Wall of text time!
Alrighty. Iâm going to discuss some broad design concepts, then hit some mechanical points of interest. Please note that Iâm absolutely an amateur here. Additionally, the increasing capability of the event team is such that I wonât touch on certain core concepts as varied reward per region, difficulty levels for different styles of player, and so on. You folks have that nailed already! So, with that said, begin the wall of text. This is primarily focused on a Seasonal Event-style thing to dovetail with Federation Day.
Broad concept: what are we highlighting?
With a Federation Day event (or any equivalent from other factions, like Liberation Day (July 11!), Workerâs Union Day (September 4), etc.), the questions are: what are we highlighting? How does this play with other factions in EVE? How does this play with the world at large? How accessible do we want it to be lore-wise?
In a case where an event focuses on a given faction, we can highlight the factionâs history (foundings, successions, turmoil, triumphs or defeats), internal politics (political parties, figureheads, political friction), or the factionâs antagonists (pirates, hostile empires, separatists, terrorists both internal and external).
The latter of those options leads to the question of how the event plays to non-primary factions. For instance, while Federation Day is clearly a Federal holiday, do we want to play up the contrast between two factions? Do we want to highlight the elements of an antagonist faction that are most hostile to the primary faction? Is there a risk that weâre making the event less about the faction or event in question, however? Or that weâll do disservice to either the primary or non-primary faction with how we handle the event? Is someone clearly âholding the idiot ballâ to facilitate the event?
Of course, this then leads into questions of theme, style, and lore generally, as the event naturally interacts with the world. Does it paint a given party as âgoodâ and the other as strictly âbad,â or does it stay true to the shades of gray and moral ambiguity EVEâs world is known for? Is it excessively grimdark? Does it compromise lore for presentation? Or presentation for lore? Does it play into an existing storyline, or pick up old plot threads and bring them back to life? Does it foreshadow things to come?
But this all boils down to an important question: how engaging is the event and its story? While lore shouldnât really be compromised for accessibility, at the same time accessibility shouldnât be compromised for the sake of pleasing a small subset of the community! Finding a balance that engages at the level of neophyte and lore maven, that introduces concepts or draws players deeper into the world of EVE, that makes that world live and breath, is an ideal. How achievable that ideal is, well-- thatâs a question!
Mechanical exploration: X-vs-Y events
Players have regularly stated a desire for events where one faction is pitted against another. How to achieve something like this mechanically, with limited development resources, is a question. EVEâs back-end can track completions of given sites, but from a design perspective ârun X site to support Xâ and ârun Y site to support Yâ might be either murky or frustrating for the uninitiated, who are likely to run both X and Y without regard to story, or else be actively hunting for sites and have to not participate in content X or Y. Likewise, X-or-Y site solutions might result in more deterministic story resolution: based on rewards, ease or speed of completion, availability of site X or Y, faction X or Y might be favored from the outset. Consider, for instance, the effect of more or less desirable LP stores on Faction Warfare.
Alternatively, one can take the basic model behind, say, the T3D race and work to automate it, to make it easier and more intuitive for players and developers to interact with. In this case, developers ensure that all sites drop event item A. Again, each competing faction has a receiving location for event item A. When players deposit items, it tracks number of deposits, name of depositor, and backend automation tracks this over a given day. This would likely need at least 3 typeIDs to work: one for the event item A, and one each for factions X and Y, so that each can have distinct tracking for each faction. Likely, the best way to model these is off of existing cans such as Barbican Repository (36904), though having a âremove # items from inventory, increment counter by #â option might be handy, so that players donât break their mouse returning arbitrarily large numbers of event items. Trust me; this is necessary.
Please note that from an immersion standpoint, having a receiving can outside each site seems a rough work-around. A better way may be to have a description for item A that itself lists potential receiving locations, so that players are directly served the info, but given the choice. Additionally, for proper shenanigans, the event item should be listed on the market for emergent play to take place.
Mechanical exploration: rewards in X-vs-Y events
Letâs assume for the sake of this discussion that site rewards are already worked out, with the usual mix of attribute boosters, combat drugs, etc. After all, the event should be engaging for those who arenât interested in the story component. At the same time, there should be something motivating for those who want to participate in the event at a higher level. Rewards may include vanity items, attaboys such as news mentions or faction recognition, unique items or ships, so on. Thereâs also the question of how rewards are distributed; to top contributors, to participators for a given faction, to all players, etc. Rewards may also be truly unique, or a time-limited unique.
Vanity items are potentially highly desirable rewards, but will require art development time. At minimum, recolors of existing skins or apparel items would be a way to provide something valuable to players without raising balance concerns, and depending on their attractiveness or rarity might be considerably valuable.
Being canonized into the world in some capacity is a tremendous motivator for roleplayers, RP organizations, and is also of interest to those who just like to see their name in lights. This is generally a safe reward to give players, as thereâs relatively less developer time involved, nor any balance issues, though repeated featuring of a given player or organization can result in accusations of favoritism. Mentions can range from inclusion in a Scope ticker, a news article, a chronicle, item descriptions or names, landmarks, and so on. Naturally, the work involved in bringing these to fruition varies markedly from one sort to another.
Unique items, especially ships or modules, are going to be a tremendous motivator to players. However, developer time, balance concerns, and the potentially excessive value of these all lend to their being a difficult class of reward to employ in small quantity. In a broad enough distribution, the value decreases as market supply increases.
With an X-vs-Y event, distribution of special rewards becomes a point of interest. Rewarding all players who contribute to a âwinningâ faction seems logical. At the same time, this just incentivizes the uninterested to give at least one event item to both sides, and then ignore it. Alternatively, group rewards given at certain threshold might also be of value, but requires careful metering of thresholds to both motivate players to participate, but not either bury them under event demands or make thresholds too easy to achieve. As a design theory exploration, this is an area rich for discussion. Iâm going to leave this for later, though. 
Mechanical exploration: regional events, a design faux pas made useful?
One of the sacred cows for EVE seasonal events is that they must be accessible in all classes of space, from wormholes to New Caldari. This seems reasonable from a design perspective, but sometimes causes events to lose their texture or impact from a lore perspective. By contrast, an event some years ago provided an event item through either existing Serpentis data and relic sites, or through Ghost Sites. This both allowed players to gather resources in all classes of space, but also provided some additional value to an otherwise less-valuable area of space for the duration of the event. In this way, one achieved the desired objective of making event items universally available, but also gave players an impetus to search in a given area to prioritize the event.
Events in the future might, if they are X-vs-Y focused, provide multiple classes of site, with some site being limited to appropriate regions, but other classes of site universally available. More on this later.
Event concept: Kyonoke Chronic Effects.
So! Time for me to lay out a sketch for an event arc. Please note that I donât at all expect this to be something CCPâd be keen on! But I think itâd be interesting from a design perspective, engaging for players, and taps a lot of the ideas touched on so far, and ties in with some events I have a personal interest in.
Kick-off Actor Event: Federation Day speeches/fireworks/etc; mostly player-run, CCP graces the event with a live actor or two to give some speeches. To avoid recapitulating on prior events, we donât necessarily have a Mentas Blaque showing, but we do have some manner of Federal politician espousing the virtues of freedom, democracy, service to the Federation, and security. This can be more or less ominous depending on how CCP wants to swing it! There are plenty of hooks for the dark side of Federation ideals, given Blaqueâs prior speeches, the Taught Thoughts chronicle, and so on.
Depending on how evil CCP wants to get, event actor protesters or terrorists might be a thing. The basic angle is that either someone who was âcuredâ of Kyonoke but is now mildly psychotic, or someone whose family died on the RP4 structure, will make a scene, due to the continued silence by authorities on what actually occurred.
This kicks the Kyonoke Inquest wrap-up back into public view in a big way, resurrecting a chain and leading to in-game events.
Seasonal Event: unknown parties release details on facilities that may be safeguarding Kyonoke Crisis intelligence. This is an X-vs-Y-vs-Z event, with the parties being the FIO, Caldari Navy, and Society of Conscious Thought. An event item, âKyonoke Crisis intelligence log fragment,â can be gathered from a variety of sites, to be turned in to event cans in Luminaire, New Caldari, or Yulai, for the respective parties. Event wrap-up will vary depending on which organization gets the most fragments, with both FIO and the Caldari Navy wanting to spin the story, while the Society might try to be the most âhonestâ about what occurred.
Sites
Three sites would be required for this. Implications from the site structure would be messy, but also side-step the usual âidiot ballâ issue with the opposition force setting themselves up for failure.
Templis Dragonaur Hidden Base: this is a low-sec only site for the racist, nationalist Caldari terrorist group, the Templis Dragonaur. Theyâre disavowed by the State as terrorists, and having gone to ground after Tibus Hethâs fall have been hiding/surviving on embezzled funds/harboring hatred for the Gallente. They instigated the Kyonoke Crisis, so striking them for intelligence on it would make sense. This would be a straight combat site. The lowsec-only nature of it is a handy cover for the fact that the Templis Dragonaur are both outlaws, and relatively few in number.
FIO Black Site: this is a primarily Gallente Federation space site, high or lowsec, but might be found in small quantities in other empiresâ space. FIO is known to be sitting on intelligence relating to the Kyonoke Crisis, and refusing to release it. FIO black sites would probably be disavowed by the Federal government, especially if theyâre very sketchy, though it could possibly be played off with loud political debates on safety-vs-freedom, and this gives plenty of opportunities for CCP to highlight various Federal Senators, etc, and for players to get involved in politicking. The site itself would be both a combat and hacking site.
Data Brokerage Relay Site: this is the all-spaces site. Operated by gray market data brokers the Intaki Bank, this would be defended by mercenaries, and has reason to be in all classes of space. The Intaki Bank has its fingers in all sorts of pies, whether as the depositor for note for the Kasaras family weapons researcher who used embezzled Kaalakiota funds to finance the Kyonoke plot, or as a reasonable place for leaked data to be hoovered up for later sale by Intaki data merchants.
Rewards: Uh! This is where I run into things! FIO-skinned exploration suits? FIO skins for Vexor Navy Issue? Caldari Navy-skinned exploration suits? CalNav skins for Caracals Navy Issue? Something shiny for the Society?
Anyway! I think Iâve written enough. Obviously, this is an adventurous set of concepts! I doubt thereâd be enough time to execute on this even if it were desirable, but as an approach it might merit consideration in the future.
just trying to stir up a bit of fun. Goodness knows we need it⌠XD
