I expected to be doing my own write-up of the race today, but that is not to be. You see, dear reader, I was out on vacation all of last week, with my game playing time during the Race being limited to Sunday. And although I logged in on Sunday morning, raring to go, I did not end up making it through much of the Race, which was very disappointing, especially considering that I spent several hours working at it.

Here were a few things that tripped me up:

• “Bonus” quests weren’t actually optional. They were, in fact, how you obtained the item. I thought the items were in fixed locations, and the bonus quests just were an alternate way to get them at first, and thus I ran off after getting a bonus quest in an area swarming with others attempting to do it.
• Other players could sabotage your quest. I found this out on DK, while fighting off 4 baddies, when some jerk came up and repaired my droid, thus FUBAR’ing my quest. As I learned later, I could have abandoned the entire Race quest chain, backtracked to Nar Shadda and gotten it again without losing my progress to reset it. But at the time, how to go about resetting it (I abandoned it and went back to the area I picked up the droid hoping that would do it to no avail) was not obvious.
• Some quests required using an item, and a dozen people were already waiting to use the item. The droid race area was swarming with people battling it out to get the fastest click. The standing around and waiting got old after about 5 minutes for me.
• Looking for and looting boxes to procure random items was not appealing for me on a PvP server, alone. I had 2 or so guildies on at any given time, and friends who were interested in doing the Race had already done so at this point, leaving me to group up with strangers, which I did some. But for random items to loot, that would not have been a good strategy. And at some point it just seemed like a lot of time/effort/work and not so much fun. Which is why I didn’t just start over and try doing it on my PvE server. At the end of the day, I just don’t think that would have boosted my enjoyment.

And this is why despite having sunk a few hours into it, I logged out yesterday afternoon, without having completed the Race. And I’ll admit it: I was bummed out about it. I’m not a quitter. Or a slacker. But at the end of the day, I play these games to have fun. And this event just…wasn’t fun for me.

Was it just me? Was this some sort of post-vacation inability to get back into the swing of the game?

Let me know your thoughts on the event in the comments!