Discussion: Captain Mako Week Events!

Hi guys! Some good ideas here, let me try to address them individually.

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Originally Posted by Zaloopa For future events like this I think a good way to avoid the boredom would be to have an objective for the event. It would take development time but would make your lives easier if you could have some object that spawns enemies and the players need to destroy that object. The rate at which it spawns enemies could be based on the number of players within a certain range of it, you could probably use a modified version of the rikti invasion code for this. It could have an insane amount of HP but very low regen to ensure that the fight isn't over too fast but also that stopping to clean up the spawned critters doesn't make you lose all your progress. Maybe have it occasionally spawn a critter that will try to heal it so that players have extra incentive to watch the spawns. That way all you guys have to do is drop the object in zone and it handles the rest for you. On larger servers you could drop multiple objects. Then any witty banter or signature enemies you want to throw out would just be icing on the cake.

Something like this would of course be ideal in terms of reducing our workload, but it's less than optimal for our devs. The reason we run events manually is so that we can avoid using up development time. Sometimes we're able to get dev time to support invasions if there's some downtime where the developers aren't so busy, but in this case, it wasn't an option, so it was a choice between doing the invasion manually, and not doing it at all. Of course, we chose to do it in a more limited and problematic form since, as I stated earlier, we feel these events are something really important for our players, and it's something we and y'all really enjoy.

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Originally Posted by Evangel Thanks for the info Freitag. For what its worth, I enjoyed the event on defiant, especially the punning soooo many fish jokes to be made! Now, I enjoyed the event...but it was very very chaotic and haphazard and , your explaination of how it works in the background shows why this is so. Fair enough, I have to say thank you very much for all the time and effort you and the other Devs put into providing events like this for us players. was this the bestest event I ever played? honestly? no. That would be the end invasion of redside beta when we fought off freedom phalanx and longbow I remember dying happy that I managed to ignore all other mobs, survive the lag and land one solid punch on States before I faceplanted... But I realise not all events can be like that and a lot of what makes CoH what it is , is the players you play alongside. So, despite what you admit can be "samey" content, the event was, for me great fun. Rather than just make yet another comment on the event without offering something in return, here's how I would have liked the event to go and yes, I realise that it more than likely would not be possible because of technical issues but I hope it gives someone some degree of inspiration for something in the future yeah yeah, I know, never could happen but hopefully it will give an idea of what, for me, would be a perfect event and will serve as better feedback than "that was boring" or "that sucked!"

Your event sounds pretty good in theory, and maybe we'll try to take a page out of your proverbial book in future invasions, but there are a couple problematic things with it. It would work great if each of us only had one zone to look after, but once we start doing multiple zones, there's an incredible potential for confusion.

Another issue is the speed at which people kill stuff. We have to, for example, spawn more stuff for a zone with 100 people than a zone with 25 people. It's probably workable, but it introduces more complexity than, say, dropping 50 mobs for 100 players vs dropping 10 mobs for 25 Players.

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Originally Posted by GPBunny I'm one who uses the word Devs. But I use it to represent all of NCSoft. A Red name is the same as a Red shirt at Target to me. You are the one that is representing your company at that point whe you interact with the customer. It doesn't matter if I ask a person where the Tide is and they work in the Food section. They should be able to direct me to either the right area or the right person. Same here. When an issue is brought up, we your customers shouldn't have to wonder what your current title is, what office you sit in, or even if you had a personal stake in said issue. What we need is that the issue is passed on to the correct person/department. That is something that you know where it goes. To expect an outsider to know your inner workings is a folley. People who read the forums may know some of who is who, but the forum makes up only 10% of the population. That leaves 90% who have no idea at all. But back to the 3 hour window. On Freedom last night after the pocket D party. People who came in late found a giant mutant Lusca still in Talos. Spent a good 40 minutes killing it with a small league. A good half of these people didn't know the event had already ended. All the same disapointed remarks came out. "Where's Mako?, "How do I get my gold title?" "Is that all there is?" and so on. You may have the best of intentions but the execution is lacking. This is why so many people are having a "ho hum experience". Now it is nice to see that you are reading the replies, and some change has happen. Like Dropping PI and focusing on Talos. But frankly you shouldn't of been using the first few servers as a beta test.

I understand that there's frequently confusion about titles and so forth. That's why I made that statement. I wanted to be clear who was involved, and who wasn't. While it may sound reasonable the way you put it, it's really not reasonable to complain about an artist when the issue is a live event that the artist had absolutely nothing to do with. Maybe you ask the artist who in Community to talk to, and maybe they'll know, but my concern was with people blaming the development team as a whole when most of them are only nominally aware of the event in the vaguest of terms. It's not their responsibility.

I understand the difficulties of a 3 hour window, and if a mob stays up after we stop spawning stuff, then of course that's a potential issue. I'm sorry those players were frustrated, but I was trying to explain the methodology above, and everything I said still holds true.

Thanks for the reasoned dialogue folks!

~Freitag

A possible solution for giving the red names more time during the events, and the players a more dynamic invasion, could be to create a destination point for invaders in each zone, and 4 invasion spawn points on the edges of the zones - that way, the mobs would seem like they were acting with more purpose by moving in towards the destination point ratehr than just hanging around in the streets.
The spawn points would need to have a list of all types of invaders attached to them that the red names could select, and then just flip the switch to activate the spawn points - for example, for this Mako week invasion on Talos island, they'd pick the suitbale mobs from the list attached to the invaison spanws, and then turn the event on - Coralax and Arachnos mobs would then spawn a the 4 spawnign points around the edges of the Talos island map and head towards the destination point - which would be the hill by the transit station.
The mobs would keep spawning at regular intertvals, and players could choose to fight them at the spawn points, at the hill, or through the streets as they moved towards their destination.

Frei thanks a ton for taking the time to explain as you did a few posts above. That REALLY gives all of us a clearer picture of what's going on here.

I'm a huge fan of the game and have been for 7 years. This event certainly isn't going to deter me from playing.

That said, given the information we had *or I had atleast* going into the event, I figured I had plenty of time to "participate" as long as I was here online in a zone with water before 8 pm. If there was some sort of schedule given out beforehand such as the one in Evangel's post above *the copied one* then I could have made plans accordingly.

I wanted to be as excited as you all were with all the build up and talk leading up to the event. Bubble was certainly burst, but hopefully I have a character or two on one of the remaining servers. If that's the case, I'll be on at the START of the event time and I'll keep my eyes peeled for a league to join! Hopefully I won't be left out.

A little more communication before the event started (perhaps somewhere were even non-board readers can see it--i.e. a pop-up window upon logging in) would have been EXTREMELY beneficial and put a lot of the disappointment to rest before it even happened. Putting some sort of schedule or a "what-to-do" out there for us to see would have given us accurate expectations. It didn't have to be completely detailed as I know you wanted there to be some sort of surprise with all this. Just a suggestion.

In any event, one of the things I love about this game is the various special events that come up. I really enjoy taking part in them!! LOVED the Summer Blockbuster event, the Christmas events, Halloween, etc. I guess those give us time to figure them out because they last longer, where this Mako event was BOOM, gone! If you missed it, oh well. That's where my frustration comes in because I feel like I followed the information out there, but still didn't get to participate. Like I said before, hopefully I can learn from this and use what I learned by missing out on Victory to make it a successful event for me on another remaining server.

For one this event has posted up for about say a month or so ( someone can correct me) a few things bother me:

1) No badge? I mean what heck the Fallen Thunder gave one why not this ? The fact as a player I have to get on an appropriate time is just a tad inconvenient. It's whatever I shrug it off and understand the process of scheduling, but a temporary gold title goes away. A random chance at code is luck of the draw. At least a badge shows you participated in the event. Maybe I'm on the only of that feels this way.

2) Where is Captain Mako? I fight an Octopus that clearly has no correlation with mako and some coralax here and there , but the the big bad fish is a no show? You might as well called it "Lusca Revenge Week".

3) The distribution of gold titles needs to be looked over because a lot folks went to the various Pocket D's only to leave empty handed with no gold title or a crack at a code just a thumb up our butts

Overall , I really did not like this event one bit. I expected something more from a character in game that has high precedence instead I got a fish flop.

I've got a few thoughts here and there based on part of this event I was able to attend and some of the events from a while ago.

• Shorter events probably work better. While a large window helps more people get in who are late, it requires a lot more work to keep people occupied. It seems like an event designed around 30 minutes would work out better. With that kind of time window, you can do either redside or blueside all in one shot and then do the other faction. That way the only zone swapping will be either storyline based travel or checking for multiple instances. In theory, shorter individual events should lead to another needed thing...
  
  
• There really needs to be more than one community rep per server. Obviously, there's difficulties in timing but that's a distinct difference from when this Mako event hit Victory server to some of the older events back when Avatea and Ocho were still here. Having two (or even three) devs in a zone allows them to bounce banter back and forth and/or have one cover narrative while the other is on spawn duty. This seems easier when the event as a whole is of a shorter length and only one faction is done at a time.
  
  
• Players may actually be too powerful for events to work well. This is very subjective but in comparison to older events, the Incarnate system causes enemies to be killed off very quickly which alters the pace of things. It seems like this "problem" is either something that will have to be worked around or alternate methods of handling it could be applied. The latter is problematic since they'd be controversial. While people might not mind being killed, they would probably object to having their characters directly manipulated. One interesting thing that happened at an older event is that it traveled through a few zones and eventually ended up in Warburg due to the event plot. While that has a forced level down, it would probably only be appropriate for an event that explicitly notes that it will cross through some PvP zones.
  
  
• Explore options for volunteers. While Zwil had a good point in the other thread that there's a lot of tools that you don't want to give players, all that probably isn't needed. What's needed seems more along the lines of a magician's assistant who's planted in the crowd. Someone who's volunteered to let you kill/debuff/etc them for the sake of the event's plot and pacing and is somewhat in on things. It would be a way for the community to help out the Community Team since you guys are doing this in your spare time.
  
  
• There really needs to be a greater objective than just killing spawns. Actually makes me really curious on what you guys can and can't spawn in a zone. Various objects from AE and mayhem missions seem like they'd work well for objects to destroy or protect. A more defined objective should help keep the crowd occupied and if an event finishes quickly people can feel good about hitting an actual goal.
  
  
• When possible, fight directly in the finale. Also leading into the fact of not knowing where your control starts and stops, directly fighting with the lfinal boss can make things more interesting than a generic NPC value since potentially you have more options and you can be more dynamic than an AI. Mix in some custom made costumes or using a specific NPC skin will catch people's attention.
  
  
• Manipulate the environment to set the atmosphere. Objects are good but seeding the fameStrings ahead of the event or perhaps "rewarding" players with one afterwards make it feel like it's affecting the world even if it's just a temporary event. I've heard that you guys actually have the ability to manipulate the skyline. Doing so could make an area look more foreboding or perhaps have the sun shine triumphantly after a victory.
  
  
• Vary location. Blueside gets the massive advantage here but (when appropriate) try having some of the events in lesser frequented areas such as hazard zones or areas with fewer common objectives.

Another way to handle the event rewards would be to make them mailable items - then it doesn't matter if the player is around to respond to the PM or not - the red names just mail the reward to them.

I'll divide my thoughts into two parts: Community Rep Events and Dev Team Events.

Community Rep Events:

You know what? I don't care what anybody says, you folks did an awesome job, and knowing what you go through to achieve it makes me appreciate it all the more. This latest event might have had some snags, but it was flat-out fun for my wife and I. I can't thank you enough that you took the time to do this.

That being said, nothing is perfect and I know there were some snags. A suggestion off the top of my head:

Spawn some neighborhood level appropriate invasion mobs all over the map. They don't have to be participating in the actual invasion, just spawns of them for people who can't - for tech, timing or other reasons - participate in the actual hosted event. ALL OVER the map. Everywhere a normal spawn would be, drop a level-appropriate spawn there. Save the harder spawns/GM's for the actual event and the neighborhood immediately affected.

That way someone who can't handle the lag or arrives too late for the main battle can still participate in some small way. And if you happen to see a player/team hunting the spawns, you can drop a couple "bonus mobs" on them or put in some sort of appearance as you're taking care of other instances or tending to Pocket D. (and how cool would it be to have a dev swing by on a signature hero to help a team or a player in trouble?)

Dev Team Events:

I've already gone on record (several times) as not particularly caring for the Nemesis event. It was fine for what it was and I don't want to complain that it happened. I just ignored it after the first day.

But I do have opinons on these scripted zone events, both good and bad.

The Rikti invasions are probably some of my favorite zone events in the game. From the atmosphere of the green sky/no war walls/air raid sirens to the distinct phases and unique quirks (like seeking physical cover so the drop ships don't see you) to the accolade you get from it, I think it's hands-down the best zone event in the game. It's thematic, it's fun and it's epic. There's a reason it usually sees wide participation.

After that, you've got what I like to refer to as the "Zombie Apocalypse Clones." The Zombie Apocalypse itself was fine and a fun addition, but with nothing to speak of outside of a costume piece for rewards and no special phases outside of massive hordes of zombies popping up out of the ground, it really doesn't get the attention it deserves from players. I still go whenever I see them up because they're just plain creepy fun.

The clones of the zombie apocalypse, not so much. The Nemesis event in particular featured nothing but Nemesis soldiers spawning ad nauseum out of thin air. After a day or so I thought "You know what? If I want to street-fight Nemesis I'll go to Peregrine Island." There was NOTHING thematic or creative about that event.

IMHO future invasion scripted events need to follow the Rikti invasion template:

1 Have at least two phases with unique goals.

2 Have a theme that affects the entire zone. Differently colored skies, Nemesis' voice booming through loudspeakers (Like Lord Recluse in Grandville) Or the fog of a Banner Event
EDIT - Oh man how cool would an Arachnos Invasion with propaganda vehicles roaming the streets spewing the Recluse soundbyte be? Get a badge for destroying the vehicles, a badge for repelling troops and a badge for signature villains. Hell yeah!

3 Have a desirable reward that can only be achieved through completing multiple event-related goals Can't stress the multiple goals enough. It doesn't have to be some power or accolade, but a costume piece, badge, something

Speaking of Banner Events, I think the ONLY reason people don't do those is that there's really no reward outside of badges to speak of to merit the somewhat complex (for a zone event) mechanics. No one on Liberty ever seems to attend them, and that's a shame. They're one of my favorites.

Last, I have to include Giant Monsters spawns. Something needs to be done to motivate more people to do those. A different reward for killing multiples would be nice (Geas of the Kind Ones is a fantastic reward connected to the Croatoa Monsters). A zone-wide siren sound wouldn't be out of place either IMHO, to let players in zone that a giant monster has spawned.

Alright any longer and I"m gonna have to move this over to the suggestions forum.

But I can't resist one last request - can we get level-independent coralax spawning with Lusca ALL THE TIME in the future?

It was so cool to see them floating out in the water with her!

Just sharing my own experiences with the event. I participated on Freedom the other night and overall I'd say it was a mess. The Talos I was in (7?) was largely in a confused state on what to do. I think Lusca/Tentacle spawns were forgotten for a short while. Then I went to Pocket D 2 after the second Lusca and waited around with everyone for a while. I don't think many noticed there was even a dev that stopped by, which I'm not sure even happened. Someone said they got a code, so it's possible, but was brief.

Overall, I walked away with just a bar of XP, 4 reward merits, and the title.

All that said, I do appreciate the effort put into this, but there should be more thought put into events of this nature. After skimming through this thread, it's no wonder your team was a bit overwhelmed.

I hope you figure something out for handling the large amount of players/zones.

I really enjoyed the Mako Events. I went to 3 of them. Victory, Pinnacle and lastly Freedom. Victory and Pinnacle went off without any problems that I noticed. Freedom was a bit confusing to say the least. I am thinking due to the overwhelming alts that were running. I counted 7 Talos Islands at one time. Whew!

My only complaint would be when the pocket D thing came up. My pocket d seemed to go smoothly. Hit Streak did a great job announcing that he was there. Turned off people's powers and proceeded to say he was going to hand out random codes. My husband's pocket d on the other hand had no one show up. I believe he was in Pocket D 6. There was no one announcing anything or giving any indication that they were there. This caused a lot of negative talk in Pocket D that they were missed.

Even if only 2 codes were given out; I believe some type of announcement in that zone should be given. That way all the people that are in that zone will think that they were included in the giveaways. I understand that it is overwhelming. Maybe just a bit of cohesiveness in announcing in each zone would be something that could be done in the future. That would eliminate all the negative chatter and make for happy subscribers.

Anyways, I did enjoy the event. Did wish Mako showed himself though instead of hiding behind his minions! haha. Keep the events coming!

So finaly had the event on Guardian

And It was a lot of fun.

And considering how many servers they where doing it on and how many differing versions ofhte zones.....wow...that is one of heck of alot of switching.

I noticed they started getting tricky...and started placing enmies in and around the Talos Island Area and then decided to have them all attack at once.....

At one point they decided to really hammer players....when they put tons of tentacles and then dropped a lusca head and then started sending in flyers alot of flyers all at the same time.

That was alot of fun....

The servers though.....good gravy i thought they where going to hemorage and die....i pulle dup the old latency check and saw the the NC servers for whatever reason have some real trouble..

All in all this was a great event...had a few players a little upset they couldnt fight an archvillain version of MAKO.....i think they where thinking it was going to be like that Invasion event on Test a while back.

Though I must say.....was it me...or is Talos Island just having issues with lots of players and things....I dont recall Kings Row slowing the servers down....
But then it might have been due to 4 differing servers with the event...all at the same time.

At the end in Pocket D a bunch of people got codes in Pocket D 1 and POcket D 2....I only know because the Legion of Catgirls was there....

Oh at one point had alot of players switch over to help defend SHardhead inthe rogue islands...it sounds like that went fairly well also.

The only thing though...that would have made this all even better is if the heros and villains didnt have that un-needed wall separtaing the Rogue Isles and the Paragon City...i mean the enitire as a Villain you cant go to Paragon....or as a hero you cant go to Sharkhead....

I get the intent about alignments and I understand the original intent for the division......but seriously there are alot more things out there......that signify those barriers need to be gone now......I already find it sad when you have a rogue join your task force.....and you get sent to Dark Astoria Refelection and they cant get there with out a mission transport power....and if they dont have that.....they get left out.

But if they didnt have these walls......the event would have been more like players would have gone to sharkhead.....if Mako said something was happening someplace else...they wouldhave all gone there too.......

In any event or Giant monster thing thats one thing you can count on....
Players dont like Invasions or Giant Monsters stomping around.....unless they can beat the stuffing out of them....and so they will go to great lengths to hunt the stuff down...

ANywise i had alot of fun......and I hope we get more stuff like this inthe furture.

I managed to get on for the event on Guardian and thought it was a lot of fun. Certainly it was pretty chaotic and a little confused compared to the scripted events, but to me that was part of its charm. I think there's plenty of room for both the Rikti/Nemesis/etc style invasions and the somewhat more 'playful' events like this. They were obviously run off their feet trying to keep things going everywhere, but it was nice to have the interaction with the community staff.

The unpredictable nature of things lead to some really fun moments too. I was in Talos Island 2 after we drove off the attack and there was an announcement that the villains needed help. So most people switched over to alts to help at Sharkhead while those of us (like me) who didn't have villains either stayed in Talos or headed over to Pocket D.

But then, just as it seemed like everything was all over, a whole flight of Arachnos Fliers came in to attack the hill while there were just a handful of us around. My DM/Inv Scrapper did her best to hold the hill and at one point was so surrounded that I couldn't move anywhere even if I wanted to. Couldn't even jump! I thought I managed to last pretty well, but had to activate Unstoppable and eventually dropped when that went down, but not before taking out a couple of Fliers.

Those of us who were still around then regrouped at the Hospital and fought off a bunch of Arachnos and Corallax in the streets. Then we joined up with another group of heroes and stormed the hill to retake it before heading to join the celebrations at Pocket D!

I imagine lots of other players had fun little moments like that and it's the kind of thing that doesn't happen nearly so often in more traditional invasions. So I'd love to see more of the same and thanks a lot again to the community team.

well I was on 3 events,and i saw good and bad. what I would like to suggest to use this as a teaching moment. you have found out that events like this are too much for a manual control and some type of automated utilities are needed . I realize you are hard at work for both I24 and I25,and any new events for the next few months.

But some kind of automated tools to make this easier,while time consuming in the beginning. would pay for itself in future events. Going back into the early days,the devs of Unreal spent Months on building utilities before they started writing the Unreal engines(this all from a article they wrote) I understand that part of the workload is getting ready for the next issue publish, cleaning up code and documentation ,as this game has had so many different programmers . but if all the Devs are scrambling for the next Issue/deadline problems that happened in the Mako event will continue.

I have a question suppose in the future,cross server teaming is made possible,and a "mako like" happens? will there be like talos 1-40 on the server? how will that be handled?



Each issue while improving the game,is like adding a ball to someone who is juggling , each one makes it more difficult.

Well, I enjoyed it, anyway. Nothing fancy or complicated, just a giant pile of heroes pounding on a giant pile of bad guys. Big stupid fun. Not something I'd want to do every day, but a nice break from the routine. And I enjoyed the corny banter in the Admin channel too. For something that was thrown together on short notice with limited resources, I thought it was fine. Thanks, Community Team.

Don't think anyone's responded to this, but are there any badges associated with the event?

Have to say, this has to be one of the lamest special events to record since I started back with City of Villains in Issue 6. Hope they learn from this and make the next event more enjoyable.

Redside, Virtue. We had Lusca. That was it. Why did blueside in Talos get Coralax invasions AND Lusca? We defeated Lusca in under 10 minutes! Not a fun event. Make sure to balance between redside and blueside the next time you do an event