Well were to start ?, A new idea for me a team challenge. Why u may ask, well I have always liked the way people often work together at meets I host , plan routes, help when stuck or provide a lift to the road after a call to mors is required. I often find the majority of road meets are all about the bragging rights associated with drag racing (which I have no problem with) and the competition. I thought it might be good to have a bit of both and hence the team event was born.
Since I was feeling rather clever, I thought I would further complicate things by adding team themes, and team cinematic introductions to include music, entrance vehicles and stunts.
Throughout the week and a half build up I was a little worried, interest was not the best as it had been for previous meets and. I had to post the event details early and it is hard to keep interest high in an event on the gta forums for that period of time. Furthermore it required people to pre plan and before the event. I had some people decline instantly when the event was posted and I appreciate this type of thing is just not for everyone, some regulars to my meets took to it straight away (as I knew they would) other teams had to be created, and despite pushing people to hook up (like a GTA blind date) it was difficult to get people to interact on the forum like I had hoped. Although I still had several people wanting to join at last minute (a little bit frustrating as the post had been up for 10days) that I did not let join, as I did not think it was fair on the others who had put so much time and effort & $$$ into their themes. To those who could not join or find a team mate I hope to have you at the next individual event.
Despite all this, and a personally shit week, I was buzzing about seeing what people had created and like others nervous about performing the intro!
I wasn’t disappointed the themes were awesome: we had humping couples in camper vans, psycho dancing twins with fireworks, air displays, exploding cars (not all intentional lol) and gay dancing cars !
Unfortunately due to xbox server/internet/uk weather, we spent the first 2 hours trying to perform for each other, before getting thrown out and having to rejoin, even more frustrating than my last technical issues. I though this put a real damper on the event at the start and although I had a great night, this really stopped it from been possibly epic and it killed a lot of the initial buzz. It also meant I rushed a lot of the off-roading and left out some events that I had spent a good few days planning.
When we finally headed off we started with a drag race lol, this was fun but chaotic, usually prefer a steady start to get people in the swing of things and give new people an idea of how things run before we hit more difficult terrain. We headed up the hill ready for the first team event the hill climb relay. Looking back this was probably a bit ambitious and poorly timed, and due to personal issues I had not had the time to write a script to explain how it would run, much confusion followed, and then to cap it all off I managed to blow every car at the start ;(
The race did run but not exactly to plan, I had hope that by forcing people to drive there team mates cars it would make things a bit more interesting but this just added to the confusion. We did a quick run around the lake with a short tough off-roading section that I could have made more of (prob will in a later meet) and due to time I didn’t stop for the synchronised hill climb.
We headed to the beach and all decided to have a straight driven relay race instead of the planned du-Athon, I went with this to avoid further complication and confusion but to those who were a little disappointed it did not run it will come back in a later meet.
We then headed for the final event the “team selfie mountain challenge “apologies to cannawafles and chewie (who had tech issues) and could not compete . I enjoyed this bit of the meet, despite ruining mine and Tash’s chances at the start but wreaking the Huntley, 5 seconds after the start, well done to the winners Tic and Outkast who held the lead from the 1st waypoint.
To finish off we had the Thelma and Louise cliff jump which was fun and I think I managed to get shots of everyone.
Again I cancelled the planned team demolition derby. A long long written piece of feedback but due to the problems I thought I had to explain my thoughts on the challenge to those involved especially as there was a huge amount of effort and patience put in by every one that joined. I’m undecided on running another team event in the future as yet. But I know for sure the next event is going to be an individual pure off roading event.
As usual any ideas, feedback and thought would be appreciated to help improve future meets.