Event System Follow-up Discussion!

We have not received permission from maouw to share the quoted post.

I like the idea of 'nonprogression' based 'quests' and 'competitions'. These events fit really well as an extension of happiness based investment quests. The event system is the sort of system that let's node communities host their own festivities and create their own sense of 'life' outside of the humdrum of siege, caravan, raids and guild wars. While I still think this type of thing should be largely 'global' and created by IS, giving tools for 'local' level events for nodes to effectively make their own holidays or host their own user generated 'quests'/'content' is probably a good tool to put in the belt.

I feel like games that have used this system in the past have fallen flat more so because they fail to produce global/publisher driven events themselves leaving it entirely to the players rather than the concept of user directed content with an established set of guidelines, costs, rewards, and purpose in other systems in the game. As an RPG it's useful for the game to give these tools directly rather than relying wholly on player activity as moderation both moderate the level of impact such events can have on the over all game play.

After all, we don't want unimmersive events, useless events, or events that have disproportionate impacts to the area compared to others. IS is still largely responsible for keeping up general activity levels in their game and games that rely too heavily on user generated content tend to flop in the long run. Yet it still has great potential if it's actually integrated into systems in a way that if not performed doesn't cause a total collapse of player activity or give guilds 'yet another tool for exploiting the game through sheer numbers'. So in a sense codifying such things and integrating them into the various systems in game can create a sort of hybrid user/producer published content that I think that more games could use. Elite Dangerous really pushes on some game play boundaries I'm surprised isn't more common given how effective they are.

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No disagreements here. Events can definitely become unbalanced without some form of cost or timer.

Sorry it took awhile to get to you @maouw , but you asked a question I felt needed a slightly more in depth answer and I've been busy.

We have not received permission from maouw to share the quoted post.

Depends on the rewards and how effective opposition to the event type in question by foreign actors is doesn't it?

I would figure artificial limitations like cool down timers and the like would make sense when the 'positive reward' is also 'easy to achieve'. But you don't HAVE to make events 'be easy to achieve'. I think 'number of slots you have available for mayoral initiated quests' (which is almost as much of a direct cap as a cool down timer) as well as the 'mandatory timer for how long a quest is open' is probably the better thing to use as a limiter for things that would have a direct positive outcome for the node in question.

That's sort of why I was thinking that it would be useful to have a category that both costs resources to initiate but produces a positive result and another that costs basically nothing but has a 'reduction of a negative result'. For sake of clarity my definition for 'negative result' is "something that would reduce or destroy current value or the ability to create value harder" and positive "creating value from nothing or making it easier to create value".

It's not that I think the 'reducing a negative result' missions should cost 'nothing'. After all that would be inflationary in a deceptive way (dm me if you want to discuss that but I am so not going into that much detail in a dev discussion lol). It's more so that the resource sink itself is what you would technically use to 'pay out to participants' since again the intention is to reduce a negative effect/situation, not generate a positive one. They are protecting their stuff, improving their roads, etc.They'll get paid for the effort in a round about way through the mats they just 'farmed' by the node but the larger 'payment' is lowering the risk of loosing their larger investments.

For the purely positive missions on the other hand, having an upfront cost from the node's coffers makes a lot more sense. The node needs some skin in the game in this case where as when you are trying to reduce the negative effect, your skin is already in said game. Of course this means that the opposition can have a more direct impact on your node degrading/losing opportunities which means it's more attractive for an opposing node to start running interference. That makes it a little more difficult to calculate how much risk and how many limitations like the ones I described at the beginning are necessary.

It's better and a little easier from a game design perspective, to balance cost of resources to reward generated than it is 'likelihood of failure due to opposition or lack of player engagement.'

I think balancing 'how effectively an event can get squashed by foreign actors' vs 'the reward' is pretty difficult to achieve since it's a factor that would depend on server culture, population density, etc. You would kind of have to tune things by 'cost to initiate' and leave in an 'average' margin for ease of interference in completion of targets by how the missions themselves can be completed. It's easier to drop off mats than it is to rack up red kills for example since you still keep mats on death.

tl;dr: Yes the coffers of a node are an effective instrument for mitigating frequency of events and how much rewards can be reaped, but their are other tools for managing this without directly capping them if the devs think it's necessary given their planned event design. I think it's better to indirectly limit them via the structure of said quests and the parameters for them. Overall both types of mayoral missions would offer ample opportunity for politically driven PvP and PvE but that means you are already working with a risk vs reward structure via the corruption system on the player level, so your question is a difficult one to answer without more data on what events and rewards they have in mind for the event system...

We have not received permission from maouw to share the quoted post.

I'm not as much a fan as it has a similar drag effect coffers does. Why limit something directly when you can limit it via the cost or parameters of the actions in question.

Amount in coffers are more related to mayoral decisions and community support and there are real limits on the latter that can be overcome by good community campaigning, offering a better node experience, etc. I think we will often see influx of player activity on occasion that can't really be accounted for by the node system itself and keeping coffer based and parameter based limitations as the primary design for limiting event impact and frequency allows for a type of flexibility that can handle that overflow im a way hard slots cannot.

On the other hand it would keep the number of node quests/events less overwhelming and not detracting from global events/node events. So there are definitely benefits to that approach. I am a big fan of mayors needing to make actual choices and possibly curry favor with since constituents over others. This type of limitation definitely achieves that at least. I still think coffer based limitations offer that same feature as well though.

Which ever limitations achieves the most community agency with minimal clutter or meta gaming is good in my book.