Today we had a very nice brazen display of why guides are necessary for organized events, with a certain someone trying to crash a public PVP team event that Nihilus was hosting. Warping the person out was only a partial solution because he was homed in the same system (@corvus) that the event was being held -- so he simply exploded back and continued to attempt to disrupt what was otherwise a very enjoyable event.

Guides need enhanced abilities to either:

A) Block people from entering a certain sector or

B) easily transport a set of people to an isolated sector or

+1. As well as set them a new home (potentially far, far away).

I disagree with the idea that magic guide powers should be used to protect mundane events. A core policy in this game is that nowhere is safe. That should include event grounds. If some dumbass wants to crash an event, the consequence should be that people shun/murder them, not that they magically get rehomed to Pelatus or wherever. Events should not be privileged. A group of people getting together to fight over a prize should be treated no differently than a group of people getting together to trade capship parts or mine or bot. They are people interacting in a physically reachable part of the universe that other people with differing agendas can potentially locate and interfere with. That is a feature, not a flaw.

+1 to letting guides set new homes for people, but this would not have helped much in the case of the above (shoot a station guard, die, back at Corvus - regardless of new home) but I think this could be used in situations outside of events; also I'm not sure about letting them block access to certain sectors. B) is a good bloody idea and I think the only one that would work in most situations but with a little twist.

A while ago momerath showed us that the latter is indeed possible when he threw together a "CTF" game for people to try out, but what sparked this idea to begin with was the need for certain people to have event manager privileges that do as you have requested. Kind of like a mini-guide, but only for the duration of an event, and with very limited abilities. Events could be submitted, the way there are now, and if accepted the person submitting the event gets promoted to event manager and then gets a limited set of actions they can perform during the time slot for the event (+ an hour each way to give time for preps and late starts).

Nothing like making a head asplode or even teleporting around on a whim, but defo the person needs to be able to teleport people to an instance that is cut-off from the rest of the looneyverse. Also they need to ability to be able to banish people back to normie space, that way if someone mis-behaves they can simply be removed from the sector. No need for head asplodes, no need for re-homing and no need for guides. (I'm not against guides, no matter what ya'll think)

I know the devs said they would look into something like this, but honestly I think it is a much better idea than needing guide help - guides are spread thin enough as it is, and you are lucky these days to find one online when any event is taking place.

2c.

[edit for wally - pizza was typing as I was]

While I agree the universe should be unsafe, and just because someone says "hey, were going to have a battle here, so dont come!!!!!!" this shouldn't change, events are one of the only things some look forward to, so making them safer is a good thing. Allowing them to be instanced also does not mean naughtyness could not happen either, but it does go a long way to taking this out of the normie space. Like a game show if you will (hell, sport-like events are even covered in the back story, kinda). Anyway, people distruping events could still happen somewhat even with the above changes, but at least it would give the person running it an option to just clean up. Sorry but murdering someone who is disrupting an event is not even always possible; they can just die and carry on if they have any ounce of brains.

Last night's event may have been big, but it wasnt officially hosted. Hence why minimal action had been taken...

OOOH NOOOO POOR WHITTLE BAWBIES

When there are roughly 20 pilots wanting to take time out of their playing session to put all RP aside and have an organized group battle that is a special thing. These type of events may not currently seem all that special. But what I've seen from hosting the events is that people will actually log on just to participate. I mean last night we got 5 or 6 infamous pilots all in the same sector together just to participate in an organized battle.

So allowing one person to come along and goof all over that, I think is not only not nice, but could cause some of the potential participants to log off. I was told by multiple people last night that they were about to log off if we continued to have problems. And indeed, I believe we did lose one pilot due to the interruptions. Say what you will about this, I don't feel good about it as the host.

I completely agree that warping people away or any other such action is lame, but I don't know what else would be a good solution short of spawning a new sector just for these type of events. I know many feel like this would remove the fighting from the verse. But are we really going to let "lack of backstory explanation" and "immersion breaking" keep us from adding something that MANY pilots have demonstrated that they're interested in? Group fighting that is organized and not full of nasty, charged-up "RP" emotions.

A more legitimate reason for not adding a special sector would be Inc saying something like "its not something we have the time for". In fact, that is actually the expected response for a random but major request such as this. But it is about the only thing I could thing of to prevent this in the future.

I guess my point in saying all this is just that I've never witnessed a time in VO where there were so many events taking place that a pilot could base his/her play style around them, almost like its a regular sports scene. We are trying to make that happen. Currently it is easy for one person to seriously hamper an event without using the warping. I think being able to easily and regularly disrupt these events is detrimental to developing this play style.

I am a bit biased since it is something that I wish to see in the game, so maybe my opinion isn't the best, but I figured I give it anyways. Thanks for reading.

I think that a guide run event should be identified as such, at any time the event is promoted.

Some people will only attend guide moderated events, and some people will only attend player moderated events, and that is just the way it is.

That some people threaten to log absent guide moderation is insufficient reason to exercise guide moderation. Let them log. The reason to exercise guide moderation, is when it is an identified guide moderated event. Please identify such before hand.

I would also prefer that guide moderated events be held somewhere out of the way, like helios.

I agree with you in theory, but in practice that would have meant breaking up a group of about 20 pilots. All of which had the same agenda of doing something that is an extremely niche thing and doesn't happen often. I don't think there are any precedents or comparisons to what we are trying to do. So thinking about these things in the same vein as other activities currently offered in-game, I don't think is all that fair.

Like if there were 20 people trying to make a trading run, but one pirate was stopping them. That is inherently tied to RP in such a way that any intervention would be offering an advantage or disadvantage to someone involved. What we are trying to do is create a sporting scene that is decoupled from a pilot's RP. A kind of sanctioned sporting scene that EVERYONE can participate in without worrying about others trolling it. You just compare this to all the other activities in VO in a very one to one manner as there is nothing like this, nor has there ever really been.

For the record though, I agree with your sentiments. It's just the practicality of things that make me feel a little differently.

You have presented a defense for hosting a guide moderated event. I did not object to you hosting a guide moderated event.

I object that the event was not identified as guide moderated beforehand.

Perhaps there should be guide moderated events, especially to the extent that a guide is willing to host such. But please identify the type of moderation beforehand.

Any player can announce and operate practically any event they can think of, with practically no expectation of any guide involvement. This is the expected norm, because any player(s) can do it. Only a guide can provide guide level moderation, and it is reasonable to ask for forewarning when that level of moderation is scheduled to be exercised outside the norm.

Regarding about hosting it in some backwater edge of greyspace, thats really not oppurtune. nearby ship and equipment availability is garbage in Edras, Helios, Pelatus, and Bractus, at least as far as most newer pilots would be concerned with when it comes to multi-match events and their standing. it also limits what some pilots can use, such as if they are usually centered around one class of ship.

I can see your point about location, Luxen. And for some types of events, this may be a consideration. Let it be considered, per event.

My primary concerns are allowing for guide moderated events, while also allowing for player moderated events, while allowing players to be able to tell the difference.

I was surprised by guide moderation of the event. I do not care for these kind of surprises.
I am not opposing guide moderation of some events. I am opposing guide moderation of all events. Some events should be player moderated, and players should know which is which, on sight.

If we can not have both, and be able to tell the difference, then I all too quickly fall back to a position strongly reassembling the argument presented by Pizzasgood.

That is a fair point. I could definitely have done a better job at advertising that it was guide hosted. But as long as I am a guide though, any event I host will be guide hosted. And specifically for this event, MANY warnings were given before guide action was taken. It certainly didn't come out of the blue.

I agree with your point though, and will do a better job of distinguishing such events. Because as you eluded to, some events are actually better when there are nonparticipants involved.

The notion of enhanced Guide command-sets to allow easier execution of Events without interruption by other players is something we've intended to do for a long time. But I don't have a timetable for implementation at this time.

I understand where Pizzasgood is coming from, but I do not consider the tradeoff of some limited sector-exclusion or instancing capabilities, of relatively short time duration (two hours at most?), to be a great burden to the rest of the game. It's certainly offset by the creation of some new and unique one-off gameplay and features.

To put it another way, we could certainly also create a completely in-context implementation where roving groups of scary NPCs would attack anyone inbound who was not flagged as an event participant, and basically achieve the same goal. But that would be more complicated to implement, have a detrimental impact on the framerate of event participants (clouds of defensive NPCs), and generally not provide any added benefit beyond a vague feeling of "maintaining temporary realism".

Events are also a great way to prototype gameplay that might show up later as full-time integrated content, with a fully in-context balance mechanic or defensive systems.

It's also reasonable to have a separation between Guide-hosted events, which may have inherent protections, versus Player-hosted events, which are not. I've tried to call out Guide-hosted events in announcements, whenever possible.

So if Incarnate is A) open to enhanced guide command-sets but can't do it right now, and B) is not opposed to the type of event that was hosted last night, then perhaps the best thing to do in the meantime is re-think the best way to hold an event like the one that happened last night.

Perhaps a plugin might be crafted to automate devwarping people? I.e. maybe it somehow populates a list of participants and auto-warps them all when the next stage of the event is to start? My understanding of the command is that it does not require people to be in the same sector as the person issuing the command...

If this is possible and could be done by some generous individual, then it would actually open up the entire universe of unmonitored sectors to be used for an event. As long as everyone homed at a station that had preferable availability of ships and addons...

I think I understand your idea greenwall.

What you mean is a plugin that allows a guide to add people to a warp-list, and then mass teleport the participants to a sector of his choosing for the event? Given the absolutely massive number of un-monitored sectors in the game, this sounds like it would do the job nicely, without the need for 'magic protection'. It also should require ZERO dev time as there are plenty of players that could build that kind of plugin.

A two system process would probably be best. First a staging sector, I'll pick azek b9 for instance, and the second would be the event sector, odia m12. Participants would be warped to the staging sector, and then the event sector. That would make it rather difficult for an interloper to quickly discover the event sector, as he would first have to catch somebody jumping to the staging sector, and then get there and catch somebody jumping to the event sector. The plugin could even randomly select the staging sector from preset list of un-monitored sectors all over.

+1 to Greenwalls implementation for Guide hosted events. As Nihilus said, many, MANY warnings were given before guide action was taken in this instance. Nihilus really should have been able to dole out some consequences IMO (devkill-and-re-home to deneb or similar far-away system, for instance) to discourage further trolling though.

I agree that player-hosted events deserve no special protections (I certainly never worried about such things for the BBFs a while back), but I do think Guide hosted events deserve "proper" moderation, in terms of ensuring all participants get a fair go at participating within the rule-set of the event.

Pizza is correct; any Guide-blessed events the Devs see fit to inflict upon the game should be "safe, legal, and rare."

Honestly, I was not present so just presumed it was a guide event simply by the OP's statements. If it was an unofficial event on the spur of the moment then Roda is right; there really should have not been any guide intervention regardless of the situation.

I never knew Nihi made guide tho, what are you guys thinking? You know he has collaborated with evil bastids to rob people right? He even had the balls to tell me I should not murder people while using an ec-89, because it was not cool. Man... There is nothing cooler.

A simple solution that is already possible is to hold the event in a sector that can only be reached by guide-warp, such as any of the 16 sectors in the center of Helios.