Despite the title, this concept is simple: create an easily accessible, high profit activity that only is available for limited times. The objective should be fairly static, the reward significant, acquiring it should require non-combat ships and it should be readily accessible to all players.

This basic principle can be applied anywhere. Create a task which, by combining a non-combat activity with wide availability and high profitability, forces group cooperation. Groups will form spontaneously because that is the only realistic way to capture the reward when faced with widespread competition.

The conquerable station could fill this role in the VO world, but unfortunately it does not deliver enough reward for the work involved, and since it can be captured at any time, basic strategy leads people to attack when no one is on the defense. Also, the nature of the defenses mean that only one sort of attack is pragmatic, constraining gameplay considerably. A time window, high monetary reward, and very simple mechanism would ensure that players show up and that varied strategies can be used.

A simple test case would be to put a small cluster of 100% "insert high-value ore" roids in Sedina B8 that are only active for about a half hour on Friday and Saturday, whenever the average player peak is. To capitalize on the ore would require a coordinated effort: fighters to defend the mining ship, probably multiple mining ships or a miner and a ferry. This would be announced as an event and suitable fluff invented*. The ore should result in big payouts for any group able to take a large share - somewhere in the high millions, maybe ten million or more - so that large groups can split the profits and so that the inevitable investment in ships is worth it.

What I consider the major strength of this idea is that it should take very minimal dev effort to implement. All that need be added is a very high value widget and a suitable drop point engineered. I imagine that having asteroids come and go is probably too difficult, but perhaps temporarily changing what a few of them drop would not be difficult. The rest of what happens is entirely up to the players.

Addressing concerns pre-emptively:

1) B8!?
- Simply a pragmatic response to the fact that B8 is where people go to fight. I chose the most popular combat WH sector to put a non-combat activity out of a desire to mix the two. Placing it somewhere else is of course fine, but B8's status as the nexus of the universe makes it an attractive test bed. I don't envision it staying there - rather, the objective would move around each week to introduce some variety.

2) Too much money!
- If no one decides to contest this except one or two miners, then the experiment fails and a few only get rich once.

3) Too hard to get players together/mine while getting shot/etc!
- I like difficult things. They force people to adapt, to organize and to rise to a challenge. The produce clear winners and losers. They give people a goal to work towards that does not merely fall in their laps. And best of all: they are unforgiving. You either succeed or you fail. In any case, if the reward proves to be too small, it can be increased for the next event.

4) Lame/stupid/Soul you're an idiot
- Fair enough.

Fluff:
* ("A high intensity storm is building in Sedina B8 which will temporarily create a pocket of rare and exotic matter near the wormhole. Scientists from all nations and corporate interests are extremely interested in the potential applications for this material, and will pay handsomely for samples. Competition for this rare opportunity is expected to be fierce.") - Then have a storm in B8 with some glowing roids that drop super valuable ore and which are very good conductors (ie heat up fast and dump heat fast)

** ("An unmarked TPG Heavy Transport is drifting into range of the Sedina B8 wormhole. Long range reconnaissance shows no sign of damage, but sensors have detected wormhole particles emanating from the cargohold. Since such a thing is well beyond the capability of any known technology, speculation at the nature of the cargo has run rampant. The major nations and corporations have all concluded that the cargo is highly valuable, and are offering significant rewards for samples.") - Then spawn a very slowly drifting, derelict TPG transport that jettisons a small, steady stream of the ore as it drifts across the sector.

I think I've managed to make a simple concept as complex as possible, so I'll stop now.

With the small player base this could run into issues but, over all its a good idea. I don't see any real way to exploit it... group of players gets together either in turret ships or has an escort or both and does what is normally a safe activity in a hostile environment. Conversely, a group of pirates/nationalists or what have you get wind of the group and decide to liven things up a bit... either way it's group activity, which is good.

The only down side I see is that there are plenty of places where players can mine in perfect safety for fairly large profits. Unless you meant for the Devs to create a new ore or completely eradicate one from the Sedina area, with the exception of B-8.

Either way, good idea.

One thing we could do is create a number of crafting missions for a number of weapons whose main ingredients are the widgets obtained during the event... that should increase interest but would not contribute to the current credit crisis. We should also have an event on the Deneb side of the GR/Deneb wormhole (like the old Border Skirmishes) that yield such a widget... just because we really need more life up in Deneb...

Ryan: The point would be that the ore available would be far and away more profitable than any other ore available normally, and which would only be available during the event. This drives people to participate because they only get one chance. If they want to go mine helio or apicene in safety more power to them, but then they miss out on the chance for lots of money or some other reward.

Shank: I like the idea of the ore being used for crafting, but I also like the simplicity of it just being very valuable. Right now, to implement this event, all that needs to happen is for a dev to make a very valuable widget and put a bunch of it in B8 at a specific time. Everything else follows naturally. For its value to come from crafting, more work needs to be done.

That said, both story blurbs explaining the event strongly imply that the widget could be used for crafting - so players would face a choice between making a few million credits and stockpiling this stuff for future crafting missions. If the devs emphasized that the ore would be needed in the future for exotic weapons and items, I suspect most would end up in the hands of organized guilds who might sell a few chunks to make up their losses, but who would mostly sit on it waiting to see what it would be worth in the future.

I believe the term you want is comet....

Periodically they should pass thru cetain sectors...

"I believe the term you want is comet.... Periodically they should pass thru cetain sectors..."

ONLY if there is some kind of notification system that let people know where it was. You can not have a chance to become uber rich if their is no chance of becoming uber dead, despite what the nation traders would like. Or if its on a set time table through the Sedina system. There needs to be a risk.

Exactly. The purpose of the timed reward is to draw a lot of people in a short period of time so that we can have a fun furball.

What this game is lacking at the moment is a profit motive to come together in a spot and kill each other. The Border stuff doesn't pay out enough, the Conquerable Station has no real value and CTC is a game of who can run the fastest. We need an event or mini-game that encourages people to fight over something in something other than bombers or fast running ships, something that rewards the team which can secure an area of space. And everyone should know about the opportunity far enough in advance that they can plan for it, form alliances, etc.

edit: Last night Ritter declared B8 a Serco mining zone and a bunch of us defended it for a few hours. mr_spuck was kind enough to accept the mining contract and spent that time producing delicious, refreshing Sedina water, which he shared with us. Now for that to work, everyone basically had to play pretend like someone would actually want to mine in Sedina B8. But it was totally player driven all the same. If there was a genuine profit opportunity to mine in B8, everything that happened because we were screwing around would have happened in earnest - we would have probably offered mining contracts to miners, secured the sector for them, and shared the profits.

All player driven. The only catalyst needed is a short term, high risk opportunity at profit that requires cooperation to pull off.

Sounds like a large 100 percent helio "comet" needs to pass thru B8 and other sectors at random times with a warning on 100

or a ghost roid that phases in and out perhaps with a mission to mine it and perhaps some aliens to defend thier sacred ground?

Soulcatcher, I already proposed something like that, where a capship would be a "mining central", offering much better prices for fresh and locally mined ores, and its faction offering mine and escort missions, while opposing factions offer an "attack that operation" mission. You can have many missions converging to same sector, with opposing objectives, and balance things with bots.

Make a Connie/Constellation be a central spot for the mess, and well defended by bots. So you have to mine in same sector and deliver to the connie.

So you can park it at Sedina B8, Dau or a remote Pelatus' sector...

actually its time odia to edras got some love.....

Alloh: Your proposal is not time limited and much more complicated, and thus would both fail to achieve my goal of a large player furball and also never actually be implemented. Dev time is at a premium, so event suggestions must be kept as simple as possible if they're to have even a slim chance to occur.

I don't want yet another "balanced with bots" situation. I want a player centric and player driven event.

Yo, Alloh, its really great you have ideas and I'mma let you finish, but you should really just use your own threads to give them instead of hijacking other threads.

Soul, it could be quite simple to implement, without bot re-balancing. Simply offer the missions with scheduled time when the capship will be there. Start/End GMT date-time. And pop capship there at start, leave at end. Not rocket science.

Chaos, not hijacking, but contributing. I like this idea a lot. Really would like to see it implemented. And since it is not PCC possible, any approach will require dev time...

Alloh.... if its so simple, make the mission on the PCC mission editor and be done with it. And yes you are thread hijacking when you promote the ideas you already posted in their own threads in the threads started by other people.