I couldn’t leave for GDC without posting this story: over in Star Wars Galaxies, Vader stopped by and paid a dedicated stormtrooper-only guild a surprise inspection. Talk about awesome.

The standard problem with events, of course, is that they don’t scale all too well. If you take a look at those screenshots, you’ll see that there are maybe 30-40 guild members who got to experience the coolness of a visit by Vader, or approximately .012% of the player base. So are events like this worth it?

The arguments in favor would be as possible:
A) This event clearly rewarded the more dedicated players of the game. Rewarding the more dedicated players of the game helps reinforce your nucleus community of players.
B) Even on the normally acerbic Evil Avatar boards, the readers were calling it cool, (and might I add, slamming the guy who posted the story for being too negative against SOE). So it’s generating some genuinely good buzz for the game, something all the games who aren’t named WoW need right now.

That being said, the problem with events is that they all can’t be as newsworthy as this one, and so they tend to just reward the faithful. Taking events to the next level involves figuring out a way for their goodness to ‘trickle down’ to more people than the ones who could be there exactly at that point in time.