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Excellent idea that I quite like but can you imagine if "Operation Spectacle" had been streamed how bad it might have affected CCP? They need to really dig down deep and sort these events out before this happens.

On an improvement front and to combat the Null Bloc a little cos, well if they want a fight lets give them one hellava fight, you could declare that you are Titan Bridging into EVF-456 and the Titan Bridge opens, Fleet jumps, and "Whoooaaaa" along with this:

"This is the FC, due to the secrecy required for this mission we had to sow disinformation and you were not bridged to where we told you we would be going. Pilots...PREPARE TO DEFEND YOURSELVES!"

Now the spies in the Fleet will be squawking on comms back to the Null Bloc FC's, Null Bloc will be TB'ing back to where ever the hell we've landed and we'll be all "Come at me bro!" and probably all die in a big ball of flame with a smile while taking the pod goo express to a clone in a Hi-Sec Station shouting on comms "What a ride, what a ride!"

Now that's how you get around spies and that would be an awesome fight I would gladly bring a decent fit to!

EDIT:

If it is part of the game to spy and try to disrupt then surely it would be reasonable that you can put out disinformation on the objectives etc. This maintains the secrecy in both the "Chronicle" and the lore along with the "excitement of the unknown" for the participants while ensuring that those not accustomed to Fleet Warfare get some time in fleet to do something i.e. "PREPARE TO DEFEND YOURSELVES!" and the Null Blocs logistics get tested along with them being a little on the back foot and not sitting at a gate waiting for the barrel to be delivered full of the juicy fish.

Look, I don't have a dog in this fight, US TZ so I don't partake in live events, and I don't live in Hi-sec or Null. But as a fan of Eve this is a little bit concerning to me.



You do realize that these "eggs" are in fact you customers right?



As for the second part, just because you redefine the question, to one that's easier to answer does not make the original question (problem) just magically go away. If you are going to refuse by definition to address that question, it's probably best to avoid having these types of events at all then.

There is a great opportunity here, one to show that blob of "random hi-sec dwellers" (the ones not in pvp corps already) how to actually work in a fleet, and coordinate themselves and get them excited about such things. BUT that's going to take experienced FCs willing to teach as they go (live events make this a great opportunity) and a lot of thought as to how to get an unorganized inexperienced group of players to not just be fodder for the more experienced ones. Now if you have to go outside of the live events team, or even CCP to do this fine, it seems a lot of people are offering to help, but if you are refusing to answer those fundamental questions about how that will play out, then it's all for naught really.

Wrong, so very wrong.
This was a fail of event because your actors did not lead the fleets in a strongly centralized manner. It was very chaotic and was doomed to fail.
Two things you should've done:
1) Lead the fleets in a centralized manner with organized chain of command. If you don't have people to be FCs, you could use help of experienced players;
2) Don't make the Empires look powerless and stupid: you should've used imperial titans to bridge people right from highsec, and imperial capital (or at the very least - subcapital) fleet should've participated in the battles - maybe led by NPCs.

The call to arms in the news looked like there would be strong combined fleet of the empires + little help from capsuleers, but it turned out to be a completely capsuleer-based action, and made the empires look so miserable. The backstory part of this event in-game was very weak.

OK, so maybe my jargon got a little muddled here. In a story driven event, an actors purpose should be to illuminate and inform the ongoing story surrounding the event. If they are also FC-ing, this is too much for one person to do to the best of their abilities. If FCs are dedicated to FC-ing and actors are dedicated to acting, then the problem goes away. Didn't say we wouldn't lead fleets, just that the primary story drivers in the events shouldn't be doing that FC-ing.

First, my experience. I ended up in a pickup fleet in Gallente space. It was not that organized, so I started acting mostly on my own. When the orders came to go to move forward, I went as fast as I could. The result is I outran the wave of TiDi following the main group of pilots. I actually managed to get all the way to the final system, and warped to the beacon. Once there I looked for the structure to shoot. We were still being given orders to shoot it, so I assume it was still there. But I never saw it. In seconds my ship was destroyed, followed by my pod.

First one thing about reinforced systems: You need to do the entire route. They all should be on the powerful node. As the pilots travel from system to system they will always be on that node, so the node load will always be about the same as the pilots move.

Next: Everyone in my fleet was completely aware this was going to be an absolute total wipeout of the high sec pilots. When I saw the announcement for players to support the pirates I knew that was going to be the outcome. Its so obvious that pitting a bunch of players who live in high to avoid combat against a bunch who play for combat alone would have this result. Yet in the Dev blog you said “We expected the Empire forces to successfully destroy the structure, interdict the pirate frigates who were trying to salvage what they could, and "win", so to speak.”

Question: What was your thought process that lead you to the exact opposite conclusion of the vast majority of the player base?

Finally, I suggest that you make this fundamental assumption for all live events: In each event there will be a large number of players who will do everything they possibly can do to ruin the event. To have a successful event, you must plan for this.

Given this comment, how do you plan to address the clear favoritism to EUTZ players when planning live events?

The argument that they have to be EUTZ because those are office hours in Iceland is getting a little tired. People in various professions all over the world work evenings and weekends on occasion. If it really is a big deal, a few live events employees in the Georgia office would likely solve the problem.

At that point, it's a simple matter of alternating back and forth between a couple of time zones or even better, planning multi-stage live events.

EUTZ --> Stage 1: Setup the Action: The actions of the participants at this stage decide exactly how the USTZ will participate.
USTZ --> Stage 2: Complete the event: Run through the event to the pre-determined outcome.

You could even extend it further to accommodate AU as well.

AUTZ --> Stage 1: Event Setup Skirmishing
EUTZ --> Stage 2: Main Action
USTZ --> Stage 3: Clean-up Skirmishing / Finale

(could also go EUTZ --> USTZ --> AUTZ)

The upside of this is that with events running over a longer period of time, you're more likely to see the trickle effect and have small numbers of players showing up over the course of the day, alleviating some of the TiDi.

A question on this: One of the complains of this Live event was that it wasn't much of a Live event at all due to the lack of communications/lorestuff from the Live Event actors. We got told were to go, and there have been comments. But very few on why of the event, and the what.
Why were these pirate-stations so interesting that they warranted investigation & destruction (from a lore-point of view)

Chatter from Live Event actors is a great boost to a live event, as it is a constant reminder to people that this is something special, something that involves the background/lore of the game they play.

PS: I know of twitter being used to relay comms, but that was apparantly only for directions? If it also was used for Lorestuff, like explaining why these piratestations were so dangerous, then it got lost.

As a solution for this, you could use the old CCP Live Event ingame channel you once opened for the Caldari humanitarian aid Live Event. This was a channel where Everyone was muted, except the Live Event actors. This would also help alot in ingame communications about live events as this would be a read-only channel for players. So it would make a nice exposition channel/commchannel. Other channels can still be used (and should be) to interact with players.

I have a thought about how to address a couple of problems, building on my experience in W-space. First, let me outline the problems this is hoping to solve:

1) Timezones. I'm US and there was no way this was happening. If you want to involve everyone, it's hard to do it with one punctuate event.

2) Overload. When everyone tries to join in at once, the server load, TiDi, everything just becomes basically unmanageable.

Let me tell you a thing we do in W-space. When we siege a POS, or more often several POSes in the same system, we have to maintain careful control of that system until the POSes come out of reinforcement. That means guarding all of the POSes we have reinforced and all of the WHs in the system, and keeping a close eye out for new WHs. We have to do this for the entire reinforcement timer, over a day of constant vigilance and quick responses to stop our prey from breaking out or their friends from breaking in.

You want an event everyone can participate in that won't kill a server? Make the objective locking down a system, and punctuate it at semi-random intervals with attempts to break the blockade. Have some of the LE team pull the night shift. You can bet that if you make it worthwhile, some player groups will try to break in. Arrange to have people either within CCP or players forming regular reinforcement fleets from various hubs, every two hours give or take. Do it in lowsec, so no bubbles or bombs. Cyno-jam the system to keep the inevitable hotdrop at bay. Also gives you plenty of time to spin lore.

This obviously puts heavy demands on the live event team. In addition to planning the event, you will need to have at least some people available throughout the entire event. Someone gets to be doing this at 4am. You need to have regular bursts of activity if the players don't provide. Of course, as anyone in w-space who has managed a siege can tell you, we do this all the time, and you get paid for it.

I don't know if it's a solution you want, but I think it's one that might work.

SC set up one camp and was blapping away at the helpless noobs, and I can assure you give us 12 hours notice and we are good to go. And that is generous, most lowsec pirates can very quickly marshal our standard fleets that will be hell for a rag tag empire fleet to handle. Yesterday we formed a very imprompto enyo fleet to blap some dreads in wormholes and it took less then 10 minutes before we where undocking.

Honestly leading any rag tag mostly carebear fleet into low and null is asking for pirates to camp the gates and that will cause massive losses, and with people who don't pvp often having no idea how to get pods out, what enemy ships to primary etc it will be a slaughter. Personally I didnt go on our little camp as I had to work, and afterwards I honestly felt bad about the 92 or something kills the fleet got with no losses what so ever.

Watch seagull in the Twitch TV feed in 70 minutes.
Then all will become clear.

If CCP's actions during the live event, and this subsequent "explanation" does not let you know what CCP thinks of high sec players, then her vision of Eve in the near future certainly will.