[Official Event] Weekend Getaway

[Barrier]

The idea is to have people use this requirement as an opportunity to develop existing RP, or create new RP arcs.

I appreciate that, but what you may not realise is that the *vast* majority of people who participate in these events do not use established characters to do it, and often create brand new ones to do so. The people who do have established characters, such as OS&C, absolutely should be rewarded for it and it's great that they got their own tailored reward but I don't think it's fair on everyone else to impose mandatory, slightly janky low quality RP posts just for this purpose. People who want to RP around an event will do so, with or without it being mandatory.

If a person has an established character to run an event with, they already have that character that they are invested in and they'll do it. Everyone else playing in the event and earning gameplay rewards provide a vector for those people to get that interaction.

Your point about writing in event threads is exactly what *should* be rewarded, and was rewarded with contrails. That's fantastic. This is not what should be a mandatory blockade for rewards people have supposedly already earned through gameplay though.

The mandatory RP doesn't make these long term memories that you're talking about. If you actually talk to people about memorable events, more often than not it's in-game interactions that are memorable, not forum RP. It's a frustrating barrier that makes people less likely to involve themselves because of the forced extra step. I won't claim my engine reward because I just don't have any ideas for anything quality to write and so I don't want to do it. I don't think I'm an outlier.

If people feel as strongly as you about this, they need to actually contact me with this feedback. When you say "I don't think I'm an outlier", my current perception is that you are indeed an outlier. However, since you're an old vet with considerable rp experience, your opinion is pretty important for all that. I'll see if I can bend the rewards rule a bit to compromise here.

Another thing about in-game rp: I literally cannot know that it happened, and when I see no follow-up after an event, I assume that nothing happened. Take something like Snake Eyes. I know there was in-game RP, because I saw it, and passed that along to story who liked one part enough to incorporate it into Crayter-IMG lore. But what happened after? No idea. And if I wasn't there on-scene, I would've missed the in-game stuff that happened, and probably wouldn't have heard about it at all. The event thread and reports had some nice write-ups, but I don't think any mentioned that moment. This stuff needs to be out in public view for people to play off of, instead of briefly in the minds of the handful of the participants of the in-game interaction.

I'm thinking long-term here, and brief cool in-game moments do not seem to be resulting in any of that. I'm sure there's a better way to balance incentives, but I learned by now that I cannot rely on people to record their interactions without incentives.

[Barrier]

More generally though, Gallia-focused events are just not very popular. I was a bit surprised to see no one on the Rheinland side either, but I suppose the incentives weren't good enough to dust off rarely played factions. We'll increment things based on this data in the future.

You did pick inactive Gallic Factions for the Event.

I wasn't going to make an IDF Ship just to do this Event.

Those few people who did (except, basically OS&C|) run the Event worked out that having a UC ID gave them a free run from being pirated. Most of the people were using the UC ID. Even saw that some would log Brigands against the rest and then log UC IDed Liners to do the runs when no others were on.

As for incentives, is there a need for 'rewards' for every Event? The extra credits made and capability for those that want to do the RP to be able to do it, should be incentive enough.

If you keep throwing a huge amount of rewards out, especially for the PvP Events, you will eventually run in to the 'I don't need anymore of those as I have loads from the previous Events, so I am not going to bother logging'.

*climbs in to a fearnought suit*

Factions are inactive for various reasons. Events are meant to kickstart activity, but of course if the underlying reason isn't solved, they'll just become inactive again. But if there are only minor barriers to activity, events can result in people developing something going forward. You may decide not to do something for an event, but other people may be waiting for a push or excuse to finally get around to making a character or doing a faction write-up.

We've tried low-reward events, and they just don't draw enough activity. That's just the reality of the community. You will get a few people who are intrinsically motivated, by the remainder of people who are required to develop meaningful RP are just not interested. And it makes sense, events generally cover a few factions at a time, so why would people make a new character or write RP about one that they don't care about. Well, at least people will do it for rewards (and credits alone just don't cut it when gold/plat mining/hauling exists).

You are right that eventually some people will be saturated with rewards, and won't log. But how is that different from what they'd do if there weren't any rewards? I'd just lose those people right away.

[Levenna]

I'm thinking long-term here, and brief cool in-game moments do not seem to be resulting in any of that. I'm sure there's a better way to balance incentives, but I learned by now that I cannot rely on people to record their interactions without incentives.

I'm sorry but it's not our job as a player base to write the disco story for you or write your event outcomes. If people want to contribute to that and write RP around the event, by all means, that's their prerogative and I think having rewards for that is awesome like the contrails this event. But, and it's a very significant but, I think your priorities are sorely misplaced here if making it mandatory is for the purpose of you being able to see it.

If you really want events to spur player activity, which supposedly you do, you can't introduce these kinds of barriers to entry and then be surprised when the response is relatively muted or participation is low. Events work best when they're well-designed and accessible frameworks for players to have natural, memorable interactions with one another within. This is what leads to events actually generating activity.

This seems to be something you're moving away from or at least de-emphasising judging by what I'm seeing you write and that really concerns me.

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[03.07.2024] LNS-Beast***: we can do this every day but you have to buy bigger stronger ships...and i'll help you

[Barrier]

Have to be honest, this is wishful thinking and in my opinion not worth having a mandatory roleplay requirement for. Splitting participation and RP rewards would be a much better way of encouraging good roleplay out of this event, whilst also allowing people to participate casually, even when the profit rewards aren't stellar. Good roleplay will surface regardless of requirements at the end of the day. I also think there is a misunderstanding of players' mindsets; players focused on roleplay will care little for cosmetic and pvp rewards, and the reverse is true. Why not appeal to that for stronger event participation?

What would you provide as RP rewards that isn't available via just participation? Affecting story is off-the table, while unique rewards can already be achieved via techexemption and SRP without the need for events. If we had something tangible to offer, I wouldn't mind splitting the rewards.

Ultimately imho we should prioritise participation above all else - as that is the basis for which roleplay will form off of and contribute to server longevity, not people being forced to make roleplay for throwaway characters that they feel no attachment to. If there is a lack of participation, because mandatory roleplay deters people, it means everyone loses. Roleplay on the roleplay server will not end if people are allowed to claim rewards without a roleplay requirement (as evident from events in the past).

You talk with confidence about stuff that I also monitor, and I formed the opposite opinion. It's possible that we are both right about different things, but I'd suggest you take a look at events after the RP requirement was instituted (from Journey of the Argonauts onwards). Did those events involve less activity? I don't think so. There's gotta be other factors at play here, and if I can retain similar levels of engagement with the RP requirement rather than without it, I'll take the RP requirement.

If the justification for forced roleplay is to encourage long term activity, have to be honest I think that is also silly. Gallia will not spring into activity overnight after a flurry of roleplay posts. It critically needs gameplay and economy changes to make it more interesting for players to fly there. That is (vastly) out of players' hands. My parody of Dr. Harlow from OSRS isn't going to revive the Brigands. But something that encourages my UC character to continue their story (cough cough Gallic POB wine/nox refineries) could. This is another subject though, and I'm not expecting you to be able to make those changes as you are working with what you have.

Everything is interconnected. The motivation to make those changes may come from a critical mass of people willing to contribute to fixing Gallia's infocards, lore, etc. And a likely way that happens is if they get attached to a character or story. Besides, I cannot make that happen, so I do what I can within the scope of events. For me it's either this or nothing - other devs have to work on these issues.

[Lemon]

More generally though, Gallia-focused events are just not very popular. I was a bit surprised to see no one on the Rheinland side either, but I suppose the incentives weren't good enough to dust off rarely played factions. We'll increment things based on this data in the future.

You did pick inactive Gallic Factions for the Event.

I wasn't going to make an IDF Ship just to do this Event.

Those few people who did (except, basically OS&C|) run the Event worked out that having a UC ID gave them a free run from being pirated. Most of the people were using the UC ID. Even saw that some would log Brigands against the rest and then log UC IDed Liners to do the runs when no others were on.

As for incentives, is there a need for 'rewards' for every Event? The extra credits made and capability for those that want to do the RP to be able to do it, should be incentive enough.

If you keep throwing a huge amount of rewards out, especially for the PvP Events, you will eventually run in to the 'I don't need anymore of those as I have loads from the previous Events, so I am not going to bother logging'.

*climbs in to a fearnought suit*

Lmao I mean that's how UC is in Gallia - they are just neutral with everyone - There's umm...yeah there is nobody who would go after them in canon, especially not Brigands openly, pretty much only wild in Gallia.

For me, love the event, sadly I was abroad on a work trip to take advantage

[Barrier]

@L1ght @Levenna
I want to understand why you think you're forced to play in events. Sure, there are rewards on offer, but these are meant as incentives. Aka they draw people to the event who would otherwise not have participated due to some intrinsic motivation like developing their character or defending their faction's asset, etc. The way you're talking, players are assumed to participate in all events, and this rp requirement is taking away their rightful spoils for this "labor". Again, I hear this feedback, and I'll be making some changes about rp requirements for rewards. But saying that you're forced to write them doesn't make sense to me. If you don't like doing it this much, you just wouldn't do it, right? You can still just farm trading rewards and bounties and enjoy a top scoring spot on the leaderboard if you don't wanna develop rp around the event.

[Levenna]

@L1ght @Levenna
I want to understand why you think you're forced to play in events. Sure, there are rewards on offer, but these are meant as incentives. Aka they draw people to the event who would otherwise not have participated due to some intrinsic motivation like developing their character or defending their faction's asset, etc. The way you're talking, players are assumed to participate in all events, and this rp requirement is taking away their rightful spoils for this "labor". Again, I hear this feedback, and I'll be making some changes about rp requirements for rewards. But saying that you're forced to write them doesn't make sense to me. If you don't like doing it this much, you just wouldn't do it, right? You can still just farm trading rewards and bounties and enjoy a top scoring spot on the leaderboard if you don't wanna develop rp around the event.

I want to understand why you're even asking this question or how it's even relevant. Your thing is events, right? Shouldn't that mean that you're looking to give people the best experience possible? How does mandatory RP improve our experience as a player base? Do people have fun writing RP for the sole purpose of claiming a reward? Is this aspect what people will return to future events to experience? People who want to write RP will do so if they want to, people who don't want to and want to just casually engage with the event will be frustrated by it as has been evidenced in this thread.

I appreciate that you'll look at making changes though

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[03.07.2024] LNS-Beast***: we can do this every day but you have to buy bigger stronger ships...and i'll help you

[Barrier]

I want to understand why you're even asking this question or how it's even relevant. Your thing is events, right? Shouldn't that mean that you're looking to give people the best experience possible? How does mandatory RP improve our experience as a player base? Do people have fun writing RP for the sole purpose of claiming a reward? People who want to write RP will do so if they want to, people who don't want to and want to just casually engage with the event will be frustrated by it as has been evidenced in this thread.

I appreciate that you'll look at making changes though

I cannot give the best experience for everyone at the same time. So I try to maximize engagement in the event while offering multiple options to play it. The point of the rp requirement is that people would be primed with it in mind to actually engage with the event beyond the bare minimum. You remember people in PvE events who would farm the needed amount of NPCs, always logging off at the first sign of contact. Or the example of this event and some others where traders simply log off and continue hauling afterwards. With the rp requirement, my intent is for people to be looking for opportunities to actually RP in-game, so that they can simply describe this interaction later, or build on it with a comm, etc. That is easier than coming up with something completely new on the fly because you just afk powertraded for ~7 hours to get the reward.

However, this also adversely affects people who just don't want to write anything outside of the game, which is a problem. But I cannot know what happened in-game. I can just do my best to incentivize in-game rp. In fact, this discussion already gave me some ideas about the basic reason for the requirement, and how I can modify it to retain them.

[Lemon]

More generally though, Gallia-focused events are just not very popular. I was a bit surprised to see no one on the Rheinland side either, but I suppose the incentives weren't good enough to dust off rarely played factions. We'll increment things based on this data in the future.

In Gallia it just pays to talk to people that play it beforehand St.Denis, me etc. I was away when the event happened, and the mistake was the event setup with UC as main haulers who nobody will want to touch in Canon without very specific cargo, least of all Brigands in the Open.

We've run huge events in Gallia in the past, it just takes a specific kind of design and prep, story was sort of inconsequential Filler folks didn't RP about before.


The RP was nice touch, having extra rewards for that aside is a very good idea. Just have in game rewards as usual and throw these as a bonus

[Ramke]

I will throw my thoughts into the wind if anyone's bored enough to read it, hopefully just constructive feedback.

I have no strong opinion on written RP as a requirement - if the rewards are good enough to warrant the effort, I will make a small post to claim it. The crux of the matter is though, to my mind, it will never really be something that is organic, and will always be a "throwaway". The only situation where that wouldn't happen is someone is actually interested in the ID or character prior to the event.

In my case, I really like Gallic Brigands, and had a small faction i was once in - so I was motivated to put in a lot of effort into roleplay. This wasn't to get any rewards, my goal here was trying to put in the effort and get the faction some recognition or activity in the canon space, as well as fly in a House I am actively looking for reasons to fly in. OS&C is the only other one here, and they've been recognised for doing a lot with the event. The other listed IDs are dead in the water.

I think St. Denis raises a good point - if you want quality RP as an outcome, those feeling motivated to RP will find it without any reward on the line. @Perfect Gentleman (kudos) is an example, and we've had in-depth roleplay both in-game and on forums and it all spurred from one random interaction while flying and shipping cargo. His character isn't even participating in the event and not one of the listed IDs, but is definitely worth recognition.

Reward wise, I applaud the potential reward of canonising or putting contributions into canon. I think that's a lot more interesting and valuable than credits which are easier printed elsewhere. Getting custom cosmetics (contrails, engines) is also very cool.

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