I actually had a lot of fun with it -- at first. It was nice playing with friends, ping-ponging Haiku back and forth on topics, and playing Haiku "tag" with other linkshells. There were lots of familiar names that under normal circumstances, would rarely visit the Community page, and some really funny and insightful Haikus. There was far more creativity apparent than in any previous special event I've seen in Vanadiel.

Flipping through the list of linkshells, it was also interesting to see who belonged to what shells. However, it was also quite apparent how many shells were moribund, and how many of the high-level HNM shells were absent from the event, or sometimes even altogether absent from the LS listings. A number of shells simply contained a link pointing to a pre-existing message board elsewhere.

Unfortunately, as the deadline loomed the situation became increasingly desperate, and the fun wore off as it became a grind by a small number of dedicated participants trying to open the event (which our server failed to do). This was reflected in the declining quality of the Celestial Nights posts, as it became increasingly cumbersome to wade through large numbers of hastily written poems to find the remaining original Haiku.

Over the course of the week I too gradually stopped writing original Haiku, first turning to duplicate copies, and on the last evening resorted to mass-spamming several hundred "poems" created using random Haiku generators. For me, this was done on inactive boards I was a member of, and not in other people's threads -- but there were some cases where active Celestial Nights threads were drowned by (well-meaning) spammers. I know of some players who bought new linkshells simply for the purpose of creating a new thread to be flooded with spam-postings. Ironically, all this work may possibly not even had an effect, as we have no idea on the method by which "points" were allocated.

All in all, it was a good idea that (briefly) brought new life to the Linkshell Community, but although the target Moogle number was, I suspect, based on particpation by only a small fraction of the players, this low expectation still was simply too high. Most likely, there was quite a bit of variation in the condition of the LS Community between servers to begin with, and that the duration of the event was not long enough for the more quiescent LS communities to fully "wake up" before the event ended.

Given this assumption, I believe the event would have been much more successful if the "prizes" had been phased in over the course of a longer-running event, with each milestone providing encouragement to players already particpating, and advertising to those players not fully aware that an event was going on. At least one of these prizes should have been a novel wearable or usable item, as furnishings cannot be displayed to other players (and thus serve as event advertising). In addition, a larger set of moogles distributed at the usual event-moogle locations providing comprehensive explanations of what and where regarding the Linkshell Community would have been helpful, both in increasing event turnout, and the ultimate goal of directing people to use the LS Community as an organizing center for their shells.

I would very much like to see something like this event take place again. However, it would also have to wait a good long time before trying again. For servers that opened the event easily, I believe there will be plenty of contended players. For servers who struggled to win (or worse; struggled, to lose), there is a fairly apparent wave of misguided ill-will directed not just towards the event, or towards the non-particpants who sat it out, but towards the very LS Community it was designed to promote.


Edited, Jul 20th 2007 3:02am by Guppie