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Definitely a setting that could work for a particular type of event. Would absolutely need more events people to do it though. People would struggle to provide a consistently enjoyable experience over such a long timeframe.

Well, this may be your personal experience of Nullsec, but I hardly think thousands of people ,in everything from shuttles to battleships being destroyed wholesale, is for you a daily experience,

but if it is?

You're doing something wrong.

I posted this in the wrong thread, it will definitely get lost there.
Warning it is long.
Please forgive me,


A large part of the problems seem to revolve around the preconceptions that events need to be large scripted "mega events"

This is always going to be a very difficult thing to achieve with any hardware and software.

When you bring large numbers of naturally antagonistic players together,and try to predict their behaviour then understandably it's not going to end well.

In the real. World events are split into tournaments or finals and semi finals etc to give everyone a chance over a period.

EvE gives us a better way to do that.It is a sandbox,players make their own events and impact every day.

A lore event that causes excitement and interest just needs to combine a little different structure to play in than the normal universe.

Ok thematic situation where a new area of space is opened with many pockets.
Some parts of it have very different rules.(like current wh space) players who choose to compete are in here for the week unless they die. (You can save this for a surprise)
So they can check in any time they like, but can never leave.


There are sites than contain something Important to the lore.

They also are needed by the state/empire/capsuleers/goons whatever to stabilise this space for their use in future.
The winning faction gets sovereignty. Pocket by pocket.
Once collected they are carried by the players in their hold until killed or looted, handed to a colleague to hold ,sold to an alliance,or handed in at the end.
Either fleets will form to protect and deliver the relics or guerrilla groups play the shell game, or whatever players decide is the best strategy for them.does the buyer honour the promise to pay? or kill you and loot it. Who can be trusted, who pays the most?
Amarr may not offer much for example and the Goons pay twice that but do you trust them to pay or blow you up on delivery?

Some areas favour the fighting of fleets, some pirates, some are almost impossible to fight in. These areas are where players can log off and rest during the week long tournament.

Now throw in the fact that over the week players will be collecting the relics that their faction needs to control the space.
And will be decided which has the most for control of each pocket at the event termination.Hand in can only happen in the last hour.

As the event approaches the conclusion PvP will get more and more intense as players ambush kill steal and cheat to get the relics already collected. The area around hand in will turn into a massive fur-ball, will it be the biggest gatecamp ever, or a massive game of hunt the courier?
Will it end at the last second with a shuttle slipping by unnoticed ? Or thousands of destroyed ships being pillaged and looted in a desperate last minute search for the relics.

So we use the players to generate their own content.you will have big fleets, small skirmish groups,awoxing spies cheating , double dealing, you think of it,we will have it. No concord no rules but the ones you make for yourself.

And all we do is give them a new space to do it in.
Should generate more tears/excitement than any scripted event. And all timezones compete.
The final side effect is future conflict, if for example Goonswarm wins 3 new pockets of space and amarr republic 2. test 5 gallente 6 etc etc Hmm sounds like good neighbours.....not.
Room for new wars and conflict in the future.

CCP the best thing is you do not even need to manage it. Just open the door, let the players go in and throw the hand grenade in!
And the players will do the rest and have fun doing it.

Hope some people like the thoughts.
It is a very rough framework and not meant to be used unchanged, but eliminates many of the issues we have experienced and should make the maximum use of the sandbox.

See what you think.
You May love it or hate it.
Pick the bits you like and see if there is something there that can be worked with.

Very interesting interview, gives a nice view as to what you are trying to achieve,the event idea I posted just as you posted this is comically similar to some of the ideas you mentioned you would like to achieve, I am not sure if that is fortuitous or you think i was stealing your ideas,
Never mind a slightly different if twisted take on them.
I assume you are still looking for live event ideas here?
If so. Shout up, I am sure there are lots of us with lots to suggest.

Every point correct
We need players to be FC and the person playing the lore role dedicated to that job and character.
There must be a dedicated events text channel for relaying information in a timely manner.
Players should sort out our own comm logistics for talk. CCP should focus on providing the event in such a way that players can run the "action"
Give goals,Set it up and let it run, you cannot possibly hope to micromanage players without it ending in disaster.
and STOP using twitter, Just because you can send messages from the server room or the tea room does not make it a good idea!

...continued

"The safest approach to ensure a trickle rather than a flood of players was to use channels that would only reach certain amounts of players at once. For all intents and purposes, this worked well. That said, it would have been unnecessary if we had reinforced the staging systems correctly, which was an organizational mistake on my part. How was this any different than what ended up happening?"

Only if you were in an quick warping ship did you actually get ahead of the TiDi. Regardless you were expecting thousands of players to travel 23 jumps in less time than could be done even without TiDi. In every system on the route there were about 500 players at all times, I would not call this a trickle as there were only a few jumps in the middle that were not locked up with TiDi.

"The fact that some people left on time and still missed the event is something we are really sorry for, but sadly there was nothing we could do once the event had started. In terms of fleet coordination, it is likely now that we will move to an entirely player-driven fleet system, so this would be out of our hands. We will look into providing good intel channels for those who need to strategize at a high level. Ultimately, there are many people better suited than us to run these fleets and there were several examples of this on the day. To those who stepped up and ran great fleets, well done and we thank you."

The problem with this approach towards fleets in an event like this one is that instead of having an overall organized fleet, you end up with numerous smaller fleets that aren’t coordinated. And when these fleets go to someplace like low or null, how are they to know which of the other fleets is friendly or hostile? You then end up with in this case empire fleets fighting each other instead of the pirates. And with the way the route was handled most fleets had to commit without the full force, going in to the fight at a disadvantage due to fragmentation and scattering over 23 jumps with heavy TiDi.

"Also the longer travel time gives us exposition time for the story and casual RP while travelling tends to make the time go quicker. Unfortunately we did not account for time dilation in this calculation and they ended up being too long. This is something we will improve on in future."

When my brother and I first discussed this event coming up we were trying to figure out exactly what was planned, because with the staging system being so deep into hi-sec in addition to a low/null staging system, it didn’t make any sense to have pilots travel that large of a distance (that is just asking for the servers to commit suicide has thousands of players travel through dozens of systems at the same time). So we had figured that CCP being CCP they would have some sort of dev hack or creative way to transit players from each of the staging systems to the end destination (be it specialized non-collapsing wormhole or secret stargate).

As for the entire premise of the event for the Empires asking for pilots to assist them and stopping the pirate research, I would have expected to be flying alongside and fighting with/against an NPC fleet such as a reverse Sansha Incursion except this time it would be the Navies bridging into Pirate space. But for most players the only NPC/CCP interaction they saw was some yellow text in local telling them to move to a new system even though they were still waiting on their ship to process the warp command they gave it 5 minutes earlier.

Overall my experience was the worst I have ever had with a CCP event, average of 14% TiDi for the duration of the time I spent uselessly attempting to participate only to give up when the various streams I was watching showed the events complete. I don’t know why I even bothered building some cheaper battleships and cruisers and staging them in the “staging system” only to not actually get do anything. The 15 minute timer I picked up before even getting back into Sarum lasted for 107 minutes, with the first minute and a half of it before TiDi really kicked in and the last minute in one of the few systems in the middle of the route that had no TiDi yet.

Next live event I may just consider saving my time and not even bothering, that’s what I told myself last time though and figured they had learned their lessons, but in classic CCP style they promptly proved me wrong and managed to one-up their failures to a whole new level. Not sure how CCP can prove they are capable of handling anything anymore. And if I wasn’t already vested to another 9 months on all 3 of my accounts I would probably unsub (between these continually more impressive failures than the previous and the “we know better than you” attitude towards testing and feedback on new stuff on SiSi).

In fact rather than CCP organising the fleet in the first place, it should be up to the players to organise the fleet and invite the actors along. The actors can give the guidance that they are qualified to give (i.e.: in-character, with knowledge of information and events that the player characters don't necessarily know about yet) while the players provide the resources they are qualified to provide: PvP knowledge, personnel management knowledge, etc.

Thus the live event crew only need to provide the motivation (and perhaps incentives) for the "live event" to happen, then be present to shepherd any player organised activity in the appropriate direction. The preparation for this is key: live events could be supported by flavour items, special encounter sites, flavour text in pop-ups like wormhole residents get at certain sites, and so forth. There is a lot that can be done by a GM or in-character actor using a minimal toolkit of item and location spawns, NPC spawns and NPC dialogue.

Yes to all!
Well put.

So what you're saying is that your actors could not act because they were being FC; and elsewhere, that they could not FC because they were acting.
In fact one of the complaints (to which I do not subscribe, mind you, i believe it's good that they weren't) is that CCP should've directed the fleets and did not. But the did not is without doubt. And another of the complaints is that your planned long route that was supposed to help in deploying the storyline wasn't used for storyline at all.

The same spindoctor tactics and circular reasoning has been used with the TIDI - "we didn't reinforce the route", "we didn't think we'd have tidi".
And with the force distribution "we thought the empires would win", "we reinforced the pirate fleets".

The whole twitter incident has been called "a success" - trickling planned and all.

You seem to want us to believe you've thought about this, but are incompetent and obtuse, incapable of the most simple analysis on the game you made, the game I add with the best game design of the last 10 years. You're capable of such game design and incapable of figuring out consequences?
And you think this is better than admitting you were too busy and underestimated the effort needed for this event, and got on it half-hearted and trying to get it over with as soon as possible?

I really like these ideas, CCP can learn from this, the players are very willing to come up with ideas, some like these that are really excellent, pick from the best and create something fresh and good, use the tools you have and grow them rather than just make giant suceed or fail events, lots of little flavours and spice on top of a simple great dish.

Encourage us CCP and we will help.
CCP goliath, you need to acknowledge and encourage posters like this who come up with great ideas, even the ones you may not think a lot of but may trigger another idea later.
And thanks again to this poster for great stuff.