A complex event, say for example if the Cal Prime event had allowed you to choose your side and fight within a series of maps that illustrated the story of a progressive engagement and held implications for the battle being conducted in the sky, would be great. That's the sort of complexity which enriches the event because the event itself is complex, but playing in it is not, in the case of this example it would require only choosing a side and deploying to battle.

That pretty much sums it up. +1 and loving the dialogue.j

Boils down to:

Ease of tracking
Meaningful rewards
Tie in the lore

Events are fine addition of diversity to the daily grind. Thanx

I would like to see some vehicles involving events. Like LAV, HAV, DS death races. You could invent some "checkpoint" system for maps to define race track and measure laps times. This on top of regular battles to spice things up. Add collateral for entrants and a jackpot for the winner. How about this? Huh?

EDIT:
With CRUs and SupDeps in the pit stop

EDIT #2:
The winner could also receive some decent loot. Like BPC of bad ass fitted vehicle...

(...)
The Interstellar Racing Championship

The Interstellar Racing Championship, or ISRC, is a corporation dedicated to bringing quality sports entertainment to pilots and racing enthusiasts throughout the New Eden star cluster. Founded in 109 as the Interstellar Gaming Consortium (ISGC) by Gyra Rho, it has been recast in 111 by the racing community as the Interstellar Racing Championship (ISRC), with the aim of keeping the Racing League alive.

How the League Works

The Racing League consists of a series of weekly races spread out over various regions within our star cluster. The League is further divided into three distinct classes: frigates, interceptors, and assault frigates. Standings are recorded for registered pilots for themselves in individual rankings, and if apart of a team will automatically be entered to score for the group. Points earned from an individual do not transfer if the pilot changes teams during a season. Unless banned, any corporation or pilot may participate in the races in any class at any time during the season, though it is recommended to start as early as possible to remain competitive. At the end of the League, the top scoring pilots and teams will win trophies and prizes for each class.

The starting region of each event is usually announced one week in advance on the public boards, and reminder notifications will be sent out two days prior to the event via FTL (in-game) mail through our mailing list.
(...)

~Good stuff.~

Before becoming a Dust addict, I was a Mass Effect 3 co-op multi-player addict for a few months. They had weekly (well, 'weekend') events that I completed (or tried to) almost every week. Some of them were fairly simple 'perform x revives', but the ones I think have the most potential here are those that encouraged you to give up your high-level gear for a few matches and run with what was that game's equivalent of militia gear. I should clarify you to had to use a specific weapon for each event...for example, militia shotguns...and I think that's a lot of fun. If you were to, say, add a militia HMG (wink wink, nudge nudge), then that week's event should be 'get x kills or assists using the militia HMG'.

I think this type of event has great tie-in potential with the recent occasions when a few copies of new AUR gear have been given to everyone. I think one was the "Mauler" suit? Say you're about to release an AUR CreoDron scout suit manufactured by CreoDron. The backstory of the event is that CreoDron needs field data for the suit before putting it into full production, and is asking us mercs to beta test it. We're all given 5 copies of the suit, and the following rewards are available:

1. Deploy in the new suit 5 times - get 100k isk
2. Get 10 kill assists wearing the new suit - get 20 copies of the CreoDron AUR shotgun (that's a thing that exists, right?)
3. Earn 1000 WP while wearing the new suit - get 10 copies of the new suit

For more immersion (but probably a little dev work), put the new suit in the marketplace so everyone can see it, but keep it locked for the first week (during the 'beta test') until you've deployed all the ones you were gifted. That's not a very substantial barrier in reality...if you want to buy them, of course you're going to use the ones you were gifted...but the idea of 'unlocking' things is just fun.

The specific rewards aren't that important, but I think what is important is that this sort of event compels you to change your play style. I realize that's exactly what some prior posts in this thread have spoken out against, but as long as it doesn't take long to complete the event, and the rewards aren't so substantial that you feel you have to participate or you're missing out (as is the nature of SP events), this encourages us to explore new playstyles that we might like if we gave them a try. As an added bonus, it would shake up the FOTM a little bit during the events, and I think that's desirable.

Unless it's a sniper rifle event - never run one of those

This is something we can do in the near future. We can now track kills by weapon type on the DB, so expect to see events based on this.

Our next event will be fairly simple, you get double SP for the WP earned in your first win of the day. Starting in October, we will be extending that to the first 3 wins of the day for most of the month. We will also try to roll out an event based on kills made by weapon type in a new "Challenge" event, and yes, no sniper rifles, (though now that I've said that, I'm sure the sniper fans will be raging).

We are finalizing the event details for September and October, and should be ready to make them available to the public by early next week.

So, lemme get your thoughts on this.

I threw out the idea a while back of having events split into two separate functions. One being mundane, which would be like "get 100 kills this week" or something, with the second part being the Double/Triple SP week.

Now, the reward is what makes this interesting. If you get 100 kills in the first week (or whatever the goal is) you get a 7-Day Active SP Boost for the following multiplied SP week.

I'd imagine marketing would hate you to death for it but considering that non-paying players would love you and even paying players can still benefit from it, there's less of a "I got a bunch of dropsuits and weapons I don't use" sort of thing.

We can appreciate players wanting SP boosters as prizes and there are some cases where rewarding these would be apporpriate such as winning tournaments or perhaps hitting all the requirements of a month long Human Endurance event.

However, from a business model perspective this will hurt us if we started to give out a lot of skill boosters. We do have a long term development goal to get a system implemented where players can chose their own rewards, it wont be ready anytime soon, but it is on the list of things we want for DUST.

What we are considering in the meantime is to set up special contracts at random times (akin to Sansha Invasion) where a new loot table will be available, i.e. officer loot.

Special contracts with unique loot is a solid idea :-) trying it into invasions is also solid

Whether this will happen will largely depend on the feedback given here.

What we are considering in the meantime is to set up special contracts at random times (akin to Sansha Invasion) where a new loot table will be available, i.e. officer loot.

Whether this will happen will largely depend on the feedback given here.

However, from a business model perspective this will hurt us if we started to give out a lot of skill boosters. We do have a long term development goal to get a system implemented where players can chose their own rewards, it wont be ready anytime soon, but it is on the list of things we want for DUST.

What we are considering in the meantime is to set up special contracts at random times (akin to Sansha Invasion) where a new loot table will be available, i.e. officer loot.

I do not like the double/triple sp per wp for the first match or two of the day and I'll tell you why;

A decent amount of the players in this game will not score in the 500+ WP range, as they are not all that great at FPS games or whatever. What this type of reward system does is benefit those who already are doing quite well, while barely helping those that do in fact need the help.

I would think a system that rewards participation (i.e. playing) rather than wp hording would be preferable. An idea previously brought up, like using a variety of militia weapons or vehicles ( thus requiring no specialization in those catagories), would fit very nicely.

TLDR; Design rewards for the non-power gamers, as these people outnumber the hardcore gamers and are the ones who will make or break your game.


ASIDE: I can easily score 1k+ sp a game, I'll just use a logi with a 30% needle, a repper, and a drop uplink, as will most people that are familiar with this game. Oh and I will revive EVERYONE, esp those in the line of fire to maximise my sp.