Live Events Discussion

A few?

I don't get out of bed for less than fifty million ISK and I'm only space middle class, not rich.

Anyone have an ETA on the plex rewards? >.>

...oh right. Listed in the first post. Derp. Sorry. :x

Kind sir, I disagree with your first comments, though I guess that isn't surprising.

To me, the whole point of Live Events is to interact with the objective and story development. Sure, the story may be mostly scripted and have a predefined outcome, which is both fine and completely understandable, but the Events are more about being a part of history and trying to alter the course. To this regard I would say that PL exemplified this in this most recent Event by defending the Provists.

Let's look at another previous Event, one which I feel was done very well: the lead up to the Incursion expansion were some of the best Live Events. A few examples of why include Mouse Nell's insertion of a probe into the wormholes that led CCP to reveal the picture of Sansha's fleet in Jove space, or the final fighting around Monalaz constellation where groups struggled to probe out the enemies and kill them before their objectives were met (we both succeeded and failed in different systems; overall I would say we failed and I partly blame my poor probing skills at the time).

Why are these examples important? Because player actions altered the story. Even if it is a small impact it makes a world of difference. I will probably never forget Mouse Nell because of that event and the background RP/planning/sabotage going on was pretty intense. The information provided by CCP was small but added a lot of depth to what was going on.

Sansha invaded the Kyonoke Pit, like the Provists did recently. It was clear at the time they were after the virus and not simply there to fight. Despite them never using the virus or the story developing much on that topic (a lot of side-arcs are forgotten by CCP, one I will never forget is during the beginning of FW when they instructed Amarr to attack Aset system in order to stop the Minmatar from acquiring very powerful and mysterious technology found in a mining colony. Minmatar defended it but story was dropped.), it added a sense of intrigue and mystery. It drove people beyond the desire to shoot something.

My problem is fighting in an asteroid belt or 100km off a station with no declared rhyme or reason from the Event Actors other than to be martyred ....from a RP standpoint it makes little sense. Why go through all that trouble with espionage and theft for such a moot reason? Sure CCP can invent some reasons later if they so desire but what's the point? The Event is over and any interactions players could have made would be lost.

To me these Events are about interaction with the story. This is the first time major rewards are handed out as a result of these Events so I can understand people disagreeing with me and saying it's about the money, but this has not been the norm of the past.

With that said, I do want to reiterate that I enjoyed the Manhunt a lot and am happy Falcon and the live event/lore team does these events. This post is just to further explain what makes the difference between a good Event and an outstanding/great Event.

Edit: I do agree that it's a careful balance to make sure people who want to attend can make it. In this regard I applaud CCP for spreading the Events over all time periods. TiDi is something you just have to deal with when it's such a large concentrated Event. What if, instead of having all the Actors condensed together, they instead spread over several regions during the same time period? An idea to think about. It could reduce TiDi and could also force groups to make a decision (do we defend A or attack B?), though it has a few negatives as well.

I could write several posts about how great the Sansha Live Events were and the things we should take from them as I don't feel I really did it justice, but typing on a tablet isn't my ideal writing form...so forgive me but it'll have to wait until I have a keyboard at my fingertips.

The overall vibe I'm getting is that:

A) The high reward potential gets other parties involved than usually would be, which could be used to generate gameplay.

B) While CCP feels that information about why the provists acted in the way they did shouldn't be spelled out, the players didn't have enough information to carry on with and generate gameplay after the events had concluded.

C) The events held outside of highsec seemed to have been more complex, while my experience tells me that highsec players who participated in the Incursion events enjoy such complexity just the same.