Backstage - OOC Forums
EVE-Online RP Discussion and Resources => CCP Public Library => Topic started by: kalaratiri on 06 Nov 2013, 12:38
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Original Report (http://community.eveonline.com/news/news-channels/world-news/empire-navies-put-out-call-for-capsuleer-assistance/)
Yulai – Acting on behalf of the navies for the Amarr Empire (https://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Amarr), Caldari State (https://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Caldari), Gallente Federation (https://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Gallente), and Minmatar Republic (https://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Minmatar), CONCORD (https://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/CONCORD) has put out a one-time call for capsuleers to provide backup on a “massive, sustained assault on high-priority targets”. Kilkkuken Mallen, Chief Intelligence Operative for CONCORD, said, “We are currently unable to provide details on the target, as this would represent a significant security risk in the operation. However, this threat is considered extremely high to all law-abiding citizens of New Eden (https://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/New%20Eden%20(cluster)). We ask that any capsuleer who wishes to protect civilized space gather up at our two rally points in Sarum Prime (https://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Sarum%20Prime) and Meves on November 7 for departure at 18:50.”
Mallen added, "This is a unique situation. We do not foresee having to repeat this call to action. Moreover, while we will of course be grateful for any assistance the capsuleers choose to render, we wish to make it very clear that after this assault, the empires will take care of any further military action. Capsuleers will not be required, and quite possibly not allowed, to intervene in these matters. Moreover, we ask that capsuleers refrain from interacting with, or taking, any elements that might be set adrift in space during the course of this assault."
Military cooperation between the empires on this scale has not occurred since the days of the Sansha War. Experts are unsure what the call for assistance could mean, with speculation running rampant. Some believe it is a new assault on Sansha’s Nation (https://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Sansha's%20Nation) in order to end its incursions once and for all while others have claimed it has something to do with the unusual explosion detected several days ago.
Mallen is not ruling out anything. “We cannot risk revealing our hand by providing further information on the operation. Capsuleers will be briefed at the time of the operation at their rally points.”
Suspicious!
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And, yet again, slotted exactly when any person who's employed and lives west of Europe can't go.
Would it -really- kill them to push things up to 20:00 or 21:00 EVE time? Really?
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Well, that is going to be a total clusterfuck.
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Looks like I'm sick tomorrow.
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Hopefully they get everyone into Sarum Prime and then turn it back into a .4
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That's gonna be messy.
*looks for a coin to flip to decide if she will go*
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Let me know if they forget to reinforce the node as 3000 people attempt to pile into 2 systems.
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uhm, so the explosion in syndicate ripped space appart and let the sleepers loose to get inside k-space?
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Maybe Sansha will be finally removed from the incursion circulation to be replaced with entity X to keep the mechanic in. Would be a nice change, not only for possible the sansha rpers who've sometimes voiced their annoyance about the incursions but give another faction a spotlight in shit flinging stage.
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The howls if that ISK faucet would be tampered with..
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but what about the Revenant ? doesn't that make Sansha's Nation a permanent part of the Incursion mechanic ? I can't really see the art department making a bunch more supercapitals and fighter-bombers ? Or the game mechanics department - what roles would any such supercapitals have, that would make them distinct from each other and from the regular ones ?
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CCP won't get rid of it entirely. Just like they won't get rid of FW.
Hazard of ~flagship features~ being part of the storyline.
At best they'd just add new content for the different factions and add them to the rotation so it's not always Sansha.
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but what about the Revenant ? doesn't that make Sansha's Nation a permanent part of the Incursion mechanic ? I can't really see the art department making a bunch more supercapitals and fighter-bombers ? Or the game mechanics department - what roles would any such supercapitals have, that would make them distinct from each other and from the regular ones ?
More likely than not that they will. Much like all the ships and drones, they will probably have a new model and a different damage type or a small gimmick.
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Time is fine.
Don't think this will be that a big event as in numbers. Well it sems Mang will be forming rvb ganked fleet(killmail whoring).
Duno why but i realy don't like when people km whore live event actors.
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And, yet again, slotted exactly when any person who's employed and lives west of Europe can't go.
Would it -really- kill them to push things up to 20:00 or 21:00 EVE time? Really?
And I am having my good-bye party in Tehran! :-(
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The thing about "we ask that capsuleers refrain from interacting with, or taking, any elements that might be set adrift in space during the course of this assault" is curious.
To me, that might as well say "Amazing Loot!".
But that goes against what we've been told, that the only reward from live events that can be offered, is any equipment that may drop from event actor ships, which is limited to t1 and t2, and that this rule is "strictly enforced" by IA.
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I would love to have gone, but I live in Ohio and I work 8-5 if I'm not up against a deadline. Which I am, as our permit set goes out next week and we have to be ready for that to go out. I'm getting redlined drawings from the client, MEPT, and furniture designer tomorrow. So unless this thing is still rolling when I get out of work and I could only stay on until I have to go to sleep so I can wake up for work on Friday.
Would it have really killed CCP to make the event on a Saturday night? I don't mind screwing up my sleep schedule, but I don't know anyone who doesn't work Thursdays. All of us have had to work weekends at our jobs, why can't CCP?
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The thing about "we ask that capsuleers refrain from interacting with, or taking, any elements that might be set adrift in space during the course of this assault" is curious.
To me that sounds like this event is a prelude to Ghost Sites. They have already hinted that there would be events related to these, and this appears to fit the bill.
Oh, and it will not be possible for me to attend this event either. I am in Shanghai at the time with no PC available.
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Currently mulling over the idea that I might just log on and go. Likely won't however, a few reasons.
I'm likely going to be busy at that time, in a place with no internet or PC able to run EVE.
And even if I did go odds are good the Sansha fellows would swoop in at the end to scoop up anything of importance once again. They really need to do something about Sansha's Nation to make the faction relevant again, the Pro-Sansha RP'ers (and more and more of them appear every day it seems) really need something to DO with events, other than this glorified kidnapping/theft angle in an attempt to remain a visible part of the story-line.
*EDIT* I should make it clear that I'm hoping things will improve in a positive way for our resident Sansha RP'ers, I am not bashing them in any regard. However, we do need more for them to do than tag along on events concerning other factions to, well, do whatever damage they can.
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Just to point out (and this is not meant as a bash on your post), the reason we are getting more and more Sansha RPers every day is because we are having fun playing the game. It would be neat if CCP would do some more with the storyline, but frankly they have made incursions a game mechanic, so they can never actually end them without essentially removing a part of the game. It sucks, but we've come to terms with that, and all the 'lol we farm you for ISK' jokes it comes with.
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The empires of EVE Online are launching an assault tonight at 18:50. But their targets are not simply going to sit by and let that happen! They've put out their own call to action for anyone who wants to fight the power of the empires! If you're devious and wicked enough to fight against the forces of good in New Eden, go to systems FD-MLJ or Utopia at 18:50 onward and join the fleets there!
http://community.eveonline.com/news/news-channels/eve-online-news/join-the-pirates-and-defend-their-assets
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The empires of EVE Online are launching an assault tonight at 18:50. But their targets are not simply going to sit by and let that happen! They've put out their own call to action for anyone who wants to fight the power of the empires! If you're devious and wicked enough to fight against the forces of good in New Eden, go to systems FD-MLJ or Utopia at 18:50 onward and join the fleets there!
http://community.eveonline.com/news/news-channels/eve-online-news/join-the-pirates-and-defend-their-assets
Fuuuuuuuuuuuuck that. That's not an IC posting, but if it were it'd be enough to make me join the High Sec meeting point. They want us to form up to defend Serpentis/Angel space? Evi would rather sit at home and play with her model ship collection.
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i kinda understand why its not IC, its aimed for null-sec alliances.....
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The empires of EVE Online are launching an assault tonight at 18:50. But their targets are not simply going to sit by and let that happen! They've put out their own call to action for anyone who wants to fight the power of the empires! If you're devious and wicked enough to fight against the forces of good in New Eden, go to systems FD-MLJ or Utopia at 18:50 onward and join the fleets there!
http://community.eveonline.com/news/news-channels/eve-online-news/join-the-pirates-and-defend-their-assets
Fuuuuuuuuuuuuck that. That's not an IC posting, but if it were it'd be enough to make me join the High Sec meeting point. They want us to form up to defend Serpentis/Angel space? Evi would rather sit at home and play with her model ship collection.
All my this.
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i kinda understand why its not IC, its aimed for null-sec alliances.....
Aka, "How to ensure an entirely one-sided event 101"
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:CCP: :bash:
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This smells of one-sided butchery
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It would also be nice if some of these 'events' were possibly multi-tiered things?
When 99.9% happen in same time spot.... :ugh:
part 1: EU time
part 2: US time
part 3 AU time
part4 EU conclusion of event
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It would also be nice if some of these 'events' were possibly multi-tiered things?
When 99.9% happen in same time spot.... :ugh:
part 1: EU time
part 2: US time
part 3 AU time
part4 EU conclusion of event
Ah but this would mean paying over time and night shift. Dropbear and Headfirst did most of theirs in their off time coz they wanted to. I miss those guys.
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There's an IC news post for pirate factions as well:
http://community.eveonline.com/news/news-channels/world-news/empire-navies-expand-call-to-action-against-enemy-forces/ (http://community.eveonline.com/news/news-channels/world-news/empire-navies-expand-call-to-action-against-enemy-forces/)
That said, it's a weekday event; I'm usually at work. It seems those always fall between 11am and 3pm local time. :s If it's a big enough deal and I got enough advanced notice, I could perhaps ask for the day off-- but, uh. Burn vacation time for this? :s
Ah well! Mak's perpetually in meetings when the big stuff happens, I guess. :roll:
Anywho! Looking forward to seeing what they have people shoot at.
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It's fun though ! Empire loyalists will fight against nullsec blocs while pirate loyalists will be barred from the event or shot on sight by nullsec alliances !
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That's not really an IC post for the pirate factions. It is an IC post calling for more aid AGAINST the pirates. It also gives no new information as to WHICH pirates, because pirates are not a bloc.
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Tiberious;
My guess is that the IC news, being sourced from the Scope or from other Empire sources, wouldn't carry 'pirate' faction news in any meaningful way, excepting as it's from the perspective of the big four.
And agreed on the bloc thing. This event definitely has an ORDER v. CHAOS overtone. I'm not sure if anyone here has ever done tabletop wargames, but WH40K periodically does events in that vein-- where the xenophobic space catholics team up with the space elves against the natural and reasonable alliance of space robot skeletons, ZERRRG, and demons from another dimension.
I haven't played these games for an age, and the fluff-burning is still hilariously bad.
(honestly, I wish CCP would do more flavor news. Even if they don't have any in-game or plot effect, a couple random IG news items a week wouldn't take much time to produce, and would fill out the universe.)
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http://interstellarprivateer.wordpress.com/2013/11/06/villard-wheel/
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I just got home, but am participating and will be providing updates as best I can.
19:05 - Sarum Prime group has been ordered to Ihal. It's a total clusterfuck at this point; the route is some 25 jumps and every single one is under 10% tidi. Yay 5 minute warps.
19:20 - did I say 5 minute warps? I meant 12-15 minute warps. Gal/Matar fleet seems to be heading for Stacmon before hitting Syndicate. So far each system I've jumped through has had 400-500 people in it; because I arrived late, I can't tell if I'm with the bulk of the fleet or not but people are saying there were around 1000 in Sarum Prime before the new destination was given.
19:35 - 19 jumps to go, and people in local I'm at the tail end of the blob - quite possible we're looking at over 1500 people per fleet.
Amarr/Cal fleet is going to RMOC-W in Curse.
Gal/Matar fleet is going to FD-MLJ in Syndi. Word is Goons and Test are already in place waiting for them.
19:48 - both null systems are now gatecamped by significant null contingents flying doctrine fleets. FD- is apparently turning into a total slaughter already. Trying to get in contact with someone already at each fight to provide better info.
20:05 - I'm giving up. Both paths are hellcamped by assorted nullsec blocs and I'm still several jumps out. Both event fleets are shattered.
Amarr admiral actor, on jumping into Doril:
Ren Karetta > I immediately regret my actions.
20:15 - Some people are actually managing to get through into Curse, on account of the nullseccers having started shooting each other. For those not in the know, Doril (the first jump into Curse) has seen some pretty heavy null-on-null action in the past few weeks already, so this is entirely unsurprising.
Doril, at least, seems to have PL + NC. vs. AAA + RAZOR vs. anyone in an event fleet. FD- supposedly has Goons and some other CFC groupies; trying to get in contact with someone there.
20:25 - Getting through Doril is entirely a matter of luck. If you are noticed, you are dead. MWD frigates and battleships are dieing alike. Not even cloakies are living on account of the wrecks, drones, and other people crowding the gate. If you are somehow able to go unnoticed, congratulations - you'd best get to safety.
I'm being told Gal/Matar group actually managed to reach their destination somewhat intact and engaged Serpentis-aligned defenders. Serps were able to hold them off long enough to self-destruct the facility.
20:35 - Event is for all intents and purposes over. Gal/Matar group is apparently scattered and mostly dead as well. In both cases, whatever fraction of the empire fleet that got through was met with numerous pirate defender actors in faction battleships. At least the Gal/Matar group managed to have a fight; the Amarr/Cal group basically got slaughtered.
I'll make a new response post now and try to answer some general questions about this.
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Aie. How big are the fleets?
I seem to recall a dev saying that loading ships was a terrible strain on the server, as any time there's a session change the server has to calculate skills/stats from base. :oops:
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Tiberious;
My guess is that the IC news, being sourced from the Scope or from other Empire sources, wouldn't carry 'pirate' faction news in any meaningful way, excepting as it's from the perspective of the big four.
And agreed on the bloc thing. This event definitely has an ORDER v. CHAOS overtone. I'm not sure if anyone here has ever done tabletop wargames, but WH40K periodically does events in that vein-- where the xenophobic space catholics team up with the space elves against the natural and reasonable alliance of space robot skeletons, ZERRRG, and demons from another dimension.
I haven't played these games for an age, and the fluff-burning is still hilariously bad.
(honestly, I wish CCP would do more flavor news. Even if they don't have any in-game or plot effect, a couple random IG news items a week wouldn't take much time to produce, and would fill out the universe.)
Then make a new news source to act as an IC pirate call. This is just frankly stupid. As soon as I heard "Fight the forces of good" and did not hear WHO the pirates were, I washed my hands of this whole stupid event.
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vOv
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Tiberious;
My guess is that the IC news, being sourced from the Scope or from other Empire sources, wouldn't carry 'pirate' faction news in any meaningful way, excepting as it's from the perspective of the big four.
And agreed on the bloc thing. This event definitely has an ORDER v. CHAOS overtone. I'm not sure if anyone here has ever done tabletop wargames, but WH40K periodically does events in that vein-- where the xenophobic space catholics team up with the space elves against the natural and reasonable alliance of space robot skeletons, ZERRRG, and demons from another dimension.
I haven't played these games for an age, and the fluff-burning is still hilariously bad.
(honestly, I wish CCP would do more flavor news. Even if they don't have any in-game or plot effect, a couple random IG news items a week wouldn't take much time to produce, and would fill out the universe.)
Then make a new news source to act as an IC pirate call. This is just frankly stupid. As soon as I heard "Fight the forces of good" and did not hear WHO the pirates were, I washed my hands of this whole stupid event.
Well, judging by the rally points I think we're looking at the Fartel and Derpentis. :P
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Sarum fleet is off to Curse, Meves fleet to (probably) PF- in Syndicate.
That's completely made up because as we all know I don't log in anymore, but I'd be happy if I was right :P
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Just to point out (and this is not meant as a bash on your post), the reason we are getting more and more Sansha RPers every day is because we are having fun playing the game. It would be neat if CCP would do some more with the storyline, but frankly they have made incursions a game mechanic, so they can never actually end them without essentially removing a part of the game. It sucks, but we've come to terms with that, and all the 'lol we farm you for ISK' jokes it comes with.
That's good for you, my only issue is that, even with the incursions, CCP *can* come up with something. Is Sansha really happy to sit on his hands after making a grand return and all that jazz years ago? So the incursions go on now on a daily basis, big deal - he, or his several more stand-out servants - could easily be about for more, well, special missions or events. There is no reason why RP'ing Z should need people to "come to terms with no events, EVER" when X and Y get the occasional event to atl simulate that time flows and things happen. It really should not be to much to ask to have the occational event that involves the Sansha, in some way.
i kinda understand why its not IC, its aimed for null-sec alliances.....
Aka, "How to ensure an entirely one-sided event 101"
This. I'm really glad now that I won't have the time to show up, all the poor sods in high-sec are marching into a meat-grinder. Do CCP *really* think a large number of volunteers from all over will have a chance to suddenly co-ordinate the ships they randomly showed up in against ANY of the null-blocks, when any of them can and will show up in a well-coordinated doctrine setup with several times their numbers?
Ha, no. No they won't.
I just got home, but am participating and will be providing updates as best I can.
19:05 - Sarum Prime group has been ordered to Ihal. It's a total clusterfuck at this point; the route is some 25 jumps and every single one is under 10% tidi. Yay 5 minute warps.
19:20 - did I say 5 minute warps? I meant 12-15 minute warps. Gal/Matar fleet seems to be heading for Stacmon before hitting Syndicate. So far each system I've jumped through has had 400-500 people in it; because I arrived late, I can't tell if I'm with the bulk of the fleet or not but people are saying there were around 1000 in Sarum Prime before the new destination was given.
19:35 - 19 jumps to go, and people in local I'm at the tail end of the blob - quite possible we're looking at over 1500 people per fleet.
Amarr/Cal fleet is going to RMOC-W in Curse.
Gal/Matar fleet is going to FD-MLJ in Syndi. Word is Goons and Test are already in place waiting for them.
19:48 - both null systems are now gatecamped by significant null contingents flying doctrine fleets. FD- is apparently turning into a total slaughter already. Trying to get in contact with someone already at each fight to provide better info.
Please keep us posted if you can, I'd like to see the end-result of this.
And I hope your in something small and light and can GTFO as soon as things start to go seriously down-hill. Yay Goons and Test waiting for us! CCP is effectively force-feeding kill-mails down the throats of the two biggest blocks in the game. Who would have though, huh?
Do not end up a Goon/Test KM Esna. Neither of them deserve it.
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Thanks for the updates Esna. Looks like its shaping up to be as much of a disaster as Luna suspected would happen.
I am reminded of a famous poem by Lord Alfred Tennyson....it begins:
Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
(Charge of the Light Brigade)
http://poetry.eserver.org/light-brigade.html
I suspect Luna is going to be emo tonight, esp. after having seen Aldy and his officers praying last night while she was also praying at the Basilica. :(
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Thanks for the updates Esna. Looks like its shaping up to be as much of a disaster as Luna suspected I think.
I am reminded of a famous poem by Lord Alfred Tennyson....it begins:
Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
(Charge of the Light Brigade)
http://poetry.eserver.org/light-brigade.html
I suspect Luna is going to be emo tonight, esp. after having seen Aldy and his officers praying last night at the Basilica. :(
I've been overexposed to this poem over the last couple weeks, but I blame playing STO and having rewatched the Flight of Angels sequence again for that. xD
(Boldly They Rode is a bitch of a mission in STO. Just saying...)
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lulz.
How does this compare with the CP event in terms of charlie foxtrots?
I'm getting the idea that when CCP calls for an all-hands-on-deck event, we should just pull up the covers and hide.
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lulz.
How does this compare with the CP event in terms of charlie foxtrots?
I'm getting the idea that when CCP calls for an all-hands-on-deck event, we should just pull up the covers and hide.
Couch-Fortress, HO!
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MOAR CUSHIONS.
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Yay, 1h and a half travel through tidi 10%, lucky me, I was just on time but the Sarum fleet left way sooner so I was late and avoided the total annihilation at the Doril chokepoint.
Apparently PL and Razor got their loot pinata farming players, since internal affairs forbids to feed more than standard T2 equipement, let's feed them with players instead !
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Razor has literally no influence anywhere, let alone at CCP.
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It doesnt really change the fact that this was basically a crude way, unintended or not, to send players into nullsec to be farmed.
Which was to be expected anyway, since the destination systems leaked a few hours before (great idea CCP). And people that committed to come through loyalism to their factions where pretty screwed since they HAD to go.
Why the hell not using a jumpbridge or something instead of sending players into that meat grinder ?
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They wanted players to show up to defend the pirates.
However, they never said "What pirates?", and once we figured it out WE, at least, went "Nope, not showing up."
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:Narrative:
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So, event is now effectively over.
lulz.
How does this compare with the CP event in terms of charlie foxtrots?
I'm getting the idea that when CCP calls for an all-hands-on-deck event, we should just pull up the covers and hide.
This was bad. Very bad. Caldari Prime was chaotic and while many couldn't get to the ultimate fight, a great many more did (something like 1500, IIRC?). A coherent narrative could still be developed, partially because players were still constrained by CONCORD up until the end. Here, though, most of both empire-aligned fleets were wiped out before they even managed to get there. The only 'narrative' was desperately trying to run a well-prepared blockade only to smash into further brick walls.
Here are some more specific issues described:
- Formup and path systems were not on reinforced nodes. Even 200 players were sending them into fits of 10% tidi, let alone 500-700 players. This massively slowed down any movement by the Empire group, turning what should have been a fairly short journey into an exceedingly long one.
- Nullsec entry points were announced beforehand. Entry into nullsec is never an easy matter, but when you announce it beforehand and then take a long time getting there (see above) it's making a bad situation worse.
- At least one (maybe both) of the routes went through 'hot' nullsec zones. Doril is the staging system for at least one major null alliance, meaning they didn't even have to move to set up a well-prepared camp. Can't speak for FD-, though it was camped by the time the Empire group got there as well.
The remainder of the empire block was met at the site of the lab by a well-prepared faction BS actor group. These only needed to prevent the lab structure from being killed for a couple of minutes before it was declared a victory in their favor. In Syndicate, enough empire people got through to make it a decent fight, but in FMOC it was apparently never really in question that the defenders would hold.
Edit:
NEW TWIST! People are now reporting the structures may have been unkillable.
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Disclaimer: I was not there.
As I noted on another forum, if the event is public (like all CCP event will need to be), the target system would leak anyway, and by the time the more clueless figure out where they'd need to go, any actually organized party is going to be ready. The clear-cut stencils ("Empires" and "Pirates") would probably hint that the parameters for the event were not designed by anyone caring about the lore. While technically the target regions make sense from a lore point of view, from the practical point of view they made none. I kind of hope marketing ordered a "cops vs. robbers mass event in null" and the poor bastards who were made to organize it simply chose plausibly deniable destinations designed to get the event to fail as miserably as possible. (And I count myself as a kind of a CCP fanboy here.)
I admit that I haven't been able to play a lot of late due to real life concerns (i.e. I haven't played in half a year), but last I was around, a fleet of 50 was probably enough to put hisec systems into TiDi. So no surprises that the first live event in ages gathers a crowd and servers go weep in the corner.
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- Formup and path systems were not on reinforced nodes. Even 200 players were sending them into fits of 10% tidi, let alone 500-700 players. This massively slowed down any movement by the Empire group, turning what should have been a fairly short journey into an exceedingly long one.
Let me know if they forget to reinforce the node as 3000 people attempt to pile into 2 systems.
You mean they actually did forget? My god ._.
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The paths were 20+ jumps, I understand. Two of them, in the matter of fact. So even if the target systems were reinforced, the fleets were large enough that they'd cause TiDi in hisec more or less by simply sitting still (or at least if travelling). I guess CCP's engineers could have hand-picked the entire path on the single node, not sure if they have premade tools for that. I believe the amount of people who got into the target systems weren't really significant in terms of server load? (Perhaps except in Syndicate?)
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I went there myself, RP be damned. Thanks to coordination with my corporation I managed to get ahead of the major group and dodge most of the TiDi, I even managed to squeeze through the gatecamps in my tiny frigate. But then I faced a wall of Goons and Syndicate pirates in a tiny frigate and got quickly popped, while everyone else was being slaughtered in the gatecamps.
I seriously question why they decided to get people to stage in a system, and then make a horrible 10% TiDi trip through known hotspots only to get slaughtered in a gatecamp. Not to mention that we got virtually no orders from the supposed organizers at all unlike we were lead to believe from the news articles, and so the offensive side coordination was next to nothing.
They had a good idea, but it was very, very poorly executed, and a lot of people are left pissed now.
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Confirming that even those who actually got to the structure were unable to damage it; all shots landed for 0.0 damage.
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From Meves to Stacmon i had 10% Tidi the first 5 jumps and that was with 450-500 in local. When i still had 4 jumps to Stamon the first few had in fact reached the target destination. when i left Stacmon local was getting to 600 or 700 (can not really recall more exact) with some poeple saying "screw this" and alot wondering where they where supposed to go from there.
Despite the TiDi trip (not all in vain since i got a fair bit into War and Peace for once) i still reached the target way ahead of the vast majority, most of which never even got near the target system at all.
Now, personally, i fully expected it to turn out like it did so have no rage about it. we took it as a nice corp outing and fully expected to die. But on the other hand these kind of killfarming events (because lets be blunt, thats all they are) does not really create much interest in me for future events.
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There is a very angry thread running in the Live Events Discussion forum: https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=293869
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Was the structure a POS type object or an actual station that has existed in space for a while?
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Was the structure a POS type object or an actual station that has existed in space for a while?
I heard it was an indestructible LCO. A scenery object. That cannot be damaged in any way, except by GM action.
Such objects appear in missions and complexes all the time.
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Tiberious;
My guess is that the IC news, being sourced from the Scope or from other Empire sources, wouldn't carry 'pirate' faction news in any meaningful way, excepting as it's from the perspective of the big four.
And agreed on the bloc thing. This event definitely has an ORDER v. CHAOS overtone. I'm not sure if anyone here has ever done tabletop wargames, but WH40K periodically does events in that vein-- where the xenophobic space catholics team up with the space elves against the natural and reasonable alliance of space robot skeletons, ZERRRG, and demons from another dimension.
I haven't played these games for an age, and the fluff-burning is still hilariously bad.
(honestly, I wish CCP would do more flavor news. Even if they don't have any in-game or plot effect, a couple random IG news items a week wouldn't take much time to produce, and would fill out the universe.)
Then make a new news source to act as an IC pirate call. This is just frankly stupid. As soon as I heard "Fight the forces of good" and did not hear WHO the pirates were, I washed my hands of this whole stupid event.
I wish they had just done that for the CONCORD call rather than having Amarr Empire actors giving us orders... then I could have skipped the whole nonsense.
I will be ignoring any future such general call events.
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Well, that was a clusterfuck.
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So... does anyone have any idea WTF that whole thing was for? Did CONCORD "accomplish" its goals? Or did CCP just not think this through and the whole thing got called off?
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So... does anyone have any idea WTF that whole thing was for? Did CONCORD "accomplish" its goals? Or did CCP just not think this through and the whole thing got called off?
Live server stress test.
Ok, kind of joking but would not surprise me the slightest.
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My current favorite theory is that this went exactly to plan.
Pirates were not interrupted, so ghost sites can be introduced (like they wouldn't have been. lol).
Capsuleers are now totally pissed with the uselessness of the Empires, a la the last trailer, setting the scene for Rubicon.
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I don't know but the announcement seemed awfully misleading as it suggested capsuleers were supposed to be the BACKUP to Concord and the Empire Navies. So, where were they?
Glad I missed this one!
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Alright.
Let's do this in AAR fashion. It's easy to pick up the terribad-CCP-hang-your-head-in-shame chant; let's get something actionable out of it. Esna's got a lot of it already. I'm just going to hit a few things as I think of them, and hopefully we can flesh it all out nicely.
In no particular order, the problems;
* Time dilation for the empire fleet;
* Nullsec chokepoints channeled empire fleet into null blocs' guns;
* Events all EU TZ during week;
* Short notice;
* Roleplay background weak.
Some of these have conflicting solutions. For instance, reinforcing a node can only do so much, especially when hundreds or thousands of players are moving; one solution would be to not do a news broadcast CTA which draws players like moths to the flame. This, however, runs the risk of events occurring for only the select few that have been made aware of it; this can lead to accusations of favoritism, wastes of resources, and so on. So-- I'm going to offer a few solutions per bullet point, and we can see which ones keep coming up.
* Time dilation for the empire fleet;
1) Smaller player counts. This can be done either by avoiding mass CTAs by alluding to events instead of posting mass invites, or by posting immediately before events instead of a day or more. An alternative example: "CONCORD announced that it will be requesting assistance for task forces venturing into unsecure space in the coming days and weeks. Pilots wishing to assist CONCORD are directed to monitor neocom channel 'XYZ blahdiblah' for the formation of task forces. Operational security requires that rally points, destinations, and times not be announced until immediately before an operation."
2) A jump bridge may have reduced travel-related tidi; instead of dozens of systems of travel, it would have been a single session change. I'm not sure if a bridge is a possibility, given game rules; it might be possible to bridge out, but not in, or it may simply not be possible to open a bridge at all.
2) Reinforcing nodes. Jita hosts impressive player counts, but most are docked up, and combat is fairly light, if constant. Odds are a reinforced node will help with time dilation, but the question is one of degrees, not absolutes. A thousand players shooting at each other will almost certainly hit 10% tidi.
* Nullsec chokepoints channeled empire fleet into null blocs' guns;
1) Destinations should not be broadcast before the event. If an opfor rally point is announced, it needs to be far enough away that the destination isn't clear; odds are the defenders/opfor will be closer, and so any time advantage will make the opfor gatecamp significantly more potent.
2) A jump bridge would move combat from the gates to a cyno; this would prevent an established camp with tacticals and anchored bubbles on gate. While it's still likely to be a slaughter with a nullsec alliance against a kitchen sink event fleet, it increases the ability of players to get through the blockade. Further, it cuts the time advantage of the defenders, time from destination announcement to arrival is cut to minutes from hours. Possible issue as before; can a jump bridge be opened in high security space? If not, an Empire titan in lowsec would be a MASSIVE bullseye. Frig. Can you imagine trying to explain that in prime fiction?
3) Alternatively, possibly using faction contacts to invite support from appropriate blocs would reduce the zerging of nullsec alliances? However, this runs smack into favoritism accusations again by multiple angles.
* Events all EU TZ during week;
Preamble: this is a known issue. At present, there isn't a reliable solution as event staff are bulked out by CCP volunteers, and CCP's event staff operates from Iceland. If additional event staff are hired at Atlanta, we may see more reliable non-EU TZ events.
1) Smaller events in US TZ may deal with US TZ being unable to attend any events; this reduces but doesn't eliminate the Iceland TZ issue, as while they'd still need event staff hours, CCP wouldn't be as reliant on volunteers to fill out bodies for large actor fleets.
2) ???
* Short notice;
Preamble: this runs into the issues above. Too much notice, and even if CCP tries to mitigate tidi and camping, the server will explode as players all plan to jam into a system at a given time.
Question: is there a solution that allows players to schedule time without killing CCP's hamsters?
* Roleplay background weak;
Preamble: I think we all agree this is a bit silly. "It's a big deal! Everyone wants players to join up! Join up, join up! Piwats, join those guys! Big deal time!"
1) Events need a longer lead-up, fluff-wise; this went from OH HAI NEWS to OH HAI EVENT in a single post and chronicle. Longer lead-time gives more opportunities for devious events that are more than shoot-actors-at-X-day-and-time, and for more player involvement in fluff. Further, it gives more time to explain strange alliances. Why would Sansha want to be there, for instance? Given the ideological differences between factions and how these are often posed as deep divisions, we may need to reestablish that, indeed, these factions often ally themselves out of necessity and convenience. Having Angel and Sansha interaction over Jove tech makes a lot of sense, if we remember to portray the Sansha as more than EVE Borg. (with all due respect to TS-F and Shaktipat; this is more an issue with common misconceptions of EVE lore, and CCP's sparing news updates reducing factions to simple stereotypes)
2) ?
So-- other problems? Solutions to existing problems? Madness and lunacy on my part?
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I'm hoping to get some clarity into this mess, from the fallout ensuing in the following days. Because right now, anyone that said "null folks are going ot get force-fed loads of kills" were completely right on the money.
I'm more disgusted with null getting more shit they don't deserve handed to them, than CCP's fuck-ups. How many times is this going to happen before someone in CCP realizes that people that live in high-sec/low-sec are not free food for their beloved Empyrians out in null?
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Back slowly away from the tinfoil.
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor)
I get the impression that this event was rushed, and the event staff haven't really been given rein to develop ideas or content as much as we'd like. The idea that marketing went, "Hey! Do this thing! Go, go!" sounds about right.
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In at least some particular order:
1: You can get smaller groups by doing two things, either creating a random "room" you jump to via acceleration gate, and you make sure everyone is traveling with a tour guide, therefore it kind of becomes "instanced". Or, you set up a hundred or so different targets, you make sure the Empire armies will "deal with the corps, you deal with the mission" and therefore the PVP people can fight the navies while the PVE people go and handle their business. Either way, having everyone fly, as one, to the mission point screams "bad judgment".
2: CCP can always say that this was just how it was supposed to turn out, but they might want to just admit that they didn't foresee nullsec blocs simply farming their fleet for ISK. They definitely don't want to make that look intentional. One way to do avoid this problem in future is to create a sort of instanced wormhole that you jump through with a fleet, or that CCP gives you an NPC Titan that "jumps" you to where you need to be. That way, they keep their own PVP gankers from ruining their events.
3: CCP is just shooting themselves in the foot. I play WoW, and WoW neither needs that much extra help from Blizzard to run their events nor do they need to worry about timezones. I still remember the Gates of Ahn'Qiraj, being there through that chaos, but increasing involvement means running a battle that might last for days. They might just have to schedule people to regulate how many NPC pirates there are to provide a suitable challenge, but it's not like they shouldn't be able to just ship people into an area to fight a giant set of battles against a computer opponent.
Either way, they need to make the event last longer so that their whole player base can play. Sometimes, that means CCP people might have to go to work early to monitor the server or stay up late. I used to pull 60-72 hours to get our EMEA Starbucks projects done by deadline, so maybe I'm looking at this from the wrong angle? They could just stagger their staff. If you want to put on an event, it makes sense to have people around for the entire time.
4. Short notice probably wasn't intentional. This all smacks of horrible planning on CCP's part, which is why the theory Kalaratiri related doesn't make any sense (we aren't pissed at our empires or CONCORD, we're pissed at CCP). If they wanted us to be pissed at the Empires or CONCORD, they should have gotten the capsuleers to the target efficiently, then betrayed them there. All in all, it looks like CCP just thought they'd put this together for fun and ended up shooting themselves in the foot with bad planning and execution.
5. Lore is probably related to the point above. They obviously need to think of a way to work this into the lore and then never, ever do something this ill-thought again. There are ways you do events, and not just RPers care about the story. They could have built up a huge problem with the Serpentis and then CONCORD could have convinced the empires to send us all on a grand crusade against the pirates. They didn't; hence why I think they didn't entirely think this through.
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Meh, I'm not mad at them at all. The server is just too large for live events to include everyone, but not including everyone is favoritism, wah wah, lemme hand out towelettes here. So there likely will never be one that *isn't a clusterfuck* *ever again*.
When the party gets too large, people make circles. That's just the nature of people.
IC of course I would translate this into a reason to not trust CONCORD.
Because this:
Ren Karetta > I immediately regret my actions.
That's my Empire talking.. ;)
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While many of the flaws have been mentioned. I think this event does deserve some credit for trying to include the widest range of players possible. (meaning highsec, lowsec, and nullsec dwellers. Also it avoided a situation where the "wrong" militias would be excluded.)
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Karmilla has a good point. CCP was aiming to be inclusive, which is laudable-- it was just poorly executed and on a short timescale.
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Karmilla has a good point. CCP was aiming to be inclusive, which is laudable-- it was just poorly executed and on a short timescale.
True, but there-in lies the fuck-up. I'm hoping to see some damage control here and for this to be improved on in the future. The whole result of this utterly depress me and I wasn't even there. Though I'll admit some of that feeling stems form my views on the matter, regarding the results, but I'm sure I've made that clear by now.
Regardless, CCP need, desperately needs to up their game on this unless they want to drive participation for events way down into the ground. They have managed to rub thousands the wrong way on this, and those will likely not be happy to attend any further events. Course, null-entities would likely disagree and eagerly away the next event to come their way, but right now, their opinion on this would be of... lesser value.
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As someone who had to work during this period, I do not immediately regret my absence. At all. :P
Nor do I regret my personal commitment to avoid live events.
Also, this is hilarious. For me.
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Just restating this again, in case it wasn't made clear enough:
The lab structures, the ones we were supposed to be out to destroy, could not be damaged. Weapons fire at them struck for 0.0 damage. Even if the entire empire fleet had focused fire on the structure, it could not be destroyed by weapons fire.
So yes, right now :justasplanned: does seem rather likely.
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Meh, I'm not mad at them at all. The server is just too large for live events to include everyone, but not including everyone is favoritism, wah wah, lemme hand out towelettes here. So there likely will never be one that *isn't a clusterfuck* *ever again*.
When the party gets too large, people make circles. That's just the nature of people.
IC of course I would translate this into a reason to not trust CONCORD.
Because this:
Ren Karetta > I immediately regret my actions.
That's my Empire talking.. ;)
I guess since I'm a part time player, I have a completely different frame of reference. Seeing the description of how it went down, I can't help but conclude that CCP just wasn't thinking. There's a hundred different ways of doing this even that leaves the nullsec corps to their show but lets the more PVE-centric hisec people have their event. They just didn't.
I honestly get why everyone on the forums seems to be pissed. If another company had screwed the pooch that catastrophically in their own game, they'd be rightly ribbed. I mean, CCP could have done this any number of ways with even a bit of extra effort, but it comes off as if they don't entirely understand how their own game works.
I really don't think they should try to carry out events anymore until they have it properly thought out. It might help if they could draw it out so that it includes the whole playerbase, maybe running randomly spawning drone areas like an incursion in otherwise safe space for a few weeks. That way, everyone can experience it a bit. In a universe as vast as EVE's, where most of the actual "space" is an empty void, you'd think this wouldn't be that difficult.
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They might have dev-sploded the structures if the pirate fleets were taken out.
Still...
That happened exactly liked it looked like it was going to.
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I'll also add that I have a fundamental issue with pre-determined live event conclusions.
Because wtf is the point if no side has a chance to effect what happens?
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I'm not 100% sure it was pre-determined. People are complaining that the structures weren't able to be destroyed by players shooting it. If it had been the other way around they would have complained just as loud if a null-bloc dropped supers and killed the event in seconds. But Eve players can't help but complain about anything and everything.
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I'll also add that I have a fundamental issue with pre-determined live event conclusions.
Because wtf is the point if no side has a chance to effect what happens?
The point is to fuck over the Caldari, obviously. :P
I seem to recall someone being very vociferous about rigged contests earlier. I think you told him to stop whining.
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I'll also add that I have a fundamental issue with pre-determined live event conclusions.
Because wtf is the point if no side has a chance to effect what happens?
Entertainment? If people wanted something that could go either way as long as they have enough ships to affect the outcome, they'd join a 0.0 alliance. It's fairly obvious that if they hemmorage subscriptions, it's not going to be the nullsec alliance people where this is sort of what they do.
Massive events run by the developers should be a bit like running a book RP campaign. There can be variation in how you do things and it has to be challenging, but you've got to keep the story moving or it all devolves into a muddy puddle of nothing.
If that's not what they were going for, they probably just shouldn't run events. It looks like players are better at doing that right now anyway.
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It looks like players are better at doing that right now anyway.
Not exactly the highest bar, though, is it?
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It looks like players are better at doing that right now anyway.
Not exactly the highest bar, though, is it?
It makes it all the more sad.
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They can get to the same point but have many branching 'paths' much like many modern RPG games.
The ironic part is that it wouldn't change the mechanics or the participants at all, just the locations, the fluff, and which actors the devs use.
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Had already decided I wasn't going because ::work for living::.
That said, even if I'd still been a professional layabout, I wouldn't have touched this one with a bargepole. EVERY LE that's hit null or low has been a clusterfuck. This one was actually telegraphed days in advance and aimed at hot interface systems. It was always going to be a slaughter.
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There was a previous issue regarding "railroaded" events, e.g. that Republic tribal dignitaries escort thing.
There were concerns raised about how that could have affected the storyline and so on.
Others raised concerns about the players inability to affect the storyline, because of the use of invulnerable (effectively- due to QA modules) npc ships.
There were other concerns about the nature of live events as "loot pinatas".
And people raised concerns about "Dev favouritism" or "Dev corruption". Claiming that the Devs "wanted people to fail" or whatever.
Has anything changed ?
If the NPC structures were in fact invulnerable, and could only be destroyed through GM action then... all the planning of any fleets, any skill shown by any pilots involved, all of that does not matter.
The event boils down to "A GM pressed a button and we lost", or "A GM pressed a button and we won".
If one side attacked with rookieships, if they met the criteria for the button being pressed, then they won. Regardless of the actions of the defenders.
If the defenders defended with rookieships and shuttles, if the criteria for pushing the button was not met, then they won, regardless of the actions of the attackers.
And because the event pivots on whether or not a single GM pressed a button, then the whole issue about transparency and integrity of CCP staff comes right back. It is not right to put a single person into that situation, where thousands of disgruntled players can complain about it.
It only leads to alienation of the players and devs. In defence of their employee, CCP will ignore or deflect criticism, and again, nothing changes.
:ugh:
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They might have dev-sploded the structures if the pirate fleets were taken out.
If Esna is right about the targets not being damageable (I didn't make it to the site to have a first hand on this) then it was totally railroaded (or just screwed up by incompetence) and this can't be the out.
The dev actors specifically ordered the fleet to shoot the target and ignore the defense fleet up until almost no one was left on the field.
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As a pirate sider who was there, here are my few thoughts.
It was a complete clusterfuck. Even before the amarr/caldari fleet arrived to Doril gates the "pirate defenders" we're quite happily killing each other as they were waiting for the main course. I ended up as Tornado food myself. There was no organization on the pirate side either. To add insult to injury for the empire folks the easiest way to Curse has a bunch of nulsec alliances living in it who camp the system almost daily. So when CCP announces "Free buffet" on news feed all of them are going to log in.
I went anyway since, at least I did want to try to put my space action inline with the RP even though I knew exactly what I was walking into - gotta keep stacking that Angel Cred, yo. As far as I can tell I was the only Angel Cartel loyalist wizard hatter in Utopia and RMOC-W amidst bunch of nulseccers.
Only thing that really makes me annoyed is the fact that the game was rigged from the start. It didn't matter for the empire forces if they broke through or not if the objectives could not actually be destroyed, and that frankly sucks and makes the whole event pointless. Not to mention it makes it a hollow victory, if you can even call it that.
On the other hand. Yay, Angel Cartel event. And ICly "Yay, Angel Cartel wins".
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Well yea it went so bad... and also IC interaction with the actors was also horrible, IC we are suposed to destroy some research filicities but that all we knew, i'm not awere was there any said by the Serp/Angel actors in the system everything happend.
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According to a poster on Reddit (http://www.reddit.com/r/Eve/comments/1q4rsj/the_super_special_loot_that_concord_didnt_want_us/), people shot the NPC pirates, too. Because why not, push button, receive faction ship kill. It is possible that a single player is now in possession of a good share (https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=3843339#post3843339) of the Blue Boxes (http://imgur.com/EU2t4Ib) in the game. See chronicle (http://www.eveonline.com/rubicon/chronicle/).
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When I think I was almost going to propose to form an independent fleet composed of a bomber wolfpack with a few tackling/neutralizing recons that could have been blackops bridged into at least one of the target system, then bomb the hell out of the defenders, and at least try to do something...
Then I told myself meh, whatever, less than 2 hours left anyway. Everyone was already ready to be part of their respective fleets. And how to send even a covops covert cyno there since it was probably already camped to death ?
But the more I think again about it, the more I have regrets not trying it.
Alright.
Let's do this in AAR fashion. It's easy to pick up the terribad-CCP-hang-your-head-in-shame chant; let's get something actionable out of it. Esna's got a lot of it already. I'm just going to hit a few things as I think of them, and hopefully we can flesh it all out nicely.
In no particular order, the problems;
* Time dilation for the empire fleet;
* Nullsec chokepoints channeled empire fleet into null blocs' guns;
* Events all EU TZ during week;
* Short notice;
* Roleplay background weak.
Some of these have conflicting solutions. For instance, reinforcing a node can only do so much, especially when hundreds or thousands of players are moving; one solution would be to not do a news broadcast CTA which draws players like moths to the flame. This, however, runs the risk of events occurring for only the select few that have been made aware of it; this can lead to accusations of favoritism, wastes of resources, and so on. So-- I'm going to offer a few solutions per bullet point, and we can see which ones keep coming up.
* Time dilation for the empire fleet;
1) Smaller player counts. This can be done either by avoiding mass CTAs by alluding to events instead of posting mass invites, or by posting immediately before events instead of a day or more. An alternative example: "CONCORD announced that it will be requesting assistance for task forces venturing into unsecure space in the coming days and weeks. Pilots wishing to assist CONCORD are directed to monitor neocom channel 'XYZ blahdiblah' for the formation of task forces. Operational security requires that rally points, destinations, and times not be announced until immediately before an operation."
2) A jump bridge may have reduced travel-related tidi; instead of dozens of systems of travel, it would have been a single session change. I'm not sure if a bridge is a possibility, given game rules; it might be possible to bridge out, but not in, or it may simply not be possible to open a bridge at all.
2) Reinforcing nodes. Jita hosts impressive player counts, but most are docked up, and combat is fairly light, if constant. Odds are a reinforced node will help with time dilation, but the question is one of degrees, not absolutes. A thousand players shooting at each other will almost certainly hit 10% tidi.
* Nullsec chokepoints channeled empire fleet into null blocs' guns;
1) Destinations should not be broadcast before the event. If an opfor rally point is announced, it needs to be far enough away that the destination isn't clear; odds are the defenders/opfor will be closer, and so any time advantage will make the opfor gatecamp significantly more potent.
2) A jump bridge would move combat from the gates to a cyno; this would prevent an established camp with tacticals and anchored bubbles on gate. While it's still likely to be a slaughter with a nullsec alliance against a kitchen sink event fleet, it increases the ability of players to get through the blockade. Further, it cuts the time advantage of the defenders, time from destination announcement to arrival is cut to minutes from hours. Possible issue as before; can a jump bridge be opened in high security space? If not, an Empire titan in lowsec would be a MASSIVE bullseye. Frig. Can you imagine trying to explain that in prime fiction?
3) Alternatively, possibly using faction contacts to invite support from appropriate blocs would reduce the zerging of nullsec alliances? However, this runs smack into favoritism accusations again by multiple angles.
* Events all EU TZ during week;
Preamble: this is a known issue. At present, there isn't a reliable solution as event staff are bulked out by CCP volunteers, and CCP's event staff operates from Iceland. If additional event staff are hired at Atlanta, we may see more reliable non-EU TZ events.
1) Smaller events in US TZ may deal with US TZ being unable to attend any events; this reduces but doesn't eliminate the Iceland TZ issue, as while they'd still need event staff hours, CCP wouldn't be as reliant on volunteers to fill out bodies for large actor fleets.
2) ???
* Short notice;
Preamble: this runs into the issues above. Too much notice, and even if CCP tries to mitigate tidi and camping, the server will explode as players all plan to jam into a system at a given time.
Question: is there a solution that allows players to schedule time without killing CCP's hamsters?
* Roleplay background weak;
Preamble: I think we all agree this is a bit silly. "It's a big deal! Everyone wants players to join up! Join up, join up! Piwats, join those guys! Big deal time!"
1) Events need a longer lead-up, fluff-wise; this went from OH HAI NEWS to OH HAI EVENT in a single post and chronicle. Longer lead-time gives more opportunities for devious events that are more than shoot-actors-at-X-day-and-time, and for more player involvement in fluff. Further, it gives more time to explain strange alliances. Why would Sansha want to be there, for instance? Given the ideological differences between factions and how these are often posed as deep divisions, we may need to reestablish that, indeed, these factions often ally themselves out of necessity and convenience. Having Angel and Sansha interaction over Jove tech makes a lot of sense, if we remember to portray the Sansha as more than EVE Borg. (with all due respect to TS-F and Shaktipat; this is more an issue with common misconceptions of EVE lore, and CCP's sparing news updates reducing factions to simple stereotypes)
2) ?
So-- other problems? Solutions to existing problems? Madness and lunacy on my part?
Jump bridges : even if that doesn't work in high sec with dev tools - which I highly doubt, it should work fine - they can just deploy a titan or a just large collidable jump bridges or even unstable wormholes like they did for the sansha events and say "THIS IS YOUR BRIDGE PILOTS" and then space magic teleport us into the target area like they already do for the alliance tournament.
I'm hoping to get some clarity into this mess, from the fallout ensuing in the following days. Because right now, anyone that said "null folks are going ot get force-fed loads of kills" were completely right on the money.
I'm more disgusted with null getting more shit they don't deserve handed to them, than CCP's fuck-ups. How many times is this going to happen before someone in CCP realizes that people that live in high-sec/low-sec are not free food for their beloved Empyrians out in null?
Nullsec alliances are unofficial shareholders. They have to keep them happy. :P
Either way, they need to make the event last longer so that their whole player base can play. Sometimes, that means CCP people might have to go to work early to monitor the server or stay up late. I used to pull 60-72 hours to get our EMEA Starbucks projects done by deadline, so maybe I'm looking at this from the wrong angle? They could just stagger their staff. If you want to put on an event, it makes sense to have people around for the entire time.
I wouldnt want that my company suddenly told me to make so many extra hours at night just like that. Even if it's a job in the gaming industry, it remains a job, one which is exhausting. Gaming industry may be famous for that kind of things - they must be a job they love after all, why not doing extra unpaid hours ? - but if they really want to extend their hours to other timezones, either they hire event actors in Atlanta again, or either they hire specific job where it's written on the contract that they can have to shift their hours to later hours some special days. By the way, when the event actors were all based in Atlanta, most events used to happen in US TZ. EU were at that time the ones bitching about the hours of most events iirc. But most of the time, for the sansha events for example, they tried to remain in the main EU TZ though, and accomodate both.
4. Short notice probably wasn't intentional. This all smacks of horrible planning on CCP's part, which is why the theory Kalaratiri related doesn't make any sense (we aren't pissed at our empires or CONCORD, we're pissed at CCP). If they wanted us to be pissed at the Empires or CONCORD, they should have gotten the capsuleers to the target efficiently, then betrayed them there. All in all, it looks like CCP just thought they'd put this together for fun and ended up shooting themselves in the foot with bad planning and execution.
From experience, I would say that you are very optimistic. People are already ICly trashing CONCORD even more for being crass incompetent. Like if it wasnt already the case before. Everyone trashes on CONCORD. It has always been a fad, "CONCORD prevents me to blow up planets !" "CONCORD prevents me to shoot at other people and I don't care if there is wardecs for that !" "CONCORD kill mothers and eat children !" etc etc.
Then it comes to something slightly off topic, but the way the event team is handling their events and the "live" lore of the universe, is being utterly done at the expense of minor factions. It's always about the Minmatar Republic, the Gallente Federation, the Caldari State and the Amarr Empire, because that would be too complicated for the average player otherwise or I don't know... But on the long run it is seriously harming the lesser factions that either get into oblivion (the less damage) or dragged like CONCORD into the mud again and again and again because after all, nobody cares. I have never asked for them to do a specific event only including Mordu loyalists or whatever, but they could include them sometimes as a central incentive to the plot, or flesh them out a little more.
I'll also add that I have a fundamental issue with pre-determined live event conclusions.
Because wtf is the point if no side has a chance to effect what happens?
It has always been the case with CCP, bare a few recent counter example with that freighter event... They don't really think this is roleplaying, for them it's just pay your ticket and enjoy your movie, you are spectator. It has always been like that, even with Aurora.
As a pirate sider who was there, here are my few thoughts.
It was a complete clusterfuck. Even before the amarr/caldari fleet arrived to Doril gates the "pirate defenders" we're quite happily killing each other as they were waiting for the main course. I ended up as Tornado food myself. There was no organization on the pirate side either. To add insult to injury for the empire folks the easiest way to Curse has a bunch of nulsec alliances living in it who camp the system almost daily. So when CCP announces "Free buffet" on news feed all of them are going to log in.
I went anyway since, at least I did want to try to put my space action inline with the RP even though I knew exactly what I was walking into - gotta keep stacking that Angel Cred, yo. As far as I can tell I was the only Angel Cartel loyalist wizard hatter in Utopia and RMOC-W amidst bunch of nulseccers.
Only thing that really makes me annoyed is the fact that the game was rigged from the start. It didn't matter for the empire forces if they broke through or not if the objectives could not actually be destroyed, and that frankly sucks and makes the whole event pointless. Not to mention it makes it a hollow victory, if you can even call it that.
On the other hand. Yay, Angel Cartel event. And ICly "Yay, Angel Cartel wins".
I heard that Stillwater managed to ask the event actors permission to go camp elsewhere since they feared to get crushed by goons in the local system, and they managed to kill a lot of reinforcement or fleeing empire loyalists.
At least that was good improvisation, but they are a rare example where it was possible.
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So ... tl;dr?
CCP runs live event meant for exposition of upcoming features of Rubicon, lots of problems lead to many dying and a lot of sperging. CONCORD denounced as incompetent boobs of the week, joining a long list of other factions who have held same title following past live events. Null-sec folks happy with kill-counts and tears to refill their travelling canteens, may go some way to washing away memory of recent significant losses by some of them too. World continues to turn, day follows night follows day, etc.
Critical analysis: Probably a safe-bet that if CCP had decided to run soft-core porn scene in background of exposition live event (a la Game of Thrones) there would be fewer complaints. Otherwise, business as usual for EVE?
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They might have dev-sploded the structures if the pirate fleets were taken out.
Still...
That happened exactly liked it looked like it was going to.
This.
It was probably made indestructible to avoid the 'defenders' from just blowing it up. If the Empires actually managed to take control of the grid where the lab is at, devhax could pop the structure. That seems like the best way to handle that aspect of the event.
But yeah, this was entirely predictable in it's outcome.
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A few more high profile events like this and everyone will be happy :ugh:
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(http://i.imgur.com/vu2E5bh.png)
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I would like to take a moment to draw attention to the Minmatar actor's fit.
http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=20372314&nolimit
(Also, heh, the url >_> )
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I love the rails. Maybe this is called intercultural exchange.
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(http://i.imgur.com/vu2E5bh.png)
... lol.
Where do you guys even find all this stuff o.O
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... lol.
Where do you guys even find all this stuff o.O
People tend to make them. There's a lot done for nullsec war propaganda. Some of them start to look rather ironic considering the way events turn out
(http://i.imgur.com/GdBi8Z6.gif)
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Yeh, the memes come from the beauty of Paint/Photoshop/etc and people seeing incidents.
Its all well and good, My butt is quite unhurt as I have no lossmail rage or tears over the event. I slept in, woke up probably around muster-time, then sat on the couch and watch Star Trek with Mirage, as we discussed that perhaps Diana Troi needs to have her breasts uncovered to use her empathic powers, then we giggled like nine-year olds and continued cracking jokes at it for the next few hours.
So all in all it didn't effect me much.
Large print:
I would rather role play with you guys than Dev Actors. Because for me it is not about influencing EVE. It is about having a good story.
:cube: :cube: :cube: :cube: :cube: :cube: :cube: :cube:
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D'awwww...
Also, meme lol. That one's one of Banksy's pieces from his recent 'installation' in New York City.
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I didn't make it to the event due to the TZ issues. Seeing how it came out I can't shake the feeling that the primary premise may have been to show how ineffectual the empires are against the null sec blocks. This to tie in with some of the themes for rubicon and beyond.
Story wise the empires now could be placed to say "well we're stuffed, we need to pit capsuleers against each other at a strategic level" and start to lift some of the restrictions on them. I don't think for a second sec levels will change but open the door to the player owned poco's gates etc etc.
Just as so much foreshadowing went on that anyone could see what a meat grinder this was going to be and eves own little chunuk bair event. Given the magic portals they can do I'd like to think there had to be some intent to it.
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The PF starts falling apart pretty quickly if the capsuleers ever get the upper hand on the Empires on their own, at least without being taken off the leash first.
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The problem with live events, is that it is hard or impossible, due to the nature of the rest of the game, to pull the wool over players eyes.
Players spend so much time looking at things closely, that the flaws in the event management mechanics are glaringly obvious - such as the weapon hitting for 0.0 damage, meaning the target was invulnerable.
People spend a lot of their time poring over game mechanics, looking for an edge, that sometimes players know more about some specific game mechanics than some ccp staff.
So, the deception is obvious, to older players, which hurts the believability of the event. Less so for newer players, who know less about the curiosities of the game mechanics.
Would have to question if this sort of thing leaves favourable impressions on those newer players though.
:ugh:
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I think a real solution is to distribute the event more.
10% Tidi? 2 Sites?
Let's do 10 sites. Spread out the camps, I promise you more of them will have longer fights. Just one or 1 2 actors per target site.
Then you have a real 'war' going on with lots of reports from different locations, people trying to get to the closest ones, and tidi effects and travel blocks significantly reduced.
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The problem with live events, is that it is hard or impossible, due to the nature of the rest of the game, to pull the wool over players eyes.
Players spend so much time looking at things closely, that the flaws in the event management mechanics are glaringly obvious - such as the weapon hitting for 0.0 damage, meaning the target was invulnerable.
People spend a lot of their time poring over game mechanics, looking for an edge, that sometimes players know more about some specific game mechanics than some ccp staff.
So, the deception is obvious, to older players, which hurts the believability of the event. Less so for newer players, who know less about the curiosities of the game mechanics.
Would have to question if this sort of thing leaves favourable impressions on those newer players though.
:ugh:
For the record, it doesn't.
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I think a real solution is to distribute the event more.
10% Tidi? 2 Sites?
Let's do 10 sites. Spread out the camps, I promise you more of them will have longer fights. Just one or 1 2 actors per target site.
Then you have a real 'war' going on with lots of reports from different locations, people trying to get to the closest ones, and tidi effects and travel blocks significantly reduced.
I think between choosing NPC Pirate Regions targets, creating NPC Jump Bridges/Titan Bridges from high-sec to either neutral NPC space (think Fed to Syndicate) or Secret Empire base in Pirate Region, it would spread things out and give High-Sec dwellers a taste for some normally null-sec only stuff. (Goal #1, expose players to different aspects of the game)
In addition, "deploying" some of the new stuff (mobile cyno inhibator for example) into the "target constellation" could give us a taste of what is to come as well. It would make sense for the pirates to deploy such tech to keep the Empire's from doing certain things and keeping opponents at arms length.
(Goal #2, introduce new equipment before launch)
I think CCP needs to revisit the goals of these events. This event seems to have gone so poorly that it missed the mark entirely.
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Reinheart, it was such a fiasco I am assuming there was intent at this point versus incompetence.
http://www.gameskinny.com/euksz/eve-online-live-event-bleating-of-the-lambs
I hope CCP enjoyed their little party.
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Event was ok-ish, but at the same time I saw mass tests on sisi that are far more organized than this event was, so yeah.
And, if it wasn't for Esna's post I wouldn't even know what happened and I was there from start to finish kind of. =D
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Reinheart, it was such a fiasco I am assuming there was intent at this point versus incompetence.
http://www.gameskinny.com/euksz/eve-online-live-event-bleating-of-the-lambs
I hope CCP enjoyed their little party.
This article is written by Poe and he does like to dramatize things.
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Reinheart, it was such a fiasco I am assuming there was intent at this point versus incompetence.
http://www.gameskinny.com/euksz/eve-online-live-event-bleating-of-the-lambs
I hope CCP enjoyed their little party.
Stopped reading at "Highsec players are generally averse to combat and conflict." because it's such an absurdly generalized statement, making it seem loads of unprepared and clueless people marched into the waiting guns of all the "pros" who do enjoy and are not averse to, PVP. It seem to set the stage for the whole rest of the post and I can easily guess what the tone and message is about. I have little desire to read the drivel of an elitist null-bear, assuming ofc that this is what it was.
If your not going to be fair on the target for your ridicule and conceded that loads of Highsec players enjoy plenty of PVP, I'm not going to give you my time to view your statements.
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It's Poetic Stanziel. Why the fuck were you even reading in the first place?
The guy hasn't posted something that wasn't alarmist bullshit since, like, ever.
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Ah, yes! The guy who grandstanded about how terribad EVE has become, and then RMTed from an obvious eBay account and is probably now banned for the rest of his days.
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It's Poetic Stanziel. Why the fuck were you even reading in the first place?
The guy hasn't posted something that wasn't alarmist bullshit since, like, ever.
Well, that kind of explain it, don't it? :P
I honestly did not know who he was, but I guess I do now.
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I've seen a couple of far better blog responses to this debacle - for instance, Jester's Trek (http://jestertrek.blogspot.com/2013/11/backfire.html), who does a good job of summarizing the nullsec vs. highsec expectations for the fight and cataloging all the mistakes made. Or Target Caller (http://targetcaller.blogspot.com/2013/11/razor-alliance-welcomes-you-to-null-sec.html), written by a RAZOR alliance member who - while utterly unrepentant for doing what nullsec alliances do - does a good job of showing that not all nullseccers are the stereotyped "HTFU or go back to highsec" and would in fact have preferred a better handling of the event as well.
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I've seen a couple of far better blog responses to this debacle - for instance, Jester's Trek (http://jestertrek.blogspot.com/2013/11/backfire.html), who does a good job of summarizing the nullsec vs. highsec expectations for the fight and cataloging all the mistakes made. Or Target Caller (http://targetcaller.blogspot.com/2013/11/razor-alliance-welcomes-you-to-null-sec.html), written by a RAZOR alliance member who - while utterly unrepentant for doing what nullsec alliances do - does a good job of showing that not all nullseccers are the stereotyped "HTFU or go back to highsec" and would in fact have preferred a better handling of the event as well.
Heh, those are too rare these days... :ugh:
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Thanks for the report.
Things like this merely show me that the current RP enviroment is untenable. The gap between what actually happens in game, and what is supposed (and RP-pretended) to happen is just too great. There are just lots of things that don't make any sense from an RP perspective:
An emergency call from the Empires/Concord for an extremely important mission but no real support in the form of Empire ships.
If its really that important, can't you even spare a few customs vessels? Why send utterly incompetent commanders? The only good RP reason could be that they want to increase the divide between null-sec power-bloc capsuleers and those that aren't. It would be cool if they went with that storyline, since it actually has a basis in EVE reality, instead of this trumped up artificial story about pirate sites.
The pirate defender fleets turned on the NPC faction battleships?
Most players don't show up out of any RP-loyalty, they're simple there for kills and loot. The story be damned.
Null-sec blocs that are nominally 'at war' not shooting each other but killing the CCP led fleets instead
What's the RP perspective for this? Massive Empires at war in nullsec, but they hate Concord and the Empires even more? Again, if you have a sandbox that works like this, you should base your story upon things like this: the divide between null-sec dweller and non-null dwellers. Yeah, maybe it doesn't make for a good story, but its better than whatever you try to make up that doesn't fit the reality of EVE at all.
With most of the playerbase having this playstyle, you either adapt your backstory to suit, or find yourself fighting the player-base at each turn to turn out a credible story, or simple ignore the playerbase and create your own story that doesn't have any points of interaction with them. CCP mostly does the last thing. Its like the RP equivalent of putting your fingers in your ears and singing 'lalalalala' and ignore the reality of the game around you.
Faction loyalty is dead, Empire loyalty is dead, pirate loyality is dead. Besides a few stubborn hanger-on (the RPers) the reality of the politics of EVE has little to do with factions and Empires.
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Thanks for the report.
Things like this merely show me that the current RP enviroment is untenable. The gap between what actually happens in game, and what is supposed (and RP-pretended) to happen is just too great. There are just lots of things that don't make any sense from an RP perspective:
An emergency call from the Empires/Concord for an extremely important mission but no real support in the form of Empire ships.
If its really that important, can't you even spare a few customs vessels? Why send utterly incompetent commanders? The only good RP reason could be that they want to increase the divide between null-sec power-bloc capsuleers and those that aren't. It would be cool if they went with that storyline, since it actually has a basis in EVE reality, instead of this trumped up artificial story about pirate sites.
The pirate defender fleets turned on the NPC faction battleships?
Most players don't show up out of any RP-loyalty, they're simple there for kills and loot. The story be damned.
Null-sec blocs that are nominally 'at war' not shooting each other but killing the CCP led fleets instead
What's the RP perspective for this? Massive Empires at war in nullsec, but they hate Concord and the Empires even more? Again, if you have a sandbox that works like this, you should base your story upon things like this: the divide between null-sec dweller and non-null dwellers. Yeah, maybe it doesn't make for a good story, but its better than whatever you try to make up that doesn't fit the reality of EVE at all.
With most of the playerbase having this playstyle, you either adapt your backstory to suit, or find yourself fighting the player-base at each turn to turn out a credible story, or simple ignore the playerbase and create your own story that doesn't have any points of interaction with them. CCP mostly does the last thing. Its like the RP equivalent of putting your fingers in your ears and singing 'lalalalala' and ignore the reality of the game around you.
Faction loyalty is dead, Empire loyalty is dead, pirate loyality is dead. Besides a few stubborn hanger-on (the RPers) the reality of the politics of EVE has little to do with factions and Empires.
^This, unfortunately. It's almost weird to have to RP about it, since the actual event and everything associated with it has become so tainted. The hisec v nullsec angle is a laughably bad concept for a story event, but otherwise it's mostly been people looking at CONCORD with anything ranging from contempt to pity. They're supposed to be the cops. We're supposed to be afraid of these people, thus either hiding out far from their reach or flying with the knowledge that we exist by their whim.
We're also now having to assume that CONCORD and the empires put aside their various differences, got together with CONCORD, put together a grand mission, and then had an ADD moment and just wandered off? It would be different if they got the fleet to where they needed to be and then betrayed/abandoned them, but it just seemed like they did something astounding by uniting these disparate political factions and then went... "meh."
How are we supposed to RP that?
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How are we supposed to RP that?
Following quote als does a neat job of indicating some of the things I find about EVE RP:
First I don't think there was a lot of people deliberately supporting pirate factions. There were just few fleets from different null and low-sec alliances that came for a fun PvP op and some slaughter of empire denizens. They were as eager to fight each other as to camp fleets coming from empire. It seems entirely possible that the facility that was destroyed – albeit too late – was brought down by them. RvB fleet came with the same goal; nobody in it really cared for the facility we were meant to destroy or defend, and we have visited the site only to try to chew on some Darkside BCs engaging some other fleet on grid.
At the end of the day, 99% of EVE players don't really care about the Empires, the storylines, the whole NPC side of EVE. They only care insofar it gets them wealth, reputation and kills.
Nobody cares.
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Saw this, thought it seemed relevant:
(http://i.imgur.com/if6QYcx.jpg)
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Saw this, thought it seemed relevant:
(http://i.imgur.com/if6QYcx.jpg)
/thread
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How are we supposed to RP that?
Following quote als does a neat job of indicating some of the things I find about EVE RP:
First I don't think there was a lot of people deliberately supporting pirate factions. There were just few fleets from different null and low-sec alliances that came for a fun PvP op and some slaughter of empire denizens. They were as eager to fight each other as to camp fleets coming from empire. It seems entirely possible that the facility that was destroyed – albeit too late – was brought down by them. RvB fleet came with the same goal; nobody in it really cared for the facility we were meant to destroy or defend, and we have visited the site only to try to chew on some Darkside BCs engaging some other fleet on grid.
At the end of the day, 99% of EVE players don't really care about the Empires, the storylines, the whole NPC side of EVE. They only care insofar it gets them wealth, reputation and kills.
Nobody cares.
I have stopped see Live Events as anything close to RP Events, they are simple not. Did so actually long before last Fanfest when CCP Falcon and CCP Eterne started with events again, but I quick realised that Event was not going in the favor of RP community. I simple listen to what little information that Dev actors give and try to deduct any information from that on what path that is most logic for me.
And yes the large portion of EVE doesn't care about backstory of EVE, not sure how CCP is trying to wave the backstory meatstick in front of those that doesnt care :psyccp:
I feel that CCP needs to sit down and find out how to differentiate the different types of events that can target different groups of players. And if events should to take place in null sec, which I think it should, it needs to be more organized to be able to handle that.
But a free for all :psyccp: why call for aid when nothing was shared, and when so, they did it on twitter, get me mad all the time.
Do events for itchy kill gratification players and do events or support for those who actually put down a bit of soul into this game as in backstory and fiction.
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Perhaps people would engage more with the background it there was some perceived reward for doing so?
No idea what sort of reward could be offered that wouldn't be horribly unbalancing though.
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Medals or recognition would already be something.
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Medals or recognition would already be something.
Caldari Prime was how many months ago again? :lol:
I don't think anyone's gotten the medals they were supposed to get for that, and of the events that have transpired since then I think only 3 or 4 resulted in news items that name-dropped players in particular. :\
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To be quite honest, I think the idea of building anything that would last more than a day or two would help. In both the Incursion events and A'J, the best RP (IMO, at least) came from people trying to build new stuff, not "win" the RP.
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To be quite honest, I think the idea of building anything that would last more than a day or two would help. In both the Incursion events and A'J, the best RP (IMO, at least) came from people trying to build new stuff, not "win" the RP.
Of course. This has been a neglected part in EVE for years. People go through great effort to build things with ugly stuff like cans. If we give players access to all the structures to build stuff, we would see beautiful structures erected.
And besides, its not like there's a shortage of space in EVE.
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I didn't even mean physically constructing structures in gamespace (though that is cool too) so much as building an idea, narrative, or effort that creates more than a transient effect on the game or its community.
For instance:
During the Incursion leadup events, some of the best RP I was involved in was the way players were able to build a narrative around trying to counter Nation attacks - particularly with respect to intercepting planet-bound dropships or disrupting Nation wormholes. Players theorized, held in-space "weapons testing" events, and then threw their ideas at actors. When one tactic failed, a new one was thought up; use of graviton ECM evolved into use of graviton smartbombs which in turn evolved into the use of a giant freighter-shaped bomb. We talked about deploying troops planetside, about trying to EMP Nation shuttles in mid-atmosphere, about trying to hack Nation motherships. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't.
But.
All of this required a community to come together to dream up these ideas, choose who to involve, plan events, and maintain communications. People chose to willingly involve others than themselves, their alliance, etc. in this process - not for glory, killmails, or loots but for the enjoyment of a shared story. A lot of those involved weren't what we might think of as "traditional RPers" - they didn't necessarily hang out in any of the channels or forums, choose to develop deep, complex characters, or involve themselves in out-of-capsule storylines. But, IMO, they were RPers because they chose to look at a situation and look to see what kind of a story could be built rather than just going "Can I kill stuff? Yes? Cool, let's drop a hundred-man alpha fleet on it and laugh all the way home."
Apologies for the wall'o'text rambling.
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Medals or recognition would already be something.
Caldari Prime was how many months ago again? :lol:
I don't think anyone's gotten the medals they were supposed to get for that, and of the events that have transpired since then I think only 3 or 4 resulted in news items that name-dropped players in particular. :\
I insisted we get CalPrime medals. Stamped my foot.
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I didn't even mean physically constructing structures in gamespace (though that is cool too) so much as building an idea, narrative, or effort that creates more than a transient effect on the game or its community.
Building an idea or narrative is fine, but if you have no way to objectify it, the narratives you can form mostly consists of capsuleer talking to each other and shooting each other. Especially when narratives involves conflict, which tend to be the most interesting narratives. Without some kind of objectification, conflicting narratives tend to end in a 'yes I did, no you didn't' exchange.
In the case of the nation attacks, CCP acted as GM and provided the objectifation. Both by their 'neutrality' and by creating in-game representations that supported the storyline. The players can then form their stories around that.
EVE is sorely lacking in tools which can objectify common narratives, especially narratives that involve the NPC part of EVE.
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Medals or recognition would already be something.
Yes, and simple and not game breaking.
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EVE is sorely lacking in tools which can objectify common narratives, especially narratives that involve the NPC part of EVE.
This, and I know that it has been up for discussion before, think CCP is handcuffed though with to much restrictions or lack of time to do anything. But as been stated previously it has been neglected for a long time and now CCP is trying to conform different media and a larger audience.
they should split the difference between RP events with a deep backstory meaning and Live Events, big is not always better.
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Operation Spectre - Event Breakdown and FAQ
14.11.2013 11:12 |
By CCP Goliath
| Comments
On behalf of the live events team, I would like to tell you all about an event that we ran last week dubbed Operation Spectre. Let‘s get into the background first. With the roadmap for Rubicon laid out, we thought it would be interesting to finally tackle something we have been thinking about since we started working on events – taking an in development feature and rolling it out with lore context and player involvement. The feature we settled on was Ghost Sites. This made sense as both CCP Affinity and CCP Abraxas were on the development team creating the feature, and the sites involved pirates--which gave us a chance to do something else that has been oft-requested of the events team – running an event in null sec.
We had some other goals prior to deciding anything about the event. We wanted to have the event story be more flexible and player driven, to act as something of a counterpoint to the more scripted story section of The Battle for Caldari Prime. We wanted to use social media to flesh out our event characters and allow people to obviously pick sides, though this goal ended up being put on the back burner due to time constraints. Finally, we wanted to run an event in more than one system at once to mitigate some of the participation problems that Caldari Prime ran into.
Our first brainstorming session yielded some positive stuff. The basic premise was that pirates were reverse engineering and "jailbreaking“ certain new technologies (mobile structures, warp enhancement, etc), some of which made the Empires very nervous. Once the Empires found out about this, they needed to put a stop to it, particularly before a certain new faction of independent spacefarers started looking any deeper into it. They would put out a call to raise a capsuleer militia and take them to the pirates' front door to obliterate their laboratories and hopefully destroy the research contained within. We decided that to flesh it out, we would use news articles and a chronicle. 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).
On the day of the event we had our target systems reinforced, our developer volunteers in their pirate ships all ready to defend their precious research against untold numbers of capsuleers, and we were ready to go! We put out a news item giving those who wanted to fight for the pirates a direction to head in, both to give the actual pirate faction sympathizers a place to go, and to provide a way to get involved in the event for the criminally-minded of you who could not enter high sec. Players started flooding into the staging systems of Sarum Prime and Meves well in advance of the event, time dilation kicked in, and it quickly became clear that we needed to start moving some of the eager participants out early. 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. We decided to reinforce Ihal and make a few broadcasts on Twitter and other social channels to direct people paying attention to these towards Ihal. This trickle effect worked well and helped deal with server load.
The Empire representative actors logged in and started to interact with people, forming them up and telling them where to go. Both fleets started to move towards pirate space, though this had not been made clear to everyone in the fleets due to the covert nature of the operation. Meanwhile, pirate actors were marshaling their forces in Utopia and FD-MLJ, ready to provide a stern resistance to the Empires and their affiliates. Some of the capsuleers turned away at the entry to low security space, unwilling to risk their clones for the Empires. More baulked at the idea of entering null sec, the area of space where pirates and alliances of capsuleers rule the roost.
Thanks to Maximus Aerelius for the screenshot! (Click to enlarge)
The force led by the Gallente and Minmatar jumped into Syndicate and the target system was announced – 8V-SJJ. They reached their target and began fighting the Vindicators of the Serpentis Corporation, who were backed up by their motley crew of capsuleers from FD-MLJ, among others. They succeeded in taking down the Vindicator forces, but were unable to destroy the mining outpost-turned-laboratory before the Daredevil getaway crew of the pirates managed to salvage the last materials there and set detonation charges to ruin any chance the Empires had of gathering any evidence. The pirate support fleet made short work of the remnants of the Empire affiliated capsuleers.
The Amarr-Caldari mustered-militias from Sarum Prime and Ihal had a tougher time ahead of them. Beset by time dilation and infiltrated by rogue intelligence gatherers from capsuleer alliances, they progressed along their route through low sec, oblivious to what lay in store just a few jumps along the route. With a ready supply of intelligence from the fleet, several alliances had set up a wall of warp interdiction bubbles inside the gate that led to Doril. Word of this got back to the Empire forces and they sat outside the gate, pondering the possible fate of those who had joined them. In the end, the need to destroy their pirate laboratory target was too great and they ordered the fleet to jump into the gate camp. Though this spelled certain death for a portion of their fleet, they hoped to get enough people through to reach their final destination and stop the pirates research. They failed. The coordinated forces of the interdicting capsuleers were able to pick off much of the fleet, though the Empire representatives did manage to get through Doril alive and muster what remained of their army. They reached their destination RMOC-W, but again were thwarted at the hands of the defenders who, as their counterparts in 8V-SJJ had done, gathered their materials, set their detonation charges, and fled.
In the aftermath, battle raged on. Pirate Dramiels and Daredevils sought their escape, many meeting their end on the journey, and their mysterious cargoes of Blue Boxes were lost to the pirates (though the purpose of the box is not yet known).
F.A.Q.
Now you‘re up to speed with what happened, we would like to address some frequently asked questions surrounding events in general, and some on the event last week. That being said, we know you will have many more questions and the team will be on hand to answer them in the comments thread. It‘s alright to be negative, but please remember to keep your feedback constructive.
Q. What was the expected outcome of yesterday's event? Was more than one result considered? Did things go to plan?
A. While there was an outcome that we anticipated; we wanted to leave the event as open ended as possible. We expected the Empire forces to successfully destroy the structure, interdict the pirate frigates who were trying to salvage what they could, and "win", so to speak. The actual outcome was different - the pirates won and got away with their research, and although the destruction of the structure was inevitable, the story impact of the actual outcome takes things off in a different direction than we had initially expected, which is cool!
Q. There has been talk in the past of better tools for live event teams. Is there any progress on this?
A. While the development priorities of the EVE project have not resulted in development of tools to improve the facilitation of live events at this time, the team has come up with some ideas to mitigate some of the limitations that the client and environment lend to the running of events. For instance, actor-driven storyline exposition may be contained to moderated chat channels in future so that players can follow the thread of the event without confusion developing through local chat. Ultimately, the old adage “a bad workman blames his tools” rings true once again, and working with the tools we do have to be as varied and flexible as possible in our events is the primary focus of the team. We learn more each time!
Q. High player interest is great, but causes Time Dilation bottlenecks. Can you foresee a way to deliver a more optimal live event experience?
A. We always strive to engage people and the participation figures at our larger events show that they aren’t just a niche experience. Balancing this with ensuring adequate server performance is tricky. We can control the size of events by controlling the information flow, but that creates the problem of having to be constantly up to date with what is happening where. For the larger events we use more large scale advertising, and this obviously pays off as we can see from the participation in this event and the Caldari Prime event, but this doesn’t always pair up well with ensuring a consistent experience for everyone and while there is an ongoing internal effort to improve cluster performance, it also forces us to be a little creative in our staging of events. We don’t have the magic recipe yet, but we’re getting better at engaging more people and we learn lessons on how to optimize the experience with every event. Different types of events can also be used to engage many people without causing undue load, for instance the Sanctuary Image Contest that we ran earlier this year, though these come with their own costs too.
Q. Are concerns about favoritism a barrier to running smaller, more specific events?
A. Favoritism is something we are extremely conscious of in the events team. We both seek to provide interactive content shaped by the players to add flavor to the EVE Universe, and to get involved where we can to enrich player created content. Obviously we can’t be at every event we are requested to be, so guidelines and rules have to exist to ensure we aren’t giving certain groups more attention than others. It is important for us to remember that the squeaky wheel shouldn’t always get the grease – just because there are particularly active or interested parties doesn’t mean they inherently deserve more of our time and attention than parties that are quieter but just as interested, or curious but not the type to ask for our help/time/participation. It’s also important to make sure we don’t show up where we aren’t wanted, hence our reluctance to run events in player owned null sec space, or wormholes (though there are plenty of logistical reasons in there too).
Q. Is it considered a pre-requisite to be conversant with large fleet doctrine in order to enjoy live events?
A. Absolutely not! While this event in particular had a focus on large fleets, and getting into null sec is obviously going to result in some fleet warfare, there are and have been plenty of event possibilities that would need no fleets at all, or small gangs, or can be interacted with solo. For the larger events, it is likely that they will trend toward being in fleets, but not necessarily utilizing the strict doctrines you see at high level play. One lesson we have learned through this event is that we should keep our actors out of fleets. While this is a concession to immersion for some people, it is also deemed necessary to ensure as level a playing field as possible. Therefore it is important for us to develop other ways than a fleet to keep people informed and able to participate. That being said, there are always plenty of player run fleets at events and many of these are well managed and openly joinable.
Q. Are there plans to host live events for those who enjoy different playstyles?
A. Experimenting with new things is definitely something that we are very interested in as a group. As outlined above, this event ticked a few boxes for us, but there are many more left un-ticked! We have an idea for an arc that has resource gathering mechanics in it to put our more industrial inclined players to the test, but we don’t have a timeframe for running it so I won’t go into more details at this time.
Q. Why did you use Twitter to get information to players about locations rather than using in game channels
A. This refers to us asking players via Twitter and other social communication platforms to move from Sarum Prime to Ihal. At the time, Sarum Prime had over 1000 players in it and was spiking heavy time dilation. Asking people to move using in game channels would have caused a mass move of players and that could have had impact on the health of the cluster. 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.
Q. Why was Doril on the route despite it being a staging location for an ongoing war?
A. We wanted to get into Curse with minimal jumps to our target systems, and going through Derelik was the best way to do that. The other ingress to Curse that doesn’t involve going through player owned space is the Great Wildlands, which would have added a very large number of jumps to the route as well as making us stage from Gallente or Minmatar space for both events. We did not thoroughly research each system on the route, so we were unaware that Doril was a staging system until it was past the point of being able to do anything about it. That said, activity fluctuates and it’s reasonable to expect the space we want to use for events to also be getting used for other purposes, so whether these considerations should even be a part of event planning is a subject up for discussion.
Q. Movement and fleet coordination quickly became a problem. What would you do in future to mitigate these issues?
A. On the movement side, we would like to try using titans to bridge people to an event destination. That's certainly something we could see being very advantageous as well as giving people a chance to do something and see something they normally wouldn't in their usual gameplay. We did discuss that, during the event, there were problems with people falling behind due to being in different ships, or having to wait to jump through gates. This is regrettable and definitely not something we would like to happen again as it has many knock-on effects to the enjoyment of the event. 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.
Q. Why were the routes so long?
A. So that we had routes to collect more people on, and that felt like they came from the heartland of the empire. 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.
Q. Will there be more wrap-up/post-action blogs like this for future events?
A. Yes. During the retrospective following this event the team identified that one thing we want to do is to have a wrap-up blog that catches people up with the whole story of an arc. That way if you only dip in and out, or if you aren't familiar at all with what goes on with events/story, you will have one place to go to access that information. Right now info tends to be scattered in a few different places and this is something we want to change. We are also looking into having an introductory dev blog prior to large scale events that catches people up with the story so far and gives them clear instructions on how to participate in the event, as that was clearly lacking here.
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One of the biggest issues with events like this is the scale and the source of players.
1000+ players for each fleet or something along those numbers. So, trying ot organize them into a more cohesive fleet requires 2 things: Common coms for all, and a doctrine of sorts. Either that or trying to organize all "averagely similar" ships into similar groupings, ergo all 'long range' BS's in one group, and brawler cruisers in one, all the fast tacklers in one, etc. Then all of these have to work together. Then you have to hope their communication holds up and everyone work out together.
Needless to say this is not going to happen without A) a miracle or B) pre-announced ship and fittings needs, and neither of these are viable. Hoping that hundreds if not thousands of players somehow work well together without prior warning and organization is not viable. Pre-announcing needs is not viable either. The opposition will simply custom-tailor a perfect response.
So, in this case of "take 1000+ randoms and shove them into null into a waiting hundred's strong well organized doctrine wall of guns" obviously failed hard. It will always fail due to the nature of how this kind of event goes. You simply can't take a huge number of people and send them off to hostile space on their own with no organization and cohesion - someone somewhere WILL infiltrate and leak the info, somewhere they will be farmed.
I'm glad to see CCP acknowledging their mistakes in this event and to hear things from their perspective is cool, but frankly unless these concerns are fixed CCP-led events to null or low is going to end the same way every time: someone somewhere will crash the party, in the name of loot, kill-mails, and "ha ha we troll you." It don't bode very well for any future events outside of High-sec. It's a shame, but the very nature of EVE likely makes it an impossibility, unless CCP is willing ot contact and use specific group to help organize their events. This would smell to badly of favoritism so it's likely never going to happen.
Well, I guess we will have to wait and see how this goes in the future. I just don't hold up much hope. :(
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That is presented in a rather... good light.
I have sometimes a hard time remembering it's about the same event...
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That is presented in a rather... good light.
I have sometimes a hard time remembering it's about the same event...
CCP's Modified Rose-colored Glasses have a bonus attribute to perceiving alternate versions of reality. :P
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That blog post was a stirring fiction story.
Sigh.
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Real question, since people tend to say that CCP employees are also in nullsec blocs, hence why people thought they did this intentionally.
Having read that response, then read everything said in their massive flame thread about it... do CCP employees play or even like this game?
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That blog post was a stirring fiction story.
Sigh.
Yeah, this. I can't tell if this is more incompetence, or deliberate effort to pretend this wasn't a disaster of an event. It's getting harder to assume stupidity - it's just too blatantly dishonest.
You'd think that CCP would have figured out that pretending everything is fine works out poorly when so many people are upset/angry. If you run an event, and it turns into a disaster, the players respond a lot better to "Whoops, we done fucked up, sorry" than to "Wasn't that awesome?"
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Quite.
Noticeably, he doesn't for a moment address the possibility that if you're heading towards one of the most significantly active nullsec regions in the cluster (Curse), maybe this isn't the best region to aim for?\
EDIT: We're not the only ones to see this either. Judging from the thread on Reddit, even nullsec is looking at this blog and going "really CCP? really?"
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My only guess is that his boss went, "Uh. Spin it. Spin it as hard as you can," and he went, "Well, okayyy..."
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My only guess is that his boss went, "Uh. Spin it. Spin it as hard as you can," and he went, "Well, okayyy..."
I don't like to conspiracy theory, but I'm inclined to go with this. Goliath is QA. Spin isn't something I'd expect out of him.
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Q. What was the expected outcome of yesterday's event? Was more than one result considered? Did things go to plan?
A. While there was an outcome that we anticipated; we wanted to leave the event as open ended as possible. We expected the Empire forces to successfully destroy the structure, interdict the pirate frigates who were trying to salvage what they could, and "win", so to speak. The actual outcome was different - the pirates won and got away with their research, and although the destruction of the structure was inevitable, the story impact of the actual outcome takes things off in a different direction than we had initially expected, which is cool!
This... is either a blatant lie or distressingly stupid.
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As many of you corporate workers know, what comes out of PR and what is actually happening can be on different planets.
:roll:
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well, since event actors are no longer allowed to be in player-owned channels, then this kind of organisation is the pattern for the future, isn't it ?
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Q. What was the expected outcome of yesterday's event? Was more than one result considered? Did things go to plan?
A. While there was an outcome that we anticipated; we wanted to leave the event as open ended as possible. We expected the Empire forces to successfully destroy the structure, interdict the pirate frigates who were trying to salvage what they could, and "win", so to speak. The actual outcome was different - the pirates won and got away with their research, and although the destruction of the structure was inevitable, the story impact of the actual outcome takes things off in a different direction than we had initially expected, which is cool!
This... is either a blatant lie or distressingly stupid.
The structures were apparently indestructible. So blatant lie it seems like.
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Q. What was the expected outcome of yesterday's event? Was more than one result considered? Did things go to plan?
A. While there was an outcome that we anticipated; we wanted to leave the event as open ended as possible. We expected the Empire forces to successfully destroy the structure, interdict the pirate frigates who were trying to salvage what they could, and "win", so to speak. The actual outcome was different - the pirates won and got away with their research, and although the destruction of the structure was inevitable, the story impact of the actual outcome takes things off in a different direction than we had initially expected, which is cool!
This... is either a blatant lie or distressingly stupid.
The structures were apparently indestructible. So blatant lie it seems like.
CCP as repeatedly insisted that they were not indestructible.
While I didn't make it to the end room, I'd be willing to bet there were a few LCOs mixed in with the target structure. People probably shot the wrong thing and got the zero damage message, and mistakenly assumed all hope was lost.
I've played enough missions to know that not everything in EVE can be blown up, even when there's something you should be blowing up.
It's also worth noting that the nullsec crowd did end up mopping the floor with the dev fleet and the structures.
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I have spoken to three people - one at Syndicate, two at the Curse event - who all confirmed that they were repeatedly landing hits for 0 damage. I find the suggestion that CCP intended to swap the target structures out for destructible versions at some point to be the most reasonable suggestion, but if that was the plan then they either forgot, didn't do it correctly, or the conditions for the swap weren't met.
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Q. What was the expected outcome of yesterday's event? Was more than one result considered? Did things go to plan?
A. While there was an outcome that we anticipated; we wanted to leave the event as open ended as possible. We expected the Empire forces to successfully destroy the structure, interdict the pirate frigates who were trying to salvage what they could, and "win", so to speak. The actual outcome was different - the pirates won and got away with their research, and although the destruction of the structure was inevitable, the story impact of the actual outcome takes things off in a different direction than we had initially expected, which is cool!
This... is either a blatant lie or distressingly stupid.
The structures were apparently indestructible. So blatant lie it seems like.
CCP as repeatedly insisted that they were not indestructible.
While I didn't make it to the end room, I'd be willing to bet there were a few LCOs mixed in with the target structure. People probably shot the wrong thing and got the zero damage message, and mistakenly assumed all hope was lost.
I've played enough missions to know that not everything in EVE can be blown up, even when there's something you should be blowing up.
It's also worth noting that the nullsec crowd did end up mopping the floor with the dev fleet and the structures.
That's what makes that bit about their expectation of the highsec fleet so mindblowing. How the Hell did they figure that wouldn't turn into a shooting gallery for nullsec alliances?
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IC, the event was a disaster (from the empires viewpoint anyway).
OOC, I think it pretty much as well as the first empire -> 0.0 event could go. And considering the poor choices made by CCP, it actually went pretty good. On top, that whole storyline of the growing gap between empires and capsuleers is actually (although unintentionally) quite nicely underlined by this event, in my opinion.
Now, some of what CCP wrote down does make me wonder if they know the game they've created and that worries me a bit, but hey... :psyccp:. I guess I've learned not to expect miracles from them.
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I honestly fear the direction they are taking with that gap between capsuleers and empires growing bigger and bigger, and capsuleers emancipating themselves and getting their own empires. While it can surely bring interesting things, it's basically widening the gap even more between us and the lore... It's already annoying as it is...
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I honestly fear the direction they are taking with that gap between capsuleers and empires growing bigger and bigger, and capsuleers emancipating themselves and getting their own empires. While it can surely bring interesting things, it's basically widening the gap even more between us and the lore... It's already annoying as it is...
On the other hand, given CCP's handling of events, it's quite possible that they'll simply drive players into the arms of the empires, from the player's point of view.
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Or, we'll all just forget this in a few weeks, with the exception of the rather eternal reputation of CCP's event team as being 'fuckin derplords'.
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Or, we'll all just forget this in a few weeks, with the exception of the rather eternal reputation of CCP's event team as being 'fuckin derplords'.
Sometimes I love you so much.
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Or, we'll all just forget this in a few weeks, with the exception of the rather eternal reputation of CCP's event team as being 'fuckin derplords'.
Sometimes I love you so much.
Only sometimes?
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Remember, that's Vince. His default mode of interaction with the rest of reality is HATEHATEHATEHATE. ;)
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Remember, that's Vince. His default mode of interaction with the rest of reality is HATEHATEHATEHATE. ;)
I think this picture taken of Vince spells something different.
Namely WUBWUBWUBWUB ;)
(http://i.imgur.com/9aWmF5B.png?1)
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There really isn't an events team anymore anyway.
Falcon is busy with additional tasks. Eterne is busy with the New player training event things.
So...
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New players event what ?
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the things where CCP shows rookie players about things. Eterne runs some part of these. If I could connect to eve's website, I could get a link, but I can't.
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New players event what ?
I suppose Louella means this (http://community.eveonline.com/news/news-channels/eve-online-news/new-player-training-session-pvp-fleet/).
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Remember, that's Vince. His default mode of interaction with the rest of reality is HATEHATEHATEHATE. ;)
I think this picture taken of Vince spells something different.
Namely WUBWUBWUBWUB ;)
*Awesome Picture*
A teacup of love for you as well. Just this once.
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Remember, that's Vince. His default mode of interaction with the rest of reality is HATEHATEHATEHATE. ;)
I think this picture taken of Vince spells something different.
Namely WUBWUBWUBWUB ;)
(http://i.imgur.com/9aWmF5B.png?1)
Oh sure, it all starts as pink. But then the hate suffuses and infects the fluffy, twisting it and destroying it, consuming the very soul of pink in a vortex of loathing. Then he goes off and starts giving people cryptic advice about time travel.
(http://viralfilm.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2013/11/darko.jpg)