[RK2] IRRK: Emergency Broadcast System Report

[Klodovik]

I got bored 4 minutes after it started. Anything fancy dropped?

[Kinryn]

Just lots of bots, ql 50, 150, 200, 300.. or so

One of the raid interfaces got loot rights for 50, 150, 200, and lost on 300.
So, lots of people selling bots now

[Azza]

(( This could've been more fun if it was a "Let's See Who Can Get the Most Manpower for Lootrights"-event.))

You mean if it wasn't?

[polishbat]

is it over or starting again in mort?

[Tutomech]

((When people started to gank each other it became quite challenging. Too bad our RI lost lootrights for 300 bots... :/ ))

((GZ to events team, something new and challenging and with nice rewards. Keep it up, please.))

it is Anarchy, greed and hunger for power interfered greatly with the defence. But RK is safe once again.

[Firestorm518]

((New? Challenging? If by challenging you mean a .001 % armor yeah sure. Here i was expecting 10000 aliens to crash down upon every major city on RK. Something to rival the raids that completely shutdown Rome and OA of old and we get THAT. This was a bad job by the events team. No Rhyme no reason and nothing but the Lootwhores getting anything out of it. The Rpers for the most part are pretty much going to either ignore the incident or barely pay it any mind. The way the aliens were buffed made worthless to attack. I spent the night the call went out scrambling to upgrade my gear. I got in the luckiest raid i have been in this game to DATE and managed to get the super pande ring and the Xan of Pride. Turns out i needn't have bothered to replace my HEOT for this event because not a goddamned thing mattered. 3 damage a pop when i can do 3k consistent now in challenger is just pathetic. And before an events team member starts going ohhh we couldn't do anything else. To make this more fun and to allow people to feel like they were having some kind of effect there was PLENTY you could do. We've seen it before (look up leetzilla if you don't believe me) where you give mobs omgwtf outrageous amounts of HP and a healdelta unlike anything else. There wasn't the challenge factor of the Artillery Commander. Not a whit of RP sense to give any idea of what the hell this was. You overpowered the wrong units the wrong way and made no sense at all. On a scale of 1-10 this was a three. Pheats you were saying to some that this was unlike anything we've seen before. *bzzzt* WRONG. ))

This was it? Either our defenses were better than i thought or IRRK needs new editors. They blew this WAY out of proportion.

[Klodovik]

Wow, you are even more bitter then me. How is that possible?

[Pheats]

Ok a quick rebuttal if I may

First of all each specific alien "boss" had its own set of shielding, and its own weakness, its not just a run in and smash things without thinking, finding the right damage type, breaking through absorbs by focusing damage types, draining nanoshields, working with peoples toolsets to bypass defenses these were just some of the possibilities.

Also considering the sheer mass of people and variant of levels present when everyone ends up doing similar damage it allows those that aren't fully leveled and geared up to at least stand some chance, that said those that do good damage normally will still be doing more, just not a whole lot more, specially if their not actually trying to work around the defenses and just tab+q.

As for health and heal delta, I can guarantee that the bosses had more HP than any previous leetzilla event, but we try to avoid heal delta's due to the fact it can cause immortality, at least if people stick with just doing 10 or less damage it will still go down.

Im sorry that you did not like the event but I'd rather avoid just making mobs tank and spank and give players something to figure out how kill.

As for the size of the event, if it hadn't taken 3 days of bribery, blackmail and coercion to get the few people that helped with this event, something much bigger might be possible, but until that happen or until they invent cloning so I can make the events team bigger, you wont be seeing a huge multiple city raid.

Yes the event could have gone better, there were times when things did not go quite as planned and future ones will be tweaked, but please... dont come thinking its just going to be a sit there and smack the mob until you beat the health delta.

[Firestorm518]

1: Even with the enforcer damage type changing abilites finding one would be like a needle in a haysack. Even when one was found (and others were rotating) It barely moved the damage meter. I dont think i did 1k damage in a hit the entire event. Absorbs were useless all nanotypes were flat out resisted. My faction had several of the rpers including several nanoattack types (Docs and NT's) with piercers. Everything and we mean everything was getting resisted. (the fact you guys were using LE NT nanos at points was...disappointing. :P ))

2: Your point while valid makes people believe they're just hacking away at nothing. For a good long time on several bosses the damage didnt move a micrometer. I'm really not a fan of this method. Because it makes the people that typically show up (And yeah there were some lowbies) the 200+ crowd believe what the heck was all that leveling for in the first place. I had the luckiest night possible the night before this happened. I've never gotten those kind of drops at any kind of raid. The only thing that rivals it is when i won 42's grand prize. And yet i t was all for nothing. I'd have gotten the same results if i hadnt scrambled.

3: I disagree you made it SEEM longer. While immoratlity is an issue (lesser now due to the improved damage curve) the fact is people weren't sticking with it. Half my force including Bubbacrush and Foos basically walked because there wasn't a point to sticking around when it was nothing more than a grind. Nulion made his own fun but it was clear we werent even equating to bee stings. Our damage types i'm pretty sure took the gambit and not a damned thing seemed to work. Because of that several just said to heck with it. Especially because it was Mort.

4: Thats fine. But if your going to do an event like this why not use the whole playfield and make it simular to a 42 raid using multiple points to coordinate multiple defensive areas rather than force the players on hand to swap equipment or be useless? I gotta tell you even at the upper end unless your fully paid its not the easiest thing in the world to get some of the equipment on.

5: That does disappoint me and i understand the manpower issues but still...

That addressed: There were also multiple times where the alien fence was near invisible and one was literally FLYING AROUND killing people. I fell victim to that fence twice. Foos at least three times. I smashed into it a couple times due to lag but i was far away from the fences on the other two counts. I dont know if thats a bug intended or what but it was a pretty large issue.

[Lylith]

OOC:

Just some comments on what has been said here:

1. Finding the right damage type: Candycane (unless it gets resisted due to too high NR) and/or MAs (you know...changing damage types on a whim) are your friend.
That said, it is definitely an interesting approach and makes fights more complicated and involved within what the game mechanics allow.

2.+3. One of the largest concerns that was voiced on DNW was that highs ALWAYS attacked everything in sight, even low level aliens, not letting anyone else kill them, so leveling the playing field by making equipment and levels mean less than they normally do sounds very nice...even if some (many?) only define themselves by the damage they do and thus their feelings get hurt.

4+5: Defensive positions are nice idea and I think the Events Team could look into it when they have the time and manpower for something like that, and of course if their tools do allow that.
Sorry to hear you're hurting for manpower on the international dimensions, too, Pheats.

----

I'll be totally blunt here, maybe even a bit insulting, but I just want to make my point of view completely clear:
You want to feel ubar? Go and kill some NPCs provided by the game, maybe some grey ones that you can oneshot. From what I can gather that was not what the event was there for. It was there to provide a challenge and to make the alien threat feel more real with hard to kill mobs that tried to build up another beachhead on Rubi-Ka. Hard-hitting, hard to kill troops that needed everyone to work together to bring down after a long and hard fight, finally the aliens were a threat again and not just something to kill fast and get loot from. Sounds like quit an experience. Can it be further tweaked and enhanced? Probably. Will bashing it without any constructive criticism help? Definitely not.

With that said...when can we expect such an event on RK1, Pheats?

[FoosballX]

OOC:

Okay everyone just calm down here. People are starting to get upset and nothing productive will come from it.

Alright let me start by saying it's great to see events trying new things. With that being said I hope that in events better judgment they'll realize something work and others don't and adjust correctly for next time.
The attack did look cool, but over all it wasn't very much fun for myself or others. For me there was a lot of lag (again I wasn't alone here) and it was very confusing on just what we were suppose to be doing.
Okay I under stand now some mobs had different dmg shields going on there. But really with all the lag and just confusion of people running about that was hard to figure out. And going from past events usually when I try and hit something and I do like little to no dmg, I do think it's time to move to the next target cause I'm not suppose to be shooting that. But really it didn't seem like that many bosses there, unless you're counting the STs that would fly away and heal up. A lot of us were running about the playfield looking for some kind of thing to kill to knock the shields out.
Also as far as the dmg with the mobs went. Well that was hard to tell too sometimes I would do 1 point of dmg, then I be back to normal. I it would fluctuate so I really had no clue as to what I was doing, and either did others. For the most part myself and others felt it was confusing and far too long, and we didn't have fun.

I feel this should be the most important factor here, we the players didn't have fun. Now I realize you can't please everyone and no matter what someone is always going to complain, but that is the nature of things. But at least from my perspective a number of players didn't have fun. So I hope the events team will look over some of the complains and see what worked and what didn't work, and make something better for next time.

Also keep in mind a lot of times players get hostile or aggressive with events for two main reasons. First going to a bad event is like spending a lot of money to see a really bad movie you thought was going to be good, it leaves you feeling upset and angry. the other reason, hate to say this but, there is an impression among a lot of players, at times, that Events (well most of ark but Ill just focus on events here) feels the players are here for them. And if we complain about how things are going we just need to shut up and like it, cause we lowly players are just little peons here for the amusement of our elite masters of the game. Now before I get some heat here, let me say I'm not stating this is true, but it is the impression from a lot of players that has built up over the years. Which is why a lot of times when players just rip into Events for things gone bad, it's because the feeling of frustration that we don't matter and you guys are just toying with us because you can.

Okay I'm starting to ramble so let me wrap up. Again great to see the events team working hard to try and do new things. This last attack might not have worked out all that well but, I hope you guys will take the data and criticisms and come up with something better for next time.

Also as far as me with the fence. I only went down once by the fence, and that's because (I'm thinking I could be wrong here I really don't know) I was so lagged out I ran right into one cause nothing had phased in on my screen. Really I died the first time having no clue as to what happened only that i got hit for unknown dmg. As far as I could tell I wasn't even near anything. The second time I went down was on the end boss when he started counting down. I was so tired and frustrated by that time I said to hell with it and just let the think kill me so I could get out of the area faster and be done.

[Pheats]

Ok another quick reply to address some stuff:

First of all, we do appreciate any feedback, these things are continuously changing and getting tweaked, and without feedback we can't make them better, but at the same time it can get a bit frustrating for us when people start hurling stuff at us in bitterness, specially when some suggestions have been tried before and got shouted down or something we simply cannot do and at times stated so before.

About the lag, unfortunately nothing can really be done about this other than a) not pre-announcing the event b) getting more people in ARK to work with so can spread things around

I think its pretty clear what the player base feels about unannounced events and getting more people in ARK is not something I can really directly influence.

As for confusion as what to do, well there really is very little we can do, we can't send you a tell telling you what to do, we can't really use effects to try and show different states as lets face it with the number of players there any sort of effect could be a perk or because of the number of people you may turn effects off.

So that just leaves letting you work it out for yourselves, ideally the plan was to get players to start working together and communicate with each other rather than just making it a team up and shoot event.

If your in a prearranged group that works well together you can tend to ignore the mass of other players and just concentrate on your own group and hopefully find patterns.

If this doesn't seem to work well, I guess we will have to change the style of the event.

And yes, the hostiles defenses are not necessarily static, just because something works at one point doesn't mean it always will (for example the beasts shields being thrown up now and then or the biodome boss reflects).

That ship spawning mobs might be heavily shielded while spawning, but after it stops it might take more and more damage until it spawns again or its shields are down because its nanoenergy has drained or both while it might not be immediately obvious hopefully patterns will emerge.

I will say that in almost all cases the things will have nanobased shielding that will go down after so much nano has been drained be it via direct nano drain attacks or simply amount of pounding its taken, but beyond that there will generally be a pattern that allows you to deal more damage if paying attention and potentially break its nano defense faster.

Others of course are a lot more obvious, such as moving away from count downs or damage type immunity/weaknesses.

Again if this really doesn't work we can change it, although at this point not sure how without making it just a matter kill the huge hp.

The fences that do unknown damage I realize tend not to be immediately noticeable (until the first time you run into them) which is why they tend to be announced with countdowns or be with more noticeable stuff such as towers.

If I can find a way to make them more noticeable I will, but if I can't I urge people to be cautious, the fences tend to be there to try and prevent people rushing into things they are not meant to (such as the center of that heavily guarded base) the general rule for the way events works is that you have to fight your way in, if it looks like you can just rush straight to the core then there's probably something you've not seen there. This is not because we dont like players doing things their own way, but because if we dont put some structure in then there is probably not going to be any real feeling behind the event (lets face it, do you REALLY want to be able to rush straight to the end boss all the time?)

That also works in regards to the monsters, if something is seriously not dieing but doesn't seem to be doing anything else (such as spawning stuff) your probably not supposed to kill it yet, for example this event worked in the manner of kill the big spawning ships first, that unleashes an assault drone from the base, killing that drops fighter shields and they open up the final boss.

There wont be anything hidden, anything that's needed will be shown or announced.

And finally... the time, yes this was a long event, it was supposed to be, and yes I know that's not something everyone will like, but these style of events are meant to be big long lasting raids to allow for many players to have a chance (specially since timezones are awkward for events, longer they last longer people have a chance to get in on it at least for a little while)

That said we do try to set it out so that people dont have to stay the entire haul to get a reward, and in fact that is also one of the reasons for the different defenses, a coordinated new group might be able to figure things out before the established group does and thus win rewards even if they were not there the entire time.

Yes this hasn't quite worked yet, but its still being worked on, hopefully groups will be able to come for a short while and have a chance at something good without feeling obligated to stay, hopefully next time this will be slight better though staying the full haul will give more chances at something good.

That said in this sort of event not everyone will get a reward, we will not and cannot pass out stuff to that number of people, it will always be a fight as to who can get the rewards (unless of course people just want xp, normal mob loot or the simple satisfaction of stomping as many greens as possible of which their tends to be plenty).

I accept this is not every ones cup of tea but hopefully this will help people consider what they want to do in future, whether it be working out groups and tactics before hand or just deciding you want nothing to do with it, the last thing I want to see is people having their game experienced ruined because they felt they did something that they really didn't want to do in the end. Specially if it was my doing.

[Lylith]

OOC:


Also keep in mind a lot of times players get hostile or aggressive with events for two main reasons. First going to a bad event is like spending a lot of money to see a really bad movie you thought was going to be good, it leaves you feeling upset and angry. the other reason, hate to say this but, there is an impression among a lot of players, at times, that Events (well most of ark but Ill just focus on events here) feels the players are here for them. And if we complain about how things are going we just need to shut up and like it, cause we lowly players are just little peons here for the amusement of our elite masters of the game. Now before I get some heat here, let me say I'm not stating this is true, but it is the impression from a lot of players that has built up over the years. Which is why a lot of times when players just rip into Events for things gone bad, it's because the feeling of frustration that we don't matter and you guys are just toying with us because you can.

I'll address that one as I feel that after being involved in RP here in AO for a few years, albeit on DNW only), I can say something about it:
While sometimes the Events ARKs can seem a bit distant they are not doing all that stuff just for their own amusement, e.g. running a CoT or BoD even if there is only one or two players present month after month, still coming up with stories for those, etc. Not saying that everything was peachy keen, but they tried and put their hearts into it.
So while I'll be the first to admit that there is stuff that needs to be improved upon (communication and flow of information, storyline information) I never got the impression that they were just toying with us for their own amusement.

[trousers]

I'm not going to go on a massive rant, but there's one huge reasons why I think the event was sub par.

There was no direction. Having upward of five targets, each with huge damage reduction leads players to be confused as to what exactly they're supposed to be doing.

In our case, the RP Raid Force, we found ourselves attacking everything, doing damage to nothing, and ending up trying to solve a puzzle that didn't exist because we had ourselves convinced something had to be causing the damage reduction.

Much to our chagrin we now find out that we needed to change our damage type ... not something everyone can do.

[Dagget]

90% of the time in an event like that, with a large crowd who suspect Lead bots will drop, 90% of the ppl will just show up and try to apply brute tank-and-spank force to the situation at hand. All the clever tricks Events slipped into the setup are wasted.

I would have suggested some tricks more like what happened at Halloween, with knockbacks and fearing and such - stuff not seen outside of a few instanced playfields but whose presence will get more ppl to start thinking more creatively about how to handle a situation.

[Pheats]

In response to trousers

Im sure can make it a bit more obvious what to do each step, though generally as long as your not trying to jump straight in to the center of a base you'll probably be hitting something you should be.

As for the damage changing, that was only necessary at a few points and when it was there was either a different target that would be weak to your damage type or it was temporary and would eventually cycle through all the damage types.

And to Dagget, knockbacks are used quite a bit during these, however it doesn't phase some people who still just smack the target regardless, and fears are not something we can just throw around unfortunately...

Though I would ask how the tricks are wasted if it lowers the effectiveness of those that are just blindly trying to forcefully do damage while raises the effectiveness of those that look into things and use tactics?

[trousers]

Though I would ask how the tricks are wasted if it lowers the effectiveness of those that are just blindly trying to forcefully do damage while raises the effectiveness of those that look into things and use tactics?

From our Raid perspective there were no tactics to employ.

There were multiple targets (IIRC, 2 drop ships, 3 'fighters', a dozen pylons and the Boss). When we first arrived we were attacking everything and managing to do 1-6 damage per hit to everything.

When we realized we could do no damage the tactic we employed was 'To find the objects (which didn't exist) which was protecting the aliens'. Obviously we thought too deeply into since the tactic you apparently wanted us to employ was Patience. And patience is something many of us lost rapidly when we realized we couldn't damage anything and were getting 2-6 FPS.

Dropping 6 'invulnerable' targets on the ground is only going to invite confusion, not a desire to devise tactics. If you truly want people to use tactics you really should have spread the event out more. You had the whole of Mort to take advantage of, however, you plopped all of your assets in one area and just hoped that someone, somehow, among all the lag, would just figure it out and then, on top of all of that, communicate the finding to everyone else.

The Pro Tip from it all, I suppose, when people are hoping to farm QL300 Lead Bots from an event, no one is sharing information.

[Klodovik]

Though I would ask how the tricks are wasted if it lowers the effectiveness of those that are just blindly trying to forcefully do damage while raises the effectiveness of those that look into things and use tactics?

Can I please get some answer on how was a MP supposed to use "tactics" in this encounter?

All I could do was, spamming my (in general) worthless nanos and eventually do 2 damage types cycle (poison and melee, if I didn't buff up pet with poison dmg override - which I did).

Watching how my participation did absolutely nothing useful, made me to go suicide on towers and do something else instead.

[Firestorm518]

I'll be totally blunt here, maybe even a bit insulting, but I just want to make my point of view completely clear:
You want to feel ubar? Go and kill some NPCs provided by the game, maybe some grey ones that you can oneshot. From what I can gather that was not what the event was there for. It was there to provide a challenge and to make the alien threat feel more real with hard to kill mobs that tried to build up another beachhead on Rubi-Ka. Hard-hitting, hard to kill troops that needed everyone to work together to bring down after a long and hard fight, finally the aliens were a threat again and not just something to kill fast and get loot from. Sounds like quit an experience. Can it be further tweaked and enhanced? Probably. Will bashing it without any constructive criticism help? Definitely not.

Ok I'm not looking for uber. I'm hoping for effective. The character i run with is a 218/22 Solitus enforcer with no small amount of LE SK dedicated. I'm relatively sure in his current condition he can tank any mob the game has including Artillery Commander. I don't get fancy explosions or dots or any of the real sweet stuff other characters get. I have my blade and aggro. In events i don't get to manage aggro. Event Characters can ignore Mongo. Therefore in events all i've got is my goddamned sword and DPS with very little recourse if they employ these tactics. Switching damage types on an Enf isn't impossible but its damned difficult (oh and the nanos aren't exactly CHEAP not to mention not having the ability to swap Arul sabas.) If my damage aint getting it done i'm an ineffective character who shouldnt even be there. That's what i felt in the middle of this.

If I can find a way to make them more noticeable I will, but if I can't I urge people to be cautious, the fences tend to be there to try and prevent people rushing into things they are not meant to (such as the center of that heavily guarded base) the general rule for the way events works is that you have to fight your way in, if it looks like you can just rush straight to the core then there's probably something you've not seen there. This is not because we dont like players doing things their own way, but because if we dont put some structure in then there is probably not going to be any real feeling behind the event (lets face it, do you REALLY want to be able to rush straight to the end boss all the time?)

The answer to that is while in one sense RP the stone cold truth: I am the Enforcer. Its my Job.