With regards to the recent thread about faction wars and RM/LN or OC/Corsair raids which (some) people seem to miss, I wanted to share a thought that had been bouncing around in my mind since the recent Omicron Major event.
The current event system is nice, but it seems to take a lot of work to make an event which is relatively short-lived, never repeated, and often unbalanced due to cap/snub inequalities.
Raids are nice, but they tend to take a lot of gathering and long distance flying, sometimes up end up with a lack of enemies, or salty enemies who didn't really wanna fight where the attackers chose to go.
So... how about introducing an "Alert" system similar to the one in Planetside 2, which works like a very simple DiscoveryGC event (2 jumpholes are temporarily added by admins). The idea behind the Alert system it is that it takes as little effort to make as possible, and can be repeated as often as is wanted. When events are repeated, its easier to balance and adjust them the next time. Making both parties jump to a basically empty or neutral system also avoids people who have no interest in participating from getting blown up.
Here's how it could look, taking the example of the Outcast/Corsair conflict.
A message appears in the console:
"An Outcast invasion fleet bound for Omicron Delta is gathering near Ibiza Shipyard. The Corsairs prepare to counter-attack at Tripoli Shipyard. Estimated time of fleet jumps: 10 minutes"
At the given time, two one-way jumpholes will open for a certain amount of time (1 minute, or 1 hour, or longer), permitting the parties to jump into the Alert area. Optionally, the jumpholes can be entered only by snubs, or only by caps (allowing for snubs to enter the alert only if they are onboard carriers).
Once the template of such an event is made (Jump Hole coordinates, JH type, and JH lifetime), it can be triggered automatically at given times, regularly, or by ingame player request.
I guess there are ways to make it more interesting and complex, by adding things like a tag-based death counter in the Alert system for the duration of the alert, character name based scoreboards, jump holes which allow only ships with the right tag to pass, or power generators which give points when they explode, which are counted alongside the kills.
Additional optional rules may apply, for example a player may re-enter the fight upon death, or he may re-enter as long as he uses a different character (motivating people to make more characters and ships). Maybe even make it a tourney-style environment, by automatically deducing credits when you jump, and giving you the same amount of credits when you score a kill (prices based on ship class?).
The important thing, no matter simple how or complex the event is, is that it's repeated more or less regularly.
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Maybe can an admin or dev who knows about this stuff say if it's relatively easy to activate temporary one-way custom jump holes without resetting the server or modifying the mod client?
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I love it. I don't know jack about FLHook, but I'm guessing the most difficult part would be setting it up to automatically do all of this on an automatic timer. It took @"King Boo" something like 10 minutes to set up the jump hole from Dur-Shurrikun to Major for the Nomad side in the recent Dyson Sphere event, but I don't imagine that's all that bad.
It can be done, in fact I could probably wrap up something like this in a matter of one or two days. The great part about PS2 alerts is that you got something out of it in the end, but with current FL tracking most player actions is quite difficult and well, what would even be the reward.
I can see the use of it to keep the server alive though, so despite I'm not really willing to work on disco again, I could make an exception for this.
If to some extend, an email alert function could be added, this system could be really awesome. Easy and efficient way to gather people that aren't always logged but that still are in front of their pc. Alley, would this be a pain to implement?
I don't really want to implement emails. We have a limited pool of emails for the server already.
I rather implement a desktop notification system similar to what Facebook does. (or Deathsnack's WF tracker if some people here play warframe)
I've also been looking to toy around with Xamarin, a mobile framework for the .NET language. While toying around, I could make it practical and develop a disco mobile app.
