I always wonder... Wouldn't an MMOs where admins are a lot more active and fun be better? Theoretically, it would be a good social thing for the game because since the admins would host events a lot, players would group up much more which is a good thing, right?

So why don't admins do that in MMOs a lot? Sure, admins would have to respond to reports and stuff, but that problem is easily fixed since it's only once every weeks, meaning that they still have about 6 days of responding to any player reports. It's not like they are part of the development team. The only thing they have to do is administer the game. I may be wrong, so correct me if I am.

I always wonder... Wouldn't an MMOs where admins are a lot more active and fun be better? Theoretically, it would be a good social thing for the game because since the admins would host events a lot, players would group up much more which is a good thing, right?

So why don't admins do that in MMOs a lot? Sure, admins would have to respond to reports and stuff, but that problem is easily fixed since it's only once every weeks, meaning that they still have about 6 days of responding to any player reports. It's not like they are part of the development team. The only thing they have to do is administer the game. I may be wrong, so correct me if I am.

There has been a few such MMOs, Ultima Online for example did several GM run events in the past, (allthough not weekly, not sure how often it happens these days as i stopped playing several years ago) (EA was hiring more event moderators (not organisers or GMs though) for Ultima Online in 2013 so i would assume they still do events quite regularly)

The problem with doing weekly events is that the events have to be interesting aswell which means you either need an insanely flexible system that is still easy for a non developer to control, otherwise they will grow stale pretty fast (good luck with that) or you will need developers to work pretty much full time just for the events, and even if your GMs can run events all by themselves it will be an additional cost as not only will the GMs running the events be mostly unavailable for customer support tasks, the need for in-game customer support is likely to increase during the events (as more players will be active) and you will need people to plan the events (another cost)

When I used to be part of a team of a small ORPG (with ~20 active users - we never advertised the game because we didn't want alot of users until the game was nearer to completion - which it never was), we were always available hanging out, chatting, running events, etc...

The key is making it so easy for moderators to run them, and make them flexible enough for moderators to tweak them.

In our ORPG, we (me and another developer) had implemented ~7 or so minigames using the lead developer's (and sole programmer's) scripting hooks into the server (we crashed that server an innumerable amount of times ). Those took alot of time to script, but could be easily ran whenever we wanted. And we'd often participate in the events also, without cheating.

Another thing we'd do is just spawn monsters in a non-PVP area for fun. Everyone loved that, actually, because it basically created an impromptu cross-guild no-PVP mass battle.

Spawning monsters we also just a single command away.

One thing that helped, is we could execute script commands directly in the chat box, while in the game. Things like: SpawnMonster(GetLocationOfPlayer(GetPlayerFromName("my name")), monsterID) ...to spawn a monster of a given ID at my location.

And we could then assign that to a hotkey.

Or we could assign something like: "ExecuteScript(1027)" to a hotkey.

This is the same scripting system we used for player skills, quests, events, dungeon bosses, etc... All fully-exposed for our abuse.

Having a flexible system is important, followed by making it easy to interact with that system (if appropriate admin privilege level) while in-game.

In a larger game, there should be a dedicated team of ~10 moderators just for that purpose. An 'event' team. Perhaps some recruited from the community, but many need to be full-time leaders who have actual server access.

Also, you can't really give out gear as prizes, or it'd just overpower people and make the game less enjoyable for them. So players should be given consumables or cosmetic items, or no items at all.

This is a personal preference thing. Personally, I hate events in MMO's. To me, it always feels like the work done on events would be better spent working on the core game, and also I feel pressured to play during the events, which I might not always have time for.

Need good tools to facilitate it. I worked with someone who had been a GM in Ultima Online LOOOONG ago and they said even the basic GM tools were very poor/limited. Tools tailored to this event task would definitely be required to allow efficiently producing them.

I do remember (the rare) events in UO from way back, and SO MANY content-starved players would show up (in same area) it pretty much locked up the Servers and very little got done (when your action commands were processed only once a minute). SO maybe weekly (or even more frequentlyrun events ) might alleviate that from happening.

Paid GM time - primary concern for viability - with lots of MMORPG running with minimal staff to be profitable

Events HAVE to be largely prerecorded scripts so that mistakes arent made in activation (and can be run consistent after testing) and so they can be reused (scripts re-run) on different servers with alot less effort/labor.

Possibly some player started events (push the button and some local 'new/temporary' small scenario would play out (matching whatever storyplot they made up). Then you could have a sequence of them in different locations -- smaller/localized/flexible

Lol. Seems so ineffective.