I just have to say I'm pretty damn disappointed. IMHO this article was insulting for several reasons.
1. Players should be willing to invest time in creating NPCs but event GMs can make NPCs at will but still only appear in game maybe once a week, if that.
2. FC originally claimed AO would be superior to other mmorpgs because they would have a dedicated event staff. These guys must get about 4 hours of pay a month.
3. I could understand some of these rules if events were actually taking place in game with more then just 3 NPCs run by the event staff. Instead of setting these kind of rules, maybe encourage or give an officail ok to people who ask to play out these story characters in game.
4. Although there might be a few people who could benifit from the advice in this article, most of it is pretty lame. RPers have been putting events together in other games for years, and had more tools at their disposal then the "superior" AO. Sorry but there's not one thing about AO that is improved over other games in the story/event department. In fact seems to me they've read Origins manual for events/story:
Have most of the story take place outside of the game on neat webpages (AO used video instead of audio, I guess a slight improvement).
Make sure players' actions have no impact on the world or the story. Especaily PvP, make sure its totaly meaningless.
Encourage players to make their own events. Saves alot of money! Of course the players will be limited by time, lack of monsters in their events, unique items and the extras that make events meaningful, but remember you saved alot of money!
If you do actually run an event, make sure that you try to keep it to as few as possible. Only the very few deserve to be involved with actual events. For the rest, just spawn a bunch of monsters somewhere, they'll love it until the server crashes!
End rant.
Hopefully the story and events will improve. The current terrorist plot seems to have potential. However, starting this senario then going on vacation was a bad idea imho.