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So I don't play EVE online, but I stumbled across the following article. http://io9.com/space-opera/ Wherein an accident sent a capital ship into enemy territory, alliances were called upon, favors pulled, and 3,000 people spent hours fighting out a spontaneous epic space battle.
Or to quote what especially caught my attention:
What's even more interesting is the capacity for open-ended games like EVE Online to create emergent stories. Nothing was prescripted about the storylines that lead to the battle -– not the alliances, the mining conglomerate, the bad blood between the groups, or the events of the battle itself. EVE creates a set of economic and military factors and lets the players run loose. The stories (and battles) occur organically. Similar things have happened with other sandbox style games, such as DayZ, where your struggles to survive among ranveous zombies and hostile players can lead to bizarre, thrilling or even emotionally resonant stories.
Major events happened naturally... Reading about what happened on EVE just makes me excited about what better, more interesting, naturally emerging epic events are going to happen in our own story. Especially because there's so much more to the PFO world than just economics and military systems.
I was going to make a thread about this almost exact topic today too. I'm really hoping that groups within the game's community will come together to create player-sponsored events/tournaments much like EVE's Hulkageddon.
If you haven't heard of it, it might be worth looking up. Essentially, players put up cash and prizes to be awarded to the top participants of the event. Hulkageddon is a tournament for PvPers to destroy as many mining vessels during the event as they can. The Hulk was a really nice mining ship that typically cost a bit of cash; thus the name of the event: Hulkageddon. (but not limited solely to Hulks, any big mining vessel would do)
The organizers of the event would keep a leaderboard of each contestant's kill count on mining vessels, and a running total of how much wealth was removed from the economy in destroyed ships. Winners were players who took top spot in various categories, such as most ships destroyed or most wealth destroyed, etc.
The annual event itself usually resulted in a loss of billions/trillions of ISK, which I find to be extremely impressive. I think it shows great creativity on behalf of the community - Not only to create and manage a large scale event, but to have it so successful that it has a major impact in game. Most people who knew better simply didn't venture out to mine during the event if they could avoid it. I hope to see something like it in PFO.
Perhaps a 4-way competition to see which group can score the most kills in a server wide melee of outlaw/assassin/champion/enforcer... or perhaps some kind of Bounty Hunting tournament where the event would be sponsored by a collective effort from all players to execute death curses on as many people as they could afford to.
Goblin Squad Member
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As someone who has planned shard-wide events and multi-guild plot-lines in Ultima Online, I can say that these are what make a sandbox style game unique. The opportunity to put your own player-made story in motion, to have others participate in an unscripted, free flowing manner, and watch the tangent story-lines it spawns spin off with a life of their own is truly marvelous - far better than any game generated quest could hope to be. Likewise, events that enable whole segments of the community to come together, to network as players and interact as characters are what stop any game from becoming the same old grind for loot, resources, and experience. These are the activities that keep an MMO from being a race to the top, ending in a mass exodus to the next new game when all the game-generated content has been consumed.
Ultima Online lasted for years past it's game-generated appeal. By the end of my tenure there, the graphics were simplistic at best when compared to newer games, the game-generated quests were nearly nonexistent, and the game expansions(at least in my opinion) were poorly conceived. So why did people stay for years past UO's prime and continue to play, even on player owned shards- because of the people and what they made together.
Lovers of sandbox MMORPGs are creative people. We are not players of cookie-cutter characters in cookie-cutter worlds. We want to be unique pieces of a growing, evolving world in which our efforts and accomplishments have meaning, are persistent, and drive the direction of our gaming experience. To quote Willie Wonka, "We are the music makers and we are the dreamers of a dream."
Hobs
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Goblin Squad Member
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For years the vast majority of customers have demanded a game where a single player/small group game playstyle opens up 99% of all content, where there is no risk and where the systems are so simple that everyone can understand them easily.
This in turn leads to a game experience that I would call shallow and repetitve.
So I hope that a good amount of customers have changed their mind, "grown up" if you want, and can cope with a game where there is risk and where you need to be part of the society (one way or the other)to archive anything.