My honest feedback is to look at /why/ events fail, and it is almost always people being incompetent/soft griefing, or other mindless bullshit that causes things to bog down to the point everyone is frustrated.
Most HVH events are just SCOPES SCOPES SEVERYONE GET SCOPES AHHHH and then everyone turning off flaslights and insta dying because the server is not balanced for HVH. The issue is how all encompassing the event is to TDM.
A good event imo, is one that drives or creates RP in a manner that cannot be eassily sabatagoed by one baldo. You don’t know who iss getting XO, or rsr, or CMO.
Yearss ago for example, we had a event where free traders came to the alaymer to sell guns, to everyone, and everyone just started to shoot them over actually engage in commerence and I had to save the CO from a mutiny that sparked from him saying guys don’t. it was just LRP fragfest. this wass a single point of failure.
Both this example, and the HVH example amounts to a single point of failure - that ungas, when bored with RP, start to frag. So what do you do? you have to remove the UNGA element, in a way that doesnt lead to round end. most event managers do this by having standard distress signal with + event on the side, however, this fails becaue the side event distracts marines so heavily the ground op fail instantly.
So a good event has to both enterain, and distract the fraggers, while also offering meaningful RP potential to anyone who ISN’T a fragger, while being open to engagement on all areas.
This is whre i think sosmething like AI WO + ASS would excel. have all the ungass fall into fragger squads, go on some line or whatever to fight xenos, then carefully manage the xeno wavess so that the marines don’t wipe, and you can control round duration WHILE offering a more immersive RP experience to the support squads, and players who want that. Have kilo/oscar doing some side event like diving hive and finding insane miners ramblin about the ‘dark matron’ and they are infected by the queens psychic whispers to infiltate the marines and leader the astray, leading them into traps until the marines confront them or start to hear whispers of thier own… etc. Stuff like this on the sisde for the RPers, while keeping the fragges engaged (yet in a controllable manner) i think is key to good events.
I heavily disagree with the “just leanon CO WL” stances, as,s this is heavily reductive and frustrating to general players. I don’t have a WL, but as a XO player i say OKAY to anything CL assks for and corpo shill, to the point of giving CL squads to do corpo specific tasks, if you rely on the WL you just make people salty as fuck, and thus more likely to soft grief. No one wants to be second fiddle to the chosen few.
P.S. I’ve never seen a hostage event where people actually RP caring about hostage lives and not just frag them+the hostage takers after negotations are pointlesss and without meaning. I’d argue this type of event is effectively, bad. There’s zero inssentive to comply with the hostage-takers, and people are just going to bloodbath and the event has a rapid end. However, something like. “The CLF have a nuke hidden somewhere on the colony, WOULD be good - as marines have to hunt for it, and capture CLF to get the location.
you could run visiting XO events or fungal neomorph events or idk usually that’s a YOU thing. I love all events so just run any I think you are the only admin who plays in my time zone. I rarely see events unless I’m playing early in the day or staying up past the morning light.