2009 Chaos Event was... better.

Okay. Here's the short version. The Chaos Event from 2009 was far better than the chaos event I just left.

As I remember from 2009, it was a constant spawn of Giant Monster, after Giant Monster, after Giant Monster, after Giant Monster, after Giant Monster.

This year... the event seems to based more on following cryptic clues dropped by a Game Moderator, and having to go to multiple different zones. I'm sure the setup made sense in somebody's head... like in PI having players fight Lord Recluse on one side of the Island while Ghost Widow sets up with her fortunata's atop the arena...

In practice, the 2010 event, from what I just played through... sucks. There's a strong zerg factor going on with most of the player base. The server that I was on opened up a second chaos event in Atlas Park, after the event had been moved to PI. However, nobody was really told the event had been moved to PI, so several players sat around AP doing nothing... till the announcement filtered it's way back that yes, GM's and AV's were in fact in PI... and everybody rushed there. A bit later, a red <ADMIN> message went out announcing AP would be started up again in order to fill server demand... as PI had spawned a couple instances.

Almost immediately, a majority of the player base in PI rushed off back to AP... which... well... didn't exactly solve the problem.

So... for a suggestion... Redo the event for the servers that had it tonight. Go back to the 2009 Giant Monster chaos spawn. Forget the cutesy AV manual spawn.

I'm with you , I started blueside for a while then dcd so I went to red side since most were on blue and the lag was present there also . How the heck can u get a badge when u get one hit in every so often . Will try later but so far this is not cool ....

Not sure what server you are on, but Mod08 was pretty straightforward when he was calling heroes over to Talos on Liberty.

And we had monster after monster after monster. Piles of Jacks on top of each other. Eos firebombing those returning from the hospital. Masses of Winter Lords and Frostlings. Signature AVs respwaning right after the last one fell.

Thanks to American Valor who tried to keep us organized in the chaos!

(I dc'd or I would stitll be there).

It kind of sucked for the players like me that couldn't log in while they were doing this. At least with last years I was able to join in.

I did post a little suggestion to how I believe this event could have been done better. Mod08 did as good as job as he could.
I just feel that if he had the resources or the company had allocated some resources to make a few tools available, it would have been even more memorable.
Let me explain.
I remember last year and feared the 6'th anniversary would be the same...
It did. Yes we did get lots of GM's to fight, we did get yellow titles, merits (and Essence of the Earth from the DE monsters), we did also get huge amounts of powerlag in the sone. I wonder/fear what will happen in one year, when we have had Ultra Mode.

But to how this event could have been even better:
I did notice that Mod08 had joined a few of the channels on our server, what if we had had this in advance.
Mod08 logs in on a RP/popular server.
[Rp/popular server]Mod08: Heya guys, could I have your attention please?
Followed by lots of "Yes", "Go On", "Heya Mod08" etc...
Mod08: As you know we are soon going to have 6/7/8 anniversary. We thought we should do things a little different this time, by having a few players actually play the Giant montsers. Would anyone want to Control them?
I will use GM as short for GIANT MONSTER (to spare typing)
(I will imagine that there will be even more YESSSS, pick memememe comments. I know I would say mememememememe)
Mod08: Great (he picks a few and this is what they will know)
The players gets a temp power for the event. Or they get a temporary character slot with a GM's on it. (How this would be possible would be up to the company)
The playercontrolled GM will only be spawned in the location that Mod08 decides. The playercontrolled GM will also get a certain amount of GM's/AV's or the like that follows him/her.
Then when the playercontrolled GM spawns in the location of choice. The Player begins emulating a villain, speaking in broadcast or any other channel (temp allowed/set up for the event) Trying to play a villain.
(Lets say I became one of these "monsters". My player name would not be the one that showed itself in the public channel.
[Broadcast] "me"Lord Frost": Muhaha. Fear me mortals! I shall freeze this city, I shall make this domain... Starting with this ... moving wagons building. (Reference for a trainstation).
You would get emotes, villain banter etc.. while the Playercontrolled GM and his cohorts walks towards the target. Jumping on cars etc.

What I'm trying to get at is... Involve the community more. We (I speak for myself, but I have a feeling many would agree with me) would love to help and make things even better.
What would be good was that you would get helpers free, no hireing of personel to help just for this.
I did mention in my "anniversary event" one thing that Anarchy Online (sci-fi morpg did very right. They called it Advisors of Rubi-Ka (ARK). In short a few hired personell ran it, but most of the organisation was crewed by active players who enjoyed helping players. They did so by greeting new players at first, then as they showed their worth, they could begin helping with troubles like /stuck etc. In this ARK they did have a kind of fellowship and a great time. I do remember that one of them told us players that he had not logged in on his player account for atleast 6 month (can't remember for sure), he just had it too fun as an ARK.

My point again is. You have an active playerbase, who would love to help out. Please Involve us
Anyone got any other suggestions to how to improve the Anniversary event?

Between the programming required and liability concerns, I don't see that as particularly feasible.

On Freedom, there were multiple event zones, but the celebration event did not take place in all of them. For instance, we had Atlas, Atlas2, and Atlas3 at the start of the event, but (to the best of my knowledge) only Atlas saw anything spawn. When Talos was called as the new location, we, again, wound up with multiple zones: this time Talos and Talos2 (eventually) saw spawns, Talos3 did not (again, to the best of my knowledge). In the future, could we pretty please get a point of clarification posted in event announcements: where, exactly, the events are going to take place if there are multiple instances of the zone in question (only the original zone, only the original and it's second counterpart, etc.). What we had, in practice, on Freedom last night was first come first serve with an attendance cap - that's not what I'd expected from reading the In-Game Server Events post. If this is how events are going to/have to occur, it would be immensely helpful if the event announcement could spell this out ahead of time. Lag aside, the portions of the event that I was able to take part in were pretty cool. It was the time that I spent in Atlas2 and Talos3 waiting for the event to start (and eventually realizing that it wasn't going to) that wasn't so cool.