Feedback to the California event - And request to shorten it

[Jack_Henderson]

Heyhey!

Let me start with this: this new event system is a great addition and both cargo as well as pvp events have tremendous potential. This event was explicitly marked as a field test, and thus I think there should be some feedback.

This is all very subjective, of course:

Positive:
> these events made activity focus in an area
> It was easy to get into irp fights there
> It generally increased activity on the server

However, there are reasons why I would ask for the pvp event to be shortened.


1. The attractivity/thrill is wearing off. It's like a certain weariness when you fight at the same place, against the same people, every 2 hours (or less) again and again. I realized it in myself, but also by just listening in on other channels.


2. The lulziness/weirdness factor increases. The Xeno group, OC Jumpy Dreads, Nomad BS joining in more or less randomly are a clear sign for me that it's slowly falling apart.


3. Players take it seriously and bitterness increases. This makes things sour pretty quickly and things have gone downhill the last 2 days. Before that it was okay, and it felt like a friendly challenge. The change for me became evident on Wednesday.


4. Harmful gunboat proliferation. These large scale fights have proven again the superiority of the gunboat class. Masses of gunboats have been made on both side and all these will be around for a long time. Everybody knows how easily the presence of a GB can ruin a fight. With masses of them around now on GRN and Liberty IDs, I expect the general fun in pvp on anything not GB to decrease. I have already talked to pvp devs about the problem.

5. Rule violations are mounting. The amount of broken rules that I have seen in these fights is... large. The transport event was even worse in that respect, as I practically did not see demands being made in many many cases. I expect a sanction-flood. Even official factions were breaking rules rather openly. A general attitude of "they aren't valid in this event" was rather self-evident.

6. Activity is drained from all other regions. It is already hard to get interaction in other regions and having many people focus a lot of time and effort into a conflict and one place harms all the rest. Therefore these events should be short and crisp to not buff one place and make all others suffer at the same time. Everybody likes a change, do something new, but when it's too long, the "periphery" suffers and dies out.


What I personally would deduct from this event test is:

> pvp events work in general
> trade events work in general

> pvp events should be shorter (4-5 days maximum; 500 points?)
> trader event rules need to be clarified (especially things like "transport demand" rules in these "high risk - high reward" events; suggestion: "Can treat event transports that carry event cargo as combat targets")
> pvp event rules need to be clarified (especially the 2-h rule seems to be hard for many to understand in group fights)
> trade event rewards cannot be that high for a long time. It sucks the life out of every other faction that is there for "money making"
> trade events could be more inclusive: trade events could have House Corps in them, for example, while Navies do the pvp part.
> pvp events are good when they are strictly limited to "main parties", like in this one: Navies/Police/Intelligence (adding Xenos, Hackers, Legion, etc would have made it messy from the very start). In this event it was a very clear House vs. House fighting for quite a few days.

In general I think that these events have a beneficial impact on Disco.
They need to he short and intense.
They should be a little more inclusive (e.g. the trade part)
And they need to distribute activity by taking part in different places. For maximum benefit, they could try and rekindle old activity hubs/action zones and promote interaction between factions that have stopped.

Thank you to those who made the events possible, and to all those who participated in them in a cool way. I've had a really good time in the California event. Perhaps this feedback is helpful

Night!

Jack

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[Thyrzul]

At 12.45 am brain is low on caff so no fuel for elaborate personal thoughts, gonna just add to/comment on the above (if you don't mind).

1.) Agreed, though I don't feel it as much warranting a shortening as was suggested.
2.) Agreed.
3.) Agreed, but I don't think it's the fault of the event or shortening could solve it. Setting things straight in the heads of some people could.
4.) Agreed, though mainly because I had not have too much chances to do so yet I would really like to experiment a bit with battlecruisers to find out their efficiency against gunboats.
5.) I myself tried to keep myself to the rules, and neither experienced much around myself when I was in-game (mind I wasn't there every time), so can't confirm, but if that was really the case, then it's sad. At the same time it's again a situation where I rather think people's thinking should be fixed. Rules are the default and should not having to be specified/clarified (repeated) for events. Rather, deviations from the rules, lifting or addition of restrictions should be clarified. I really can't fathom why would anybody think default rules don't apply here, I found nothing nowhere to suggest such.
6.) While it was true at first, I can't really fit this with the first point. If the attractivity of the event and the part of the playable area it happens at is losing attractivity, doesn't that mean people are flocking back to the rest of the playable area? Trade events also went down quite fast, draining activity from elsewhere no longer than like a day, attracting many so the bonus one could have claimed with it was distributed well among them.

In general I semi-agree with Jack's post.

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[Karst]

Like I said, I do think the point limit for this limit is too high.

And yes, I can pretty much +1 everything here.
Somebody told me at some point that this event brought out the worst in people, and I optimistically laughed it off.
Unfortunately, there's a lot of truth in that.
A scenario in which pretty much the same people fight each other in pretty much the same ships, in the same area, more or less continuously is, well, unhealthy when it goes on for extended periods. It's really starting to build up bitterness, and it feels like it's dividing people into "GRN players" and "LN players" (even though I'm sure most older players have ships for both sides). People were combatdocking in fair fights and even teamkilling to avoid giving the enemy team points.

Don't get me wrong. It was absolutely fantastic for activity; it really brought the server back after the downtime. We haven't had these kinds of numbers regularly in a long time.
And the fights have been a lot of fun. I really liked that if you weren't sure what to do in disco, you could log Ga/Li in California and there would almost always be stuff to shoot.

For the economy part of the event: I would say it was way too profitable, and way too short (although those are kind of connected).
I mean sure I get it, people were supposed to log Navy transports en masse to finish it, but it was really, really overdone. In the future I think prices comparable or somewhat below ore routes would be adequate. These routes already have the advantage of not requiring teamwork and time in the form of a miner.
The phenomenal profitability is also certainly part of the complete madness that ensued, with caps engaging transports with no demands and even no RP.

I think the Bundschuh event was a better example of how this should be done: profitable, but not vastly more profitable than everything else. It lasted about the right amount of time, it caused indy Bundschuh to pop up (which in my experience all really put an effort into RP'ing), but it didn't go overboard.

Overall these events really are awesome. I daresay the monetary bonus for kills might even be increased - the economy part showed there was no real concern with how much money people made anyway.
But they should be switched a lot more frequently. We're now at 33% and it's really starting to become a poisonous situation.

Edit: Almost forgot, I wanted to comment on gunboats as well.
It's a balance question and not really related to events but it really did show the utter dominance of the class. Right when the first fights broke out, there were almost no gunboats present, while at this point gunboats make up like 50% of the total numbers.
I don't have a GRN gunboat but I flew a Defiant in those fights several times. It's untouchable.
Gunboats are just so much better than any other class, it's half a miracle people even flew anything else. They were the absolute kings of these fights. Snubs can barely touch them, cruisers are too slow, battleships won't even hit them.
Though the Defiant is undoubtedly one of the best if not the best gunboats in its own right, the class itself is seriously problematic as a factor in group fights.

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[Lythrilux]

Whilst I do agree with all your other points, I disagree somewhat with point 4. Yes, Gunboat numbers were mounting. Was it impossible to counter? Nah, not really. Mad props to those RNS cruisers who mounted cruiser missiles. You were a real pain in the ass for the LN GBs. Yet, I failed to see Liberty employ a similar tactic. I wouldn't call the numbers of gunboats in the event pvp-balance breaking - people just didn't use the right counters.

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[RSA Nico]

Hi

I agree with most of those points you made. 5000 kills for the winning side to high due to server activity and the last 2 days activity inevent went down as intrest went down.

As for the transport side. My opinion is to make RP on server as they did with the 2 forum theads explaining event so if a ship is spotted with the said goods that he can be engaged without ingame RP. With this said its also subjected to the relevant ID's involved in event.

Lastly i just want to say thanks to the Dev team for implementing this new feature into Disco, i know it will just get better from here. Wel done and thanks for keeping Disco alive to all active players.

Regards
Nico

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[Karst]

Whilst I do agree with all your other points, I disagree somewhat with point 4. Yes, Gunboat numbers were mounting. Was it impossible to counter? Nah, not really. Mad props to those RNS cruisers who mounted cruiser missiles. You were a real pain in the ass for the LN GBs. Yet, I failed to see Liberty employ a similar tactic. I wouldn't call the numbers of gunboats in the event pvp-balance breaking - people just didn't use the right counters.

Lolwut? Cruiser missiles were a complete non-threat, and my Liberty Gunboat was my main combat ship in this event, and was targeted by cruiser missiles many, many times. Unless you're not in turret view, you'll see a cruiser missiles from seventy million k away, chuckle, and press the cm button once or twice when it gets closer. If you get hit by a cruiser missile in a boat you're incompetent.

I distinctly remember one fight situation in which the GRN side had two boats, and three battlecruisers, and the LN side had two boats. Both sides also had snubs obviously.
The battlecruisers were nothing more than a minor annoyance. Oh, they're a bit close, just move a little further away. All three battlecruisers were destroyed with pretty minimal effort from the gunboats.

But your comment doesn't surprise me as you're constantly saying Gunboats are all np np when they obviously have by far the smallest skill range of all classes and even in the hands of mediocre boat pilots like me can totally dominate a battlefield.

Edit: Yeah we probably shouldn't turn this into a GB balance discussion

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[Lythrilux]

Edit: Yeah we probably shouldn't turn this into a GB balance discussion[/color]

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[Ogie]

Instead of shortening the event by reducing targeted kills (2500), increase the number of kills on type of ship.
Like if we destroy a fighter we get 1 point, if we destroy a BS we get 5 or 10 points
Because it is very difficult to destroy a BS, it takes so much bombing on a BS and we only get 1 point while they bring GBs, fire multiple razors or kill us on fighters and easily get same points that we get by killing a BS
So we spent 40 minutes in destroying 2 BS and a GB and we got 3 points, meanwhile they killed our 3 bombers during the fight and got saved from loss by balancing points easily
This happened yesterday, GRN: 1 cruiser, 1 BS and 1 GB killed 4 or 5 bombers and we hardly destroyed their cruiser and BS. So whats the point of fighting ? Even we managed to destroy their heavy ships we were still in loss

And that is not all. Warships other than GRN-LN and BAF should not be allowed to enter in California system or in the area where the event is taking place (until the event ends). Since the event started, I see an OC BS jumps from other system, pew pew every LN ship and when he is about to get destroyed, he cloaks and jumps back. Nomad BS uncloaked and pew GRN ships. Its like calling friends in ooRP and they shoot the targets they want in RP then leave quickly while the other hostile forces whom they helped don't shoot them because they helped them ooRPly,

[sindroms]

I also would like to point out that employing someone dedicated to the event topic would be a good idea. It was a very refreshing thing to see the first few events go without a hitch, but now the bar for the rheinland one has been full for a couple of days now and nobody seems to have the time to replace it with a new event or to at least remove the already completed one.

On the subject of events like this, the only actual issue I have with them is that it is still unclear whether or not they have any significant impact on the lore, since they are hosted by the Team. So it is rather clear that GRN stomped over LN in the last event, so does that mean that due to the disbalance in player strength, Liberty loses half of California? That would be a rather crap way of doing things, but at the same time - if I was playing on one side and we won, having NO impact on anything would make me want to attend other events significantly less. It would seem like a very carebear "nobody loses :3" attitude.

As for the activity zones, these events should involve as many IDs as possible at any given time. In an ideal world, the events should - over the course of one month - visit every part of Sirius at least once and include every single ID at least once, so to give official factions a chance to utilise the extra activity as well.

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[Xoria]

> trade event rewards cannot be that high for a long time. It sucks the life out of every other faction that is there for "money making"

This would also be true of ore prices that enable 100 million credits an hour, or 15 million every 8 minutes running between Dublin and New London (thanks for the easy cash BMF). After looking over the "planning" document for ore prices, I argue the current system is a random, arbitrary, and nonsensical mess. Some serious attention to logic and comprehensive planning is desperately needed.

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