Well I found all the old threads that talk about this, but they're all dastardly locked so that I can't resurrect a thread from 2006 or 2008, so here's a new one.

I don't really WANT to know that a guide is online, but having them take a more active role would be interesting.

There's nothing more fun and/or entertaining than guides lurking around making the game more fun and/or entertaining. They can monitor the game, make sure no one is blasting nazi hate speech on channel 1, make sure that Ray's patches haven't broken something important, and yet, they can do fun things like:

1. Impersonate NPC's. Pretend you're a harmless trader, then WHAM out come the lightning mines and sunflares as soon as some lazy pirate tries to get ya.
2. Take control of the CTC and change up the course for once. (Take the Itani CTC through Serco space! Make the Serco CTC hang around in Ukari jumping to random sectors)
3. Move the "foggy" hidden stations in grayspace for fun and/or profit. Just enough so you have to look a little harder.
4. Impersonate hive bots. Talk on 100. "Bzzzt. I'm a hive bot. You will be assimilated."
5. Spawn a Trident in "newb" zones and let some newbie players ride along to see the universe, and maybe shoot at pirates or a Leviathan.
6. Capship battles
7. Bunchies
8. capships VS. bunchies
9. racing, whether deneb run-style or tube-style.
10. mining events with secret loot asteroids
11. mining events with hive queens chasing players around, perhaps with secret loot asteroids AND secret loot hive queens
12. Take a Serco HAC into Deneb O-3 just to see what would happen
13. Take an Itani HAC into Geira (for once) just to see what would happen.
14. Recap the events of any of these things on the station news as soon as the event is over to commemorate/memorialize those who took part.
15. faction-vs-faction wars. Who wouldn't love to see an Orion vs. Tunguska battle in Odia over some new asteroid field?
16. Guides could act as the "Mission-giving NPCs" where they could act as "Admiral such-and-such" and command players to take part in Deneb border skirmishes. Cool rewards abound!
17. Other stuff that someone might list below:

YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES.

This is the kinda stuff I think VO has been sorely lacking. If a guide can do it, problem solved!

+1, and a qualifier:

These are things that I would love to be doing, though a few would piss people off beyond imagination. John would be unlikely to allow #1. Some may be possible now, but many require building or repairing the guide commands. When there is a change in code (which is pretty often these days, even if you can't see it) there is a fair chance that any related guide commands will be impacted in some way. At best, they still work. At worst something bad happens, followed by admonishments from a certain dev who is not John. As you can imagine, testing and repairing guide commands is a far lower priority than making sure that the average user's experience is smooth.

Yeah last week we were ganking and chasing Phaserlight yelling "spawn itani capships!"

He did not.

:(

If you are bored with the game, just say that.

This is part of what that whole "new event tools" thing in the Kickstarter was about (as our long-suffering PCC people will attest). I'm hoping this kind of stuff could be used by guides, or even regular players who just schedule sector-usage in advance.

The current toolset available to guides is a bit messy. But yes, I agree that more wacky spawned content would be really beneficial.

There's more than just a few coders on the PCC, you know. If you need more wacky spawned content scripts to run to entertain players with occasionally, one of us would probably write them for you if we had the tools to do so.

one of us would probably write them for you if we had the tools to do so.

I imagine you can see a bit of a chicken/egg problem there.

Plus, most of the "event" tools I'm referring to is wired a bit more directly into erlang and the server-side than would be trivial to expose to the PCC.

But, I agree, there are more PCC resources available than we are effectively utilizing at present, and improving that is my goal. And like so many of my goals, I can't make it happen immediately..

Even editing just the server-side NPC code? As long as it wasn't a risk to the production server for somebody to test it, and some kind of "watchdog" could be set up to revert the test server back if it crashed a sector or something.

We don't necessarily need a fancy GUI editor. :)

Whistler said: John would be unlikely to allow #1.

That's too bad, since I could see #1 being immensely entertaining. Just create a character with a * in front of an autospawned name, like TPG Trader "*Marcus Klempf" and then proceed to fly through grayspace until someone tries to pirate you. Then , when they get close, unleash hell! Bwaaahahaha.

I think most semi-experiencd players would think this is kickass.

I'd volunteer to do it, except giving me guide powers or even a pale smattering of guide-like powers would probably be a bad idea. I'm rather sure I would break something and certain that I would piss people off.

You'd just spawn 600cu of Tequila and end up passing out on the side of an asteroid. :)

Instead of ALLMIGHTY GUIDES, a much simpler and safer alternative was what I proposed before:

Host: event-focused "guide"

Almost all those ideas can be implemented using PCC missions, restricted to Hosts and given timeframe and location, so not prone to abuse.

All required is a little love from the Devs, to implement "visibility date" and few missing features, and a smart usage of PCC editor, and we're set!

Idea already tested and proven to work. Would be perfect with multiplayer support for PCC missions, but even that we can workaround, as using a specific sector for event.

Incarnate, have you tried the sample events done in PCC?

Alloh will just spawn "Alloh's ideas from hell", and sticky his own topics until" they get noticed. Try having a little flexibility, embrace others' ideas.

You'd just spawn 600cu of Tequila and end up passing out on the side of an asteroid. :)

Actually... we had an event like that once.