CRA armor, Guide Program II and my thanks

(thread from EF, but seems it may be nice here too)
I wrote this thread to explain more how the extended guides got the CRA armor, the guide program(s) themselves, also, i wrote that from my point of view and not on behalf of the other guides for that matter
My hope is to answer the "what is the guide program" and "what did they do anyway?", which i write in terms of the communicator role i generally had (more to that more later on).
One thing right away, although I may just mention just a few names, the others aren’t forgotten or something, it’s mere examples, nor have I been around for all the timezones to speak much about time spent for any guide, so, no “that one did more than the rest” or something info in any case.

But first, the main topic
thank you
thank you to the extended guides, who showed a great commitment and it was fun to work with you, was a great time
thank you to Simon and Emma (and Hanne later on), for giving us the opportunity to do what we used to do so often and so long a bit more officially and helping us with event prizes and advertising for them in the client loader
thank you Stave and ETA for the help with the TP runs, especially during the CP sale phase, to which i come later more in detail as well
thank you newbies, for participating in the events, or asking us stuff, or making us smile, hope you had fun and some value out of our help

so now, to how it started
for me it actually started with guide program I, when i got a PM from Simon the Guide who asked if I would be interested in some guide program to help newbies.
So mostly, standing around NAZ (newbie arrival zone) and offering help and info to the incoming newbies.
Did that since years already pretty much, so I thought, why not and agreed.
Why i was asked in particular I don't know, but I guess the time I used to spend at the NAZ helping newbies, along with most of the rest of the NAZ crew (ppl who where there pretty regularly), getting recognized by the official guides, since we were there before and after the official guides from MA/FPC came, so I figure we got noticed, which is why most of us got asked if they want into the guide program and accepted, maybe the guide I wrote had influence as well.

Generally guide program I had quite some people, don't even know the exact figures of that one, so along the NAZ crew we got to see more faces

Pretty soon at the start of that we got told what the reward would be ("similar to foxtrott ME" or so).
The first program went pretty smootly, especially the old NAZ crew spend from 1 to up to 14 hours at the NAZ (salute to Jot here for that amazing patience, i guess he has the highest hour count of all of us).
It went rather smoothly, nothing THAT spectacular happened, we got the "why the hell can't i sweat" wave right into the face though, which was rather tough at times.

Anyway, so far to the past, since the real topic is about the extended guide program II

when the first guide program finished, some of us got asked if we want to join the second one too, but it was meant to be way less than before. We started with 9 guides afterall, but had 2 drop outs after the program started. I can't blame them, guiding was rather time consuming and partially frustrating, but those two points i will explain more later on as well.
When we got asked to do that, there was no info about any reward whatsoever, nor how long the program was supposed to last. What we got told and want to mention especially, is that "2-3 times a week of guiding is enough" or so. And no, we didn’t get paid, although some people assumed that.
We also were allowed to ask Simon and Emma for some event prizes or giveaways for newbies (opalos, ammo for those, t1 faps, but also some fairly special 'improved' newbie clothes).

And now, to what we did, which is the commitment I spoke of before:
And remember, without knowing IF we get any reward, let alone what it will be (cause get real, a guide marber is a rather crappy gun, cause plain ped value doesn't matter for most of us guides, its about usabilty).
Of the "2-3 times a week", most of us where there 2 hours per day (that would be my standard time mostly, although I had some 'overtime' here and there but also days off) to up to 14 hours per day over several weeks (even Jot took a break here and there )
we where there, daily, several hours

on TOP of that, (so in my case, additionally to those 2 hours i called my "shift"), we planned events, organised (that was mostly Faye and I )and held them (where we partially worked all together)
to name a view:
"Kill 1000 newbies quest", from Faye (was held 2 times i think)
"Treasure hunt", Faye, lost track there, over 4 times?
"Bridge of Death", from me, (3 times i think)
"Picture event", Faye, held once
"Riddle event", Faye, once
"Easter pic event", me, once

that’s already over 11 newbie events, that’s more newbie events than normally in year I guess

ADDITIONALLY to those "shifts" and "events", we were on TP runs, mostly held by Stave and his ETA crew (to which Faye and I belong as well), which were partially to our event places, mostly to far off places

another good example of the commitment shown would be that one of us guides had an operation, but even guided per laptop from hospital and back at home during the curing time

One of the most interesting parts of the guiding program was certainly the CP sale following newbie wave
it had so many newbies all of a sudden that port atlantis and swamp camp server couldn’t handle it anymore and sent the people to TI castle, which isn’t a great newbie place as you may guess
during one day we made a newbie tp run and relocation program and Faye, Stave and ETA especially took loads of newbies to Nea’s to get the servers more empty (figure was 500 I think?, 4 runs per day at that weekend)

What we had to endure, was mostly newbies who thought we are NPCs and thus ignored us totally, or slow times without many newbies coming in, so it was a bit boring at times.

(rant partConsidering all of that above, I got seriously pissed at some (mostly uberish) people, who spent like 5 minutes per decade at the NAZ or helping newbies, to show up at PA/NAZ to have the cheek and say that guides are never there.
I mean we are humans too, we got lives, we spent shitload of time on this and then get stupid comments by ppl who don’t even come close to a 1/1000 of what we did(rant off)
Alongside with that, I also had a special role as guide more or less, since I was mostly there for contacting Simon and Emma when we needed prizes for the events, or informed them about other guides need/wishes.
I was also asked to check newbie the newbie situation out during that time, which made me set up a thread here Looking for feedback about the newcomer situation by the community (just had mediocre feedback), which info was partially used in a total of 8 newbie situation reports I wrote, of which 5 had a pretty considerable size. Parts of the problems and matching suggestions of those got actually used and implemented. (I also wrote some other suggestions concerning newbies, but I won’t get into those).

Now, until pretty much 2 weeks ago, we still didn’t know when the guide program would be finished, we actually got several rough ending times during the guiding phase of which none really worked til the last one(which was also said that we get our reward then, first real confirmation we had I think), but I guess they got too busy (especially with vehicle stuff now) to really get guiding finished or give us a certain date.
Until yesterday we didn’t even know what we would get, so it was quite a surprise for all of us.
Guess that’s most of the story for that

But I will leave it to the other guides to add something of they want to :=)