Define global events. Consider the 20th anniversary arc for example. What was the EM contribution to that? I did notice a couple of events that seemed to be related to it, but the bulk of what constituted that arc was a series of quests programmed by the dev team, as Dot pointed out, plus a very light and somewhat ambiguous layer of fiction written by a single EM. So the question becomes, what are the expectations for global events with regards to the role of the EMs?
In my view the real problem with events that goes beyond rewards or quality is that they don't have any teeth. Never does anything that occurs in an EM event seem to have an effect or consequence on the virtual world. It's all pure storytelling whose beginning often times has no precedent and its ending no consequence. Accrue a few years worth of events, and you have yourself some shard history, but who is writing it down? Does anyone remember everything that happened? And did any of it matter? Do the players have a role or are we merely an audience contributing a few lines of commentary? Was there ever any risk, or stakes, or chance of loss?
Put together an EM team and have them cobble together a series of events that are played out on multiple shards, but to what end? You can have some drops, you can have some interactions involving an EM surrounded by a careless mob of dragons and flapping wings standing over everything, and you can have some NPCs that respond to keywords. What is it that we're hoping to gain from all of this on a global scale? This is a genuine question, not meant to undermine anyone's point. My own point here is that, what is it that we are hoping to gain from EM events beyond drops?
Here is my answer to that question: personally, I would like the events to matter in that the course of an event is not always static but determined by the ability of the players to engage a threat or choose a direction, where losing is a possibility, and where losing means something in a grander sense. That's the dream. As it stands now, the EMs are working with the tools they have been given; many of them use those tools extraordinarily well, like on Catskills. For me, I yearn for events that are more than follow the EM from one mob to the next and from one mini-game to the next clever puzzle. The value of drops and promotion rewards pale in the shadow of those scant few moments where the world felt alive and the story developed its own course.
None of this is really meant to be a criticism of EMs, to clarify. It's more of a commentary on what seems to be the limitations of the program.
