Regulation-fun balance.

General Discussion
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After reading Warfan’s cryosleep post I figured it would do good to have that conversation on what is the ideal balance between the two, specifically referring to admin events.

To clarify I am aware that it takes a lot of effort to set up events manually and it may be difficult for an admin to do that too often. I don’t know, I am not an admin and therefore not familiar with the whole process. So I’d like to hear from the admins that run events regularly. I also recognise that to have this community going regulation needs to be in place so that it doesn’t fall into anarchy and die. However I feel like it would certainly do good if said regulation was more relaxed, maybe allowing more events for admins or in cases that something goes wrong for there to be some sort of compensating event like the case with Warfan. For example more regular mini-events would be a great improvement to spice up boring shipside rounds. Or having the liberty to run more of the big events like say HvH or others. I feel that if the admins have the wilfulness to run these events they should get a somewhat greater liberty to run them. And in the end probably all will be happy as more events=greater variation of ig experiences.

What do yall think of that?

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97% of the players in a round can like your event, in any other respect it’d be an A+ grade, and you will still get 5 people complaining and saying that the event sucks and they didn’t have fun, not because it wasn’t fun but because there are 100-200 people on the server and you aren’t Jesus.

Furthermore consider people always complain more loudly than they approve. You hear those 5 people, but the 80 people who don’t really care, and the 10 people who really enjoyed it, don’t say much of anything.

In my experience, no matter what event you run there will be someone complaining about it. You can’t dismiss the complaints outright, but you are also simply never going to have an event everyone liked.

 

On Fun Events:

I’ve found the best events tend to be hands-off without constant admin supervision. I’d always just nudge people in the right direction using voices/feels in their heads to act as a conscience or gut feel and gently push them in a better direction or give them ideas, but always let them play it out themselves (even into utter disasters). Or in other words, resist the temptation to spawn things to “balance” out how your event is going - sometimes it’s necessary but it’s really easy to overdo it.

This is where prior experience playing tabletop roleplaying games is a HUGE help. Running an event isn’t much different from running a D&D adventure.

I also found it important to recruit random people - not friends - into events. People who don’t even ask to be part of an event; just ask them if they’re interested. Yes it is actually a lot of fun to make private stanley (or in my case a random assisstant) with 10 hours of playtime the antagonist of your event. Watch different people, pick out the ones who seem like they have a cool head and can roleplay and throw it at them out of the blue. To be sure you still do want to ask more openly for volunteers sometimes, especially for filling out a lot of roles, but when you can observe and handpick (not your friends!) for something you get much much better results.

You also have to mind what sort of players you’re dealing with. This is colonial marines, this is not the roundtable of bureaucrats who love talking for 10 hours server. People playing this game want to shoot and kill stuff, so if you grab 10 random people for your event and ask them to solve a problem, 9/10 times they are going to solve the problem by shooting it. Either don’t give them to tools to shoot their problems, or pick people who won’t do that if you don’t want it to happen.

And as far as how often you run events - it does need to be limited. If you run events all the time, people quickly get tired of them the same way they’d get tired of playing the exact same map 5 times in a row, or playing whiskey outpost 5 times a week. Events are a pleasant change of pace, but you don’t want them to be the norm.

5 Likes
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Best event I was ever part of was the round where they spawned a bunch of survivors on solaris and then the USMC arrived to take over parts of the area and we were supposed to have a few CLF, the building your own areas, the making do with map loot etc. Then the meteor storms hit and the admins started abombing things after some HVH antics, I think more events like that, although my main issue with CM events is the playerbase not admins creativity alotta the time, you’d have to label it greenshift then pull the ol switcharoo but the playerbase would staff report you hahaha, its annoying honestly.

I think less micromanagement is better, guidelines are good but playerbase needs to step up and think for themselves instead of just saying “you gave us nothing”, go find metal and build, make natural defenses something.

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iirc The regulations Warfan broke were like… the barest bones regulation you can think of.
All he had to do was ask for permission before running an event, and he didn’t do it- It was a minor issue until he escalated it before self-resigning.
I don’t think it’s a good place to start a discussion of regulation vs fun on- Because the regulation there was “Please ask before you do the funny event”. I really don’t believe that asking for an okay to run an event means events are crippled in some way.

To me, most events aren’t really that much more fun or enjoyable over a regular round. Like, I’ll be planetside and then I hear that some PMCs shot up CIC, and now groundside is fucked. Those kinds of ‘RP mini events’ don’t include the rest of the playerbase- It’s legit just the dozen or so people shipside who actually get to experience it. I’d rather events be actual events, like the time everyone dressed up at Vietnam marines with tanks, Amphibious Invasion, or the time xenos were liberating the colony from the human infestation.

3 Likes
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That second paragraph is literally 90% of current events so ive got no issue being ERTbanned because I don’t desire to massacre shipsiders basically unopposed, it has to be the entire ship deploying for relief effort or full on attack on a hostile colony or something.

1 Like
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From what I got Warfan was fired. Did I miss anything?

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He also made this post, I’d recommend reading the PM logs he included at the end, he very much dug his own hole.

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fair enough

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Heya!
So I think this might be just a slight lack of knowledge of how our event system works or a misunderstanding of it. And that seems to be a decently pervasive thing in our community.
There is a publicly accessible event guidelines file but I’ll explain it anyways. (The event guidelines on the forums are also kind of outdated and bad, its on the list of things that I want to do this year I promise)

I’m just gonna explain how it works without getting into anything else so if anyone is looking for drama/dramabaiting or anything like that look elsewhere.
I’m also trying to be as transparent about it as possible but if anyone is gonna try and take this good gesture in bad faith and are gonna try to run with it my wrath will be swift and merciless.

Broadly speaking we have 3 types of events. Cosmetic events, Minor events and major events.

Types of events

Cosmetic events

Cosmetic events are events like changing the colour of a xeno, giving the captain a funny hat or giving the CL a big gold bar to bribe the CO with.
While technically a different kind of event I also lump Objective events in here. They are events like giving the CL an objective or breaking something on the ship and telling MTs to go fix it.
Fax response events I also lump into this category. Fax events are just responses to faxes ingame like sending a bodyguard to the CL who got their assault case dismissed by MPs or sending in a provost inspection team after getting a fax about something on the Almayer that needs their attention.

The goal of all of these types of event is that they are supposed to add RP or flavour into a round. But they are also supposed to have little to no impact on the round itself.
These events shouldn’t include stuff like making a really big shotgun that does double damage or sending in a WY squad to capture the queen because the CL sent such nice faxes.

All of these events can be run by any staff member who is not a trial-moderator at any time and they dont need authorization. ERTs might need authorization though if they aren’t purely reactionary, IE you want to send 3 pizza delivery persons to surprise the marines at briefing.
You also dont need to log most cosmetic events, although if you give any objectives or send any ERTs you should be logging it.

Minor events

Minor events are allowed a bit more impact on the round and can start to include stuff like event characters, spawned in items that people dont usually have access to or a small extra part of the map that gets spawned in.

The goal of these types of events is to create fun and RP opportunities for players while having only a slight impact on round balance and flow. Its fine if these events give minor boons to one of the sides but they shouldn’t be big gamechangers.

These events need to get logged right before, during or after the event was run (we really dont care when as long as its not a week after the fact or something like that)
They can also require authorization. Admins and above are free to run these events whenever they like without asking for authorization. Moderators and Smods should be asking for Authorization first.

Major events

Major events are events that have a major alteration to roundflow and affect a lot of players. They are events like Spawning in two tanks and giving xenos multiple special xenos to have some sort of epic battle, swapping out a faction with another one like having the Almayer manned by the UPP instead of the USCM or a greenshift where marines land on a planet without any xenos to fight.

The goal of these events is basically always to just create a big fun scenario for the players of the server.
The events are allowed to give clear advantages or disadvantages to one side (Although keeping things fair is most fun for everyone and encouraged) and affect basically all players on the server.

These major events always require logging.
They also also require authorization for anyone who isnt a part of management.
Something to note also, that kind of goes for all events but especially for major ones, if there is a large departure from the lore/setting that should also be included in the authorization request.

Now those are decent summaries of the types of events, there are some if’s but’s and when’s but this broadly covers it all.
I mentioned logging and authorization a couple of times and I dont think there is any harm in describing how that works.

Logging:

By logging we mean documenting the fact that an event happened around X time. We have a specific channel for this and whenever someone runs an event that requires logging they should log it either just as they are about to run it, during the event when they have some spare time or after they completed the event.
Logging it isnt complicated and it’s just a short message saying something like “Spawned in a UPP Ambassador to RP with the CO” or “Ran [Link to the authorization request]”

Sometimes if an event grows out of scope you’ll want to log any extra stuff that you did like “Sent in a UPP extraction team after the Ambassador got arrested”
That stuff is just to clarify what you did basically. Thats the entire purpose behind logging.

Authorization:

A couple of event types require authorization and we have a discord forum thingie for that.
In there we ask for staff members to give the general idea of their event and to ask for authorization for it. If its really silly or a really large departure from the lore/setting they should also include that.

When it comes to how much we want people to sketch out it really isnt that much. Basically just a really short description of what they’re planning to do. The average length of a request is around 4-5 sentences.

Now for the actual authorization usually its just “Authed, go for it” but sometimes there will be questions or caveats. Something like “Dont run this on highpop”, “How are you planning to deal with marines shooting the ambassador that you are sending to the Almayer?” or “Can you do this another way like doing X instead of X?”

While I dont have any cold, hard, data the approval rate for events is very high. I’d estimate about 75-90%.
We also try to be decently accommodating as management by getting to the event auths quickly, and I always tell people that if they need an event authed right there and then to hammer home that its for the current round (by putting it in the title or something) and we’ll try to be extra fast in getting to it.
There is also some other stuff that can be done to help out like giving someone rolling auth (to run an event multiple times) and relaxing event standards at times like christmas, april fools, etc.


ANYWAYS this is all kinda just a ploy to give my, biased, opinion. I think that while there are some slight rough edges the event system as it stands works really well and would not need any adjustment to try and make it more accommodating since those would probably cause more issues than they would resolve.

I dont think I missed anything in how I described the event system. But its also kinda late as of writing this so I might have been sloppy on something really minor idk.