An Event in the Making
I like to describe a lot of the work I do as "high-load, quick-turnaround projects". That is to say, with events and many sponsorships, we build things that will be used by a LOT of people at once, and need to be built very quickly.
A lot of people went into the building of this event. During any event, we always hear complaints about how we should just get it right the first time, or how we should schedule things better, or how we should be cast into the abyss for delivering an event that isn't 100% bug free. Events aren't the only thing Gaia does, and a lot of people went into the making of this event:
Event Credits (About 25 people!)
Some people also said we should have planned earlier, but if I'm not mistaken the planning for this began two months ago. A common complaint was about the Isle de Gambino manga being late. Honestly, each manga was supposed to come out weeks before the event started (one per week for 5 weeks) -- but our art team was simply stretched way too thin between the event, zOMG, item updates, Cash Shop updates, sponsorships, updates to old features, and new features.
All told, we came together very well in the end.
Running the Event
Launching
It used to be that when I launched an event, I would spend much of the morning sweating bullets, and then be so stressed out that I would go home early as soon as the event was stable. There were always major explosions, more than a few casualties, and the loss of about 2 years of my life.
Since X-Mas 2007, I think, we've kind of mastered the event launch. Unfortunately, we've also started doing things with events we've never done before (e.g., events that are much more Flash-heavy).
Fixing
Many of us continued to work through the event. A number of the games were buggy and we fixed a lot of that, we tweaked the scoring a couple times to make it fairer, and artists continued to work on manga and downloads.
All told this was a fairly stable event! You can count on no-hands how many times the site went down.
Scoring
There's always some controversy about scoring, so I'll clear that up here.
Scoring is adjusted to make the scoring as fair as possible. By taking average scores this year, we eliminate the issue that a particular team (e.g., Durem) has many more players than any other team.
But that alone isn't enough. There were a few other issues we had to address:
#1 - More players does mean you have a bigger workforce for cheating, which sadly, people try to do to get an edge.
#2 - As the event went on, the average score began to level out for each team. It was starting to look like every single team would end up with an event score of 5.55. Not particularly exciting!
We addressed both these issues by throwing away lower scores based on a threshold determined by day. So for example (and this isn't the exact mechanism), on day one we threw away scores below 1. On day two, we threw away scores below 1.5. On day three, we threw away scores below 2, etc.
What this ensured is:
1. Players who joined other teams just to bring down the average would not be counted unless they got a reasonable score for that team.
2. The range of counted scores became smaller, therefore the disparity in team scoring became greater. So instead of seeing scores like 5.55, 5.54, 5.54, 5.55 you see scores with a wider margin of difference.
The downside of this method, which I deemed acceptable, was that players who weren't that good didn't bring their team down -- which basically meant that it became a competition, really, between the best players on that team (or players who got better throughout the event).
This was based on the day of the event, though, so many users saw a switch at midnight. There was no conspiracy to make any particular team win -- in the end, we decided, this was the fairest way to score and give each team equal footing.
On Flash in Events
Now, the other big controversy in the event was making much of it Flash-based. I want to clear something up here as well.
My general philosophy on Flash is that except for mini-games, it's probably best to use it to enhance an HTML experience, not replace it. We did it last year with the Halloween event by having the Flash HUD at the top of each of the event forums. This year we also did it with the announcers on the Event page for Olympics.
Now, a lot of Gaians think "Flash == Crash", but that's simply not the case. The reason a lot of our Flash experiences in the past have been a problem for some users is because of the backend, not Flash itself. We have server software that is responsible for allowing people to interact with each other, chat with each other, etc. In the past, this aspect of our Flash experiences (all games, towns, and rally) have been very flaky. With Prom, again, all the inter-user communication overloaded our backend/network -- so that's where it failed.
Olympics is much more stable as a single-player experience with a competitive aspect around it (rather than with direct player-to-player communication/interaction in the games themselves). Therefore it's much more stable.
On top of all that, the Summer Event is definitely something we experiment with -- for bigger, more canonical events like Halloween, I'd definitely recommend the team shy away from Flash-based experiences.
The Good!
I've been very happy with the bigger events we've had since Summer Festival of last year: Summer Festival 07, Halloween 07, X-Mas 07, Prom 08, and Olympics 08. In my opinion, an event like this is valuable because:
- It allows people to get more immersed in the Gaia world when they join a team
It adds a lot more fun when there's a competitive aspect to it that's not directly confrontational
It boosts discussion in the forums like crazy and generally makes Gaia is a great place to be
Unique to this event, there was new content every day.
All told, I'm very happy with it, especially that we got so many great manga out of it, and soon, a bunch of new skins!
Community Member
i've watched the events grow larger and larger. you guys really impressed me this time. overall, pretty smooth.
people will always b***h, don't let it get you guys down too much.
keep up the good work!