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February 13, 2001
OSI: Looking For Something To Do?
The following was added to Online Community Relations page on the Ultima Online Web site:Looking For Something To Do?
While virtually all of my previous comments from the team have been about Community Relations, I am also responsible for the Event Programming team here at OSI. Hopefully many of you have seen the recent event announcement and accompanying event calendar. I’ve seen a lot of questions from players asking what the motive is behind these events, as they are a bit different than what we have done previously, and I figured this would make an excellent opportunity to talk about events in UO.
Before my time here at OSI, as a player, I experienced three “events” that I was aware of. I say “that I was aware of” because often, players are involved in an event and don’t even realize it. The recent change assigning purple names to volunteers has helped this somewhat, as players are now more easily able to discern whether that mongbat is part of something special or not. I recall all three of those events with great fondness and each one gave me a sense of accomplishment and made Ultima Online feel more alive. Even though, for the most part, I was fighting the same AI controlled monsters I always fought, the fact that killing these monsters had a purpose beyond skill and loot made the battles more exciting.
While everyone wants to create vast, dynamic fiction (what I refer to as a scenario) that touches and changes the game-world, the basic building blocks of a scenario, the event, are easily over-looked. Running this schedule of events allows us to not only create some fun and exciting things for players to do outside of their usual gaming experience, but at the same time, keeps things simple so we can gather the information we need to run even better events in the future. It’s much easier to gather information from single events, (looking at what worked and what didn’t work, how events affect those not involved and/or not expecting it, etc.) than it would be if the events were all tied together in one over-arching story. Of course, some of the events we are running now do have stories behind them.
So what’s next? Well a lot of that depends on how these events go and what we (and you) learn. Hopefully in the coming months I’ll write more event related comments from the team as we move towards the next evolution of events. In the meantime, I hope all of you get a chance to participate in these events and look forward to your feedback on the message board we have set up.
-Calandryll
Manager of Community Services
Posted by Keith at February 13, 2001 5:41 PM