A happy Boxing Day to all. I'm looking at trying a new sort of event later today, 21:00 hours UTC (3pm Central, 1pm Pacific, 4pm Eastern). Duration may be about an hour.

Much like the previous event, I have to give some fair warning that I'll be trying some "newer" stuff, various tools and things developed for the purpose of running future events. So, no guarantees that all will go smoothly, of course, but I hope it provides some fun.

We'll be staging a major bot attack in a single sector in grayspace. The goal is simply to destroy the most bots. This may involve clouds of bots chasing players around.. 10 and 20 on 1. Or it may be a bit more distributed than that, as I can't overload the sector with too many. Either way, it may be pretty chaotic.

I will tentatively be attempting to also give out a unique trophy or trophies at the end, but no promises there either. I don't have any real scorekeeping system, but I'll try to work it out with grepping some logs. Again.. we'll see how it goes.

If this sounds like a fun holiday activity, then I hope you'll stop by.

Durn ..no time today. I hope somebody records it.

And here I thought maybe we were going to have a competition to see who could make the better bot AI. You've let me down!

Being that it -is- Christmas though, I guess an epic bot battle will have to suffice :D Maybe we can keep one as a pet when the event is over? :D Are you planning on spawning custom bots or standard ones?

Now...if certain players or factions were allied with the bots and needed to keep them alive via repair/combat...

Hot damned, i'll try to be there.

Damn, it would be the weekend I'm home with slow internet. Interested to hear about it though.

Neat demo of the new tools, wasn't near as fun as the convoy event. Hope your test went well though, if all your new toys work you can put monsters on closet and give us candies.

Some people said they enjoyed it more than Dark Convoy, others not as much. But generally people said it was fun, so that's cool. It was a good test, this stuff helps demonstrate what tools we need to add and improve.

For most kills, the official winner was: spidey

The runners-up were:
Maalik &c, Ecka Estenk, Ostello Lennan, Niki, WoS, Dalin Seivewright, Phaserlight

Unique trophy objects, with the awardee's name, were handed to all of the above, except for OstelloLennan who apparently left early.

Thanks to everyone for coming by.

Congratulations, spidey. Good shots, all around.

Congrats all!

We really need more coop stuff like this...

Was fun, while I still prefered the dark convoy. That one could be weekly.

By the way, what about have some major weekly events, like dark convoy, or a massive bot concentration, that all nations call for help?

Hey, the girlfriend was yelling from the other room for me to come to a lovely dinner!

Well that's my excuse. Sorry I left so early...

Great job everyone! Was fun!

-Ostello Lennan
UIT

I think I enjoyed this event more just because it felt like I actually accomplished something. Dark Convoy was a mess due to the griefers that made following the convoy incredibly difficult as well it took an insane amount of coordination, which just wasn't a viable tactic with that many people, to take down a simple capital ship.

This event was confined to one sector with 3 nearby stations so even if you did die, by bot or griefer, getting back into it was a very easy, assuming you had enough faction at any one of the stations there. Getting actual kills also created that sense of accomplishment like you were actually doing something, whereas Dark Convoy was more "turbo turbo turbo" until you could up with or go ahead of the convoy and then it was "wait, shoot, and probably die quickly." which would definitely work if there was dynamic spawning locations that automatically kicked in.

At any rate, it was great fun.

Oh man, Breazle and I should have been there, we would have won that hands down!

This sounds exactly like what we were doing before, but it was 100 to 1 instead of 20 to 1. :D

If I'd had an earlier warning, I would have shown up. -.-

The "warning" went out over a week ago, in the email newsletter. Perhaps you should consider signing up for that :).

I didn't get that mail for some reason. The spam filter didn't seem to have caught it either. I think I received all newsletters before though.

There was an e-mail sent out about the Drone Wars event being planned? I don't think I got that e-mail either :\

- A TBA developer-run event will take place on Saturday, December 26th
at 21:00 UTC.

Received 12/21/9

- A TBA developer-run event will take place on Saturday, December 26th
at 21:00 UTC. Our last event, "The Dark Convoy" was widely considered a
success, with significant player involvement. The nature of the next
event will depend on various development factors still in flux, but
details will be posted to the forum as the event nears.

Edit: Nm, was buried in the epic email that went out on the 12th.

Could I suggest:

Send out event emails separately from general update newsletters. That newsletter had a lot of information to sort through. I skimmed it about halfway, and ended up missing the event notice.