This year, the event ran 7-8 hours, which I think was a great stretch and roughly what I had planned (last year I think it was 3 hours or so). The give and take here is with really good rewards, we want to only have it live for a smaller slice of time to mitigate some of the farming that has been mentioned. So if we did a longer lasting event, the rewards would of course have to be lessened dramatically.
On the note of getting some of the community to help with events, sadly, we really can't have that for much the same reason SOE/DBG can't use their community to come up with events. If we work with a player on something, there's always that chance they will tell their friends, or even innocently let some detail slip then giving an advantage to people. For this event I told no one anything. The ONLY staff that even knew anything about this was Sirken, Nilbog, Rogean and myself. Not even the guides knew much more about it other than what you all knew.
I'm glad to hear you enjoyed the clues, it took me an absurd amount of time to just come up with the clues, mob locations, dialog, etc (and I still had some lore mistakes in there, sorry!). I put in a LOT more time this year than last and it looks like it was well worth the effort. Hell, I put in 1.5 weeks just in testing the thing. I started working on this event on Sept 1st.
I can't say when/if we'll have more events, only that this experience has definitely got me thinking more about what other events I could write up. Likely less massive/server wide affairs, but some smaller, special, level specific events.
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