[Official Event] Operation Pesticide

[Haste]

One of the weak points of the event from our side was definitely not making it clear that the "Titans" were there, essentially, as scenery and a minor way to even the player number odds slightly if needed.

... and heroic assaults against them in smaller craft will yield little success.

This was meant to be a subtle hint towards this, but in hindsight clearly it was far too subtle.

The Alma going down for what was effectively a Zoner Carrier that was "made up on the spot" was not something we were intending on doing here.

This was the first time I or Reeves organized this type of server event (at this scale), so we overlooked a fair few things. There are definitely a lot of lessons for us to learn here.

Last-minute deciding to make the event a respawn event, despite it not being labeled as such in the OP, was another "symptom" of our inexperience. I do believe it was the right call, as I suspect the fighting would have ended or would have been reduced to - most likely - a dozen Zoners chasing a handful of Liberty ships around very quickly; making the "transport escort" aspect pointless. I'm personally not a huge fan of respawn events, and I think neither is Reeves, so we tried to build an event without that mechanic, but this setup clearly wasn't suitable.

Despite all of this, I hope everyone had fun! It was a big, chaotic furball that was fun to watch, so I hope it was at least as fun to play. Thanks everyone for coming.

Do keep the feedback coming, too. It'll only help us improve future events.

Respawn was fun even though I think some adequate warning should be given before it is disabled, so that people do not find themselves starting the final fight on half their supply of nanobots after surviving for a long time.

Yep, that's another thing. Next time we should let everyone regroup a final time and brawl it out, I think.

1. Despite being destroyed, the Alma was either admin moved away before destruction and then magically reappeared with full health or was never meant to be destroyed or damaged?

Its admin shield got destroyed by an explosion, so after the initial /shields, its shields never came back up. It was expected/intended to take a bit of damage but not be completely destroyed, but obviously it died incredibly quickly at that point. I beamed it away as it would've made the rest of the event pretty awkward if it went down then. As I wrote earlier, though, we definitely could've handled the "titans" better as they were really just set pieces here, but that wasn't communicated.

seem like the entire event was rigged for Liberty from the get go

Full disclosure: the Alma versus Zoner Carrier portion was most definitely rigged. The Alma originally was planned to be the Zoners' "doomsday timer", slowly creeping up on Erie to blow up the Zoner Carrier and do Alma things. Clearly didn't quite play out that way as the ship got involved in some Q-Ship cleanup action early on.

Why the transport pilots/players either flew in a straight line without cruise (when outside of range of enemies) and never used batts or bots?

After the Zoners pulled ahead by virtue of two transports making it away without anyone even batting an eye at them, the transport player made a bit of an effort to not make it a completely flawless victory for the Zoners. Maybe they overdid it, maybe they didn't. The loadout strength of the transports was highly variable too and it was up to the pilot's discretion to make them "fair" against the players that showed up, to at least give them a bit of a fighting chance. I will personally say that fine-tuning transport loadouts with beefy event armors against effectively unknown aggressors (for all we knew 40 Liberty Navy ships could've shown up against 5 Zoners) is always going to be hard, and a bit of deliberate "user error" on the pilot's part for the loadouts that turn out surprisingly strong is something I think is a good call. We just can't account for every possibility with an open event like this.

I will say that we did weigh the transports player's "self restraint" as a point in favor of the Zoners, as if the player had fully min-maxed the loadouts more transports would have undoubtedly made it to safety.

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