Thought on those FAQ's...

The link in the faq’s     live events team     is a good read but only compounds my belief that the team don’t know what they are doing, regarding holding live events in their own game. Expectations should be more in key with what actually happens with player interaction. As I read I kept saying “No S**t” when reading a lot of the info in the post.

Examples:

“From here we worked out a route, some flavorful items for the pirates to hold, some more details on the story components, and the shape that we expected the event to take (of course, this latter part is very like predicting the Icelandic weather more than 15 minutes in advance).”   No S**t – Stomping in someones nullsec back garden wasn’t gonna get noticed!?

“The problem was, if we couldn‘t control the movement and make it more gradual, we ran the risk of running into more severe issues.” No S**t  - loads of people would turn up. They really didn’t think that would happen!?! Really no crowd control at a live event!

“We decided to reinforce Ihal and make a few broadcasts on Twitter”    Is twitter a part of the game now? Really… twitter! That went from an out of roleplaying… out of character.... to an out of game event…

“Other social channels to direct people paying attention to these towards Ihal. This trickle effect worked well and helped deal with server load.” So players were so narked off about the game that they were off doing other stuff and CCP needed to use "Other social channels". No S**t – for a game with a form to fill out if your going to have a big fight in a system, this team didn’t’ think about “server load”…

“More baulked at the idea of entering null sec, the area of space where pirates and alliances of capsuleers rule the roost.” No shit, its called common freaking sense. This again makes me ask the question – did CCP think that stomping in someones nullsec back garden wasn’t gonna get noticed?! It’s like throwing baby seals into the killer whale infested waters.  Where was the concord support section of the fleet… 

This last example reminds me of the last battle you play as a death knight in wow. Its scripted and in the battle you get massively over healed, fighting against npc’s doing epic damage. This includes scripted conversations with high ranked NPC’s. You are there and you see and are part of the proceedings. Now compare that to the ccp event… spent a long time in ti-di jumping to area - jump to null.. dead. Thanks for coming. WTF.

Events need to be controlled and have specific points where players can change the course of events. Not just have random stuff happen randomly.

A good way of having events like this happen is similar to the Fighting Fantasy series of choose-your-own-adventure books. Have a story, have it planned and scripted and have it have many pre determined path's to send players down.   If people are going to be in null, as part of a multi-empire fleet, let them be over powered. Give them null people the hard fight against the soft carebears. Have the systems locked down by concord the way the incursion systems are locked down.

I really dont' get why people employed by CCP, designing the flow of the game, making the game, can't see past things that are so blatantly obvious to normal players. 

The event was what it was with what they had, quick, fast and nasty. 

Di-ti saved me from the hassle of it. 

Rant over..... 




Link to the faq:


http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/operation-spectre-event-breakdown-and-faq 







  On a better note .....I was uplifted by the presentation last night:  http://acasualcarebear.blogspot.ie/2013/11/last-nights-ccp-show.html