Preface
Inspired in part by my post in the collaboration thread, as well as other excellent posts there, and building on this post about dynamic events, I’d like to suggest that you design your own living event. To summarize, these would be permanent/repeatable, long term events that can span multiple days (with sub events) and could also take failure scenarios into account. Development resources is not a particular concern. Go nuts, as long as you stay within the framework of the existing game.
My Contribution
Location: Queensdale
Day 1
There is a merchant hanging out near the farms of Beetletun. He has a large cart, and is requesting your help filling it with resources for his next trip. Unfortunately, centaurs and wildlife keeps attacking him. Throughout the day, perhaps at 1 hour intervals, he requests different things; wood logs, vegetables, ore, defense from centaurs that are attacking. Once 24 (or so) of these events have passed, he has the stock he needs and is ready to move on.
Day 2
The merchant starts his travels across the map to the Township of Claypool. He will take this trip in segments, each segment representing an event. For the ease of example, let’s say be begins a leg every hour. During each event, you need to protect him from enemies and bandits. Each event can be slightly different. Maybe they barricade a bridge, maybe they try ranged attacks, there’s a brute force assault, and so on. If you fail and the cart is damaged, there will be an event to defend while repairs take place. Perhaps you have to escort a repair NPC to him from somewhere else. The merchant begins his trip with 100% resources. As events fail, some of these go lost, so he can finally arrive at Claypool with minimal, average, or all resources.
Day 3
The merchant sets up shop in Claypool. Depending on the amount of resources that survived, what he sells will be increasingly good. It can be everything from food buffs to other more interesting things. There are events to escort traders from other locations to Claypool so they can trade with the merchant. There are some options here, such as if the escort took an inordinate amount of time, perhaps his best food resources spoiled and their end result wont be available for purchase.
Day 4
The day begins by the merchant leaving Claypool in a scripted event. About halfway through the map, his cart breaks down. The first event is to escort some soldiers to come and protect him. Once that is done, subsequent events of the day are to collect various resources for him. This can either be individual events that trigger at intervals, or the server has to meet a set amount of resources throughout the day. Your total contribution would in this case be counted at the end. The last part of the day (after the cart is fixed) is an escort event back to his original starting point by Beetletun.
Notes
This would then repeat. Note that the “days” do not necessarily mean strict days. That could be the minimum, since the sub events are based on time. If, for example, it takes you longer to do certain events or if you neglect his repairs, he would not proceed until these events were done. This creates a living scenario where you can’t just follow a timer.
Achievements
For every single sub-event you complete, a repeatable achievement counter increments much like when you play an activity. In this case it would probably be under a heading called Living Events and the achievement could be Queensdale Merchant or some such thing. Every time you complete a number of sub-events, you’d receive some sort of reward. If you’re very diligent, perhaps there could be really good rewards for these achievements after a large number of sub events are completed.
You can always chip away it. Different maps would have different living events.
You could add a lot of elaboration to my idea depending on tech developed for it, but as a very basic example I think it is fine. It’d be great to see the ability of receiving credit for contributing to events after you leave the map. I know you can contribute now, leave, and if you return before an event is over, you get credit. Doing something so you don’t have to be on the map could allow for a different kind of chipping in during lengthier events.
I’d love to see what you would design in this regard.