Hey!

On Saturday 28th March, EU guild Rock Paper Signet [RPS] held the great MARCHING ORDERS PvE event: Three armies started out from the home zones of each of the Orders of Tyria: Priory, Whispers and Vigil. From there, they travelled across the land, picking up clues from characters within the self-contained story, before finally ending up in the Silverwastes for a combined effort to take down the Mordrem Vinewrath.

Although I was the one to initially issue the challenge to the Orders, I refrained from committing to a single zerg. Instead, I shifted around, ensuring that all armies were (literally) running smoothly.

Due to a number of other GW2-related events taking place during March, we reserved marketing this one to the masses until the week before. As such, I had expected less numbers than Battle of the Five Armies.

I was therefore really surprised when so many folks turned up! The Whispers won on attendance, but the Priory pulled through when taking down Vinewrath during an intense finale.

As always, there are things to improve on: Our method of allocating specific assistants to help with taxing people (both at the start and during the night) seemed to work really well. I also feel that folks enjoyed the short ‘quests’ given out by the colourful characters each zerg encountered. Still, we’ll likely trim the time spent over the course of the evening and get better organised if we are gonna combine zergs in the Silverwastes towards the end of a night.

This is the part where I usually put thanks in and this list is growing to be ridiculously long. I think it goes to show how much our infrastructure for these events has improved over time:

- Cheers to [RPS], who did a swell job as always. Specific thanks go out to the leaders and deputies of each army, who helped keep the evening on track. The assistants did an absolutely amazing job too to ensure the downtime between maps was minimal.

- Particular thanks to RebelMaren, who (spoilers!) played all of the quest-givers on his many alts throughout the night. Aside from that one incident with sticks, the Priory zerg and me in Frostgorge which we won’t talk about…

- I owe a debt of gratitude to guildwars2 - who helped promote it both on Tumblr and using Twitter. Heck, thanks to everyone who helped get the word out there: Whether it be on Tumblr, Twitter, Reddit or through your own communities. These events simply would not be as fun as they are without the numbers.

- Cheers to everyone who streamed and recorded the evening. I believe there were around five streams in total on the night and I think covering stuff like this does wonders for highlighting the community. I think we can emphasise this even more in the future, so long as there’s willing coordination between streamers.

- Not sure if I said this when I originally posted the infographic, but thanks to worldoftyria for allowing use of their screenshots during the initial promotion of the event (from here - you’ll see what I mean).

You can keep up with any other event announcements by following this blog on Tumblr or on Twitter.

See you at the next one!