I just had to say another quick hello and tell you that LotRO Beta had a bunch of GM run events in it, so don't lose hope yet ;).
 

Sare, both WoW betas had GMs and CMs running around at the end of them. Betas are a different beast - less people and special cases anyway.
 

I was lucky to join a GM event in daoc, it was really, really nice (was like a quest, involved talking to a couple of GM played characters that gave you hints and a big fight at the end). In the end it was even our group who solved that quest - included going to some epic zones when nearly none of us was high enough to survive there, real fun.

But I agree, with the current amount of servers and players it seems to be impossible to have some real events done by GMs, but it would be nice to see more big events that change the "daily life" for everyone on that server, at least during the event. Maybe something like a big invasion etc, like WoW had before naxx, it was fun.

cu starside
Ice
 

Just more events, please.
 

As Ikuturso said, WoW beta's had end-of-server events that at least from screenshots were *awesome*. Why don't they count? Because the PTR isn't a "regular" server? So what?

And while not an "event", WoW GM's do occasionally show up to help people/guilds. The most well known occurrence of this is of course GM's helping Nihilum take down BT and Heyjal bosses in the PTR server, but a GM or two will sometimes show up to help a guild on a live server. I've read of a GM coming to help a guild with a bugged Moroes fight. I also remember seeing pictures of 2 GMs in goblin suits helping out a guild in Gruul's. How cool is that :)
 

Not sure about the traditional 'guy at a PC controlling "Lord Nemesis" for an hours player slaughter' type of thing anymore, but the recent GW Dragon Festival one seemed to work quite well.

Entirely scripted and automated, I think, to prevent the usual 'GMs <3 [uber guild]' whining, or just to stop much beleaguered CS staff taking the opportunity to go postal for once.

The instancing zones help a lot, and the way they do their towns means it just clones off a new copy once the first one is full, so no point-load server crushing, that I could see.

And most importantly, the prizes were largely cosmetic, although to be fair, GW isn't really a particularly gear-focussed game anyway.

All seemed to work well. Those few olden days EQ GM events I remember tended to start with some NPC zonewide bellowing, and be followed very quickly by everyone desperately scambling for the nearest zone exit.

They typically seemed to involve a GM-controlled monster 20 or more levels higher than the indigenous hunting, running around massacring people, which in the days of XP loss, was SERIOUS BUSINESS!

It been a long time though, and the trauma is slowly wearing off. Maybe I dreamt the whole thing!

I do like seeing a bit more, and unusual, involvement from time to time though.

Perhaps some kind of half-way thing would be good - standard NPC quests which are only available some of the time, or which come and go, new quests showing up and older ones going away - a more dynamic approach to the 'standard' background questing which is always there maybe. It seems to be becoming the standard format for the Holiday offerings - why wait for just the Holidays?
 

Why should it required premium pricing?

We pay for the game itself, then we pay per month for access to the game, and then we pay additional for each expansion.

That subscription *should* include live interactive content.

It was something that EQ was doing right.
 

€50 a month sounds intimidating. How about a kind of "pay per view" model where you can buy into individual GM moderated events for a smaller amount (perhaps $10 a go)?

Alternatively I wonder if it would be possible to leverage the power of the community - perhaps players who achieve certain goals could become evil-overlords or whatever with limited support from GMs. I know that player generated content is often no-content but if GMs provided the over arching storyline and individual players provided the manpower on each server it might work at an acceptable cost.
 

I realize it's very frowned upon, but I've played on WoW private servers before. The "GM"s often held server wide events that were fun, and it brought about a lot more interest than most of us were having in the regular game.
 

BTW, we players can make our own events. I very much liked a christmas competition my guild held for its members. Basically, some officers hid in remote parts of the world, and we had to find based on riddles we got. First group to find all won the event and got some small reward. This was on normal WoW server, not a roleplaying one.
 

The heart & blood of UO was its GM events, but no company has done it consistantly since. I was involved in a few events in EQ, but Van Hemlock has a pretty good approximation of how well those were handled...

Betas usually have a few stress-test events, such as most recvently, LotRO had GMs running around as Creeps with players all congregating in the towns to kill them.

In the end they just result in lagfests and often are fun for only a select few people while the majority of the players just become collateral damage to the event.
 

There's already a game like that, and The Matrix Online sucks.
 

The idea of higher supbscription servers with more GM events, better support, etc has already been done by SOE with Everquest. The server was Stormhammer (also known as the Legends server).
 

It's all relative. If you lined up all the folks who buy gold/characters and took the average monthly expenditures for the top 1% spenders, I suspect (and I'd love to see the actual data) that $50 would look like a paltry sum in comparison.

So in terms of your proposed 'luxury' server, I think people would pay it. Crazy people with disposable income, specifically. But when 9 million people play a game, even if only 1% of its players are crazy then it's still 90,000 people. (making what, 40,000 North Americans? That'll fill a server) So yeah, I think Blizzard could gouge a bit by adding another payment tier.

But why stop there? If this is really about supply (available bandwidth, available GMs) and demand (players that want to witness an event), then Blizz could theoretically auction off "seats" to a premium private-server-event. People would pay. (Oh, there's unique loot, too! You better believe they'd pay.)

I think this would be 2 things: extremely lucrative in the short term (remember the crazy RMTers with disposable income, now forced to outbid each other), and very very terrible PR. I can't imagine your standard $15/mo grunt being very happy about this little party they've been excluded from.

I've meandered a bit, but in conclusion I think your premium server idea would have enough willing (crazy) customers, but foster so much ill will that it would not ultimately be profitable.
 

Oh no, I've got more.

A new thought has forced me to rethink my position. A premium server created specifically to run events would not be feasible for WoW-specific reasons I'll get into. But I still think you could apply my comments to premium content in general, like the "seat" auction.

Okay, the problem with picking servers is there are multiple competing forces. It's not like picking a line at the grocery checkout where less people = best line. In WoW your desired server (ignoring horde/ali balance and time zone factors) has enough people to form groups easily (LFG RFK 4M PLZ GOD SOMONE ANSWER ME) but not so crowded that you spend a lot of time frozen in Lagforge (stuck in the chasm).

What I mean to say is there's a 'magic number' between desolate and crowded. And I suspect that if you took this perfect scenario, this magic number of folks and gave em all a big shiny event to look at, it'd still crash the server.

Let's return to the supply/demand angle. It's appropriate, since your solution to a demand-too-high problem is to raise the price. I'm theorizing (and again I'd love some sort of data) that if you were to raise the price until the very moment that the event population was manageable, your "premium" server'd have a real hard time getting a SM together at 40.

If Blizzard wants to have world events, there needs to be a technical change in the way they're handled, not an incentive-based one.

(Heh! Thanks for helping me find something to think about at work today, Tobold.)
 

EVE Online has GM-run events; I can't vouch for the frequency.

They don't try to grab the whole server. From what I vaguely recall, there are chat channels where CEOs of corps interested in role-playing are invited to join, possibly segregated by race/region. GMs come up with event plans, give a one- or two-day warning on the chat channels or by in-game email so the corps have people on line and some idea of what's going on, and then they're off. If you see news on EVE about, e.g., relief convoys to planet X getting blockaded by faction Y, that was a GM-run event.

while I was active in a RP corp it seemed there was about one every week that would come up in the regions of space we frequented, with recurring GM characters developing personal relationships with the various corps and using the events to spark larger RP play (usually war, of course.) :)

The only one I participated in personally ended up us being security for a meeting between some hostile parties that just ended up scheduling another event, but the tension, unknowns, and cooperation around the event were just as much fun as a PvP raid.

ATitD is niche, but it also had occasional GM-run events when I played in the first two tellings.
 

Oh yes, I forgot. I was in an ATitD event, where Pharaoh (the lead designer) gathered everybody on the German server I was playing on to discuss how to improve the game. And then implemented some changes right on the spot, which was probably the coolest thing I've ever seen in a MMORPG. But then, the whole server population at the time he did that was less than 50 people. :) Not much of a lag problem. Can't see that happening in WoW.
 

I hate GM events. In almost all cases, they're never anything more than lag fest. I'm also very suspicious of them for another reason - it might be a way for dishonest GMs to funnel items to favored players.
 

Why would it have to be a GM run event? If I were dev'ing a game, I'd set up a scenario, make special accts that control npc's, hire a group from the local uni that are actors/gamers/pc enthusiasts to control the events on the servers, have them employeed in your office, oversight by management, and pay them min wage for a day or 2 or whatever. It'd cost the company minmal amount, and the players would eat it up. Run 2-4 of these such events every year, and it adds just a bit of spice to your game.
 

mbp said "I wonder if it would be possible to leverage the power of the community" which I think might work very well. I had been thinking in terms of special events, much like a beta signup you could have a 'help invade X' signup, everyone gets a special login, and away they go. I've also often thought some of the big baddies should be human-driven. Like a rare spawn whenever they show up for work.

Jason was also there, noting "hire a group from the local uni that are actors/gamers/pc enthusiasts to control the events on the servers, have them employeed in your office, oversight by management, and pay them min wage for a day or 2 or whatever." But I think it would be easy enough to staff without paying. After all, the idea is that we pay the fee to keep the servers running, keep new areas and baddies being devved, etc. We all know the economics don't work to pay people to run everything, but it seems like enough ppl would be willing to do these things pro bono in exchange for a good time (which is, after all, what we're all after, right?)
 

We're moving curiously close to LotRO's "monster play" with these proposals.

Problem is, if you don't even trust GM's to be not partial and favor one guild over another, how are you going to trust temp staff or unpaid volunteers?
 

Tobold must be a psychic )

http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=81282
 

Well, my point wasn't a trust issue. Its more, GM's have a full time job, CS. You want to run an event on multiple servers. Figure 1-2 people working for the company per server, on a very part time basis. The point to me of hiring temp staff, is you don't advertise (come play wow) You advertise looking for actors/gaming enthusiats to play npc's for a 2 day skit or something like that. Try to get people not involved with the game. Also, hiring people gives you some power, ie they work for you, thus they must do what you say, and you can put management over them. Also, just search your customer DB for the applicants, if they have a registered acct, see what servers they do/don't have characters on and put them on servers where they have no interest. Its the best way I can think to make it impartial. The reason I shy away from unpaid enthusiasts is they have an interest in the game. Try to hire people for a job, not for a gaming experience, and your more likely to get an interesting and succesful experience for your players. And the cost really wouldn't kill the budget of a company like Blizzard or SOE given that its part time, min wage work.
 

I have seen you write about Bartle but I am curious if you have ever played a MUD?

Before I started playing MMORPGs I played muds (RP focused ones usually) . MUDs I played typically had a playerbase in the hundreds or less. They also typically had "GMs" that where deities of different faiths\religions within the game and there where frequent "GM" ran events.

Within this comparatively small (playerbase wise. I have played MUDs that I would contend had more content than WoW, with more frequent patches\content additions) world your character could actually do significant things and be a significant part of the worlds history.

There is still a small but thriving MUD community around today, and there are thousands of (absolutely free) muds to be had in said community.
 

I played LPMUDs for some time in the early 90's. On an university mainframe via Telnet, on a green-on-black text-only screen. Those were the days. :)

Good example on how a smaller playerbase allows you to have more significant events in a game.