Walking The Walk

Tuesday night the guild was putting together a sixteen-man operations group for Xenoanalyst II. Since we didn't have enough guildies around who were both able and willing to join, we filled the remaining spaces with pugs. Checking my own friends list for candidates, I was delighted to see that my old guild leader (let's shorten this to "Mogle" for the rest of the post) was online on his dps Shadow. While he had been more or less inactive for several months, I had no doubts that he would still be an asset to our group, so I asked for an invite for him.

We downed story mode easily enough, but knew that hard mode was going to be a bit of a push with pugs in the group. Still, things seemed to be going well enough on our first attempt. That is, until I noticed a whisper from Mogle: "How do I turn walk off again?"

At first it didn't even register properly with me what was going on; I thought that I had only just noticed a whisper that he had sent me before the fight started or something. However, when he followed it up with "LOL" and "HELP!" I took a closer look and noticed that his Shadow was ambling around the room at an extremely casual pace, lightsaber out and everything. "/ on numpad" I tried to reply in between fits of laughter, but the slash at the beginning caused it to be eaten up as an invalid emote several times before I managed to fit in an extra space to make it go through.

Meanwhile we had made it to the first Environmental Awareness phase and people were rushing to the core to dps it down - except for Mogle, who was walking towards it really, really slowly, and me, who was too busy watching him and laughing my ass off. Then Mogle disconnected. I knew that this wasn't going to go well with a dps down, and it didn't. We failed to down the core in time, and while we attempted to recover from the tank death this caused, we never quite did. Oh well, wipe.

As soon as Mogle came back online, I just had to whisper him:

Me: "Oh god, the sight of you walking around the room really slowly... too funny."
Mogle: "Lol, erm...when I pressed / on my numpad it shut my computer down."
Me: "Lol, what? Really?!"
Mogle: "Yeah, I have one of those fancy gaming keyboards, and I have / on numpad bound to shutting my PC down. The funny thing is, I knew that when you told me to press it, but I still did it anyway."

So not only did he get himself stuck in walk mode, he also "disconnected" himself! Needless to say, I couldn't help but relay that story to the rest of my guild (especially as there were some grumblings that doubted whether we had enough dps in the group). Fortunately they agreed that it was hilarious. On the next attempt, with everyone actually being able to make it to the core in time, we passed the dps check with ease and downed the boss.

As much as I love me a good boss kill, an epic wipe can be just as good. Much love for Mogle.

(And if you think that I'm being mean to him for poking fun at his mistake here, let me state for the record that I did something similar the first time I fought Operator in TFB on hard mode. I just didn't immediately realise that I had accidentally toggled walk on since it was my first time and I thought that the boss simply had some kind of slow on hard to make it more difficult. That said, I've never accidentally shut down my PC in the middle of a boss fight, so that was a new one even for me...)