Idea for special competitive events

[Stardouser]

I say "competitive" but bear in mind that my idea is far too large-scale to be e-sports or anything.

Anyway, I was thinking it would be cool if there were something like weekend events, ie, from Friday night to a Sunday night for example, that are designed to a certain number of picked/invited players to a 48 hour war(or even 12 hour, whatever is appropriate, because I'm aware that the next objection is "uh, we have to sleep") that's fought on a continent(or a 2 or 3 continent map) specially designed for it.

Let's just say we wanted this special event to be designed for exactly 900 players, 300 per empire. The way that players would be invited/selected is through their Outfit leaders, a standard submission from an Outfit leader would be himself and 19 other players, for 20 total, and basically each empire in the event would be 15 20-man outfits. If appropriate, each person or outfit could be required to pay SOE some kind of entry fee to cover the server overhead for the weekend.

And so, let's just say we're talking about a 12 hour day long event/war here, to avoid the "how do we sleep and not get overrun by people who don't need to sleep" question. Anyone care to help me massage this basic idea into a more fully formed one? If the concept could be solidified, perhaps it could even be something that the game engine would automatically let people organize with minimal GM assistance, so that EVERYONE could participate in thing kind of thing every so often, if they want to.

The key here is the control that Outfit leaders have over their guys to get them organized. Yes, there's 900 players and that's a lot, but that's only 45 outfit leaders for the overall event coordinator to deal with. Or even less if we changed it to 30 man outfits.