It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
MMO in-game events are one major way to drum up community interaction as well as make things interesting every few months. Events themselves can come and go at predictable times, mostly repeating themselves year over year. And Bradford has never really been able to get into them.
Comments
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
Overall the most i'll usually do if, and that's a big IF, i get involved is dabble at best. Majority of the time i ignore them completely.
It's something i've wondered, why would i ignore such content, and it's about progression, it slows down my goals it halts progression, and is about the only explanation.
I've mentioned before that i did at one time take to an event and it was in Wildstar Halloween, i did nothing but that for the entire time it ran which was way too long overall and they did that because it was insanely popular.
Problem was by the end i'd lost all focus on whatever i was progressing on, my goals and like a switch the drive to play was turned off, can't explain it was just off, for good too which was weird.
A dev would log on a main story character and RP the current lore. They would call the server to a location for a huge fight or w/e, they would interact with the players. It felt epic, it felt like the devs actually wanted you to belong in the story.
Right up until it gets revealed that the staff member is favoring ingame friends with inside knowledge or event rewards, which is what happened in EVE.
Live event teams would have to be rigorously vetted or stay out of the game as players to maintain impartiality. This is because live GM run events by their nature would only be available to a subset of the players that happen to be in the right place at the right time (which could also disadvantage certain timezones). This could easily lead to accusations of favortism if the rewards are significant.
In contrast the standard "events" available in many MMOs are basically open to any player that logs in within the time interval.
Ideally it would manifest itself as community raids where there is some objective that needs to be solved and when one person solves it, all players get some advantage. If its not solved no one does.
Today it might be a raid boss a bunch of players need to kill. Next one might be a crafting related raid and beyond that a collector based raid. It cannot be personal for the reason you listed.
The game should be designed around the events system, not a tacked on version that has no real effect on the game.
I do not want to see real world holidays ported or slightly revised to fit into my digital world. If you're going to have ingame holidays at all, come up with new ones for their world. Use some goddamn imagination.
Now I have no problem with DDO's Piratefest (Crystal Cove) or the Mabar evernt (Halloween), but you don't have players crammed into the same area like the other games do.
The one I really liked was the old (pre-cu) SWG Galactic War attacks the GM's would launch on cities. The current version SWG: Legends does aren't quite the same, but still fun.
SWG (pre-cu) - AoC (pre-f2p) - PotBS (pre-boarder) - DDO - LotRO (pre-f2p) - STO (pre-f2p) - GnH (beta tester) - SWTOR - Neverwinter
I hate all the seasonal real world events shoehorned into MMOs as well as the quantity of them repeated year after year. It seems like there's barely any time left in the year when an event isn't running.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
They don't seem to do that and instead just have some event "celebrating" the holiday instead of fitting the event to the game world.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
In my opinion it takes a better vision of their game in order to make the game world, events, leveling, and everything that goes with an MMORPG cohesive and interesting.
I would almost bet that many of these things are just "get er done and let's get on with it" types of things.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
I remember one where you had to pair up with someone of another race. You'd both be teleported into a random high level zone where you'd be stripped of your armor, but given infinite invisibility and sneak (unless you left the zone). You were each dropped at a different spot and had to first find an item, then find your partner and trade the item. At that point, you were done and sent back to town.
The challenge was finding your way around these huge, terrifying areas, where anything could one shot you, probably without a map, and having to communicate with your partner to coordinate where you were, etc.
There were others that were a lot of fun as well.
But over the years, events in MMOs have become just another kind of grind for people to sink their time into.
One recent example I can list is ESO. ESO's seasonal events are nothing BUT grind, with arbitrarily limited-time rewards. 'cause why not sneak some of that FOMO in there while you're at it, right? In a game where everything is 0s and 1s and they could give the reward(s) to every character on every account if they wanted to... they pretend somehow they're limited. Though I'm sure at some point, they'll sell the "discontinued" rewards on the crown store anyway.
Fake scarcity to create FOMO in a video game is one of the laziest, lamest and cash-grabby-est kinds of "incentive" I've ever seen.
Do daily quest 1 to 5 and/or collect 100 of event items to trade them at the event npc for useless crap or even worse, immersion breaking outfit that doesn't fit to the games style aka clown/cop/cowboy so you can roleplay the Village People.
Why aren't we having events anymore that are really interesting and/or affect the world.
Enemies taking over a city, plagues, giant ass all killing dragons, hunt for a kidnapped npc, gm driven custom events, ...
1997 Meridian 59 'til 2019 ESO
Waiting for Camelot Unchained & Pantheon
The best content i ever played was not in essence an event but in reality it was because it occurred about 2x a day and you might miss it each day.That was Besieged in FFXi.
IMO devs make events because it looks good in the PR,they don't want to be pointed at for being the only dev that didn't make any events.Besides being good PR they also use them a LOT now a days as advertising.
SO then i have seen some WORLD events but if your not the one solving the puzzles then your just basically an onlooker.My point is that World events don't really focus on the whole community like they appear to on paper.
So i have to decide if i really care if the events are ground breaking or amazing and imo i don't need them to be.Just give me something decent to take part in,something that i will actually do and not just look the other way.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
I check out of games until the Holiday event is over .. Horrible shit for the most part
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
Ah the memories of frame by frame combat with 100's of corpses littering West Commonlands.
As for some MMOs doing events "favouring" certain players well I think you only had to be there in the right location to take part that was about it. It was not cliquey at all.
As long as this task focused on at least two kinds of players per task I think it could be successful and fully automated.
This month something needs to be built. Next month its some kind of fight, a month later something completely different.
Players don't want events as much as they want to participate in some cooperative theme that has some real benefit to it. The event also has to be unique each month. The only ones you should see again are the ones that were failed to complete.