Live Events Discussion

The sandbox has walls and the players need to be aware of them. There's a EULA for a reason; by your argument, there shouldn't be.

True, but so far every event has been scheduled so I cannot attend.

Every.
Single.
One.

(US west coast).

Also, if you do not use devhax, you got to plan every live event under the assumption that the actor's ships will be destroyed. What is their survival rate? 1%? Less? That means every single live event has the same summary: "The NPCs showed up and were destroyed." If the result of player interaction is the same every single time, there is no reason to have the event. You really got an issue here: Use devhax and the result is known: all ships survive. Dont use devhax and the result is known: All ships are destroyed. You need to find some way for the result to be uncertain. This means you need to have a way for players playing on the side of the NPCs to defend the NPC against an alpha strike suicide gank. For example, remote shield extenders, remote resistance amplifiers.

We have a pretty decent survival rate when we want to. I don't know percentage-wise but I would think that when we want to live we're probably 50/50 or thereabouts.

This is an interesting debate.

The last event I ran had plenty of room for player influence. Unfortunately a group of players decided to go down the one path of influence to undermine the entire event to ruin it for everyone involved. A lot of people spent a lot of time and effort into them to create something for players to enjoy.

Perhaps one day I will do more events, but it is too discouraging to see the work involved in creating them, more frustrating to see the work others did to help me put it together, be targeted with the only goal is to ruin it. If I had the power to fix loop holes in an event to prevent such things, I would exercise them.

So I can completely understand why CCP did what they did.

"The senator's Deimos is torn in two by a massive explosion as the hostile ships sweep onto the field in a flurry of gunfire. If you have salvage drones, turn to page 112. If not, turn to page 300."

Like it :D

I loved Flight of a Thousand Rifters! It was awesome

I think consequences against an alliance harbouring what is probably ICly 'known terrorists' make sense. Although less harshly, at least to begin with, as the IC assumption should be made that the alliance itself is not responsible unless they say so.

Perhaps an increasing penalty against alliances whose members repeatedly open fire on peaceful events, with negotiation in the circumstances the alliance is willing to boot the members responsible.

Not only does this make IC sense, the idea of flying a 'false flag' operation, by sneaking a spy into an enemy alliance and starting attacks with repercusions against that alliance, is pretty cool. Followed by panicked alliance leaders trying to convince CONCORD officials that "It wasn't us!"

Increase the difficulty of successful attacks on peaceful events, but not to invulnerability, and increase the consequences.

PS: An automated system might be fooled by metagame stuff like hopping out of the alliance for the duration of the attack, but a person will not be. So considering these are GMed events, that won't work. You'll need to try a lot harder to get away with it.

There are lots of things that I see here that were seemingly not considered. It's abundantly clear that with any and all Live Events players will show up to shoot the actors. Some ideas of what could have been done, or what can be done in the future:

1) The Elder is not a capsuleer, so their name should not have been on the ship, there could have been a fleet of decoy ships. If they all have super heavy tank, it'll be super hard to take them all out.

2) NPC escorts on each side of every gate that automatically jam or destroy anyone that targets a flagship.

3) A flag for actor players that sets the drop rate to 0% for ship loss. If no modules drop, you can fit anything. (Wouldn't Republic Fleet ships be fully fit with Republic Fleet gear?).

4) This one requires a lot of work, but: have the Minmatar Republic go to war with Goonswarm/whoever else attacked. FW pilots get the player corps as wartargets, incursions in any sov space, and keep the war active until the player corp surrenders.

5) Vargur Tribal Issue?

I don't know, the in-character explanation the DED actor gave made sense. Each empire contributes high-level tech to CONCORD, so it would make sense for high-level officials in each empire to have CONCORD-like tech. Seeing as Minmatar are known to shield tank, it would furthermore make sense that they would have CONCORD levels of shielding. The entire argument from Goonswarm's corner sounds a lot like "devhaxs, used by devs!", to which I simply must roll my eyes. Didn't anyone use a ship scanner and Show Info? CCP did this not to let people who don't even roleplay to ruin a major story arc, but did it to entertain the players who do have an appreciation for the lore and don't say "lolrper". Yes, CCP could have just had a Scope article on the meeting happening, but do you realize how awesome it was for Minmatar roleplayers to see official tribal delegates, in space? I would be very sad if these levels of whining and tears made live events even more infrequent.

Reimbursing the involved parties has nothing to do with bending over, it has everything to do with apologizing for using god mods in a player interactive event.

Regardless of those involved I think all of us agree that the response to the situation would be the same.

I appreciate CCP's quick and reasonable response to this issue, and I too look forward to participating in future events.