The Hunt for Joker

[Lyanna]

The Hunt for Joker was a two-part series of events, both of the manhunt and fetch-and-carry type. Players were challenged to find Joker as many times as possible within a set time limit, and bring those items to myself. In the second event, an additional complication was added where the person they had to return the items to (me) was hidden as well, and clues provided via a bot who was witness to the kidnapping.

 

Lessons learned:

 

- Joker has become incredibly hard to find recently. One estimate puts him at around 80 spawns in C1. Organising a contest around trying to find him many times no longer has the same exciting feel as it used to have when the number of spawns was smaller and there were more expert Joker hunters. A constant rhythm of Joker findings is needed to generate excitement, and nowadays those are too few and far-between. People start getting discouraged if there have been no sightings within half an hour. Clues would have to be provided in order to solve that problem, but that requires a high-level mod. Future Joker-hunting events would probably have to rely on a "Find him first" principle rather than a "Find him the most number of times".

 

- Joker-hunting has a few advantages over regular manhunts: the broadcasts are made automatically, so everyone immediately knows when someone finds Joker, making it easier to keep track of. And secondly, Joker automatically respawns somewhere else in a blink of an eye, creating a moving target that's much more difficult to find.

 

- Joker's best prize is a Steel Shield, which has a current market value of around 400gc. Prizes offered for Joker-hunting needs to be more than that, as well as more than the amount of time it takes to hunt Joker. The current prizes offered for this contest were in the 2500 - 10000 gc range, which attracted plenty of newbies and Explorer-type players. However, newbies often had no idea what Joker looked like, having never seen him before.

 

- Don't hold Joker-finding contests on days with great positive effects, like rare manufacturing day. That seriously decreases the number of people willing to take part, I think. The opportunity cost may be too high, unless the prizes are raised further. Also, players seem to get confused with too much story or role-play elements involved in the announcements, sad to say.

 

- I used Gossip's "about player" feature as a tool to give out clues to a person's location for the manhunt part of the second contest. That was a good innovation, I think, and can be used more often in future events. If there were more bots with the "about <something/someone>" feature or that broadcast player-submitted messages on channels, more variations to this element could be integrated. Bots help to reduce the manpower requirements for running events.

 

-Lyn-

Edited July 4, 2007 by Lyanna

[cho-yun]

around 90 joker spawns

 

intresting lessons

 

Gossip is always good bot to use lol..

 

if it's a good day a big prizes (like 100k) will bring a big crowd coming

Edited July 4, 2007 by cho-yun

[ttlanhil]

- Don't hold Joker-finding contests on days with great positive effects, like rare manufacturing day.

There's already something good happening on that day... Days that are generally seen as negative (some days are positive to some people and negative to others) tend to bring larger crowds (unless everyone logged off when they saw the day )

Bots help to reduce the manpower requirements for running events.

To some degree... I set up some simple commands for vakana to respond to for a contest, and so many people had trouble with the instructions.

It was two-part simultaneous, run by just myself; they had to answer a few questions from vakana to get a special word to tell me when they found me (with the standard find-me with clues on channel 6 for that part).

I kinda felt bad, because so many people had trouble with it; they didn't understand instructions, and there was no way I could adjust for it and tell them all "no, not quite" (there were some "not quite" responses set up, but those were for answers that were almost valid. Like rabbit not being an animal with 3 types (since fluffy is monster). Not for cases like "ttlanhil: PM vakana with what my highest skill is", then vakana gets "PM from playername: with what my highest skill is").

 

I did prove that it works, and I can set it up quickly (if it's just word-response pairs, then I can add a bunch in a few minutes, no restart required), but I learnt that there are some rather strong limits to what players will be able to manage with bots in events.

 

That said, vakana has helped with several events now, and I'm open to ideas on how to work it better; or requests for her help in an event