Cadsuane wrote:

Shinryu wrote:

We do not need daily live events. 

Perhaps not daily but we do need them regularly.

Oh, of course, I was referring to the fact that the debate seems to be either A.) Daily Live Events or B.) No Live Events at all when the reality is quite different.  We do not need daily live events, but we do need a story that actually has forward movement.  I agree that regular live events (and not just when the story requires them) should be a part of the New Approach going forward.

ZaneZavin wrote:

Rarebit wrote:

Sati's Playground was in part an effort to establish a place where players should spawn their own bad guys. Currently your story options there are limited to ninjas and Cypherites. I do want to add more variety to the boxes you can use there, but I don't want to add boxes without rewards to go with them, and that takes time, which I'll just have to make time for at some point(s) as we go along.

I think unlimits would be a nice fit in there.

Oh God no.  I'm all pew-pewed out.

Rarebit wrote:

I understand (and I said this in my first post on the subject) that people who have been used to playing in daily live events will feel their loss. I think events are cool too--after all I did however many hundreds over several years. But the vast majority of our players did not make it to live events; as I eventually came to realize, it was like one or two dozen people who I was seeing over and over under different guises. So from my perspective, what you aptly call the "narrative to time ratio" looked something like

close to half of my dev time = 1-2 dozen players entertained for several hours per day

which to me is inferior to the present scheme, which gives *everyone* (possibly after some levelling or teaming) several hours of play time--probably more if they aren't charging through it--and (and this is important to me) makes the story much easier for everyone to follow.

I realize it's an apples and oranges thing--most live event regulars will no doubt say they find the *everyone* content dull by comparison--but it just felt wrong to me to spend that much of my dev time on the small number of players who were hitting up the daily live events.

Whether or not there's a viable compromise point, I don't know yet. It will mostly be finding out how many live events I can fit in around the current scheme, I think, although as I've also said, I'd prefer to keep the events I do spend time on central to the story (or the large ones that nearly everyone has a shot at attending--eh unless they work the same hours I do and can't get off--which is what the meetings and parties are for), so it will depend on how good I can get at seeing/leaving important spots in the story where vital personal player interaction is required--the recent Ghost event, for instance, came along because I realized that players weren't quite putting something together that I wanted put together before 12.1; it wasn't something I'd planned to do while I was developing 11.3. For 12.1 I already know of one event I'll need to do, and I'll have to see based on how players react to the story of 12.1 whether there's anything else I'll need to cover with an event.

I may as well mention that planning, preparing, running, and documenting even these smallish events I'm able to do on my own generally takes somewhere in the neighborhood of three to four hours of dev time; I think players generally don't realize that. Some people will say that I should just do quickies--just jump in with some character and fool around for a bit--but I don't want to get sloppier with our characters and our story than I have to; I'm just not interested in that at all, at least not as long as there's a story to maintain.

 

Replied more extensively in an other thread.

But since you still are planning to do at least one event in a patch, i got an idea for you. If you want enough people to actually attend it, let people know that somethign is going on.

Previously that was done via the liaison system, wich was pretty much flawed to begin with. The liaisons are gone, hooray or not, i won't speak of that. Proposal:make a post with a set date, like you did with the org meetings. Let it be from Message_Buffer, and include nothing more than a few lines like: "Mass Merovingian operative movement predicted to occure on 25/12. Notify others." The post itself shouldn't hang there for the whole month, just submit it a few days or a week before it happens.

If you do not, you will again be talking to a small circle of people that for some reason still stayed jacked in after having done the content. Plus, the information will have a limited spread speed, and we will have the same thing as we had witht the Ghost event, where alot of Zion operatives didn't even know Ghost was around at all let alone what he discussed with the few people he met.

I believe the event with Ghost was meant to be small and credit where it's due, those who were present did a great job in their responses, especially PS10N, it really made the event seem natural and spontanious.

Rarebit wrote:

I may as well mention that planning, preparing, running, and documenting even these smallish events I'm able to do on my own generally takes somewhere in the neighborhood of three to four hours of dev time; I think players generally don't realize that. Some people will say that I should just do quickies--just jump in with some character and fool around for a bit--but I don't want to get sloppier with our characters and our story than I have to; I'm just not interested in that at all, at least not as long as there's a story to maintain.

I think the majority of your doccumentation is wasted effort, if you spent less time doccumenting and more time doing events the difference in general knowledge could be balanced out. The sloppiness of impromptu events is relative to your effort and action, considering how people normally react to utterly simple and uncomplex dialogue of the majority of past events and meetings i have difficulty accepting you could do the job any more sloppily then what we've come to be used to.

As for the doccumentation i appreciate that the effort is made in order to share the story with everyone, but it shouldn't be priority- the matrix is a lot more enchanting when there are secret aspects to it - a few screenshots and a quick writeup with the names of the operatives involved could easily spare you hours of formatting logs and screenshot spamming.

If you make your workload needlessly larger, your explanation of how long it takes to do your work is nullified.

Again this is my opinion only - i just tend to feel that people would probably like more events and less LE posts, then less events with posts. People don't have to go to every event, but the more that happen, the more likely it is they'll get to go to one. More effort should be spent on free form interaction in the game rather then trying to make sure everyone understands what's going on, it's an elitist system, but honestly the majority of people don't know what's going on anyways.

Besides- if you stick to your means this way - it basically means we'll never have random encounter events with say ghost wanting to spar, or random agent attacks or chances at dialogue unrelated to the current story. Not everything needs to happen to tie into this bloody oligarch and BIP business, if things were more spontaneous and constantly happening people would jack in more often and try to be more aware of what's happening.

If people think an event might happen - they jack in and stay jacked in - more people perpetuates a more active community.

Rarebit wrote:

as I eventually came to realize, it was like one or two dozen people who I was seeing over and over under different guises. So from my perspective, what you aptly call the "narrative to time ratio" looked something like

close to half of my dev time = 1-2 dozen players entertained for several hours per day

Ah-hah! I see the flaw in your calculations. It wasn't one or two dozen players you were entertaining and putting in the effort for; it was one or two dozen, plus however many people read the resulting threads in the Live Events forum. I'd wager that's a lot of people.

Granted, it's not interactive content for these other people, but it's content nevertheless and the removal of live events hasn't resulted in much more interactive content in its place, so there's no improvement there anyway. More importantly, perhaps, it's these live event threads which provided the sense of continuing story that many people think is missing now.

I propose advertising for events.  The more that know, the more that will go (provided the timeframe is manageable).  The recent org meetings had a great turnout since people knew in advance.  Perhaps something to that affect could be done for other events.

 Remember the old event banners?  Great turnouts.

Darminian, you are one of the loudest people when it comes to having a go at Rarebit for plot holes, the recent party is a prime example. The documentation that Rarebit is talking about is not just the LE posts but the planning and prepping of what is to be told in an event, what should be given away in the upcoming event, what people should already know, what hints have been dropped but not picked up on yet etc... in order to try to cut down on plot holes as much as possible. Without the plans a slip of the wrong info, which can happen (Rare is only Human after all), could spoil the planned story for the next update, possibly more.

Also being secretive with the LE posts is a kick in the teeth of those people who are still unable to attend LE's regardless if they're advertised or not.

Besides, I hear the Bretheren had an encounter with Ghost recently...

Rarebit wrote:

I understand (and I said this in my first post on the subject) that people who have been used to playing in daily live events will feel their loss. I think events are cool too--after all I did however many hundreds over several years. But the vast majority of our players did not make it to live events; as I eventually came to realize, it was like one or two dozen people who I was seeing over and over under different guises. So from my perspective, what you aptly call the "narrative to time ratio" looked something like

close to half of my dev time = 1-2 dozen players entertained for several hours per day

which to me is inferior to the present scheme, which gives *everyone* (possibly after some levelling or teaming) several hours of play time--probably more if they aren't charging through it--and (and this is important to me) makes the story much easier for everyone to follow.

I realize it's an apples and oranges thing--most live event regulars will no doubt say they find the *everyone* content dull by comparison--but it just felt wrong to me to spend that much of my dev time on the small number of players who were hitting up the daily live events.

Whether or not there's a viable compromise point, I don't know yet. It will mostly be finding out how many live events I can fit in around the current scheme, I think, although as I've also said, I'd prefer to keep the events I do spend time on central to the story (or the large ones that nearly everyone has a shot at attending--eh unless they work the same hours I do and can't get off--which is what the meetings and parties are for), so it will depend on how good I can get at seeing/leaving important spots in the story where vital personal player interaction is required--the recent Ghost event, for instance, came along because I realized that players weren't quite putting something together that I wanted put together before 12.1; it wasn't something I'd planned to do while I was developing 11.3. For 12.1 I already know of one event I'll need to do, and I'll have to see based on how players react to the story of 12.1 whether there's anything else I'll need to cover with an event.

I may as well mention that planning, preparing, running, and documenting even these smallish events I'm able to do on my own generally takes somewhere in the neighborhood of three to four hours of dev time; I think players generally don't realize that. Some people will say that I should just do quickies--just jump in with some character and fool around for a bit--but I don't want to get sloppier with our characters and our story than I have to; I'm just not interested in that at all, at least not as long as there's a story to maintain.

 

But you have to take into account that those few dozen 'regulars' that consistently show up for LE's are the people who are either a) truly keeping up with the story, or b) looking to score a LE reward. Most of the rest of the players have given up on LE's over the years because they had become boring and repetitive, but moreso because they realized that they had almost zero impact on the story. Their questions went unanswered. Their interaction with the characters were generally one-sided or "scripted" (and I'm using that term loosely). Their battles counted for nothing (with the exception of a precious few notable instances like the hovercraft battle for Lock). All of which rendered immaterial their own personal connection with the story or the characters. Using my snowglobe analogy again, it's nice to look at the world under the glass for five minutes, but most of the time it just sits on a shelf unnoticed.

I know your hands have been tied due to the nature of story-progression and trying to avoid derailing the whole thing. I get the issue that allowing people to make choices with regards to the story will eventually lead away from the planned progression. Maybe that's one of the largest contributing reasons to this "new approach". Maybe now that events aren't being held daily there can be more interaction and players can have more effect on the story. Maybe now that the main delivery vehicle for the story is a static part of the world, you'll have more flexibilty inside it to explore the tangents and create a meaningful experience for the player. 

Delivery of the story has always been an issue with this game, since the early days of its conception, because it has a unique feature that most other MMO's don't have: live interaction with established character artifacts. The only other games to attempt this have been Lord of the Rings and the upcoming DC Online. It'll be interesting to see how SOE handles Live Events with Superman and Batman. I think it will look a lot like MxO's early days. But I digress...

Character and story interaction is what we crave, as you well know. Those of us that are still here didn't pick this game up for any other reason. Since we first met Morpheus and Neo and Trinity and Cypher and Agent Smith, we have wanted to be a part of that struggle, we have wanted to fight the war. If you tell us it's just not possible, then I suppose we'll have to live with that. Or move on.

Garu wrote:

I propose advertising for events.  The more that know, the more that will go (provided the timeframe is manageable).  The recent org meetings had a great turnout since people knew in advance.  Perhaps something to that affect could be done for other events.

 Remember the old event banners?  Great turnouts.

DO WANT.

Why can't *everyone* be able to attend in-game functions that involve more than just standing around talking about the last month in hindsight but progressing the storyline in a meaningful way?

I think, in general, the argument is less about the loss of constant stimulation through daily events and weekly crits but more about how we've gone from extreme to the other with no real progression between 6 week intevals.

The gaps gotta be filled somehow. Either with a quicker patch schedule or a return to at least some events, preferably, as highlighted above, that are pre-advertised in at least some fashion.

Bringing up the old 'banner' events is interesting though. With all this dev time thats apparently been freed up due to getting rid of daily events, why cant it be refocused on more involved 'large scale' events like we've had in the past? You know, develop some scenary changes or a new boss or type of spawn or something that'll be used in these big announced events that, with proper announcement, everyone will be able to experience and enjoy.

ShiXinFeng wrote:

since the early days of its conception, because it has a unique feature that most other MMO's don't have: live interaction with established character artifacts.

I thought that was why most of us played this game????

Certainly used to be why i played.

Perhaps it would be best to have a few well advertised events per org between updates events that start at different times so that players in most timezone should be able to make the time to attend.

Many people have alts now so those that turn up as the wrong org either have no slots left for an alt of that org, hope that the event will allude to some PvP or just plan on causing (OOC) problems. But those troublemakers can be dealt with.

If this is possible I would be willing to trade it for the Operative Parties which, although fun, can be done at anytime by us players (albeit with lack of Effy). If I had to trade something in addition to the parties it'd be a few of quest item rewards. I would have said the Org meetings but they should be good for discussing current story and what happened in the events or to 'plan' an upcoming event etc.. plus they are good for allowing people to catch up on what they may have missed... although the LE posts could do almost the same job, players who use the LE posts to catch up just wouldn't be able to ask the LE character any questions.

Also, even though I've been against it and it's not on the cards, if it meant making it easier to implement then I would become in favour of a Recursion-Syntax server merge, but only if.

But as I said before, I'm going to wait for the update after Christmas to fully and appropriately judge what I think about the approach.

Darminian wrote:

Rarebit wrote:

I may as well mention that planning, preparing, running, and documenting even these smallish events I'm able to do on my own generally takes somewhere in the neighborhood of three to four hours of dev time; I think players generally don't realize that. Some people will say that I should just do quickies--just jump in with some character and fool around for a bit--but I don't want to get sloppier with our characters and our story than I have to; I'm just not interested in that at all, at least not as long as there's a story to maintain.

I think the majority of your doccumentation is wasted effort, if you spent less time doccumenting and more time doing events the difference in general knowledge could be balanced out.

As for the doccumentation i appreciate that the effort is made in order to share the story with everyone, but it shouldn't be priority- the matrix is a lot more enchanting when there are secret aspects to it - a few screenshots and a quick writeup with the names of the operatives involved could easily spare you hours of formatting logs and screenshot spamming.

Again this is my opinion only - i just tend to feel that people would probably like more events and less LE posts, then less events with posts. People don't have to go to every event, but the more that happen, the more likely it is they'll get to go to one. More effort should be spent on free form interaction in the game rather then trying to make sure everyone understands what's going on, it's an elitist system, but honestly the majority of people don't know what's going on anyways.

I'd have to disagree. The fact that events are properly logged and made available to everyone always was, and always has been, an awesome idea. Take it from someone who spent a good long time trying to document an undocumented storyline over 9 servers with massive pre-arranged events. It was not easy. The Live Events forum is a god send. Thank you Romav.

cloudwolf wrote:

I'd have to disagree. The fact that events are properly logged and made available to everyone always was, and always has been, an awesome idea. Take it from someone who spent a good long time trying to document an undocumented storyline over 9 servers with massive pre-arranged events. It was not easy. The Live Events forum is a god send. Thank you Romav.

I don't dispute it's a valuable tool and i appreciate it's  existance, but am i wrong in thinking it'd be better to have more events and less detailed live event posts, i mean everyone seems to have the same general point quality and quantity of events, i understand it's hard to doccument the story if you don't have every exact detail and all 15 screenshots - but i mean effectively rarebit could still just include a log and throw on some screenshots still save himself plenty of time and get it over with.

===

"The documentation that Rarebit is talking about is not just the LE posts but the planning and prepping of what is to be told in an event, what should be given away in the upcoming event, what people should already know, what hints have been dropped but not picked up on yet etc... in order to try to cut down on plot holes as much as possible. " - Vinia

Considering the state of his dialogue and the number of plot holes already present i'm inclined to completely disregard your point and say to you despite your unending view of a flawless rarebit that you can't possibly convince me that it takes hours of work to decide your not going to talk about x, and your only going to talk about y. especially when he can take all the time in the world to reply and suitable answers consist of "i don't know", and "you don't need to know".

It might all just come down to arguing about shaving off an hour or two, but an hour off of every event done can generate another event - that's what im for, i'm pro events - i'm on board having movie charachters jack in to give off the feeling that city isn't dead to help perpetuate the community - maybe breathe some life into this dead city.

I still like the idea of seeing the event person show up as online in your friend's list. Mix that with the banners and people will at least know when something is going on...you don't have to tell them where it is, but people will something is going down somewhere on that server...