These bigger events are more like maneuvering oil tankers than speed boats.
Once you start turning, you aren't changing it quickly.
In this case:
-- I started hearing that people couldn't get in.
-- At first, people were telling me they thought the arena was locked. But it wasn't locked. I double checked that it wasn't. I also locked and unlocked it just to toggle that functionality.
-- As more such messages came in, I exited the arena to see what was going on from the outside. I then saw that all arenas were closed down, and I could not get in to any arenas, including back into Special Events 2.
-- I called Ditto (who was in the arena) on the phone and told him what was going on.
-- Spikes then worked on calling HTC, and I went to the message board to put an urgent message in the CM area for HTC. Perd already put up a message in the general area.
-- I asked the inside CM's to tell people not to exit the arena or they would not be able to get back in.
-- I kept trying various ways to get back in.
-- After a while, the arena was not enterable for long enough that there was a significant number of people who tried coming in and then gave up and left for the day.
-- For a while, numbers held up.
-- But because people couldn't get in, the players in the arena eventually dwindled to about 10 or fewer active allied and 20 or fewer active axis.
-- At that ratio, the allied side tried a mission and got annihilated, which (as we know from experience running events) causes some additional players to leave.
-- That's when we had an online meeting to decide what to do and came up with the options: (1) redistribute players currently in the arena to even up the sides and continue, hoping that arena might get fixed at some point, or (2) cancel and reschedule.
-- We talked to the axis side to see if they wanted to have some axis pilots go allied to balance numbers.
-- They preferred cancelling and rescheduling.
-- We announced cancellation.
-- After we announced that, we got notification that the problem was getting worked on.
-- We had no way to call players back and reverse the cancellation message.
-- We had no idea how long it would take to fix anyway.
-- We can't do things like telling everyone, "There are troubles. Try coming back in a couple hours, and we'll see if it's up." You loose too many people when you do that who don't come back.
So, the event is rescheduled to June 22nd.
I really wanted to fly in it, too. I blocked out my day for it and worked out with my wife and kids and parents to do various things today that would free me up to be able to devote 14 hours today (as I have an hour of work before, 12 hours during, and 1 hour after the event to perform). I worked a month on this event it before it ran -- takes work to get these produced. I worked a couple hours last night to make the setup scripts that do stuff during the event, then (for me) work up early to get things going.
So, if you wish we got to fly this today, imagine how I feel.
But stuff sometimes happens, and we deal with it.
