left.

Till next time…