Interesting read, though I thoroughly disagree with the author. He is simply dwelling on what bad events have done in the past. There are 2 games which have had decent live events.

One of course is EVE, and ive heard about a bunch of cool events, though I have never done one.

The other, which did them even better, was Matrix Online. Kick ass live events were the one thing that MxO did far better than any other previous game. Often the events would run for days, be well supported by in-game placed props and NPCs, and of course many feature characters.

Even if you werent online when Morpheus went and was speaking to Zion faction peeps, or an Agent to the Machines, you would still hear about what went on. You could still take part, usually they would even have mini-cinematics to go along with an event, and the events pretty much always ran concurrently across servers, yet could have different results on each server.

They also gave reasons and even setup locations for PvP. I have fond memories of assauling Zionist strongholds keeping them from running quest items to their turn in agents, and fighting Machines for drops. They made interacting with the feature characters fun as well.

One thing to keep in mind though, is they decided on having Live Events early in their development cycle. How involved, interesting and difficult events are to set up and run is largly deteremined by the type of integrated tools and support that are created during the initial development process. If resources are put into it early, making and managing events, even for differing results on different servers, is more than doable.

On the other hand, without proper tools, it becomes insanely time consuming and a major manpower hog to create and manage. It just depends on what the people charged with running them have to work with. I will say there is a definate market for well-run interactive events though, especially ones that help shape a story.

Its just up to enterprising and farsighted devs to see as much, and successfully tap into it.