Events are too frequent

[Larington]

I think the events at the moment are so frequent they've lost all novelty value and I'm not the only one, one of our outfit members drew up some comments on it and why our outfit feels it's time the number of events was reduced.
(http://www.immortalserialkillers.co....opic&topic=651)

Part 1:
Feel more than free to add your own stuff in on this thread just in case his twitter arrow should find its target. Which is why it's in the public section, so it can be read by whomever Larry throws it at.

Let's start with a TLDR list of problems and a couple of possible solutions and then some waffle.

1/ There are too many alerts. As far as I can tell they function like this. One alert ends, between sixty to seventy five minutes later another starts, they last two hours (excluding dominatrix wins). Meaning we spend more time under an alert than not.

2/ They are not working as a whole as advertised, I gather from my outfit mates that they were intended to function such that if a server was low pop', due to time of day or the server in general they would act to help "focus" the servers population ensuring people came together for that Planetside feeling of "scale". However as above, they run twenty-four-seven. They occur in prime time and it doesn't seem to matter what the servers overall population is like.

3/ They are untargeted and unintelligent in their occurrence. They do not take into account starting position, world pop's, time of day. They appear to be little more than just a RNG from the list of possible alerts stuck on a fixed timer. The newer kind are usually just won by those with the highest world pop, encouraging more fourth empiring and population imbalance.

4/ They are often disruptive and unwelcome to players. Because we know we only have an hour window between alerts it's very difficult to get any sort of momentum into tasks that we want to achieve for ourselves, even if those are remarkably thin on the ground in Planetside 2 in the first place. But for instance, trying to lock a cont' and an alert drags half your population away from the task.

So now, a couple of possible solutions.

A/ By far my favourite, utilize your Gamemasters. You picked that word for them, you didn't call them CSR's. Let them, an actual human being, make a decision about whether or not a server at any given time might benefit from an alert. I realise that GM's are very busy individuals, responsible for many games at once and many tasks within them but if they can take the time to look at the maps, the pop, the local time on the server and make a call. That would be better.

B/ Just cut the number and frequency of the things down, most of this outfit (even the folks that love you guys at SoE) think there are far too many of them. They have lost all sense of being anything out of the ordinary now, in fact they are Planetside 2 now.

Now, some waffle. Yay!

My largest problem with them is that they are a very "modern" piece of gaming. They are fundamentally a bit of lazy and Pavlovian design which thinks that all gamers need to partake of a series of dull, repetitive tasks (assigned for them by someone else) followed by a treat at the end because whos'a'clever'little'gamer'yous'a'clever'little'ga mer. Cut this crap out, Planetside was an RTS game where the players made decisions for themselves, by themselves in a large hive-brain towards an overall vague goal. Which was, paint the world the colour of your empire. The first time that occurred back on Werner, now that was an event, one that sticks with players.

The concept of them is all wrong, it's all part and parcel of the general nonsense of the thought that "fights are the be all and end all" of Planetside 2. Which is the wrong way to think about it, the game should revolve around three massive teams co-operating and competing to control territory and the fights are a byproduct of that. Alerts, like the new 75% rule, are plasters (band-aids to you yanks) designed to try and cover up the gaping wound in gameplay terms that having only three cont's, with warpgate footholds and no sanctuaries is.

Whilst having one or two targeted alert a day might be acceptable, having them around the clock for more of the clock per day than not is tiresome, irritating, and not Planetside.