First Community Wide Event

Right so now that we have a fairly stable base of posters and are thinking of ways to bring in new blood I think it's time we had our first community wide quest type event. Here's the rough of it:
Raiders are seen approaching stableton and are one day away. The raiders swear alegiance to an enigmatic chem dealer who calls himself the Surgeon. The Surgeon plans on splitting any loot with ponies who help him. There are two threads: Defending Stableton and Raiding Stableton. Both are open and both will allow players to have both pvp and red shirt battles. Loot will be given as seen fit. The exact ending will be left open. I think we give a higher cap payout to raiders and better loot drops to defenders.

There are two possible endings depending on who which side wins the merging thread (Fight for Stableton). Either the defenders win and Stableton remains free or the Surgeon wins and we rename it because of that. I think we should also add a respawn zone, like a hospital for after the event ends. Respawning will cost either caps or equipment. Thoughts?

I like it, but I'll either need to write up modifiers so tactics and aiming are rewarded or we need to all agree on ground rules for the PvP part.

As for respawns, I would imagine that someone needs to transport you to that hospital, or patch you up. This would make scouting alone all the more dangerous...

This seems like a brilliant idea, and we've got enough players to pull it off if we can get everypony to participate. We could give members badges for participating in community events like this, badges which are exclusive to that event. I bet everypony would love that!

The reviving at a hospital part seems a little hard to pull off if we want to keep it feeling realistic, though. If a character gets shot up with bullets by another player, it wouldn't be hard to imagine that they got pulled back to a hospital before they died, but a character like Starry is either going to set them alight with a firebomb or blow them to peices with a missle or a grenade. Such a character wouldn't plausibly be revivable, or in the case of the firebomb would survive with hideous burns that would cover the majority of their body.

I don't think anypony wants their character to be redshirted, but I also don't want anypony to have to fight with a less instantly lethal weapon. I also don't want to pretend that our weapons simply aren't as lethal, only because they're being aimed at other players.

I'd imagine the best we could do would be advising players to be exceptionally cautious, like always fighting from behind cover and fleeing from a battle before taking too much damage.

If players know they'll be revived at the end, it might encourage them to take risks, or to literally go kamikaze by making a move that would definately kill them, but take another player(or two) out. If we don't let players know about reviving, they won't try to be rambo, and they'll be less inclined to show off their baddassery by killing other players.

Hmm, The best way to keep lethality and thus the consistency of the game is to make things survivable but have then break bones, maim limbs and such... In many ways this is worse then character death but keeps combat being dangerous...

Talk'd to some Marines and they told me that most combat situations pretty much degenerate into taking cover, waiting for superior fire support and maybe flanking with cover support... Also being shot, rarely translates into death...

What you die from is bleeding out, instead your more likely to go into shock. The second shot is what kills you, the one that is a foot away and to the brain-pan...

Even fragmentation grenades are meant to cause casualties (no longer able to fight) rather then kill their intended targets... This is because casualties have to be looked after and slow the unit down, corpse do neither of those things...