The vigil is a funny beast. This Test lures us into staying up late, for hours on end, turning out all our stockpiles, into an ever-higher, ever-increasing, ever-faster bid for absolutely nothing concrete but the hope that we might get more points to pass the test sooner, rather than later.
Basically, the Test of the Vigil is a scavenger hunt. You build a vigil fire for a cost in materials. At the start, requests for items show up every 15 minutes. Throwing said item into the fire nets you a "sacrifice."
The requests speed up as sacrifices increase, to 1 min intervals, and then apparently even quicker, to 2-3 a minute. The expense of the sacrifice varies randomly, but tends to get more alarming as time goes by.
Your final score at the end, is the total number of sacrifices you did, multiplied by the total number of sacrifices other people made.
This leads to an interesting juxtaposition of cooperation and competition, where it is in everybody's best interest to have a decent amount of people participating in the vigil - more stockpiles to draw from, more people taking turns means more breathing room when things get really hectic and so on, and it is also in everybody's best interest to ensure they have the most personal sacrifices out of the vigil fire. (eg. 30 sacs x 90 (120 sacs total) = 2700 points, whereas someone who did 20 sacs x 100 = 2000 points.)
This is sometimes solved by having a vigil caller, preferably someone impartial who has already passed the Vigil test, so that sacrifices can be divided out evenly between participants.
The expense of the sacrifice is another consideration. Ideally, you'd want everyone to take the sacrifice as it comes in their turn. But what if the person doesn't have the item? Do you give him another sacrifice and have someone who can afford the cost bear the brunt? Do you let the person who has the items get another sacrifice in, while the other person gives up their right to sacrifice in the round? Both solutions have been used. Other guilds prepare a massive stockpile for eventualities like this, so that they can provide materials to such stranded participants, out of goodwill, and the assumption that everyone does their part to prepare the stockpile.
In the first two weeks of the Test though, no one has passed, and no one can be considered impartial. Already in the last three or four vigils I've been in, there are varying degrees of "dishonesty" going on. Easy sacs can sometimes be stolen. The caller can purposefully not call a few sacs in order to fill it themselves.
Hell, even I have been guilty of a certain amount of sac "fixing" - as I entered two characters into the vigil, I intentionally gave one alt the other's sacs a few times, to skew the ratio of sacrifices from an even 32:32 for example, to 30: 34. My alt cannot complain, unlike a real person, but it benefits me to have at least one character winning the Test pass. I tried not to be too blatant about it, as winning scores are shown, so it would be very suspicious if one of my characters came out miles ahead of the other.
There are other ways of gaming the Vigil, and I've used a couple. One is to outlast the opposition. If you can stay on for 24 hours, putting in your sacs fair and square, one obviously gains more sacrifices than people who can only be online for 8 hours and have to log off.
The other is to deliberately end the Vigil. In our first vigil, it so happened we faced a very nasty resource of fish meat that no one wanted to contribute, and the participants, mostly another guy and me, decided "screw it" and were about to end it. It so happens that the resident drama queen logged on about 5 minutes before it was about to end, and pretty much gave us a hilarious amount of hell for doing so - presumably she wanted the fire to go on so that she could get more sacs out of it while we had to go, and presumably she suspected us of deliberately ending the fire before she could do so.
In our second vigil, a number of us were again quite happy to end it when another ugly resource popped up (a lot of leather). Admittedly, we wanted to end the vigil before the weekly test passes were scored, so that points could be counted on top of our existing points - so none of us had selfless intentions for doing so.
It so happens that my friend the Bastet vet showed up, and he argued for extending the vigil, and even brought all the expensive resources needed to keep it going. Do you think he had selfless intentions? Hell no, he obviously had some free time, so this was a good chance for him to get more sacrifices and higher scores if the vigil continued. Granted, a large extended vigils benefits all participants, by virtue of the fact that few others in Egypt can match the same feat, so everyone's scores are boosted higher. But one cannot deny the fact that one can boost one's personal scores by grabbing a bunch of sacrifices when your vigil mates have to log off or can't cope, either. :)
Having been on for nigh unto 24 hours, and facing significant depleted stockpiles (I generally don't sacrifice stuff that is too dear for me), I admitted defeat silently and logged off for the duration.
To my dry amusement about five hours later, when I logged on, my friend the Bastet vet was in high dudgeon because he was rather upset with the drama queen for deliberately (he says) ending the vigil with no reason and no real vigil killer, to the point he was nearly ready to quit the drama queen's guild, but he got ahold of himself and managed to calm down some (for which he has a good deal of my respect.)
Apparently, drama queen decided enough was enough and decided to end the vigil, and so intentionally withheld announcing a sacrifice that was quite easily filled. And then promptly filled in all the easy sacrifices around it. While the poor vet was off looking for really ugly resources in order to get his sacs in (they could very well have given the harder sacs to him - that was part of the reason why I buggered off too, because the previous caller was assigning me shitty sacs out of order that I was refusing to do).
So understandably, I think the poor guy felt more than a little used. Hence the vent to me.
On another amusing note, another guildie asked innocently about the vigil, and I also faked innocence and asked about what happened in that second vigil. What killed it? (As there is normally a vigil-killer that everyone admits is too fucking expensive to even consider.) Oh, went the admission, the actual item that killed it was this -easy item.-
(on purpose)
Me: ....?
Oh, yeah, dunno what happened there, why no one did that sacrifice, says drama queen's spouse (which I suspect was drama queen playing him). But there was another 250 leather sacrifice and 40 more cut stone after that (which are all expensive items, and were probably entirely fictional).
So what have we learned from this? That the drama queen is not entirely reliable, that another guildie whom I never liked anyway is probably dishonest and deceptive, that I still trust the Bastet vet over them and feel a little sorry that he got so carried away - but really, it was HIS freaking choice to both accept the sacrifices and to continue the vigil (which he argued for, mind you), so if you participate in a con game and get angry that you've been robbed...
Yes, it's still not right. It doesn't excuse the dishonest behavior from an impartial standpoint. But it really takes two to quarrel, two to clap, and so on. :P
Then again, are we not all using each other? That is how the nature of the Vigil progresses.
I played the same game. And when the stakes got too high for me, I said, no, I don't want to win that badly, I have other priorities that cannot be sacrificed just for a stupid first week vigil pass, and I stopped.
If I win this week, I will be delighted. I am hoping for it, because I chose to invest a significant amount of my Christmas and New Year holiday doing it, knowing the opportunity won't come again during normal work days. Then again, there are a lot of other people in Egypt, who could be burning insane vigil fires for all I know, all thinking the same thing, so competition may be a lot worse than imagined.
If not, there is the week after that, and the week after that, which will hopefully finish off all those who didn't win in the first week, assuming no one else got maniacal about sacrificing stuff.
And ultimately, it boils down to time again. In six months, when half the server has left due to burnout, drama or boredom, some of these tests will be much easier to pass... assuming you even wanted to do so then.
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