Oooh, yes! Let me share one of my all-time favorite memories from CCP days!
So this is back in the Sansha's Nation Live Events era. A quick recap for those who missed it is basically, Sansha's Nation are invading capsuleer space and using wormholes to do so by sending their invasion fleets through them from some unknown location.
We (CCP Headfirst and I) know that at some point, inevitably, people are going to want to know where these ships are coming from - what's on the other side of the wormhole. So Headfirst (I think, perhaps one of our other level designers) starts on that. We build a dungeon/site on our internal servers to depict just a glimpse - but a scary one, we hope - of what lurks on the other side. He spends hours creating a mahoosive fleet. Shit is pretty laggy, I recall, and one of the DBAs in Iceland is like "Why is [internal server name] behaving like shit?". Good times. When it's completed, I take a screenshot, prettify it a little in Photoshop...
...and then, we wait.
In fact, as I type this, I realize that I can't recall if we poke and nudge a little, to imply that it's possible to send a camera probe through the wormhole, or if perhaps this whole idea is originally spurred by players roleplaying trying to send camera probes through. I really can't recall. One of the great things about running Live Events was that so often, we'd be inspired by player input and react to it, rather than go in with our own ideas (or alternatively, we go in with our own ideas, and then the input we get from players improves upon it or outright replaces our own, it was so cool letting things flow more or less organically).
Anyways, it eventually happens. We have this character called Mouse Nell trying to get a glimpse of the other side. We're about to make people's head spin. It's pretty exciting.
One thing about throwing it over to players though, is that it's also a little terrifying. There's so much you can't predict in terms of how they will react and what they will do. As a long time member of the RP community I'm able to counter this somewhat since I know a lot of the self-described roleplayers in EVE, and I can reasonably predict how they might react to things. But, as time goes on, and people of all kinds get involved in these events, it becomes important to involve as many as possible, and not just keep it to the RP community. This "Mouse Nell" person, I don't know who they are, and we have no idea how they're going to react when we send them the image. Will they keep it to themselves and hoard the knowledge? Will they run with it? Perhaps some other unforseen outcome?
The camera probe comes back with the image.
![](https://tufl.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/sansha-fleet.jpg)
Image from
here.
Mouse's first words are "...so many". Headfirst and I are cackling like schoolchildren. So far so good.
And then (I can't fully remember the words, so I'll paraphrase) Mouse says:
"So, I've got some good news and some bad news guys. The good news is that the image is really clear!"
We laughed for a solid five minutes. I'm grinning like an idiot now just thinking about that line. What a response / way to play it! We could've sat in a room with the entire storyline team for a week trying to script this, and wouldn't have come up with anything near as perfect.