Automated Non-Trammie Events!! (Bring in the Clowns)

[the bazookas]

Since the "automated events are trammie" and NEA argument appears to be the major obstacle for having automated events, I have a decidedly "felucca-ie" idea which also, as far as I can tell, doesn't violate any T2A mechanics that aren't available already at any GM-assisted event. Now, I know that felucca didn't really exist before UO:R, but I'm going to call the regular T2A ruleset world "felucca" from now on... So here's my idea(s):

• Instead of having event gates that take you to trammel-world where you sign up for teams and what-not, just have the gates take you to one side of a board (area where you can't mark a rune), where everybody is assigned to a team (unless it's some kind of FFA event)--teamates flag green (or blue--read on), enemies flag orange (ALL IN FELUCCA, OF COURSE) (assignment is random, but where the teams are close to even). Also, the gate boots you off your horse and leaves the horse behind.
• The two halves of the boards have some kind of wall between them for about 2 minutes. Then, when 2 minutes is up, the wall goes down, and everybody can have a good time killing each other off or doing whatever they want to do--either in a team FFA or a CTF or a survival setting or a king of the hill or a "whoever holds onto the ball the longest wins FFA" or a "harvest the other team's ore" or any of the aforementioned ideas + MONSTERS or (insert great idea here) setting.
• FULL LOOT! When you use a potion, it's gone. When you swing your magic hally, it gets worn. When you die, your loot is fair game.
• I would argue that there should be NO auto-ressing, although there could be an invulnerable healer at either end of the board, as well as a banker so you can restock (assuming you don't get res-killed before you have the chance, which is certainly possible)--although it actually might be more interesting without a banker ; You would have to rely on your teammates/loot bodies to restock (or maybe each team has a small house to which they are automatically friended or a team-specific secure container where they can store stuff they brought with them through the gate (at the peril of it being looted by a griefer--even a teammate, of course... but yet you could kill said griefer ). Perhaps, in order to prevent people from constantly ressing, dying could flag you a criminal for 30 seconds assuming that's possible (or a full 2 minutes if the timer can't be adjusted). Furthermore, there could be some type of reprecussion for attacking your own team members (maybe your team members should be blue to you instead of green?--a possibility, but that might be more difficult to implement, and could make it more difficult to stop a griefer (really only if there is that whole secure chest thing going on though, or if they are doing some kind of non-flagging action like blocking or something))
• Prizes? Personally, I would participate without them--but I'm sure that there'd be plenty of loot to go around. Besides, if there isn't a silver motivation for winning, people might be less likely to exploit the system to win (although trying to figure out how to exploit the system / stop others from exploiting the system can be a lot of fun in its own right). ALTERNATIVELY, you could have there be an entrance fee (e.g. hand 5k to an NPC after saying "doofushead join", which results in you teleporting into the game), and then use that amount of money as a prize to be shared by the winners (this would, I believe, reduce multiclienting afk noobs onto the other team (of course, making the teams truly random would make it so you might accidently drag your own team down with your afk noobs)).
  ... or yet another prize alternative (which is kind of a game unto itself): have everybody spawn with a single token (or something else small--something difficult to find and loot), and then have it so you can trade those tokens in for gold or something else of value (to reward you for either getting kills or being sneaky)... I believe it is possible to make it so the tokens say "you cannot pick that up" when you try to drag it after it's in your own pack (or maybe you just can't throw it in your bank, assuming you have access to the bank on the field). It could be a team-specific token, so you can't get anything from looting your teammates (or physically can't pick up a token off of a teammate).
  
  These are just some suggestions, I don't know how technically feasible they are from a scripting point of view.

Other Details (I think these are "Pros", but some might see them as "cons") involved in running this type of event (at least the way I envision it)

• It's not trammie... you risk as much coming to play as you do running around on the field.
• No restriction on spells (you can summon deamons if you want, paralyze, whatever).
• No restriction on who you can attack--assuming greens and oranges (you can kill your teamates--this opens the door to griefers, but also opens the door to dealing with griefers). Making teammates blue would mean murder counts would be the penalty for teamkilling.
• No restriction on skills you can use.
• One team can completely wipe out the other team--which ends the game.
• Grief... yes, there almost certainly will be plenty of grief going around (people joining with multiple characters? People on opposing teams helping each other? Suicide bombers(my favorite)? People killing teammates as they pop in the gate (of course, you can make the gate pop you in at a random location on a given side of the board)? BUT, this can make it interesting, and also motivates people to try to figure out ways to overcome the grief (or deal it out more efficiently, depending on what you like to do).
• If staff decided to participate in the automated event in any way, you can imagine the possibilities (since it's the regular ruleset, there are really no hard constraints for any given "match")--GM's could spawn monster teammates to help a losing team... they could add obstacles / structures to the map.... or whatever else they think is best. AND BEST OF ALL even if they aren't available / interested in intervening, the felucca event can still run itself.

Sounds like Felucca at its finest to me.

FAQ
How is this similar to a player-run event?

• For most PvP player run events, people are put on a guildstone so that you can freely attack each other. Whether you attack your own team is up to you.
• Still in Felucca--same ruleset as would be applied in any player run event
• It can happen in a semi-controlled environment that can be achieved by players (as in twin towers or a castle)
• They are griefable.

What is the difference between this and a player-run event?

• enemy teams are in different "guilds" (flagged green or orange, unless its possible to make teammates blue to each other so that there is penalty for killing each other)--the green and orange COULD be accomplished by player-run events, but usually isn't (at least in those I've attended): usually it's just all green. Also, these events would be automated to save time and effort (in player-run events it can take ~10 minutes to get everybody on the same stone, wasting everybody's time (and also making it so you have to get back in the guild you were orginally in).)
• (This comment only applies to player-run events that occur inside of a blocked off castle or twin towers... it is a moot point for the vast majority of player-run events): Less control over who participates means more griefers might get in (which could--depending on who you are--make things more interesting). This makes it difficult to control the outcome of the event; since castle-enclosed player-run events can exclude people, those who do participate are more apt to "play by the rules".
• For a player (or players) to run this kind of event, it takes a TON of organization and work (providing gates, res stations, facilities, etc) and a lot of that could be automated. I've hosted a few events, and it's a LOT of work. I know Flea organized a CTF, and I'm sure he'd agree that it'd be nice if a lot of the details were automated.

Would this be difficult for staff to implement on this server?

• I must defer to the experts, but I can only imagine that the fundamentals of these non-trammie events would not be very difficult to put together / automate (especially in comparison to the trammel events that formerly inhabited (infested, according to some) the shard). The players would create the challenge for each other.

Why don't we already have these non-trammie kinds of events?

• Probably because of the grief potential, but I must defer this question to the staff. I don't think grief potential is a good reason NOT to have these kinds of events (because in general, it would mean that all player run events should also not occur).

Won't this take away from field PvP?!?!?!?!?

• Don't player run events take away from field PvP?... OH NOES! Must... stop... all player run... events immediately! (don't worry, explosives will be used en masse)
• If these automated events take place in a field (e.g. "green acres"), then this will almost certainly INCREASE field PvP... hah! You get it? I thought it was kind of punny...

Bring in the clowns, I say.

[the bazookas]

Could possibly even do it in normal areas (like Terathan Keep, which the automated script could block off the recall-in-able areas after the game started), although this would mean that people who were already in that area might be disruptive to the game. However, everybody would be blue to them (and maybe they couldn't touch the flag or otherwise participate directly, assuming it's a CTF game), and if these events didn't take place in a set-aside area, then perhaps horses could be allowed (in which case the people who were hanging out on the "board" don't really have any advantage over those who were in the area before the match started.

Just a thought. I think a set aside "board" would be less easily griefed, however. I don't know how difficult it'd be to program it on the regular board either... maybe more so than a set aside area.

[archaicsubrosa77]

Events were fine until it became apparent that people were using afk means via alts to gather trophies by logging in on non guilded characters and entering them.

Just make automated events for fun only and in game events should be where you earn your trophy rewards.

I mean a sidegame doesn't have to be era accurate. Some people just troll to troll until there seems a reason for their trolling.

Yes some people are that bored and just do it for the LULZ.

There hasn't been a real effective PVP training thread because it's better to show and do. We train all skill in character by macro before going out...why not evolve instead just our macroed skills but strategies to take this game to the next limit in order to make alot of adventure for newcomers in just the sheer tactics of war and strategies of plot.

The Veterns often become the GM's of this world, let us then fashion for ourselves the best in putting the skills of new or rusty players to practice.

When I go out on the field, I do expect the highest trained soldiers...challenges make this game fun, I am sure many agree.

The more combat you will see the more variety will be acquired and one and one battle templates will not always be in the majority. Or if some of you hadn't noticed you are cut down easily by an army of dexxers and medidexxers when you set out alone on foot. Tank mages do not press the issue that you cannot escape. They are far too easy to recall from.
My vision of tomorrow is a gretaer issue of Chaos and Order. So greater heroes and Villans should arise. Thing is the developers left that up to us to accomplish. So I feel the events were schools for these soldiers and should not be seen as an inaccuracy, but as a necessary acquaintance to a far more dark and sinister world. Because we know how brutal it can be...unless you want easy kills then tax the miners.

I urge you to look at the sidegame events like us all sitting at the tavern having just a friendly game a way to advertise self and play politics. Just a bit of festivities amidst all the carnal mindless bloodshed. But I am in full support with familiarization and interaction with new players in this game...and the events are the best way I can see how that can be accomplished.

[the bazookas]

archaic,

I kind of feel like I agree with much of what you are saying... but... I'm not sure I follow your trend of thought all the way through your post. Furthermore, after reading your post, I'm also unsure whether you like the idea of Automated Felucca events (although you seem to think events are good in general).

But, as for what I did understand, I shall respond:

Events were fine until it became apparent that people were using afk means via alts to gather trophies by logging in on non guilded characters and entering them.

I agree that people abused the system for CTF / domination games, although the main complaint I saw (whether this is why they discontinued the events or not) was that they occur in trammel and have no risk involved.

Just make automated events for fun only and in game events should be where you earn your trophy rewards.

Personally, I agree. I think people would still attend, particularly if staff was occasionally involved in spicing things up. But, if FULL LOOT is involved, then you certainly have a chance to get a bunch of reagents and what-not (possibly nice items if somebody wanted to risk it). This would also reduce the motivation for afk-joining the other team (not to mention that if teams were completely random, then it would be difficult to get an advantage this way).

As for events being a training ground for PvP--I wouldn't say it's necessarily much better than field PvP for that, but it certainly doesn't make you a worse PvPer .

I urge you to look at the sidegame events like us all sitting at the tavern having just a friendly game a way to advertise self and play politics. Just a bit of festivities amidst all the carnal mindless bloodshed

Mindless bloodshed doesn't necessarily have to be carnal . In any case, the sidegame events you refer to are player-run events, I presume--and I fully agree that they are excellent. I suppose what I'm saying is that large scale PvP events are VERY difficult for a player to organize and pull off successfully without the resources available to the staff (or scripting access), and what I believe what I have proposed is a possible solution to this. I also don't believe that it means that we have to do this to the exclusion of other "friendly" automated events (although I believe "friendly" events are easier for players to organize and control than PvP-centered events).

[the bazookas]

I just had an interesting idea (I'm just brainstorming--Note whether you vote "good idea" or "bad idea" should depend on the basic premise of this post (not the specific ideas that I have--I think, assuming a lot of people (most importantly staff) think automated felucca events are a good idea, that we would need to create another post with another poll on which you could vote for as many options as you want, with a list of all the possible ideas)

Perhaps it would be possible to make a room with a series of levers and switches that affect what kind of game it will be (or maybe just a "voting" system involving in-game commands)--e.g. high end mob spawn, low-end mob spawn, game type (CTF, domination, etc), bankers or not, random teams or not, etc.; I don't know how difficult it would be to script that kind of stuff in, but I think it'd be kind of cool if the players had some control over what happened in the automated event. Perhaps access to the "control room" is either randomly granted or granted to a player who has certain achievements...

I wonder if it might even be possible to allow a certain player to be in another type of control room the entire game (maybe it's in a house in the middle of the map)--kind of like a seer, but it wouldn't be necessary to change his account in any way; He could just pull levers that spawn team monsters for a given team or apply buffs or whatever... he could even earn a rating by how "even" the game is kept while he is in the control room.

I think that'd be pretty interesting, although I could imagine it getting out of hand... heh (did anybody else play Ultima Underworld, where there was a set of buttons that spawned rats, and you could just keep pushing it until there was a huge army of them?). I suppose there would have to be some kind of selection process (e.g. have a forum post where those who are interested being in the control room "sign up" and are voted upon, and then hand selected to be put in a queue that automatically assigns a given character to be in the control room, assuming they are online)... again, I'm not sure how hard it'd be to script that such that the GMs don't have to be directly involved (after creating the queue, that is).

[the bazookas]

I find it strange that there does not appear to be much of a response (good or bad) to these ideas--Personally, I would have thought that those who really liked the automated events that took place in trammel and those that really hated the automated events in trammel, could be happy with these kind of Felucca events. Kind of like a compromise--you know, the thing that the US congress doesn't do, right?

I remember the bitter gripings about the trammel events; but now that there is a proposed alternative, nobody wants to speak up about it?

Anybody care to elaborate on their votes?

Could staff please weigh in?

[Blaise]

It's not that you haven't put a good amount of thought into this, and shared it with us. I'd guess it's just a sore spot for those who enjoyed the events and are pretty much "meh" about the flood of 'where are events' and 'it should be like this' threads.

Don't let the lack of input or feedback stop you from sharing your thoughts.

[Holy Mittens]

When I talk about events, automated PvP tournaments aren't really what I'm thinking of.

[the bazookas]

When I talk about events, automated PvP tournaments aren't really what I'm thinking of.

I presume that you are referring to player-run events? I agree that player-run events can be a lot of fun, but I'm proposing that it's simply too difficult to sustain high-quality player-run events on a frequent basis, and that a lot of the logistics that make player-run events slow to start as well as few-and-far-between could certainly be automated with staff's help--and since they are busy, scripting automated Felucca events seems like a great alternative (I've been to some player-run events where it took about 30-45 minutes of mostly sitting around for most people just to get everything set up and ready to go--Not because the players hosting the event hadn't put a lot of time into it, but because the limitations of a player in terms of setting up "teams" (adding to a guildstone) and making other preparations are such that extra time is required.

If you meant non-PvP events as being the events you think about, let me first say that I speak mostly of PvP events because they are (I believe) the most difficult for a player to set up and execute an event for, and because I personally find them the most fun--(there, I declared my conflict-of-interest... happy now?). As for non-PvP events, I would propose that there certainly plenty of possibilities for automated events (e.g. PvM team survival events, even some crafting events), still within the Felucca ruleset.

Honestly, the only limit to what kind of events could be had is the creativity of the players and staff and the scripting constraints of the game. If it is all within the T2A Felucca ruleset, then it's era accurate, right?

Some other wacky(?) ideas that I just had:
You could even have an event that involves crafters: defend the crafters while they try to meet some kind of crafting quota. You could make it so they have to go out and harvest the materials for it and must be protected (like harvesters in command and conquer).

Or you could have an event where walking through the gate makes you a ghost, and you res on the other side where a bunch of regs / bandages spawn on the ground (that you must gather), but no weapons--you would need a miner and crafter to build weapons for you. Honestly, the sky is the limit. But, without the powers of the staff, such an event would be a 1-time deal, and require a huge investment of a players time (and could only be run by a small subset of players who have a controlled environment like a castle that it could be played in).

Neat ideas? I think so. Era accurate? I think so. Possible without some sort of staff help / automation? Yes, it's marginally possible, but you can only imagine how much work it would take.

And yes, I understand that it would take quite an investment from the staff to script these kinds of events (how serious, I don't know), but I'm pretty sure that starting out with a well designed (especially styled for code-reuse) team ffa-event would not take THAT much work. Think about all it would take:

• opening event gates to an area with no recall /gate in or out
• add characters randomly to teams (could have more than 2 teams)
• put a wall between the team areas and after 2 minutes remove the wall and let the rest happen as it may
• set up an invulnerable healer at each end of the board (either use criminal counter to make it a while before you can res after dying, or put the healer far away from the action of the board). possibly a banker too.
• after a team gets wiped out or after a certain time limit, teleport everybody back to a town (maybe wait about 1 minute after, so everybody can loot the dead if they want)

In fact, you could even start with a regular FFA. All you'd have to do then is have "cells" (maybe composed of 2-minute long walls of stone) that the players are teleported into. The entire board is opened up after 2 minutes, and everybody is flagged orange. I can't imagine that would be too much work, and I think it'd be a lot of fun.

From there on, I can imagine extending these events is just a matter of adding various tweaks (add in forges, resource gathering areas, monster spawning, different structures, forcing certain team constraints, etc) to create other awesome events. Once an event is created, it can be reused! That's the beauty of programming--I love programming because once I create a solution to a problem, I rarely have to put work into that problem again. Am I lazy? Yes, as lazy as I can get away with... but I'll work real hard (even on my own time) to get a program working so I don't have to work anymore (don't tell my boss). That doesn't mean you won't need to tweak it here and there, but the hard work has been done (assuming you planned carefully).

The staff appears to have some great developers... how difficult would it be to script these kinds of events?

[archaicsubrosa77]

There were two major things about the events that I think I had a problem with, other then that they were fine.

They happened too often and regularly. They should come as a surprise. "oh joy an event is happening" *trumpet sounds* Because of this they were often sabotaged in some way.

And

There was no mounted pvp events

[Soma]

There were two major things about the events that I think I had a problem with, other then that they were fine.

They happened too often and regularly. They should come as a surprise. "oh joy an event is happening" *trumpet sounds* Because of this they were often sabotaged in some way.

And

There was no mounted pvp events

It was good that the events happened quite often, when you live in a different timezone and go to work, it is nice knowing that you wont miss all the action because you aren't available throughout the whole day. Personally, if I could make it to three or so events a week I was overjoyed.

But of course, this opens up the possibility of people exploiting the multitude of events for trophies.
People AFK'ing/multi-clienting was a huge problem in events like double domination, team deathmatch and CTF because you were reliant on your teammates to assist, having one AFK player could potentially screw over a dozen people on your team who put effort into showing up and working for the win.
From what I remember Gauntlet, LMS and Deathmatch didn't have that many AFK problems because the AFK'ers would more than likely die within seconds.

Not to mention some notorious statloss reds abused the events to claim their own bounties - but I won't get into that.

I also never understood why people liked mounted PvP, in the field you use mounts because it's necessary, but for every scheduled duel/consenting fight people get off their mounts, I assume its because its much harder to run offscreen or hide while on foot, either that or because people hate the mount stamina system so damn much.

[the bazookas]

Yea, I personally think no mounts is more fun; harder to escape, no trotting. Not to say that we couldn't come up with events where mounts are perfectly fine (team survival, for example). But for PvP, I think no mounts is definitely better.

[Events] happened too often and regularly. They should come as a surprise. "oh joy an event is happening" *trumpet sounds* Because of this they were often sabotaged in some way.

I agree with you, but on the other hand, having SOME scheduled events is nice (for a number of reasons). Personally think there should be some of both--spontaneous scripted events AND scheduled ones. Maybe a few of each per week.

[Halbu]

Yea, I personally think no mounts is more fun; harder to escape, no trotting. Not to say that we couldn't come up with events where mounts are perfectly fine (team survival, for example). But for PvP, I think no mounts is definitely better.

IMO it's harder to catch up to people on foot in long chases, they never make mistakes by running into trees ect. And there seems to be more mistakes in general in fast horse chases.

And no mounts is clearly a disadvantage to warriors, mounts allow them to close in for interrupts and damage.


Trotting is a problem though, but if you know how to "cut off" then you'll hit them with melee. Where you see someone on screen is not their realtime location, you have to make up for it. Just takes practice.

[the bazookas]

Bump... for great justice! (or at least good times)