Live Events Discussion

Over the past week, there has been extensive development of the Caldari bloc storyline.

While it is very exciting to see the storyline develop, the pace of events has made interaction a challenge (at least for me) and I suspect others, who are not in the prime event timezone. In addition, those without loyalties involved are generally left watching from the slide lines, hoping they will get to see some fun next.

As a lesson learned from the past week, slowing the pace of the story unfolding may help to actually increase interaction. Unless there is an outside schedule driver, I am not sure why the pace needs to be 24-news cycle pace.

I am going to make a recommendation: slow down the individual bloc development and spread out how the blocs are receiving attention.

As an example, spreading the past week's activities out over two weeks versus one week would have afforded players a weekend to figure out where their characters stand and interact with other characters.

In addition, it opens the potential to have (unrelated) events occurring in other parts of the cluster. Instead of having 2 Caldari bloc live events this week, there may have been one Caldari and then one Minmatar (again unrelated to the Caldari arc).

Maybe I am off-target and everyone has loved the pace of events this past week and my experience is just an anomaly.

Could you share what kind of pace you are looking to achieve?

As was pointed out on a community board, there is the tug between play-ability and believe-ability for a string of events as well, so sometimes we as players just may not have the opportunity to try and take part.

Please also bear in mind that there was only one actual "Event" last week. This was the Mordu's Legion incursion that pulled out Osmon Survelliance personnel.

The rest was all news based, and had no physical representation from our side of the fence in game at all.

For instance, the events where Intara Direct Action filed against Kaalakiota were completely player driven. I saw a few forum posts, and happened to mention how awesome it was to CCP Delegate Zero, who then suggested I antagonize things a little, so the lawsuit came about and was completely based around news and a couple of brief visits by actors to "The Summit".

The Ishuk-Raata news that went out also didn't involve an event on our part. I just saw the post, and ran with it because it fits with the direction of storyline and adds another layer of depth to the way we're trying to portray things right now.

As Eterne has pointed out, when I locked myself away for a week of insomnia and planned out events for the storyline that CCP Abraxas and CCP Gnauton have put together, I deliberately restricted the schedule to having at maximum, a single scheduled live event in a week.

In some instances there might be two, three, four, five news articles in a week at times, but only one event.Typically the news will be either fallout from an event that's already happened that week, or will be a precursor to what's coming up in the near future. There are also a few articles that have been produced by our awesome ISD Mercury Team that are being slipped in to beef up the delivery of major story beats and provide more context and depth.

A single ingame event per week is by design. It's done so that should things like the Ishuk-Raata demonstration, or the Electus Matari re-patriation convoy crop up, we can give player events some recognition and devote the little bit of free time within the schedule that we have to embracing and promoting them when they fit within the context of what's currently going on in storyline.

So yeah, definately don't despair... and don't consider live events something that are going to be exclusive to the EU timezone. I've said many times, and I'll say again that one of the paramount things I've pushed for and included in the events schedule is to make sure that there are going to be both EVE and DUST live events in both timezones that everyone can enjoy.

Right now, we're just getting started, and making sure that what we're doing is solid, well managed, well organized and delivers the quality of content that we want to provide for players. Once we have that nailed down we'll start to expand on what we're doing a hell of a lot and push to make events far more grand and way more flexible in terms of what timezone they're hosted in.

Hope this at least quells some of your concerns, and as always if you have any specific questions about how things are organized you can always either post here, or evemail me and I'm more than happy to speak with people.