My suggestion does involve indies. It, actually, will work even if none of the officials bother to show up. Expecting for ~20 players to log is a liability. It is much safer to make events for the general populace and then allow the officials to ramp off that for their own storylines.
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I wrote a long list of lore-fitting events (a mix of spontaneous/resultless and story important, spanning every region and inclusive of many factions) for the Admins to use with their event system. On their request, in late 2015. Only three were used, "Royal Flush Part II", "Kepler Crunch" (this one was admittedly a failure), and "The Empire Strikes First" (though I don't know if they used that name) ... and none since.
Apparently, the reason for this was that most of the current Admins are not trained with their current event system, so the one who is, is writing a simpler plugin for them. I could be mistaken. I'll not pin it on laziness, though.
There have been other events run instead, however, which I find quite curious. A spontaneous California event, the Harmony stuff, and Delta stuff a while back, and maybe a few others ... basically anything since the IKN stormed into Kyushu on January 3rd.
I'll let them comment on this without saying too much more, as I've been occasionally asking them privately for more than half a year now, to no avail.
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To be honest I personally wouldn't even require all admins to understand how these are set up, just one, The Wise. Then I'll just write up the event plan, submit the request, and if there is an agreement or consensus, I send them the necessary cfg and optionally dll changes required for setting up the event. Any of them can approach The Wise with a "Does it do what hey says it does?" question, The Wise can say yay or nay, if nay jump a few steps back, if yay, it can be set up.
I dare say I understand how to set up pmuch most of the things we've seen so far (or can look up the relevant places for clues): commodity buffs, supply event, combat event, ID restrictions, basically all stuff one can find in .cfg files. Only thing I dunno is how to define infocards, like names and descriptions for custom commodities, that's .dll stuff.
It honestly would be simple for a Dev/The Wise to make the event, save it to a file with the right naming structure, provide the info for it, and pass it on to an Admin and have a simple copy/paste and then link it to the thread said person makes. It wouldn't be THAT hard to do.