To the Dev's re R** Launch Events

Whilst many in the community love a good dance party to pass the evenings away as they role play / dance to Darkstarr's tunes, is it possible to have an event for the community that's meaningful in a different manner?

I ask this as yet again last night there was a party this time in the test server (even our GM @E n v y was apparently getting his bootlace, stetson and cowboy boots out to join in). I'm sure many others like myself and tbh the rest of my guildies online last evening feel the same as me and I've got to be brutally honest and say rather stick pins in my eyes!

I fully appreciate a large proportion of the community love a good dance / party to wind down after a RL day and so all I ask is, as well as those type of events how about something like a big dragon wreaking havoc in a town, or troll uprising looking for more bones for their soup as the start to a R** launch where all guilds / players of any level can join in together again as a community to defeat the evil <insert baddies name here>?

I appreciate you'll get the community's shouts of the nasty PvP'rs will just gank everyone so maybe have it in a PvE only area where you need to flag yourself to gank / be ganked or disable PvP within that area completely during the event.

IMHO it'd just be a nice change and it doesn't need to be every release just to keep launch events fresh and so they appeal to all types of players

 

I would not call what took place last evening on the QA server a dance party. I generally do not die at dance parties. At least not so often.

Perhaps @Chris or another dev could organize some sort of battle in another location while @DarkStarr spins the tunes.

 

I was going........I was all set.........the multi box was ready to go........I could smell the double XP

Then reality set in as I had to attend a 3 hour meeting at which I literally did stick pins in my eyes just to stay awake.

 

??

These dance parties DO involve big community battles. I at various points yesterday I looked down and saw a clockwork dragon, trolls, chaos demons, reapers, and a thundering herd of death bunnies. And with all that, I'm still not interested in dance parties, but it's not that hard to show up and do my part for a stress test, tab out and read the news.

 

Fungus, I support your plea. It s time we are finally given exciting and perhaps even meaningful (*gasp!*) staff-run events.

Only thing I cannot understand is how you can refer to dance parties as "roleplaying". There is no roleplaying happening there, no stories, no character advancement... People just stand around and use visual emotes.

I sometimes go to dance parties but that is usually either because the host is someone I like and want to support, or because someone is there with whom I am hoping to get some real RP (usually not happening though).

@Alley Oop: True, but these battles are not meaningful. Spawning random monsters on the participants of a dance party simply doesn't do it. I know the focus last night was stress testing, and for that it is fine. But as staff-hosted events I would generally like to see something more inspiring.

 

There are many other types of events in the game organized by members.
No one has to attend the 'staff' events those are purely optional.
But you will miss enjoying some great interactions with other avatars.

A few months ago, Dragomir Mori had a Pirate Ship Christening. It was a great PVP type event that was amazing.
Also, there are events to raise $ for sick avatars and events in game to encourage each other.
Recently, I attended an event that was an actual avatar wedding in game.

Each week/month I see Guild, POT and Avatar events that are not simply dance parties.

Maybe expecting 'someone else' to provide events for your enjoyment could easily be solved by creating one yourself.

 

Helvig and many others do indeed create events. I think the point of this thread is to ask for other Portalarium generated events other than the ubiquitous dance parties which many of us have no interest in.

 

Yes I read the post.

Did you attend the QA stress test event?

Yesterday's stress test was such an event.
It appealed to 330 avatars.
If you wanted to dance, get on Darkstarr's ship and dance for two hours.
If you wanted to die, get under the ship and fight bosses.
If you wanted to stand alone and complain about not being entertained, there were lots of places to do that.

Seems like it was exactly what the OP asked for.

 

Just to clarify, this is a call for dynamic RP/story driven occurrences.

 

Am sure the OP can answer for himself but am pretty sure it was nothing like what he is asking for.

And it's not complaining it's requesting alternatives.

 

unfortunately naked dance parties (which I dislike) have been the route the devs have gone and now its been so long its lore. Im happy for the people who like that kind of stuff but I agree, I would like to see far more meaningful events. Ive been critical on this for a long time, especially all the social marketing focused on that.

The best event I went to was oh about 2 years ago before persistence where the devs hosted a huge "kill the dev" event and we killed Lord British a few times.

Now that was fun.

Lets see some better events and lets stop pandering to a set (and known) small population of players.

 

I've read a number of complaints about how the dance party is a Portalarium run event., it's not. The release party started as a community, player run event that was hosted by players in player run towns. And it still is.

The Kill Lord British event was a player run event where the devs were invited to attend. Portalarium didn't plan the e vent, a player did.

If you want something different, plan it and invite the devs. They will come. But stop relying on Portalarium to put something together and complain when they don't. Do it yourself.

 

To my mind, it's a stronger play to simply promote adventure events without disparaging social events. Otherwise it comes off as petty, and might put off some you would like to participate in adventure events. I'm all for both.

 

You'll be happy to hear that 99% of Avatars are showing up clothed nowadays!

Naked has been relegated (mostly) to the hot tubs of peoples own homes.

 

As a former MMORPG developer myself, I can attest to just how much effort would end up going into planning, creating, testing, executing, and cleaning up these release events. It can be a major drain on core development time if those developers are involved in the process either directly or indirectly, such as building support systems for events. You'd need a dedicated team to these tasks, and the events need to be planned out months in advance. Maybe 2-3 release cycles at least. They need to undergo some kind of testing process to ensure balance, fairness, and that they won't ruin the economy.

I'm not saying don't do it. Let's just not lose sight of the fact that it could impact progression of the overall game if they are now tasked with creating meaningful event content with each release. Are we at a place where this trade-off would be acceptable?

PS Remember they are already doing the Grand Tour each release too, which probably isn't a considerable time sink, but does give players something new and rewarding.

 

Of course that is false. I learn of these events from official Portalarium updates where they (the company) are asking people to join in for official testing of the server/zones. To boot, the devs are all in the zone spawning creatures to test. Most of these are official "royal warrant" and official events my friend. Of course they have to utilize larger guilds / social groups. Unfortunately they tend to use their usual favorites.

Again, I dont have an issue with that, I have an issue with it being the same ol dreary naked dance party. I'll say it again, that targets the extremely small population interested in that. Im concerned about that vast majority of population who wants to play a game like this for the fact that its an MMO and they like to kill critters.

I will not attend "dance parties" which has excluded me from dev content in this game since I stopped doing so over a year ago.

You are describing secondary events where a random guild has an event and invites someone like LB, they show up and attend.

 

Good news! The naked seems to be gone!

I get you don't like dance parties, so if you want to harp on them fine. But the naked is gone. If you want to keep spreading the whole "naked dance party" thing that existed two years ago because we didn't have many clothes back then, I'll just keep posting screenshots until you let the pejorative go.

Here's the latest "naked" dance party:

 

I agree completely with the OP.

If there was a dev-run event that actually asked us as players to do something interesting, something lore based... something besides standing around emoting, I would be interested in joining.

For instance:

• Officially run, massive, team-based PvP events... like assaulting a castle
• Scavenger Hunts
• Major cataclysmic event at an NPC town
• Festival with official dev-run games and contests

you know, stuff like that.

 

I would just like to chime in and say that the official release parties are not actually Portalarium events, Avatars Radio has been putting them on for several years. We have recently gotten Starr to participate as a DJ (it seems to be a not-so-secret passion of his), and it has always been a good opportunity for some profiling of server performance each release, but it has always been and will always be a community created event.

Of course, the QA stress test was definitely driven forward by Port!