Live Events Discussion

And here I was thinking you guys took part in Minmatar FW a few months ago for the RP reasons. :P

If that's what you think I'm saying, then you're completely failing to see my point, which is that by its nature this particular event was NOT sandbox.

Look, the Goons for the most part have their section of the sandbox that they claim, and all the people who are interested in sharing that section with them have (or at least think they have) the resources to meet Goonswarm on their own terms. If the Goons want their space, then the owners of that space typically have the ships, numbers and muscle to stage a defence. If they get involved in a market war, then the other side typically has the cash to step up and match them.

If a player freighter gets suicide-ganked, it's not really an issue. Their fault for not taking the appropriate precautions.

If the entire point of the live event is for a character to publicly travel from point A to point B along a specific route at a specific time in a nice ship, and this fact is advertised a day in advance, and if they will do so no matter what, then no such precautions are possible. In the sandbox, the freighter op can be rescheduled, the scout can warn the freighter not to jump in and it can dock up instead. The NPC was going to go through that gate come hell or high water, even in circumstances where a player in the usual sandbox context of the game would be like "to hell with that."

In that context, if anybody - goons, a militia corp, anybody - decide they want to play silly burgers with the event by throwing a suicide gank at it, then all the people who go along to "escort" the NPC have no say in the matter. They can't prepare, they can't defend, they can't counter. The mechanics of highsec and the fact that this is a live event place the whole operation outside of the usual sandbox framework.

In the sandbox, if you fail to defend against something then that's your own fault for not being prepared for it, or for allowing the information to leak or whatever. In yesterday's live event, there was literally nothing that the escort players could have done to counter your gank attempt. We don't have the means to take damage on the target ship's behalf, or to give them any kind of a significant HP buff, or render it impossible to lock until the ship with the anti-lock module has been destroyed.

There was an asymmetry of capability in that scenario. One side was capable of influencing the outcome by ganking the target ship, the other side was incapable of stopping them. What using the QA module did was resolve that asymmetry by making both sides equally powerless, which restored us to a kind of sandbox-ish scenario where everyone's powers were limited, but they were still capable of acting and influencing things outside of those restrictions.

Other live events have not been so asymmetrical. Take the Combined Harvest jump freighter op - either side could have "won" there. if I'd placed the Cyno somewhere stupid, the freighters could have been blown up. If Snuffbox had blown me up before I could light the Cyno, then the freighters would have had to slog it through lowsec, becoming much more vulnerable.

Live Events need to have equal opportunity for success or failure for both sides. If it's simply impossible for one side to adequately counter the other in any realistic way, then the fairest thing to do is to force everyone onto a level playing field even if that means introducing restrictions that don't otherwise exist in EVE.

I am simply thrilled to see how CCP is responding to the concerns of the player base. When I first started this thread, I was very worried for the future of Live Events and the sandbox in general (although, not as much). Now, if I can convince Warr Akini and Powers Sa to give it another try next time . . .

We'll be around. Just make sure those petitioned Taloses don't show up in null where we don't need them :3

I take it you didn't read my most recent post then? The one in which I explained why this particular live event (not all, just this one) fell outside the usual sandbox bounds?

Read it and decide for yourself.

If you've got a means of making an event where a high-ranking delegate parades in a shiny ship from A to B at a specific time and place and still make it sandbox, share it.

The entire point I'm trying to make is that "beefing up the security in accordance with how the universe of EVE works" was never going to cut it. Putting the event on made it a gank-magnet, and this being highsec there was nothing the escort players could have done to stop the gank from happening. The only scenario in which the gank could be thwarted involved a dev module. The only way to avoid the event being a gank-magnet was to not hold the event at all and just have a news story, which is nowhere near as much fun and doesn't really involve the players at all.

Of the three options - not holding an event, going ahead with the event in the full knowledge that it would be targetted and that the gank was basically 100% likely to succeed, or going ahead with the event and placing everyone on the same equally impotent level playing field, I'd say option 3 is the best one.

One live event which bucks the trend doesn't threaten the entire nature of the game, folks. Try and retain some perspective.

Your point is valid to degree but EVE is about player created content. Live events happen all the time at the players own creation if they actually want them, but they form part of that content, in this case the players wanted a scripted event like a mission or single player game. Why play an MMO but want fair scripted events? You can go do a mission where you can blow up a freighter. Goons gave them content, content that should have been expected but those players probably didn't expect to be part of the content, maybe EVE isn't for them ;)

The ridiculous thing is the objective of this live event is what happens in wars every day, just the players wanted to bring along their shiney ships and shoot an easy target rather than real players and completely avoid any kind of risk for there actions. Basically people wanting to play a single player game but be able to circle jerk with their buddies over who has the most expensive epeen. CCP just fed that.

CCP bends over