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.

i think we should add umm zone's custom lineage 2 server as the top 3 in game events to this date...cough...cough...CHOKE......

Worst two in game events for me happened in Shadowbane, no surprise there... early after its release.

The worst one was some jackass GM decides to have an event where he, some kind of evil overlord, spawns a massive undead army just outside the KGB city's walls and goes on to kill us all. This was when most of the guild was low level still and poor.

Not only this but CoS had JUST maybe an hour ago burned half of our city to the ground and blew large holes in our walls. Everyone was already broke and pissed and then this "event" happens.

CoS had good relations with the GMs... statues and shit from their events placed in there WinterHaven city... me thinks the well timed GM attack/event was planned with the CoS attack.

So many of us were pissed and were shouting at the GM to get the hell out of here, we don't want your retarded "event" right now... "can't you see our city was just demolished!?!?!?" after that day I don't believe KGB ever was offered another event. Screw them.

oooo