What irks me the most about events (and note that I don't say I dislike them; I do like them!) is that sometimes it feels like only "famous" people can get it going. I've been poking and prodding about the miasma all I can, and gotten ignored. I'm betting that later today, someone else will go and do the exact same thing, and they will get a response.

Oh I think that has much less to do with the prominence of a player and much more to do with the admin being ready (or even present) to progress the event.

There is that, sure, but it always seems to be the same group of people getting to talk to the NPCs. Joe Nobody is far less likely to get a response than Urist McCityLeader.

I stopped being a fan of events mainly because of the way certain people started acting during them. Just started getting on my nerves, so I try my best to avoid them like the plague, but somehow always get pulled back in, though sometimes it does end up good. I've known certain people who've bitched oocly over ic actions from others in regards to events.

Yeah, that's another thing: happening to be most active on weekends and in west-coast-USA-primetime-and-later helps a lot at finding events fun. Everyone else just gets to feel like they only get to watch the middle 20 minutes of a Cronenberg movie and try to figure out the rest after leaving the theater from what they can glean from the reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. (This would be a lot less so if people went out of their way to help their fellow guild/citymates know what's going on, but most of the people who know the event the most are the ones who hold their cards closest to their chests.)

The other problem with events for me is that, even more than the rest of the time, we put away all expectations of what we would do based on who we are. The most obvious example is that bit above about people wanting to hoard the secrets so they can be the one in the spotlight, even when there's no good IC reason to do so and every reason not to. There's also how we take all our IC motivations, ideologies, alliances, etc. and temporarily abandon them, knowing we're going to start them right back up fifteen seconds after the event ends. (This doesn't matter as much as it used to, since those things are already worn threadbare and usually ignored, but it used to be a real turn-off.)

And finally, there's how, when you look just barely beneath the surface, the event always turns out to be a bashing run followed by a game of capture-the-flag. It's nice, I suppose, to put a different color of paint on those now and then, but it's sure not something new.

Nothing I say should be taken as criticism of the people who bust their asses to make events. Most of the flaws here either come from the nature of the game (computer-program-driven, massively multi-player, and delicately balanced) or the nature of the player base (mostly made of selfish people).

I have missed quite nearly every major part of every event since I started playing in 2007. This has more to do with my job, that requires flexibile and often late hours, and the ability to remorselessly throw away your weekends.

That said, compared to other MUDs I have played, and played when I had amazing amounts of free time relative to now, events are at least accessible to people.

In my first MUD, generally, some admin controlled NPC would interact with a few big name players. They would get dragged off on quests, know what's going on, fight the important fights and get new spells and fun items. The other 80+% (conservatively, probably more) of the game lost RL months worth of experience being deathsight fodder. I'll never forget moving two rooms out of the town square as an "event" started and being one-shot by some super demon, undoing a month and a half of experience gain in a fraction of a second.

In another, the admin was fairly even handed about event participation, but almost always included an "invasion" to give EVERYONE a chance to participate. Mobs would converge on the PC town in waves, and all the players would either log off or form up. It was always a meat grinder, and usually most people ate some sort of painful XP/training loss. The problem with this was, it got worse and worse as the invasion had to be balanced around the top tier, who could do things like, heal every awake player, or explode whole rooms of lesser monsters. So to fight them, horrible invasion counters were developed, like, an orc thing that would hit EVERYONE in the room for a fair amount of damage for every single hit against it (which, when first introduced, killed just about everyone awake in one go.)

So, while Lusternia's system suffers from "biggest clot of fighters decide to monopolize event, guess everyone else can go sit in a manse or die or something", it isn't the worst system out there, and at least the events tend to be stretched out for long enough that if you REALLY want to do SOMETHING, you can.

Have you played Dominion with him yet? He's such a stupid noob. (Secretly though I <3 him, but don't tell anyone)

Are you sure that isn't Lusternia you are describing?

Stop it, your bitterness is showing

It's not being bitter (what is there to even be bitter about?). It's true. The majority of large events will end up with lots of aggro mobs killing people everywhere.

It's funny how you keep telling me I'm bitter, but you can't ever explain what it is.

Back when we were both fish I think he said he was the alt of someone who I didn't really hold in too high of an esteem. Maybe other people have the same experience too?

The Event seems to have brought about a brand new idea that seems to have a lot of potential. I hope this new idea proves fruitful.

That being said, ritualists really need to design a ritual that makes it impossible to talk in a room.

The eternal bane of events: People being... well, people.

I wish I could stay but I have some very wonderful plans this weekend.

Admins, I appreciated the fun we had so far!

Amazingly, I'm (cautiously) optimistic about this event, which is more than I can say for most of the other world events I've participated in since... well, a very long time. (Tully messing up the ritual after Denust mentioned it was ) I'm still expecting every non-Demi on Prime to die in a horrible invasion of Ice Devils, but this part has been... dare I say it? Fun.

Told you so.

Whiners.

If it doesn't make it to the sphere, I'm going to whine.

Just saying.

(If it does, many other people will whine instead, I am sure)

Can you win? Answer: No!

Part of me wants to see what the cool artifact we get is, while another part wants to see what happens if the miasma reaches the crystal.

But we can do both! Simply attack the miasma from the other direction and push it east.

Wait, we get a cool artifact out of this?