06-25-2012, 07:05 PM
You log in, decide to do a quest/event, make the announcement. Takes anything up to 20 minutes before enough players to warrant starting will mass up.
Then you have to explain the rules of the event to all of them and answer the usual 3-5 questions (usually about things you've already answered). This probably takes another 10 minutes.
The event starts, it has to last at least 30-40minutes to be worth bothering with and can be fairly intensive as players tend to page and ask questions during the event when you're trying to add monsters/pair up players/res people/refresh people/ move people around and enforce the rules if necessary.
Then afterwards you need to give out some sort of a reward to all of the players, this usually takes 5-10mins together with the obligatory "well done everyone" etc.
Then afterwards there is the clean up, dealing with players accusing each other of cheating, dealing with players who are complaining/accusing staff of cheating (there are always some), clearing away monsters/resetting the arena/whatever. This again can be anything from 5minutes up to half an hour if you get a particularly stubborn person complaining about something.
So we have a conservative total of well over an hour, if not closer to 2. That is if there are no other massive time wasting problems e.g. a player manages to loot someone, someone finds some way to abuse the event and has to be jailed, people paging because a PK killed them after the event, the event gates not working properly etc. etc. any of these can take a lot of time to deal with. I know because they've all happened before.
I've run a lot of events and when I do it I know I have to say to myself "Okay Loki, here goes your next 2-3 hours". Even dealing with pages can take up hours of time if people want sufficiently complicated things. Having to jail someone, which does also happen, can take hours if they choose to argue and not accept being jailed (since we try to actually make people understand why they are being jailed instead of just going all heavy-handed).
Now with the playerbase being low events may be a bit quicker, but the problem is that the few times recently that I've been able to find UO time there haven't been many players around. There may be events from time to time but the fact is that there can be no guarantee that there will be a regimented timetable of events, it's too demanding on staff time and ignores the fact that the staff are regular people with lives which they can't shape around a timetable set by UO, that isn't reasonable.
Then you have to explain the rules of the event to all of them and answer the usual 3-5 questions (usually about things you've already answered). This probably takes another 10 minutes.
The event starts, it has to last at least 30-40minutes to be worth bothering with and can be fairly intensive as players tend to page and ask questions during the event when you're trying to add monsters/pair up players/res people/refresh people/ move people around and enforce the rules if necessary.
Then afterwards you need to give out some sort of a reward to all of the players, this usually takes 5-10mins together with the obligatory "well done everyone" etc.
Then afterwards there is the clean up, dealing with players accusing each other of cheating, dealing with players who are complaining/accusing staff of cheating (there are always some), clearing away monsters/resetting the arena/whatever. This again can be anything from 5minutes up to half an hour if you get a particularly stubborn person complaining about something.
So we have a conservative total of well over an hour, if not closer to 2. That is if there are no other massive time wasting problems e.g. a player manages to loot someone, someone finds some way to abuse the event and has to be jailed, people paging because a PK killed them after the event, the event gates not working properly etc. etc. any of these can take a lot of time to deal with. I know because they've all happened before.
I've run a lot of events and when I do it I know I have to say to myself "Okay Loki, here goes your next 2-3 hours". Even dealing with pages can take up hours of time if people want sufficiently complicated things. Having to jail someone, which does also happen, can take hours if they choose to argue and not accept being jailed (since we try to actually make people understand why they are being jailed instead of just going all heavy-handed).
Now with the playerbase being low events may be a bit quicker, but the problem is that the few times recently that I've been able to find UO time there haven't been many players around. There may be events from time to time but the fact is that there can be no guarantee that there will be a regimented timetable of events, it's too demanding on staff time and ignores the fact that the staff are regular people with lives which they can't shape around a timetable set by UO, that isn't reasonable.