I have been asked to write a little about the XBOX Premonition event from an organiser's perspective, so here is the CoR debrief and a few of my own thoughts from another thread.
Debrief
Cmdr JT442 reporting.
XBOX Premonition Allies Operations
CoR Intelligence Unit
Salome’s Shadow
Deep Recon X Command Team
The EXO training discord was used to become the XBOX Premonition Operations hub, with the assumption that the interest in the event would be relatively low. We had set up a separate server, but was deemed to have no purpose and more hassle than enough to get everyone transferred from the training rooms to a new server. At this point we had about 100 commanders in attendance with two weeks to go. I volunteered to lead the support fleet, with the other organisers forming a close protection wing. (I have no PvP experience). I also approached Military Militia to lend a hand - they certainly earned their place in CoR’s roll of honour!
As soon as the event started gaining forum presence, we were inundated with commanders - a stream which needed to be security screened before being allocated to a fleet. We eventually totalled 790 commanders in the discord with a further couple of hundred tagging along with various factions. With two days left to run, we caved in to the ‘100% inclusion’ thing and opened a ‘Yuri Supporters’ role of unverified commanders.
The event itself was quiet for the most part with all of the action being with Yuri’s instance. Only 3 named hostiles were reported, with a total of 10 un-named potential hostiles or complete innocents getting in the way. Most combat was blue on blue.
The plan was followed almost to the letter with all of the fleets dropping in behind Yuri after Waypoint 3. The only incident occurred when several commanders disobeyed orders and followed Yuri to the final destination. 99% of commanders never saw combat and believe they were led on a wild goose chase of patrols…. The other option available would have been to park them in one system for 4 hours.
We succeeded in getting Yuri to his destination - all of the Admirals played a major part, and none of them shouted at me for seemingly random orders to fill in time while we waited for Yuri to show up. For me, the stars of the show were the close protection team - Stormy, Az and Red, and Military Militia for providing close support.
I believe we fulfilled the given criteria of inclusion for all, and succeeded in the mission itself. Our main problems were instancing, lack of in-game comms (Discord works really well though) and lack of enemies. Boredom was the biggest problem. If FDev had dropped a Cap ship into Tionisla, it would have been amazing.
The Event from an Organiser's POV
For those of you who were part of the XBOX Premonition Discord channel, hopefully I shouldn't need an introduction. I was one of those responsible for leading the event. Hopefully the following statement should make things clearer and allow FDev to take on board some of the comments. I should state that these are my PERSONAL observations, and not those of any player faction.
From the outset we knew that we would have a communication problem. In game comms are sketchy at best, so we would have to rely on a third party system. discord was deemed to be the most suitable application because of its ease of access, ability to group people into an organisational structure and the ability to make everyone aware of orders when they arrived.
Initially we had estimated that the interest would be quite low. We quietly planned for a total of 100 XBOX participants. In the end, our total was 790.
We had a balancing act to do - Operational Security vs Commander inclusion. We knew that this would be an event which would exclude a lot of people. To that end we put the server invite in the public domain as much as we could. The one issue we had is that we also knew that the 'enemy' would also infiltrate the server and see what our plans were. We had to background check almost everyone. In the end, we gave up and created a 'Yuri Supporter' role so that ANYONE who wanted to participate could do so, in essence creating a new fleet of people potentially hostile to Yuri...
We did not have the same no-guns rule as the PC guys, BUT we did try to keep a safe distance from Yuri. His close protection detail were a bit twitchy and we tried to avoid blue on blue as much as possible. There was only one instance where it went a little wrong and I had to make a snap decision to get a whole fleet out of the way. Sorry guys - Barnards Star was a minor diversion tactic.
For operations, we also had to make the same balance. We elected to keep Yuri and his close guard as separate to everyone else as we could. That scheme would minimise hostile involvement. But then what to do with everyone else? The three main fleets would clear the route of hostiles while the Supporters' fleet would maintain a shield around the assumed final destination. Which brings us on to the next statement..
We didn't know where we were going until during the event. 90% of the movements were constructed on the fly. We had a rough plan, and it worked to a point. The final destination was not relayed until we knew Yuri had almost completed his task. This made it somewhat difficult to position large groups of people where they could still get to the final destination without compromising the mission. In the end it turned out that the ending was a bit of a damp squib, and there was no major announcement of Thargoid invasion.. just a few beacons which had already been found.......
I can also confirm that Fleet 3 was NOT a bait fleet. We became the vanguard in a huge sprawl of people, BUT accidentally caught up with the lead.. Fleet 2 also did the same. Sorry there was no enemy on the day.
In summary -
Technical issues
- instancing. Soft limit of 16 per instance before lags kill the servers (well done to the group of 24!)
- lack of in-game comms
- lack of alternate FD comms. If FD built a discord type server, it would be brilliant.
Event issues
- lack of information to organisers for OPSEC reasons.
- Organisers (me included) not prepared for the scale of the event
- Too many people complaining about not being included. There was plenty of time and lots of notice. We did try.
- Lack of involvement for those who WERE included - we could only work with what we had. Battlefield decisions were made. 99% worked.
- No enemies showed up... we were expecting hundreds. We had less than 10. I can only name 3....
You may not like the way it was run, BUT 790 people were involved and we won.
Well done to everyone who took part. It was an interesting experience.