Post by Azherae on 2022-04-30 16:29:35
We have not received permission from maouw to share the quoted post.
An event system cannot be for the sake of entertaining players if it is meant to be part of immersion. The player, in my opinion, must never feel 'like it's been too long since an event happened' and ALSO feel justified in expecting one.
I'll go all the way down to the most basic so that I don't end up talking about other games from my perspective. I'll put just a basic paste from Besieged pre-event mechanics at the end. But for stuff related to my opinions on events, let's use just MINECRAFT.
Let's say you're the sort of player who lives in 'villages' in Minecraft. Every so often, a 'Pillager patrol' type enemy spawns and wanders toward or into your village. They start attacking villagers, who you are possibly invested in if you were playing that way. If you're prepared, it's interesting. If you're unprepared, it's terrifying, because if you kill the leader while they are in the village, a full assault begins. That full assault is the event.
This doesn't happen often enough for the prepared player to 'expect it as a challenge to break up monotony'. It doesn't happen often enough for the unprepared player to 'be fearing the countdown, scrambling to get prepared again above all else'.
What that player type normally does with their time:
Build up their levels maybe, build houses, earn village currency to enhance their gear, mine to get iron for anvils to do the enhancing.
What that player type needs to do in the event:
Fight off 4-6 waves of relatively powerful attacking forces from multiple sides, more complicated if they didn't build up walls or defenses in all directions.
What that player needs to do to prepare for this:
Assuming they don't want to just always avoid it (there's ways to drastically increase your ability to avoid this entirely) they need to - build up their gear, optimize the village layout for defense, possibly put armor on the villagers in some versions, make sure they always have enough food and weaponry stashed.
But if these raids were so common that they were 'part of main gameplay', not only would the loop change, they would just add things like 'preparing heavily for raids' to the player's 'what they normally do with their time'. At that point, it's not an event, to me. This has to be a choice, the emotional payoff of 'being prepared for X event' diminishes when you're just 'expected to be prepared because it happens often enough'.
And unfortunately, since you did 'poke the bear'.
I'm losing interest in this game somewhat for what is possibly an unfair reason. Steven doesn't talk about anything I actually find innovative yet. There's a lot of 'cool sounding things' that are really just 'the obvious next iteration of things that the better games have done for years', as your own post kind of pointed out.
"We will have a dynamic event system." - For an MMO? this has no meaning to me. It's a 'no brainer', because games without them aren't fun and the good ones have been doing it for years, even some of the lackluster MMOs manage, and the implementation is the issue.
The fact that 'weather will change the world' is such a 'yeah... and...?' to me, that I basically don't care. I absolutely don't fault Steven for mentioning it and hyping it for all those people who have somehow never played a game with serious weather-event-spawn dynamics. Throne and Liberty is currently doing the same, talking about 'weather will change the power of your spells' because apparently people think this is new and dynamic or something.
I'm just blessed to have played things that make this all 'basic' to me, and I continue to play them. The only thing this 'event system' is offering me is 'a slightly more living version of a game I already play' without any of the guaranteed quality or any of the things that would improve it, so far, so what's the point until they show us more?
Here's the paste, this just explains the buildup to the Besieged event:
The Besieged map displays the state of the enemy armies. Each of them has a strength level, "Enemy Forces".
When this number is below 100, the enemy is "Training".
During Training the force level rises slowly.
The speed of Training depends on the number of Archaic Mirrors they have when their invasion window opens.
The force level can be lowered by defeating monsters in the appropriate stronghold. However, once it is reduced to a certain point, the rate of the increase of that force will accelerate.
Defeating a Notorious Monster inside that base will automatically reduce their force by 1.
Their force level is increased by 1 when a player inside that stronghold is KO'ed.