Best Of

I think there has been some productive, if fraught, conversation in the pet peeves thread, but that's not the best place for a discussion about improvements. In the interest of having that conversation, I'm just going to start this thread with a few good criteria, some criticisms, and, finally, my ideas. First, a few, hopefully uncontroversial, criteria for a good event:

1. Accessibility is the goal of any team event. No one should feel like they cannot participate because they are bad at combat, or that unskilled participation drags down the rest of the team.
   
2. Numbers should improve your chances of success, but not overwhelmingly so. No one should feel like they have to participate or they are letting their side down. Also, the strategy of the participants and the execution of that strategy should be the greatest factor of success.
   
3. Team events should be exciting and interesting. A stale meta will get old fast and it will be incumbent on the playerbase to keep engagement up against boredom.
   
4. Team events should have clear winners and losers, while winning and losing should not be the only fun to be had. Something of value should be gained, possibly even for the losers.
   

Now, how well do Lessers, Majors, and Orrery fare with each of these criteria?

1. All current events are very accessible. No one should ever feel like they cannot participate because they will just be a detriment to their team. The only point against accessibility is that there is a requirement to have some sort of leader calling targets. No leaders? No contest. No fun. A-
   
2. Numbers improve your chances of success, but Lessers do little to nothing to get smaller groups any sort of chance to catch up. It is, ultimately, up to the participants to try to eke out a win. The various modes of Majors do some things to help with this, but steamrolling with a large group is still the dominant strategy when numbers. Orrery benefits slightly from having some non-group strategies ("keep away" with the orb), but those are not very fun to play against and there's nothing to do with a small group if the large group has the orb. D-
   
3. Majors handle this well enough. Two contentions of four or five different types is pretty good. Lessers and Orrery are very samey. The different circumstances and class mixes create some novel encounters, but they are mostly bash fests. B-
   
4. Gateway Majors and Orrery do very well with having clear winners and losers, but Lessers and other Majors do not. All events value the losers only to the extent that people can earn a lot of experience. However, if you don't get kills, you don't get anything. C-
   

As promised, my idea for a new team event is similar to King of the Hill, which I envision will be a new type of foci battle called Greater Foci:

• Found similarly to Lessers, they show up as a node in a room on LEYLINES, and spawn randomly alongside minors.
  
• Unlike Lessers, their room is not a room within that area. Instead, they exist in a separate, instanced area (the "hill"). To get to the hill, you will use a new refining ability, Attuning. Simply REFINING ATTUNE [SPIRIT|SHADOW] anywhere from the Greater's area to begin an uninterruptible 5-second channel to teleport to the hill instance. Only 3 players per tether are allowed on the hill at a time. Neutral players can choose which tether to attune as. As long as only one tether has players on the hill, the Greater is being extracted by that tether. Otherwise, it is contested, does not progress, and may end before being completely extracted, similar to Majors running out.
  
• This splits participation into two different modes: 3 players on the hill, and everyone else. Everyone not on the hill will be able to help their tether by slaying eld that spawn in the area, similar to Onslaught. Slaying eld while your tether is also controlling the hill speeds up extraction. Conversely, slaying eld while not extracting denies those eld to the extractors. Overall, your tether will need to be in control of the hill the entire time or slay a decent number of eld to fully extract a Greater.
  
• These are not totally separate modes of play, however. The people on the hill may take channeled and directed actions to help those at the Greater, a few examples will be provided below. Ultimately, the goal will be to give the advantage to the tether controlling the hill while not improving the ability to control the hill too much. These actions will only be available while the hill is uncontested. There also exists the slight ability for those in the Greater area to protect the hill, in the form of the Attune time. This should be a minor factor, however.
  

Example hill effects. All actions require your tether to control the hill (i.e. the hill must be uncontested to start a channel or to take an action). Channels may be continued while the hill is contested, if you think that's wise. Note, "allies" refers to those of your own tether, and "enemies" refers to those of the opposite tether, not your own personal allies or enemies.

• channel to increase the eld spawn rate;
  
• channel to increase the Attune time to 10 seconds;
  
• channel to create a 3 second movement delay across the entire area, for all players;
  
• channel to give all allies in the Greater area perfect out-of-room stealth;
  
• channel to give a returning-like defense to all allies;
  
• action to permanently "shrink" the hill, reducing the max number of players per tether to 2;
  
• action to reverse this "shrink", only usable by the tether that did not shrink the hill in the first place;
  
• action to revive an ally in the Greater area, as long as their corpse is still on the ground;
  
• action to swap places with an ally in the Greater area (they get pulled into the hill and you're out in the Greater);
  
• action to give all enemies in the Greater area hidden shyness (untethered are unaffected).
  

As this is already a large post, I will leave it up to others to consider how well this event idea handles the criteria at the top. I also had another idea for a sort of treasure hunt mode. I think this Greater idea suffers a bit in terms of accessibility. I think the ideal of accessibility would be if you could show up alone or un-webbed to a team event and get something for yourself and your tether, and I have some ideas on that.

In addition to this new mode, I also suggest a new drop for eld at team events: ylem motes. When you slay an eld at a Lesser, Greater, or Major, you have a chance of receiving a ylem mote. These motes may be traded in at the pylon for a ylem shard, or used on another eld, slaying them for no experience, but causing them to drop one extra guaranteed mist. These would be very valuable to crafters and people without Shackle. A shop or other uses would also be great. The 3 players on the hill should also be able to collect a handful of ylem motes as a Greater collapses.